Why India is so half-hearted about the U.S. rebalance towards Asia

By Joseph Singh

Best Defense
diplomatic desk

The U.S. may be seeking an unconditional partner in its
effort to rebalance towards Asia, but it shouldn't hedge its bets on India. "We
want strategic autonomy. We don't want to be identified with U.S. policy in
Asia, even if we secretly like it," Ambassador T. P. Sreenivasan, retired
Indian diplomat and former Permanent Representative for India at the United
Nations, said at an August 9 event hosted by the Johns Hopkins
University School of Advanced International Studies. 

Sreenivasan painted a complicated picture of U.S.-India
relationships, mired by domestic political pandering, a history of distrust
between the two countries, and a concern that a firm commitment to the American
rebalancing effort will further aggravate tensions in a rapidly changing Asian
strategic landscape. 

Despite these challenges, however, U.S.-India cooperation is
closer than ever. Indeed, as Sreenivasan sees it, the rebalancing effort has
incentivized a more accommodating U.S. approach toward India. In 2010,
President Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to endorse permanent
membership for India on the U.N. Security Council. He also reversed previous U.S.
policy opposing India's application to join the Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation economic forum. The U.S.-India strategic dialogue, launched in
2011, included a host of agreements on a wide range of issues including
collaborative endeavors in higher education and clean energy to increased
cooperation on cyber security. And earlier this year, the Defense
Strategic guidance specifically acknowledged that a "long-term strategic
partnership" with India is vital if the U.S. is to achieve its goals in East
Asia. 

To be sure, there are concrete reasons for India to support
the U.S. rebalancing. Its relationship with China is handicapped by a host of
intractable issues, including a disputed border between the two countries,
increasingly close Sino-Pakistani relations, and Chinese access to India's
Himalayan water supply, which the government fears it could one day divert.

But ultimately, U.S. policymakers believe that an
increasingly muscular China will most magnify tensions in the congested
maritime landscape. A U.S. naval and air presence would be India's best parry
against a China that could use its growing military prowess to resolve regional
schisms -- or so American policymakers have tried to convince their Indian
counterparts. U.S. strategy, as laid out in the guidance, is to draw India
into a regional alliance to hedge against China through gradually increasing
military cooperation, beginning with humanitarian missions, and then
progressing towards high-profile operations, such as naval special warfare
exercises. Strong intergovernmental and interagency cooperation, intelligence
sharing and collaborative efforts in weapons development will herald new and
historic strength in partnership, according the guidance. 

No doubt, military cooperation between the two countries is
at an
all time high. Yet there are reasons to question that the Indians that the
Indians will translate this increased cooperation into concrete strategic
alignment. For one, India remains skeptical that the U.S. would actually defend
core Indian interests in the face of Chinese aggression.  It sees U.S. involvement in the region as
fundamentally self-serving, with the transactional arrangement between the U.S.
and Pakistan constituting the case-in-point. Indeed, the rebalancing will do
little to assuage Indian concerns about growing Sino-Pakistani cooperation.
Instead, India believes its foremost interest is in retaining its "strategic
autonomy" to retain the capacity to respond to potential threats on its own
terms. But as a recent
CSIS report notes, "Rather than being guided by an overarching national
security strategy or strategic planning documents, these decisions are usually
made on a case-by-case basis."

Second, India fears that the U.S. move away from the Middle
East will result in sparse resources for Afghanistan and counterterrorism
efforts writ-large. India has already poured billions of dollars into reconstruction
and development aid in Afghanistan, and has committed to training Afghan
security forces as the U.S. drawdown continues. A rushed withdrawal or scant
deployment of residual forces could leave the country unprepared to provide for
its own security and serve to reignite insurgencies, spark civil war and close
a crucial gateway for trade in Central Asia. If the Indians are preoccupied
with guaranteeing stability in their own backyard, they will be unable to look
eastwards.

Finally, increased U.S.-India defense cooperation is
complicated by India's close
defense relationship with Russia. India, which is the world's leader in
defense technology imports, purchases over three quarters of its military
technology from Russia. Recent efforts to increase U.S.-Indian defense
cooperation haven't been successful, the most notable example being India's
decision to deny American firms a
$12 billion contract for fighter jets. Thus, bold policy pronouncements
relaxing export barriers on U.S. defense technology, for example, while
potentially fruitful for long-term cooperation, will be unlikely to unravel
Russian industry's grasp on the Indian defense apparatus. 

At the moment, it seems the Indian government's insistence
on strategic autonomy may be concealing what is more likely a state of policy paralysis.
On the one hand, India is concerned by increased Chinese assertiveness in the
region, but also fears that throwing its military heft behind U.S. rebalancing
efforts will induce further economic and military instability and hurt
relations with Asian countries that feel Chinese growth is benign. Until India
reasons that these latter risks are outweighed by the threat posed by Chinese
regional hegemony, its strategic calculus is unlikely to change.