How India’s Domestic Politics Impede Its Foreign Policy

Until recently, few scholars—let alone former diplomats or analysts—made much attempt to draw on substantial theoretical literature to inform their discussions of India’s foreign policy. Instead, studies of New Delhi’s approach tended toward the descriptive or didactic. But this trend has given way to a new wave of scholarship that explicitly links international relations theory to case studies of India’s foreign and security policies.

Political scientist Rajesh Basrur is the latest to contribute to this emergent genre with his book Subcontinental Drift: Domestic Politics and India’s Foreign Policy. Basrur’s analysis follows neoclassical realism, which incorporates domestic factors to explain states’ foreign and security policies—unlike structural realism, which overlooks internal characteristics to focus on the distribution of power. Neoclassical realists contend that factors such as the efficacy of a state’s institutions shape its responses to external threats or impending shifts in the balance of power.

Subcontinental Drift: Domestic Politics and India’s Foreign Policy, Rajesh Basrur, Georgetown University Press, 268 pp., $44.95, January 2023.

Using this lens, Basrur argues that despite India’s long-standing goal to attain great-power status, its ambitions have so far been hobbled by so-called policy drift, in which factors such as political polarization impede the purposeful pursuit of policy. His approach is novel because it highlights how endemic features of India’s political system have gotten in the way of its decision-making; a single-minded focus on India’s external environment doesn’t adequately explain its choices. Basrur’s decision to fold his argument into neoclassical realism advances understanding of New Delhi’s foreign policy. He makes clear that unless India’s political leaders can harness domestic forces toward their aspirations to play a more significant role in Asia and beyond, they will remain hamstrung.

Basrur shows how features of India’s domestic politics have influenced its responses to foreign-policy challenges using four case studies: the U.S.-India civilian nuclear agreement, India’s role in the Sri Lankan civil war, its nuclear strategy, and its response to cross-border terrorism from Pakistan. He draws on a vast array of secondary sources and archival material for context and argues that in each case India’s policymakers responded to external changes and threats—but that the implementation of these policy choices was often haphazard because of domestic political dynamics.

New Delhi’s cumbersome responses in these cases reflect the government’s policy drift—a critical inability to overcome domestic hurdles to swift policy implementation. For example, the first detailed case study Basrur examines involves the monumental 2008 U.S.-India civilian nuclear agreement, which separated India’s civilian and military nuclear reactors and placed the former under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. The accord effectively legitimized India’s clandestine nuclear weapons program by enabling India to participate in global nuclear commerce, which contributed significantly to a rapprochement in U.S.-India relations. Despite the agreement’s obvious strategic benefits for India, Basrur writes that the negotiations quickly became mired in India’s domestic politics.

Specifically, India’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) opposed the deal, even though it had few reservations about a closer security partnership with the United States and had carried out India’s 1998 nuclear tests. In opposing the agreement, it hoped to score political points against the coalition government. Meanwhile, the Indian nuclear establishment slowed the negotiations, raising dubious and polemical objections. The agreement almost fell through as a result. In the end, then-Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh finalized the treaty through a fraught two-level negotiating strategy—one with his domestic interlocutors and another with the United States.

The debate over the civilian nuclear agreement reflects a case of involuntary policy drift: A weak and fractious coalition government faced unexpected hostility from its principal opposition. By contrast, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government today has an overwhelming parliamentary majority; it is mostly subject to voluntary policy drift attributed to its own inefficiency.

The second case Basrur examines is India’s intervention in the Sri Lankan civil war under the auspices of the 1987 Indo-Sri Lankan Accord—and the fiasco that followed. Then-Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi got involved in the conflict, which began in earnest in 1983, in part because India was concerned about Sri Lanka’s growing closeness to the United States and other external powers. Gandhi hoped to expand New Delhi’s influence. Under the terms of the accord, India sent a peacekeeping force intended to disarm the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who were fighting for an independent Tamil state.

Basrur shows that the intervention went awry from the outset. The LTTE only reluctantly disarmed and soon after returned to the battlefield, with disastrous consequences for India’s peacekeeping forces. Once again, the policy drift stemmed from Indian domestic politics. The government in Tamil Nadu, an Indian state home to some 60 million Tamils, had misgivings about New Delhi’s policies toward Sri Lankan Tamils. In the end, the intervention realized few, if any, of India’s initial goals. Worse still, it engendered hostility toward India in Sri Lanka that enabled China to gain a foothold in the country. (Gandhi was eventually assassinated by an LTTE suicide bomber at an election rally in 1991.)

Yet again, domestic political imperatives and interorganizational rivalries, such as that between civilian and military intelligence, contributed to policy drift—in this case, with long-lasting consequences. The resulting rift between New Delhi and Colombo allowed China, India’s principal adversary, to step into the breach.

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Many countries experience obstacles to efficient policymaking, reorienting goals and priorities. But Basrur’s analysis shows that numerous institutional problems hound India in particular, ranging from the structure of Indian federalism to bureaucratic listlessness. Many of these shortcomings are also evident in his discussion of India’s inability to formulate a coherent policy to address Pakistan’s persistent sponsorship of terrorist groups that wreak havoc on Indian soil as a case of involuntary policy drift.

In the case of cross-border terrorism, New Delhi has been unable to forge what security scholars refer to as a policy of “deterrence by denial,” or creating barriers that make it difficult for an adversary to inflict harm. Basrur focuses his discussion on the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, for which the Lashkar-e-Taiba group claimed responsibility. He argues that overlapping jurisdictions between security and intelligence agencies, along with a lack of coordination and contingency planning, led to an Indian strategy failure to ward off the attack.

Subcontinental Drift underscores institutional pathologies that continue to hamper India’s foreign and security policy apparatus. India’s policymakers would do well to heed his analysis. India’s political parties, both regional and national, often pursue parochial and short-term interests at the cost of national priorities. Organizational decision-making remains incremental and idiosyncratic. And an outmoded bureaucracy that privileges generalists instead of encouraging policy specialization will continue to impede India’s interest in playing a more significant role in global politics.

Many of the examples of policy drift Basrur cites stem from the demands faced by messy coalition governments dealing with fractious allies. By contrast, Modi and the BJP now enjoy a comfortable majority in India’s Parliament. But the current government’s foreign-policy decision-making has demonstrated similar policy drift, from its lackadaisical response to the compelling security threat from China on the border to its inability to formulate a clear-cut role for itself within the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue alongside Australia, Japan, and the United States.

Unless India’s policymakers forthrightly tackle long-standing structural bottlenecks through bureaucratic reforms, improve policy coordination on national issues across state and central governments, and tackle the question of overlapping organizational jurisdictions, policy drift will continue to thwart India’s aspirations as a global leader.