India stays cool in volatile arena

For a nation that has aspirations of being a regional player in the rough-and-tumble game of international relations, India has been showing a lot of restraint recently.

When the royal family of Nepal was massacred and riots broke out on the streets of Kathmandu in June, and Maoist insurgents alleged it was all part of an Indian conspiracy, India's leaders mostly stayed mum.

When Bangladeshi forces shot their way briefly into the Indian state of Meghalaya in May, India's leaders calmed their constituents, saying it was all a misunderstanding.

And when ethnic Tamil militants attacked Sri Lanka's main airport last month, cutting off the entire nation for days, India simply offered words of concern for its southern neighbor.

Is this any way for a growing regional and nuclear power to act? It wasn't too many prime ministers ago that India would have responded to such provocative events with an economicblockade, offers of armed intervention, or at least a firm rattling of sabers.

The homeland of Indira Gandhi and Ashok the Great is not exactly beating its swords - or nuclear weapons - into plowshares. But India's approach to foreign policy - whether chastened by past conflicts or motivated to focus energies where they can do the most good - has taken a more cautious and tolerant turn. It's a dramatic change that, for better or worse, will affect the prospects for peace in one of the most unstable regions of the world today.

"We have to show restraint, because India is bigger than all its neighbors combined," says S.K. Singh, who served as foreign secretary in the early 1970s. "We are very careful about throwing our weight around, because our weight is so considerable."

India's new cautious tone comes at a crucial time, as strategic partnerships are being formed and traded. Since the end of the cold war a decade ago, India has worked hard to prove its relevance and worth to the United States and to other nations with whom it shares common interests of trade, development, and regional stability.

While much of the world's attention tends to focus on India's nuclear-weapons capability, demonstrated by 1998 underground nuclear tests, India's true strength may rest in its blue-water Navy, capable of patrolling sea lanes from the coast of Africa and the Persian Gulf to the Straits of Malacca and beyond.

Christina Rocca, on her first tour of India as new US assistant secretary of state for South Asia, noted this expanded role in a speech last month in New Delhi. "As the largest country in the region, India has a role and a responsibility to play in helping secure stable, peaceful conditions in South Asia and beyond."

If India is becoming more cautious as its prominence grows, it could well be because the world's largest democracy has seen that exerting power has costs. India's intervention allowed ethnic Bengalis to break away from Pakistan in 1971, creating Bangladesh. But many Bengalis who fled Pakistan settled here, and ongoing Bangladeshi immigration has led to political instability and armed insurgency in six of India's 28 states.

In 1987, Indian troops were sent to help Sri Lanka combat ethnic Tamil rebels. The largely unsuccessful operation angered Tamils in India's prosperous state of Tamil Nadu, where Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was later assassinated by a Tamil suicide bomber.

Of course, not all of India's exertions of power had such harmful consequences. A 1988 trade blockade of northern neighbor Nepal, over its purchase of Chinese weapons, forced the royal government to relent. And India's ongoing fight to hold onto the war-torn state of Jammu and Kashmir has arguably brought India's chief enemy, Pakistan, to the point of economic ruin.

Even so, India's political elite say that the days of leaping into every local fracas are gone. "We suddenly realized that ... by being preoccupied for the last 50 years with our rival Pakistan, we had reduced ourselves to Pakistan's size in the perceptions of the world," says Bharat Karnad, a security analyst at the Center for Policy Research, an independent think tank in New Delhi. By shifting its priorities to a broader area, Mr. Karnad says, India has become a more attractive partner for the US. "America is beginning to realize how critical India is in containing Chinese expansionism."

As the government minister most responsible for changing India's relations with its neighbors, I.K. Gujral, prime minister in 1997-98, says the best way that India can bring peace to the region is to focus on common international economic interests, not narrow military ones. While relations between India and Pakistan remain tense, especially over the troubled state of Jammu and Kashmir, Mr. Gujral anticipates that movements toward a South Asia Economic Community (modeled after the European Union) and strengthened regional groups like the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation will help reduce tensions. "Once free trade comes, the borders will melt away," he says. But until then, India will need to act cautiously. "India has a vested interest in the stability and prosperity of Pakistan, because they are on our border."

But some experts say India's ambitions may be limited by the fundamental problems facing any developing nation. "India sees itself as inheriting the strategic position of the British and the colonial Raj," says Stephen Cohen, a South Asia expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "But India is not going to emerge as one of the top powers unless it does two things. One is that it must either accommodate Pakistan or destroy Pakistan. The other is that India must get its economic system to at least a Malaysian level of efficiency."