The 1st IISS-Citi India Global Forum
India as a Rising Great Power:
Challenges and Opportunities
New Delhi, 18–20 April 2008
OPENING REMARKS
Dr John Chipman, Director-General and Chief Executive, IISS
(As delivered)
Mr Minister, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, the International Institute for Strategic Studies is delighted to welcome you to this IISS-Citi India Global Forum.
This year the IISS celebrates its 50th anniversary, and we are honoured to be able to have an occasion to celebrate the start of a new generation of global work, here in India. The IISS has had a vibrant relationship with India since its birth. We have enjoyed a strong Indian membership, a number of Indians have come to the IISS as researchers and senior fellows, Indians have been members of our international Council for decades and more recently we have established a strategic dialogue with the national security establishment in this country, many of whose members have spoken at IISS events around the world. Against that background I would like to recognise in the hall today an early IISS member, the doyen of the Indian strategic community, a friend of our first director, Mr K Subrahmanyam.
The IISS, based in London, but international in its staff, character and perspective is engaged in strategic analysis, in spreading the habits of intellectual provocation and reasoned debate, and in contributing where it can to multilateral diplomacy and defence relationships. It has done so with particular vigour in Asia. Seven years ago we established in Singapore the Shangri-La Dialogue, which uniquely brings together defence ministers, chiefs of defence staff, national security advisors and other members of the security sector from 27 countries. This Asia security summit organised by the Institute, is the principal forum for multilateral defence diplomacy in and for the region. We are delighted that the Indian defence minister and senior officials have regularly attended and we look forward to welcoming again this year a Minister-delegation from this country.
The IISS looks at global strategic questions in the round, and is interested in examining the different dimensions of strategic change. An important element of that is analysing the different factors that inspire changes in global power and their consequences: hence this conference.
This morning, the Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, hosted a reception at his residence for a number of our delegates. In remarks made to us he thanked the international delegates to this event for the faith they had put in India’s commitment to the globalised economy. The PM noted that the former kings of India had held that non-interference in the daily lives of the people was an important element of sound rule and that this was what the Indian leadership now also understood as the governing principle for organising a sound liberal economy. He emphasised how important it was for India to take up its full role as a responsible global citizen. We thank the Prime Minister for his support and message to this conference.
The economic rise of India is one of the international relations truisms of the day. India’s status as the linking vowel in the now famous BRIC acronym even implies India’s centrality and its particular capacity to maintain effective relations with the other rising economic powers of Brazil, Russia and China as it develops its own special position in international society. A country still formally non-aligned, is in fact building an external policy based on multiple alignments and is attracting massive international attention as its economic reforms continue and its political extroversion strengthens.
The principal international debates about India’s rise have centred on the question of whether India can continue its heady rate of growth, and on the issue of the challenges to that development posed by infrastructure weaknesses, bureaucratic inefficiency and education shortfalls. Optimists point to the fact that these problems are well-recognised by India’s reforming elite; pessimists to the barriers to progress in these areas that remain. In general there is consensus that a reasonably acute angle of growth can be identified well into the future and that the assumption by India of a form of great power status as a consequence is a question of time, to be accelerated by the multipliers of political will and governmental finesse.
But there remains a sense in which India’s rise is debated in almost existential and deterministic terms. India’s rise is seen virtually as a fact of physics answerable principally to the laws of momentum. The efforts by outside business and governments to invest in the Indian relationship are based on the presumption not just that India will continue to rise, but that it will take a more self-conscious position in the world. This requires of outsiders a more considered attention to the national interests and professed attitudes of the developing Indian world view. It imposes on Indian public opinion and its political elites the requirement to think through that world view in a fast-changing context. In any case, people see India’s rise as indicating it may assume a form of great power status.
Historically, good great powers have often been seen as vital custodians of an international system that benefits all. Less good great powers, have sometimes suffered from the strategic entrepreneurship of misguided leaders wedded to eccentric ideologies. Indifferent great powers, have found their reputations harmed by the strategic arthritis of well-meaning political opinion too cautious boldly to defend values or interests. India will certainly be a new kind of great power and its character will be unique, not typical of any rising power of the past. But what strategic culture will India create for itself? Will India be able to define a national interest that its hugely diverse domestic opinion will support? What are the liabilities as well as the benefits that India may have to assume in order to take its seat, usefully, at the top table? What greater attention, some of it good, some of it adverse, will India attract because of its greater prominence? If investments in education and infrastructure are keys to sustained economic growth, what investments in social cohesion, defence, energy security and foreign policy formulation will be necessary for India to play a larger role politically in preserving the international peace and prosperity to which its economic growth so naturally contributes?
These are some of the questions that this IISS-Citi conference is meant to explore. It will, from the IISS point of view, help to animate future research of ours on and with India.
Indeed, this conference is seen by the IISS as a process, by which we begin our closer engagement with India, and make India and Indians a more integral part of the global IISS family. We shall in the coming months and years wish to hold more conferences in India, working with a variety of think-tanks and government ministries or agencies to conduct more research and policy prescriptive analysis with Indian friends and members, and to have that IISS agenda more regularly led by Indian opinion-formers. With more Indian members of the IISS, we hope that this initiative will ensure our continued excellent strategic dialogue with the Indian government, and that Indian points of view, including from a new generation of thinkers, are well reflected in our own research. As we work elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific, in the Middle East, in other parts of the world, we hope to boost the Indian participation in our other Dialogues and conferences.
The IISS looks forward to our discussions here and to our growing relationship. We are grateful to CITI for the sponsorship that has allowed us to be present here today. It therefore gives me great pleasure to invite the Chairman of CITI, Sir Win Bischoff, to make his remarks and to introduce this evening’s speaker.
