In a country of 1.5 billion people, there are many views on what exactly is India's national interest. Two types of views exist: one argues that Jawaharlal Nehru's world-view has undermined national interest, while the other claims the current regime is liquidating it. A more worthy exercise is to lay down the broad framework of what any national interest strategy for India should take into account.
Any national interest strategy is as good or bad as its assessment of the world order it is meant to navigate. India has survived as a country and democracy despite being a theatre of great Cold War rivalry. The world is still under significant US dominance, but China is beginning to challenge American dominance. This challenge is coming in ways different from the era of Soviet Union and American competition.
India is critically dependent on the US and China in different ways today than it was on the US or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. With its embrace of globalisation, India's fortunes are organically linked to the US economy and the global economic order it presides over. China has emerged as India's largest source of imports, and decoupling from either the US or China is not a feasible option for India.
Safeguarding India's national interest requires pulling off a trapeze act of navigating Sino-US rivalry between flying projectiles. Disruptions now seem to be the norm rather than exceptions in the world. Preparing for an environment where disruption is the norm requires strategic resilience.
India enjoys no strategic leverage, which puts it in a position where it must try to minimise the potential pain when the two superpowers decide to exercise their leverage in a hostile manner against India. The guiding framework of building such a resilience for India has to be "land, peace and bread" in a democratic framework.
The pursuit of democratic legitimacy cannot be the great Indian rope trick of balancing growing economic palliatives with unscrupulous political finance. The only way these two challenges can be overcome is by making them an integral part of the political discourse which appreciates these nuances instead of fluctuating between narcissism and nihilism.
Indian polity has had its most acrimonious debates on social issues, but there has been an agreement on the economic strategy: reforms along with economic palliatives midwifed by plutocratic political finance. With each crisis, inflicting more and more pain on an already precarious people, the vacuousness of such arguments only becomes more apparent.
Pakistan, as a hostile neighbour, will have to be an extremely critical component of our national security strategy. But national security strategy is only a small subset of a national interest strategy. Countries which confuse the first as the second end up exactly like Pakistan, or North Korea.
