In the heart of Kathmandu, in the narrow lanes around the famous Durbar Square, a quiet transformation is taking place. The Chinese are coming. There are the tourists – almost 10% of the total visitors to Nepal in 2012 and more than eight times as many as a decade before. There are the new languages schools – generously subsidised by Beijing. And there are the shops full of Chinese goods, even those which India, long the dominant power in the small Himalayan state, can supply in abundance.
"Middle-class Nepali people can afford jeans if they are made in China," said Babu Dhakal, a 32-year-old shopkeeper who earns a living from cheap Chinese clothes, drinks Chinese beer and eats Szechuan cuisine when he can with new Kathmandu-based Chinese friends.
Beer, hotpots and trousers may not add up to a geopolitical shift but are nonetheless central to the success or failure of India's efforts to guide the vast, troubled but steadily less poor south Asian region towards stability and prosperity, all while countering the growing power of regional rivals and maintaining good relations with the US.
Writing in the local Indian Express newspaper last week, Amitabh Mattoo, a respected Indian foreign affairs specialist and academic, said those efforts were failing.
"India's military and economic prowess is greater than ever before, yet India's ability to shape and influence the principal countries in South Asia is less than it was … 30 years ago," Mattoo wrote.
Senior officials in India's ministry of external affairs say such criticism is misplaced and argue that the nation's foreign policy has followed sophisticated, coherent and realistic principles that brought considerable success.
"We understand that in a globalised world, there are just too many linkages between states to try to coerce people, even if you are the biggest in a region. Much better to be friends with everybody and watch them all then come to you," said one.
Such views explain why India, as its own diplomats readily admit, punches below its weight globally. A series of abstentions on key votes at the United Nations has frustrated western diplomats who complain of India's apparent lack of any guiding vision.
This too is rebutted by Indian officials. "The criticism is [that] we are not muscular enough. But when you are at our stage of development, economic and otherwise, you don't have the big visionary thing, you stay below the radar, and you focus on your own backyard," one said.
But India's backyard is a thicket of thorny problems, even if huge opportunities for commerce and other exchanges do exist. Growing trade between India and its neighbours – even hostile Pakistan – has not been matched by closer relations between the two states. Nepal, Bangladesh and the Maldives lurch from one political crisis to another. India cultivated the ruling military regime in Burma where, with a haphazard reform process now under way, it has found itself wrong-footed. Leader and Nobel prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi delivered a stern reprimand to her hosts when visiting Delhi in 2012. Relations with Pakistan, despite hopes of a reboot following the election of commercially-minded Nawaz Sharif, remain poor. There are fears for Afghanistan after most US troops leave at the end of the year.
One problem for Indian mandarins is the impact of domestic politics on the "subtle, complex, balanced" foreign policy they say they would like to pursue. Sometimes India's regions have exploited the apparent drift at the centre to pursue external relations independently – or have sufficient electoral significance for policy to be made to suit them.
Last year the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, was forced to skip the meeting of Commonwealth heads of government in Colombo. Coming amid allegations that the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, had failed to properly investigate allegations of war crimes committed by his army in the final phases of the bloody war against Tamil separatists or to move forward political reconciliation with the Tamil minority of the island nation, attendance would have incensed India's own more than 70 million Tamils. Singh had hoped to divert anger by visiting Jaffna, capital of the Tamil-dominated north, officials told the Guardian, but under pressure from strategists within his own party chose eventually not travel to Sri Lanka at all.
"He had to choose sides," said an Indian official. Relations with Pakistan are also hostage to a vociferous rightwing and an often jingoistic media.
China, which remains the biggest rival and example to India of apparently successful development, can exploit such weaknesses. Beijing, which according to Delhi-based analyst Manoj Joshi "systematically challenges the very idea of an Indian sphere of interest", has used commerce, soft loans and technical assistance for major projects to make inroads in Sri Lanka as well as Nepal. China has made a push in Bangladesh too.
Though hawkish Indian policymakers worry about encirclement by Chinese client states, Mohan Guruswamy, an expert on Chinese-India competition, says Beijing's influence is "exaggerated".
One potential ally to help stem competition from China might have been the US. But after a sudden warming a decade ago which resulted in a landmark nuclear agreement, relations have chilled. A spat over the arrest of an Indian diplomat in New York revealed a friendship that was at best frayed and fractious.
The flagging Indian economy – around a third of the size of China's –may be one reason for Washington's lack of interest. A second may be the absence, since 2009, of key individuals committed to the relationship in the White House. Officials in Delhi say the relationship has become "transactional, not strategic" and that has allowed "petty disputes to dominate". However, defence sales and joint military exercises are thriving. As for the European Union and the UK, both appear more interested in India than vice versa.
Wholesale change now looks likely. Singh and the left-leaning Congress face defeat in the ongoing elections by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party, led by the controversial and polarising Narendra Modi. Though Rajnath Singh, the party president, told the Guardian last month that the BJP wanted to be "friends with all nations in the world", the BJP manifesto also talks of stopping unnamed countries running "roughshod" over Indian interests and hints at a revision of India's doctrine of "no first use" of its nuclear weapons. A reference in the Congress manifesto to encouraging friendly relations with "socialist" countries was dismissed by analysts as a throwback to the 1970s.
While campaigning, Modi has already signalled a tougher line on ongoing border disputes with China and has said that he wants to see a "strong" India that cannot be "stared down" by other powers.
In reality this may clash with a desire to build commercial partnerships regionally, said Michael Kugelman, an analyst at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington.
"His pro-business and pro-trade qualities will lead him to cultivate strong relations across the board … Yet at the same time, he will certainly react more strongly to provocations from neighbours than did the Congress-led government," Kugelman said.
One conflict Modi may have to fight is with his own diplomats, most of whom see the subtle, pragmatic complexity of policy over the last decade as in tune with "Indian", and their own, sensibilities.
"It is about being mature and readjusting to the new reality. It is about growing up," said the Indian official.
Defence News - India's subtle foreign policy could take tougher line under Modi
"Middle-class Nepali people can afford jeans if they are made in China," said Babu Dhakal, a 32-year-old shopkeeper who earns a living from cheap Chinese clothes, drinks Chinese beer and eats Szechuan cuisine when he can with new Kathmandu-based Chinese friends.
Beer, hotpots and trousers may not add up to a geopolitical shift but are nonetheless central to the success or failure of India's efforts to guide the vast, troubled but steadily less poor south Asian region towards stability and prosperity, all while countering the growing power of regional rivals and maintaining good relations with the US.
Writing in the local Indian Express newspaper last week, Amitabh Mattoo, a respected Indian foreign affairs specialist and academic, said those efforts were failing.
"India's military and economic prowess is greater than ever before, yet India's ability to shape and influence the principal countries in South Asia is less than it was … 30 years ago," Mattoo wrote.
Senior officials in India's ministry of external affairs say such criticism is misplaced and argue that the nation's foreign policy has followed sophisticated, coherent and realistic principles that brought considerable success.
"We understand that in a globalised world, there are just too many linkages between states to try to coerce people, even if you are the biggest in a region. Much better to be friends with everybody and watch them all then come to you," said one.
Such views explain why India, as its own diplomats readily admit, punches below its weight globally. A series of abstentions on key votes at the United Nations has frustrated western diplomats who complain of India's apparent lack of any guiding vision.
This too is rebutted by Indian officials. "The criticism is [that] we are not muscular enough. But when you are at our stage of development, economic and otherwise, you don't have the big visionary thing, you stay below the radar, and you focus on your own backyard," one said.
But India's backyard is a thicket of thorny problems, even if huge opportunities for commerce and other exchanges do exist. Growing trade between India and its neighbours – even hostile Pakistan – has not been matched by closer relations between the two states. Nepal, Bangladesh and the Maldives lurch from one political crisis to another. India cultivated the ruling military regime in Burma where, with a haphazard reform process now under way, it has found itself wrong-footed. Leader and Nobel prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi delivered a stern reprimand to her hosts when visiting Delhi in 2012. Relations with Pakistan, despite hopes of a reboot following the election of commercially-minded Nawaz Sharif, remain poor. There are fears for Afghanistan after most US troops leave at the end of the year.
One problem for Indian mandarins is the impact of domestic politics on the "subtle, complex, balanced" foreign policy they say they would like to pursue. Sometimes India's regions have exploited the apparent drift at the centre to pursue external relations independently – or have sufficient electoral significance for policy to be made to suit them.
Last year the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, was forced to skip the meeting of Commonwealth heads of government in Colombo. Coming amid allegations that the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, had failed to properly investigate allegations of war crimes committed by his army in the final phases of the bloody war against Tamil separatists or to move forward political reconciliation with the Tamil minority of the island nation, attendance would have incensed India's own more than 70 million Tamils. Singh had hoped to divert anger by visiting Jaffna, capital of the Tamil-dominated north, officials told the Guardian, but under pressure from strategists within his own party chose eventually not travel to Sri Lanka at all.
"He had to choose sides," said an Indian official. Relations with Pakistan are also hostage to a vociferous rightwing and an often jingoistic media.
China, which remains the biggest rival and example to India of apparently successful development, can exploit such weaknesses. Beijing, which according to Delhi-based analyst Manoj Joshi "systematically challenges the very idea of an Indian sphere of interest", has used commerce, soft loans and technical assistance for major projects to make inroads in Sri Lanka as well as Nepal. China has made a push in Bangladesh too.
Though hawkish Indian policymakers worry about encirclement by Chinese client states, Mohan Guruswamy, an expert on Chinese-India competition, says Beijing's influence is "exaggerated".
One potential ally to help stem competition from China might have been the US. But after a sudden warming a decade ago which resulted in a landmark nuclear agreement, relations have chilled. A spat over the arrest of an Indian diplomat in New York revealed a friendship that was at best frayed and fractious.
The flagging Indian economy – around a third of the size of China's –may be one reason for Washington's lack of interest. A second may be the absence, since 2009, of key individuals committed to the relationship in the White House. Officials in Delhi say the relationship has become "transactional, not strategic" and that has allowed "petty disputes to dominate". However, defence sales and joint military exercises are thriving. As for the European Union and the UK, both appear more interested in India than vice versa.
Wholesale change now looks likely. Singh and the left-leaning Congress face defeat in the ongoing elections by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party, led by the controversial and polarising Narendra Modi. Though Rajnath Singh, the party president, told the Guardian last month that the BJP wanted to be "friends with all nations in the world", the BJP manifesto also talks of stopping unnamed countries running "roughshod" over Indian interests and hints at a revision of India's doctrine of "no first use" of its nuclear weapons. A reference in the Congress manifesto to encouraging friendly relations with "socialist" countries was dismissed by analysts as a throwback to the 1970s.
While campaigning, Modi has already signalled a tougher line on ongoing border disputes with China and has said that he wants to see a "strong" India that cannot be "stared down" by other powers.
In reality this may clash with a desire to build commercial partnerships regionally, said Michael Kugelman, an analyst at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington.
"His pro-business and pro-trade qualities will lead him to cultivate strong relations across the board … Yet at the same time, he will certainly react more strongly to provocations from neighbours than did the Congress-led government," Kugelman said.
One conflict Modi may have to fight is with his own diplomats, most of whom see the subtle, pragmatic complexity of policy over the last decade as in tune with "Indian", and their own, sensibilities.
"It is about being mature and readjusting to the new reality. It is about growing up," said the Indian official.
Defence News - India's subtle foreign policy could take tougher line under Modi
