India needs a global security forum that it can lead

India has a history of hosting large gatherings of government and other influential elites. It hosted the Asian Relations Conference of 1947, even before gaining independence. This was also the moving sentiment at the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia.

This sense of reach and leadership, however, fell by the wayside in subsequent decades as India shifted its focus to combating a sometimes actively hostile external environment and multiple internal crises. Only in the last two decades, when India’s economic growth has picked up, the old faith has started returning on the world stage. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, foreign policy has developed a special dynamic, with a former professional diplomat in charge of foreign affairs and three ministers of state to boot – the most in any central government ministry.

Raisina dialogue is a result of this activism. Largely supported by India’s Ministry of External Affairs, it has risen to the level of its predecessors, such as the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore and the Manama Dialogue in Bahrain. But it is already past that Indian government has started new initiative.

This is because New Delhi is, even now, playing the game of playing catch up in the region. India does not have the kind of intergovernmental forum that it can actively lead, where its views and positions hold the kind of sway that ASEAN has, for example, the ASEAN Regional Forum or the ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting Plus . While these are largely talk-shop, they keep alive the useful fiction for ASEAN that it is at the center of regional geopolitics and capable of directing it.

Since the mid-1990s, China has actively sought to shape its region and the wider world through regional initiatives such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), with a focus on Eurasia, as well as regional Including a series of economic cooperation forums. China-Eurasia Expo and China-ASEAN Expo. These are large forums where business elites meet to exchange ideas and seal deals under subtle Chinese political direction.

China has also undertaken a variety of South Asia-focused initiatives such as the China-South Asia Think-Tank Forum and the China-South Asia Legal Forum. In these forums, Indians are often mere bystanders or are ignored as smaller countries in the region use China’s support to criticize India or let the Chinese fire from their shoulders.

Over time and with greater confidence, China organized pan-Asian or trans-regional initiatives such as the long-running Boao Forum for Asia, its rival to the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and sub-regional forums. Is. The Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism, which seeks to undermine both the Asian Development Bank-led Greater Mekong Subregion Project and the India-led Mekong-Ganga Cooperation Project. The Chinese have also used other forums such as the Singapore Forum of the IISS to present their narratives about the dangers of the US-led global order.

India urgently needs a major security dialogue forum, which can lead and set the agenda to promote its own interests amid the dominant US-China or US-Russia competition narratives. Such issues, no matter how real or intractable, do not bring them to regional or global attention without furthering the Indian narrative or demonstrating India’s ability to perform key security functions – mediation, peacekeeping, and yes, fighting wars. To allow it to dominate is to underestimate and undo India. Good work by New Delhi’s G20 presidency and forums like the Raisina Dialogue.

In addition to platforms within the SCO, the Chinese have a long-standing Beijing Jiangshan Military Forum and other intergovernmental mechanisms such as the China-Africa Peace and Security Forum and the Middle East Security Forum. Concept paper on China’s new global security initiative, released in February, talks of “encouraging”[ing] greater exchanges and cooperation between university-level military and police academies” and China’s willingness to “provide other developing countries with 5,000 training opportunities over the next five years to train professionals to address global security issues” For”. Such confidence comes from years of preparation and hosting of multilateral dialogues by the Chinese military.

India has active defense training and cooperation mechanisms with many countries in its immediate and extended neighbourhood, including UN peacekeeping. But these initiatives have been few or poorly advertised, at least partly because of poor civil-military relations in India. This has to change.

The National Maritime Foundation, an Indian Navy-backed think-tank, organizes an annual Indo-Pacific Regional Dialogue focused on maritime issues and defense expos have caught on in a big way but this is not enough. India’s military diplomacy must move beyond port calls, military exercises and some slots within the Ministry of External Affairs allotted to serving defense personnel to make up for the ministry’s manpower shortfall in administrative and logistics functions.

Instead, the Indian government should do away with archaic service rules regarding contacts between Indian military officers and foreign counterparts during officially sanctioned education and training exchanges, and promote field study and intellectual endeavor within the Indian Armed Forces. Culture should be promoted. India needs a global forum whose conduct and agenda are led by its military, which can more strongly signal its global capabilities and ambitions.