Independence 2.0

On the eve of India’s 66th Independence Day, it is time to recalibrate the meaning and content of the word “freedom”, which has to adapt to an international situation that is quite different from the one in which our founding mothers and fathers kicked out European colonialism.

The Indian Republic is presently relatively secure against foreign invasion and occupation, not only because we are able to stay united as Indians and defend ourselves better, but also due to the practice of direct imperialism going out of vogue in great power politics.
Barring special cases like Afghanistan, there are few instances where foreign armies are entrenched in a country and ruling it by fiat. If explicit colonialism was the norm in the 19th and early 20th century, it is taboo in the 21st century thanks to the high costs of nationalist resistance and the reputational damage that a great power suffers if it tries to brazenly violate the sovereignty of another state. In retrospect, we live in a more balanced world with fewer military conquests and subjugations than ever before.
Yet, there is no dearth today of threats to sovereign independence and freedom of weaker states to chart their own destinies. Power has diffused more widely in the age of multipolarity, which places checks on imperial ambitions. But there has never been and will never be a world with absolute equality in capabilities of all states.
There is sovereign equality of states as enshrined in international law, but that pertains only to status and not to material and ideational capacities, which vary a lot. So, as long as we have a nation state system with unequal units, there is bound to be politics of pressure, intimidation, penetration and subversion exerted by one or more powerful states on weaker states or even regions as a whole.
In India, we hold on dearly to the tenet of “strategic autonomy” as a bedrock of our foreign policy.
What has changed is the context in which we wish to exercise this autonomy, not the basic principle. Instead of worrying about being dragged into polarised camps as a satellite or virtual colony in the Cold War era, we now bristle at Western or Chinese pressures on us that circumscribe our freedom to make choices on energy security (buying oil from Iran, voting for or against it in the International Atomic Energy Agency, or exploring drilling options in the South China Sea), democracy (promoting political change in Burma or voting on the war in Syria at the United Nations), defence strategy (conducting joint military exercises with a broader range of states in the Bay of Bengal under the “Malabar” codename), and diplomatic partnerships (growing closer to Israel or Taiwan).
On this Independence Day, we can be permitted some satisfaction that India has not allowed itself to be dictated to by any foreign power to a degree where we are subservient. But the danger persists that a political leadership that is beholden to the West or to China could make “practical” compromises from time to time on specific issues, without realising that a giveaway on one interest could set general precedents that India is malleable and buyable. A vigilant press and an awakened citizenry which follow international affairs closely and debate the wellsprings of India’s positions on various global matters are necessary for our freedom to not be surreptitiously chipped away.
In the 21st century, the politics of pressure emanates not only from more powerful states but also from multinational corporations (MNCs), foreign investors, unfair multilateral institutions and violent terrorist groups. Our record in maintaining freedom from these non-state actors has been mixed. By maintaining a statist political order, we have avoided the fate of some fellow developing countries where MNCs have suborned governments, plundered natural resources and destroyed the environment. But the clamour to make India a more “business-friendly” destination has compelled domestic adjustments that do not augur well for the economic and ecological rights of our workers and rural communities. Our repeated failure to prevent terrorist attacks on Indian soil through proactive use of coercive statecraft is another black mark on political freedom of
citizens to live unencumbered by random violence.
Canadian scholar Michael Ignatieff has argued that the rise of China and Russia as powerful “post-Communist oligarchies” proves that freedom is divisible, i.e. that economic rights can be increased in societies without enhancing the corollary civil and political rights. But in India since 1991, we have a consensus that economic and political freedoms are two sides of the same coin and must be pursued simultaneously. Our economy is definitely freer than it was before the opening up of 1991, although we need to expand the conceptualisation of what “economic freedom” means to the poor and the working class, instead of confining it to entrepreneurs who want freedom from a still overbearing bureaucratic machine.
To cite from former US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four freedoms, we as a people prefer both “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear”, making us a much more aspirational society than that of China or Russia currently. Our intellectuals like Amartya Sen and less articulate but liberty-conscious lay people have rejected the “Asian values” proposition that economic and political freedom constitute a zero-sum game in which one must be restrained for the sake of the other. India, therefore, carries a special global burden of disproving the divisibility thesis through its simultaneous march of political and economic freedoms.
In an interdependent world, where the actions of one state or non-state actor willy-nilly have an impact on the circumstances and decisions of others, we have to be realistic about how deliberately independent any society can remain. But on this Independence Day, we should re-dedicate ourselves to inseparable twin goals — preserving our strategic autonomy in asymmetric foreign affairs and shouldering the responsibility as a universal role model for indivisible civil and economic freedoms in domestic affairs.

The writer is a professor and dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs