5.1 Ideas
5.1.2 India: multilateral aspirations and globalisation
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would be more effective at national levels if deployed as part of a portfolio of policy and regulatory instruments aimed at sustainable development (IPCC, 2001: 24 point 7.7 and p29, points 8.1-8.2).
The interplay of negotiations focusing on mitigation and adaptation is a story about choices: in the beginning and considering the stocks of GHGs already in the atmosphere, mitigation was the focus of the negotiations by both developed and developing countries. This was as much because of the more powerful voice of the developed countries as it was because of the belief that focusing on adaptation meant admitting to the defeat of mitigation attempts (Rayner, 2010). So focus was initially on mitigation, not adaptation, but in the absence of meaningful, mitigation measures as required by science, adaptation has become more important and urgent. In some ways developing countries have inadvertently stymied themselves as, by not pushing (or being able to push) the adaptation agenda from the beginning and being unable to ensure mitigation, they now stand to suffer most from the climatic changes.
development in the developed world (Hurrell & Sengupta, 2012). That same year, as a result of its more open, outward looking “mind-set” and an institutionalised “Look East” policy adopted in 1992, India became a full dialogue partner at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) (Malone & Mukherjee, 2009). Integrating with the region was not, however, without impediments:
India’s application to join the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in 1997 was rejected ostensibly because India showed reluctance to “embrace the norms of free trade and investment that are the foundations of APEC’s existence” (Carmichael, 2014), despite, for instance, evidence to the contrary in the form of India joining the WTO in 1995 and liberalising trade (albeit fairly slowly).
On the international stage, at the United Nations, India ran for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council (UNSC) in 1996. It had come to believe that as the world’s most populous democracy and a leading developing country, it was entitled to a greater say on the UNSC.
Unfortunately other countries did not share this view and India was humiliated when it lost the vote, and therefore the seat, to Japan (Malone, 2011). Eight years later India and Japan, in collaboration with Germany and Brazil, launched a joint UN reform initiative to gain accession to permanent seats on the UNSC. When Japan’s accession was blocked by China, India’s ambitions were also thwarted (Malone, 2011).
India also interacted with the UN following the series of nuclear tests it conducted in May 1998 in the arid Pokhran region of Rajasthan. After detonation, the newly elected BJP government declared India to be a fully-fledged nuclear state, to a largely appreciative domestic audience. The UNSC issued a resolution (Resolution 1172, May 1998) condemning India’s tests (and also Pakistan’s retaliatory tests), but it did not issue sanctions. Sanctions were applied automatically by the USA, pursuant to the Glenn Amendment (section 102 of the US Arms Export Control Act of 1994), imposing sanctions on any non-nuclear state that detonated a nuclear device. Within six months however, most of the US sanctions had already been lifted and a dialogue was opened between the USA and India (Morrow & Carriere, 1999).
Notwithstanding the indicators that will be discussed below as examples of continued widespread poverty, the Indian Government sought to assert itself internationally in the nuclear realm by detonating an underground nuclear weapon. Being able to do so was considered a matter of national pride and prestige befitting a country that had been a leader in multilateralism during the Cold War and was asserting its sovereignty in the face of what it saw as “nuclear apartheid”. India had steadfastly refused to join the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons18 (NPT) (and
18According to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty there are five nuclear states – China, France, Russia, UK and USA – defined as states that detonated a nuclear weapon prior to 1st January 1967(United Nations, 2010)
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its extension) or the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) as it believed that the nuclear regime divided the world into countries that had nuclear weapons and those that did not and effectively precluded any change in that status quo regardless of the defensive needs of a country or of any geopolitical changes that might occur (Singh, 1998).
In fact India’s relationship with the USA had long been one fraught with conflicting agendas and priorities, but the turn of the century witnessed the beginning of a change in relations between the world’s two most populous democracies. In 1998 Indian PM Vajpayee visited the USA, professing to be “baffled” by the “unsatisfactory” state of Indo-US relations and calling for these to be
“restructured on an equal footing” in order to create a relationship that would be the “mainstay of tomorrow’s stable democratic world order” (Vajpayee, 1998). Vajpayee went on to pointedly argue for the USA to be cognisant of India’s “sensitivities” and not to impinge on its defence and scientific cooperation arrangements with Russia. He added what sounded like a subtle warning when he said,
“For democratic governments like ours, which desire closer understanding with the USA, it becomes extremely difficult to move forward in the face of such public declarations” – a comment only a country seemingly very assured of its emerging importance would make (Vajpayee, 1998).
India’s prompt offer of assistance to the USA in the wake of the September 2001 World Trade Centre attacks further reflected this thaw (Kronstadt, 2005a).
India also set about strengthening ties with other emerging countries; in 2003 it signed the “Brasilia Declaration”, establishing the India-Brazil-South Africa Dialogue Forum (IBSA) with Brazil and South Africa. The aim was to strengthen ties between emerging democracies of the “global South”
and to create a “purely South-South grouping of like-minded countries, committed to inclusive sustainable development, in pursuit of the well-being for their peoples and those of the developing world” (IBSA, 2015). IBSA provided a forum to share views on issues of mutual interest – both regional and international – and to promote cooperation in a range of areas, including international trade, environment, defence and technology for instance (Alden & Vieira, 2005). The increased institutionalisation of ties with other large developing countries is an indication of India’s growing confidence in dealing with its allies on an equal footing and in providing a challenge to the prevailing institutions of global governance (Alden & Vieira, 2005); a challenge given added clout by India’s growing material capabilities.
Despite India’s growing material capabilities, however, domestic finance for tertiary institutions was still in short supply. This in turn had an impact on the type of climate science studies that could be undertaken - computer processing power, for instance, being both essential for running general circulation models (GCM) and expensive to acquire. In contrast, climate policy studies were most
often funded by international donor agencies and so tended to reflect the interests and research agendas of the funders (Kandlikar & Sagar, 1999). This international influence likely constrained the development of an intrinsically Indian climate change policy canon in this phase by instead diverting minds and attention to address better-funded issues of less relevance. For example, despite India’s reliance on the monsoon and vulnerability to climate impacts, few studies into impacts and adaptation were undertaken, whereas studies of mitiagation abatement options proliferated (Kandlikar & Sagar, 1999). The development of ‘home-grown’ analysis of domestically important issues would determine whether Indian researchers and politicians would be captive audiences to international assessment, critics reacting to their undesirable features, or equal collaborators” in the production of knowledge (Sagar & Kandlikar, 1997).
Like many developing countries, international environmental issues - as climate change was generally perceived to be - were overshadowed by urgent domestic issues of underdevelopment and concomitant environmental degredation. Even the Center for Science and the Environment (CSE) which had engaged so forcefully on the issue of equity in relation to climate change in 1991, had been focussing more on domestic environmental issues like urban air and water pollution (Narain in Kandlikar & Sagar, 1999). Thus to the extent that India began to formulate its ideas about climate change policy it was due to the activities of a small number of researchers and government officials (Kandlikar & Sagar, 1999) and was framed by broader concerns that the Developed countries would use environmental problems as a means to “sabotage the South’s developmental aspirations” (Najam, 2005).