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THREAD: In my latest for @9DashLine, I call for more analysis into India’s geostrategy during the Raj. How did the Raj view India’s position in Asia? Why does independent India define its boundaries as per what British India’s civil servants drew? https://www.9dashline.com/article/indian-geostrategy-lessons-from-the-raj
In Part I, I look at a speech that Lord Curzon of 1909, where he explicitly lays out the role India played in the spread of Empire. Curzon believed India ‘could veto any rival in Tibet’, and would have been disappointed with how India managed the border situation in the 1950s/60s
Many elements of British India’s geostrategy can guide us even today. @MohanCRaja has long argued about the key tenets of Indian foreign policy w.r.t external intervention security assistance to small powers, & a security perimeter from Aden to Malacca as descendants of the Raj.
Why do Indians shy away from learning how the British administered it? IMO, it is because most Indians (quite rightly) view the Raj as being an unjust imposition by a foreign power and doesn’t represent them. But modern India regards many of the Raj’s boundaries are sacrosanct.
In the second part, I look at KM Panikkar’s masterly 1951 book, India and the Indian Ocean, where he identifies that despite countless invasions from the north-west, India only lost her independence truly when she lost command of the Indian Ocean in the 16th century.
Panikkar’s views of India dominating the Indian Ocean are in tune with what most Indian security analysts call for today. Yet there is one area where India has made little progress since the 1950s when Panikkar writes: the development of a great national mercantile fleet.
India has long overlooked developing its ‘merchant navy’ when ironically it provides the world’s 3rd largest number of sailors in merchant navies globally. India uses foreign-owned ships for its own trade and its ports are for from competitive and are far from being world-class.
In summary, India’s own history can provide a number of lessons for becoming the great power that many in India desire it to be. The Raj may have been an ‘Inglorious Empire’ as @ShashiTharoor writes, but it is not bereft of lessons to be learned.
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