The current ruckus over AU-KUS — the trilateral securitypact between Australia, the

United Kingdom and the UnitedStates, which was announced onSeptember 15, 2021 — has revealedthe hazards of group diplomacy,which Prime Minister Indira Gand-hi had anticipated when PresidentZiaur Rahman of Bangladesh pro-posed a regional organisation forSouth Asia.

The SAARC yearsApart from its reservations aboutthe reference to security in thedraft charter for SAARC, or theSouth Asian Association for Re-gional Cooperation, India was in adilemma — that not joining the fo-rum would look as though Indiawas against regional cooperation.And if it joined, it faced the possi-bility of its neighbours ganging upand using the SAARC institutionsto pressure India on various re-gional issues. One other concernwas that the proposer of such agroup would be suspected of aspir-ing to the leadership of a region.

On balance, India joined the As-sociation with a number of condi-tionalities such as the exclusion ofbilateral issues, decision-makingby voting, and holding of meetingswithout all members being pre-sent. But despite the imperativefor cooperation in vital fi�elds,SAARC became an arena for Indiabashing, particularly by Pakistan.It was bilateral diplomacy in theguise of multilateralism and it be-came moribund as India did notattend the last summit. SAARC be-came a liability as it was clear thatthe region was not mature enoughto have a regional instrumentality.

Today, the world has a wholespectrum of groups — from the Eu-ropean Union at one end to the

African Union at the other — withvarying shades of cooperation.Groups with acronyms such asNorth Atlantic Treaty Organiza-tion (NATO) and the Association ofSoutheast Asian Nations (ASEAN)and numerical groups from a no-tional G-2 to a real G-77 which hasmore than a 100 members, exist.

Many of them do not have re-gional, ideological or thematic ho-mogeneity to lend them a reasonfor forming a group. The time, themoney and the energy spent onconvening not only summits butalso a whole paraphernalia of mi-nisterial, offi�cial and expert levelmeetings do not seem justifi�ed.Bureaucracies, with United Na-tions salaries and perks, growaround these bodies, developingvested interests to perpetuatethem. Such groups which do nothave “sunset” clauses continueeven after they diminish inimportance

Searching for an agendaFinding the agenda for these or-ganisations and groups is anotherdiffi�cult exercise. The growingagenda of the United Nations in-cludes everything from peace onearth to celestial bodies and evenUFOs. When India decided to re-main in the Commonwealth evenas an independent country, the na-ture of the affi�nity to the BritishCrown changed and its agenda ex-panded beyond the concerns ofthe former British colonies. Theonly way it could survive, afterZimbabwe became independentand apartheid disappeared inSouth Africa, was by duplicatingthe agenda of the United Nationsand repeating pronouncements ofmember-states made in other or-ganisations. The role of the Com-monwealth was reviewed, but themembers reached the conclusionthat it had continuing relevance.

The rationale of some of theother new groups was uncleareven when they were formed. AGoldman Sachs economist foundsimilarities among fast growingeconomies such as China, Russia,India and Brazil and recommend-

ed massive western investments inthese countries. The countriesconcerned formed an intergovern-mental group called BRIC and la-ter BRICS, with South Africa addedas a representative of the Africancontinent. At that time, it wasfeared that, with the presence ofChina and Russia in it, it would beconstrued as an anti-Americangroup. As expected. China quicklyassumed the leadership of BRICSand tried to seek changes in the in-ternational economic system byestablishing a bank, with the pos-sibility of credit for its members.The result of this developmentwas undermining the relevance ofanother, less ambitious, group ofIndia, Brazil and South Africa (IB-SA), which had several commoninterests. As candidates for perma-nent membership of the SecurityCouncil, they had specifi�c ideas onUN reform and on South-Southcooperation.

On AfghanistanThe recent BRICS summit had Af-ghanistan on its agenda and the di-verse group was able to reach aconclusion only with diff�erent ca-veats. Russia and China were moresympathetic to the Taliban thanthe others. At the Shanghai Coop-eration Organisation (SCO) sum-mit, delegations found some com-mon elements of concern withdramatically diff�erent approaches.The SCO started off� as a friendlygroup of China and some of theformer Republics of the Soviet Un-ion, but with the addition of India,Pakistan and Iran, it became a di-verse group and it could not reachagreement. Pakistan naturally

sounded triumphant, but even Pa-kistan Prime Minister Imran Khancould not gloat over the unshack-ling of the Taliban in the face of alooming humanitarian catas-trophe in Afghanistan. Whetherthe Chinese presence in thesesummits and the meetings bet-ween Wang Yi and S. Jaishankar(the Chinese State Councillor andForeign Minister and India’s Exter-nal Aff�airs Minister, respectively)made any diff�erence to the stand-off� in Ladakh is yet to be seen. Butwe know that frequent meetingswith the leaders of China do notnecessarily mean a meeting ofminds as Beijing’s trajectory ofthoughts and actions are highlyunpredictable. Those who sawChina’s President Xi Jinping andPrime Minister Narendra Modi inconversation in Mamallapuram(near Chennai), at the second in-formal summit between India andChina, in October 2019, wouldnever have thought that theywould ever be in an armedconfl�ict.

India and other groupingsIndia has also had experience oftaking initiatives to encouragegroups without the participationof Pakistan, knowing well that Pa-kistan’s presence is a sure recipefor trouble. One of them is the Bayof Bengal Initiative for Multi-Secto-ral Technical and Economic Coop-eration (BIMSTEC), an internation-al organisation of seven SouthAsian and Southeast Asian nationswhich are dependent on the Bay ofBengal: Bangladesh, Bhutan, In-dia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmarand Thailand. The group re-mained dormant for many yearstill it was revived a few years ago asan alternative to SAARC. Though ithas an ambitious agenda for secto-ral cooperation, it has not gainedmuch momentum.

Another group which India haschampioned is the Indian OceanRim Association (IORA). The or-ganisation was fi�rst established asthe Indian Ocean Rim Initiative inMauritius in March 1995 and for-mally launched on March 6-7 1997

(then known as the Indian OceanRim Association for Regional Co-operation). It also drags on with-out any signifi�cant progress.

On the other hand, the two ac-tive groups, Asia-Pacifi�c EconomicCooperation (APEC) and NuclearSuppliers Group (NSG), have elud-ed us even though we have majorstakes in them. We campaignedactively for membership of thesetwo bodies, but gave up when wemade no headway. In the processof working with the U.S. on a bou-quet of groups such as MissileTechnology Control Regime(MTCR), NSG, the Wassenaar Ar-rangement and the AustraliaGroup, we ended up with mem-bership of Wassenaar and the Aus-tralia Group, in which we were notinterested.

The Quad and AUKUSThe Quad had a chequered historyof India fl�irting with it for years tillthe Chinese threat became real in2020, but New Delhi’s reluctanceto call a spade a spade has driventhe U.S. to new alliances such as asecond Quad and then AUKUS asthe U.S. wanted to fortify itselfwith allies against China. But thereaction of France to AUKUS hasraised the issue of loyalty amongallies even though AUKUS hasmade it clear that it was meant on-ly to enable the U.S. to transfer nu-clear propelled submarine tech-nology to Australia.

The proliferation of alliancesand groups will be a matter ofclose scrutiny by many countriesin the light of the new trend initiat-ed by the U.S. Collective bargain-ing is the strength of group diplo-macy but it cannot be eff�ectivewithout commitment to a com-mon cause. It stands to reason thatIndia should also reconsider theplethora of groups we are in andrationalise them after a realitycheck.

T.P. Sreenivasan is a former Ambassadorof India to several multilateral bodies, andis presently Director-General of the KeralaInternational Centre,Thiruvananthapuram

An alphabet soup New Delhi needs to sift throughIndia needs to reconsider the plethora of alliances it is in and rationalise them after a reality check

T.P. Sreenivasan

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