The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), comprising countries from Europe and North America, has informally sought a partnership with India, in an effort to contain Russia and China.

Apart from 32 full members, NATO has 40 partners around the world in Asia, Africa, South America and Oceania. Though India is a strategic partner of the US, receiving equipment and intelligence from Washington, NATO does not consider India a Non-NATO ally”.

However, both the US and NATO see India as a bulwark against authoritarian China and Russia and want it to be a major Non-NATO ally eventually.

This wish was verbalised by the US Ambassador to NATO, Julianne Smith, earlier in April, while speaking on strengthening relations with South Asia and the Indo-Pacific. She stated that though there were no plans to expand NATO to be a broader global military alliance, it does seek different kinds of partnerships with countries outside it.

Such partnerships envisage political engagement, inter-operability of the armed forces and equipment standardisation.

On India, specifically, Ambassador Smith said membership was not being opened to anyone in the Indo-Pacific or Asia-Pacific region. But paving the way for a partnership with India, she said: We both at NATO and United States, welcome what India has been able to do for the people of Ukraine. We are very grateful for the humanitarian assistance that India has been able to provide which is critical right now and those needs are only growing. Certainly, appreciate calls coming from India for some sort of immediate end to the war in Ukraine. That’s important. And we have been in constant communication with India about what more we can do together to hold Russia accountable, and we have done that and worked with India, spoken with India several times since Russia started this war inside Ukraine.”

She acknowledged that the US and India did not always share exactly the same policy approaches, but the two countries did share a commitment to upholding the rules-based order and ensuring that the key principles particularly as they relate to sovereignty and territorial integrity, those principles are respected.

Smith pointed out that NATO had been turning its attention to India as seen in references to the Asia-Pacific and the Indo-Pacific regions in its strategic documents.

The reason for this shift is, obviously, the mounting challenge posed by a rising China. India’s troubled border with China and its claims over the Indian State of Arunachal Pradesh make it a suitable candidate for recruitment to the NATO’s stable. Since 2017, China has been renaming dozens of places in that State which China says is South Tibet”. China is also saying that the Indian Ocean” is not Indian”.

Now the question whether India should have a partnership with NATO arises. There are arguments for and against it, put forward by Indian strategic thinkers. The entrenched view is that any close tie-up with NATO could end up in India’s becoming a part of the global War on Terror” with all its commitments – commitments India cannot undertake.

On the other hand, Dr. C. Raja Mohan, writing in the Journal of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University, Singapore, in July 2022, says that while India has not formally welcomed NATO’s growing outreach to the Indo-Pacific, it should have no reason to shun it.

Any additional pressure on China from Europe and NATO cannot but serve India’s interest in balancing Beijing,” he posits.

And yet, NATO is still taboo in New Delhi. The view in Delhi appears to be that any close relationship with a military grouping goes against India’s traditional non-aligned” status that had given it much elbow room in foreign affairs as well as international respectability. Joining NATO even peripherally will go against India’s time-tested policy of not going in for military alliances. And NATO is essentially a military alliance.

For example, in 1970-71, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had politely told her Soviet allies that India could not accept their offer of a military alliance ahead of the Bangladesh war. Instead, she got them to sign a Treaty of Friendship. India managed to get arms from the Soviets to fight that war without signing a military pact as such.

The present Modi-Jaishankar duo in New Delhi has put India on the path of multi-alignment” that is driven by national interest” rather than by predetermined relationships. Thanks to this policy, New Delhi has bought oil at a 30 per cent discount and S-400 batteries from Russia, defying US sanctions.

Dr. M.A. Muqtedar Khan, Professor of International Relations at the University of Delaware, warns that if India develops a very close relationship with NATO, it will join Taiwan to be a frontline State in any Sino-American war. Given India’s dislike for stationing foreign troops on its soil, India will have to fight China with its own men (though with arms given by the US and NATO).

Dr. Khan also said if India became a critical partner of NATO, which unlike the Quad is an explicitly military alliance, it will thoroughly alienate traditional friend Russia, which has locked horns with Ukraine over the latter’s bid to join NATO. It will be stab in the back for Russia which has been selling oil to India at a concessional rate.

Khan added that Sino-Indian relations, already fragile over the border issue, will be further exacerbated. And if China and Pakistan were to collude, India may have to face a two-front war on the Eastern and Western fronts with deleterious consequences for its bid to become an economic power. Further, India will have to bear the consequences of becoming a client State of the US (like Pakistan) and losing its hard-won independence.

Dr. C. Raja Mohan, on the other hand, takes a positive view of a tie-up with NATO. An India-NATO dialogue would simply mean having regular contact with a military alliance, most of whose members are well-established partners of India,” he writes in the Indian Express.

India has military exchanges with many members of NATO — including the US, Britain, and France — in bilateral and mini-lateral formats. Why, then, is a collective engagement with NATO problematic? If Delhi does military exercises with two countries with which it has serious security problems — China and Pakistan — under the rubric of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), why should talking to NATO be anathema?” he queries.

He points out that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is bringing about a change in the outlook vis-à-vis Europe. Joining the Franco-German Alliance for Multilateralism in 2019 and the Rafale deal with France are examples. Modi has been invited by France to attend Bastille Day. Modi’s first summit with Nordic nations in 2018 was recognition that Europe is not a monolith, but a continent of sub-regions.

NATO is riven with factionalism. Türkiye, one of its earliest members, has been a continuous problem for NATO with President Erdogan striving to follow an independent foreign policy. He had not been seeing eye to eye with the rest of NATO on human rights and the Kurdish rebellion in his country. Türkiye had opposed the entry of Sweden and Finland into NATO. Türkiye got sanctioned by the US for ordering S-400 from Russia and was punished for financing terrorism by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). But despite differences, Türkiye has not quit NATO, nor has there been a call from other NATO members to sack it. It still houses US bases.

India could follow the Türkiye example of being in NATO in some ways and for some reasons, and yet have an independent foreign policy, some say.

What India will do eventually is not clear. But India would certainly think it through very carefully so that it changes its policies even as it sticks to its core values such as national independence, sovereignty and dignity. Its primarily goal is to pursue its national interest and not be a lackey of some other power.

Dr. Khan rules out India joining NATO, but for limited purposes (for say, technical modernisation and intelligence gathering and sharing) it could have arrangements with NATO, he said.

By P.K. Balachandran