In all territories beyond national jurisdiction, beginning with Space, we now need to "bend the West" towards what may called an Indra doctrine. A doctrine that derives from a post-Westphalian, post-European, Indic theory of International Relations.
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This brief essay is an elaboration of a presentation I was invited to make at a session of a webinar on: “Growing Space Economy and Space Governance Challenges” hosted on by the Research and Information System for the Developing Countries (RIS), New Delhi, on 27 May 2022. It is carried here by kind permission of RIS.
Since the late-Sixties, India has pursued a steady programme of Space research, access, utilisation and exploration. India now populates Earth Orbits, and beyond, with Indian-owned and operated space assets, placed there by launch vehicles built in and launched from India. Earth Orbit is a territory – not a ‘commons’ -- that is both conflicted and beyond national jurisdiction. The governance of that territory is contested by those who are congesting it with their assets -- active or discarded; and, while so doing, infecting it with ‘astropolitik’ – that stubborn virus of Earth-based power politics that lives and survives in the pristine vastness of Space only because it receives nourishment and support from the harbourers of that virus on Earth.
India’s place in Space and role in its governance from now until she enters the second century of her independent existence as a Republic may be portrayed in a ‘Space Governance Matrix’ which looks like this:
in which India is currently placed at the top left-hand corner. She should move steadily in the time-scales indicated, to the bottom-right corner:
At least until the middle of this Century, and possibly till its end, the governance of the territory of Space will be contested by its early squatter-occupants. These are the ones who created exclusive national jurisdictions in an earthly Westphalian order that created territorial nation states in Europe, and later in their colonies -- including the Americas, let us not forget -- but have nevertheless contested in violent wars that very order for 350 years since they themselves created it.
Even as the populations of the West (as also those of its military colonies of Japan and Korea) age and decline in both numbers and technological felicity, the urge to preserve and continue post Cold-War, hegemonic orders in all domains of international relations is an inherited, untreatable, addictive disease of the West. A symptom of that affliction was manifest in a statement on the then Ukraine situation by Kurt Campbell, the Deputy Assistant to the President and Indo-Pacific Policy Coordinator, U.S. National Security Council, who stated in May 2022 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington D.C., that as a matter of policy: ".... it is in all of our best interests to try to work over time to bend its [India’s] trajectory more to the West.” “Bend India”? Really?
That attempted ‘bending’ includes solicitation of India’s signature on treaties with clever, but gratuitous, calls for bans on “debris-causing” Anti-Satellite weapons. India was not born yesterday, as ban-proposer U.S. Vice-President, Kamala Harris – of all people – should know particularly well.
I have posited elsewhere that India should lead the construction new ontologies of international relations in Space that are based on the trusteeship principle, effected through a re-purposed, extant, Trusteeship Council of the United Nations. See: http://isssp.in/the-governance-of-outer-space-repurposing-the-trusteeship-council-of-the-united-nations/2
In all territories beyond national jurisdiction, beginning with Space, we now need to "bend the West" towards what may called an Indra doctrine. A doctrine that derives from a post-Westphalian, post-European, Indic theory of International Relations. Such a doctrine will also need to be realist enough to build, deploy and credibly demonstrate the attendant trans-domain instruments of power to show we can, should we need to, bring that theory to practice -- whether the West “bends” to Indra or not. Our nuclear tests of 1998 and our Anti-Satellite test of 2019 were two demonstrations of autonomous technological capability to operate in Western, Cartesian ontologies if we had to. Those tests were not, in and of themselves, material declarations of the acceptance and adoption of those ontologies as now our own, much less were they – as the West still scorns them to be – statements by a neophyte of its “arrival” on the world stage.
What, then, might be the Indic features of an Indra doctrine for Space? One feature will be the need to orient a techno-colonial West to an ontological understanding of autonomy in the sense that The Buddha meant it: “Be Unto Yourself the Only Lamp”. The second feature, as India traverses the Space Governance Matrix in time from top-left to the bottom-right, will be the inculcation into her next two generations the bases-of-action embodied in that remarkable conversation between the young Rama and the celebrated guru Vasistha, left to us to imbibe in another ‘must-read’ by the recently late Professor Roddam Narasimha.3
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(a) Giri, Chaitanya: India in the Second Space Age of Interplanetary Connectivity, Routledge, South Asia Edition, 2022. This is a densely written and copiously referenced work of scholarship: A must-read monograph for anyone with an in-depth interest in, or policy-responsibility for, India's place in Space beyond the Geostationary Earth Orbit.
2. After that tract was published, I discovered that my proposal therein on holding Space in the trusteeship of the United Nations had been made, inter alia, in the 1997 Kofi Annan Report on the reform of the UN: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/243753?ln=en. Para 85 of that Report reads: "85. Member States appear to have decided to retain the Trusteeship Council. The Secretary General proposes, therefore, that it be reconstituted as the forum through which Member States exercise their collective trusteeship for the integrity of the global environment and common areas such as the oceans, atmosphere and outer space. At the same time, it should serve to link the United Nations and civil society in addressing these areas of global concern, which require the active contribution of public, private and voluntary sectors."
3. Narasimha, Roddam: “Verses for the Brave: SELECTIONS FROM THE YOGA-VASISTHA”, Penguin Books, 2021.