Book Chapter - Seeking a Seat at the Table: India Turns to the Arctic

This is a draft of a chapter submitted by Aditya Ramanathan to Handbook on Geopolitics and Security in the Arctic: The High North Between Cooperation and Confrontation, June 2020, Edited by Joachim Weber, ISBN: 3030450058, 9783030450052

Introduction

India defines its interests in the Arctic as being scientific, environmental, commercial and strategic. This expansive definition is meant to keep India’s options open. On the one hand, Indians are concerned about untrammelled exploitation of Arctic resources and would like an international treaty to keep the Arctic Ocean off-limits – an idea rooted in its experience with the Antarctic Treaty  System in the twentieth century. On the other hand, India does not want to be left out of commercial opportunities that may arise as the Arctic ice recedes. For now, India is content to have a seat at the table. This impulse best explains India’s Arctic engagement, in particular, its successful pursuit of observer status in the Arctic Council.  

In 1903, Indian nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak published The Arctic Home in the Vedas, a  highly speculative 500-page tome that argued that the Arctic, and not central Asia, was the original homeland of the Indo-European peoples. However, Tilak’s book – a mishmash of geology and references from ancient texts – brought the Arctic into the imagination of modern  India only briefly (Tilak 1925).

A more substantial legal connection was born in 1923 when India’s British rulers ratified the  Svalbard Treaty, (Ingimundarson 2018: 7). effectively making it one of the High Contracting  Parties. In the decades after independence in 1947, political and diplomatic elites would only show episodic interest in the polar regions. The first such burst of interest came in the 1950s  but was centred around Antarctica. Indeed, as we shall see, India’s engagement with the  Antarctic would inform its approach to the Arctic in the early twenty-first century.

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