What's standing between Modi & Trump? India's contradictions

The Print

2 days ago

You could start with Modi's rise in the summer of 2014. That's when this establishment was celebrating the end of the 30-year wait for a strong leader to consummate India's strategic, economic, political and moral weight. In short, its Comprehensive National Power (CNP). The first warning shot came from Xi Jinping as his troops came for a stroll in southern Ladakh's Chumar region exactly when he was being feted by Modi in Ahmedabad. Their actions worsened over time. On China, however, India has had a long view.
To protect ourselves from Trumpian diplomacy on social media, we must first introspect the bipolarity within our establishment discourse. Establishment here means not just the Modi government but also much of its support base in public debate, from social media to TV panelists and Op-edists, in that order of significance.
Psychoanalysing Donald Trump is a booming global business. We in India are doing our bit. The only objective, however, is to find a way of surviving him for about two more years. It can't be to cure him. Nobody has a pill or therapy for him. India has to look at ways to protect itself from his industrial-scale irrationality.
Overall, the mood was upbeat. India had arrived, an indispensable power in the new world to which it was teaching multipolarity and multi-alignment. If a Western strategic scholar described India as a powerful swing state, the reaction was: grow up, you aren't talking of Turkey or Brazil; we are already a great power, or almost there.
The peak was 2023, the G20 year. By now India was the toast of the world. Soon to be the fourth largest economy, the pivot of the Quad, even more significant because we weren't a treaty ally. We were the only one of the four staring down China and keeping nearly a hundred thousand of its troops occupied along our 3,488-km borders.
India was finally punching according to its weight, with the parade of G20 heads of state for handshakes and hugs with Modi at Bharat Mandapam being the high point. India was sermonising the world, especially the West. Europe was a specific target, partly as an aggressive defence of our ties with Russia, but also because it played so well with the base. All this makes up the first pole in this bipolarity in the establishment discourse.
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The arrival of the other pole can be timed with the souring with the US, Canada and somewhat understatedly Britain by the G20 summit. The Nijjar-Pannun issue cast a shadow, but barring Trudeau's Canada, the rest did not make a public spectacle. The first evident setback was then US Ambassador Eric Garcetti announcing that Joe Biden had been invited to visit New Delhi in January for a Quad summit and also to attend the Republic Day parade as chief guest. He cancelled and the French saved us greater embarrassment.
By this time our bipolarity was evident, and growing. All of these were seen as deliberately hostile actions. For a decade the belief was that the West saw India as a vital, indispensable strategic ally. There was even some quiet acknowledgement of American help in the crisis with China, in both the north-western and eastern sectors.
Now the muscle memory was back. The West was hostile, couldn't accept the rise of an aatmanirbhar India, wanted to strangle our roots and clip the branches to diminish us into a strategic bonsai. It was delusional to think that the West would accept us as an equal. From hailing ourselves as indispensable, essential, natural allies for a decade, large sections of this establishment were returning to Indira-era prickliness.
The purchase of Russian oil was flaunted as an expression of strategic autonomy rather than quietly letting it be what it actually is—prudent purchase within the sanction-prescribed price band. This was a smart business decision. Smarter diplomacy needed it to be kept low-key.
To be fair, the boasts of defiance, thumbing our noses at the West, came not from our diplomats or politicians but from the larger BJP ecosystem. It was a bit like, see we can stand up to them as China does.
By around this time last year this victimhood pole had begun to overwhelm the earlier euphoria. Hasina's collapse was blamed on Washington, liberal foundations and the 'evil' Clinton-Obama Deep State. They certainly helped along what they saw as democratic forces, in the same way as the Arab Spring, but with much lower involvement. It angered the Modi establishment even more as it came within eight weeks of the election where its score stopped at 240. The 'world' was again up to its own tricks and weakening him.
This hurt us in two different ways. One, the 25-year post-1998 investment in a new American relationship was being lost. Second, we became too angry, too victimised to ask how come our diplomacy and intelligence were defeated so easily. India had made phenomenal investments in Bangladesh, and it wasn't just business, electricity or even a very open-hearted border settlement. For heaven's sake, India was issuing upwards of two million visas annually to Bangladeshis. Nobody sensed how unpopular Hasina had become, or the storm that was brewing.
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The rude fact is that while hostile forces outplayed us in Dhaka, both Bangladesh (anti-Hasina network) and Pakistan have played Washington enormously better than us. This, when we've been celebrating the rise of the diaspora, counting Indian-origin individuals among top CEOs and some stars in US politics. For them to make an effective lobby our diplomacy has to rally them. The professionals and politicians have left it all to the Prime Minister's goodwill. This is unreasonable and lazy, bordering on arrogance.
The result is this fury of the jilted lover. In this formulation, America is a hostile superpower and we have to fight it all by ourselves. Pakistan is an enemy, China uses it as its borrowed knife to stab us, and Russia is a weakened force.
Everybody is against us. Even Allama Iqbal, such as he was, wrote: sadiyon raha hai dushman daur-e-zamana hamara (the world has been our enemy for centuries). Don't worry. We will fight alone. We've been there before. We're a deeply patriotic nation. The Swadeshi Jagran Manch has already said it is up for the fight. What does Trump know?
This is the second, dominant aspect of our bipolarity. The pity is we've jumped backwards into it without taking a deep breath, assessing the new reality, and responding accordingly. The debate in Parliament demonstrated that we are still trapped in Cold War rhetoric. The issues of mediation, for example. The government could've handled it simply by acknowledging that in any India-Pakistan crisis post 1987 foreign powers have helped by leaning on Pakistan. Foreign involvement has always been there, but never, after the Simla Accord, to mediate over Kashmir. Vajpayee invented a smart description for it: facilitation.
A response like thanking Trump for putting some sense into Pakistan's head and saving it from self-destruction would not have hurt the Modi government. It could've just said this in Parliament rather than suggest Trump is lying.
Why did it not happen? Because Rahul Gandhi drew first blood within hours of the ceasefire, saying India had accepted mediation. As we wrote in this National Interest, the Modi government finds it impossible not to react to Rahul. He can often provoke them to switch their agenda. All of this fed into this enormous sense of victimisation. This, when the real establishment, the Prime Minister, External Affairs Minister, Commerce Minister are quiet, prudent, not taking Trump's bait, negotiating behind the scenes. The opinion within their own base, however, is a self-inflicted challenge. That's the bipolarity within the establishment.
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