Four years ago, on a reporting trip to the predominantly Dalit township of Mirzapur district on the state’s south-eastern border during the 2022 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, this author met a poor middle-aged Dalit man, a committed voter of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). He reiterated his support for the BSP but also said that his vote in the national elections would go to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Why? The man said, Narendra Modi government has increased the prestige of the country in the world.
After much prodding the man came up with specific details. When the (Russia-Ukraine) war broke out, the government was successful in stopping the war and evacuating our students. He said, even superpowers like America and China have not been able to evacuate their students. I realized that it was pointless to argue with them that American and Chinese students do not go to study in Ukraine. But when the BJP made it a campaign point in the 2024 elections, unlike many smug but foolhardy observers of Indian politics, I was neither surprised nor infuriated. Narendra Modi’s government has significantly boosted India’s national prestige, an idea that has been systematically and consistently promoted by the BJP’s campaign machinery in the country. Although one can debate about the magnitude of its political impact on the BJP’s electoral fortunes, it has certainly been an integral part of the regime’s effort to create an aura around the personality of the Prime Minister.
Certainly, there is nothing wrong with such an effort. Political parties are free to choose the issues on which they want to campaign and shape popular sentiments. The BJP was remarkably successful in creating positive sentiment around the strength of India’s foreign policy. It was portrayed as powerful against India’s belligerent neighbor Pakistan, which has been waging an asymmetric war against India for decades. It was described as generous towards its smaller neighbors and other poor countries in the global South. And it was shown to have greater equality than in the past compared to rich countries, whether it’s the US or European countries or even petrodollar states.
Occasions, even if routine, were turned into spectacles for the public. The Delhi G-20 summit, the Prime Minister’s public engagements with Donald Trump in 2020, his big state visits under the Biden presidency and the now forgotten showdown with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Tamil Nadu are all part of the same pattern. If necessary, one can give further examples to support the embodiment of the logic of diplomacy.
Not everything is purely cosmetic in this approach. Many external activities of this government have achieved concrete results. Trade deals, supply-chain relationships, security partnerships have been created.
Despite these gains, one could also argue that India has made mistakes of both omission and commission. These include the failure to stop Sheikh Hasina, our biggest ally in the region, from carrying out atrocities and political excesses, which led to public anger and her downfall, and the Prime Minister visiting Israel just days before launching a war against Iran in collaboration with the US, which made it appear that we were on Israel’s side. Then there are miscalculations. Trump 2.0 made India one of the biggest targets of his trade war, while the Indian state considered him a good friend who would be happy to compromise with the country, the biggest example in this case.
How did these mistakes happen? The purpose of asking these questions is not to criticize the ruling regime. This is the work of the opposition, not of any analyst. And frankly, the East has been quite inept at scoring such points on a variety of issues over the last 12 years. This question is important because answering it requires an objective assessment of India’s strategy under the current government.
Three major factors come to this writer’s mind.
1. A miscalculation of trust that suggests uniformity of foreign relations based on similarity in domestic political rhetoric
India’s right wing loved Donald Trump, and not because of his policy vision of how America should be. They liked him because he was staunchly anti-Semitism and seemed more attractive than the woke democrats and his other Western peers, who often criticized India on things like Hindutva. That Trump’s right-wing-reactionary traits would also be applied against Indian exporters and H1B workers was not something that even occurred to him until the shoe fell on the other foot.
A similar argument can be made regarding Israel. The Palestinian conflict, partly because of its historical development and partly because of its representation in Indian public discourse, is often seen as a religious question rather than a nationalistic one. The celebration of Israel’s military power against the Islamic threat had blinded India’s right wing to the (now obvious) painful economic consequences of a major military incursion into West Asia.
This is a lesson that Indians, regardless of political ideology, both the right wing and its opponents, need to learn well. Great ideological similarity does not always lead to similarity of national interests between countries.
2. He came, he had an offer that no one could refuse, he always did a better job than the one he came on, he saw, he won in geopolitics.
There are no permanent friends or enemies in geopolitics. Relationships become hot or cold, depending on whose interests are important at which time. Donald Trump realized this the hard way when he had to seek trade isolation with China after the Chinese threatened to cut off rare-earth supplies in retaliation for Trump tariffs. Sri Lanka realized that it needed India in the IMF debt restructuring talks after playing a strange game between India and China, where one of the loans being negotiated was Chinese. India realized that public sentiment about breaking ties with China was untenable given our large trade ties with it.
In today’s geopolitics, these conflicting issues matter more than personal warmth and photo-ops. As is clear, the strings of these relationships are extremely complex and entangled in the world and the voltage of geopolitical harmony can increase or decrease depending on the circumstances. India needs to work on its abilities to make offers that cannot be refused, rather than harbor the illusion that a leader’s charisma is working for us. In the east there will be a need to increase the economic strength of the country.
3. Creating international recognition requires collective hard work rather than outsourcing caesarism
A cliché often heard in foreign policy discussions in India is that the best foreign policy is a sustained 8% GDP growth rate. The experience of the last six years, when the world has repeatedly faced massive supply chain disruptions, shows that the best foreign policy is also self-reliance in being able to secure things like pharmaceutical APIs, fertilizers, having adequate reserves of fossil fuels, rare-earth supplies and so on.
The short point is that to reach great power milestones there is no software bypass and a country must go back to the physical basics of brick-and-mortar self-reliance. Thanks to its software highway to development, India was duped into believing the former. Although some of these actions may be hampered by the natural resource endowment a country like India faces, on many fronts, a country as big as ours should have no excuses. The bitter reality is that India is still far behind self-reliance in many sectors. A government that has been in power for the last 12 years with a good majority can do better than blaming its predecessors.
What exactly has prevented India from performing well on this target? A fundamental asymmetry in our political economy is responsible for this.
The public, most of whom face extreme economic uncertainty, has been protected from turmoil by the rapid spread of economic palliative measures. This has happened at both the central and state government levels and has bipartisan support across the political spectrum. This has resulted in economic costs. India’s enhanced international prestige is the proverbial placebo rather than an effective medicine in this political bargain.
Domestic capital, without which such self-sufficiency cannot be achieved today, is unwilling to make such commitments because it can continue to earn, relatively, risk-free profits in other activities that take advantage of the size of domestic markets and where competition with foreign producers is not required. This separation from investments that promote the national interest is often legitimized by their desire to provide political finance. The money spent in Indian elections is huge in a country with such low per capita income levels.
The fragility of this short-termism, existentialist for the underclass and conveniently profiteering for the rich, often remains hidden when things are going well in the world. But in times of crisis like the present, our weaknesses are exposed.
Public discussion, considering the truth of the country’s entrenched poverty, often tries to move behind placebo issues rather than raising more fundamental questions. The disproportionate outrage and mudslinging over Pakistan’s role in brokering the ceasefire between the US and Iran, along with the complete lack of discussion on why India is no longer immune to the physical disruptions caused by war and what can be done to fix this, is a glaring example.
So what is to be done?
Certainly, democracies, where periodic renewal of power is the primary objective of a political party, are more prone to such disparities. On the other hand, an authoritarian country like China is able to better prioritize tasks in its national interest. Although this is a reasonable excuse, it can be disastrous for a country if it is allowed to be condoned.
This is where the political message of the supreme leadership, whether democratic or dictatorial, matters. Indians, to paraphrase Stalin’s famous 1930 article acknowledging the excesses under the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union, have become ‘a whirlwind without success’. It is unreasonable to expect a poor farmer or gig worker to appreciate the complexities of the supply chain and the underlying functions of India’s strategic resilience. They should be educated about the task taken up by politics. It is useful to end the column with another old Soviet joke.
Construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway began during Lenin’s reign. Once when Lenin was traveling by train with his Politburo the train stopped. What happened? Lenin asked. Comrade, there is no way forward, they were told. He said, let’s all get down and lay the tracks. Decades later, it was Stalin who was on the train and the same thing happened. He said, I give you 24 hours to go off the track, otherwise you will all be shot. Then Khrushchev came and he too had to face a similar plight. He ordered, let’s take the tracks from the back and lay them in the front. When Brezhnev faced the problem, he said, it doesn’t matter if there are no tracks, let’s pretend we are moving.
India’s international standing will depend on where our political leadership actually stands on the Lenin-Brezhnev spectrum. While all four Soviet leaders ruled a strong country, their contributions to advancing the national interest could not have been more different.
Opinions are personal.
