While Modi has been raising the country's global profile for a while now with high-profile visits to Japan, the US and, most recently, to Australia, to be followed later with Russia and the UK, so far we have tended to dismiss each one of his visits as more hype than substance. Our cynical belief (including mine) has been that these trips were more intended to bolster Modi's image than the country's. We have now reached a turning point where what could be dismissed as hype is becoming a potential reality. Perceptions have the power to change objective reality, and Modi is on the cusp of doing so.
President Barack Obama's acceptance of Modi's invitation to be the guest of honour at the Republic Day parade is possibly the tipping point that separates pure atmospherics from reality. In the past few weeks India has sorted out its WTO disagreement with the US over food subsidies, coaxed a better visa deal from Obama for our IT professionals and Stem (science, tech, engineering and maths) students to work and study in the US, and generally improved the quality of our bilateral relationship in many areas.
The additional reason why one should see this as an inflexion point for the relationship is this: both Obama and Modi transcended their personal biases to look at the future rather than the past. Consider how much both leaders have learnt to forgive or forget in order to put their national interests above themselves.
Obama had put it on record that he had misgivings about Modi becoming Prime Minister because of his middle name (Hussain) - implying that he cannot accept someone who is perceived to be anti-Muslim. Modi has put aside bitter memories of a US visa denial to him born more out of evangelical activism than genuine concern for communal harmony in India. If the concern was real, no leader from anywhere in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, for example, should ever have been welcome on US soil. But that is manifestly not the case.
President Obama's decision to be chief guest at the R-Day parade thus has both symbolic value and directional messaging on bilateral and geopolitical realities. This is partly because no Indian PM has ever managed to get the leader of the world's foremost superpower to come on R-Day, which is our show, our pride. But more likely, this is also because of our own ambivalence about ties with the US. From a political perspective, we have always had a chip on our shoulders about the US from Nehruvian times even though all aspiring Indians have seen America as the land of dreams and opportunity and sent their own progeny there to educate themselves and get rich.
Hopefully, the Modi-Obama dialogue will allow both countries to escape the hypocrisies of the past.
Many important signals are being sent to the world at large and to ourselves following Obama’s decision to mark his attendance at the R-Day parade.
These include:
#1: We have reaffirmed the relationship between India and the US as one between natural allies and partners. This is not only about a shared belief in democracy, but one driven by shared geopolitical concerns on the rise of China and terrorism, among other things. But there is a caveat here: we have done this repeatedly in the past too – under Narasimha Rao, under Atal Behari Vajpayee, and Manmohan Singh, but each time we allowed events and past suspicions to overpower the larger logic of partnership. If Modi does not repeat the mistakes of the past, this change will be for real.
#2: The primary geopolitical signal is clearly one of building a power axis to check China's ambitions in Asia and the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The US, Japan, Australia, India and Vietnam are key to this axis - a fact underscored both by Modi's diplomacy priorities and Obama's. As President of the US, Obama knows that it cannot be a globocop in Asia or the Pacific without countering China. It cannot do the whole job itself, as US economic power shrinks in the coming decades and new challenges rise in the Islamic crescent of West Asia. Japan is keen to defend itself, and has begun to make changes to its defence posture under Shinzo Abe, but its economy is weak. India is key to US geopolitcal interests just as the US is key to India's.
#3: The Obama-Modi footwork is an indication of a shift in India’s own sense of itself, and the world’s gradual recognition of this reality. No country respects another that merely tries to be a lackey or apes another. Under Modi, who makes it a point to emphasise his own cultural heritage by speaking in Hindi and refusing to apologise for what he is, the world senses a new power rising in India. This is pretty much what Shinzo Abe has tried to do in Japan by visiting the Yasukuni shrine, angering China. Just as Abe has demonstrated that Japan does not have to kowtow to external demands on what he should be or do, Modi’s message is similar.
This message started with the popular mandate for the BJP, and after that by Modi’s own conduct and body language in front of the world. The challenge for Modi is to convey two opposite things: that the BJP is not a majoritarian party, while, at the same time not being apologetic about its own Hindu roots. To achieve this, Modi has to turn the BJP into an inclusive party where it may have its conservative impulses, even a Hindu tinge, but that ultimately it is no different from the German Christian Democrats, or the US Republican party, or the UK Conservative party – which have traditional links to the religious and cultural right.
#4: Modi’s relative success at diplomacy is proof that change happens through a demonstration of power – both hard and soft. While Nehru projected soft power, his ideological moorings alienated him from the west, even though his own through process was influenced largely by it. He was like a student who hated his mentor. His daughter emphasised hard power, but she ruled when the cold war was hot. Her projection of power was seen as a proxy for Soviet designs.
Given US proximity to Pakistan, this was probably inevitable, but that is another story. It was only under Narasimha Rao, Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and, now, Modi that India has learnt the true value of projecting power. We now have the potential to retain strategic space to pursue both geopolitical alliances and our own national goals.
Under Rao, we discovered that a bankrupt nation has nothing to be proud of. He and Manmohan Singh helped free India from the clutches of the Nehruvian rate of growth and unnecessary suspicions about capitalism.
Under Vajpayee, India demonstrated both hard and soft power. With the Pokharan blasts, Vajpayee first brought US sanctions upon us, but the Jaswant Singh-Strobe Talbott talks brought the India-US relationship to an even keel, with the US officially realising that it may have made a mistake in permanently bracketing democratic India with theocratic Pakistan. 9/11 allowed India to get even closer to the George Bush administration.
Under Manmohan Singh, an Indian economy growing like gangbusters again caught the world’s attention, but it was growth unrelated to anything Singh did. It was more the result of global buoyancy and the climate of low inflation and reforms initiated by Vajpayee. This interest peaked with the signing of the India-US nuclear deal, which ended our global pariah status in matters nuclear.
But Manmohan Singh dropped the ball when he decided to play second fiddle to Sonia Gandhi’s selfish political interests, which landed the Indian economy in a self-created mess. But Singh did contribute, in his first tenure, importantly to the projection of India’s soft power with his image as an honest and self-effacing leader. The problem was, while Singh received personal acclaim, his inability to project hard power allowed everybody to walk over us – from China to Sri Lanka to Pakistan. Internally, every tinpot caste or regional leader ran a coach-and-four over the country’s interests.
Under Modi’s energetic domestic and geopolitical presence, India is now able to project both hard and soft power. He has done this in two ways. By galvanising the soft power of the global desi (the NRI community), he has demonstrated to world leaders in their own backyards that he and India cannot be ignored in power equations anymore. He is trying to revive growth back home by focusing on making ease of doing business his focus. He has excited domestic and global business.
Big bang reforms will help, but even if he steadily and consistently reduces regulations, gets the government off the backs of business and the people, improves the climate for growth and investment, invests in a robust defence capability, and generally rebuilds the India story, he will have delivered. His success depends on reviving India’s economy and creating jobs, and investing the gains to project both hard and soft power.
It is this promise of India under Modi that Obama has silently acknowledged by agreeing to turn up on R-Day. It is up to Modi to ensure that the promise does not fizzle out – the way it did after Rao and Manmohan Singh.
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