By John Dayal
Never in the past has the United States dared to categorically tell India to shift its foreign policy and join the American camp globally, and not just attempt to contain China.
As Prime Minister Narendra Modi returned from a trip to Austria and the Russian Federation this week, where he hugged President Vladimir Putin, US Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti expressed his nation’s frustration about India’s assertion of being a peacemaker because of Modi’s visible closeness with leaders across conflict lines.
Ambassador Garcetti told a US-India defense news conclave in New Delhi: “No war is distant anymore, and we must not just stand for peace. We must take concrete actions … the US and India need to know together.”
“We will, in crisis moments, need to know each other … that we are trusted friends … that in times of need in the next day, be acting together, that we’ll know each other’s equipment, that we know each other’s training, we’ll know each other’s systems, and we’ll know each other as human beings as well,” he said.
That is an invitation to India to join the US and NATO in supporting Ukraine against Russia in the ongoing war.
India had, during the second Modi government, joined the US in its military exercises in the South China Sea as part of QUAD, the Quadrilateral Security Defence that has created the biggest power against China in the Indo-Pacific region.
Modi’s policy on the Ukraine-Russia war — neither criticizing nor condoning it — is perceived as unconscionable and unethical in political and human rights circles in Europe, despite his reassurances to the West that India remains firmly committed to maintaining strong ties with them.
The political convulsions within several European countries in recent elections this summer may have thrown up new leaderships, but the public perception that India is opportunistic and not idealistic remains strong.
For India as a nation, this is a precipitous fall from the times of independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who helped create the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War.
He helped reaffirm the Five Principles that ought to guide relations between nations — mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence.
india’s foreign policy remained strong, largely adhering to this neutrality and affirmation of peace, through all the prime ministers from Nehru to the first BJP prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
It withstood Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s going to war with Pakistan which led to the creation of Bangladesh, despite stoic disapproval from the US, and she presided over the Nuclear Implosion in the deserts of Pokhran in Rajasthan in the face of an American embargo on higher nuclear and rocket technology.
Vajpayee, whose BJP party had invited scorn for the demolition of the 500-year-old Babri Masjid in 1992, later as prime minister in 1998 ordered the test of a nuclear fission device in the same proving grounds of Pokhran. This was a nuclear bomb by any other name. The West seemed annoyed but didn’t try to take any punitive action.
China perhaps helped Pakistan to test its own nuclear bomb soon thereafter. To the world, this was just an official show that the two South Asian nations were now nuclear powers — a fact they had known for years.
Modi’s advent on the international scene after becoming prime minister on May 26, 2014, has seen a foreign policy change, which is criticized for presenting the prime minister as the single omnipresent potentate and being low on substance.
Up to now, Modi has made 77 foreign trips, visiting 67 countries on all continents, including visits to the US to attend the United Nations General Assembly. He has been five times to China and eight times to the US, including for speaking at the UN General Assembly.
In recent decades, India has been an overbearing big brother in its neighborhood, kowtowing reluctantly to the militarily far more powerful, and technologically and therefore economically far more advanced neighbor to the north. Not anymore.
One example is the Maldives, a sovereign country of atolls that barely rise above the waves of the surrounding Arabian Seas. It got so annoyed that its president, Mohamed Muizzu, ordered the resident Indian armed forces group to leave, setting a deadline.
Although relations are a little better and the Maldivian president came to attend Modi’s third swearing-in ceremony, there is no guarantee what the world will hold in the future.
Ironically, the only area where China has bowed to India has been in population. After reigning for a century as the most populous country in the world, China is now number two, its population declining because of the one-child policy.
Pakistan, with which India has gone to war four times since the two countries took shape after the 1947 partition of the sub-continent, has been a peculiar entity in India’s foreign and domestic policies.
Muslim-majority Pakistan is often accused of sending terrorists to India, particularly in the Kashmir Valley. Those who have crossed over from Islamic Bangladesh are depicted as “white ants” that hollow out the Indian economy. India’s water-sharing issues with the two countries in the west and the east remain a trigger for future acrimony.
Bangladesh leader Sheikh Hasina is not an infrequent visitor to India. But the Pakistan leaders are so. Nawaz Sharif, the then prime minister, came to Modi’s first oath-taking ceremony in 2014, but he was not invited for the third this July.
Modi made a surprising dash to Pakistan on Christmas Day in 2015 to visit Sharif, and his family at a grandchild’s wedding. He touched the feet of Sharif’s mother in a traditional show of respect, a photograph that traveled across the world.
Pakistan remains the most reviled neighbor in the political discourse of the ruling party as it nurtures its majority Hindu vote bank on a heady mix of Islamophobia and foreign terrorism if not aggression.
Modi is perhaps most at a loss on how to handle China, and more so, its absolute ruler Xi Jinping.
As the reputed international relations magazine Foreign Policy recalled in an article, Modi laid out the red carpet in his home state Gujarat for Xi in 2014 in the hope of building a rapport and laying a foundation to resolve their countries’ vexing border dispute in the Himalayas.
“But as they … chatted on the veranda of activist Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram, Indian media was reporting on a new Chinese incursion in the mountainous region of Ladakh. Hundreds of Chinese troops were staring at their Indian counterparts while insisting on building a road inside Indian-administered territory.
Five years later, in October 2019, Modi gave Xi a tour of the seventh-century temples at Mamallapuram in southern India. Eight months later, Chinese troops entered Galwan in Ladakh and killed 20 Indian soldiers with nail-studded clubs. There were four Chinese deaths.
In November, for the first time since the Galwan clashes, Modi and Xi met in Bali, Indonesia, as India assumed the G-20 presidency and Modi all but declared him a titular head of a new international coalition. India was to spend billions of rupees celebrating Modi’s G-20 presidency in its 12 months.
But within a few weeks of the Bali meeting, Chinese troops occupied a mountain post in the state of Arunachal Pradesh which China claims as its own.
Modi’s “numerous attempts to woo Xi — whether through the evocation of hospitality, history, or global statesmanship — have done little to stem China’s increasingly assertive claims along its 3,360-kilometer (2,100-mile) border with India.
This worsening of bilateral relations represents a political problem for Modi, who sold himself to the Indian populace as a strong leader, unforgiving on questions of territorial integrity and national security. Yet he has presided over a loss of men and reportedly also land to the Chinese,” Foreign Policy said.
As Modi paints India into a corner, the new Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party claims Modi handles international diplomacy whimsically, jumping from one position to another without a coherent strategy.
Opposition parties note that in the past, despite political polarization, there was a broad consensus on India’s foreign policy, especially regarding China, Russia, and the United States.
Modi has five years in office. That is a long time for his government, and his political party, to evolve course corrections. But in the short run, he is not going to find it easy to heal wounds that have been inflicted in the neighborhood, and embarrassments that have been created abroad.
And he may find it difficult to find the exact words in which to tell the US ambassador that he has spoken out of turn and that India will not join the war in Europe on any side.
source : uca news