William Milam on the implications of Narendra Modi’s decisive electoral win on South Asia
In some ways, it seems to me, the world has turned in the last few weeks from just topsy-turvy, meaning unpredictable and worrisomely unstable, to downright scary. Yeats’s words in his poem about the 1919-1921 Anglo-Irish Civil War seem very apposite these days. In the Middle East, war between Iran and the US needs only one slight miscalculation to set it off. In Europe, headlines this morning indicate the populist, authoritarian parties of the right and of the left are both making large gains in the European Union-wide EU elections in many European countries, at the expense of the Center. Apparently and surprisingly, this does not seem to be the case in Germany. This promises to widen the gaps and reduce the ability to find political solutions to the issues that face Europe. In other words, the polarisation that characterises US politics and has just about put paid to any idea that we can reach political solutions to the many problems that face us has spread across the Atlantic.
In South Asia, the final results for the five-week Indian election show a decisively huge victory for the populist BJP, which has serious implications for both Pakistan and Bangladesh and for regional stability in South Asia.
If these are not enough to keep one awake and in a sweat at night, how about the following: North Korea is shooting off short range missiles again and daring the international community to do something about it, while President Trump is in the country most threatened, Japan and dismissing the action as benign. China, hurting from the trade war President Trump started, is beginning to act like a caged cat because of domestic pressure from its one party-apparatchiks wounded by a weakened economy, and is asserting more “sovereignty” in Southeast Asia.
Syria and the Russians look poised again to massacre innocent civilians with chemical weapons as they attempt to close out the rebellion that began seven years ago. Last but not necessarily least, the United Kingdom seems to be preparing to tear itself apart through BREXIT, also a symptom of the growing political polarisation everywhere – though the economic damage of BREXIT may be limited primarily to the UK, but the psychological damage to the West could exacerbate the already significant decline in the morale of Western countries and give another boost to the populist movements.
This is a lot of problems to deal with, and most of them seem can be traced back to Trump. But I don’t have enough space available to deal with all of them, or enough printable adjectives and adverbs to discuss those that Trump is responsible for. So I will limit myself in what follows to a riff on the unexpected overwhelming election of Modi in India. This could have wide-ranging implications for the region and especially for India’s two contiguous South Asian neighbours, Pakistan on its Western border, and Bangladesh on its Eastern border. I guess the main question is whether this solid victory, showing the BJP is here to stay, will give him the courage and the confidence to turn aside from some of the Hindu-nationalist BJP policies, which he espoused with enthusiasm during the campaign toward an more inclusive vision of his nation and a more flexible one toward his neighbours which aims at regional cooperation and stability.
An outsider could ask if, though their circumstances as well as their mindsets were significantly different, will he learn from the example of Atal Vajpayee, the three-time BJP prime minister of the late 1990s and early 2000s who deviated from the far-right, Hindu-nationalist policies of the core of the party in search of regional peace and comity. Of course in 1998-9, when Vajpayee as PM joined Nawaz Sharif, PM of Pakistan in trying to bring an end to the age-old hostility between the two nations, suddenly more dangerous to the world, and the region, as both had come out of the closet as nuclear powers, he was, on the one hand constrained from a more Hindu nationalist approach, which his party might have wanted, by a coalition in which the other parties in the government rejected Hindu nationalism, as well as supported by some coalition partners for the far-sighted policy. That it didn’t work, subverted by the Kargil invasion is one of the great political tragedies of South Asia. When Vajpayee was PM in the majority BJP government of 1999-2004, he tried to put back together the aborted peace process with then Pakistan President Musharraf—the villain of Kargil five years earlier—and that didn’t work either, possibly because his flexibility was constrained by a BJP majority government (though there was likely some lack of flexibility on the other side too).
So the question is whether Modi, with a full-throated BJP majority, and seemingly more public support for a Hindu Nationalist state—Modi ran on such a platform which caught the voters’ fancy like the populism now overcoming centrist policies in the West—and his constraints are likely to be, not just the BJP right wing, but the greater public support for the policies espoused by that BJP right wing. It is an age-old question in politics everywhere—whether a leader elected on a specific hard line policy agenda can switch to a more inclusive and cooperative one that aims at peace and stability in the region. It has happened, but usually only when that leader realises that his position is safe because the policy agenda he was elected on is not working anyway. Or in the case of some political systems, the leader realises he has time to make the new agenda work before he has to face the public anyway.
For Pakistan, the stakes could be very high. On the one hand, a Modi that feels secure enough in his newly-found popular acceptance to want to work with Pakistan for regional stability, as Atal Vajpayee obviously did, would provide Pakistan once again an opportunity and an incentive to carry out those reforms and policies that would lead to a normalised relationship over time. We have to hope that it would capitalise on a Modi government intent on that idea. However, after the Pulwama/Balakot imbroglio, that seems a distant dream if not a figment of the dreamer’s imagination. Modi’s huge victory may have forever hardened the muscular policy that India followed after the Pulwana incident. If this is the Modi we will see, then we can expect increasing instability and uncertainty, and a very rocky relationship indeed.
A number of Bangladeshis probably cheered Modi’s win as good for Bangladesh, as India under Modi has backed the Awami League government without question about its dismal human rights record and in spite of the stolen election of last December. But there is also uncertainty as what Modi’s decisive win means for Bangladesh. This springs from the implicit threat of the virulent anti-Muslim rhetoric that the Modi campaign employed and the fact that his government had stepped up the publication of a National Register of Citizens which had been lingering undone or unfinished for many years. Pakistanis have also registered the anti-Muslim tone of his campaign. This register has now been completed in the state of Assam in Northeastern India. It seeks to eliminate from the citizen rolls those who have immigrated into Assam after March 24 1971, the day before the Bangladesh war of separation started. In other words, it targets Bangladeshis who have immigrated after that date and takes their citizenship away. This is, in effect, what the Burmese did in Myanmar to the Rohingyas. There are now a million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. About four million Bengali speaking people in Assam are believed to have been stripped of Indian citizenship and are effectively stateless. There is no policy decision as to what to do with them. But press reports indicate that the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the election campaign has raised public cries that they be deported. Modi can dampen this down rather easily, or he can use the issue as leverage with Bangladesh. Whether Modi continues to push hard on his populist, hard line agenda, will determine, inter alia, the fate of these four million people.
The truth is that Mr Modi holds the fate of the sub-continent in his hands after his smashing victory in India. Will he imitate Vajpayee or Trump?
The author is a diplomat, and is Senior Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
The article appeared in The Friday Times on 31 May 2019