India Trumped!

26 February 2020

We will scarce believe that our stodgy diplomats allowed a foreign dignitary to visit India, hold a Electoral Rally type Stadium address, and then have a press conference without our executive counterpart, i.e. the PM of India and tick off all personal and private agendas of his visit while bagging $3 billion in contracts under the FMS route in under 48 hours! Actually President Trump is way far more successful as a deal maker than he was as head of Syndicate Trump! I don’t think his Trump Tower deals had any where the kind of closing his Presidential sweepstakes with foreign nations has been!

So Trump was majorly into the trade deal with India, which was presaged by first lowering India’s trade support, by recategorising India from developing to developed country! That is very clever, because, when he now eventually restores some of those very concessions, Trump will declare these as signs of India’s strategic closeness to USA and sign of Indo US Partnership in Asia. For Modi 2.0, Trump is simply one who will be embraced despite/ at any costs to India’s strategic and tactical calculus.

So looking at all the images that Trump’s visit beamed, you can tell that American Indian community will now be conflicted between a person who calls Mr Modi his great friend, who has shown great personal chemistry on this trip with him. We don’t have stump mics in these interfaces, but those words they kept exchanging while strolling everywhere in front of the camera were not ‘sweet nothings’ or ‘Personal courtesies’! Of course, knowing Mr Modi well by now, we cannot also bracket these as strategic nudges or offers of insight into weighty global matters, ( notwithstanding the views of a serving Supreme Court Justice!) But what ever were those mouthing, they were perfectly matching the mood and tenor of President Trump. The optics of the trip will weigh on the minds of Indians at home and abroad, particularly those aspiring for US Visas and those already there in USA looking for Green Cards or settled with them! It was a scintillating performance, never mind ‘Dolan’ Trump or the gaffes in pronunciation Trump made in his stadium speech!

Would Trump have missed Dr Manmohan Singh’s presence at the Presidential Banquet? No. Trump thinks he knows more about any subject than any expert or scholar, so it was just as well that Dr Singh chose to absent himself. Yet, when one looks at Motera Stadium optics in India and contrast it with Howdy Modi event in USA, the diplomatic charade of such events was starkly absent in India. In USA, there were both Democrats and Republicans who represented bipartisan support for Indo-US relationships and acknowledging Mr Modi’s current leadership of India. So Mr Modi could well have had the Indian political representation as broad based as possible at his Namaste Trump event, rather than make it what it turned out to be, a private party from his side to Mr Trump! Perhaps this triggered the ‘boycott’ of the State Dinner in Delhi, though folks were eager to portray that Ms Sonia Gandhi was forcing the hand of Dr Singh and Mr Azad who had official invites because she was not! ( It is a well established diplomatic tradition that visiting dignitaries of India’s strategic caucus of nations meet political leadership across the spectrum, a practise the IFS cultivated from the days of Nehru through Dr Singh, which made India’s foreign policy delinked from domestic political compulsions.)

So whatever were shortcomings those were purely on the Indian side. We got the Navy the helicopters she badly needed, including sensibly, a minimum number off the shelf, ( from their fitting quota on a USS Naval AirCraft Carrier that is undergoing major refit ) which means that while the remaining come in due course, Navy will not say like the IAF, ‘if only we had the Rafale’! We also got more anti submarine capability, with maritime patrolling aircraft in ASW suite of the P3 Orion class, besides more Apaches and a tactical missile shield for the Army and revived the interest of the three services for Predator drones. These armaments and platforms are sorely needed for India to keep pace with the increasingly sophisticated Chinese PLA, PLAF and PLAN inventory she now encounters. Did India discuss modified F16s reclassified as F21s for local production as its ‘staple’ MiG 21 replacement for its squadrons starved  IAF? Will the Tata-Lockheed JV go ahead? Or did India sound the US for F35s as its FGFA option?

If you assumed that only military deals were the topic, then you were wrong. But the rest of the talks were also military geostrategic, going by the chatter and news reams devoted by mainstream news columns in India and America that discussed Trump’s visit. The angle was the alliance against China, where the Indian left wanted India to not commit, to remain with the option of staying as an Asian power and alternative to China, while the Indian Right was seeking to plunge headlong into this US strategy of containing China by proxy. Yet, unlike Japan which is actively funding India and investing in India to build her up as an Asian power under PM Abe, ( a policy first supported by charismatic  former PM Koizumi), USA is not aiding any project in India, nor has she offered any technical assistance even for the Kaveri Jet Engine programme, content as she is that the LCAs are now flying on GE engines imported under licence from her! So the core opposition to USA in India by scholars is, how unlike China, USA is not writing any cheques. And how Saudi Arabia is investing in Chinese Belt and Road initiatives even as she remains foremost ally of USA in West Asia!

Trump is at an advantage, in fact, the USA is at a great advantage, because unlike any previous era, today, India’s domestic polity is heavily influenced by expatriates based in USA and their financing of her think tanks and her political parties through Electoral Bonds. For what ever private reasons, US based Indians are sensing that this is the magical window for them to script an American version of a WASP  ruling bloc in India. The CAA-NPR-NRC is not an exercise that will create an exodus of Muslims out from India, as much as more cleverly it will be an exercise to disenfranchise millions of Indians who are not in the political correct spectrum of opinion espoused by the NRIs. Their prescription is Identity based voter blocs( HinduHindi); Identified beneficiaries (CronyCapitalism) Intentional Interventions for Insurance Based Public Services in Health, Agriculture, Education, and other sectors to create a climate favourable to new rent seekers or sahukaars- Insurance Agencies and agents! So whatever is now engaging India domestically, to understand it and counter it, one needs to study the American Far Right and Ultra Conservatives, the world of Dark Money and how more of the same manipulative approach will span out in India which clearly is in no institutional shape to offer meaningful resistance unlike the USA still is in!

Effectively we have reached this point, which is far removed from the perch where Nehru had placed us, using stratagems like NAM. We as a polity are now mentally colonised by American Right Wing and White Supremacist Racist thought, ( which is originally  full blown in its Nazi form) and if you don’t think so, just watch American Comics from Comedy Central HBO and Netflix to get this drift! Still, one cannot deny Trump’s personal impact and his self projection, which left India stumped and trumped!