4 August 2021
Continuing with this vein of strategic rigidity, from Afghanistan’s Taliban woes, we can shift toward how the last seven years has been a series of mixed events, opportunities that were offered by the arrival on the national stage by Mr Modi as a person with no baggage, and his audacious attempt to reshape destiny of India’s foreign policy.
Few will recall today, the euphoria on the campaign trail was one which for the first time, raised issue with voters on matters abroad and in power play at the strategic high table. For an India fed on a diet of ‘roti kapda and makaan’ ( bread, cloth, and shelter) and where voters tended to vote increasingly for the candidate with the bigger Gandhi backing them, ( Gandhi is euphemism for currency notes that now carry his image), Mr Modi spoke in bits and pieces, about foreign policy and strategic affairs, in ways and means that signalled many things, above all, a desire to break free from the knotty past and to get going for the future that beckoned.
I would not like you to read into the forthcoming paragraphs as anything but an attempt to white wash the strategic setbacks that India has been subjected to in these last several years. Rather, in continuity with the previous blog, where we found evidence of rigidity in the strategic community in Western centres, we find evidence of the very same ‘straight jacketing’, a grid lock if you will, of vested interests.
When Mr Modi invited all the leaders of Political SAARC which is now called South Asia as a more politically correct coin for what is the Indian subcontinent, one hoped that the shared geography, history and culture would send a balloon of hope for a long rooted desire to cut the losses from the destruction of this region through colonial ‘divide and rule’ decision making. If Korea feels that it is the only divided nation in the world today, it shows, how much the ground has shifted in perceptions of our Asiatic neighbourhood, from once viewing much of their domestic and geopolitical world that included the Indian subcontinent to now marginalising it entirely. If one included Africa, few Eritreans and Ethiopians, few Sudanese, few South Africans of non Indian origins, can actually look eastward and see how fracturing of nationhood was first experimented with by the West in India. So if some how India could lead and show the rest of the world a new way, one that would actually be a throw back to her ancient and medieval past, it could solve much of the tensions and debilitations that were imposed on entire regions by modern notions of nationhood. If Mr Modi could lead this ‘South Asia’ back to being one market, one interconnected and locally involved centripetal forces that would forge a union just short of political reunion of this crucial piece of geography, the world would be much better situated to face the challenges going forward.
By the time Mr Modi dropped by to greet Mr Nawaz Sharif on his way back from Afghanistan, we know that Indian strategic rigidity could have thwarted his project. We know that military reforms of resizing, or right sizing of force levels, including the cutbacks on Mountain Strike Corps, the size of the MMRCA down by 100 aircraft, were not signals just to China with whose leader Mr Modi enjoyed a bonhomie, but also to Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka which in the past have been exposed to militarism of various degrees from India. Further, Mr Modi’s renewed focus on border trade and reviving ancient trading posts, his infrastructural push in the frontier areas was a strategic calculus, mainly of soft power, which was to be hijacked by immature and often jingoistic media which had aided Mr Modi’s appeal in the run up to 2014. In this singular aspect, where Mr Modi repeatedly demonstrated his strategic silence and refusal to engage with media that was on a rapacious and vicious 24 hour news cycle, whose eyeball hunts snowballed into über nationalism and conferred more strategic rigidity, the rest of his team or even the powerful organisation of RSS from Nagpur, could not adapt to this altered scenario.
So, mandarins, media houses and the masses, were unable to move as swiftly and sift through the signals the larger environment offered as the leader perceived. By 2018, when Mr Modi was hosting Mr Xi at Pallava capital Mamallapuram, the capture of his agenda was complete. If you see Doklam as a response by the Chinese to India’s refusal to join the BRI/OBOR initiative and then see how the US with alacrity has joined Pakistan Uzbekistan for a Central Asian logistics corridor, or how steadfastly US has denied India access to the table with respect to Afghanistan, you will see how babudom bet on wrong horses, and more importantly frustrated Mr Modi. If the Pandemic had not intervened, the real reason for Mr Modi downplaying his efforts in foreign affairs would have been in the clear- that his attempts to recast Indian foreign policy had been thwarted.
Consider how the MEA has played with respect to China, how with respect to G7, how Mr Modi has yet to have a one on one with POTUS or any other G7 leader so far, and how he has been unable to even speak to the Chinese President and you can think of either of the two scenarios- either he has been hemmed in, or he has given up surrendering to the larger caucus within his establishment that supports strategic staleness and prefers stalemates, since risks are many in flux and in change!
Few Indian commentators see how even Pathankot attack was not used by Modi to paint Pakistan into a corner, how in a first, the ISI itself was invited to join the efforts to unravel the plot. Yet, there were forces who suffered benign neglect in the decade under Dr Manmohan Singh, who sought to restore the hyphenation of national security with Pakistan and terror, forces who were comfortable in such a scenario but all at sea when faced with increasing complexities that China’s rise was bringing about. If you see Pulwama and India’s use of IAF over air raids on Balakot, you can see how craftily this was joined at multiple levels, speaking about Pakistan or shrieking about it on prime time, which itself had become big business. You would wonder why a country with barely 25% English conversant population would offer an outsized platform to a channel that broadcast a TV debate conducted largely in English and which used apart from abusive tone and language, a ready laundry list of strategic parlances and rehyphenated India with Pakistan. How the SAARC plot was to be placed in cold storage, how despite the friendly Rajapakshe brothers, friendly Nepali leaders and friendly PM Sheikh Hasina from Bangladesh, India kept losing contracts, support and votes in key strategic matters that would have furthered the integration of the region, yet, one which still managed above this Cold Shouldering Wall erected by Delhi, to reach out during the Second Wave of Covid and offer aid to the extent they could?
The frustration that now confronts India is not just lack of options going forward, but the arduous task of rebuilding all those linkages that were, to be crudely put, allowed to wilt or willingly destroyed, by this clique that sought to keep India bracketed in a hostile neighbourhood and unable to deal with this Climate of Strategic Uncertainty, one which Mr Modi anticipated back in 2014, a full half a decade, ahead of his Aussie counterpart!
Even on China, if you see how Mr Modi attempted to make efforts personally, you can see clearly how the tail wagged the dog. We don’t know as yet, exactly which vein of vested interest drove India into a confrontation over the BRI initiative, but if India had been nimble under Mr Modi’s expressed desire for change, she could have offered a modified BRI, like the Russians have, with her rail network continuing to remain Broad Gauge while they mated with Chinese meter gauge ones across the terrestrial borders. There was benefit for India, if north Kashmir could be accessed from across the Karakoram, or from Muzafarabad and other traditional routes to Kashmir. Kashmir would then have had a whole new, ‘beyond Banihal Tunnel’ view!( For starters, do read how Paramahansa Yogananda travelled to Kashmir in his stellar ‘Autobiography of A Yogi’) Ultimately trade and transport are not going to be allowed by the market forces to remain in silos, especially if India is still a ‘growing nation’ and ‘importing’ much more than exporting. Having a cross border trading post in Sikkim without a transfer/exchange of goods from Nanjing would be silly in 21st Century, especially when it was being done for centuries before the advent of British colonialism in India!
Instead of burgeoning trade and benefiting from Chinese manufacturing by becoming regional depot and supplier to the subcontinent, India forced the Chinese to develop their own linkages to Sri Lanka, to Bangladesh and Nepal, not to mention renewed attempts by China to get Bhutan to start border trade, even through intimidation by developing Gwalaphug inside what is viewed as Bhutanese territory, and likewise in several points across the Nepal border. If Doklam and now Depsang along with other flash points along the Ladakh frontier are seen as inroads by China, they can be viewed as acupressure or acupuncture tactics to obviously make India see reason. One they hoped India under Mr Modi would automatically see.
So, is Macaulay to blame? That reading and thinking in English, amongst Indian elite, amongst her strategic community, that actually needs notations to understand epic contexts, which fail to see how rehyphenating with Pakistan is a curse, like how reuniting Jara Sandha’s halves was for the Emperor of Magadha? Is this Anglican world view, which looks upon India as an extension of the West and not an oriental cultural hegemon and trade centre, that has foisted its agenda relentlessly against Mr Modi’s view of Indian foreign policy?
indiarubberman.com 