Stop fearing ordinary people

THE legendary public intellectual and political analyst Abdul Ghafoor Noorani, who passed away at 93 in Mumbai last week, had believed that Narendra Modi’s foreign policy flowed from his ideological prejudice cradled in Hindutva.
What that entailed was threefold: making India umbilically inseparable from the West given Hindutva’s visceral hatred of communism from its inception. It is another matter that the Cold War is over and the hatred of communism has outlived its utility. The US is courting communist Vietnam without giving up entirely on communist China. Second — even though it required a marked paring down of Hindutva’s love of Hitler — a fawning relationship with Islamophobic Israel has defined India’s recent policy preferences.
Modi’s seeking a second term for Donald Trump in 2020 was of a piece with his anti-Muslim politics. India’s recently unveiled citizenship laws came from this prejudice. A third constant in the Modi foreign policy, according to Noorani sahib, was the lure of acceptance with the Indian diaspora, chiefly the type managed and plied by Hindutva’s overseas infrastructures. The Howdy Modi element has thus remained a mainstay of the policy.

How does the South Asia neighbourhood appear in this preordained ideological posture?
“The era of uninterrupted dialogue is over,” says India’s foreign minister although the claim is problematic on two grounds. First, there’s scant evidence of any uninterrupted dialogue happening ever with Pakistan. Two, who will talk to Pakistan about issues raised by India on the political violence in Kashmir if not India?
The foreign minister’s remarks, reportedly made at a private event last week, were said to re-frame the country’s future ties with Pakistan. S. Jaishankar said India would respond in kind to adverse signals from Pakistan. The threat has been milked dry by the current government. Many Indians, including a former governor of Jammu and Kashmir, once closely allied with PM Modi, have learnt to take such claims with a pinch of salt. S. Jaishankar also said India would yield to positive gestures from across the border. That’s a relief.
Given that the current ruling dispensation in Pakistan is also known to take its cue from Washington, there should be room for some kind of rapprochement between the leaders who belong to the same international corner. Except that with his vague remarks, the foreign minister has added needless mystery to the suspense about whether Modi would attend the Shanghai club’s summit in Islamabad in October or skip it as he did with the one in July in Kazakhstan.
Now, Kazakhstan has had no axe to grind with New Delhi over Kashmir or any other dispute that Pakistan obviously does. Yet Modi didn’t go to Kazakhstan, citing engagements at parliament, reportedly. Ergo: India can have more than one reason to skip an international gathering, particularly if led by China or Russia.

One can’t be faulted for concluding that India thinks hard about being on a diplomatic circuit if it has the potential to rile its Western minders. It has been argued that India kept the Russian oil imports going, which deserved to be hailed as a brave and defiant stand. A closer scrutiny reveals that the embargoed trade suited the West in a duplicitous way given that substantial quantities of refined petroleum from Russian oil treated in Indian refineries were destined for European markets. The BBC did once report that the UK government was looking into the “loophole” about its indirect imports of Russian oil refined in India. We have been waiting for a follow-up on the story by the outlet ever since.
The Modi government’s unusual business interests had somehow eluded Noorani’s radar in assessing Indian foreign policy. One such interest reportedly underpinned the policy towards the unpopular and autocratic Hasina Wajed government in Bangladesh. A controversial coal-fired thermal power deal with Dhaka was struck with the Adani group whereby electricity produced allegedly with imported dirty coal in Jharkhand would be sold to Bangladesh.
The Adani group has been in the crosshairs of Indian opposition parties for its unhealthy proximity to the prime minister. His deal doesn’t seem to have found favour with the drastically changed circumstances in Dhaka and is cited as one of the lapses by the ousted regime in dealing with India. In an interview with Karan Thapar, a Bangladeshi editor regrettably noted that there was palpable antipathy in his country towards India.

One had asked a similar question of former military ruler Gen H.M. Ershad in 1997. Ershad was the host of the first Saarc summit in Dhaka in 1985. I asked him the reason for hosting the disparate group and then setting up a formal club. His comments were recorded in a TV documentary on Saarc sponsored by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. “We were all allergic to India. So, we decided to come together to deal with our common challenge.”
Looking back at the 1985 meeting, it comprised leaders who didn’t see eye to eye with India. Junius Jayewardene from Sri Lanka, Gen Ziaul Haq from Pakistan, King Birendra from Nepal all had a Cold War mistrust of Delhi. It was difficult to understand Bangladesh’s grouse with Rajiv Gandhi though. “India helped you win independence, so why this bristling?” Ershad’s reply could at least partly explain the journalist’s complaint to Thapar the other day. “First you sent the army to help us. Then you sent the baniya to subjugate us.”
The remedy? Try removing our governments from the frame in dealing with each other in South Asia. What you would find are ordinary people from a different stratosphere. Like the one shared by the javelin heroes of the two countries whose mothers told us ever so movingly that they prayed for Arshad Nadeem and Neeraj Chopra with equal love and faith.
As Noorani sahib would say, the bonding was the missing antidote to the narrowness with which South Asians are kept separate from each other.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
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Published in Dawn, September 3rd, 2024