An India-Africa summit slated over the next few days has had to be unfortunately put off because the Ebola virus is rearing its head.
At long last, India is returning to its own geopolitical centre. It may have taken Donald Trump’s irrepressible fondness for Pakistan, the war in West Asia’s knock on the economy and the potentially doomsday US-China cinch to focus the mind. At last it’s happening — notwithstanding the lecturing by senior MEA official Sibi George about India’s ancient civilisational heritage to a young Norwegian reporter because she asked a question that he entirely disapproved of.
Fact is, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin and Lula da Silva and Cyril Ramaphosa and Narendra Modi are all going to be in the same room a few months from now — all leaders of China, Russia, Brazil, South Africa and India, the founder members of BRICS. The Quad foreign ministers’ meeting is an indication that the long-delayed Quad summit could materialise soon.
It’s a measure of how things have changed if only to remain the same, is the real story of India’s foreign policy in the last 12 years, since PM Modi won power. India has deepened friendships with the US (these days on a bit of a roller-coaster), Israel and UAE, faced off with China on the cold, icy heights of Galwan, made friends with Pakistan and then punished it for continuing cross-border terrorism, sought to reinvent other parts of its neighbourhood (like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) and gone Dutch in the Netherlands. As for Norway, we know by now that it’s a six-letter Wordle you can rearrange nicely when you drop the 18th letter in the alphabet.
Not that a new international realignment is in the offing just because India is hosting the BRICS summit. The Trump visit to Beijing last week told us that China will continue to refuse to confront the Americans, because America remains its largest trading partner. While Putin’s visit to Beijing this week tells us that in the fourth year of his stalemated war with Ukraine, and with the help of leaky Western sanctions, Russia will continue to seek the stabilisation of key relationships, such as China and India. (Russia is keenly aware that China’s economic ties with the US will limit Beijing’s feelings for Moscow, no matter how much the two agree on other matters.)
Let’s call this the Age of Seeking New Friends and Influencing Peoples — even elites, who live on the right side of the railway track and are in the business of managing nations will understand the spirit that infuses multi-alignment. This is not a withdrawal from the world, like non-alignment was, but an even greater engagement. As India enters the 80th year of its independence, it has understood that as a regional power that must make the best use of its circumstances, it is best suited to the pursuit of multiple relationships.
Not that India has not spoken its mind even when the tie with the former Soviet Union resembled an alliance. When Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 for Doctor Zhivago, it was Jawaharlal Nehru who led the charge for allowing him to travel to Sweden to receive the medal. (The Soviets didn’t listen.)
So many other examples come to mind. From Indira Gandhi’s smiling retort to an American journalist who asked if India leant Left or Right, and she said “we stand upright;” to Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s invitation to Bill Clinton to India in 2000, only two years after the US had sanctioned India for going nuclear — the former US President spent five glorious days in India, being feted everywhere he went (and about five hours in Pakistan in a security bubble), enjoying himself so much that it didn’t matter anymore who had punished whom and who had offered forgiveness.
That’s why the “coat-tail school of diplomacy”, which proposes that you ally with a powerful power so that you avail of the benefits that come with being in its shadow — much like what Japan and ASEAN nations have done these past several decades — cannot work with India. The country is too vast, too different, too diverse, too messy to fit into one regimented framework. That’s why the One District, One Cuisine policy in Uttar Pradesh (none of which are non-vegetarian), is bound to come a-cropper. To take the food allegory a bit further, the BJP has understood that its beef bans in the North Indian states it rules cannot be imposed on its allies in North-East India.
That’s why the return of PM Modi’s foreign policy to its own geopolitical centre is welcome. The challenges are enormous because the straying has accentuated some fractures, distended some relationships and broken off others. It is equally true that the straying has taught us a valuable lesson, which is to trust, but verify. RSS leader Dattatreya Hosabale’s exhortation to PM Modi to normalise ties with Pakistan — keep your borders stable, remain watchful, he is saying — is an essential part of the “trust, but verify” doctrine first enunciated by that all-time guru, Chanakya. (Like Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, stabilising borders was the first touchstone of Deng Xiaoping’s foreign policy in the early 1980s; these gentlemen understood that a calm periphery is a recipe for peace within.)
The return of both BRICS and Quad is a good sign, because both are centres of stability. Sending a political player to Bangladesh is an expansion of that idea. Sweetening ties in Sonia Gandhi’s mother country, Italy, was a tiny gesture worthy of that Italian philosopher, Machiavelli.
Now to restart the hard work of fixing the house within. Sending Sibi George home for an all-expenses-paid trip to Kerala to relook at how communities as different as Syrian Christians and Moplah Muslims and Malabar Hindu Nairs look at the same story might be a good beginning.