There are some small but important issues that come up as India eases into a leadership role as befits the country - whether taking over the rotating presidency of the G20 in 2023 or that of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) or again the monthly presidency of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Should India take to these roles with restraint and dignity and not strut about at home or abroad in an embarrassing display of excitement?
It is understandable that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would want to flaunt these positions that come India’s way during election time, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as the chief campaigner of the party, would speak out aloud about this. Again, when External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar went to Moscow for the annual inter-governmental meeting between India and Russia, it was advertised as the minister going there on the special mission of mediating peace between Ukraine and Russia. Of course, the Ukraine question would have come up as part of the talks, and the Indian minister would have suggested the need for peace talks, but it is not true that he went there on a peace mission.
It is, therefore, unseemly that foreign policy experts should be citing these developments as marking the recognition of India as a power to reckon with in world affairs. The fact is that India has always enjoyed respect internationally, but it has not always exerted its good offices in a bold manner or spoken its mind on burning issues. India played it safe for pragmatic reasons, especially after the end of the old Cold War in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indian pundits on foreign affairs had exhorted the government in the 1990s that India should tone down its moral rhetoric as a Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) leader and that it should mind its own business and look after its own national interests. And there were vigorous attempts, as there are now, to persuade the powers that be in the country to slide into the Western camp of democratic countries led by the United States and other European powers. But in the last few years, especially after Prime Minister Modi had upped the rhetoric of India as a spiritual mentor of some kind with its self-proclaimed universal Hindu heritage in a troubled world, the Indian foreign policy experts have joined the chorus singing the yet-to-be-realised role of India as a world power.
India has always had the potential of a world leader, and it played the role quite hesitatingly in the 1950s and up to the 1962 debacle in the war with China. Indira Gandhi was quite pragmatic and guarded about playing the role of the world leader when she signed in the friendship treaty with the Soviet Union in 1971, and when she abandoned the Soviet alliance and took India closer to Reagan’s America in the early 1980s, even as India played host to the 1982 NAM summit in New Delhi. But she maintained restraint and dignity as she moved nimbly from one camp to another. The impatience and the loudness that is visible and audible in the moves of the Modi government need to be reined in because they seem as yet premature. India is yet to be a decisive player on the world stage that it could become. India cannot afford to be impudent and imprudent in its tone as it seems to be becoming one.
India has been forced on its back foot, as it were, in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war. New Delhi has realised that the strategic relations with Russia in economic terms as quite crucial for the country, and the BJP, especially in its Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS) days, had railed against Indira Gandhi’s policy of cosying up to the communist Soviet Union without appreciating the geo-strategic compulsions of the time. The Modi government and its pro-West, anti-communist chorus of foreign policy pundits are now forced to recognise that Russia is an important factor for India, and there is no escape from the geo-strategic linkage with Moscow. That Vladimir Putin is more a dictator than a democrat is glossed over. Of course, the foreign policy wonks are now more anti-China and, by implication, anti-communist, and they maintain uncomfortable silence over the Russia-China anti-West axis.
Immediately after India became independent, it was possible for India to assume the stance that it was against colonialism and supported any country fighting to shake off the shackles of colonialism. Even then, India under ostentatiously romantic Nehru – he was as much a realist as any other politician – was careful not to adopt a too militant anti-imperialist position as a careful examination of the foreign policy of that time would show – was quite careful in not going overboard. Today, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union (EU), Australia and Canada may believe that they are the defenders of liberal democratic values even when they violate the principles in practice. But India today is hesitant to affirm and proclaim its belief in liberal democratic principles. This was so in Nehru’s time, and it is so in Modi’s time today. India has always been afraid of democracy and freedom because it has not been too sure whether it would want to uphold them in the country at all times. India has railed against the West for its hypocrisy on the issue of democracy and freedom, but it never committed itself to the liberal credo!
Indian leaders and experts have always invoked national interest as the supreme principle, and Indian dissidents – honourable souls – would condemn one kind of tyranny but not another! So India and Indians remain pragmatists, and the pragmatism is carried to cynical extremes! It is good to be worldly-wise, but it also behoves that India should indulge less in self-righteous rhetoric or display the undignified swagger of a big power when it is as yet a player of modest clout.
(The writer is a New Delhi-based political commentator)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.