Again, he was at it, that charming show on two legs, playful and
coy. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been burning the
charismatic fuel of late, making the necessary emissions in
visiting friendly countries. Each time, he seems to be
getting away with more and more, currying (pun intended) favour
with his hosts and landing the necessary deals.
For all the excitement of going to a fellow cricket loving state
such as Australia, no one was under any illusion about the
prize. Easy gains there on matters of commerce, education and
security: a pliant PM, a pliant Cabinet, a political and business
class hungering for access to a country which recently passed China
as the most populous on the planet. In all of this, Modi had
the audacity to urge Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to
do something about reported acts of vandalism against Hindu temples
in Melbourne.
In scale, nothing was going to compare to courting the
superpower that, for all its might, teeters. On his June
visit to the United States, Modi was building on earlier efforts to
show India as a viable partner in a number of areas.
The Modi visit exemplified the calculations of the moment.
The US has been rather clumsy of late, engaging in a foreign policy
described by former US Secretary of the Treasury, Lawrence
Summers, as a bit lonely. US foreign policy makers have
tended to miss a bit or two, not least understanding the value
Indian officials place on their military relationship with
Moscow. The Indian political establishment is also mindful
about how useful New Delhi is seen in Washington, the traditional
counter to Beijing. That counter, however, is seen as subordinate
to maintaining US supremacy under the lecturing guise of the
rules-based order.
Such poses are simply not acceptable in either the Modi
worldview or those of Indian policy makers. As Indias
External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has opined with a tart frankness,
Washingtons power can be described as a transient moment of
American unipolarity. To assume, arrogantly, that history was
at its end at the conclusion of the Cold War was a Eurocentric
analysis jettisoned by nationalism. It is exactly such nationalism
that Modi brims with.
The
joint statement from the two countries made familiar, and
predictable assumptions. Much of it was frothy. Both
Biden and Modi affirmed a vision of the United States and India as
among the closest partners in the world a partnership of
democracies looking into the 21st century with hope,
ambition, and confidence. Naturally, there is no mention of
Modis nationalistic...
