Suddenly, everyone loves India. But it’s an affair, not a marriage. Whether it lasts depends on the consequences of this week’s watershed election. At stake are the credibility of Indian democracy and, potentially, the country’s future as a cohesive unitary state.
Courting India as a counterweight to China, the US is ardently pursuing a deeper security relationship. The EU hankers after a free trade pact. Countries ranging from Australia to Norway to the UAE have already forged bespoke deals.
France greedily eyes a growing market for its weapons manufacturers. For Germany, India is an $18bn land of export opportunity. Britain, the former colonial power, is a keen suitor too – though frustratingly for Raj romantics, a post-Brexit tryst is on ice.
The western democracies are not alone in wooing Delhi. Russia offered a sweetheart deal on cut-price oil when Ukraine sanctions bit in 2022. The feeling is mutual. India’s government cheered when Vladimir Putin won last month’s bogus presidential “election”.
India sits awkwardly on the Ukraine fence. It treasures its post-independence, non-aligned legacy, and has not forgotten cold war-era Soviet links. Through the G20 and an enlarged Brics – the organisation comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and UAE – it keeps close to the global south, which it aspires to lead.
India’s 1.4 billion population – the world’s largest – youthful age profile and expanding economy – the fifth biggest – are turning it into a modern Klondike. Gold-diggers flock. All stake a claim for Delhi’s attention, influence, markets, skills and tech. At least, that’s how the prime minister, Narendra Modi, sees it. His Hindu nationalist devotees believe India, a “civilisational state”, is embarked on a benign global mission as a vishwaguru (teacher to the world) under Modi Baba’s sage, cult-like tutelage.
Up to 960 million people will vote during the six-week election, with Modi seeking a third consecutive term. The electorate of impoverished Uttar Pradesh state alone is bigger than that of Brazil. Modi’s ruling hard-right BJP faces a multi-party opposition alliance that includes the once-dominant Congress, but is predicted to win easily.
Yet let’s pause right there. Amid all this gushing and fawning, awkward questions arise. Is the Modi miracle for real – or an illusion that could disappear into thin air? For Modi’s infatuated followers, he is an inspirational, divinely anointed figure leading the reunited Hindu nation to long-denied glory. For opponents, he is a narcissistic authoritarian bent on extinguishing India’s democracy and pluralist, secular constitutional traditions.
Modi’s divisive policies could split the country. And for an importunate west, another basic question nags: can he be trusted? India is the key swing state in a global struggle to determine the new world order. Whose side is he really on?
The risk of India becoming a democracy in name only – an “electoral autocracy” – is undeniable. Opposition politicians are in jail or face abusive official intimidation. The courts, police and newspapers mostly toe the government line. The unbiddable BBC is blatantly targeted.
“Modi has centralised power in his office to an astonishing degree, undermined the independence of public institutions such as the judiciary and the media, [and] built a cult of personality around himself,” wrote Krea university’s Ramachandra Guha in an excoriating essay. “The facade of triumph and power that Modi has erected obscures a more fundamental truth: that a principal source of India’s survival as a democratic country, and of its recent economic success, has been its political and cultural pluralism, precisely those qualities that the prime minister and his party now seek to extinguish.”
Modi’s strength, as embodiment and chief beneficiary of Hindu majoritarianism, is also weakness. Intolerance feeding violence against religious minorities is a BJP hallmark. Human Rights Watch accuses it of “systematic discrimination and stigmatisation” of Muslims and others. Echoing his time as Gujarat’s chief minister, when hundreds died in anti-Muslim riots in 2002, Modi initially ignored Hindu attacks on Christians in Manipur last year. Kashmir is another blackspot.
“The prime minister’s central ideological project is the creation of a Hindu nationalist country where non-Hindu people are, at best, second-class citizens,” wrote Yale’s Sushant Singh. “It is an exclusionary agenda that alienates hundreds of millions of Indians.” This, it is argued, is fatally weakening the bonds holding India together.
Centrally directed partisan policies that aggravate India’s north-south divide, disadvantage opposition-run states such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and undercut the federal system contribute to this process of disaggregation. Yet southern votes are insufficient to prevent a Modi victory – leading some officials there to talk of a “separate nation”.
If Indians decide to risk national unity and the evisceration of their democracy, that’s their affair. But the west’s conditional love may curdle. Western governments want India in their corner in the standoff with China and Russia. They want India’s business. But they also want a genuine democratic partner, not another dictator with a superiority complex. They will not continue to look away if, for example, Indian agents persist in assassinating political opponents on their turf.
The hubris of Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Modi’s external affairs minister and close confidant, is instructive. He writes that India’s priorities should be to “engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia, bring Japan into play, draw neighbours in, extend the neighbourhood and expand traditional constituencies of support”. Jaishankar calls this “multi-alignment”. In short, Modi’s over-confident India, a nouveau riche superpower increasingly governed by arbitrary fiat, believes it can be all things to all people. It wants to have its gulab jamun and eat it.
That’s a big mistake. In geopolitics, as in life, first principles are important. Leaders and nations must ultimately stand and be counted – or else end up unloved and despised by everyone.
• Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s foreign affairs commentator
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• This article was amended on 14 April 2024 to correct the spelling of the Indian dessert gulab jamun.
