As New Delhi welcomed streams of international delegations and global leaders, from Rishi Sunak to Sheikh Hasina Wazed and Joe Biden and many more arriving in a power procession unprecedented for India, two headline points emerged from an unexpected direction: the principal Opposition.
One, the interview with former prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh on the front page of The Indian Express. And second, the statements from Rahul Gandhi speaking to the media in Brussels.
The first said nothing that was critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government. While taking a by-and-large optimistic view of the direction in which India is moving, he only said it might do better in an environment of social harmony. Rahul Gandhi was more direct and charged the government with presiding over democratic backsliding in India.
Both, however, were also forthright in their view that on Russia and Ukraine, the Modi government had taken the correct approach and that it had their backing. Rahul went a step further to say that even an opposition government would have followed broadly the same policy.
This isn’t entirely new to Indian politics. On some of the most critical issues of foreign and strategic policy, the ruling establishment and the main Opposition have generally agreed in the past. Lately, however, our politics has been so broken, so polarised, that even what would have been a perfectly normal few words of solidarity have now become headline-worthy.
Where it started isn’t difficult to find, nor does it need any deep archival research. The relationship between the Congress and the BJP had taken a particularly bitter turn post Vajpayee. In the Advani era, niceties or honour among the thieves, whatever you choose to call it, had dissolved into pure vitriol. Besides ruining the national discourse, it was also corrosive to the larger national interest. Here are three good examples, two purely of foreign policy, and one on economics but with wider implications. Consider these:
• Between 2005 and 2008, the Indo-US nuclear deal. While it would be a reasonable argument that Manmohan Singh’s UPA was only taking a logical next step in the process Vajpayee had started, the BJP saw it as so much a “surrender” that it didn’t hesitate in joining hands with its permanent ideological adversaries, the Left for example, in trying to defeat the government in a confidence vote on the deal.
Sushma Swaraj, then the BJP’s most prominent leader in Parliament, compared the deal to Emperor Jahangir allowing the East India Company to do business in India. “Which laid the foundations of two and a half centuries of subjugation. The repercussions of the nuclear deal also may be the same,” she darkly warned.
• The BJP similarly blocked the India-Bangladesh boundary deal, which involved the two countries exchanging enclaves deep inside each other’s territory. It was unwilling to see reason, not even that it would serve India’s larger interest deeply to give the Awami League government of Sheikh Hasina a boost and in the process settle one of its disputed boundaries. Arun Jaitley said, “There should be no compromise with Indian land.”
By that time, Modi had already emerged as his party’s preeminent leader and I had written a National Interest column in August 2013 headlined ‘Dear Narendrabhai’, suggesting that he intervene and help get this concluded in the national interest.
• And the third was allowing FDI in multiple-brand retail. Once again, the BJP was at its shrillest, calling it the destruction of India’s economic freedoms, fretting over the future of the neighbourhood mom-and-pop shops (as they are called in the West), and forcing another Parliament vote that it lost. This wasn’t just economically important, it was also of strategic importance because reforms like these built India into the economic power it is today.
About a decade on, it is instructive to say where each policy stands. Indo-US strategic ties are far deeper and this government swears so strongly by the nuclear deal that it will most likely work in the direction of resolving the liability issue.
On Bangladesh, settling the borders was among Narendra Modi’s earliest achievements and there was zero controversy. And multi-brand retail? Step by step, the restrictions have been removed or diluted. And e-commerce, whether carried out by the global market leader, Amazon, or the many foreign (mostly Chinese and some Japanese) funded startups, is a lesson to those in the BJP who forced that second Parliament showdown, which they lost.
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If you are the more sceptical type, you might argue that the Congress taking this view on the Modi government’s Ukraine-Russia policy should be no surprise, pleasant or not, because it fits in with their leaders’ multi-generation pro-Soviet, anti-Western (read America) upbringing.
The fact, however, is that the Congress, out of power for the 10th year now, had overseen the big moves with the US, repositioning India decisively on the western side. The aggressive rise of China has now made it easier for the BJP.
While it is correct that many in the Congress were deeply suspicious of Manmohan Singh’s policy, even angry, they put up with it. By this 10th Modi year now, we haven’t seen the Congress attack him on the US policy, the deepening strategic partnership and dramatic diversification in the sourcing of weaponry away from Russia.
To understand how significant a shift this is in our national politics, we need to look back exactly 40 years. In March 1983, Indira Gandhi hosted the Non Aligned Movement (NAM) summit and marked it as her finest foreign affairs hour after, of course, the liberation of Bangladesh. Fidel Castro hugging Indira was the highlight image of that era. Indian political and policy elites still nurtured and loved the pretence of being a ‘revolutionary’ nation of some kind.
Even subsequently, as the going became tough in the second half of his tenure, when a beleaguered Rajiv Gandhi thundered “naani yaad dila denge” (OK, bad translation: teach them such a tough lesson that they’d seek refuge in their grandmothers’ laps), he wasn’t talking about the Soviet Union or China. America was still the Satan.
The 40 years from the NAM summit to this G20 with Biden, Macron and Sunak bilaterals mark India’s march from a fake non-alignment to a mostly transactional policy autonomy.
When P.V. Narasimha Rao took the first, hesitant steps of change, he ran into a wall from both his party and the BJP. We must note that if he hadn’t reformed the economy, India would not have acquired this global stature.
Our growth, the size of our economy and our improving demographics are our greatest strategic assets. All of it a good case study in what financial markets players would describe as the power of compounding. Again, this baton has been carried equally keenly by every subsequent runner in this relay: Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and now Modi.
The fundamental shift in India’s worldview owes itself to the fact that its competing political forces collaborated in the national interest. The Congress now backing the Modi government on Ukraine-Russia is just another of those moments that make us feel better about our mostly broken politics.
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