Subcontinental setbacks have a message for India: Junk victimhood & respect thy neighbour

Bangladesh is just latest example of disquiet in India's neighbourhood. We need to junk domestic politics & excessive religiosity, acquire humility in our approach to neighbours.

Illustration by Prajna Ghosh

The dramatic events in Bangladesh bring the focus back onto India’s neighbourhood, and the Modi government’s record in dealing with it. To take a deeper look at what’s immediate, we need to begin a quarter-century ago.

This is when Atal Bihari Vajpayee made his big move with Pakistan by taking the bus ride to Lahore. You can choose your friends, he said, but you can’t choose your neighbours. It followed that improving ties with them was imperative.

In 2008, Dr Manmohan Singh took it a step forward with his call of “Neighbourhood First”. In 2014, Narendra Modi also put his stamp on it with his characteristic style, inviting all the leaders in the extended Subcontinent for his swearing-in. He followed it up with visits to the neighbours, mostly held in a mood of resurgent euphoria and in one case, with an extraordinary sense of drama.

This when he surprised all by breaking a journey in Lahore to greet the then prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, on his granddaughter’s wedding.

There was hope now, if India’s first leader with a majority in 25 years was showing such commitment to improving relationships in the region of seven sovereign nations with multiple divides and tectonic faults, some caused by ideology, all deepened and widened by history. Some also had Cold War-era debris cluttering them. It was a formidable challenge to repair and clean these breaches and build bridges over them.

As Modi’s third successive term gets under way, how does his scoresheet look? Bangladesh is the biggest crisis. For 15 years now, Dhaka had been India’s closest ally. The pivot to a secure northeast for India is located in Dhaka, especially with nobody ever knowing where the centre of gravity is in Myanmar.

Pakistan saw dramatic changes, and its new regime almost fully broke off with India after the 5 August, 2019 changes in Jammu and Kashmir.

Nepal, meanwhile, ratcheted up distrust to a level where it changed its national maps to incorporate strategically important Indian territories, through which ran a pilgrim route to Kailash-Mansarovar. As always happens with competitive and prickly nationalisms, the map also got unanimous endorsement in Nepal’s Parliament.

Sri Lanka had its own version of a ‘colour’ or ‘maidan’ revolution following an economic meltdown, as well as the Chinese acquisition of its prime port at Hambantota. The rise of Mohamed Muizzu in Maldives on an ‘India Out’ campaign is a more recent story. Bhutan is under intense pressure from the Chinese to ‘settle’ its border, ideally on the basis of ‘never mind India’s interests’.

Is this dramatic turnaround for the worse entirely India’s fault? Or is India a victim?

How can India claim victimhood when it is such a dominant force? Its GDP today is four times that of the rest of the region together, its population three times, and its global power multiple times.

Its people have also earned for their republic that unique quality in this neighbourhood: a stable constitutional democracy where every transition has taken place democratically, peacefully and credibly. Junk that idea of victimhood.

Ours is among the most unstable neighbourhoods in the world. Most neighbours are highly populous, with crowded cities, youthful, and have tasted democracy unlike messy regions in Africa. The combination of a large, young aspirational population with a taste for democracy means that difficult thing called public opinion matters.

In the immediate context, that’s what Hasina and India as her friend overlooked in Bangladesh. These are not nations where a dictator, however powerful, can do things public opinion doesn’t like. Each is a much more imperfect democracy than ours. But none is a perfect dictatorship either. In all these countries, you deal with both the regime and public opinion.

That public opinion also understands sovereignty. If India is seen as hectoring, it causes a dreadful immune reaction. We’ve seen this in Nepal, Maldives, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. That 2015 blockade is an awful scar.

The fact is, South Block is mindful of this and mostly correct in what it says. But, what is said in the media seen as friendly to the government — which is almost all our news TV channels, especially in Hindi —  is tracked closely. This is worsened exponentially by ultranationalist social media handles.

These put out threads of revisionist, often non-factual history of India’s ties with the neighbours and their territories. Some recommend sending in the Army to Bangladesh, opening the borders for Hindus (there are 14 million of them), and creating an enclave in Rangpur.

On the day External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar ended his visit to Maldives, mostly to pour oil over troubled waters, the canard that Malé had “handed over” 28 islands to India spread. It made it to what passes for prime-time debates on some Hindi TV channels. Somebody even said: “Muizzu ne ghutne tek diye.” (Muizzu has gone down on his knees). We can toss it as a joke but Maldivians won’t. A country with about half a million people and a $7-billion GDP has one blessing in the same measure as a rising behemoth like India: sovereignty. Ultimately, South Block had these tweets deleted. Too late.

Put yourself in the chappals of a neighbour who’s watching this discourse from India. All they hear about Indian policies is ‘muscular, muscular, muscular’. Muscularity is great, but what about those other attributes: cerebral, cultural, scientific, intellectual? A nation with the humility to be a teacher to the region, if on the way to be the ‘vishwaguru’, as Swami Vivekananda imagined in his Chicago address.

Are our academic institutions good enough to attract some of the lakhs of students from our neighbours who go overseas for education? Do we want them? What about a shower of scholarships, internships, cultural performances and movies instead of hyper-nationalist media insults?

As the sole superpower’s record tells you, soft power is not an adjunct but critical to hard power. Does India have think tanks to house dozens of scholars from the neighbouring countries, invite them to conferences, run its own track-2 processes? It isn’t as if India doesn’t know this. That’s why we buy power from Nepal and Bhutan but export to Bangladesh. These are vital economic linkages and stakes. Forget Adani.

The other side of the coin is the overplaying of the Hindu card. The prime minister’s visits to Nepal and Bangladesh had temple visits as highlights. The larger reality, however, is that along our longest borders, we face large Muslim majorities. They look at us askance when we ask them to treat their minorities fairly. It is a case of disastrously ‘perfect’ timing that just when Bangladesh is on the boil and our diplomacy is engaged in damage control, Assam last Thursday presented its first CAA citizenship to a Hindu from Bangladesh.

For five years now, and especially since the war in Ukraine began, India has been talking up multipolarity, strategic autonomy and multi-alignment. Good ideas, but these are available to our neighbours as well, especially with the Chinese shadow, much bigger than ours. They can all play China against us as we might play (however bashfully and clumsily) the US against China. The Subcontinent is not our strategic preserve. Even the mighty Americans have failed to subdue Cuba, just next door, and Venezuela, which isn’t far away.

The fundamental construct of India’s neighbourhood policy still needs to be what Vajpayee postulated, Manmohan Singh embraced and Modi energised. It’s just that we need to junk domestic politics and excessive religiosity while acquiring much humility and a renewed respectfulness towards our neighbours.