For those who love Old Cricket and New India. Perhaps even for those who understand neither cricket nor India,” tweeted External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar over the weekend, posting a video of former West Indies cricket captain Vivian Richards thanking India for the Covid 19 vaccine it has exported to his country, Antigua.
The unkind will probably say that Richards is the Ministry of External Affairs’ (MEA) answer to Rihanna, the West Indian-American singer from Barbados, whose 2 February tweet (“why aren’t we talking about this?”) in support of India’s farmers blew a fuse inside the Narendra Modi government, which launched a whodunit investigation that led to the infamous toolkit’s promoters in Canada.
No matter. Jaishankar’s vigorous defence of the New India is in line with the Modi government’s engagement with the world – with the China model in mind.
“You use the dichotomy of democracy and autocracy,” Jaishankar said at the India Today Conclave over the weekend, adding, “You want the truthful answer – it is hypocrisy. Because you have a set of self-appointed custodians of the world, who find it very difficult to stomach that somebody in India is not looking for their approval…”
Certainly, Jaishankar is among the smartest people in the Modi cabinet. He is delivering on China – the disengagement in Ladakh has begun, even if it’s not over yet – and he has put the PM on the global stage, up close and personal with the Quad leadership: Joe Biden of the US, Scott Morrison of Australia and Yoshihide Suga of Japan.
And if you look closely enough, you will see who the Modi government is emulating. China may be India’s biggest rival and challenger these past several months because of the face-off in Ladakh, but it’s clear the PM likes the model of a strong leader who runs a dutiful State, which he takes from strength to (economic) strength.
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The Chinese inspiration
In the post-pandemic Modi era, the clues are everywhere. The Budget has given ample warning about the government’s decision to sell off large loss-making public sector undertakings. More recently, principal economic adviser Sanjiv Sanyal told me that the government doesn’t care which country — including China — manufactures buttons or anything else, as long as it brings FDI into India.
This, of course, is the Indian version of Deng Xiaoping’s famous phrase that he used with such telling effect for three decades, pulling China up with its bootstraps and out of the poverty-stricken cesspool it had been wallowing in for decades: “I don’t care if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
Deng, of course, had the advantage of being the head of the Chinese Communist Party, and therefore brooked no challenge. PM Modi is equally powerful today — the Opposition’s rank failure to pose a threat is certainly not his problem — and has a sharp antenna for what the rest of the world is doing.
The coronavirus pandemic taught Modi another key lesson in realpolitik – that the rules are different for the strong and powerful. So when the European Union and China signed an investment deal on New Year’s Eve, it was clear for all to see that economic strength had won over human rights in Xinjiang. Or the fact that millions of Europeans had died of the Covid-19 virus, which originated in China and about which Beijing had refused to fully share information with the WHO.
Germany’s Angela Merkel, who held the EU presidency at the time, was clear that she needed China because her country needed the jobs Chinese investment would create – 120 billion euros invested in the EU so far, while the EU had invested 140 billion in China.
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Becoming lean and mean
Modi understands that if India wants to be taken seriously on the world stage – like China – it must become lean and mean, perform or perish. So India will soon clear FDI proposals, including that by Chinese automakers despite the PLA troops still engaged in a border standoff with the Indian Army in Ladakh.
As for New Delhi’s response to the allegations of human rights violations in Kashmir — just like complaints about Beijing regarding Tibet and Xinjiang — several lots of diplomats have been sent on overnight visits to Srinagar and Jammu, where the MEA have tightly and fully controlled the message from start to finish.
Sanyal made another point, which is that the government will pick and choose, and not allow FDI into sensitive sectors, such as in the rollout of the 5G network. For all practical purposes, Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant, won’t be welcome. He could have added the media to the list.
A restriction on foreign ownership of digital media to 26 per cent, the ban on certain foreign journalists’ travel to Jammu and Kashmir, and a clampdown on visas for foreign journalists is part of the effort to control the narrative on India — and its global image.
The China model is clear to see. China has banned BBC News as well as American social media giants like Facebook and Twitter. Chinese alternatives like WeChat (for Facebook) and Baidu and Weibo (for Twitter) are hugely influential. India now has its own Twitter-like platform called ‘Koo.’
At the 19th Chinese Communist Party Congress in 2017, President Xi Jinping stated that China would improve its “capacity for engaging in international communication so as to tell China’s stories well, present a true, multi-dimensional and panoramic view of China…”
Jaishankar, a former ambassador to China, seems to have taken a neat leaf out of China’s book. He not only quickly shut down Rihanna, but the MEA also participated in a massive public diplomacy effort — certainly a feather in Modi’s cap — which resulted in a joint signed article on the Quad in The Washington Post.
The best ‘good news’ story, of course, is the leveraging of the India-made Covid-19 vaccine to inoculate the world – even Canada, which was critical of the government’s handling of the farmers’ protests and who Jaishankar reprimanded is buying some.
Moral of the story? Strength begets strength. If you’re strong enough, you can change the rules of the game. ‘Khela hobe’ with the world – and Freedom House type of reports downgrading India on the freedom scale be damned.
Views are personal.