The willingness of French President Emmanuel Macron to come to India at short notice to fill in the vacuum left by US President Joe Biden’s inability to participate as chief guest of the Republic Day ceremonies later this week has two consequences.
First, it solidifies the India-France relationship – that’s an obvious takeaway. Considering India has bought large amounts of defence equipment from France in recent years – and is planning to buy some more – Macron would have obviously been happy to respond to India’s embarrassing need for a high-profile guest at the last minute.
It helps, of course, that the visit is more or less ceremonial. This means Macron will experience the full, spectacular display of Indian hospitality in New Delhi and Jaipur, where he is being feted.
Ask Bill Clinton. Photos from his 2000 visit show him being showered with red rose petals, surrounded by Rajasthani women dancers during his side trip to Jaipur. Back then, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo had visited India as the chief guest on Republic Day. But it was Clinton’s March visit, barely two years after India’s nuclear tests, that became a defining moment in the India-US relationship. Significantly, it came within a year of the US lifting its sanctions against India, which had kicked in after the 1998 tests.
Clinton had just about put the Monica Lewinsky affair behind him at the time. He probably wanted to just get out of Washington DC’s critical atmosphere and enjoy himself a bit. India promised to be fun – so what if it was led by the BJP which had just gone nuclear, or worse, had fought a war with Pakistan at Kargil which had ended with him— the US— mediating in Blair House. So, Clinton showed up with his daughter – his wife, Hilary, hadn’t bothered.
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Next best chief guest
Macron has a bit of the same je ne sais quoi that Clinton had in abundance – certainly not as much, but enough. Macron is also interesting because he’s married to a much older woman – it certainly makes him unusual. Whatever it is, he’s coming to New Delhi at short notice. And that makes India feel good.
So, what if Biden had his reasons to turn Modi down, the government must have said to itself, we have Macron.
Second, Macron filling in Biden’s gap sends an important message to the rest of the world. That India has so many influential friends that it doesn’t matter if one of them says no – even if he’s the most influential man of them all.
But there’s a third message here that is equally important. It is clear that Russia’s unnecessary war against Ukraine as well as America’s continued defence of Israel’s indefensible slaughter of the Palestinians – more than 25,000 people have been killed at last count – is giving rise to a helpless outrage in the rest of the world.
Brute strength matters
The truth is that if any other power – Russia, China, or the Europeans put together – had started such a war against the Palestinians, they would have had to end it within a week. But Biden’s America has gone on and on and on, shutting its eyes, ears, and brains to the determined destruction of another people.
In fact, America’s shameful defence of Israel has provided further sanction for Russia’s Vladimir Putin to continue wreaking whatever further distasteful havoc he has been causing in Ukraine for the last two years.
The moral of the story? Only brute strength matters. China learned this lesson a long time ago. It’s a lesson India has shied away from, for years, but one the Narendra Modi government is fast absorbing.
If you have the economic capacity and the military prowess, you can shake off any amount of international criticism. Nothing else matters.
So as Modi goes to the polls for a third term, which he is more than likely to win, this is what his foreign policy looks like:
Muscle matters, yes, but it is equally important to stay engaged, even if it means paying lip service to nations you don’t really care about anymore because they are no longer part of your influencer circle – like the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Kampala, Uganda last week, attended by Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar.
Jaishankar showed up in Kampala because it was important to show your own domestic audience that India continues to keep one leg in the “Global South”, as well as watches China’s interest in the region. That’s why he held a meeting with the Palestinian foreign minister–a photo-op that didn’t mean very much, because Jaishankar refused to criticise the war unleashed by Israel or call for an end to it.
Biden’s moral weakness on the Israel-Hamas war means the Democrat Party’s focus on human rights elsewhere in the world is total hypocrisy. It means that Modi is strong both because he has no domestic rival nor does he need to pay heed to any carping from abroad.
In this brave new world, India has taken a leaf out of how the world’s most powerful nations play, and it is beating its competitors out of the park.
Jyoti Malhotra is founder-editor of Awaaz South Asia web platform. She tweets @jomalhotra. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)