Sober Indians will need a strong dose of antiemetic to endure the panegyrics to “democracy” and “shared values” that will emanate from Narendra Modi’s tour this week of the United States. The prime minister is scheduled to speak before the US Congress and dine at the White House. Since he is not the head of state, this expedition can’t, strictly speaking, qualify as a state visit. The Americans used to be fastidious about classifying such things. When Manmohan Singh went to Washington in 2005, George W Bush hosted for his guest “the equivalent of a state dinner”. But words lose and acquire meanings all the time. And this state visit will be an exhibition of that truth.
When Modi and Joe Biden compliment each other as torchbearers of democracy and champions of global stability, they will be trading stock phrases bleached of meaning and substance. Indian democracy in Modi’s reign has been reduced largely to an exercise in casting and counting votes. The prime minister presides over a cult of personality unrivalled in the world. Knocks on the doors of detractors, roundups of opposition figures, harrying of foreign and national media, jailing of journalists and protestors, and rancid cronyism at the national level are supplemented, on the regional level, by persecution of minorities and collapse of order. Modi, lest we forget, hasn’t spoken a word about the carnage in Manipur, a state three times the size of Delaware. The prime minister’s attention is consumed, instead, by the spectacle that awaits him in the United States. He has palms to press and pictures and videos of handshakes and hugs to share with his domestic worshippers, who genuinely believe that the world runs by the wisdom purveyed by the father of what they call “New India”.
The prime minister’s self-absorption is matched by the stupidity of his most performative critics, who beseech the American president to berate Modi for straying from the democratic path. The obsceneness of setting up the head of an empire decaying from its addiction to gratuitous foreign wars as the umpire of what constitutes correct democratic conduct does not occur to them. Their heads are so deeply lodged inside their fundaments that they cannot notice the absurdity of exhorting a state that still maintains a torture facility in Cuba—and is responsible for the displacement of 37 million people in distant lands in the past two decades—to hector India on its internal affairs.
The abuses of Indian democracy are being catalogued by Indian journalists, and ordinary Indian citizens everywhere are placing their liberty on the line to reclaim their country. I imagine they can do without—in fact, I believe their cause will be tainted by—the perfunctory solidarity of a state that has a history of extinguishing the prospects of democracy in its own neighbourhood, abetting head-chopping regimes in West Asia, nuking Japan in the 20th century, using chemical weapons against Iraqis in this century, facilitating the butchery of Bengalis and Indians by stocking the armouries of Pakistan, and massacring an untold number of defenceless Asian civilians from the skies since 2001.
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Self-respect to sycophancy
India’s attitude to the United States used to be governed by respect and self-assurance. Nehru kept a bronze cast of Abe Lincoln’s hand on his desk and rubbed it whenever he felt his resolve weakening. Indian thinkers, activists and freedom fighters, as the American historian Nico Slate details in his outstanding book Coloured Cosmopolitanism (2017), inspired the African American struggle for emancipation and helped in their agitation for equal rights. That self-confidence began to degenerate into self-abasement after India’s economic liberalisation. India’s business and governing elites began craving American approval, and the slightest praise of Indian democracy by the Americans was lapped up by Indian commentators yearning for validation. In 2003, ministers in New Delhi, including LK Advani, spoke of deploying Indian soldiers to Iraq as part of George W Bush’s “coalition of the willing.” It fell to Atal Bihari Vajpayee to evoke pan-Asian solidarity to squash the idea: “Indian soldiers will never be sent to kill their Iraqi brothers,” he told his cabinet, before pushing a resolution through Parliament condemning the war.
That streak of autonomy crumpled under the weight of Manmohan Singh’s sycophancy. Singh spent the first anniversary of the 26/11 siege of Mumbai not with the victims of the worst terrorist atrocity on Indian soil in the 21st century, but among his admirers in America. A self-respecting leader might have been affronted merely at being asked to be away from his country on such a sorrowful occasion. Singh seemed grateful for having been invited. The Americans, for all their florid proclamations of friendship, neither halted their sale of weapons to Pakistan nor granted India extensive access to David Headley, the Pakistani-American double-agent in their custody whose knowledge was instrumental to piecing together the planning behind the Mumbai attacks. Nobody could blame them: they were serving their own interests—so, to India’s misfortune, was India’s prime minister.
Modi went further still. In 2015, he instructed his officials to publish a book of his conversations with Barack Obama. Four years later, he announced a huge corporate tax cut to soften the Americans before clowning himself to gratify Donald Trump: “He has achieved much for the United States and for the world,” the prime minister said of Trump at an event in Texas. Photos of the two men walking hand in hand were splashed on the front pages of every major Indian newspaper. Exactly a day later, Trump appeared next to Imran Khan and offered to mediate the dispute in Kashmir—a proposal so inimical to India’s position that it repudiated every ounce of energy Modi had just expended to stroke Trump’s ego. Four years on, Modi is again being asked to sing for his supper. Americans are applying tremendous pressure on Delhi to become an American client. All the paeans to “values” in Washington this week have a purpose, and strengthening the cause of democracy isn’t it.
Kapil Komireddi is the author of ‘Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India’, which will be published in a revised and updated edition next month. Follow him on Telegram and Twitter. The views expressed above are personal.