Four years ago, on a reporting trip during the 2022 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections to a Dalit-majority settlement in Mirzapur district on the state’s southeastern border, this writer met a poor, middle-aged Dalit man who was a committed Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) voter. He reiterated his support for the BJP but added that his vote would go to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the national elections. Why? The man said that the Narendra Modi government has added to the country’s standing in the world, and that is why.
After prodding, the man came up with details. When the war broke out (Russia-Ukraine), the government was able to stop the war and take out our students. He said that even superpowers like the United States and China were not able to graduate their students. I realized that it was useless to argue with him that American and Chinese students do not go to study in Ukraine. But when the BJP made this a campaign point in the 2024 elections, I was neither surprised nor scandalized, unlike many self-righteous but aloof observers of Indian politics. The idea that the Narendra Modi government has succeeded in significantly enhancing India’s national standing has been one that has been systematically and relentlessly promoted through the country’s Bharatiya Janata Party campaign machinery. While one might argue about the extent of its political impact on the electoral fortunes of the BJP, it was certainly part and parcel of the regime’s attempt to create an aura around the personality of the Prime Minister.
Certainly there is nothing wrong with such an attempt. Political parties are free to choose the issues on which they campaign and to shape popular sentiment. The BJP has had notable success in cultivating positive sentiment about India’s foreign policy prowess. It has been portrayed as aggressive against Pakistan, India’s red neighbour, which has been waging an asymmetric war against India for decades. It has been described as a benevolent state towards its smaller neighbors and other poor countries in the Global South. It has shown that it has become more equal than it was in the past vis-à-vis richer countries, whether they are the United States, European countries, or even oil-producing countries.
Events, even if they were ordinary, turned into spectacles for the public. The G20 summit in Delhi, the Prime Minister’s public events with Donald Trump in 2020, his state visit under the Biden presidency, and the now-forgotten scene with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Tamil Nadu are all part of the same pattern. One could give more examples, if necessary, to support the embodiment of the diplomacy argument.
Not everything in this approach is entirely cosmetic. There have been tangible results from many of this government’s external engagements. Trade deals, supply chain linkages, and security partnerships have been made.
Despite these gains, one could also argue that India has committed errors of omission and commission. These include the failure to restrain our greatest ally in the region, Sheikh Hasina, from committing atrocities and political transgressions that inflamed popular anger and led to her downfall, and the Prime Minister’s visit to Israel days before launching war on Iran alongside the United States, which made it appear as if we were siding with Israel. Then there are miscalculations. Trump 2.0, which made India one of the biggest targets of its trade war, while the Indian state viewed him as a good friend who would be happy to make a deal with the country, is the biggest example of this.
How did these errors come about? The aim of asking these questions is not to criticize the ruling regime. This is the job of the opposition, not the job of the analyst. Frankly, the former has been completely incompetent at scoring such points across a range of issues in the past 12 years. This question is important because answering it is necessary for an objective assessment of India’s strategy under the current government.
Three main factors come to this author’s mind.
1. A false leap of faith that suggests that foreign relations are identical on the basis of similarity in internal political discourse
India’s right wing loved Donald Trump not because of his political view of what the United States should be. They liked him because he was vocally anti-woke and seemed more approachable compared to the woke democrats and other Western peers who often criticized India for things like Hindutva. The fact that Trump’s reactionary right-wing traits would also be deployed against Indian exporters and H1B workers was not something that occurred to them until the shoe was placed on the other foot.
A similar argument can be made with regard to Israel. The Palestinian conflict, partly because of its historical development and partly because of its representation in Indian public discourse, is often viewed as a religious rather than a national issue. The celebration of Israel’s military might in the face of the Islamist threat blinded India’s right-wing to the painful (and now obvious) economic consequences of massive military intervention in West Asia.
This is a lesson that Indians need to learn well, regardless of their political ideology, whether they are from the right or against it. Greater ideological convergence does not always lead to congruence of national interests between countries.
2. He came, he had an offer no one could refuse, he always did better than he came, he saw, he conquered geopolitics
In geopolitics, there are no permanent friends and enemies. Relationships become warm and cold depending on whose interests are needed and at what moment. Donald Trump learned this the hard way when he was forced to seek a trade détente with China after the latter threatened to cut off supplies of rare earth elements in response to Trump’s tariffs. Sri Lanka, having played an illegitimate game between India and China, realized that it needed India on its side in the IMF debt restructuring negotiations as one of the debts being negotiated was Chinese debt. India realized that public sentiment about decoupling with China was untenable given our significant trade relationship with it.
This trade-off matters much more than personal warmth and photo ops in today’s geopolitics. As is clear, the wires of these relationships are very complex and mixed in the world, and the effort of geopolitical friendliness can increase or decrease depending on the circumstances. What India needs to do is strengthen its capabilities to make offers that cannot be refused instead of harboring illusions about the charisma of some leaders who are doing the job for us. The first requires adding more to the country’s economic strength.
3. Building international standing requires a collective effort and not external tsarship
A cliché we often hear in foreign policy discussions in India is that the best foreign policy is a sustainable GDP growth rate of 8%. The experience of the past six years, when the world has suffered massive, recurring supply chain disruptions, shows that the best foreign policy is also to be self-sufficient in manufacturing pharmaceutical APIs, fertilisers, holding adequate fossil fuel reserves, being able to secure supplies of rare earth elements and things like that.
The short point is that there is no programmatic bypass to reach the superpower stage and a country must return to the physiocratic basics of brick-and-mortar self-sufficiency. Thanks to its fast growth software, India was fooled into believing the first option. Although some of these endeavors may face a natural resource hurdle in a country like India, on many fronts, they should not be ignored. D as big as ours has no excuses. The hard truth is that India is still far from achieving self-sufficiency in many areas. A government that has been in power for 12 years with a comfortable majority can do better than blame its predecessors.
What exactly prevented India from doing better in this endeavour? The fundamental asymmetry of our political economy is the reason.
The masses, most of whom face extreme economic vulnerability, have been prevented from becoming restive by the rapid spread of economic palliatives. This has occurred at both the central and state government levels and has bipartisan support across the political spectrum. This has resulted in an economic cost. India’s enhanced international standing is a placebo rather than the effective medicine in this political deal.
Domestic capital, without which such self-sufficiency cannot be achieved today, is unwilling to make such commitments because it can continue, relatively speaking, to make risk-free profits in other activities that exploit the size of domestic markets and where competition with foreign producers is not needed. This rejection of national interest-driven investment is often legitimized by their willingness to provide political financing. The money spent in Indian elections is insanely high for a country with such low levels of per capita income.
The fragility of this short-termism, which seeks survival for the underclass and benefits the rich, is often hidden when all is well in the world. But our weaknesses become clear in times of crisis like the current one.
Public discourse, in keeping with the country’s inherent poverty of truth, attempts to pursue placebo issues rather than raise more fundamental questions. The disproportionate incendiary and vilification of the role played by Pakistan in brokering the ceasefire between the US and Iran, coupled with the complete absence of discussion about why India is not more immune to the physical disruptions created by the war and what could correct this, constitutes a glaring example.
So, what should be done?
Certainly, democracies, where the periodic renewal of power is the primary goal of any political party, are more vulnerable to such inequality. On the other hand, an authoritarian state like China has been able to better prioritize its national interests. While this is a legitimate excuse, it can become crippling for a country if it is allowed to turn into an apology.
Here lies the importance of political messages from the senior leadership, whether democratic or dictatorial. If we may paraphrase Stalin’s famous 1930 article, in which he admitted the abuses under the Soviet Union’s collectivized farming system, Indians became “giddy with success.” It is unfair to expect the poor farmer or self-employed worker to appreciate the complexities of the supply chain and the tasks essential to India’s strategic resilience. They must be educated about the task facing the policy. It’s worth ending the column with another old Soviet joke.
Construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway began during Lenin’s time. Once, when Lenin was traveling with his Politburo on a train, the train stopped. What happened? – asked Lenin. Comrade, he was told, there is no way ahead. “Let’s all get down and lay the tracks,” he said. Decades later, Stalin was on a train and the same thing happened. He said: “I give you 24 hours to lay the tracks, otherwise you will all be shot.” Then came Khrushchev, and faced a similar dilemma. Command, let’s take the tracks from the back and put them in the front. When Brezhnev faced the problem, he said, It’s okay if there are no tracks, let’s pretend we’re moving.
India’s international standing will depend on where our political leadership falls precisely on the Lenin-Brezhnev spectrum. While all four Soviet leaders ruled a powerful state, their contributions to promoting the national interest were very different.
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