The derisive coordinated onslaught by the global media and academic social scientists against India and the government of Narendra Modi indicates a mood in Washington to engineer regime change.
India is facing particularly complex and intensifying dilemmas in the current and rapidly evolving geopolitical situation, owing to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is the single greatest loser among third parties as a result of the outbreak of the conflict. The near-total isolation of Russia and significant vulnerability owing to swingeing Western sanctions have delivered it, and not just metaphorically, hogtied into the hands of China. How Russia will now balance its historic relationship with India while finding itself deeply obligated to and dependent on China is a question that should cause serious concern to Indian policymakers.
India may have truly lost a friend whose appreciation of India’s neutrality and arms purchases cannot equal the suddenly increased material value that close relations with China affords. Already, the even more unwelcome threat of CAATSA is looming for India as a direct consequence of the war in Ukraine and deepening US sanctions against Russia. A worse outcome may follow if the price of China’s support compels Russia to share high-end military technology while American hubris makes it oblivious to the implications.
The war in Ukraine is highlighting the essential contours of contemporary international relations. The US emerged victorious in the Cold War in 1991 but continued to facilitate the economic and military rise of the Peoples’ Republic of China, initially justified to counter the USSR. Although this policy had begun with President Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972, US support expanded despite the Soviet defeat in 1991, owing to boundless conceit. It was a policy apparently predicated on ensuring the complete and permanent prostration of Russia, without paying heed to the problem the PRC might pose one day.
Indeed, the US espoused a policy of benign indifference to China’s violating international trade norms, effectively suspending the rules of a level-playing field. China used this freedom to the hilt by outright theft of intellectual property and became the centre of global counterfeit trade, copying any product that took its fancy. In fact, the US went one step further by encouraging American firms to enhance profits by relocating to the low-wage PRC and making prodigious quantities of investment capital available to Chinese firms from Wall Street. The writing on the wall was not read by Washington policymakers. The US in its supreme racial self-confidence, despite not having won a single war since the Korean stalemate, decided it could take on all-comers and establish itself as the sole hegemonic power, the one exceptional power.
The overall US policy stance was the determination to enduringly outmatch its erstwhile principal competitor, Russia, and it remained confident of retaining primacy over any other potential rival, like China too. Like great powers in history, it has sought to systematically subdue lesser states to its own political and economic purposes as well. Subversion, assassinations, and outright invasion, with whatever necessary subterfuges without even any concern about being exposed as a predator, have been its hallmark.
The post-war antecedents of such a policy date back to the early days of the Cold War and examples are too numerous to mention, not least the brutal murder of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, the overthrow of regimes in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, and so on. More recently, it has waged devastating genocidal unilateral wars in the Middle East, with flimsy justifications. The US is currently attempting to seize Venezuela’s sizeable oil resources to replace dependence on the Middle East.
In the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, the US continued to expand NATO and began extending its reach to the very borders of Russia recently, with the help of Ukrainian neo-Nazis. It prompted Russia to recall its experience of the Nazi attempt to liquidate Russians as a people altogether and it is resisting violently now. In recent weeks, the complete subservience of its NATO allies to US demands has been laid bare during the Ukrainian crisis. The question of existential import for India is the nature of its role and place in this emerging world order the US is attempting to fashion, especially in the context of their deepening mutual ties, sought with alacrity by the Indian establishment.
The derisive coordinated onslaught by the global media and academic social scientists against India and the government of Narendra Modi indicates a mood in Washington to engineer regime change. The evident aim is to replace the contemporary poster boys of Indian nationalism and self-assertion with more ‘reasonable’ and accommodating individuals, perhaps from within the BJP itself. Serial public outcries in Indian cities over nonissues, like the CAA, farm laws, and now the manufactured wrangle over hijabs, have domestic roots but international support for them suggests their true usefulness for regime change.
There is a persistent international chorus denouncing any Indian attempt to deepen national integration and unity as well as economic transformation. Every attempt by India to advance is being demonised with cynical resort to protest about endangerment to diversity, equality, human rights, caste crimes, gender violence in India and of course complete fabrications on press freedom being curbed. In addition, there is now pending, as a result of the passage of the Islamophobia Bill by the US Congress, naming India as the principal target, an attempt at the menacing intensification of protests by minorities against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, by bestowing them emphatic official legitimacy.
Of course, replacing the BJP itself with a fractured and weak coalition of warring regional political parties, which have more commitment to family fortunes and their own political party rather than the nation, will be the preferred outcome. Such a coalition government will be easy to manipulate by the Anglo-Americans since each coalition partner will be jockeying to advance parochial interests with whatever succour it can garner abroad. A feeble Central government has always been the goal of India’s adversaries and hence the support for any forces that weaken it, whether minority protest or Maoist violence. The latter was once aided by both China and the US to punish Indira Gandhi for her intervention to create Bangladesh.
Repeated attempts to discredit and weaken the Modi government have already been made, with incitement and support from abroad. That China and Pakistan also have a hand in this pie of destabilising India is irrelevant to Western powers with their own goals. No alternative government in India will be able to choose China and Pakistan over the US and India’s policy towards the Sino-Pakistani alliance will remain unchanged.
One vital issue quite missed by Indian policymakers and commentators is the true implication of greater US dependence on India to prosecute its policy against China. India becoming more important in this regard does not predispose the US to adopt greater forbearance towards Indian preferences. On the contrary, the complete opposite is the case because it accentuates the desire to exercise even greater influence and control over India, if need be, through regime change and implanting a more obedient dispensation.
The truly alarming scenario which ought to concern Indians is the threat of the breakup of the country. Unfortunately, parochialism and complacency are the norms of Indian political life and the absence of grasp of history and geopolitics is its hallmark. There seems to be no cognition that countries and empires regularly fall apart, which indeed has been the case of both Russia and India itself. It is a fear that also preoccupies China’s leadership and political elites despite pretensions to great power status.
A potentially grim Indian situation is staring us in the face, with secessionist movements and sentiment rife in parts of the country. Modi’s courageous though piecemeal striving to unite the nation by creating a citizenry that values good governance more than sectarian identity is provoking the inevitable resistance from those who have created political space for themselves by cultivating vote banks based on social divisions.
The ideology of Indian secularism itself has evolved into a backdoor for consolidating the unfinished politics of partition and Pakistani intervention in India through a Muslim vote-bank. This phenomenon has been made unambiguously clear by the induction of Mohammed Ali Jinnah into the recent UP Assembly elections. In addition, the unfolding threat to India’s unity can be judged from a spectrum of de facto to quasi de jure, with J&K somewhere towards the latter extreme, the hastening separatist drift of Punjab, highlighting secession impulses, somewhere in between, and both West Bengal and Tamil Nadu at the other de facto end. In all cases, the writ of the Central government is either insecure or has to be enforced, as in J&K or indeed the Northeast.
Let me conclude by outlining a potential endgame that cannot be wholly ruled out given the defiant mood of many Indian states and refusal to acknowledge the remit of the Centre. Should a fractious coalition collective government win a two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha it is not beyond the realms of possibility for some regional political parties to seek to amend the Constitution to enshrine separatist choices. It might end up allowing Indian states to engage independently with countries abroad, in accord with already developed ominous ties with the global church and Islamist ideologues.
The two largest components of such a governing national coalition are likely to be West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, dominated by Islamism and evangelists, respectively, where the quasi-separatist sentiments of the political class are fully manifest. Such a supposedly unthinkable re-configuration of the national constitutional order might eventually lead to the refusal of individual states to contribute to national budgetary allocations for federal tasks like defence. This was, in fact, the specific reason, fearing Sheikh Mujibur Rahman might be reluctant to contribute to the national defence budget, which precipitated the Pakistani Army crackdown on its eastern half in 1971. The moment such a novel legal order is constitutionally ratified, India’s foreign adversaries may well claim a right to intervene is justified to protect the democratic and human rights of Indians if any attempt was made by nationalist factions of the polity to oppose the dissolution of the Indian republic.
Is this possible? Absolutely, since Indian voters twice elected a foreign-controlled UPA that presided over the country’s quickening implosion. The only defensive option for India’s is nationalist forces is to consolidate the nation’s political heartland and turn it into an impregnable fortress of consensus to defend the Republic. It may then have the legitimacy and means to deal with the truculent separatist border periphery that is threatening the Indian Union.
The writer taught international political economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science for over two decades. Views expressed are personal.