"The military operation in Ukraine, compounding the effects
of the pandemic, has contributed to the ascent of a giant that defies easy
alignment. It could be the decisive force in a changing global system.
Seated in the domed, red sandstone government building
unveiled by the British Raj less than two decades before India threw off
imperial rule, S. Jaishankar, the Indian foreign minister, needs no reminder of
how the tides of history sweep away antiquated systems to usher in the new.
Such, he believes, is today’s transformative moment. A
“world order which is still very, very deeply Western,” as he put it in an
interview, is being hurried out of existence by the impact of the military
operation in Ukraine, to be replaced by a world of “multi-alignment” where
countries will choose their own “particular policies and preferences and
interests.”
Certainly, that is what India has done since military operation in Ukraine began on Feb.
24. It has rejected American and European pressure at the United Nations to
condemn the Russian military operation, turned Moscow into its largest oil
supplier and dismissed the perceived hypocrisy of the West. Far from
apologetic, its tone has been unabashed and its self-interest broadly naked.
“I would still like to see a more rules-based world,” Mr.
Jaishankar said. “But when people start pressing you in the name of a
rules-based order to give up, to compromise on what are very deep interests, at
that stage I’m afraid it’s important to contest that and, if necessary, to call
it out.”
In other words, with its almost 1.4 billion inhabitants,
soon to overtake China as the world’s most populous country, India has a need
for cheap Russian oil to sustain its 7 percent annual growth and lift millions
out of poverty. That need is nonnegotiable. India gobbles up all the Russian
oil it requires, even some extra for export. For Mr. Jaishankar, time is up on
the mind-set that “Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s
problems are not Europe’s,” as he put it in June.
The Ukraine military operation, which has provoked moral
outrage in the West, has caused a different anger elsewhere, one focused on a
skewed and outdated global distribution of power. As Western sanctions against
Russia have driven up energy, food and fertilizer costs, causing acute economic
difficulties in poorer countries, resentment of the United States and Europe
has stirred in Asia and Africa.
Grinding trench military operation on European soil seems
the distant affair of others. Its economic cost feels immediate and palpable.
“Since February, Europe has imported six times the fossil
fuel energy from Russia that India has done,” Mr. Jaishankar said. “So if a
$60,000-per-capita society feels it needs to look after itself, and I accept
that as legitimate, they should not expect a $2,000-per-capita society to take
a hit.”
Here comes Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India, pursuing
its own interests with a new assertiveness, throwing off any sense of
inferiority and rejecting unalloyed alignment with the West. But which India
will strut the 21st-century global stage, and how will its influence be felt?
The country is at a crossroads, poised between the vibrant
plurality of its democracy since independence in 1947 and a turn toward
illiberalism under Mr. Modi. His “Hindu Renaissance” has threatened some of the
core pillars of India’s democracy: equal treatment of all citizens, the right
to dissent, the independence of courts and the media.
Democracy and debate are still vigorous — Mr. Modi’s Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party lost a municipal election in Delhi this
month — and the prime minister’s popularity remains strong. For many, India is
just too vast and various ever to succumb to some unitary nationalist diktat.
The postwar order had no place for India at the top table.
But now, at a moment when Russia’s military operation under President Vladimir
V. Putin has provided a vivid illustration of how a world of strongmen and
imperial rivalry would look, India may have the power to tilt the balance
toward an order dominated by democratic pluralism or by repressive leaders.
Which way Mr. Modi’s form of nationalism will lean remains
to be seen. It has given many Indians a new pride and bolstered the country’s
international stature, even as it has weakened the country’s pluralist and
secularist model.
India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, himself a
mixture of East and West through education and upbringing, described the
country as “some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and
reverie had been inscribed” without any of those layers being effaced.
He was convinced that a secular India had to accommodate all
the diversity that repeated invasion had bequeathed. Not least, that meant
conciliation with the country’s large Muslim minority, now about 200 million
people.
Today, however, Mr. Nehru is generally reviled by Mr. Modi’s
Hindu nationalist party. There are no Muslims in Mr. Modi’s cabinet. Hindu mob
attacks on Muslims have been met with silence by the prime minister.
“Hatred has penetrated into society at a level that is
absolutely terrifying,” the acclaimed Indian novelist Arundhati Roy said.
That may be, but for now, Mr. Modi’s India seems to brim
with confidence.
The Ukraine military operation, compounding the effects of
the Covid-19 pandemic, has fueled the country’s ascent. Together they have
pushed corporations to make global supply chains less risky by diversifying
toward an open India and away from China’s surveillance state. They have
accentuated global economic turbulence from which India is relatively insulated
by its huge domestic market.
Those factors have contributed to buoyant projections that
India, now No. 5, will be the world’s third-largest economy by 2030, behind
only the United States and China.
On a recent visit to India, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen
said that the United States wanted to “diversify away from countries that
present geopolitical and security risks to our supply chain,” singling out
India as among “trusted trading partners.”
Nonetheless, India is in no mood to cut ties with Mr.
Putin’s Russia, which supported the country with weapons over decades of
nonalignment, while the United States cosseted India’s archenemy, Pakistan.
Even in a country starkly fractured over Mr. Modi’s policies, this approach has
had near universal backing.
“For many years, the United States did not stand by us, but
Moscow has,” Amitabh Kant, who is responsible for India’s presidency of the
Group of 20 that began this month, said in an interview. New Delhi has enough
rivals, he said: “Try, on top of China and Pakistan, putting Russia against
you!”
Mr. Modi’s India will not do that in an emergent world
characterized by Mr. Jaishankar as “more fragmented, more tense, more on the
edge and more under stress” as the military operation in in Ukraine festers.
“Paradoxically, the military operation in Ukraine has
diminished trust in Western powers and concentrated people’s minds on how to
hedge bets,” said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a prominent Indian political theorist.
“India feels it has the United States figured out: Yes, you will be upset but
you’re in no position to do anything about it.”
That has proved a good bet up to now. “The age of India’s
significant global stature has just begun,” said Preeti Dawra, the Indian-born
director of global marketing at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Communion and division
Arriving in Varanasi, Hinduism’s holiest city, in 1896, Mark
Twain remarked on the “bewildering and beautiful confusion of stone platforms,
temples, stair-flights, rich and stately palaces” rising on the bluff above the
Ganges, the river of life.
Mr. Modi, 72, who adopted the city as his political
constituency in 2014 when he embarked on his campaign to lead India, saying he
had been “called by the mother Ganges,” has cut a pinkish sandstone gash through
this sacred jumble of devotion.
Known as “the corridor” and opened a year ago, the project
connects the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva, to the
riverfront a quarter-mile away.
The broad and almost eerily spotless pedestrian expanse,
with its museum and other tourist facilities, links the city’s most revered temple
to the river where Hindus wash away their sins. It is quintessential Modi.
Cut through a labyrinth of more than 300 homes that were
destroyed to make way for it, the passage intertwines the prime minister’s
political life with the deepest of Hindu traditions. At the same time, it
proclaims his readiness to fast-forward India through bold initiatives that
break with chaos and decay. Mr. Modi, a Hindu nationalist and tech enthusiast,
is a disrupter.
A self-made man from a humble background in the western state
of Gujarat, and from a low status in India’s caste system, or social hierarchy,
Mr. Modi has come to embody an aspirational India.
Through what Srinath Raghavan, a historian, called “an
incorruptible aura and a genius at orchestrating public narratives,” he appears
to have imbued India with the confidence to forge the singular path so evident
over the 10 months since Russia went to military operation.
“Modi’s social mobility is in some ways the promise of India
today,” Mr. Raghavan said in an interview.
That Modi-inspired promise, as invigorating to the
traditionally lower castes of Hindu society as it is troubling to the Brahmins
who long ran India, has come at a price.
Vishwambhar Nath Mishra, a Hindu religious leader in
Varanasi and an engineering professor, said that the corridor had been a
“blunder” that had destroyed 142 old shrines, an example of the bulldozing
style Mr. Modi favors.
“We have always been a unique family in Varanasi, Muslims
and Christians and Hindus who sit down and work things out, but Mr. Modi
chooses to create tensions to get elected,” Mr. Mishra said. “If he is trying
to establish a Hindu nation, that is very dangerous.”
Every morning, Mr. Mishra bathes in the Ganges. He heads a
foundation that monitors the river and showed me a chart illustrating that the
level of fecal matter in it is still dangerously high. So why does he do it? He
smiled. “The Ganges is the medium of our life.”
One recent evening, I watched the Hindu prayer ceremony on
the riverfront from a small boat. Perhaps two thousand people had gathered.
Candles flickered. Chants rose. Along the great crescent sweep of the river,
smoke billowed from the pyres that burn night and day. For a Hindu to die and
be cremated in Varanasi is to be assured of transcendence and liberation.
A distracting electronic screen flashed behind the ceremony.
On it, Mr. Modi’s bearded face appeared at regular intervals, promoting the
Indian presidency of the Group of 20 largest global economies, an organization
that calls itself the “premier forum for international economic cooperation.”
Mr. Modi, as this elaborate choreography of the spiritual
and the political suggested, wants to turn India’s presidency of the G20 in
2023 into a premier platform for his bid for re-election, to a third term, in
2024.
“Big responsibility, bigger ambitions,” proclaimed one
slogan on the screen. G20-related meetings are planned in every Indian state
over the next year, including one in Varanasi in August.
India wants its presidency of the group to have the world as
“one family” and the need for “sustainable growth” as its core themes. It wants
to push the transformation of developing countries through what Mr. Kant, the
organizer, called “technological leapfrogging.” India, with its near universal
connectivity, sees itself as an example.
About 1.3 billion Indians now have a digital identity.
Access to all banking activities online, through digital bank accounts, has
become commonplace during Mr. Modi’s eight years in power. They were once the
preserve of the middle class. Poorer Indians have been empowered.
“Nobody wants the current world order,” Mr. Kant said.
“There are still two billion people in the world with no bank account.” India
will advocate on behalf of poorer nations. But the issue with Mr. Modi’s “one
family” theme is that, just up the road from the riverside prayers, his
divisiveness is evident.
Secular ideals, dented
It is not easy to get into the complex, at the top of Mr.
Modi’s new corridor, where the 17th-century white-domed Gyanvapi Mosque abuts
the Kashi Vishwanath Temple. Intense security checks take a long time to
negotiate because this is an epicenter of the inflamed Hindu-Muslim tension in
India.
Armed guards are everywhere. They stand beside the mosque,
which is encased behind a 20-foot metal fence topped with coils of razor wire.
They patrol the Hindu crowds, who line up in saffron-color robes beside the
temple to make their offerings of milk, sometimes mixed with honey, to the
simple stone lingam that is the symbol of Shiva.
The only mammals that cross easily from the Hindu to Muslim
worlds, as if to mock the stubborn divisions of humankind, are the lithe gray
monkeys that scamper over barriers from shikhara to minaret.
A flurry of legal cases now centers on the mosque. A court
survey this year claimed to have uncovered an ancient lingam on the premises of
the mosque, so establishing, at least for hard-line Hindus, that they should be
allowed to pray there. Large Muslim prayer gatherings have been banned.
In the ascendant Hindu narrative that Mr. Modi has done
nothing to discourage, India belongs in the first place to its Hindu majority.
The Muslim interlopers of the Mughal Empire and other periods of conquest take
second place. Mosque must yield to temple if it can be demonstrated that a
temple predated it.
If Mr. Putin has chosen to portray Ukraine as a birthplace
of the Russian world inseparable from the motherland and embraced the Orthodox
Church as a bastion of his power, Mr. Modi has chosen Varanasi as a core
vehicle of his assertion of India as essentially a Hindu nation. Of course, the
Indian leader did so in the interest of power consolidation, not conquest.
Three decades ago, the razing by a Hindu mob of a
16th-century mosque in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya, which Hindus
believe is the birthplace of the god Ram, led to the death of 2,000 people and
propelled the rise of Mr. Modi’s party.
A temple is now being built there. Mr. Modi, who presided
over the groundbreaking in 2020, has called it “the modern symbol of our
traditions.”
Faced by such moves, Ms. Roy, the novelist, voiced a common
concern. “You know, the Varanasi sari, worn by Hindus, woven by Muslims, was a
symbol of everything that was so interwoven and is now being ripped apart,” she
said. “A threat of violence hangs over the city.”
I found Syed Mohammed Yaseen, a leader of the Varanasi
Muslim community, which makes up close to a third of the city’s population of
roughly 1.2 million, at his timber store. “The situation is not good,” Mr.
Yaseen, 75, said. “We are dealing with 18 lawsuits relating to the old mosque.
The Hindus want to demolish it indirectly by starting their own worship there.”
Increasingly, he said, Muslims felt like second-class citizens.
“Every day, we are feeling all kinds of attacks, and our
identity is being diminished,” he said. “India’s secular character is being
dented. It still exists in our Constitution, but in practice, it is dented, and
the government is silent.”
This denting has taken several forms under Mr. Modi. Shashi
Tharoor, a leading member of the opposition Congress Party that ruled India for
most of the time since independence, suggested to me that “institutionalized
bigotry” had taken hold.
A number of lynchings and demolitions of Muslim homes, the
imprisonment of Muslim and other journalists critical of Mr. Modi, and the
emasculation of independent courts have fanned fears of what Mr. Raghavan, the
historian, called “a truly discriminatory regime, with its risk of
radicalization.”
As I spoke to Mr. Yaseen, I noticed a man with an automatic
rifle seated a few yards to his left. Clearly a Hindu, with a tilak in the
middle of his forehead, he took some interest in the conversation.
Who, I asked, is this man with a rifle?
“He is my guard, appointed a couple of months ago by the
district administration to protect me, given the tension over the mosque,” Mr.
Yaseen said.
The guard was a police officer named Anurag Mishra. I asked
him how he felt about his job. “I am standing here to protect a fellow human
being,” he said. “My religion does not really matter. Nor does his. My
superiors told me to do the job.”
Mr. Yaseen said that he was happy to have a Hindu protecting
him, even if “I trust in God, not in the guard.”
That one Indian citizen protects another — a Hindu police
officer with a rifle safeguarding a Muslim community leader from potential
Hindu attack — was at once reassuring, in that it suggested secular,
democratic, pluralistic India would not go quietly; and alarming, in that it
was necessary at all.
A delicate balance
At the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, in November, Indian
diplomacy played an important role in finding compromise language after several
Western countries had pressed for harsh criticism of Russia over Ukraine or
even for Moscow’s ouster from the forum.
Could India, with its ties to Russia, mediate a cease-fire
in Ukraine, or even a peace settlement? Mr. Jaishankar, the foreign minister,
was skeptical. “The parties involved have to reach a certain situation and a
certain mind-set,” he said.
And when will the military operation end? “I wouldn’t even
hazard an opinion,” he said.
Still, India wants to be a bridge power in the world birthed
by the pandemic and by the military operation in Ukraine.
It believes that the interconnectedness of today’s world
outweighs the pull of fragmentation and makes a nonsense of talk of a renewed
Cold War. If a period of disorder seems inevitable as Western power declines,
it will most likely be tempered by economic interdependence, the Indian
argument goes.
With inequality worsening, food security worsening, energy
security worsening, and climate change accelerating, more countries are asking
what answers the post-1945 Western-dominated order can provide. India, it
seems, believes it can be a broker, bridging East-West and North-South
divisions.
“I would argue that generally in the history of India, India
has had a much more peaceful, productive relationship with the world than, for
example, Europe has had,” Mr. Jaishankar said. “Europe has been very
expansionist, which is why we had the period of imperialism and colonialism.
But in India, despite being subjected to colonialism for two centuries, there’s
no animus against the world, no anger. It is a very open society.”
It is also situated between two hostile powers, Pakistan and
China.
In December, there was another skirmish at the 2,100-mile
disputed Chinese-Indian border. Nobody was killed, unlike in 2020, when at
least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers died. But tensions remain high. “The
relationship is very fraught,” Mr. Jaishankar said.
Escalation at the border is possible at any moment, but it
appears unlikely that India can count on Russia, given Moscow’s growing
economic and military dependence on China. That makes India’s strategic
relationship with the West critical.
In the light of the military operation in Ukraine, however,
each party is adjusting to the fact that the other will pick and choose its
principles.
“Ukraine is certainly not seen here as something with a
clear moral tale to tell,” Ms. Roy, the novelist, said. “When brown or Black
people get bombed or shocked-and-awed, it does not matter, but with white
people it is supposed to be different.”
India is in a delicate position. In the face of American
criticism, the country chose to take part this year in Russian military
exercises that included units from China.
At the same time, India is part of a four-nation coalition
known as the Quad that includes the United States, Japan and Australia and
works for a “free and open Indo-Pacific.”
This is Indian multi-alignment at work. The Ukraine military
operation has only reinforced New Delhi’s commitment to this course. Washington
has worked hard over many years to make India Asia’s democratic counterbalance
to President Xi Jinping’s authoritarian China. But the world, as seen from
India, is too complex for such binary options.
If the Biden administration has been unhappy with India’s
business-as-usual approach to Mr. Putin since Russia’s military operation in
Ukraine, it has also been accepting of it — American realpolitik, as China
rises, demands that Mr. Modi not be alienated.
At the end of my stay, I traveled down to Chennai on the
southeastern coast.
The atmosphere is softer there. The economy is booming. The
electronics manufacturer Foxconn is rapidly expanding production capacity for
Apple devices, building a hostel for 60,000 workers on a 20-acre site near the
city.
“The great mass of Indians are awakening to the fact that
they don’t need the ideology of the West and that we can set our own path — and
Modi deserves credit for that,” Venky Naik, a retired businessman, said.
I went to a concert where a musician played haunting songs
and spoke of “renewing your auspiciousness every day.” There I ran into Mukund
Padmanabhan, a former editor of The Hindu newspaper and now a professor of
public practice at the newly established Krea University, north of Chennai.
“I do not believe Modi can marshal Hinduism into a
monolithic nationalist force,” he said. “There are thousands of Gods, and you
don’t have to believe in any of them. There is no single or unique way.”
He gestured toward the mixed crowd of Hindus and Muslims at
the concert. “People don’t like to talk about the project of Gandhi and Nehru,
which was to bring everyone along and go forward, but it happened, and it is
part of our truth, part of the indelible Indian palimpsest.”"
It is interesting that from the former pinnacle of Western imperialism, India, comes the push to eliminate the remnants of Western exceptionalism in the world.
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