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 war in Ukraine, to be replaced by a world of “multialignment” where countries will choose their own “particular policies and preferences and interests.”
Certainly, that is what India has done since the war in Ukraine began on February 24. It has rejected American and European pressure at the United Nations to condemn the Russian invasion, 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,” 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 per cent annual growth and lift millions out of poverty. That need is non negotiable. India gobbles up all the Russian oil it requires, even some extra for export. For Jaishankar, time is up on the mindset 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 war, which has provoked moral outrage in the West over Russian atrocities, has caused a different anger elsewhere, one focused on a skewed and outdated global distribution of power.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 fertiliser costs, causing acute economic difficulties in poorer countries, resentment of the United States and Europe has stirred in Asia and Africa.
Grinding trench warfare 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,” 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 towards illiberalism under 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 — Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party lost a municipal election in Delhi this month — and the prime minister’s popularity is 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 aggression under President Vladimir 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 towards an order dominated by democratic pluralism or by repressive leaders.
Which way 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.
“Hatred has penetrated into society at a level that is absolutely terrifying,” acclaimed Indian novelist Arundhati Roy said.
That may be, but for now, Modi’s India seems to brim with confidence.
The Ukraine war, compounding the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, has fuelled the country’s ascent. Together they have pushed corporations to make global supply chains less risky by diversifying towards 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 Putin’s Russia, which supported the country with weapons over decades of nonalignment, while the United States cosseted India’s neighbour, Pakistan. Even in a country starkly fractured over Modi’s policies, this approach has had nearly 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!”
Modi’s India will not do that in an emergent world characterised by Jaishankar as “more fragmented, more tense, more on the edge and more under stress” as the war in Ukraine festers.
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.
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.
- New York Times
Roger Cohen
The writer is a journalist, author for NYT
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