As India votes, doubt grows about Modi’s intentions

It freely borrowed from the Obama-era language of American foreign policy, the very word carrying with it the sense of a belated strategic awakening. As Charlton stressed in his preface, whereas the 20th century was America’s, and the 19th an age of empire, “we may well end the twenty-first century with India on top”.

These statements are only a snapshot of the expectations about what a rising India can mean for the geopolitical balance of power.

India is being fitted into a premade, and fundamentally flawed Western mould: as the democratic bulwark to a rising and assertive China. That has taken concrete institutional form in India’s willing membership of the Quad, alongside Australia, Japan and the United States.

Even when India has not followed the script the West writes for it, as in its refusal to condemn Putin’s war in Ukraine, ongoing enthusiasm services a common hope that may never be achieved: a soft alliance against China.

Concerns about Modi’s growing illiberalism and his Hindu nationalist agenda are not new. But as India goes to the polls, the pressures on civil society have become more acute.

Modi’s cult of personality is becoming quasi-imperial. Roundabouts in India’s major cities are akin to Modi merry-go-rounds, his towering image tracking the travelling eye. India’s COVID vaccine certificates were stamped with Modi’s image. Vice-chancellors at universities have been instructed to install “selfie points” so that students can capture images of themselves with the leader.

These factors, along with the centralising of power in his office and ongoing challenges to the independence of the media and the judiciary, led distinguished Indian scholar Ramachandra Guha to declare of Modi, that “the self-proclaimed Hindu monk of the past has … become, in symbol if not in substance, the Hindu emperor of the present”.

But what kind of challenge does Modi’s India present to Australian foreign policy into the future? Indeed, the broader question here for policymakers is how will Canberra deal with Indonesia, China, Japan and India other than just fearing abandonment?

Peter Varghese, former secretary of Foreign Affairs and Trade and before that Australian High Commissioner to India, sets out the reality.

“Whatever direction Indian politics takes over the next decade or so, it is likely to emerge as the world’s third-largest economy, a much stronger defence industrial base, and an activist foreign policy designed to position India as a separate pole in a more multipolar world. This is what India means when it says it strives to become a leading power,” he says.

What form this more confident Indian nationalism might take, with its sharper elbows at home and abroad, is another question.

Varghese is less sure about the ultimate success of Modi’s Hindu nationalist project. “How far and how fast he can implement this agenda is an open question. India is fundamentally a diverse nation which is not easily shoe-horned into a monochromatic Hindu state.”

The likely mess that such a confrontation with 200 million Muslims might bring looms. Though Guha does not think India will follow Sri Lanka’s example, where an economy believed to be on the cusp of joining other Asian tigers instead devolved into three decades of violent civil war.

Varghese, a historian by training, recalls that Indian democracy did recover from the strain of Indira Gandhi’s “emergency” in the 1970s, “with its frontal assault on the rule of law and freedom of the press and imprisonment of opposition leaders”. He adds: “This suggests there is nothing wrong with Indian democracy, which cannot be fixed by what is right with Indian democracy.”

There’s no need for Western diplomatic medicine or finger pointing about democratic backsliding either, Varghese says. “That will be counterproductive. This is India’s battle, and it must be resolved by Indian voters.”

Quiet but patient explanation is the order of the day, he says, presenting the case, “why an India, which turns its back on its secular liberal democratic character, makes it a much diminished strategic and economic partner for Australia”.

The geopolitical implications here are obvious. As Varghese explains: “India as a balancer of China makes much less sense if it is no longer a liberal democracy. Australia wants to see China balanced because it is an authoritarian state which seeks to become the regional hegemon. An authoritarian India is a much less credible balancer than a liberal democratic India.”

Externally, India is unlikely to play the role of aggressor. But the relationship between India and China will surely be fraught: they are made for misunderstandings and India may well be overplaying its hand as the coming economic power.

As the experience of Europe and North America in the late 19th century shows, the onset of modernisation brings with it not only rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, but mass nationalism and the intense need for social bonding. Modi is harvesting those very sentiments now to “make India great”. But nationalism, as is all too evident, can be a jealous master.

Dealing with the discomfort of a regional state that is crucial to the balance of power but bears illiberal and authoritarian traits, is not a new situation for Australia. From the 1970s until the late 1990s, for example, Australian governments refused to let the plight of the East Timorese derail relations with Jakarta.

Australia’s policy on these questions has been, typically, to avoid attempting to pass judgments on their regional partners’ domestic policies, seeing such action as too large an interference. Public denunciations have been seen to be counterproductive.

There are no easy answers to Australia’s Modi dilemma. He will likely emerge strengthened when the election results are known on June 4. Don’t bet on Australian leaders relinquishing strategic dreams about what India might become. But a little more clarity and prudence about India’s current trajectory would not go astray.