dailyO
Politics

Can Modi and Trump put democracy first, and not their egos?

Advertisement
Angshukanta Chakraborty
Angshukanta ChakrabortyJun 26, 2017 | 17:44

Can Modi and Trump put democracy first, and not their egos?

In a piece written by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for The Wall Street Journal yesterday, June 25, he said that he returns to the United States a year after he and former president Barack Obama jointly overcame the “hesitations of history” in the India-US ties. As he dines with current president of the United States, Donald J Trump, PM Modi is expected to sing paeans to shared and cherished “democratic values”.

Advertisement

In his recent tweet, President Trump has declared India as a “true friend”, something he had reiterated before a gathering of Hindu Americans led by tycoon Shalabh Kumar, himself a great supporter of Trump. Fringe Hindu groups have celebrated Trump’s birthday in India, turning him into a deity of sort, even as Indians in the United States have become victims of hate crimes, and the department of homeland security, as well as the immigration authorities in the US, put a curb on the all-important H-1B visa that’s the capillary network of India’s vast tech diaspora in the United States. But for Trump, "Make America Great Again" was a refrain that’s blind to such inconvenient truths.

Yet, the two leaders are meeting later today in a much-hyped, officially bilateral and one-on-one capacity, and Modi is the first world leader to be formally hosted in the White House, and be accorded the honour of a White House dinner. This is continuity because even former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh became the first state guest to be hosted in the White House in 2009 when a callow Obama became the first African-American president of the US.

Advertisement

Since then, the talks of Indo-US strategic partnership, the following through of the civil nuclear deal, maritime cooperation in Indian and Pacific Oceans and the Paris Climate pact, which India ratified – had been fruits of a really growing relationship between two mature democracies embracing each other. However, with the Trump administration overturning many of the achievements of the previous Obama regime, and pursuing more of direct bilateral ties, which are heavily dependent on President Trump’s personal chemistry with the global leaders, this is indeed a tricky path for PM Modi.

trump_062617052611.jpg
Though often compared on the basis of their similarities, Modi and Trump have many crucial differences.

The murmurs of spruced-up defence cooperation, especially after last year’s LEMOA (Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement) between India and US, are the only slices of reassurance in the political and diplomatic circles. PM Modi’s op-ed in The WSJ notwithstanding, the bilateral trade figures wouldn’t matter to Trump, whose populism is premised on his notorious “America First” motto, one of the primary reasons why he pulled the United States out of the all-important Paris Climate deal, one of the high points of the Obama regime.

Advertisement

Though often compared on the basis of their similarities – riding the populist waves to secure major electoral mandates — Modi and Trump have many crucial differences. While the former is extremely cautious with his public utterances, and wants desperately to be counted as a statesman even though his party indulges in the most heinous form of electoral Darwinism, the latter is a 3am tweet, crying over “FAKE NEWS” on most days. Though both Trump and Modi have a difficult and adversarial relationship with the non-tabloid media in the two countries, and both the regimes have been caught intimidating free press, asking openly for regime-friendly nicer stories, they are being given a tough time, more in the US than in India, of course.

The congratulations over phone on electoral victories aside, what would connect the two is evidently hinged on high-end defence deals, less so on defence cooperation because Trump cannot be said to have a “vision” on anything beyond immediate and myopic economic interests. Already, reports that the US has agreed to sell India 22 Guardian drones have been all over the Indian media, and it’s expected that in the joint statement later tonight, the POTUS and the Indian PM would make a formal announcement on this. We can expect some boost for Modi’s Make in India initiative as a fighter aircraft-hungry India either agrees to buy, or partially/jointly manufacture with US help, some much-needed fleet.

Yet, as The Economist put it, Narendra Modi has been found to be a “constant tinkerer”, but “not much of a reformer”, a “firebrand nationalist” under whose reign “India’s raucous democracy” has been much “subdued”. The Make In India initiatives are sinking, even as his new-day-new-scheme gimmick has been exposed as more or less a rehashed version of UP-era initiatives. So much for those who bet on the strongman’s ability to take hard decisions and put India on the smart path to development.

Come to think of it, the two leaders representing the world’s largest and the oldest democracies, would meet today, and all we can talk about with limited enthusiasm is a set of possible defence pacts, minus long-term vision, and only hinged on shared Islamophobic tendencies of both the current administrations. If Trump’s stalled executive order on preventing entry of citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries for a period of 90 days – one of the very first decision he took as he assumed office – is anything to go by, can we discount the fact that there was no Iftar dinner in the White House this year, breaking a long tradition of official secularism in the United States?

What an echo it has in India, where the last Iftar party organinsed by President Pranab Mukherjee in Rashtrapati Bhavan wasn’t attended by a single Union cabinet minister serving the Narendra Modi government! This, in the wake of a spate of lynchings, mostly of Muslims and Dalits in the country, is really the official nod to an emboldened lynch mob that sees state sanction in its communally motivated orgies of violence.

It’s extremely disconcerting that both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald J Trump, while reaping the fruits of boisterous democracies in both the countries, are presiding over a catastrophic attempt to disembowel democracy from its roots.

As dire prognosis of Hindu Rashtra in India and triumphalist return of White nationalism in the United States happen together, we see the two leaders of the two most important democracies in the world, make a bonfire of civil rights, putting muscular militarism at the very centre of their cramped worldview, even as they desperately covet attention, adoration and admiration from all.

This was evident in the manner PM Modi paraded the “surgical strike” before an audience of eager NRIs and prominent business heads in the US, as something for which India gained diplomatic stature in the international stage. His confidence was placed in India successfully de-hyphenating itself from Pakistan and being able to front terrorism as an issue that must be tackled head-on, separating it from the Kashmir crisis, which Pakistan both foments and latches on to.

modi-body_062617052625.jpg
We see the two leaders of the two most important democracies in the world, make a bonfire of civil rights, putting muscular militarism at the very centre of their cramped worldview.

Yet, with the beef lynchings becoming a veritable national(ist) epidemic, comparisons with Pakistan and its draconian blasphemy law, are becoming the new normal. Mirrored tendencies in the United States, with Indians becoming victims of Islamophobic hate crimes perpetrated by White neo-nazis who are unable to tell apart a brown Arab from a brown Indian or South Asian, show a common stream of majoritarinism gripping both the countries, both of which are lands of immigrants, with civilisations built upon each other as waves of incoming peoples settled down. Both Modi and Trump are indifferent to such layered history of their respective countries, the foundations of the democracies in life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, as well as being true to the Constitution of the Secular, Democratic Republic. While Trump sees nothing beyond myopic monetary gains and is ready to upset painstaking work done by previous regime for quick bucks, as evident in his courting of Saudi Arabia and signing the 110 billion dollar defence deal with the monarchy that seeks to achieve a complete overhaul of the Middle East, securing maximum control at the expense of Iran, Modi desires a lasting impression on the world stage.

This, however, doesn’t sit well with his Sangh-driven political ideology and the vision of turning India into a Hindu Rashtra. Modi’s odes to India’s entrenched secularism in foreign soil are a sore contrast with his deafening silence on the exploding graph of anti-minority and anti-Dalit violence, even though his regime is never short of erecting token Dalits and Muslims in key posts to beat the larger groundswell of resistance.

We need to ask if Modi seeks unquestioned power for India in the international theatre, is he living up to it? In the world stage, yes, because he’s keen to establish personal rapport with most, and can be counted on to say the right words at the right time, singing homilies of India’s civilisational greatness.

The International Yoga Day that was just observed in several countries of the world is a significant yardstick of Modi’s soft power, as is New Delhi’s creditable role in Afghanistan, which the US has been forced to acknowledge and how.

But that’s more about far bigger diplomatic wheels that couldn’t be upset by individual demagogues, though Trump is way too irresponsible and unpredictable to cock a snook on longstanding ties and alliances. Europe, for one, is devising policies keeping Trump out of the picture, or expecting the least from him. Of course, India isn’t in a position to do that, and certainly it’s not even what should be advised. Over the past two decades, many global anchors have held together and brought closer India-US ties. Trump and Modi are acutely aware how they need each other in a volatile international theatre of too many players, and a diminished importance of the USA in calling the shots. China is a common hiccup for both, but then China is no democracy. The vibrancy of an India-US partnership was as much cultural as strategic, and both New Delhi as well as Washington couldn’t be less aware of each other’s role in propping the other up.

Can a lack of historical consciousness be the bedrock of a future of two countries that had hitherto vouched for their democratic foundations?

The gaffes from the current White House administration – the latest one being press secretary Sean Spicer wishing India a "Happy Independence Day" two months too soon – parallel the ones from New Delhi under Modi regime, and that betrays a lack of engagement with the past, or to see it as something that must be wiped clean to create a future of muscular certainties, of nationalist homogeneity and destructive militarism.

Can Modi and Trump put democracy first, as they meet over dinner tonight?

I wouldn’t bet on it, and that’s the tragedy of this, notwithstanding the emergent bonhomie between the two “true friends”.

Last updated: June 26, 2017 | 18:46
IN THIS STORY
Please log in
I agree with DailyO's privacy policy