WORLD VIEW 09
Tuesday, 20 May, 2014
Modi must re-establish India’s global clout
HIndusTan TImEs
A
sHyam saran
rejuvenated BJP, under Narendra Modi, has a rare opportunity to reinvent India and rewrite the India story. The election has reversed the political trend of the past two decades and more, the inevitability of coalition governments at the Centre and the parallel rise of regional parties in the states. Modi will not be constrained by any ‘coalition dharma’, which the outgoing prime minister had laboured
under. While strong regional parties continue to flourish in some states, their ability to influence decisions at the Centre will be more circumscribed. The CentreState equation has changed. Whether this is a one-time phenomenon or the beginning of a new trend in Indian politics is still an open question. There are enough credible arguments that support either assessment. Indian foreign policy will be impacted. To begin with, there will be a positive, though largely perceptional, change in India’s stock abroad. The emergence of a strong government at the Centre, led by a decisive and charismatic leader, will inevitably be contrasted with an outgoing government, seen as preoccupied with multiple crises, unable to make any bold moves or even deliver on its own previous initiatives. Interest in engaging India will revive in the major capitals of the world and we will witness a sense of urgency in key international leaders wanting to interact with and take the measures of the man who has joined their ranks, beating all the odds. This gives the incoming government a welcome head start. There may be a temptation to focus the energies of the new dis-
pensation on setting the domestic house in order and turn to the world outside only later. This must be resisted. External engagement must go hand in hand with domestic repair, since success in the latter may depend heavily on the former, given the globalised nature of India’s economy. For example, reviving investment and re-energising the manufacturing sector will need capital and technology flows from advanced industrial economies, in particular, the United States, Germany and Japan. India’s relations with these countries will need immediate attention. It is India’s neighbourhood that holds the key to its emergence as a regional and global power. If India’s neighbourhood is politically unstable and economically deprived, there will be bigger challenges to India’s security and its own economic prospects. India’s security is inseparable from that of the Indian subcontinent. Its economic destiny is likewise enmeshed with that of its neighbours. Here is an opportunity to clear the decks in our neighbourhood, so that India is able to break out of its subcontinental confines and expand its footprint beyond its borders.
Under successive governments, India’s engagement with its neighbours has at best been episodic and mostly crisis-driven. This must change. The new prime minister must not follow his predecessor’s example of rarely travelling to our neighbouring capitals. In fact, the first order of business should be to connect with leaders of the subcontinent, including Pakistan. There will be continuities in the challenges confronting India. Managing an essentially adversarial relationship with China will require a mix of expanded engagement and robust deterrence. There is greater power asymmetry between our two countries than ever before and this will require asymmetric responses. The infrastructure on our side of the contested border requires urgent and sustained upgrade and we must build our maritime power to safeguard our ocean space. Above all, we must reject the notion that we are condemned to live with the current asymmetry with China. If any country has the prospect of closing the gap with China, it is India and a strong and committed government will be able to pursue this goal. I believe it must.
The other continuing challenge is Pakistan. Outing Prime Minister Mammohan Singh often said that while he had no mandate to change India’s borders, he did have the people’s mandate to render these borders irrelevant and allow the free flow of goods and people and the celebration of shared cultural affinities. I believe this was a sound approach, but it was an approach that often became a casualty of continuing hostility from the Pakistan establishment, in particular, its use of cross-border terrorism as an instrument of State policy. India needs to use a diverse mix of instruments to try and change the strategic calculus in Pakistan. This includes measures that will convince Pakistan that the continuing use of terrorist violence against India will entail a significant cost. There are several vulnerabilities on the Pakistani side that are potential pressure points. We should certainly signal our readiness to settle the issue of Jammu and Kashmir, but I do not agree that we should unilaterally accept the status quo. The LoC as a border may well become the end point of bilateral negotiations. They cannot be the starting point. Until then the
Manmohan Singh formula is a sensible posture to adopt. The advent of a new government, which is expected to revive the economy and provide coherent and effective governance, will expand India’s options in its external relations. There is no doubt that in the decade of 1996-2006, India emerged as a major and influential power on the strength of its high economic growth rate and its growing engagement with the world. If Prime Minister-elect Modi succeeds in putting India back on the growth expressway, handling foreign policy issues will become that much easier. While he will need an accomplished team to support him, he will himself be the chief asset India needs to re-establish its credibility and clout in the councils of the world. Having proved himself successful in navigating one of the most complex, diverse and rapidly transforming polities in the world, he comes with proven credentials to help make the world a better and safer place for all its citizens. Shyam Saran is a former foreign secretary. He is currently chairman NSAB and RIS and senior fellow, CPR.
JOHN KERRY’S DOCTRINE The slow end of ideology pOLITICO Edward-isaac dovErE
John Kerry then had a different worry about America’s role in the world than the secretary of state does now. “What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism,” Kerry told Yale graduates in his Class Day speech. “There’s a “serious danger of assuming the roles of policeman, prosecutor, judge, and jury, all at one time, and then, rationalizing our way deeper and deeper into a hold of commitment which other nations neither understand nor support.” That was so 48 years ago. Kerry delivered those lines in 1966, as a graduating senior. Sunday, he returned to the campus in New Haven as secretary of state for another Class Day speech he saw as a bookend to rail against the governments in Washington and elsewhere for not assuming enough of a role in the world. These days, rarely a week goes by when he’s not flying to another country, managing American involvement in Ukraine, the much-discussed but still nascent “pivot to Asia,” negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, the Syrian civil war, a full collection of African conflicts and his own failed attempts to make any movement toward an IsraeliPalestinian settlement. It worries him that he doesn’t feel he has enough support for these efforts back home. The 1966 anxiety about interventionism stuck out to him when he re-read the speech as he was preparing this year’s, Kerry said Sunday. With Vietnam, 30 years in the Senate, a presidential run and 15 months handling America’s insertion all over the world as President Barack Obama’s top diplomat now behind him, Kerry told this year’s graduating seniors that the biggest danger now is an America that isn’t getting involved enough. “We cannot allow a hangover from the excessive interventionism of the last decade to lead now to an excess of isolationism in this decade,” Kerry said Sunday. “I can tell you for certain, most of the rest of the world doesn’t lie awake at night worrying about America’s presence — they worry about what would happen in our absence.” Particularly in international affairs — but also on climate change, on the influx of immigrants, on energy policy and on infrastructure — Kerry said the world is changing more quickly today than when he first spoke at Yale, making even more embarrassing the failure of governments in Washington and beyond to keep up. “The problem is today’s institutions are simply not keeping up or even catching up to the felt needs of our time. Right before our eyes, difficult decisions are deferred or avoided altogether,” Kerry said. “And the sum total of this inaction is stealing the future from all of us.” And the people who instead win the future, he said, are radical extremists who take advantage of the “slow suffocation of conventional wisdom” that stops gov-
ernments in Washington and abroad from taking more of a role. Sunday’s speech was the first of two backto-back speeches to his alma maters. Monday, he’ll be at Boston College, where he attended law school, for another dive into his thinking that, given the Jesuit roots of the school, will explore the role of faith in guiding America’s responsibilities around the world. Kerry will invoke Boston College theologian Father David Hollenbach, “who brought the challenge of human dignity to the forefront of Catholic social teaching.” “What do I mean by dignity? When men and women have access to clean water and clear power, they can live in dignity. When men and women have the freedom to choose their government on Election Day, and the freedom to engage their fellow citizens every day, they can live in dignity,” Kerry will say, according to a draft of the remarks as prepared for delivery. “When citizens can make their full contribution, no matter their ethnicity, no matter who they love or what name they give to God, they can live in dignity.” The twin speeches hadn’t been Kerry’s plan. But after being invited to Yale from one of the Class Day co-chairs who’d interned in his speechwriting shop at the State Department, and then receiving the invitation from Boston College, he decided to use them as a chance to express himself on a foreign policy where little has been going right of late for the administration — and which, depending on how the midterms go in November, may be the only avenue for Obama to pursue legacy achievements post-November. The 1966 speech had started as a much more traditional, cliché-heavy sendoff to graduates. But with Vietnam very much on his and everyone else’s minds, Kerry scrapped that version, and on a pre-graduation Skull & Bones retreat instead wrote what became his first major speech on public policy. By contrast, drafts of the speeches for this year had been bouncing around for weeks. Kerry finally got down to writing them in earnest in his Air Force jet flying to and from London last week, wearing his usual jeans and a hooded sweatshirt flying wear, stocked with a bottle of water and a sleeve of Oreos. Looking out on an assemblage of sombreros, jester’s caps, pharaoh’s crowns, helmets, glued-on stuffed animals and other silly hats that are the tradition at Yale for Class Day — Kerry himself went bare-headed, but joked that “this might be only event Pharrell could crash and go unnoticed” — the secretary warned the seniors about the consequences of official inaction: “the result is an obvious deepening frustration if not exasperation with institutional governance.” He urged them to pay more attention to the worries he expressed as secretary than the ones he expressed as a senior years before. “I’m forewarned that no one remembers who delivers their graduation speech,” Kerry joked. “All I really remember about our speaker in 1966 is that he was eloquent, insightful, really good looking.”
INDIA HAS REJECTED THE POLITICS OF LOYALTY AND LEGACY. CAN PAKISTAN MOVE ON TOO?
IndIan ExprEss Husain Haqqani
In his book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, American political psychologist Drew Westen argues that feelings trump cold analysis in the making of political choices. What, then, was the dominant sentiment that resulted in the massive mandate for Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party in India’s latest general election? As an India-friendly Pakistani currently living in exile in the US, I observed the Indian election through the media as well as the eyes of many Indian friends. That, admittedly, does not qualify me as an authority on Indian politics. But as Benazir Bhutto used to say “There is a bit of India in every Pakistani and there is an element of Pakistan in every Indian.” Pakistan’s democrats admire Indian democracy and have always done so, even at the risk of being accused of being pro-Indian by the country’s militarydominated establishment. Linked by a shared civilisation and having been one country until 1947, the political sentiments on both sides of the border have remarkable similarities. Indians have adhered to democracy consistently while the democratic aspirations of Pakistanis have been devoured by an overwhelming military-intelligence complex. But, like India, Pakistan’s democratic process
(whenever it is allowed to operate) is influenced by familiar feelings about caste, religion, feudal loyalty and ethnic identity. In the first few elections after Independence, Indian politics was dominated by the sentiment of gratitude towards those who led the country to freedom from the British. The foremost sentiment in Pakistan, of trying to forge a new nation and to justify the two-nation theory, ended in the military’s dominance. The task of defining Pakistani nationhood could not be left by the military to feudal politicians prone to cutting deals among themselves. The death of Jawaharlal Nehru resulted in contention for leadership among many equals within the Indian National Congress. Indira Gandhi could claim Nehru’s legacy through the bloodline, making it easy for the people to transfer their emotional loyalty from Nehru, the freedom fighter, to Indira, the freedom fighter’s daughter. Her tragic assassination triggered the emotion of respect for sacrifice, which continued after the assassination of her son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi. In Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) went through similar transitions after the judicial execution of the elder Bhutto and the terrorist assassination of his daughter, Benazir. Family legacies had worked to build democracies in countries as far apart as Greece and India. The Papandreou and Karamanlis families provided leaders for rival parties in Greece, and the Nehru-Gandhi family was the focal point for the Indian National Congress. Pakistanis sought a similar nucleus in the Bhutto family for struggle against military rule. In India, the Nehru-Gandhi family made policy with a free hand but the Bhuttos in Pakistan have had the added burden of dealing with the machinations of the military-intelligence complex. The politics of family legacy is often intertwined with
ideology. For example, for many, the Nehru-Gandhi family represents India’s secularism and in Pakistan, the Bhuttos are identified with relative pluralism in an otherwise hardline Islamist ideological environment. But the depth of loyalty to a legacy lasts only as long as the memory of the legacy. With each passing generation, India’s memory of its freedom struggle is less sharp. Sentiments of loyalty over past sacrifices, too, cannot last forever. As has been said by virtually every pundit and columnist over the last few days, India is now swept by the desire for progress and change. Ideology may still be important but performance and results matter more to more and more people. The dominant sentiment in India’s latest election was embracing aspiration and modernity while rejecting ideology and legacy. The spectre of a communalist Modi did not scare voters because the Modi associated with the Gujarat riots of 2002 did not show up during the election campaign. The Modi people voted for espoused a vision for bullet trains, efficient government, economic opportunity and modernity. The people are often willing to accept that leaders can change their view. After all, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-e-Azam of Pakistan, had gone from being an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity in the 1920s to being the principal advocate of the two-nation theory and Muslim separatism. It was sad as well as comical to see globally recognised terrorist Hafiz Saeed appear on Pakistani television to describe Modi’s election as prime minister as affirmation of the two-nation theory. India appears to have moved beyond ideology as the core emotion of its politics. One does not need to wait to see the Modi government’s performance at home to say that Pakistan needs to move beyond ideology and towards functional modernity as well.