India uses Ukraine war in search of new global status

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Sitting in the government building inaugurated by the British Raj less than two decades before India threw off imperial rule, Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar need not be reminded of how the tides of history wash away antiquated systems to make way for new systems.

For him, the current transformative moment is something of this nature. “A world order that is still very deeply Western”, as he put it, is being rapidly eroded by the impact of the War in Ukraine, to make way for a “multi-aligned” world in which countries will choose “their policies, preferences and interests own”.

This is undoubtedly what India has been doing since the war began on February 24th. She has rejected American and European pressure at the United Nations to condemn the Russian invasion, made Moscow its biggest oil supplier and rejected what she sees as the West’s hypocrisy. Far from apologizing for what it is doing, the country has reaffirmed its choices and has not hidden the fact that it is defending its own interests.

With its nearly 1.4 billion people, India, which is soon to overtake China to become the world’s most populous country, needs cheap Russian oil to sustain its 7% annual growth and uproot millions of people. of poverty. This need is non-negotiable. India gobbles up all the Russian oil it needs, even buying a little more for export.

Make way for the India of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who pursues his own interests with unprecedented assertiveness, rejecting any sense of inferiority and any unrestricted alignment with the West. But which India will parade across the global stage in the 21st century, and how will its influence be felt?

The country finds itself at a crossroads, balanced between the vibrant plurality of its democracy since independence in 1947 and a shift towards illiberalism under Modi. The prime minister’s so-called “Hindu renaissance” puts at risk some of the fundamental pillars of Indian democracy: equal treatment of all citizens, the right to dissent, the independence of the judiciary and the press.

Democracy and debate are still raging – Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost a municipal election in Delhi this month – and the prime minister’s popularity is high. Many think that India is too vast and diverse to ever succumb to some unitary nationalist imposition.

The postwar world order did not include a seat for India at the head table. But now, at a time when Russia’s military aggression under President Vladimir Putin has perfectly illustrated what a world made up of dictators and imperial rivalries can look like, India may have the power to tip the scales in the direction of an order dominated either by democratic pluralism or by repressive leaders.

It remains to be seen which way Modi’s nationalism will lean. While undermining the country’s pluralistic and secular model, this nationalism has given many Indians a new sense of pride in their country and raised India’s international stature.

There are no Muslims in Modi’s cabinet. The prime minister has been silently reacting to attacks by angry Hindu mobs against Muslims.

“Hatred has penetrated society to a degree that is simply appalling,” said Indian novelist Arundhati Roy. That may be true, but for now Narendra Modi’s India appears to be oozing confidence.

The Ukraine War compounded the effects of the Covid pandemic and fueled India’s rise. Together, the two factors have led large corporations to reduce risk in global supply chains by diversifying towards open India and away from China with its state surveillance apparatus. The war and the pandemic have accentuated the global economic turmoil, from which India is relatively shielded thanks to its huge domestic market.

These factors have contributed to optimistic projections that by 2030 India, currently the world’s fifth largest economy, will become the third largest, behind only the United States and China.

communion and division

In 2014, when he launched his campaign to lead India, Narendra Modi, 72, made Varanasi, Hinduism’s holiest city, his political base, saying he had answered the call of “mother Ganges” – the river of life. Since then, he has hewn a cut of pink sandstone that runs through the city.

Known as “the corridor” and opened a year ago, the project links the Kashi Vishwanath temple, dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva, to the bank of the Ganges River, 400 meters away.

The wide and almost eerily immaculate pedestrian corridor, which houses a museum and other tourist facilities, connects the city’s most revered temple to the river where Hindus wash away their sins. It is a fully representative work of Modi.

Opened in the middle of a labyrinth of more than 300 houses that were destroyed to make its construction possible, the corridor connects the prime minister’s political life with the deepest of Hindu traditions. At the same time, it proclaims his willingness to propel the country into the future through bold initiatives that break with chaos and decay. A Hindu nationalist and technology enthusiast, Modi is a politician who breaks with the established order.

Coming from a humble family in the state of Gujarat —and low status in the caste system, the social hierarchy—, Modi built his own path and ended up embodying the India that wants to rise in life.

Vishwambhar Nath Mishra, an engineering professor and Hindu religious leader in Varanasi, said the corridor was “a mistake” that destroyed 142 ancient shrines – an example of the demolishing style Modi favors.

“Here in Varanasi we have always been a unique family made up of Muslims, Christians and Hindus who have dialogued and resolved things together, but Modi chooses to create tensions to get himself elected,” said Mishra. “If he is trying to create a Hindu nation, that is very dangerous.”

It’s not easy to get into the complex situated at the top of Modi’s new corridor, where the 17th-century Gyanvapi Mosque flanks the Kashi Vishwanath Temple. Tight security checks are time-consuming because the site is one of the epicenters of festering Hindu-Muslim tensions in India.

There are armed guards everywhere. They position themselves at the side of the mosque, protected behind a metal fence over six meters high topped with coils of laminated wire.

There are a whole host of court cases at the moment revolving around the mosque. A court-ordered investigation this year claimed to have uncovered an ancient “lingam” (an abstract representation of the Hindu god Shiva) on the grounds of the mosque. At least for hard-line Hindus, the finding ruled that they should have the right to pray on the spot. Large prayer meetings of Muslims were banned.

According to the rising Hindu narrative that Modi has done nothing to discourage, India belongs first and foremost to its Hindu majority. Muslim intruders from the Mughal Empire and other periods of conquest take a close second. A mosque must give way to a temple if it can be proved that a temple preceded it.

While Putin chose to portray Ukraine as the birthplace of the Russian world, inseparable from the Russian motherland, and to embrace the Orthodox Church as the bastion of his power, Modi chose Varanasi to be the main transmitter of his declaration of India as an essentially Hindu nation. . It is clear that he did so in the interest of consolidating power, not conquest.

Three decades ago, the demolition by an angry Hindu mob of a 16th-century mosque in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya, believed by Hindus to be the birthplace of the god Ram, led to the deaths of 2,000 people and spurred the rise from Modi’s party.

A Hindu temple is being built on the site. Modi, who presided over the start of work in 2020, said the new temple is “the modern symbol of our traditions”.

Faced with these initiatives, Arundhati Roy, the writer, expressed concern that is shared by many. “The Varanasi sari, worn by Hindus and woven by Muslims, was a symbol of everything that was so intertwined and is now being pulled apart,” she said. “A threat of violence hangs over the city.”

a delicate balance

India believes that the interconnectedness of today’s world outweighs its fragmentation and makes allusions to a renewed Cold War irrelevant. If a period of turmoil seems inevitable as Western power declines, it will likely be tempered by economic interdependence, runs the Indian argument.

With inequality worsening, food security worsening, energy security diminishing and climate change accelerating, more countries are asking what answers the Western-dominated post-1945 world order can offer. India seems to believe it can play the role of intermediary, bridging the East-West and North-South divides.

Jaishankar said: “I would say that overall in the history of India, the country has had a much more peaceful and productive relationship with the world than has been the case with Europe, for example. Europe has been very expansionist, which is why that we had the period of imperialism and colonialism. But in India, despite having been subject to colonialism for two centuries, there is no resentment against the world, there is no anger. India is a very open society.”

Another thing to mention is that India sits between two hostile powers: Pakistan and China. In December, another skirmish occurred on the contested border between China and India. Nobody died, unlike in 2020, when at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers were killed. But the tension is still high. “The relationship is extremely charged,” said Jaishankar.

A border escalation is possible at any time, but it seems unlikely that India can rely on Russia, given Moscow’s growing economic and military dependence on China. This makes India’s strategic relationship with the West crucial.

In light of the war in Ukraine, however, each party is adjusting to the fact that the other will handpick its principles.

India is in a delicate position. In the face of US criticism, this year the country opted to participate in Russian military exercises that included Chinese units. 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 advocates “a free and open Indo-Pacific”.

This is India’s multi-alignment in action. The War in Ukraine only reinforced New Delhi’s commitment to this path. Washington has worked hard over many years to make India the democratic Asian counterweight to 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 pragmatic approach to Putin since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it has also embraced it. With the rise of China, American realpolitik requires that the US not alienate Narendra Modi.

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