India’s Pakistan-bashing

S Nihal Singh

MS Sushma Swaraj’s speech to the UN General Assembly is a game-changer in India’s relations with Pakistan. Despite New Delhi exercising its right of reply to Pakistani accusations, the External Affairs Minister launched a full-scale attack on Pakistan.

The speech was cleared by the country’s top leadership and had two objectives. First, to use Pakistan as a tool in campaigns leading to the general election of 2019 thus postponing prospects of serious talks until after a new government is formed. Second, with the Modi government becoming increasingly vulnerable to the darkening economic picture, it needs an evocative issue to push for votes.

In the process, Prime Minister Modi is willing to sacrifice his country’s  world standing by devoting the bulk of his Foreign Minister’s address to its neighbour,  rather than dwell on the country’s approach to issues of war and peace in the region and the world. Two crises on the front burner are the threat of a war over North Korea’s nuclear programme and US President Donald Trump’s threat to end the nuclear deal with Iran.

Mr Modi and his team are painfully conscious of the harm to BJP’s carefully built image of a dedicated hardworking corruption-free government doing its best for the country the economy could cause. The government’s failures in two key areas of creating jobs and seriously resolving farmers’ misery are an open book. With the GDP plunging in the last quarter, a drastic new campaign is the need of the hour.

It came in the form of a jumbo televised BJP national executive meeting in New Delhi to put a brave face on the government’s economic stumbles. The official credo is still to sing praises of demonetisation, almost universally condemned by economists as counter-productive, and dismiss problems in implementing GST, a good idea in itself, as temporary glitches.

In the meantime, the independent-minded BJP leader and former Finance Minister, Mr Yashwant Sinha, took aim at his party leadership. He called Mr Arun Jaitley’s Cabinet appointment reprehensible on moral grounds because he lost his 2014 Lok Sabha contest. Further, he charged that official figures of growth were cooked up and it would take a miracle to turn the economy around by the time of the 2019 election.

An enterprising reporter has counted that Mr Modi’s name appears 191 times in the national executive’s resolutions passed. In any event, nobody doubts that he is in complete control of the party, assisted by his fellow Gujarati aide Amit Shah in key areas, and the sycophantic label once applied to Indira Gandhi of “India is Indira, and Indira is India” is more appropriate in relation to Mr Modi today.

Apart from elevating Mr Modi to a higher pedestal, the national executive meeting was notable for postponing the party’s Ram Rajya vision, including the doubling of farmers’ income, to 2022, beyond the 2019 election. The Prime Minister’s slogan of “nation first, party second” did not jell because the whole tenor of speeches and resolutions took a highly self-congratulatory tone. The only concrete promise was to reach electricity to all the country’s villages before the general election.

To the credit of Mr Modi, he understands well that after mastering his party, he needs to employ modern technology, including trolling on the Internet, and employing the army of RSS workers to induce voters to vote for the BJP. And he is indefatigable in using his histrionic abilities to woo and retain voters.

As Mr Modi must have been informed by his advisers, everything is not going his way. A remark made to me by a small businessman is more representative of many sections of society. He told me, “People are fed up. Here he is extolling the virtues of bullet trains forgetting the situation on the ground.”

For hard-headed reasons, the PM has decided to concentrate on domestic problems, rather than grandstanding on the international stage. He sent his Foreign Minister to the UN General Assembly session, an event of importance in the diplomatic calendar. The BJP has the ambition of coming to power in the remaining states either under its own steam or in coalition arrangements. It has already demonstrated its penchant for converting minorities into a workable majority.

Perhaps Mr Modi believes that after the general election he can repair the damage caused to India’s aspirations in the region and the world by pursuing a hectic round of whirlwind diplomacy. His two standing commitments for the remainder of the year are the visits of French President Macron and Ms Ivanka Trump, the influential daughter of the US President.

Among the self-congratulatory themes of the national executive was how Mr Modi handled the Doklam crisis with China. He himself alluded to it in his remarks. But it seemed to be more as an image-building exercise than a discussion on the standoff in itself. Obviously, relations with China and Pakistan have to figure prominently in looking at the neighbourhood.

Indeed, the one conclusion one can draw from these developments is the early start for the general election campaigning. All energies in the BJP are devoted to winning the election at a time the the Opposition has secured a bonanza in the form of the government’s economic problems. That the Opposition itself is hopelessly divided is another story.

The Modi government and the BJP might be loath to say it, but the parameters of the country’s foreign policy were laid out by Nehru. Apart from the mistakes he made on China and the irrelevance of non-alignment with changing times, Mr Modi must build on the solid foundations Nehru laid.

The new dispensation’s problem is that it wants to transform Nehru’s secular India into a Hindu rashtra emphasising the virtues of native values and myths and is desperately promoting Deen Dayal Upadhyaya as the new icon of an advancing nation. This scheme of things impinges on a foreign policy otherwise guided by realpolitik. Its battle today is to revive the era of fast growth achieved for the most part by the Congress-led coalition.