Benching Dalai Lama

The Narendra Modi government’s abrupt reversal of its China containment policy is a welcome and realistic acceptance of India’s lack of capacity to sustain muscularity in foreign policy for long. For four years, South Block has deluded itself with the belief that an unspoken alliance with the US and occasional laundering of the Tibetan cause were adequate bulwarks against a rising China. But a government note last month asking all senior officials to avoid functions marking 60 years of Dalai Lama’s exile is perhaps the first time India has so visibly distanced itself from the Tibetan cause. 

The situation obviously is direr than South Block is letting it out to be. For, Tibet and Buddhism (along with yoga) are PM Modi’s preferred soft foreign policy tools. PM Modi made it a point to be always accompanied by a sapling of the sacred Bodhi tree as if to underline India’s spiritual pre-eminence over competitor China during his visits to the Buddhist-dominated Sri Lanka, Mongolia, South Korea and Japan. India ought to have realised the limited utility of the Dalai Lama when it egged him to visit Mongolia. The move spectacularly backfired after Mongolia apologised to China and promised not to repeat the mistake. The bell for course correction since then has been ringing loudly: China wrested Maldives away from Indian influence, Sri Lanka is seeing the political reemergence of a former President disdained as pro-China while the Communists won the Nepal elections on an anti-India plank. Donald Trump’s baiting of Narendra Modi on social media has reinforced the folly of putting all strategic eggs in one superpower’s basket.

India’s slipping foothold in the neighbourhood is a stark testimony to the short shelf life of a foreign policy pivoted solely on aggressive nationalism and bluster that conceal the systemic weaknesses and the absence of an overall foreign policy framework. Time will tell whether Modi’s walk back on Tibet will act as an ice-breaker or whet China’s appetite for extracting more concessions. But the self-realisation about the limitations of a one-trick pony circus in conducting foreign policy could not have been more dramatic — and, more timely.