What to expect beyond pageantry

Sandeep Dikshit in New Delhi

Those seeking parallels in Donald Trump’s first visit to India will find none. Going by the penchant of Narendra Modi’s team for unabashedly laying it out thick, the pageantry will have its crescendo in an over one lakh people serenading Trump and Modi in a newly built stadium. Preceded by a roadshow, Monday’s Ahmedabad event will be a major statement by India in more than one way.

There have been more equally enthusiastic and spontaneous serenades to foreign leaders in India before, most memorably recalled by External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar of his mother turning out to greet Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev in 1955. Twenty times more people than those at Motera Stadium are believed to have voluntarily attended a Bulganin-Khrushchev event at the Maidan in Kolkata. For exoticism, a temple in Trump’s name can hardly match a village named after Jimmy Carter. A precedent to Melania Trump’s statuesque screen presence was in Michelle Obama’s easy grace.

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What then is the standout moment during the second shortest trip by a US President after Richard Nixon, who spent an uneasy 23 hours in Delhi? Never before has a leader of a foreign country (Modi) summoned such huge crowds less than six months after asking the President of the US to join him on American soil in a rally that rivalled only that of the Pope. And Trump’s gesture to come to India, who unlike Barack Obama — the lover of sights and sounds of different shores — prefers outings to his golf resort rather than standalone foreign visits, means a time for a meaningful kickstarting of ties is round the corner.

Fields of alignment

The desire for a better association was always there, right from Dwight Eisenhower’s 1959 visit. The fears of India permanently gravitating to the Soviet\Russian or the Chinese camp were always unfounded, for there never was a beti-roti ka rishta with these political orders. Unlike the US or its older cousin the UK, Indians rarely intermingled culturally and socially with the soil of Russia or China. When the window for migration narrowed in the UK and now in the US, the liberal political order in Canada and Australia showed that it is even-handed by granting citizenship to applicants not sharing their majoritarian faith. The Indian elite’s preferred destination for its kith and kin has always remained the West, if only it has accelerated in the recent times.

The fields for alignment have also widened since the time General Kicklighter proposed a strategic dialogue with India in the military and security fields. India is now even more alluring to the West after it opened its economy and built its military muscle. This trajectory has been helped by a background-supporting chorus from the expatriate community, which has tripled in size. It is not yet a large-enough woo-able voting bloc, as is one of the suppositions since the Trump visit takes place eight months before the US presidential elections — an Afghan peace deal will do more to his ratings.

But the quick-paced immigration to the US in the past two decades has coincided with ascent of the Hindutva right in India. The rise of the Hindu-American diaspora has not gone unnoticed by American political operators. Diwali celebrations at the White House are no more a novelty, including for the culturally challenged Trump. These Hindutva advocates have been given a voice in the Modi government’s articulation and defence of its policies in western capitals, including Capitol Hill. It has also given rise to countervailing forces that find fault in the Modi government’s heavy-handedness in Jammu and Kashmir and exclusion in the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. They want the US government to force the Modi government to dilute such policies because increased social tensions in India will destabilise the neighbourhood.

For a President like Trump, who is himself implementing Muslim and country-specific exclusionist immigration policies, such opposition should be water off a duck’s back. The more mouth-watering prospect is complete alignment in economic and security policies. Translated, that means India sustaining US regional security policy with military hardware bought from the American military industrial complex and converting itself into a no-hassle stopover for US business interests.

Asia-Pacific dynamics

America’s Asia-Pacific strategy (‘Pivot to Asia’ during the Obama days), of which India appears to be an important fulcrum, is the prevailing old order’s attempt to counter their dominance in the seas of Asia from the Sino-Russia axis. India’s costly handshake — over Rs25,000 crore in military orders during Trump’s visit and several thousands of crores every year in sophisticated joint military exercises — has quantifiably increased its vigil of the Bay of Bengal and the eastern Indian Ocean, besides giving it bragging rights in the eyes of its much smaller neighbours.

Trump’s second stadium rally with the Indian Prime Minister indicates that the big moment for a never-before India-US tango is round the corner.

India is undertaking its biggest-ever configuration of the armed forces. At the end of this restructuring, the Peninsular Command will offer unity of arms and services similar to that of the American Pacific and Central Military Commands, thus eliminating many of the existing liaisoning and coordination headaches.

More modular Indian armed forces will be an asset for the region’s upholders of the old order — Japan, Australia and the US, who have borrowed one of the oldest plays in strategic statecraft to maintain their economic, technological and military advantage — to form a partnership with the rival’s rising power in the region. As China climbs the technological ladder, all of them as well as India need each other to effect digital transformation and embrace frontier technologies such as Artificial Intelligence. India in turn will seek more people-to-people contacts through legal mobility for skilled labour.

The bottomline of all partnerships is who gets how much of the spoils, and Trump has acquired the image of an aggrandiser. Questions are already being asked from the Indian Government about the shadowy identity of organisers of such a major event.

The reverberations from the show will expectedly drown out the contrarian voices. But as Indian Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla indicated, neither trade nor security pacts should be win-win. While attempting the biggest-ever India-US realignment, Trump will have to be mindful of the caveat. In the past, it had divorced Indian and US regional policies.

The potential for estrangement has since diminished, but full realisation will remain a bridge too far.

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