World opinion unlikely to force CAA rethink

Soft power flows directly from hard power, but has otherwise been proven to be not a decisive force in world politics. Will the US impose sanctions against India? After all, the Magnitsky Act since 2016 applies globally. Will petrodollar states in the Gulf embargo Indian labour? It is their sovereign prerogative to do so. But neither seems in the realms of possibility, as of now.

Confronting criticism: The Citizenship (Amendment) Act caravan has proclaimed its determination to roll on, come what may.

MK Bhadrakumar

MK Bhadrakumar
Former Ambassador

The year-enders on India’s foreign policy have copiously bemoaned the country’s stark isolation from the ‘international community’ due to developments in J&K and the enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act. The pervasive belief seems to be that the government is under pressure from the withering international criticism, although, ironically, right-wing populism in India is only following the international trend of politics.

A clear understanding of the international criticism is needed today. In geographical terms, the criticism stems from the West and major Muslim countries. Countries in Africa, Latin America, large swathes of Asia and the Eurasian landmass remain impassive, no matter their inner thoughts. Bangladesh is a case by itself, it harbours atavistic fears that the Hindu nationalist government may finesse the religious pretext as diplomatic tool to interfere in its internal affairs.

For the English-speaking Indian elite, everything boils down to Western attitudes. The European criticism is patchy but authentic, as the continent is also locked in a struggle with the demons of populism and nationalism, undermining its liberal democratic order.

The latest case is the Faustian deal between Austria’s Conservatives and Greens to form a governing coalition that includes banning headscarves in school until the age of 14 and preventive custody for potentially dangerous immigrants. The measures are part of what Conservative leader Sebastian Kurz describes as his tough stance on illegal immigration and political Islam, aimed at appealing to his base.

In comparison, the criticism arising from the US stands distinctly apart. American exceptionalism, a vastly discredited notion, is rearing its head. It is gratuitous and self-adulatory but in shrill tone due to the civil war conditions in US politics.

Everything about Donald Trump becomes toxic for one half of the Americans. That is why, no matter the drum-beating by the BJP’s

fellow-travellers in the Indian media, Howdy Modi was an incredibly silly venture that brought no significant gains to India, but needlessly caused a discord within the diaspora and alienated the Democrats — thereby fracturing the carefully-nurtured ‘bipartisan consensus’ over the US-Indian relations.

But even Democrats themselves aren’t lily white. Didn’t Barack Obama have a cynical attitude toward Israel’s unspeakable crimes? Didn't Bill Clinton do a volte-face on China to preserve Walmart’s business interests? India too has experience of the limits to US exceptionalism.

Arguably, this entire rhetoric that ‘values’ bind India and the US, propagated by the pro-American lobbyists, has caused a systematic erosion of India’s strategic autonomy. The US-India relationship is transactional and Trump’s policies are riveted on mercantilist considerations.

However, we will be seriously erring by underestimating the criticism from the Muslim world. The difference here is that India has affinities with the Muslim world that are felt in the blood and felt along the heart. Beyond the reality that India has the second largest Muslim population in the world, there is the thousand year history in India’s civilisational flow that cannot be obliterated, and there is the backdrop of the Partition in 1947, which has no parallel in modern history.

What Indian discourses are loath to admit is that Pakistan has a special place in the Islamic world.

Secondly, Delhi has adopted a derisive attitude towards the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which overlooks the fact that the ground beneath the feet is shifting. There is a deep yearning within the ummah for a renewed Islamic identity. The Islamic summit in Kuala Lumpur (December 19-21) signals that this yearning is taking an overt, systemic form. The summit took to the heights as a grand effort to shift narratives for the ummah, to move towards the unification of the Muslim world so as to better address issues of conflict, extremism and oppression.

But it also signalled a challenge to Saudi Arabia’s leadership of the ummah. Riyadh senses it. The Saudi disquiet took the form of its intervention with Pakistan to withdraw from the summit, followed by the visit by Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud to Islamabad on December 26 to personally mollify the sense of hurt in Pakistan over Riyadh’s reticence to champion the Kashmir cause. The ensuing competitive Muslim politics can be expected to have downstream reverberations in regional politics.

Both Turkish President Recep Erdogan and Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohammed have a well-earned reputation for being statesmen of strong convictions and tenacity. India should be careful to avoid the fate of the former Soviet Union, which the Islamic world came to regard as ‘anti-thesis’.

The bottom line is that any expectation of the government being forced by the ‘international community’ into a rethink on the CAA is sheer naïveté.

What is happening in India today is a long march towards a Hindu rashtra. Everything depends on whether the resistance to the government’s trajectory would coalesce into a national movement. Meanwhile, the turmoil in the country might continue or even exacerbate. Since it relates to religious, ethnic and territorial problems, how the situation would develop is impossible to predict.

But the CAA caravan has proclaimed its determination to roll on, come what may. The international opinion makes no difference to it. In fact, the idea that somehow soft power — which is to say cultural influence — can be used to decisively change the behaviour of foreign nations is, or should be, dead and buried. Soft power, when it does exist, flows directly from hard power, but has otherwise been proven to be not a decisive force in world politics.

Will the US impose sanctions against India? After all, the Magnitsky Act since 2016 applies globally. Will petrodollar states in the Gulf embargo Indian labour? It is their sovereign prerogative to do so. But neither seems in the realms of possibility, as of now.