Not long before his election to the Indian premiership in May 2014, Narendra Modi expressed confidence that his “Hindutva face” would be “an asset when dealing with foreign affairs with other nations”. In late 2019, with the wisdom of hindsight, this confidence now reads as delusion.
In recent days, as nationwide protests and demonstrations have railed against the National Register of Citizens and Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, seasoned commentators on the domestic-international interplay have written of the risk that the current leadership’s policies pose to India’s international status. They have pointed to the Modi government’s unconcealed majoritarian agenda and divisive politics. They have also focused on India’s failing economy.
But the rot goes deeper. All three of India’s historically significant routes to high international status – the acquisition of material capabilities, recognition by established powers and the cultivation of likeminded followerships – have been eviscerated by Modi’s leadership.
A way out of India’s reputational impasse remains, however. It resides in the life breath of India’s democracy – the country’s hundreds of millions of youth – many of whom are rising up to claim back the nation.
In order to understand India’s simultaneous decline over the past five years and rise again over the past fortnight, it is necessary to examine India’s pathways to international status.
The most obvious route is rising material power. After five years of a Modi government, the prospects for economic growth, investment in India’s military-industrial complex and major change within the Indian armed forces look dim.
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India’s economic growth has now fallen for six consecutive quarters. The government’s fiscal innovations have been unable to address the slow employment growth that has led to weak consumption demand. Self-reliance in defence remains a distant dream: SIPRI data shows that India’s arms imports have increased by 24% between 2008-12 and 2013-17, as compared to China’s, which fell by 19% during the same period. No major Make in India contract has come to fruition. Where military modernisation is concerned, the government’s decision to appoint a Chief of Defence Staff – a move designed to bring coherence a reform to India’s defence policy – is being eyed skeptically as yet more symbolism over substance.
Rising material power, however, has historically not been the most important to India’s global stature.
The second pathway to high international status is social. It centres on recognition from existing major powers. Ascendancy via this route, as Michelle Murray has argued in her recent book, The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations, depends on whether incumbent powers view an aspiring major power as compatible with the international order.
Demonstrators carry posters during a protest against a new citizenship law, outside the Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi, India, December 21, 2019. Photo: Reuters/Anushree Fadnavis
There is a reason why India has, until recently, been lauded by the North Atlantic powers as the world’s largest democracy and celebrated as a vibrant and largely open economy. There is also a reason why India’s embrace of the rhetoric of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific has met with enthusiasm in Washington, Brussels, Paris and London, as well as in Tokyo and Canberra. Through a commitment to liberal values at home and abroad, India has convincingly spoken the post-Cold War language of recognition, signalling its relevance to the management of the existing international order. The willingness to embrace this script has formed the core of India’s value added compared to China.
Under the Modi leadership, however, India’s democratic credentials now face their greatest challenge since the Emergency. The systematic erosion of Indian democracy over the past five years runs wide and deep, but since August of this year, the abrogation of Article 370, the potent linkage of the NRC with the CAA, and the brutal police crackdown on student protesters have made toxic headlines in the same capitals that have celebrated India’s apparently liberal rise.
Of course, India’s engagement with the liberal international order has always been guarded, and on its own terms. However, the turning away from a free and open domestic political system under Modi has weakened India’s freedom to engage selectively. Decisions like the government’s withdrawal from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which really may be in the interest of the nation, can only be humoured abroad if much else appears congruent with India’s liberal international image.
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The third pathway to high international status is also social. It is the route that Rajesh Basrur and I examined in our book Rising India: Status and Power. There, we traced the counter-hegemonic pathway that India pursued in the early decades of independence. It was a pathway that shunned international power and domination in favour of the cultivation of a followership of likeminded states, based on trust and mutual confidence. It was a route which lent India surprising levels of international status when it was neither materially strong nor recognised by the established powers.
Counter-hegemony has served a number of social purposes. It has differentiated India from the dominant, neo-imperial powers of the post-WWII order. It has denied the possibility of full collaboration with those powers even in the face of India’s more recent recognition seeking. More recently, it has sought to differentiate Indian engagement in Asia, Africa and Latin America from Chinese assertiveness.
It is this third pathway that the current government has actively sought to destroy, until recently mostly in rhetoric. Modi’s 2016 alleged ‘boycott’ of the Non-aligned Summit played well (or was well played) in the Indian media, for example, implying India’s ‘graduation’ from a group of ‘lesser powers’. Yet despite efforts to exorcise Nehruvianism from domestic-focused foreign policy discourse, India’s outwardly-trained foreign policy practice has retained international solidarity with weaker nations as an essential resource. The government’s 2015 goodwill tour of the Indian Ocean, for example, bannered under the catchphrase ‘Security and Growth for All in the Region’, rests on an unmistakably Nehruvian benign, egalitarian and inclusive form of leadership.
The central hallmark of this leadership has always been the invocation of a shared experience of oppression and a will to rise up against inhumane treatment, narrow self-interest and the structural violence of social, racial and religious hierarchies. Now that the Indian government has become the oppressor at home, whom can it inspire abroad? Which follower state could have confidence and trust in the regional or global leadership of an oppressive regime?
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It is here that the intervention of the Indian citizenry matters most in the eyes of the outside world. Certainly, the people’s defence of democracy reads well through the lens of the established powers’ quavering faith in the future of liberal democracy. But for those nations and peoples who still struggle in positions of weakness in the global hierarchy, the images of a rising citizenry restore a shared sense of fraternity and sisterhood. India, that model nation of solidarity with the downtrodden and that clear voice of the oppressed may have disappeared from the seat of government. But it is alive and well on the streets of India’s metropoles, leading courageously from below.
Modi’s ‘Hindutva face’ has been rejected by India’s citizen defenders like an organ after a failed transplant. The mobilisation of recent days suggests an immune system whose core vitality is intact. Those protesting have turned the government’s idea of a ‘foreign body’ on its head, peeling Modi’s face away from the nation.
In late 2019, India may have declined on the world stage, but its citizenry is rising.
Kate Sullivan de Estrada is Associate Professor in the International Relations of South Asia, University of Oxford and author, with Rajesh Basrur, of Rising India: Status and Power (2017).