As G20 and Quad meetings suggest, India’s brave new diplomacy comes of age under Narendra Modi

External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar begins The India Way, his 2020 book examining India’s “strategies for an uncertain world”, with a Satyajit Ray film, Shatranj Ke Khiladi, depicting the “Indian self-absorption” amid chaos and turmoil. He writes, “It (film) depicted two Indian nawabs engrossed in a chess game while the British East India Company steadily took over their wealthy kingdom of Awadh.”

Today as another global power rises and that too in India’s neighbourhood, and with whom the External Affairs Minister has recently confessed having an “abnormal relationship”, one expected Jaishankar to shed the Panipat Syndrome of looking the other way when threats first knock India’s doors. A flurry of diplomatic activities in India in the last fortnight suggests Narendra Modi’s India has shunned this syndrome for good. And an apt example for the same can be New Delhi’s decision to hold the G20 ministerial summits and a Quad meeting almost simultaneously.

For once, India has not been apologetic about Quad. As Jaishankar reportedly told the audience at the ORF’s Raisina Summit, “Look, we are not apologetic. I do believe — because I keep reminding people of 2004, because to me, if your origins are in common good, there’s a lot — there’s an innate virtue in your existence… So we do stand for something. What I would not like to be defined as is standing against something or somebody, because that diminishes me.”

Jaishankar’s comments are a tell-all sign of a rising, confident nation that is not afraid to take a stand on issues of global interest. And while doing that, the country is willing to “transcend the old framework of analysis”. This was evident when India refused to fall in line with the West in condemning Russia on Ukraine. India, in sharp contrast, took its supreme national interest into consideration. For, any attempt on India’s part to side with the US-led West on Ukraine would have inevitably pushed Russia deep into the Chinese orbit. At a time when the Chinese troops were stationed at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and Pakistan intrinsically designed by the nature of its origins to constantly look for opportunities to hurt India, it was a doomsday scenario for New Delhi. More so when India excessively relied on Russia for arms, and the US was known to make wild swings in its foreign policy decisions vis-à-vis the subcontinent.

India’s Ukraine gambit provoked the West no end. The US and its allies saw it as an act of Indian perfidy, especially against the democratic world order. A series of veiled threats followed, from one Western capital to another. The old Pakistan card was also played, where Western diplomats made a series of pro-Islamabad statements. But India not just stood its ground, but also fought fire with fire. It showed the West the mirror on Ukraine, whether on refusing to censor Russia in the United Nations, or defending its decision to buy Russian oil at a discount.

There are several reasons for India’s pro-Russia stand on Ukraine while sailing on the US-led Quad boat. In The India Way, Jaishankar himself points out two reasons, without making it too obvious. One, as he writes, “the US may have weakened, but China’s rise is still far from maturing. And together, the two processes have freed up room for others. Both have a use for third parties as they contest each other”. Jaishankar, in fact, believes that the mutual dynamic of the US and China may “well drive multipolarity faster”.

This opens up new opportunities for “middle powers” such as India, which by the end of the 2020s is set to become the third largest economy in the world. Talking about the multipolar world, Jaishankar writes in the book, “What will emerge is a more complex architecture, characterised by different degrees of competition, convergence and coordination. It will be like playing expanded Chinese Checkers, including with some who are still arguing over the rules.”

The second reason is the utter failure of the Americans to comprehend the true nature of communist China. Even when the Dragon has refused to follow the Deng philosophy of “Hide your strength, bide your time”, especially since the arrival of Xi Jinping, who has moulded himself on the lines of Mao, the gravity of the Chinese situation seems to have largely eluded the Americans. What else could explain the American tendency to squander away a possible ally in Russia against China, thanks to NATO’s avoidable eastward push in the past three decades, leading to the ongoing Ukraine war? This “fateful error of American policy”, as George F Kennan, best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War, calls NATO’s eastward expansion, may explain why China has in the last few decades been winning without fighting, while the US has been fighting without winning!

The Ukraine war is a classic case of what’s wrong with America’s foreign policy. This war may have benefited the US’ Deep State and the arms lobby, but the nation as a large has geo-strategically forfeited an opportunity to truly encircle China with neighbours that are not truly in sync with Beijing’s hegemonistic worldview. India has stood its ground in making its point that the US is fighting a wrong war in Ukraine, even though Russia too has erred by attacking a sovereign nation. That China — and China alone — is going to come out smiling as the West not just dissipates its resources in fighting a wrong enemy in Ukraine, but also pushes a potential ally in Vladimir Putin firmly into Xi Jinping’s camp.

In his book, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the global superpower, Michael Pillsbury writes, “Beijing’s strategy to replace the United States as the dominant geopolitical power requires America’s goodwill and assistance.” Ironically, this has mostly been the case with America’s foreign policy since the 1940s, when the US refused to enthusiastically support Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army, as Mao duped the West in believing that the Chinese communists, to use Frank Dikotter’s words in The Tragedy of Liberation, were “agrarian reformers keen to learn from democracy”.

Even as late as the 1990s and the early 2000s, Americans had the romantic notion about China slowly moving towards democracy. With able support from unsuspecting liberals such as the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who through his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, made us believe that “no two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s”, the façade of China reforming continued to hold the American imagination. The reality, however, was just the opposite. Economic prosperity allowed the Chinese communist government, to use Philip P Pan’s words in Out of Mao’s Shadow, “to win friends, and buy allies, and to forestall demands for democratic change”.

While the US-led West is slow to realise the error of letting China off the hook, especially after the pandemic woes, thanks largely to its Russia obsession, India under Narendra Modi has managed to tread a fine diplomatic line. It has turned a geostrategic challenge into an opportunity where nations on both sides of the geopolitical divide trust Delhi. It is Modi’s Midas diplomatic touch that India holds both G20 and Quad summits almost simultaneously, and yet no one complains about it. India’s brave new diplomacy seems to be coming of age under Prime Minister Modi.

The author is Opinion Editor, Firstpost and News18. He tweets from @Utpal_Kumar1. Views expressed are personal.

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