 "Atmanirbhar Bharat is a call for self-reliance launched in 2020. Prima facie, the idea is being seen as an economic necessity as much as a strategic requirement. Representational image")
As disruptor par excellence, US President Donald Trump is setting new goalposts for his nation and its allies on the one hand, and new goals for ‘em all, friends, adversaries and the ‘inconsequential’ rest, to achieve. The latest is the American decision to stay away from the G20 Summit in South Africa and the Cop 30 climate conference in Brazil.
In the absence of the US in both meetings, the final decisions are inconsequential. The US was considered the unknown father of the G20. It continues to be the single largest polluter and will remain so for years and decades to come. It motivated the Cop series, but when global consensus set separate goals and goalposts for every nation, including the US, America spewed venom.
Yet, the West, starting with their well-funded climate NGOs, have failed in the past decades to paint China first, and then China and India together, as the world’s worst polluter(s). That title and brand still rest with the US.
It is not just about Trump. He is a greater disruptor and lacks the finesse of his predecessor Republican presidents. In recent times, recall how the Bush Administration lied through its teeth to convince the world, even in the ‘holy precincts’ (!) of the UN General Assembly, that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Their charade was exposed within hours, yet the US and its allies went ahead with their pre-set goals that were otherwise linked to 9/11 and President Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’ theory.
Together, they went ahead to destroy Iraq and ‘legally assassinate’ Saddam, as if to convince their conservative domestic constituencies that even if they had to bring the most cruel dictator of his times to book, they would do it only lawfully and using legal means. Even to kill a dog…..
Quick Reads
View AllIf the US thus took the UN system for a ride, from time to time, they had boycotted UN institutions like Unesco and UNHRC because they were not singing the tunes that the White House liked. The irony is that after every such boycott, a successor Democratic president would restore America’s membership of those fora. This has meant that neither the UN nor its other member states are clear if, on a given day, the US is in or out of the US system – or part(s) thereof.
Can world nations, especially those that are at the receiving end of the UNHRC, for instance, count on the US as a friend or an adversary – and if so, for how long? A study of such affected member nations could show that they used to count on the erstwhile Soviet Union more during the Cold War and China for the possible exercise of their veto vote, if and when required in the UN Security Council.
And China especially, and more visibly, has been exploiting such dependence on smaller nations at the receiving end of the UNHRC diktat. Why then blame those nations, and not the US, if criticising China is the focus?
Mind, Mindset
It is in this overall global background that one needs to look closer home.
Prime Minister Modi’s Atmanirbhar Bharat is a call for self-reliance launched in 2020. Prima facie, the idea is being seen as an economic necessity as much as a strategic requirement.
The present tactic seems to be paying rich dividends. Nations and their war machines are now ready to set up shop in India and also transfer technology for joint production. Earlier, only the erstwhile Soviet Union and its mini Russian avatar would do so. The West now seems to have been impressed by the way India is making money out of the joint Brahmos project with Russia by selling them to third nations. In the hands of China’s traditional adversaries like the Philippines and Vietnam in the China Seas, it also carries a strong strategic message.
For the idea of Atmanirbhar to help make India a superpower, India has to manufacture things that are big and small, on its own steam. It should start and end with military equipment, pin to aeroplane, as the saying goes. No, not on borrowed technologies, but on know-how designed in the country and tested and proven, again, inside the country. Today, when we declare that we have manufactured the Tejas fighter or another aircraft carrier, the engine of the craft comes from GE, that American private sector behemoth, otherwise bound by Congressional laws and presidential injunctions.
Among them all, Moscow would still be the most reliable, but our experience is in the fading years of the Cold War past. On the civilian industrial side, a crisis-ridden Russia could not stand by the erstwhile Soviet commitment on the long-forgotten Kudremukh iron-ore project in Karnataka.
Remember how India badly needed the much-promised cryogenic engine for our space odyssey and how Russian President Boris Yeltsin went back on the Soviet commitment – all because the US told him to do so. Yeltsin and Russia needed American support to stay afloat – and the proverbial beggar could not have been the chooser, after all.
Strike Hard
In such a situation, for Indians to believe that furthering bilateral trade in military equipment would fast-track our superpower ambitions – even with technology transfer and joint production in India – is not that easy at best. Yes, on paper, in ordinary times, one can discuss and debate favourably to argue how interdependence in the new global order means no two countries can hope to outsmart the other just by perfidy of whatever kind. That is for ordinary times. Extraordinary times do exist, and they too show up. That is when the reality of being a superpower and being a wannabe superpower would strike – and strike hard.
It is often pointed out how even Trump 2.0 could not take forward the threat for India to stop the import of cheap Russian oil, defying American and European sanctions. Yes, the American threat was linked to the Ukraine War, and if this was not a threat, what could have been one? The considered reasoning in the matter was that the US wanted India as much on other fronts, and India wanted America on some others.
Looking Beyond the Frame
The aforesaid reasoning is not the whole truth. First and foremost, even while lowering the red flag on India, Trump 2.0 quickly moved to re-hyphenate India and Pakistan in its South Asia policy, decades after the US learnt to de-hyphenate it. Trump’s playing polly-polly with Pakistan, starting with Army chief, Gen Asim Munir, now Field Marshal, in the days immediately following India’s successful ‘Operation Sindoor’, is only a reflection on what Establishment America is up to.
If nothing more, like China, the US, too, now wants to tie India down to South Asia, rather than tied down with Pakistan, politically and economically. The question of economy does not arise, and thankfully so. The Pakistani economy is at such a low, even the average Pakistani does not wish it on India. Nor does it expect the Indian economy to nosedive to their levels, now or any time in the future.
In the final analysis, there is no shortcut for India to achieve superpower status. To begin at the beginning and let future generations take over is how it should be – and how it actually is shaping up to be. The Soviet Union became a superpower because the US became one, and there was this ideological rivalry between capitalism and communism, at times induced from and by the West to invent a global equilibrium in the post-war world.
Bide the Time
To reach superpower status, the US at least strove in isolation for decades and centuries before the First World War. Maybe the lack of such hard initiative was an inherent problem that also contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The ‘Soviet occupation of Afghanistan’ may have been an inevitable, yet coincidental happening. In our time, China is where it is today only after decades of isolation and insulation under Mao’s era, which also crafted the likes of Deng Xiaoping.
Today’s world is not that of the previous century. Nor is today’s India, the China of the previous century, or the US of more such centuries. Yet, the basic parameters remain unchanged. There is no substitute for original thinking and original hard work. India’s space odyssey and India’s nuclear programme, among others, have proved that Indians can do it. Though we do it, we are not always doing it – success or failure is another matter. But you cannot claim even failure without trying.
That’s the mantra, but then, a considerable part of the Indian private sector still seems to remain as the boxwallah companies that they used to be under the British East India Company and others that followed it. Yes, the government did grant tax concessions on research and development, but they need more support.
Today, there are very many Indian private sector companies that can invest adequately and continuously in R&D. They also have deep pockets to be able to wait for years and decades for the final product. But they are not doing it. They must be motivated to do that.
(N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)