Many of Jaishankar’s thoughts reflect Modi’s evolving worldview

The following is an excerpt from Minhaz Merchant’s latest book, ‘Modi: The Challenge of 2024’

Narendra Modi’s first-term prime ministership began in a flurry of activity. Foreign policy was a priority. Fixing the broken economy was another. But there was a complication. Though the Congress had plunged from 206 Lok Sabha seats in the 2009 general election to 44 seats in 2014, it had left behind an ecosystem of loyalists across the bureaucratic spectrum.

The ecosystem had been carefully built over decades of dominant Congress rule. Between 1947 and 2014, the Congress had been in power at the Centre for 55 out of 67 post-independence years. Its loyalists included Left-leaning academics, historians, activists, bureaucrats, lawyers and journalists. The ecosystem, promoted, patronised and protected by the Congress, enjoyed power and privilege without oversight or accountability. Marxist historians dictated the political and social narrative. Text books reflected a quasi-colonial mindset. Dozens of educational institutions were named after members of the Nehru-Gandhi family. So were roads, airports, sealinks, parks, colleges, planetariums, libraries, museums and welfare schemes.

Much of this dynastic narcissism took place after Nehru’s death. Nehru himself was a visionary in several respects. He established the Indian Institutes of Managements (IIMs) and Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), built steel plants in a plundered post-colonial country bereft of infrastructure, and crafted a nuanced foreign policy. He failed, however, to read both Pakistan and China correctly. Nehru erred grievously by granting over-generous terms to Pakistan in the 1960 World Bank-midwifed Indus Waters Treaty (IWT). He underestimated China’s latent hostility that led to the 1962 Sino-Indian war. India’s defeat broke Nehru’s spirit. He died 19 months later, in May 1964.

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Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi took the wrong fork in the road, leading the country towards economic socialism. It cost India dearly. In the two decades between 1966, when Mrs. Gandhi assumed office, and 1984, when she was assassinated, India’s average economic growth rate ambled along at just over three per cent a year. During the same period, the tiger economies of Southeast Asia, ranging from Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia to the Philippines, Taiwan and Indonesia, grew at an average of over eight per cent a year. Those two lost decades were to prove costly for India’s economy. Mrs. Gandhi was prime minister for the entire period between 1966 and 1984 except for the short post-Emergency interregnum in 1977-79.

[caption id=“attachment_13163152” align=“alignnone” width=“593”] MODI: The Challenge of 2024 (English) Image courtesy: Amazon.com[/caption]

Fast-forward to 2014. Modi’s first three years in office produced robust economic growth. In 2014-15, GDP rose 7.4 per cent; in 2015-16, it surged by 7.9 per cent; and in 2016-17, despite the disruption caused by demonetisation in November 2016, GDP still increased by 8.2 per cent, later revised downwards to 7.4 per cent.

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But warning signs had started flashing. The full effect of demonetisation, which squeezed lakhs of small cash-reliant firms out of business, was felt in 2017-18. The introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in July 2017 caused further disruption. GDP growth in 2017-18 sagged to 7.2 per cent. Worse was to follow. The economy began to stall in 2018-19 with growth plunging to 6.8 per cent. By 2019-20, the news was even grimmer: in the last financial year before the Covid pandemic struck, GDP growth fell to 4.2 per cent, later revised downwards to below 4 per cent.

Demonetisation and GST bludgeoned the micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) sector. Jobs were lost as small businesses shut shop. Towards the end of the sixth year of Modi’s prime ministership in March 2020, India’s economic growth seemed to have hit a nadir. It hadn’t. A perfect storm was brewing. It would strike the Indian economy with gale force in March 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world, plunging India’s economy into its worst crisis in over half-a-century.

But back in February 2019, other thoughts occupied Modi’s mind. Campaigning for the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Modi again crisscrossed the country, addressing hundreds of rallies. His ma-beta charge against the Congress, used so effectively in the 2014 campaign, had morphed into a more forceful assault on political dynasts and their corrupt, corrosive sense of entitlement.

Congress President Rahul Gandhi had meanwhile shed his reticence and attacked Modi ferociously. Emboldened by the Congress’ victories in the Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh assembly elections in December 2018, Rahul used the taunt chowkidar chor hai throughout the electoral campaign. Modi had earlier declared himself the chowkidar (guardian) of the country, protecting it from the machinations of corrupt dynasts. Rahul turned the epithet against the incumbent prime minister.

Citing the 59,000-crore Rafale fighter jet deal as proof of corruption in the Modi government, Rahul’s attack was relentless – and unsuccessful. When the results of the general election were announced on May 23, 2019, the Congress had won a mere 52 Lok Sabha seats, an increase of eight seats over its 2014 tally. The BJP swept back to power with 303 seats.

Rahul took responsibility for the party’s second successive humiliating defeat and resigned as Congress president. But he continued to call the shots in what now seemed, more than ever, a family enterprise rather than a political party.

Modi had more urgent matters to worry about than the implosion in the Congress. After the Pulwama terrorist attack by the Pakistan-backed Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist group on February 14, 2019, Modi had ordered an airstrike deep into Pakistan on a terrorist training camp in Balakot. The attack, following the September 2016 surgical commando ground strike across the Line of Control (LoC), displayed a new muscularity in India’s approach to Pakistan.

With China too, earlier inhibitions gradually gave way to a stronger line on Beijing’s provocations along the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Matters would escalate with China in eastern Ladakh. But for the moment Modi basked in the glow of the BJP’s landslide victory in the May 2019 general election, a packed political and legislative agenda lay ahead.

How much had Modi changed at the start of his second term in 2019 since I first met him in 2012?

He was now a global statesman with an international profile. After the results of the 2019 Lok Sabha election were declared, all eyes were on Modi’s new cabinet. Would there be major changes? With former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley terminally ill (he passed away in July 2019), former External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj suffering from serious ailments (she died in August 2019) and former Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar having succumbed to cancer in March 2019, Modi had lost over a short period of five months the services of three of his four most important ministers.

Traditionally, the four senior ministers who serve on the powerful Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) hold the home, defence, finance and external affairs portfolios. Without Jaitley, Swaraj and Parrikar, who held three of those four portfolios, Modi faced a challenge of talent and experience at the top end of his cabinet. He shuffled Home Minister Rajnath Singh – the only survivor among the big four—to defence. BJP party president Amit Shah was inducted as home minister. Nirmala Sitharaman, who had been elevated to finance minister after Jaitley took ill, retained her portfolio. The surprise addition to the big four was S. Jaishankar, a former foreign secretary who was appointed external affairs minister. It would be the first time a bureaucrat – an Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officer – had been given charge of the critical foreign ministry.

Jaishankar is an erudite and principled man. Context and disclosure is required here. Jaishankar’s late father, K. Subrahmanyam, served for several years as head of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA). He is credited with establishing India’s nuclear doctrine. Subrahmanyam was a contributing editor in my first media startup for a decade and a columnist for another 10 years in my second media startup before he sadly passed away in 2011.

His son Jaishankar had a distinguished career in the foreign service. In August 2016, when he was foreign secretary, Jaishankar requested a private meeting with me. I flew down from Mumbai for the day. We met at his official Delhi residence for a little over two hours. India’s future strategy with respect to China and Pakistan was the principal focus of our discussion (which must remain confidential as it was off the record). The idea was to create a strategic blueprint for a policy on Pakistan and China.

A former ambassador to Washington and Beijing, Jaishankar speaks Mandarin, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese (his wife is Japanese), Tamil, Hindi and of course impeccable English. Though entirely unconnected with our conversation, India’s surgical strike across the LoC in September 2016, a month after my meeting with Jaishankar, following a terror attack on the Uri army camp, showed the Modi government’s determination to take Pakistan abetted terrorism head-on. After my meeting with Jaishankar, I was driven to the prime minister’s residence on 7 Lok Kalyan Marg. Security in the three-bungalow complex is tight. Modi holds key meetings here.

After his retirement as foreign secretary, Jaishankar briefly served with the Tata Group as a strategic advisor. Meanwhile, following his landslide victory in the May 2019 general election, Modi mulled inducting technocrats with specific domain knowledge into his cabinet. No one was more surprised than Jaishankar himself when he received a phone call that the prime minister was considering him for the key foreign minister’s post. It was unprecedented. Never before had a former foreign secretary been appointed foreign minister.

Jaishankar has proved one of the standout ministers in the Modi cabinet. He was confronted, within a year of being sworn in, with China’s aggression along the LAC in the spring of 2020. Amid the early diplomatic effort mounted by the ministry of external affairs (MEA) to defuse the standoff, Jaishankar found time to write a meticulously researched book The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World. In it, he made a key point about India’s geopolitical challenges and opportunities:

“As the world moves towards greater diversification the case for enhanced participation in global value chains will strengthen further. India can move more purposefully in this direction but it must balance that with building up its domestic capabilities. A more capable India that will emerge as a result of greater self-reliance will surely also have more to offer. Far from turning its back on the world, India is actually preparing to participate more but with better preparation. After all, Atmanirbhar Bharat does coexist with Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is a family)."

Many of Jaishankar’s thoughts reflect Modi’s evolving worldview, especially in the transformed geopolitical environment following the Russia-Ukraine war.

The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost_’s views._

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