Time for India to revisit ties with the West, not just Canada

Going beyond the unprecedented tit-for-tat expulsion of half-a-dozen diplomats, including high commissioners, over the off-again-on-again ‘Nijjar row’, it is time New Delhi reviewed the whole gamut of bilateral relations, not just with Canada but with its western allies as a whole. This owes to the US, the UK, and New Zealand now, and also Australia, during the earlier innings last year, readily reflecting the Canadian view in the matter rather than telling Ottawa to shut up, or at least maintaining neutrality that could be touched and felt on the streets of India.

India’s problem in the matter owes not just to Canada or the US or one or two episodes of the kind. It has its logical origins in New Delhi’s readiness to compartmentalise bilateral and multilateral ties with these worthies, as they alone have dictated to Third World nations and got away with it all. For the past couple of years, Canada has been more visible, vocal, and vociferous on alleged human rights violations by Indian officials and their henchmen in that country.

If even remotely true, it is also a more serious case, too, compared to the US State Department’s periodic reports about human rights violations inside India, not confined anymore to the North-East and northern-most Jammu & Kashmir, their standard punching-boy when the idea is to hit New Delhi, but not hard. Over allegations of lynching in India over the past decade and such other Hindutva-related allegations of human rights violations, the US and the rest of the West have been coming after New Delhi, both through their official reports, NGO studies, and more so at the UN Human Rights Council, Geneva.

Stratification, compartmentalisation

As far as the West, especially the US, goes, they have mastered the art of stratification and compartmentalisation of their national interests vis-à-vis such other nations. Thus, Washington over the last two decades and more so in this past decade of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule has drawn the fine line between its strategic and defence businesses with New Delhi on the one hand and alleged human rights ‘concerns’ on the other.

There is enough on the table to show that, both in the case of India and the rest of American allies, at times including traditional members of ‘Big Boys Club’, the US has used such extraneous issues to twist their arms to get what it wanted. The arm-twisting would be gentle at first, then through proxies like Canada if the situation offered itself, and then hard and straight after ensuring that the victim nation had no choice but to fall in line.

India is in the precarious second stage of such conversion and cannot shout or cry out. All that New Delhi has succeeded in doing through two-plus years of Canadian harassment in la affaire Nijjar is to treat it all as a bilateral issue—which it is—and nothing more. In private, Indian leaders and senior officials are believed to have been taking it up all with the US and other Western powers that are seemingly or obviously siding with Canada, when no such seconding of Ottawa’s proposition was either sought or warranted.

Slowly but surely, India is slipping into the third stage of the Western pressure tactic in the matter, starting with the US—and also ending with the US. Once into it, there may be no turning back for New Delhi. It might well have to comply. Turn back to check how orchestrated campaigns by the West, starting with their international NGOs, which were heavily funded by their governments in ways that cause eyebrows to rise, on child labour, climate change, ozone depletion, etc, then you will know that at the end of it all, there is a Western business interest.

But they are good at picking up the right issues and promoting those causes in ways that end up convincing the host nations and their people first, and then their governments, which are handed down a fait accompli. India’s experience with the anti-Koodamkulam protests in southern Tamil Nadu was/is a case in point.

Rationale, reason

At the end of it all, New Delhi is discovering that nothing has changed on the US-India plate in matters that are of interest to India since the days Indira Gandhi undertook that statutory travel across the globe on the eve of the ‘Bangladesh War’, whose outcome was predictable and thus known in advance. It helped India to reconfirm what was always known. That the West would not accept rationale and reason, as long as they were not engineered in their homes, too, was well known, yes.

Today, India has walked the American talk—too far, too long—for it to make a hasty about-turn. The options too have become limited, if not nonexistent, in the process. In the past, the Soviet Union stood by India, both inside and outside the UN, including fora like the UN General Assembly, where you needed a veto power to back you. Today’s Moscow is not half as powerful as it used to be during the Cold War, at least in political terms, if not military terms.

Russia today is caught in the hasty Ukraine War, which the US-led West is fighting through proxy. President Vladimir Putin is not able to finish the war as he might have hoped for when he started it. Nor is he willing to count on India as a friend and ally the way his Cold War predecessors in the Kremlin had done. Attribute it to Russia’s fall, withdrawal, and unsteady re-climb over the past decades; New Delhi too could not have stuck to a single ally, that too, a fallen one, without compromising its interests and concerns, wholesale.

In the reform-era India, the national agenda too had shifted from politics to economy, and Moscow had little to offer to help one-time ally to rediscover itself. In terms of investments, markets, and immigrant jobs, the West, especially the US, alone had it in them—and that was too enticing for New Delhi, which readily signed up on dotted papers, so to say, when produced by Washington, since the days of the Manmohan Singh government. It had begun earlier, under the Vajpayee-led BJP-NDA government. In a way, the picture is complete. It is now continuing under the Modi regime as well.

There was a difference. The Manmohan Singh-led UPA-I and II dispensations were not caught in new human rights allegations of the Hindutva kind. The same cannot be said of the Vajpayee government, which had instances like the ‘Staines murder’ and even more so, the ‘Gujarat riots’. Whether it was then or earlier when the ‘Ayodhya demolition’ and consequent riots took place across the country under P V Narasimha Rao, the ‘father of economic reforms’, the West had less to gain by highlighting them.

With Rao, it was the advent of economic reforms, hence the opening up of the vast Indian middle-class market(s) and foreign institutional investment (FII) opportunities. In the case of Vajpayee, the US in particular was really concerned about the eruption of an India-Pakistan nuclear flashpoint in the aftermath of rival weapons testing in 1998. The American climbdown on unilateral sanctions, which other Western nations aped, ended in the civilian nuclear deal that favoured India post-facto but also opened up India in matters of defence and security cooperation, both of which only the subsequent Manmohan Singh government could take forward.

Rules-based order, what

India has historic issues with not just Pakistan but also China, which, as a wannabe superpower, has been of greater concern in recent years. The question arises if, in the name of preparing to fend off present and future threats from China, New Delhi should be getting ensnared in the web of international alliances that it should have been checking and testing at every turn.

The outcome of such entanglement is here and immediate, as the Canadian episode and the like have been demonstrating at periodic intervals, one step more than the previous one(s). In comparison, fallout(s) vis-à-vis China is in an indeterminable future, even granting that Galwan was a part of it. Constructs and slogans like rules-based conduct in the sea may be appealing in the context of Chinese overreach, vis a vis what is otherwise rechristened as American outreach, post-Cold War.

But what about a rules-based Western approach to issues on land, especially involving friends and allies? Indian complaints against Canada, for instance, are not new. It goes back to the era of the ‘Emperor Kanishka’ mid-air blast in 1985 and is a standing example of Ottawa’s unacceptable governmental conduct when it comes to New Delhi’s complaints about the furthering of Khalistani terrorist interests on Canadian soil. It has not changed.

At the end of the day, nations like India and other non-American members of US constructs such as Quad and Indo-Pacific have only been outsourced Washington’s medium- and long-term geo-strategic concerns after it had carefully and cleverly shifted them away from Europe, where they had belonged in the previous century. It might not have been the intention or goal, but by launching the Ukraine War, Russia has since brought it back to Europe, but that does not suffice.

First, it was the US fooling around with the UN and its systems in the name of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in the hands of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, which the world has forgotten since, very completely. Now, the US’ West Asian ally Israel is cocking a snook at the UN by declaring secretary-general António Guterres persona non grata, and then going on to raid the UN peacekeepers in Lebanon, with Washington stopping with lip service to the world body and its future.

India’s condemnation of Israel in the matter is as ambiguous as that of the US, only that not many nations are looking up at New Delhi for cue, as used to be the case in the Cold War, or pre-Cold War era, soon after Independence in 1947. Yes, India too has been a victim of terrorism for long, and that Hamas started it all a year ago, on October 7, 2023, cannot be overlooked—but the measure of Israeli retaliation too cannot be condoned for long without causing ripples elsewhere.

Connecting the dots

New Delhi also has to connect the dots where it matters the most—the neighbourhood, that is. If nations like Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Nepal, and Bangladesh, under the predecessor Hasina regime especially, were not disinclined towards China, the reasons were not entirely economic, as was obvious. It owed to politics, the politics of the international UN Security Council/UN Human Rights Council variety. For the US, it is a matter of ‘our terrorists and your terrorists’, ‘our human rights violations and yours’.

Nations like Sri Lanka have been caught in the web for the past decade and more and are convinced that at some point in time, they would be hauled up before the UNSC, when the veto-vote by China and Russia alone matters. That the world bypassed the UN system long ago and has sort of accepted the US as the final arbiter, they are unable or unwilling to accept.

Hence, the contradictions in their political behaviour on the one hand, consequent strategic equations with China, if not Russia, in the immediate Indian Ocean neighbourhood, and consequent economic commitments that they might as well do without otherwise. Suffice to recall that at the height of the India-Canada controversy last year, the Sri Lankan government of President Ranil Wickremesinghe, through foreign minister Ali Sabry, ticked off Ottawa.

It flowed from Canadian political behaviour, especially under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to make bilateral and international issues of domestic politics, where migrant constituencies are concerned. In the case of Sri Lanka, it’s the Tamil expatriate votes that count, just as it has been the Sikh/Khalistani constituency viz India.

Independent of it all, it may be too early to fathom a reason, but there is no knowing why Russia has not been taking such nations under its wings without strategic and economic commitments of the Chinese kind. But is it also in tune with the past Soviet conduct of taking India’s lead on South Asia?

Re-evaluating Russia

Even without rushing to such conclusions, New Delhi may have to re-evaluate the Russian response to its new and continuing concerns in recent years even after its stand-alone position on the Ukraine War. It also involves the consequent Indian purchase of Russian oil, defying American and other Western sanctions, and their repeated leadership visits to New Delhi for the purpose.

Yet, Moscow too seems to be a doubtful customer from the Indian view compared to the Cold War past—especially after New Delhi began moving away from its orbit, beginning with the Indo-US defence cooperation pact in 2005 and its acceleration and diversification since. Is it then confident that China won’t buy peace with the US and/or Europe, behind the back of Russia, if the terms are otherwise agreeable? And is China too playing around with Russia until such time it is ready to strike at wherever it wants, in whatever way it wants?

And thereby hangs a tale, rather a tangle, which India has to be careful to not get caught in, more than already—one way or the other, one camp or the other.

The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.