"References to Pakistan and the presence of diplomats at Narendra Modi’s public meeting in Delhi recently have led to interest in the BJP prime ministerial candidate’s possible foreign policy. As a chief minister Modi has had an unusually busy external relations portfolio. He has travelled abroad frequently and made Gujarat a key business partner for a host of countries. This has given him a richer foreign policy experience than most peers. It has also given him opinions on priorities of Indian diplomacy.
For instance, he has made the point that a synergy of trade and traditional foreign policy issues is now staring us in the face. Modi is not the first politician to accept this. The question is: If he does get the mandate, will he use his political capital to reorder institutional structures to catch up with current realities? Will he, for instance, take on entrenched turf warriors and push for a merger of the commerce ministry and the ministry of external affairs? To achieve this will require a particularly bull-headed prime minister.
That apart, Modi has made a case for delegating foreign policy to the states. Seen in isolation, this seems puzzling. However, it needs to be linked to Modi’s thrust on domestic prosperity and its inevitable repercussions on economic diplomacy. Here the examples of border provinces such as Gujarat and Punjab may have been on his mind.
Addressing Pakistan at his Rewari public meeting on September 15, Modi said if terrorism were to be curtailed, the two countries could benefit from a sort of peace dividend. He was restating an obvious but under-articulated Indian strategic bet in the past 15 odd years: as India’s economy grows, nations that neighbour India will find it increasingly useful to plug into the Indian system than to fight it.
South Asian economic unity is unlikely to be a one-shot, big-bang process. It is going to be incremental and the role of border provinces will be crucial. That chief minister Parkash Singh Badal, a close friend of Modi’s, is pushing for greater commerce between Indian and Pakistani Punjabs offers a template for pushing to the states what New Delhi may not want to do, or be able to do. It is here that Modi’s years as a chief minister may make him more open to giving states a stake in foreign policy shaping.
Other than neighbouring countries, any future Indian government’s principal focus will be on the vast swathe that begins in Sri Lanka and ends in Sydney, and can be described under a variety of rubrics: Look East,
Indian Ocean Region, the Indo-Pacific. Countries such as Japan, Indonesia and Singapore present India big windows as it strives to become an economic and maritime power.
Modi understands this region well. One of his earliest chief ministerial visits was to Singapore.
Goh Chok Tong, Singapore’s former prime minister, is a confidant and mentor figure. Japanese investment and technology will be instrumental if India is to become a manufacturing economy. Gujarat, the rare Indian state with a manufacturing story to tell, is almost a strategic partner ofJapan and its primary investment destination in India.
Modi’s visit to Japan in 2012 was very successful but it was his trip to China the previous year that first suggested a change in how big powers were viewing him. Senior Indian political visitors to China meet one or two
Communist Party politburo members. Modi met four, in Beijing and in the provinces. High on symbolism, the Chinese gave him a bullet-proof motorcade and motorcycle outriders, previously granted only to India’s president and prime minister. They were conveying a message.
Modi conveyed a message too. He got the Chinese to agree to invest in a greenfield textile facility in Gujarat. He interrup-ted his schedule, took a detour and visited the offices of TBEA Energy to listen to its executives. TBEA Energy was facing obstacles in beginning production at its transformer-making plant in Gujarat. Modi’s speedy intervention impressed the Chinese authorities who saw in him problem-solving qualities. Not that the Chinese don’t see a Modi prime ministry as a poli-tical challenge, they do; but they also consider it an economic opportunity.
The elephant in the room — or studiously outside the room — is the United States. Privately its diplomats concede the visa revocation of 2005 a disaster. Publicly they say they don’t want to do anything now because it would seem like interfering in Indian domestic politics, a weasel-word answer given that the original visa denial was a crass intervention of just this kind.
It has led to a situation where in 2014 India could have a prime minister who enters office with a genuine grievance against the Americans. This is unprecedented. At the peak of the Cold War, even
Indira Gandhi and Lyndon Johnson had a honeymoon period.
Unfortunately, American diplomats have not sensed the hardening mood in Modi’s party. Dismissing the visa status and reciting the application case history of a chief minister is one thing. A prime ministerial candidate is another matter. One of these days, a thoughtless remark by a State Department spokesperson could trigger a dramatic response from a BJP functionary. The sad part is one can almost see it coming.
(The writer is Australia India Institute-Observer Research Foundation Chair for Indo-Pacific Studies)
Courtesy : The Times of India, October 7, 2013
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