Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the world stage

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has managed to put himself in a prominent place on the world stage. When he goes abroad, as he did while on a state visit to the United States, or when he addresses foreign leaders as he did at the G20 meeting India hosted in New Delhi on September 9, 2023, he portrays his country as one of the world’s great powers. India, according to him, is setting several examples relating to governance the world should choose as an example to follow. Some of what India has achieved should not obscure the problems the country faces. However, before turning to the problems, we should not forget some of the country’s achievements.

India now, no doubt, is one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. By placing a robot on the less-explored side of the Moon, Prime Minister Modi can claim that his country has done what the rest of spacing-faring world was not able to do. Modi has now announced the plans to build a new chip-making pants in a new city to be built in Gujarat, Modi’s home state. The city to be called Dholera is one part of the Indian plan to make microprocessor chips. It will also house a factory that will make solar panels. As Alex Travelli wrote in The New York Times, Modi’s plan is “an ambitious undertaking as it is bold and speaks volumes about Mr. Modi’s belief that he can propel India into the top tier of advanced technology.”

Even when there is no doubt that India’s impressive technological advances should be noted, these achievements should be used to deal with the country’s many problems, including extreme poverty in the country’s poor areas. Although the rate of growth of the population has declined, the people living in extreme poverty remains large. While India is now seeing its economy increase at a rate almost twice high as that of China, Beijing used its past increase to alleviate poverty. Not only urban poverty, China has seen impressive declines even the poor rural areas.

This was the theme of the commentary by several Indian thinkers who could speak and write openly as they were outside the country. India’s stature on the world stage may be threatened by India’s “contradictions”, said Manjari Mahajan, the co-director of the New School’s India-China Institute. “India’s global agenda of inclusivity and pluralism seems at odds with its domestic repression of critical voices among academics, think tank analysts, opposition politicians and journalists,” she said. “The Indian government wants complete control of the narrative about India and is intolerant of any entity that offers or can offer alternative perspectives to that,” Mahajan said. “At some point, these contradictions — between how you project yourself internationally as opposed to what’s happening domestically — catch up with you. Your credibility becomes compromised.”

Manmohan Singh, who served as prime minister when India faced serious domestic issues and managed to reduce the repressive role of the state in the country’s economy, was not happy with the way Modi was using the foreign stage to advance his domestic agenda. He said in an interview with The Indian Express that: “While India’s standing in the world should rightfully be an issue in domestic politics, it is equally important to exercise restraint in using diplomacy and foreign policy for party or personal politics.”

A newspaper analysis of the way the Modi government prepared the country for the September 9 meeting of the G20 attended by several heads of state including the United States President Joe Biden, focused on the amount of attention received by the event. “Faced with a world polarized into increasingly adversarial blocs, Indian officials hope to rise above the divisions as their country hosts the summit of the leaders of Group of 20 largest economies,” wrote The Washington Post. “Over the past year, India has hosted more than 200 G-20 events focused on thematic areas, including climate and education, in over 60 cities, touching all corners of the country. Meanwhile it has been sprucing up and illuminating monuments and city infrastructure with signage reminding Indians that something big has come to town.”

The leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP, that Prime Minister Modi heads, has made it clear that it wants to turn India into a Hindu nation by adopting Hindutva as the country’s governing philosophy. At the G-20 summit, Modi sat behind a sign that said “Bharat” rather “India”. It was a signal to foreign leaders the direction in which the country was moving under the BJP leadership. Most affected by this move will be India’s large Muslim minority estimated to number 200 million. In fact, Bharat has the third largest Muslim population after Indonesia and Pakistan.

“The term Bharat has taken on fraught political violence in recent years as the preferred nomenclature of Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist BJP,” wrote Sammy Westfall in his report written for The Washington Post. “While nationalists argue that it is already an accepted alternative to ‘India,’ which bears some colonial baggage, Modi’s critics have noted that the BJP uses ‘Bharat’ to evoke the sense of exclusively Hindu past in a country that is home to more Muslims than any nation in the Middle East.”

Hinduisation of India was not limited to the name plate behind which Modi sat at the summit of G-20. For instance, Sambit Patra, spokesman for the BJP, shared an image of an official card referring to the visit of the “Prime Minister of Bharat, Shri Narendra Modi” to Indonesia for the 20^th ASEAN-India Summit” on September 7. A prominent BJP politician, Himanta Biswa Sarma, wrote on X: “REPUBLIC OF BAHRAT — happy and proud that our civilization is marching ahead boldly towards AMRIT KAAL”, using the term meaning “auspicious period” that Modi evokes to describe the nation’s resurgence under his rule.

There is no doubt the direction in which Modi and the BJP are taking their country. Once their programme is fully in place, India would not be an inclusive state. It would be exclusive, recognising only Hindus as the county’s full citizens relegating the large minorities to secondary state. With that as the official stance, India would find it hard to fulfil its other ambition: to lead what it calls the “global south”. Earlier in 2023, India brought together the leaders of more than 100 developing and poor nations for what it called the Voice of Global South summit, a virtual event.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 18^th, 2023.

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