Forget what the Carnegie Endowment has to say about Narendra Modi. It's irrelevant gobbledygook, anyway, and more for the consumption of a non-Indian audience. The Modi path is the only alternative we have right now to strategic relevance
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s South Asia Studies department has just come up with a study on Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s economic record, titled, ‘The Modi Debate Worth Having in India’, by Milan Vaishnav. Now, off- hand, I’d usually ignore a piece like this for what it is — a superficial commentary by white people for white people who want to feel up-to-date and informed — just to get ahead with a basic update, but not really interested in the details. What happened with this piece though is a bit more complicated.
First, notice the condescending arrogance that preambles this ‘research’. Mr Vaishnav says, “While his candidacy offers the tantalising possibility of a substantive debate about how India should be governed the Modi discussion to date has frankly disappointed.” Having created an artificial lacuna out of thoroughly flawed premises, he then proceeds to fill the lacuna with his ‘insight’ and ends with congratulating himself, albeit obliquely, for some ‘excellent research’.
Anyone even remotely interested in Indian politics or the economy would have noticed that ever since the Gujarat growth model has come into existence, its detractors have been using every single piece of economic material — real and contrived — to bring Mr Modi down. Anyone with online access to The Economic Times, Business Standard or Firstpost, would have noticed what a rollicking debate we’ve been having.
Yet, the good folks at Carnegie would like us to believe that India has not had this debate to its standards of ‘white’ satisfaction and they need their token curry muncher to come up with their two cents worth. Now, if Carnegie’s South Asia programme is afflicted with a ‘white saviour’ complex, what gets worse is how the Indian media has reacted.
The Times on India promptly published this in it Op-ed page. Given that their own group publication, The Economic Times, has come up with some far more in-depth research on the subject, one would wonder why The Times of India would want to publish a superficial throw-away from an institute that has never been known for its economic analysis. The answer: India has yet to get over its inferiority complex where a ‘white man’ label has the mystical ability to confer superior wisdom, greater perspicacity and highly superior arguments that no native brownie can marshal.
Why is this importantIJ For starters, our lot in Washington, DC, is crumbling rapidly. Our recent Ambassadors have been such a disaster that Pakistan’s nukes seem safe by comparison. And, if sending bad Ambassadors wasn’t bad enough, our economic growth has slowed as has our enthusiasm for cooperation with the West.
The growing phenomenon in Washington is one of ‘India fatigue’, and this is raising its head in dangerous ways. Forget what people say about looking at things ‘holistically’. Holistics are meant for ayurveda spas and fake godmen and not international relations. Every relationship is based on tangibles. The fact is that the India-US ‘strategic partnership’ simply cannot be sustained based on esoteric concepts — tangibles are the only thing that can strengthen that relationship.
So, while on one hand, the US has walked several miles for India, the latter, largely due to its acute governance deficit and inability to deliver, is seen as a promise welsher. Increasingly the non-proliferation Ayatollahs who had been clamouring against India and had been pushed into oblivion following the India-US nuclear deal, are now being given a new lease of life. Once again these clowns are finding print space in influential journals, and once again they are able to use superficial analyses like the one described above to either play down India, or sabotage what seems like our best hope of recovery.
Today, India has the fastest clearance time in Washington of any defence equipment request and the lowest rejection rate (one per cent). The 40-plus per cent that is returned is done so because of incomplete paperwork, unclear requests and inadequate documentation. Yet we take a reflection of Indian bureaucratic incompetence to be an insult to our dignity.
Similarly, while strategic ambiguity can be an asset, strategic schizophrenia is not. While we can mislead China into believing that we would not necessarily balance against them, for us to believe this is both dangerous and counterproductive. For instance, our pusillanimity over the recent ladakh episode will cost us dearly, just as Jawaharlal Nehru’s too smart-by-half defence and foreign policies did in 1962. Bullies, as we know, are only encouraged by submission.
So where does Mr Modi fit into this equationIJ let’s take the three most strident criticisms that have been bandied about (criticisms, not unproven slanderous libel). First, he is an autocrat’; second, he hasn’t focussed on so-called social development; and, third, he views the world in black and white. If all this is true, this is the exact reason that he’s the best thing that could happen to India’s security and defence policy.
First, what one set of people see as autocracy is what the others see as a firm hand. After five years of having a Prime Minister who is the closest thing we have to a real life demonstration of the Schrödinger’s Cat experiment, can we actually be blamed for wanting some direction and leadershipIJ If the India-US relationship is rudderless at the moment, it is precisely because of a lack of leadership.
Second, what some see as not focussing on social development is what some of us on the economic right would see as fiscal prudence. Given the doldrums we are in and given the crippling current account deficit, this is significant. Just because Gujarat has suddenly come into money, doesn’t mean it should go on a ruinous spending binge a la the Gandhi family. That Gujarat is slow in social development is undeniable, but it is exactly Mr Modi’s fiscal prudence — increasing the size of the pie before distributing it — that no one has bothered to prioritise thus far. It is this exact fiscal prudence that will make the ‘tangibles’ in the India-US relationship possible.
lastly, our bipolar disorder with regards to China can only be cured by someone who has a black-and-white view of the world. The nuance is so that decision-makers actually take the best-informed decisions and don’t bog them down in pointless self-doubt and pseudo profound strategic delusions. Nuance is for academics, decision is for leaders.
So, forget what Carnegie has to say about us — its irrelevant gobbledygook anyway. The Modi path is the only alternative we have right now to strategic relevance. Optimal or not, at least it will spare us banalities like the Carnegie debate for a few years.