External Affairs Minister (EAM) Dr S Jaishankar called it a “bad habit” that the West had. He said that “the West thinks it has a God-given right” to comment on the internal affairs of India, and cast aspersions on its leadership. He warned that this sort of abuse of international protocol could go both ways. And he spoke, not only as a minister of the realm, but also a distinguished former diplomat.
To a certain extent it already is, with the Indian media regularly calling out the Western interference, and pointing out its many shortcomings on its home turf.
It is a mote in one’s own eye syndrome, to paraphrase the Bible. Multiple matters, ranging from global warming-based natural disasters, forest fires, frequent shootings at schools, racist killings by police, pogroms allowed by dissident Islamists and Khalistanis, against Hindus, or Indian Missions, render most of the Western carping about India nonsensical.
It is also an intrinsic racist bias, where problems that concern the White nations are given precedence over those of others. Why should blue-eyed and blond children die in Ukraine, was one such proposition. Similar questions are not ever asked about the ongoing turmoil in Syria. The EAM has pointed to this as well.
Overall, this refusal to take Western bias and distortion as acceptable is a feature of current Indian foreign policy.
The EAM has also pointed to the efforts being made by Indian politicians who have lost electoral favour in India, attempting to pressurise the government by organising and lobbying ill-informed interventions from abroad. He said our Opposition should actually stop inviting comments from abroad on our internal matters.
Distortions on the revocation of Article 370 with reference to Jammu & Kashmir, which was, in the first place, a temporary provision, should have been better understood by the West. Criticism of the Indian judiciary, when it criminally convicts a politician, is tantamount to disrespect of our institutions, particularly when it is mixed up with allegations of motivation by the government. Slurs also need to be researched properly.
Perhaps the real reasons for all this go much deeper.
It is no longer China, Pakistan, Turkey and sundry others, who oppose Indian ascendancy economically, militarily and diplomatically.
Against these detractors, from whose ranks Malaysia, with its massive sales of palm oil to India, has wisely dropped out, a large number of countries have come forward to back India.
These include the 120 countries India reached out to, in addition to the ones formally in the G20, under India’s chairmanship for this year. Many are from all the nations of Africa, South America, West Asia and the Asia-Pacific.
Quite a few of these regard India as a torch-bearer and benign influence for the Global South. This more so as the United Nations General Assembly, (UNGA), has fallen into ineffectiveness, hijacked by Islamic interest groups, and China.
But even as India is a member of QUAD, BRICS, SCO, G-20, ASEAN, BIMSTEC, etc, while associating with AUKUS; a certain resentment of its rise, even amongst its Western friends, seems to be brewing alongside.
Prominent friends in the West, including the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, have taken to regularly commenting on and criticising India’s internal affairs and its leaders in its media for some years now. Targets include Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, and External Affairs Minister Dr S Jaishankar.
In short, many of the distinguished politicians who have unfurled the proud banner of Indian nationalism as of 2014, when this administration first came to power with a large majority. Leaders, who define the ‘New India’ that will soon propel India to 3rd rank economically, with a GDP upwards of $10 trillion per annum, and PPP rankings undoubtedly at No.1, up from the present No.3.
This, despite India being the most populous country in the world, already, with the largest young workforce. China, which would like to retard this process, has an ageing population. This is in common with much of Europe, Japan and America. None of these countries and regions have any hope of rectifying the situation despite population boosting measures taken, for at least three decades.
Part of it, a Catch-22 of course, is a local populace resistant to immigration from other races and cultures, while their own economies are faltering. Brexit has not been a great success, prompted as it was by such sentiments.
The Global South is rejoicing about this Indian good news, alongside India, but is this likewise in the G-7 and the G-20?
The criticism directed at India at present probably wants to slow down India’s rate of progress at around 7% in GDP growth year-on-year, the highest amongst any major economy in the world.
It is also a campaign of negativity designed to blunt, if possible, the chances of re-election of the present dispensation for a consecutive third-term in 2024.
A strong Indian government is less biddable from the Western point of view. And India’s propensity for building its foreign policy on enlightened self-interest is putting most countries in the West in an adverse negotiating position, compared to its facile domination of the exchange in the past.
India, as a food surplus nation of over 1.40 billion people, is showing up in the currently food deficient West. It is also, more and more, the ‘Pharmacy to the World’, and first in innovation as the Start-Up Capital as well. Its banks are better managed than the West, and its sovereign debt-profile is infinitely better, as hailed by the international rating agencies, the World Bank, the IMF and others.
India is still the biggest buyer of armaments in the world, even in 2023, with an expanded buying list, despite its strong thrust at indigenisation for as much as 68% of its purchases. But this too, raises two new problems. India is emerging as an arms exporter, and a most competitive supplier. And it is buying less, and will buy even less progressively, from the expensive armaments industry of the West.
Therefore, there has been a step-up from the erstwhile media bias in certain well-known publications and broadcasters with a leftist orientation masquerading as liberalism, against the present Indian administration.
Unsubstantiated charges include a tendency to dictatorship on the part of a wildly popular Narendra Modi, communalism (read anti-Muslim and Christian), including of late, an anti- Sikh (read the terrorists that want to wrest Punjab into Khalistan), and anti-Semitic bias (no basis whatsoever, given the excellent relations with Israel).
There are also charges of gagging the Opposition (amplified by the constant whining of electorally feeble and criminally convicted Congress leader Rahul Gandhi), alleged, but spurious claims, of subversion of Indian institutions including its judiciary, and muscular Hindutva (ditto).
The role of George Soros, a Hungarian Jew and naturalised American, also allegedly active against former President Donald Trump, soon to be in his felony trial in Manhattan, the NGOs and activists he finances, is not often mentioned in these quarters.
Neither is the avalanche of Chinese money via its embassies, Confucian Studies Institutes and direct investments in companies, universities, Hollywood and so on, being used to buy anti-India opinion. These extend to academia and amongst Western politicians, lobbyists, anti-India activists, opposition politicians and their financing.
Pakistan is ever active, despite its bankrupt status, through its official machinery, and its covert ISI. It is prominent in certain countries abroad, particularly Britain, which finds it difficult to stomach India’s rise. Dubai, where the Pakistani underworld has a network, via Bollywood, its infrastructure and financing, via terrorist and drug cartels, and also directly in India through disgruntled elements particularly amongst Islamists and Khalistanis. It is however having trouble keeping this up, given its own terrorism problems internally and breakaway movements in Balochistan, the NWFP, and friction with Afghanistan.
Blow-hot blow-cold countries including the immensely rich on liquefied natural gas (LNG), Qatar, is also sometimes anti-India for hardline Islamic reasons, financing terrorists, and criticising India via Qatar’s media outlet Al Jazeera. Qatar tends to play influence games with both sides. It is a GCC member, despite sometimes prickly relations with Saudi Arabia, and hosts a massive US air base in Doha.
India gets on very well with Israel, Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. It has a military base access at Duqm in Oman. Oman meanwhile is drawing closer to Saudi Arabia with a new railway line linking the two countries.
India is doing increasingly better with Iran, partially due to Russia’s good offices in addition to its own long-term ties. A land-route from Russia is already operational via Iran, an undersea fuel pipeline is extant.
Russia is developing another sea route from its north to India and India has been invited to build a new IT enabled city at Vladivostok despite Chinese claims on the city and its environs.
India is also doing very well with Greece in the EU, where it is developing the port of Piraeus in an effort to establish another sea route to Europe from India.
Mauritius is allowing India to build a new military base in the Indian Ocean on one of its islands close to the British-US occupied Diego Garcia.
All this diplomacy and progress points towards future great power status in addition to India’s economic prowess. And it is being done with much greater bonhomie than anything China is up to in a variety of places around the world.
So the causes of the disproportionate and intemperate Western media commentary on trivia and gossip are fairly clear. It is expressing discomfort and even a degree of fear at the prospect of a consecutive third term for the present dispensation of the BJP backed by a formidable RSS. If all this has been accomplished in under 10 years, what does the future hold in store?
So now, various governments have now got in on the act. Government spokespersons in Western countries are commenting as well. After the US, Britain, it apparently is the turn of Germany.
The US finds it difficult to stomach India’s neutral to independent stand on the Ukraine War under the Biden administration. Should the Republicans win in 2024, some 18 months from now, they will almost certainly put an end to the Ukraine War, if it is still raging. The possibility of it tipping over into the use of tactical nuclear weapons or even WWIII is ever present already. But the Republicans could end it because of a greater comfort with Russia than under the Democrats.
Presently, EU and British governments, beholden to American largesse, are chiming into the Biden narrative, though most are feeling the pinch worse than both America, and, ironically, Russia.
A strong reason for British sniping, including via the BBC, is its colonial history with India, and that India has already overtaken it in terms of its GDP. It is also about to overtake Germany next.
Germany also has continued good relations with China, strategically opposed to India, despite China’s role in the Covid-19 pandemic and their support of Russia in the Ukraine War. German Chancellor Schultz recently visited President Xi Jinping in China, one of the first Western leaders to do so, after China called off its draconian Covid lockdowns recently. This despite the NATO and EU positions generally cool to ongoing Chinese ties and the dependence on Chinese supply chains.
Germany has also been the biggest buyer of Russian gas and fuel over the last several decades. It continues to do so to an extent, via a circuitous route, even now, compelled by otherwise very high fuel prices from elsewhere, despite stringent sanctions imposed on Russia by NATO, EU and Britain.
Germany, like Britain, has been steadily slipping in terms of its economy, including in its vaunted car industry, and other engineering enterprises. This has limited its options and autonomy. France, the other big EU economy, despite its fiscal troubles, is on good terms with India.
Fortunately, so is Japan, which India is also destined to overtake economically, and this bodes well for the future.
The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator. Views expressed are personal.
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