On 12 June, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution demanding an immediate, unconditional and lasting ceasefire in Gaza. It spoke of ending Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war. A total of 149 nations voted in favour, with America and Israel opposing. India abstained from voting, repeating a pattern it has adopted in the Modi era. This has upset some Indians because it is a break from India’s longstanding position on Palestine and Palestinians, but it is in keeping with the thrust of the BJP’s Hindutva ideology.
On the other hand, the government’s supporters have been upset by the even-handedness with which the world has approached our recent conflict with Pakistan. We cannot get nations to take our side.
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This column is not a critique of India’s foreign policy under Narendra Modi; it is an attempt to explain it. The BJP’s manifestos from the very beginning, in its Jana Sangh avatar in the 1950s, have little to offer in terms of foreign policy doctrine. However, Foreign Minister S Jaishankar has laid out his thesis in his writings and this will help us appreciate what India is attempting to do in the world. Jaishankar assumes that in our time the United States and Europe will look inward (his first book of essays was published just before Trump lost in 2020), while China would continue to rise. This would open the space for countries like India to be opportunistic in their engagements with the world and for this they did not need consistency.
What India wanted was a ‘multi-polar Asia’—meaning one in which India could claim parity with China. Many balls would need to be kept in the air, Jaishankar writes and India would handle them with dexterity. This was opportunism but that was all right because opportunism, he tells us, was in India’s culture. We should understand our abstention from voting against genocide and starvation of children by Israel in this light.
The Mahabharata’s lessons, Jaishankar says, are that deceit and immorality are merely to ‘not play by the rules.’ Drona’s demanding of Eklavya’s thumb, Indra’s appropriation of Karna’s armour, Arjuna using Shikhandi as a human shield, these were but ‘practices and traditions.’
Inconsistency in policy was not only fine but required because ‘obsessing about consistency’ made little sense in changing circumstances. So what was such a doctrine to be called? In a speech he made where he first laid out this doctrine of opportunism and inconsistency, Jaishankar said it is hard to think of a name. He takes up and discards the phrases — ‘multi-alignment’ (‘sounds too opportunistic’) and ‘India first’ (‘sounds self-centred’). He settles at ‘advancing prosperity and influence,’ which he says is accurate but thinks is not catchy. He believes some name for it will eventually come if it is pursued long enough, because part of the challenge is that we are still in the early phase of a major transition.
The opponent will point out that this was no real foreign policy at all. This was a cover on top of what was already going on. What interested Modi, and what was inconsistent but made for pageant and ceremony, was being passed off as something meaningful. The opponent will also ask why Jaishankar’s doctrine is detached from the rhetoric offered by the BJP. There is no role for India the civilisational entity, which nationalists from Nehru to the BJP have made much of. There is no Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam-style romanticism or Vishwaguru-type bombast here, and Jaishankar’s nameless doctrine is stripped of all forms of morality and ethic. This is not India engaging with the world on the strength of Indian pluralism. The world is a transactional place and India must be dexterous enough to be able to take advantage of it. One important element of this line of thinking was to take advantage of the war in Ukraine and buy cheap Russian oil. Europe, dependent on Russian gas for energy could hardly press other nations for buying from Russia. India did so, along with China. How much cheaper was it? The average landed price of imported crude for April–December 2022 was $99.2 per barrel. If oil from Russia was excluded, the average price was $101.2, meaning a saving of $2 per barrel. And this money did not come back to the Indian citizen as we have seen in the price of fuel; instead it enriched private refiners.
Jaishankar does not appear to have anticipated that this theory of his worked both ways. In such a world as he imagined, others would also seek to take advantage of India, and treat it in opportunistic fashion. This might help explain why our global outreach has received such a tepid response. We have chosen to be transactional with the world, as our UN votes reveal. The major powers understand and accept this and they will in turn be transactional with us. Whether this is good, bad or indifferent foreign policy is for the reader to decide.
By Aakar Patel
