Modi at 70-Global Statesman of Bharat

In a breakthrough at the 6th BRICS Summit in Fortaleza in July 2014, in Brazil, India got the presidency of the New Development Bank (NDB). It was launched with an initial capital of $50 billion after the leaders signed the “Fortaleza Declaration”. While China walked away with the bank’s headquarters, to be located in Shanghai, Modi got Beijing to agree on equal shareholding rights for all members. The historic Fortaleza declaration, inked by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with barely two months into the top job, was a precursor of bigger things to come and needless to add, Modi the strongman, has not disappointed. If anything, foreign policy has been amongst Modi’s outstanding achievements. Making that surprise halt at Lahore in 2015 to wish Nawaz Sharif on his birthday, was a calculated risk worth taking. It was spontaneous, not impulsive. And in hindsight, it is Pakistan’s loss, as in the last six years it has been completely isolated by the international community and has been reduced to becoming an impoverished satellite extension of China. When the time came for a no holds barred aggression, post the Pulwama attack by Pakistan in 2019, Modi showed unwavering commitment in avenging the martyrdom of our men in uniform. Before that in September 2016, the surgical strikes at Pakistan showcased Modi’s ability to cut through the diplomatic maze and take decisive action without flinching about the trap of a “perception war”, that most leaders invariably fall into.

The September 2016 ‘surgical strikes’ by Indian special forces inside Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and the February 2019 ‘airstrikes’ by Indian Air Force against terrorist training camps at Balakot, deep inside Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, were defining moments in Modi’s Pakistan policy. India’s actions stemmed from its desire to change the status quo in India–Pakistan relations, by punishing Pakistan for its continued use of Terrorism as a negotiating tool. New Delhi under Modi, could raise Islamabad’s failure to act in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks and Pulwama terror attack and force it into the FATF blacklist. It is to be noted here that Pakistan has been on the FATF ‘Grey List’ since June 2018, after a relentless pursuit by the Modi government that exposed Pakistan and it’s terror laden military establishment, at virtually every global forum.

Pakistan is in big trouble after the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), recently maintained that the Islamic nation should continue in the Grey List. Now, India is set to put in a new request to increase scrutiny into Pakistan’s involvement in terror funding, and it’s inaction when the task force meets for its next plenary in October, this year. A deadline looms over Pakistan, and if the country does not comply with the remaining 13 conditions laid out by the FATF in its 27-point Action Plan, which include curbing terror financing, enforcing laws against proscribed organisations and improving the legal systems, it could be blacklisted,for good.

Marrying foreign policy with larger climate-related goals has been the high point of Modi’s tenure in the last six years. A case in point is that India and France took the decisive step of forming the International Solar Alliance (ISA) in 2015. “From solar infra to social infra, from technical infra to space infra and from digital infra to defence infra, the India-France alliance is moving forward strongly,” Modi said, then. And it is equally noteworthy that India is set to achieve most of its COP-21 goals, set for 2030, in the next 18 to 24 months itself.

At present India’s nuclear power accounts for only 3% of its total electricity output, but it wants to increase its share to about 25% in the next twenty years. To realise that goal, India has plans to build about eighty new nuclear reactors in the coming decades. If India could count on Japan’s advanced cutting edge reactor technologies, it could accelerate India’s progress in the nuclear power generation and take advantage of the convergent mutual interests with Japan. Japan itself is in the process of boosting the export of its nuclear technologies for peaceful uses. Hence the Indo-Japanese civil nuclear agreement that was signed in 2015 assumes enormous significance.

Thanks to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India is the only non-NPT signatory with which Japan entered into a civil nuclear deal in what can be described as recognition of New Delhi’s impeccable non-proliferation record. The signing of the deal will boost bilateral trade. It will also give an impetus to the strategic military and defence relationship between the two nations. Again, the deal has been instrumental in countering China’s reckless regional adventurism and in dealing with the uncertainty of US foreign policy if any, after the US election outcome. Japan will assist India in nuclear waste management and may undertake joint manufacture of nuclear power plant components under the Make in India initiative.

In an unprecedented move in October 2018, Modi had sought a review of the payment terms with major oil producers during his meeting with top executives of global oil companies and experts from the energy sector, amidst rising crude oil price, globally. Indian energy firms have invested over $38 billion to buy equity energy stakes in oil assets in 28 countries, including Australia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria and Russia. Since India imports over 80% of its oil and over 18% of her natural gas requirements, oil diplomacy is yet another area that merits attention. A lame-duck opposition led by a fading dynast like Rahul Gandhi, a corrupt leftist media and other sundry Modi naysayers has written reams about the recent India-China standoff in Eastern Ladakh. Surprisingly, this decrepit lot has never bothered to highlight how Modi’s energy diplomacy, to insulate India from the vagaries of a volatile oil market, is slowly but surely shaping India’s big leap at being the “Aatmanirbhar Bharat”, that Modi is assiduously working for.

Since the Modi government came to power, there has been a greater focus on regional powerhouses such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, Israel, and Iran. Modi’s diplomatic outreach has reaped dividends with countries in the region, sending out signals of camaraderie. Between 2018 and 2019, Modi was honoured with highest civilian awards from West Asian countries such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, and Bahrain. During Modi’s 2019 visit to the Saudi Kingdom, it announced investments of $100 billion in India. The timing of the visit and the announcement was particularly crucial, as it took place against the backdrop of India’s revocation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir, which had left Pakistan grovelling for international diplomatic support. Only a leader like Modi could have pulled off such a masterstroke. Not a single Arab nation opposed abrogation of Article 370, proving in no uncertain terms, how Prime Minister Modi’s arrival on the world stage is a textbook case in global diplomacy that goes beyond pleasantries and cold handshakes.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE are going to jointly develop the world’s largest greenfield refinery in Maharashtra, India. Both West Asian countries have pledged to invest in India in the areas of infrastructure, petrochemical, refining, minerals, and mining. In addition, in 2019, DP World Dubai agreed to invest in the construction of the $10 billion Mumbai-Pune hyperloop project. The region’s investors are also showing confidence in Indian startups. In 2014, Qatar invested in e-commerce giant Flipkart. Startups such as Byju, Ola, Big Basket, and Zomato have received funding from West Asian investors.

India’s policy, focussing on West Asia (the Middle East) had witnessed a big bang resetting since 2014 when the Modi government came to power. This understanding was missing earlier, as could be seen in the stoic silence by the erstwhile, decadent, Congress regime, following the 2011 Arab uprisings. For example, India abstained on the vote to impose a no-fly zone over Libya. A similar approach was seen in the wake of the Syrian uprising. While New Delhi did approve UN sanctions, it opposed any attempts at regime changes and distanced itself from any military strikes.

Modi however, understands the ex-pat potential in West Asia. Since the 1970s when the oil boom began, the number of Indian migrants, mainly from the southern states, have grown rapidly. By 2018, there were 8.5 million Indian migrants in the Gulf states. Remittances from the region which stood at $ 36 billion in 2015-16, have grown significantly, since. During Modi’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia in 2019, the Indian government agreed on integrating the e-migration system with the Saudis, to safeguard employment conditions. The two countries also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), to increase the quota of flights between the two countries. In the last six years, several agreements have been signed for the benefit of Indian workers in the Saudi kingdom. Among them, India launched a RuPay card in three Gulf nations, that will benefit not only ex-pats but also Haj and Umrah pilgrims.

In the last six years, security cooperation has also become an essential focal point in India-West Asia relations, with cooperation on counter-terrorism, cybersecurity, terror financing, money laundering, and securing sea lines of communication, taking centre stage. The Gulf nations have been used by some Indians to travel to conflict zones to join terrorist groups like the Islamic State; Gulf nations have also been used as sanctuaries by several individuals wanted in India. India’s incremental engagement on this subject has led to several extraditions. The extradition of British middleman Christian Michel, wanted in the Agusta Westland scam, from the UAE in 2018, is a ringing dismissal of both the power and tremendous respect that Prime Minister Narendra Modi wields. Could any other leader have pulled this off? Extraditions are never easy, as we all know. Congressis who keep singing paeans about Indira Gandhi, forget that she handed over 93000 prisoners of war (POWs) in 1972, to Pakistan, without even managing in exchange, to get home the 56 Indian soldiers who were brutalised and imprisoned in Pakistani terror camps.

Indira Gandhi was just an average politician and certainly not the iron lady that a politically irrelevant Congress would like to have us believe. The Simla Agreement signed by Mrs Gandhi on July 2, 1972,is one of India’s poorest legacies, laying bare Indira’s incompetence. What the Simla agreement failed to achieve for India could well have been obtained through the 1973 Delhi Agreement signed by India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But alas, again, that never happened.

India had Pakistan on its knees, in the 1971 war, holding over 15,000 square kilometres of Paki territory and 93,000 of its soldiers. It is mystifying why Indira Gandhi, so quickly,returned both. Why did Indira not take back Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK), after Pakistani army had been vanquished? Why did Indira meekly surrender all that had been conquered by our brave soldiers, simply in lieu of empty promises of good behaviour by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto? Instead of asking puerile questions of Modi, Rahul Gandhi should read up on his grandmother’s abject surrender to Bhutto, at the negotiating table in 1972. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is his own man and does what he does because he has the courage of conviction that Indira Gandhi never ever had. Hence futile comparisons to elevate Indira and put her in the same bracket as Modi, are juvenile, unfair and unacceptable.

Coming back to the Saudis apart from trade, India and Saudi Arabia agreed to conduct their first joint naval exercise in December 2019. During the Cold War, India publicly supported the Palestinian struggle, fearing a domestic backlash and the anger of other Islamic nations. However, after the 1990s, with Arab-Israel peace gaining traction, India also decoupled its relations with Israel from the Palestine struggle. But, under the Congress-led UPA, from 2004–2014, the India-Israel relations again went into cold storage, thanks to ex-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who was always gingerly vacillating between wanting to please the Arabs and appease the Israelis, achieving precious little in the process. It is therefore entirely to the charismatic leadership of Prime Minister Modi, who embraced Israel wholeheartedly without losing sight of India’s interests in the Middle-East, that today India has successfully dehyphenated India’s foreign policy on Israel, from Palestine.

Prime Minister Modi brushed aside the conservative view and decided to go ahead with a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, his Israeli counterpart, on the sidelines of the UNGA at New York, in September 2014. That was the first instance of de-hyphenation of our foreign policy. The “sky is the limit to India-Israel relations”, a statement by Netanyahu post that historic meeting, strengthened Indo-Israeli relations, beyond the usual bombast. Not just West Asia, there are several other instances where hyphenation, during the Congress regime in the past, handicapped our ability to forge ties that help our national interests. Pragmatic de-hyphenation has helped us in formulating a more effective foreign policy. For example, Modi has refused to support missile or rocket attacks on Israeli territory, by militant outfits like the Hamas. Of course,we are wedded to our support for the just cause of the Palestinian people and their government. We have supported Palestine in resolutions sponsored by them or other countries at the UN on many occasions, under Modi, in the last few years. That policy will continue. But Modi has stripped India’s foreign policy of conventional hyphenation and hopeless romanticism and rightfully replaced that with realism and pragmatism. We are friends with both Israel and Palestine, as much as we are friends with both the USA and Russia.

Speaking of Russia, Putin has been courting the Modi government to join the oil-rich Euro-Asian Economic Union (EAEU), founded in 2015. EAEU is a free trade bloc consisting of Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The union has a market of 183 million people and a combined gross domestic product of over $1.9 trillion. A potential EAEU-India deal is part of a push by Moscow and New Delhi to boost their bilateral trade to $30 billion by 2025.

“Russia and India have a perfect political relationship, but they don’t have a normal economic base underlying it,” said Alexey Kupriyanov, a senior research fellow at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences. “We expect that concluding a free trade deal will provide that base.”

Yet restoring economic ties is not Russia’s only motive. Persuading Modi to sign an agreement with the EAEU would help Moscow elevate the bloc’s status by showing that global economic heavyweights take it seriously, contended Artyom Lukin, a professor of international relations at the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok. Moscow intends to keep Beijing at arm’s length for now. China signed a trade deal with the EAEU in May 2018, but unlike the agreement being discussed with India, it is nonpreferential, meaning that it does not eliminate duties for China. In sharp contrast, Putin is willing to let India have the benefit of duty waivers and free markets with minimal tariffs, was India to join the EAEU. Being the astute politician and consummate statesman that he is, Modi, of course, is biding his time and will likely join the EAEU, only after ensuring India’s interests are fully taken care of. In fact, “India First”, has been the guiding principle underpinning Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign policy outreach and also precisely the reason why Modi is such an incredibly powerful player today, in the global pecking order. Modi refused to join the belt road initiative (BRI), which incidentally, is in tatters today, leaving China with a massive bad debt of over $102 billion.

Coming back to BRICS, which has been the foreign policy pivot of the Modi government, NDB’s Articles of Agreement specify that all members of the United Nations could be members of the bank. However, the share of the BRICS nations can never be less than 55% of the voting power. From an Indian perspective, BRICS has emerged as the voice of developing countries, on diverse issues like WTO, climate change, inclusive development and cooperation in areas including trade, finance, health, agriculture, energy, space, culture, education, technology and IT.

It is no secret that India has to maintain the delicate balancing act between Russia-China on the one side and the US on the other. While India’s stature in global affairs in the last six years under the visionary, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has seen an unprecedented rise, the current crop of BRICS leaders to are, opinionated personalities — from Chinese President Xi Jinping to Russian President Vladimir Putin to Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro. Hence the shrewd deftness with which South Block, in the last six years under Modi, has taken the lead in galvanising BRICS to take a strong stand against Terrorism and isolate terror states like Pakistan, putting aside conflicting domestic agendas, is commendable. In 2018, at the 10th BRICS’ Summit, the joint working group on counter-terrorism decided to constitute sub-working groups in five areas: terrorist financing; use of the Internet for terrorist purposes; countering radicalisation; the issue of foreign terrorist fighters; and capacity-building. During meetings of National Security Advisers of BRICS, India’s NSA Ajit Doval put forward a proposal to host a BRICS workshop on digital forensics in India. Brazil also made Terrorism one of the priorities for its presidency. It held the first BRICS seminar on Strategies for Countering Terrorism.The focus on countering global Terrorism was even more pronounced last year at the 11th BRICS Summit in the wake of terrorist attacks on Israel on 12th and 13th November 2019, with Israel being bombarded by over 250 rockets and missiles by radicalised Islamic Jihadis and Palestinian militants.

That BRICS put counter-terrorism on top of the agenda, has been a huge diplomatic victory for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India, as was evident even at the BRICS Summit in Xiamen in September 2017, with China as the chair, despite the strained ties at that point, due to the standoff in Doklam. Again at the 10th BRICS Summit in Johannesburg, Partnership on New Industrial Revolution (PartNIR), which is a programme of partnership among BRICS nations that sought to focus on maximising the opportunities arising from the Fourth Industrial Revolution/New Industrial Revolution, showcased how India under Modi, has taken the lead in making intra BRICS trade, commerce, investments and people to people connect, the cornerstone of its global messaging. From hosting the BRICS Summit in India, that took place in Goa, in 2016, to potentially hosting the G20 Summit in 2022, Modi has not only made BRICS his foreign policy fulcrum, but more importantly, he has confounded his critics, with the seamless ease with which he has donned the mantle of a global statesman, who is always sixty steps ahead of his peers.MOU between trade promotion agencies of BRICS will help to achieve the target of USD 500 billion intra-BRICS trade target going forward, among other things.

In 2019, “BRICS– Economic Growth for an Innovative Future”, was the theme. In the Summit, apart from Brazil’s decision to allow visa-free entry to Indians and agreement on bilateral cooperation in areas like biofuels, post-harvest technologies and animal husbandry, what stood out was Modi’s renewed commitment to achieving a $500bn intra-BRICS trade target, going forward. Good diplomacy and good economics go together, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi knows this much better than anybody else. Modi’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at Brasilia in 2019 also garnered attention. It was the 4th meeting of the two leaders in 2019, after Modi’s visit to Vladivostok in September 2019, underpinning how Russia is one of the key pillars of Modi’s foreign policy outreach. The two leaders noted that the USD 25 billion bilateral trade target by 2025 had already been achieved. Russian President Vladimir Putin highlighted the potential of the Arctic region in natural gas and invited India to invest in the region. The leaders also reviewed the progress made in the Infrastructure sector, especially railways, including raising the speed of the Nagpur-Secunderabad sector railway line. The leaders further noted cooperation between India and Russia in Defence sector and Civil Nuclear Energy. Moving away from Russia, India’s diplomatic relations with China have been a matter of much debate in the last few weeks, post the Galwan clash. Large sections of India’s morally bankrupt media have questioned Modi’s strongman image, completely ignoring facts which showcase how China ended up with a bloodied nose, in more than 55 years.

“China continues to be in illegal occupation of approx 38,000 sq km in the Union Territory of Ladakh. In addition, under the so-called Sino-Pakistan ‘Boundary Agreement’ of 1963, Pakistan illegally ceded 5,180 sq km of Indian territory in PoK to China. It also claims approximately 90,000 sq km of Indian territory in the Eastern Sector of the India-China boundary in Arunachal Pradesh,” said, Rajnath Singh, India’s Defence Minister on the floor of the parliament, on September 17, 2020. About the loss of 38,000 sq km in Aksai Chin, to China, an embarrassingly frivolous Nehru is reported to have said in Parliament “not a single blade of grass grows there.” It would be good to have an inept Rahul Gandhi respond to, why his great grandfather handed over territory in Aksai Chin to the Chinese on a platter, but well, expecting credible answers from the Congress scion, is an exercise in futility.

Coming back to Rajnath Singh, while the two sides were engaged in diplomatic and military dialogues, Singh added, the “Chinese side again engaged in provocative military manoeuvres on the night of August 29 and 30, 2020, in an attempt to change the status quo in the South Bank area of Pangong Lake.

But yet again, timely and firm actions by our armed forces along the LAC prevented such attempts from succeeding,”. Singh only confirms what Modi has reiterated repeatedly–India has never believed in being an aggressor. Still, equally if provoked, it will hit back and avenge with all the might at its disposal. That China’s reckless expansionism has few takers globally, is not a hidden fact any longer. Modi’s foreign policy which has relied judiciously on “soft power”, has not shied away from sharp retaliation either. The 2016 surgical strikes against Pakistan, are a case in point. By banning over 117 Chinese apps including TikTok and PUBG, Modi has called out Xi Jinping’s bluff. Inflicting economic damage is not always about the billions lost–it is about sending out the right message to an irresponsible bully like China, that India’s territorial integrity is not up for sale. Modi not only valiantly stood up to Xi but asked him to back off, in no uncertain terms. Today, while India’s compromised leftist media is going over the moon, eulogising China’s military exploits, the hard truth is, Xi Jinping faces heavy dissent at home, and his stature globally has diminished beyond repair. On the other hand, post-Galwan, Modi has emerged irrevocably stronger because of his deft handling of this border skirmish. The post-COVID global order has no place for geopolitical bullies and Xi is learning it the hard way Beyond all this, every collaboration between China and foreign tech organisations could potentially be impacted by the ever-expanding US export controlsPost the US ban on Huawei, for instance, the UK and Australia also joined the bandwagon and imposed partial bans.

Any Chinese entity that publicly claims to be involved with civil-military fusion (CMF) could be blocked from US tech exports. For political reasons, almost every university and large tech company in China feel obliged to publicly say that they support CMF. Numerous Australian (and Asian) universities have large deals with organisations that publicly state they support CMF. If their collaboration relies on equipment from the US, as it often does, they are vulnerable to supply disruption. In other words, while the world is beginning to decouple from China, though this will not happen overnight, Prime Minister Modi has been smartly mainstreaming India’s geopolitical outreach with a mix of soft power, commerce, trade and most of all, with his uncompromising commitment to democratic values of freedom, inclusion and global peace, that set him apart from others on the world firmament. That Modi is no pushover is amplified by the fact that while China refuses to recognise Taiwan’s independence, two senior parliamentarians of the BJP, Meenakshi Lekhi and Rahul Kaswan, ‘virtually attended’ the swearing-in ceremony of Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, in May 2020 and sent her congratulations. Tsai was sworn in for her second term. Going back in time, one recollects how Nehru turned a deaf ear to pleas from Lhasa when China attacked Tibet in 1950. Contrast that with Modi’s unwavering support to the Dalai Lama ( in exile since 1959) when the Tibetan spiritual guru visited Arunachal Pradesh in 2017, after a gap of eight years.

Turning the focus back onto BRICS, in the final analysis, Euro-Atlantic powers realise that India’s close relationship with the US and commitment to a liberal global order is what prevents BRICS from becoming a divisive, illiberal anti-Western coalition, led by Russian muscle power and Chinese money power. For instance, had Modi boycotted the Xiamen summit in 2017, amidst the Doklam standoff then, it would have been the death knell of BRICS and simply reduced this grouping to an incoherent bunch of expansionist powers like Russia and China on the one hand and tottering economies like Brazil and South Africa on the other. Brazil and South Africa, which in the last few years have wandered aimlessly from one domestic economic crisis to another, have increasingly started looking at South Block, to enhance bilateral cooperation, to prevent further marginalisation.

BRICS, which accounts for almost 42% of the world’s population, 23% of the global GDP, about 17% of the world trade, almost 50% of the world’s economic growth and 26.6% of the world’s area, is being shaped by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in more ways than one. Modi is redefining multilateralism and multiculturalism, with BRICs emerging as a template for cooperation between emerging powers. This grouping is also a useful instrument for India to fight the agenda-setting monopoly of Atlantic powers, in its quest for a greater role in global governance. Above all, if BRICS has furthered the cause of a multipolar world, the credit for this unarguably goes to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign policy outreach that is both inclusive and global in its approach, but with “India first”, being the guiding diktat.

“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a moulder of consensus—Martin Luther King Jr”. Indeed, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the moulder of a new democratic consensus that is being forged by global powers, to re-boot a new geopolitical order, in the post COVID era.