As the sole self-proclaimed Hindu state in the world, Nepal had long been a lodestar for Hindu nationalists. Its constitutional embrace of secularism was a serious blow. But Modi didn’t merely stop at being sullen. His government demanded a series of amendments to the Constitution. When Kathmandu did not relent, there followed a lengthy and criminal blockade of Nepal. Oil containers and trucks carrying medicine piled up at the open border. Dozens of Nepalese citizens were killed in political unrest and, according to UNICEF, more than three million children were placed at risk of death or disease.9 Post-earthquake reconstruction came to a halt. Marooned by Modi and faced with drastic shortages of food, medicine and fuel, Nepalis made desperate appeals to the world for emergency assistance and diplomatic intercession. A deep revulsion for India crystallised in Nepali minds and hearts. Nepali politicians resolved thereafter to diversify their friendships and dependences. China immediately stepped in to exploit the rage against India with an assistance package of US$ 146 million.10 And for the first time, Kathmandu and Beijing held joint military exercises. As Modi drove India’s soul-sibling into the arms of Beijing, the lesson absorbed by other small states in the region: never embrace India too tightly. He annihilated the influence and goodwill India had built up over decades to win a few extra votes and, more egregiously, to make Nepal a reliquary of his hideous genre of nationalism.
The fiasco in Nepal might have humbled a less conceited figure. But it did nothing to wrinkle Modi’s megalomaniacal self-conception as a geostrategic genius. And so on Christmas day of 2015, fresh from stamping on India’s relationship with Nepal, he tweeted: ‘Looking forward to meeting PM Nawaz Sharif in Lahore today afternoon, where I will drop by on my way back to Delhi.’ Modi was seized by the belief that all that India’s most intractable foreign relationship needed was his personal touch. He treated the challenge that had consumed generations of Indians as though it were another application for a factory in Gujarat. By turning up in Pakistan with barely any notice—a few hours after announcing his trip on Twitter—Modi immediately undermined the opposition and his parliamentary colleagues on an issue so vital to India’s national security that it had always remained above partisan politics. More Pakistanis in power than Indians knew about Modi’s travel plans. His decision was all the more contemptible considering his own record, in opposition, of tormenting any politician who dared to make an overture to Pakistan. After supping with Pakistan’s prime minister at his inauguration, Modi assiduously cultivated the image of a tough guy and encouraged the intensification of Indian hostility towards Pakistan. He instructed India’s armed forces to respond forcefully to Pakistani provocations on the de facto border between the two nations in Kashmir. He abruptly cancelled talks between Indian and Pakistani diplomats after Pakistan’s high commissioner to Delhi held a meeting with Kashmiri separatists. There was certainly no demonstrable change in Pakistan’s behaviour to justify Modi’s volte-face. The men behind the Mumbai massacre still remained at liberty. Hafiz Saeed, a terrorist carrying a US$ 10 million US State Department bounty on his head for his role in the atrocity, continued openly to incite violence against India. Dawood Ibrahim, the man behind the worst terrorist assault in India’s history, was still living in palatial splendour in Karachi’s Clifton neighbourhood.
Modi’s visit to Pakistan was the first by an Indian prime minister in more than a decade. When Nixon went to China, it was said that only a man of his reputation among America’s hawkish conservatives could have risked making that momentous voyage. Modi’s acolytes began making similar arguments for Modi. An Indian prime minister belonging to a Hindu-supremacist party, they said, had fostered peace simply by ‘dropping by’ the Islamic Republic for a couple of hours on his way back from Afghanistan. If anything, the opposite was true. Nixon’s journey to China was preceded by arduous preparation. Modi’s visit was not a daring deed of statesmanship: it was an unhinged display of hubris. And in any case, Modi’s personal diplomacy was a non-starter because Nawaz Sharif, his Pakistani counterpart at the time, was never the real decision-maker in his country. That job has always been held by the military and intelligence chiefs, and they legitimate their unchecked power and endless purloining of Pakistan’s resources by magnifying the ‘threat’ from India. Unrehearsed efforts at détente by Delhi have always elicited deadly reprisals from them. The last time Sharif hosted an Indian prime minister in Lahore, in 1999, his army, unbeknown to him, launched a war against India. Sharif was deposed from office and exiled to Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan was placed under military dictatorship for a decade.
The animosity between Pakistan and India was always anchored in irreconcilable national ideologies. One regarded itself as the authentic home of the subcontinent’s Muslims; the other, until Modi came along, saw itself, at least in theory, as the instantiation of a pluralistic secular nationalism that transcended religion. Each nullified the other: rejection of its Indian past is the condition of Pakistani patriotism, and Indian secularism is a repudiation of Pakistan’s schismatic nationalism. The two can exist in peace only if they can exist in isolation from each other. This explains why the most substantial stretches of tranquillity between the two nations materialised when they spurned each other. Like a divorced couple, the states of India and Pakistan, especially Pakistan, needed time apart to evolve identities independent of the other. Alas, to the detriment of their peoples, they have been in each other’s faces ever since the British departed the subcontinent. And like every Indian prime minister before him—and like every well-intentioned commentator who advocates ‘sustained dialogue’ with and champions engaging ‘moderates’ in Pakistan—Modi never grasped that, far from nurturing peace, India endangers genuinely peaceable democratic politicians in Pakistan merely by befriending them.
As Modi departed Lahore, I wrote in the Observer of London that his ‘“diplomacy” will do nothing to advance peace. Instead, it will embolden elements within Pakistan’s military–intelligence complex to act in ways that will be adversarial to Pakistan’s democracy—and India’s security’. Within days of Modi’s return to India, men from Jaish-e-Muhammad, an asset of Pakistan’s military–intelligence, staged a major attack on an Indian airbase on the border with Pakistan. A joint investigation instituted to catalogue the facts dissolved into the usual recriminations when Islamabad, under duress from the uniformed men, accused India of executing a false flag attack ‘to malign Pakistan’.11 Far from jumpstarting a peace process, Modi aggravated the already dire enmity between the two nations.
When the next terrorist attack occurred—this time at an army base in Uri in September 2016—he did something else that was unprecedented: he shamelessly used the military to bolster his own cult. Delhi has periodically ordered the Indian Army to stage covert attacks against terror camps within territory in Pakistan’s hands. The secrecy that governed these missions, allowing Pakistani authorities to save face, averted escalation between the nuclear-armed states. Modi, stamping on this tradition, breathlessly publicised the ‘surgical strike’ he claimed to have authorised inside Pakistan-held territory. The strike and its success have invited scepticism, but anyone caught questioning the wisdom of boasting about it all was thrown to Modi’s digital hounds.
The man who had so brazenly undermined India’s non-partisan political traditions by visiting Pakistan, and was exploiting the Indian military’s valour, was deified as a patriot and those who refused to worship him were demonised as ‘anti-national’. Having kept the Indian parliament and his own cabinet in the dark as he hugged the Pakistani prime minister, Modi fostered an atmosphere in India in which any relationship with Paksitanis became tantamount to treason. A major Bollywood producer was bullied into donating a substantial sum of cash to an army fund for the crime of casting a Pakistani actor in a film shot at a time when Modi himself had materialised in Pakistan. The army refused to accept the money, but the producer was forced into recording an abject apology in which he pledged never to ‘engage with talent from the neighbouring country
’.12 The principal association of Indian film producers placed a blanket ban on Pakistani actors and technicians from working in India. A self-confident and secular India would never countenance the segregationist nationalism around which so many Pakistanis rally. It would also never persecute Pakistanis, who are our flesh and blood, for being Pakistani. But Modi, who seeks to convert India into a Hindu facsimile of Pakistan, has done the opposite: he has paid the ideology of Pakistan the compliment of imitation while victimising ordinary Pakistanis who should have been welcomed by India.
After opening up India to renewed attacks from Pakistan, Modi proceeded to wreck other existing security partnerships. The Indian Army has routinely conducted clandestine counter-insurgency operations against militant posts inside Myanmar with the acquiescence of the country’s rulers. Modi vandalised this hugely advantageous arrangement to advertise a raid conducted on his watch in June 2015. Preoccupied by his insatiable craving for personal aggrandisement, he forgot to contemplate the effect the decision might have on the delicate partnership India had laboriously cultivated with the establishment in Naypyidaw. The generals in Myanmar, outraged at being cast as impotent guardians of their own nation’s borders in Modi’s self-promotional stunt, were left fuming.13
Having demolished India’s standing in South Asia, Modi cemented an alliance of sorts in West Asia with Israel. His visit to the Jewish state, the first by an Indian prime minister, was historic. But there were squalid ideological reasons that made it special for so many Hindu nationalists. India, after all, was once considered, in the words of Bernard Weinraub, ‘the loneliest post in the world’ for Israeli diplomats.14 Having voted against the creation of Israel at the UN in 1947, India desisted from establishing full diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv until 1992. For decades, Israel’s presence in India was limited to an immigration office in Mumbai. In between, India voted with the majority to pass UN resolution 3379, condemning Zionism as a form of racism, became one of the first non-Arab states to recognise Palestine’s declaration of independence in 1988, and was generally among the more vocal non-Arab voices against Israel. But by the twenty-first century, India had become Israel’s closest eastern partner and its largest arms market. Since 2001, the diasporas of the two countries have emerged as energetic allies against a shared enemy: Islamic extremism. A survey by the Israeli foreign ministry in 2009 found India to be the most pro-Israel country in the world, well above the US. Once a bastion of pro-Palestinian sentiment, India appeared at the bottom in a worldwide poll in 2011 of countries sympathetic to Palestinian statehood.15
What precipitated this dramatic shift?
Israel had all along been a quiet friend to Delhi, volunteering clandestine support as India sought to repel attacks by China (in 1962) and Pakistan (in 1965). Israeli officials knew also that India, which had no traditions of anti-Semitism, had arrived at its Israel policy through a combination of post-colonial hauteur, realpolitik—particularly its desire to placate Arab Muslim opinion in its contest against Islamic Pakistan—and an ethical commitment to the Palestinian cause. Partly for these reasons, India’s anti-Israel sloganeering rarely provoked any anxiety in Tel Aviv.
A triad of reasons account for the revision of India’s attitude towards Israel. The first is the belated realisation that no amount of deference to Arab sentiment could alter Muslim opinion in West Asia in India’s favour: when it came to Kashmir, Shia and Sunni united in supporting Pakistan’s position.16 The second was the collapse of the old world order: the demise of the Soviet Union meant that India had to forge new partnerships. The third cause of the intensification of Indo–Israeli ties is less well known: the rise of Hindutva in India. As the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz once phrased it, ‘Relations between Israel and India tend to grow stronger when … India experiences a rightward shift in anti-Muslim public opinion or in leadership.’17 For Hindu supremacists, Israel has always been something of a polestar: a nation to be revered for its ability to defeat, and survive among, hostile Muslims. In 2009, Mumbai’s anti-terror squad arrested, among others, an officer in the Indian Army, Prasad Purohit, for masterminding a terrorist attack on Pakistani citizens and plotting to overthrow the secular Indian state. In his confession, Purohit admitted to making plans to approach Israel for help.18 The saffron obsession with Israel was always enmeshed with the desire to terminate India’s support for Palestine. The Congress Party’s pro-Palestine stance—largely meaningless after 1992, when India established full diplomatic relationship with Israel—was impugned by the BJP as a sop to Indian Muslims. In truth, Indian Muslims have made noticeable efforts to build bridges with Israel. In 2007, for instance, Maulana Jamil Ilyasi, the leader of 500,000 imams of India, travelled to Israel to interact with ‘Jewish sisters and brothers’.19
But the irony of Modi steering India closer to Israel has been lost on the pro-Modi Likudniks in Israel. The founding luminaries of Hindutva were enamoured of Hitler. A key ally of the RSS, speaking for ‘sensible Hindus of India’ in 1939, ‘welcomed’ with ‘jubilant hope’ ‘Germany’s solemn idea of the revival of the Aryan culture, the glorification of the swastika, her patronage of Vedic learning, and the ardent championship of Indo-Germanic civilisation’.20 Reverence for Hitler has remained strong among Hindu nationalists. Social studies textbooks published in Gujarat when Modi was the state’s chief minister contained such chapters as Hitler the Supremo and Internal Achievements of Nazism, and students were taught that ‘Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government. He adopted the policy of opposition towards the Jewish people and advocated the supremacy of the German race.’21
Is the capacious imagination of Theodor Herzl, who envisioned a socialist ‘New Society’ for all inhabitants of Palestine, disgraced or upheld when Modi—forged in an ideology that lionises the tormentors of Herzl’s people—mouths platitudes about democracy with Netanyahu, an ethno-religious bigot whose anti-democratic politics are awash in the venom of Dr Geyer, the villain of Herzl’s foundational text on Zionism?
Modi’s success in Israel occurred against the backdrop of a dangerous escalation with China next door that, astonishingly, has not received the kind of attention it merits. If Pakistan’s neurotic nationalism makes it the most complex and urgent security challenge for India, China’s view of India as an obstacle in its path to a permanently predominant position in Asia makes it Delhi’s gravest long-term threat. Beijing recognises India as the only power in Asia with the potential to stymie China’s expansion. At the same time, with a GDP five times the size of India’s, China is outwardly contemptuous of comparisons with India. Yet both nations are haunted by the same question: can the twenty-first century accommodate the aspirations of India and China? It is difficult to conceive of it now—when China entrances the world with its glitzy buildings and much of India still sports a slovenly look—but there was a time when China esteemed India as a fount of spiritual and intellectual enlightenment. The great Buddhist monk Faxian, travelling to India in the fourth century, hailed it as the true ‘Middle Kingdom’ and described his own motherland as merely India’s ‘border land’.22 A host of Chinese scholars, trained at Indian universities and seminaries, returned with ideas that reshaped their native land. The Tang emperor Taizong, spellbound by the Buddhist scriptures hauled back from India by the monk Xuanzang, became a patron of the Indian religion and adopted its tenets throughout his realm. As Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew once averred, India exerted the same civilisational influence in Asia as Rome and Greece did in Europe.23
But then India, repeatedly ravaged by a variety of imperialisms, fell grievously behind. Post-colonial histories now club the two countries together. In truth—even though Britain relied on Indian muscle to inaugurate China’s century of humiliation, and a handful of Indian families made massive fortunes in the trade of opium—India, physically separated from China by the buffer zone of Tibet, remained largely ignorant of China for much of the past millennium. Once the communists expelled their rivals and established a firm g
rip over China, Churchill was among those who wrote to Nehru—‘the light of Asia’—with the hope that India should defend the ‘freedom and dignity of the individual’ against ‘the Communist Party drill book’.24 India’s self-abnegating generosity, rather than elicit gratitude, only inflamed Chinese resentments. Mao, smarting at Nehru’s paternalistic pretensions to leadership of the post-colonial world, radiated the arriviste’s disdain for his regime’s most illustrious advocate on the international stage. Impatient to reclaim China’s position after a century of dishonour, Mao could not abide an Asia with multiple centres of power. And Delhi’s decision to grant asylum, in defiance of Beijing’s feelings, to the Dalai Lama following Tibet’s decimation by Han supremacists confirmed it as a potential contender. Certainly, India never troubled China more than when it dissented from Beijing in order to uphold its own liberal democratic values. When Beijing demanded that the growing number of Tibetan refugees in India be banned from staging protests against China, the foreign office in Delhi told the mandarins across the Himalayas that there was ‘by law and Constitution complete freedom of expression of opinion in parliament and the press and elsewhere in India’.25
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