27 April 2020, NIICE Commentary 4257
Martand Jha
Until the last decade, the Government of India was either referred as the Central Government or the Union Government in the country. Sometimes, commentators called the government by the name of either a party in power or an alliance in power, such as the BJP government, the Congress government, the NDA government, or the UPA government. Today, all these pre-existing nomenclatures have transformed and the term most used to refer to government of India and its policies is “Modi government”.
This highly person-centric approach to refer to a government has been seen after a long time, since Indira Gandhi was in power. It is reflective of Prime Minister Modi’s influential approach to each and every sphere of governance, especially in the area of foreign policy. When Modi 1.0 came to power in May 2014, the first thing he did was to invite all the heads of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) member states (including Pakistan) for his swearing in ceremony, as a measure to reach out to India’s immediate neighbourhood to ‘refine’ and if possible, to ‘re-define’ India’s bilateral relations with each of its neighbours.
This move caught many International relations observers by surprise and since then, PM Modi’s personalised approach in conducting foreign policy has been seen as applaudable numerous times since 2014. In his last term, there were many ‘hits’ and ‘misses’, especially in the South Asian region – the biggest disappointments being Pakistan and China, yet again. To PM Modi’s credit, he tried to extend a hand of friendship to Pakistan in the beginning of his Prime Ministerial tenure, when he surprised everyone by making a stopover at Pakistan to meet his counterpart, Nawaz Sharif.
However, with the attacks at Uri, Pathankot, Gurdaspur and Pulwama, the bilateral relations between the two nations sunk to new lows. The reason for the same is that it is necessary to look back at Modi government’s South Asia policy in its first tenure, to understand and frame the Modi government 2.0’s policy in South Asia better. Many scholars of international relations and diplomacy argue that Modi’s tenure as Prime Minister since 2014, saw India’s old-time partners like Nepal, Sri Lanka and Maldives drift away from India as they chose to shift towards China.
China has proven to be a thorn in India’s neck because it aims to become the dominant power in South Asia. With the Doklam crisis in 2017, followed by informal Wuhan talks between the two nations, Sino-Indian relations have seen a rollercoaster ride. To achieve its ambition of domination, China has been putting great efforts in terms of providing economic assistance, as well as Foreign Direct Investments in almost all of India’s neighbouring nations. India is heavily outmatched by China’s potential in luring these nations who see that they don’t have anything to lose if they side with China. Also, since the Modi government is focusing more on the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) group of countries over the last couple of years, SAARC has, for a considerable period taken a back seat in India’s foreign policy settings. The primary reason again is Pakistan, with whom India doesn’t want to extend its hands of cooperation, neither bilaterally nor on a regional footing, until Pakistan stops using terror as an instrument of state policy against India.
Nothing has fundamentally changed in the MODI 2.0 government vis-à-vis its South Asia policy, as compared to MODI 1.0. However, the outbreak of COVID-19 has seen an initiation of the COVID-Diplomacy by Narendra Modi, so that South Asia as a region could come together in this unprecedented time of crisis. Once the Coronavirus crisis gets over and the world gets back on its feet, the opportunities and threats New Delhi would face in dealing with all of its neighbours, would be unraveled. COVID-19 has the ability to change the trajectory of India’s South Asia policy, simply because post-COVID-19, a new world order is likely to emerge.
Presently, India is importing protective equipment and testing kits of COVID-19 from China. This is despite the fact that many in India, including those who support the ruling BJP, believe that China is to blame for the spread of the Coronavirus, a global catastrophe that has taken almost two hundred thousand lives globally. However, on a diplomatic front, 2020 marks 70 years of bilateral relationship between the two countries, India and China. India’s policy in South Asia since independence has been to act as a fulcrum and a backbone for the South Asian region, because India shares its borders with most of the countries in the region.
Due to its geographic location, India’s position has always been in advantageous, but Modi’s South Asia policy would depend heavily on India’s economic prowess in the future, especially since it was already in a bad shape even before the arrival of COVID-19. What the Coronavirus national lockdown has done is to deliver a big punch on the face of the already-hurt Indian economy. At this juncture, China appears to be much more economically powerful than India to be in a position to medically help the other countries in the region. Also, China wants to play the role of a hegemon in South Asia, and therefore to fulfill its long-time ambitions, it would be willing to provide huge economic packages to almost all Indian neighbours, which frankly, India cannot afford to do. Everything right now depends on how long the lockdown in India goes on, and when things would start to go back to normal. Until then, the picture of an India with a MODI 2.0 would remain unclear in the South Asian narrative.
