[icopyright one button toolbar]
Barack Obama’s presence at India’s Republic Day ceremonies today, the first for a US President, could be the start of something new and big enough to build a legacy for him and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Modi’s invitation to Obama as chief guest was a bold political gesture aimed at his opponents in India. Previous governments have avoided inviting American Presidents because of hostility from the left wing, which loudly steered Indian opinion until Modi’s electoral victory trounced its power base in May 2014.
For Obama, winning over Indians may not be as easy as leading the West because of the very dissimilar cultural underpinnings, including a different worldview, but Obama’s “audacity of hope” could help since Modi, too, is audacious and hopeful.
For the first time, there is a genuine opportunity for Obama and western democracies to make a difference in India and possibly set the world order on a less jittery course. But Indians are individualists because of their civilizational beliefs. They do not take kindly to guidance from others and Modi, in particular, is steeped in philosophies centered on persistent hard work, self-reliance, self-discipline and being solely responsible for one’s actions.
Overall, Modi is a right-leaning nationalist who supports “humane” capitalism and recognizes that Indian democracy should lean westwards for the sake of its own resilience and economic success. His pivot towards Russia, China and the east is good strategy for such a large and argumentative nation but how far it proceeds depends on Washington’s esteem for his beloved India, warts and all.
India lives in a very tricky neighborhood marked by an unstable nuclear-armed Pakistan and theocrats in Iran who might be covertly building nuclear weapons capacity. In the north lies China, run by ruthless authoritarians apparently nostalgic for ancient glory when it was a self-styled middle kingdom of “superior civilization” that expected tribute from all foreign powers.
Beyond lies Russia, which Indians thought was a mainly European country seeking respect from its EU peers, but is now orchestrating a new Cool War with Europe despite the risk of becoming a supplicant for money at China’s door.
For more than 67 years after emergence as a modern nation state, India sat on the fence without unambiguously choosing its side in world politics. To this day, it is undecided on whether to be a committed member of the family of liberal democracies, including their vision of the current US-led world order, or stand aside on its own path. Obama could help to coax India off the fence.
Time is now running out. The fence upon which India was vacillating has become a tightrope buffeted perilously by the current state of world affairs and the evident dangers of nuclear proliferation. There is a growing tussle between the model of world order based on liberal democracy, human rights protection and rule of law on the one hand and authoritarian governance and kleptocracy with nuclear ambitions on the other.
Worse, a hot war is growing between the foundational ethos of liberal democracies and Islamist totalitarianism. The growing strength of Islamist terrorism is an existential threat to India because religious tolerance is indispensable for its governance.
The unpredictable turbulence of economic globalization is worsening the environment for good governance. Pitfalls are multiplying because of US-European tensions with Vladimir Putin’s ambitious Russia, deep suspicion of Xi Jinping’s assertive China, and implacable Islamist terrorism infesting huge territories from the Pacific to the Atlantic — in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
Radical Islam, the genitor of Islamist terrorism, is steadily ousting moderate political Islam and posing direct threats to India by turning Pakistan and Afghanistan into volatile incubators of messianic totalitarianism. Moderate Islam’s weakness is allowing free reign to radical Islam’s untrue claim that Muslims everywhere should reject liberal democracy because it is not compatible with their religion’s ethos.
In effect, a small cult of self-deceiving extremists obsessed with blind terrorism has taken the Muslim religion hostage to provoke war with “non-believers”. Ominously, the puppeteers of those terrorists are now acquiring territory in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in addition to Syria, Iraq and parts of Africa.
Since inception on 15 August 1947, modern India chose to be a democracy and sovereign Republic with a Constitution that borrowed from the best-known practices of secularity, tolerance and fair governance. At present, it is celebrated as the world’s largest democracy and a beacon for authoritarian developing countries and emerging economies. All Indians live in freedom without fear of the midnight knock. Over 800 million vote every five years in national elections and trudge resolutely to ballot boxes several times each year in state, province, district, city and village elections.
Remarkably, voter devotion continues to deepen although India is far from being a liberal democracy as practiced in the US and Europe. Most citizens do not have access to sufficient food, health, education and justice. Religious tensions continue mainly among Hindus (81%) and Muslims (14%), but can also involve Christians (3%) and Sikhs (2%).
Despite undeniable complexities stemming from India’s peculiarities, Western democracies would gain precious security benefits by making common cause with Indians for the longer term. The love of Indians for democratic freedoms is a necessary bulwark in the new global war against totalitarian terrorists trying to dethrone democracy as a universally applicable wellspring of world governance. Preventing Islamist terrorist also requires partnerships of trust among democracies under attack, including intelligence gathering and intelligence sharing.
The three Paris terrorists were hard-to-detect lone wolves using military precision for murder. India has the world’s largest Muslim minority at 170 million and almost all reject the terrorist version of their religion. But there may be many undetectable homegrown Islamist lone wolves who must be prevented from subverting the freedoms found only in a democracy.