Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first meetings with President Donald Trump in Washington next week could reveal whether India will become an American military ally in all but name.
Trump approved the sale of $2 billion worth of surveillance drones to India ahead of the visit, making it a rare country receiving weapons equivalent to those supplied to NATO allies.
Modi is very keen to acquire weapons and advanced transfers of defense technologies to India to deter China. He also wants Trump to treat its archenemy Pakistan as a state sponsoring terrorism even if that is not openly stated to the world.
Earlier this week Lockheed Martin said the classic F-16, one of the world’s best-known warplanes, could be built in India in partnership with industrial group Tata. If all goes well, India would become the manufacturing and export base for all F-16s worldwide.
The main competitor for a large order from India’s Air Force is the Gripen fighter manufactured by Saab of Sweden. It is likely that positive chemistry between Modi and Trump would sway the $12 billion deal towards Lockheed Martin.
The Trump administration seems to be laying out the red carpet for Modi. He will be the first foreign visitor to dine with Trump at the White House after five hours of talks and a reception. Modi’s visit will be lower key than that of China’s Xi Jinping to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort but the two men and their two countries could knit a tighter weave.
However, many commenters are overstating the similarities between Modi and Trump as nationalist strongmen. The similarities are misleading.
Trump is a self-declared disruptor but does not seem to think through the implications of his ideas. He disdains politics, politicians and bureaucrats because his only experience is as a businessman who spent years courting notoriety through televised showmanship.
With serendipity, he came upon sound bites like “Make America great again” that galvanized the most parochial and angry Americans. He has sketchy notions about America’s systems of governance and legislature. He has no long-nurtured political capital. Those angry people could turn against him just as quickly as they favored him if he is slow to mature as a politician.
Modi is different. He is a shrewd politician hardened by the battles and perfidies of securing votes. He is expert at the labyrinths of Indian democracy and a master manipulator of politicians and officials. He is also a rare public administrator familiar with the utility of leading-edge technologies.
He seems to deeply understand that enabling Indians to leapfrog into the 21st century requires embedding new technologies in their daily lives. That would liberate their creative thinking and entrepreneurship, turning them into engines of their own progress.
It might even free them from the blinkers that make voters narrow-minded in their social mores, intolerant in their moral attitudes and bigoted in their religious beliefs.
Yet, like Trump, Modi is a prisoner of his most loyal followers. The fetters on Trump are his dependence on inward-looking voters, who are far removed from the past generations that proudly integrated diverse peoples to build America’s greatness.
Modi’s shackles are his religious loyalists blinkered by their interpretations of what they see as Hinduism. They seem blind to the open-armed embrace of all human and other life recommended by the great minds who bequeathed to them the ancient record of humankind’s search for the meaning of life, known as Vedic literature. That search later found itself abridged into various strands now described as Hinduism and followed by about 80 percent of Indians.
These fervent Modi campaigners are still fighting the last century’s cultural battles. That was when some Indian thinkers strove to restore cultural pride by trying to constrict India’s mostly unregulated beliefs in molds patterned on the hierarchical structures of Christianity. They included founders of RSS, the movement that educated Modi’s formative years and now thinks its own time has finally arrived.
It is trying to use Modi’s dependence on its skills at rallying votes to pressure him to push the entire nation towards its ideas. Its justification is the need to redress humiliations dealt to indigenous Indian beliefs by more than 1500 years of conquests by invading Muslims and Christians.
Trump’s core supporters may be headed to dashed hopes because of his shortcomings as a political statesman. Modi’s loyalists are likely to be disappointed because he is too much of a 21st century leader to let them drag India back into the last century.
That was when religious doctrines, castes and social divides took precedence over the right to life with dignity for the large majority of Indians. He seems to have evolved beyond his past. Hopefully, Trump is evolving too.