Congress, Modi, Team India

The Congress' support to critical elements of the Modi govt's foreign policy through Manmohan and Rahul's comments marks significant change for the better

As New Delhi welcomed streams of international delegations and global leaders, from Rishi Sunak and Sheikh Hasina Wazed to Joe Biden and many others, in a power procession unprecedented for India, two headline points emerged from an unexpected direction: The principal Opposition.

One, the interview with former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the front page of The Indian Express, and, two, the statements from Rahul Gandhi speaking with the media in Brussels.

Dr Singh said nothing that was critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government. While taking an optimistic view of India’s direction, he said it might do better in an environment of social harmony. Mr Gandhi was more direct, accusing the government of presiding over democratic backsliding in India.

Both, however, were forthright in their view that on Russia and Ukraine, the Modi government had adopted the correct approach and had their backing. Mr Gandhi went a step further to say that even an Opposition government would have followed broadly the same policy.

This isn’t entirely new to Indian politics. On some of the most critical issues of foreign and strategic policy, the ruling establishment and the main Opposition have generally agreed in the past. Lately, however, our politics has been so broken and polarised that even what would have been perfectly normal words of solidarity have now become headline-worthy.

Where it started isn’t difficult to find, without the need for any deep archival research. The relationship between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had taken a particularly bitter turn post-Vajpayee.

During the Advani era, niceties or “honour among the thieves”, whatever you choose to call it, had dissolved into pure vitriol. Besides ruining the national discourse, it was also corrosive to the larger national interest. Here are three good examples, two purely related to foreign policy, and one on economics but with wider implications. Consider these:

Between 2005 and 2008, the Indo-US nuclear deal. While it would be a reasonable argument that Dr Singh’s United Progressive Alliance was only taking the logical next step in the process started by Vajpayee, the BJP saw it as a significant “surrender”. This perception was so strong that it didn’t hesitate to join hands with its permanent ideological adversaries, the Left, for example, in trying to defeat the government in a confidence vote on the deal.

Sushma Swaraj, then the BJP’s most prominent leader in Parliament, compared the deal to Emperor Jahangir allowing the East India Company to do business in India, which laid the foundations of two and a half centuries of subjugation. “The repercussions of the nuclear deal also may be the same,” she warned.

The BJP similarly blocked the India-Bangladesh boundary deal, which involved the exchange of enclaves deep inside each other’s territory. It was unwilling to see reason, not even that it would serve India’s larger interests deeply to give the Awami League government of Sheikh Hasina a boost, and in the process settle one of its disputed boundaries. Arun Jaitley said: “There should be no compromise with Indian land”.

By that time, Mr Modi had already emerged as his party’s preeminent leader and I had written a National Interest column in August 2013 with the headline “Dear Narendrabhai”, suggesting that he intervene to help conclude the deal in the national interest.

The third example involves allowing foreign direct investment (FDI) in multiple-brand retail. Once again, the BJP was at its shrillest, calling it a destruction of India’s economic freedoms, fretting over the future of the neighbourhood mom-and-pop shops (as they are called in the West), and forcing another Parliament vote that it lost. The reason it wasn’t just economic but of strategic importance is that it is reforms like these that built India into the economic power it is today.

About a decade on, it is instructive to assess where each policy stands. Indo-US strategic ties are far deeper and this government swears so strongly by the nuclear deal that it will most likely work in the direction of resolving the liability issue.

On Bangladesh, settling the borders was among Mr Modi’s earliest achievements and there was zero controversy. And multi-brand retail? Step by step, the restrictions have been removed or diluted. And e-commerce, whether carried out by the global market leader, Amazon, or the many foreign (mostly Chinese and some Japanese) funded startups, is a lesson to those in the BJP who forced that second Parliament showdown, which they lost.

If you are the more sceptical type, you might argue that the Congress taking this view on the Modi government’s Ukraine-Russia policy should be no surprise, pleasant or not, because it fits in with their multi-generation pro-Soviet, anti-Western (read America) upbringing.

The fact, however, is that the Congress, out of power for the 10th year now, had overseen the big moves with the US, repositioning India decisively on the Western side. The aggressive rise of China has now made it easier for the BJP.

While it is correct that many in the Congress were deeply suspicious of Dr Singh’s policy, even angry, they put up with it. By this 10th year of Mr Modi’s rule, we haven’t seen the Congress attack him on the US policy, the deepening strategic partnership and dramatic diversification in the sourcing of weaponry, away from Russia.

To understand how significant a shift this is in our national politics, we need to look back exactly 40 years. In early March 1983, Indira Gandhi hosted the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit and marked it as her finest foreign affairs hour after, of course, the liberation of Bangladesh. Fidel Castro hugging Mrs Gandhi was the highlight image of that era. Indian political and policy elites still nurtured and loved the pretence of being a “revolutionary” nation of some kind.

Even subsequently, as going became tough for him in the second half of his tenure, when a beleaguered Rajiv Gandhi thundered “naani yaad dila denge” (teach them such a tough lesson they’d seek refuge in their grandmothers’ laps) he wasn’t talking about the Soviet Union or China. America was still the Satan.

The 40 years — from the NAM summit to this G20 with Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Rishi Sunak bilaterals now — mark India’s march from a fake non-alignment to a mostly transactional policy autonomy.

When P V Narasimha Rao took the first hesitant steps of change, he ran into a wall from both his party and the BJP. We must note that if he hadn’t reformed the economy, India would not have acquired this global stature.

Our growth, the size of our economy and our improving demographics are our greatest strategic assets. All of it is a good case study in what financial markets players would describe as the power of compounding. Again, this baton has been carried equally keenly by every subsequent runner in this relay: Vajpayee, Dr Singh and now Mr Modi.

The fundamental shift in India’s worldview owes itself to the fact that its competing political forces collaborated in the national interest. The Congress now backing the Modi government on Ukraine-Russia is just another of those moments that make us feel better about our mostly broken politics.

By special arrangement with ThePrint