Why it still matters what the West thinks of Modi’s India
4 min read . Updated: 12 Mar 2023, 11:17 PM IST
PremiumAs recently as 10 years ago, there were signs that Modi was concerned by what the Western media thought of him.
Let us say, you have to take on Narendra Modi and you need a bigger political force than him for this, whom will you call? Which brings us to why, a few days ago in London, Rahul Gandhi complained about the demise of India’s democracy. He was doing what many disenchanted Indian activists before him have attempted—campaigning to make the West a counterweight to Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Can the West be that?
Seeking external influence to neutralize a local force is not an esoteric tactic. Even ordinary people use it all the time—disenchanted with their primary oppressor, they try to align with a bigger bully.
In the time of street thugs, loyalty was the protection money people paid their thugs. When the thugs were not good enough to protect, people shifted allegiance to a bigger thug. That is how the age of thugs may have ended—when bullies could not protect people from more formidable forces and people sought out more useful oppressors. The mechanism is the same even today. People pay allegiance to a person, belief, organization or an ideological bloc, but if they are not happy with what they get out of their loyalty, they try to align with an equal or bigger force.
The same tactic was at the heart of B.R. Ambedkar’s exhortation to Dalits to abandon the very source of casteism, the Hindu religion, and shift allegiance to Buddhism. This is also why many Dalit intellectuals have glorified the English language and dismissed Hindi. One Dalit activist even attempted to build a temple to Goddess English. Writers and filmmakers who have been ignored by the Indian intellectual establishment routinely try reaching out to the West, where the acclaim industry is more influential. In fact, the value of intellectual acclaim itself is that it is a counterweight to capitalism. And the humanitarian movement in any nation is, one way or another, a part of the global Western counterweight to local strongmen.
Rahul Gandhi did not exactly “address the British parliament" as some of the Indian media reported; he spoke in one of the rooms there, to about 90 people, among whom there were some British parliamentarians. He told them that Modi’s government was “stifling" and that being a member of parliament in India was “quite rough" these days.
Before that, in a chat hosted by a think-tank, he said the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, widely regarded as the mother ship of the BJP, was a “fundamentalist, fascist organisation." “You can call it a secret society," he said, “It’s built along the lines of the Muslim Brotherhood and the idea is to use the democratic contest to come to power and then subvert the democratic contest afterwards." A common message in all his chats was that except for the fact that elections are held, India is not a true democracy anymore. He also claimed his phone was bugged by the Indian government, and that India “has already been invaded" by China. Once, he stated that Europe and the US were not doing enough “to restore democracy in India" as they profited from trade with India.
Rahul Gandhi may believe, rightly, that Indian democratic institutions do not favour him anymore. Once, he probably respected these institutions. After all, his party created them. But then, what use is allegiance if the syndicate does not protect you? So he seems keen to reach out to an external force, the West, to exert pressure on Modi to be fair.
Shifting allegiance from one syndicate to another does not guarantee success. For instance, Ambedkar himself faced failure. Most Dalits did not convert. The Hindu religion, a formidable cultural force, largely prevailed by reforming itself. The West was once a major player in the local politics of emerging economies. It still might be in some, but not anymore in India. As recently as 10 years ago, there were signs that Modi was concerned by what the Western media thought of him. Also, Western governments could arm-twist us with economic threats and sanctions. All that has changed. It is possible that Modi has given up on winning the affection of Western media. Also India is too big now for the West to squeeze.
What does India want to be; which country is India’s role model? If you asked the middle-class this 20 years ago, or even at the height of India’s fake love affair with the Soviet Union, the answer would have been “the United States." There was a general ambiguous feeling that the West was, all said and done, good. But as people are more informed and misinformed in the age of information, America and the rest of the West do not have that moral heft anymore.
I do not see how the West can seriously infiltrate the present Indian political system to “restore" fair practices. But there are some potent aspects in the Western moral system that Modi and his BJP may underestimate at their own peril. For instance, the West has a superb monster-creating machine in its liberal media. Take, for instance, the global image of Saddam Hussain, Vladmir Putin and even Donald Trump himself. Modi is already in the cross-hairs of Western media, which is an integral part of the ideological bloc known as the West. Modi’s image there, I feel, is just a level better than Putin-Hussain and in the same category as Tayyip Erdoğan and Jair Bolsonaro. It could get worse.
On crimes against humanity, the West might be hypocritical but its concern is not fake. I believe that the West truly finds clear-cut evil despicable. So there would likely be economic and political consequences to a global perception, which Rahul Gandhi may have contributed to in London, that Modi and the BJP committed such crimes.
Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’