Mr Modi’s third term

By 4 June, Narendra Modi will almost certainly be elected for his third five-year term as India’s Prime minister. 

The increasing centrality of India to Australia’ s world view is now a given. It is less certain that managing our future dealings with India will be straightforward. 

There are three broad – not mutually exclusive – perspectives in the West on Modi’s India. 

The first is of a country that the West wants and needs. It has the world’s largest population and fifth largest economy. By 2030 or so, that economy will be in third place. It’s GDP is projected to grow at close to 8% this year. 

Modi is widely popular, astute, ascetic and hard working. In his time, India has made enormous strides in improving its infrastructure, in the systems by which it delivers welfare and in reducing the sea of impedimenta for which the Indian bureaucracy is renowned. 

We and our Western friends also share with India a large measure of China-driven strategic congruence, which has inter alia led to a bevy of security related exercises and exchanges. We also now have the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad). The raison d’etre of that body is security, although it is not billed as such. 

A second perspective is one with which much of the West is uncomfortable. 

Modi has changed India from a chaotic, if functioning, liberal democracy – premised on a strong secular tradition since the days of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru – into a majoritarian elective autocracy. 

The BJP government’s ideological sustenance is drawn from the tenets of the century old Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing Hindu organisation to which Modi owes much of his early political education. 

The RSS’s concept of governance involves controls by the government of key institutions such as the media, the judiciary and the election commission. 

India’s electoral machinery still functions reasonably fairly. But the other pillars of an effective democratic system, including individual rights, an independent judiciary and freedom of expression, have been eroded. For example, the World Press Freedom Index ranks India 161 out of 180 countries and jurisdictions on the level of media freedom. 

Crucially, the sometimes uneasy but nonetheless effective compact that has existed between Hindu and Muslim since India’s traumatic birth as an independent nation in 1947 is in jeopardy. 

Modi’s government largely ignores the aspirations of Muslims and other minorities. It removed the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, formerly the only Muslim majority state in India. It has also pushed a concept of a national register of citizens which has been widely criticised as biased against Muslim refugees in India. 

The consecration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya on 22 January was the most recent example of the trend under Mr Modi towards a Hindu supremacist India. 

Many Hindus regard Ayodhya as the birthplace of the Hindu God Ram. It was also the site of a 16th century mosque built at the beginning of Mughal rule, and, Hindus believe, on the ruins of a Hindu Temple. In 1992, the mosque was destroyed by Hindu hardliners. This action sparked violence resulting in about 2000 deaths. 

The third perspective on Modi’s India – brought home by India’s refusal to take issue with, or join, a sanctions regime against Russia over Ukraine – is that while Indian foreign policy may have elements in common with much of the West, particularly on China, its external outlook is driven almost wholly by its interests as it defines them rather than by shared concepts of global order. 

This is not too different to the time of Nehru and his successors. 

However, these days foreign policy has also been harnessed by Modi and his outstanding foreign minister, Jaishankar, as a means of enhancing Modi’s domestic appeal. 

Modi is successfully portrayed as being courted by the West, while standing up to it; as a leader of the Global South; and as maintaining a positive and economically beneficial relationship with Russia. In the process, Modi has made Indians at home and abroad feel good about themselves. 

What does all this herald for us as Modi enters his third term? 

Most of the indications are that India’s economic outlook is good, despite some reservations such as a tendency towards protectionism, relatively low domestic and foreign investment, and government favouritism towards some big business players. That should suit us. 

However, aspects of Modi’s broader Hindutva policies leave cause for concern. 

While major nationwide disturbances along confessional lines resulting from government policy are unlikely, history shows they cannot be excluded. 

Moreover, the BJP’s hold on the country is most pronounced in the north. It has much less clout in the southern states and West Bengal where regional parties are dominant. 

As the central BJP government has sought to strengthen its hold on aspects of governance that previously have fallen to, or were shared with, the states, resentment of the BJP in the south has increased. 

This issue could become vexed in 2026 when a census will be held after which a reallocation of seats in the federal parliament is scheduled. This is supposed to be based on population, which is growing much faster in the north. 

When the question last came up in 2001, the BJP government (then in coalition) accepted the argument of the southern states that the allocation of seats should not depend only on population and no reallocation was made. 

A BJP with its own majority under Modi is much less likely than in 2001 to give ground on such a crucial issue. 

For all Modi’s and Jaishankar’s foreign policy smarts, on the external front a risk for India is that it could go too far too fast in its current authoritarian direction. This could stimulate domestic resistance in the West and make management of its relations with India harder to handle. 

There is also some possibility that the hubris that marked India’s recent assassination of a Sikh separatist in Canada – and attempt to do the same in the United States – could impact on the judgement with which it pursues its external aims. 

And while strategic alignments between liberal and illiberal governments are ubiquitous, management of alignments is a great deal easier when the parties involved have democratic systems in common. 

Modi and the BJP have never sought to disguise their objectives, although they have been as skillful as any political group at spinning their messages. 

The longer strong leaders are in power, the more they tend to double down on their fundamental political beliefs and objectives. Modi will be no exception. It would be a tragedy – one not without adverse implications for the West – if India’s long struggle for internal harmony were now to founder on the rocks of sectarian and regional divisions. 

Jawaharlal Nehru allegedly had a book of verses by the American poet Robert Frost at his bedside. The story is that he had underlined the famous words 'but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep'. 

After re-election, Modi will have his own promises to keep. They will not be akin to what Nehru had in mind. This will be a pity. 

John McCarthy is a Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Melbourne and a senior advisor to Asialink. He was High Commissioner to India from 2004 to 2009 and ambassador to numerous other countries.