Op-Ed: Nationalism Isn’t Driving India's Knife-Edge Foreign Policy
Image Credit: Twisted Wizard IS the BOSS, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
On a sweltering August day in 2014, newly-anointed Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed his country of 1.1 billion people for the first time. He paid homage to the “Indian Dream,” where “[his] poor family…got the opportunity to pay its respects to the Tricolour of India at the Red Fort [in Delhi].” The child of a tea vendor who methodically worked his way through party politics, the Prime Minister painted his party’s vision of a unified, diverse, and opportunity-rich India, a manifestation of the rich cultural ideals of the Vedic period of 2,000 years ago.
Since that day, the Modi government has made no secret of its vision for India: a highly developed, confident nation openly embracing its rich Hindu culture. In contrast to American secularism, where a strong separation of church and state exists, the Indian government is tasked with facilitating the religious beliefs of all its citizens. This manifests in the form of providing government services to different religious groups, such as providing subsidized hajj (ritual pilgrimage to Mecca) for Muslims — a program that was later ended under Modi. In the Prime Minister’s eyes, India neglected its majority Hindu population (79.8% per the 2011 census) in favor of minority appeasement (most significantly Indian Muslims, who form 14.2% of the population).
Over the past decade, Modi’s government has directly supported Hindu temples, hosted International Yoga Days, and even gone as far as to found a ministry of Ayush, or traditional Hindu medicine. Modi’s government has also been accused of promoting majoritarian politics and stifling dissent by enforcing draconian Colonial-era provisions like the Sedition Act of 1870 in service of his consolidation of power in the central government.
Upon cursory examination, the Modi government’s actions merely reflect a more pro-Hindu, centralized approach to governance, yet its actions belie a concerted effort at reframing India’s national identity. Particularly, Modi maintains ties to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing, paramilitary organization. The RSS is dedicated to the ideal that India is a fundamentally Hindu country and that India’s values should be aligned with orthodox Hinduism. The Modi government has acted consistently with the RSS’ policy priorities, opposing the legalization of same-sex marriages and revoking the constitutional autonomy of the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir.
However, despite a distinct shift in domestic policy, no such “India First” nationalism or promotion of Hindu ideals has been seen in the nation’s foreign policy. When compared to the Trump Administration’s “America First” doctrine, the Modi government does not display an ideological framework for conducting foreign relations. Rather, it appears to be motivated by a desire to maintain the status quo, non-alignment, while furthering the use of force projection to further a more visible role on the world stage.
Since Indian independence in 1948, the dominant foreign policy doctrine has been the pursuit of “nonalignment”: eschewing bloc politics in favor of a tightrope balancing act between the great powers (then, the U.S. and Soviet Union). After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, India rapidly pursued trade and defense partnerships with the U.S. This included becoming the only non-party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty allowed to trade nuclear materials and joining the “Quad,” an international security dialogue, to promote American influence in the Pacific.
Under the Modi government, however, India has returned to balancing between the emergence of two new power blocs: the U.S.-led Western order, and Russia. This was clear vis-à-vis Ukraine: on account of Russian support against American military actions in the Pacific Ocean during the Cold War, India shirked American exhortations and continued to consume Russian oil despite heavy sanctions, abiding with its policy of continuing funding the war effort. However, Modi also indicated his support for a peaceful outcome in the conflict, meeting with Ukrainian President Zelensky numerous times.
Modi’s actions with respect to the conflict alone are enough to dispel any notion that his government’s foreign policy is motivated by Hindu nationalism. The “dog eat dog,” power politics of hindutva (i.e., Hindu nationalism) would have advocated for Russian acquisition of Ukrainian territory, perceiving Ukraine (and Western powers) as proponents of a liberal Western ideology bent on the suppression of traditional Indian (i.e., Hindu) values and social norms. While both the Prime Minister and almost all the prominent members of his party favorably view a return to these “traditional values,” the government evidently sees no need to jeopardize its rapid economic growth and international goodwill for the sake of ideological purity.
There is no greater example of the Modi government’s clear-eyed pragmatism than its Middle East policy. While initially steadfastly pro-Palestine on human rights grounds, India has now shifted to be firmly in the Israeli camp. To a certain extent, this can be attributed to the rise of Hindutva thought in political circles: determined to reclaim Hindu culture from centuries of perceived Islamic suppression, policymakers see no humanitarian crisis, but rather an opportunity for India to weaken Islamic influence and promote its interests in the region.
Despite the irredentist strategizing of Delhi policy wonks, the Modi government has demonstrated the premium it places on moral prestige regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict. While the Prime Minister almost immediately offered support to Israel, his government has also contributed significant amounts of humanitarian aid to Gaza. The purpose of provisioning aid can be seen as two-fold: first, to present an image of a prosperous, generous India, able to contribute millions of dollars of aid, and second, to counterbalance its vociferous support of Israel to maintain the support of Gulf allies.
Despite a sympathetic central government and a highly supportive public, the Indian government under Narendra Modi has repeatedly proven its unwillingness to overtly litigate past harms on the world stage, instead favoring a pragmatic, humanitarian foreign policy underpinned by the nonalignment doctrine of decades ago.