The perpetual weak link

IS India a weak link that worries the architects of the Shanghai club and the BRICS group? The question is as urgent today as it ever was, its importance underscored further by a potentially crucial BRICS summit that Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosts later this month. Several factors may be at play to determine if India is indeed a weak link for BRICS. Every country has its core interests and India’s foreign policy today seems to be based on two key factors, one being the calculation as to who or what can best help deliver the core interest of the ruling elite, namely the consolidation of a majoritarian state, the Hindu rashtra.

It’s all too well known that the financial foundations of Hindutva lie in the West, a fact that became even more obvious with the recent visit by the head of the RSS to the US and Canada. Russia and China have scant interest in the ruling party’s ideology as long as it does not disturb the political furniture the two groups have worked hard to set up. The West, too, couldn’t care less about the dominant worldview of a country as long as it is a trusted ally. A classic indication here is the silent acceptance of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.

When Western human rights groups mount pressure on India over its treatment of religious and ethnic minorities, it’s more of a leverage to extract political outcomes than a pursuit of moral tenets. A second factor in framing foreign policy is the interest of major business houses aligned with the Modi government. A typical episode showed India’s vulnerability in the Adani affair in the US. The political quid pro quo to get relief in the corruption case would be hard to assess, but it would be equally hard to ignore.

In the middle of this equation, a nagging frustration stalks Narendra Modi’s battle to project himself to the world as a visionary from India, most recently in the image of Mahatma Gandhi and Gautam Buddha. Last week, Modi cast himself in the role of the two visionaries he cited to Vladimir Putin in Bishkek, telling the Russian leader to terminate the war in Ukraine so that the world could live in peace and prosperity. Putin is always inclined to be patient with India given the importance he attaches to New Delhi’s membership of the Shanghai club and the BRICS orbit amid the groups’ sharpening battle with the US dollar and Donald Trump’s revulsion at a multipolar world, which much of Asia, Africa and Latin America seeks.

A nagging frustration stalks Narendra Modi’s battle to project himself to the world as a visionary from India.

Putin heard out Modi, eyes lowered and feet tapping in lieu of rudely looking at his wristwatch. Donald Trump, too, wants Russia to terminate the war as does Europe, preferably by weakening Moscow and, if possible, by delivering a strategic defeat. They pine for the elusive outcome without leaning on any moral principles, though. To them, as for much of the world, wars are politics by other means.

What is less discussed in the Indian media is the fact that the war between Russia and Ukraine was set off by the US and its European satellites, which had ignored Putin’s red lines and sought to plant Nato’s battle formations right on Russia’s borders. The war became imminent when the West staged a colour revolution to oust a Russia-friendly government in Kiev and installed one that would eventually lead to Volodymyr Zelensky’s elevation as the West’s costly catspaw.

Modi’s message of peace in elliptical geometry — “move from unending war to end of war” — did not go unnoticed by those who witnessed India’s bruising conflict with Pakistan in May last year. Initiated as revenge for an unconscionable terror attack on Hindu tourists in Pahalgam, the war was curiously suspended with Trump’s self-proclaimed intervention but not closed. War or no war, hostility to Pakistan remains a major input in the consolidation of Hindutva.

In other words, the tensions with nuclear-armed Pakistan and India could go kinetic at the time of nuclear-armed India’s choosing, Buddha’s and Gandhi’s moral tenets notwithstanding. Both revered legends were the eminences grises in the Nehruvian concept of the modern welfare state he wanted India to become. And Nehru’s idealism flowed equally from his belief in the Soviet system of a command economy as the one best suited to alleviate mass poverty created and deepened by the colonial plunder of India. Mao’s China, too, was moving along the path Nehru extolled, except that Nehru placed his quest in the framework of democracy. A similar path was followed by Deng Xiaoping’s economic liberalisation and Xi Jinping’s market consolidation, with neither leader loosening the grip on the command economy. “Horse racing will continue, stocks will continue to be traded, and dancing will continue,” Deng prophesied with the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997.

Nehru’s fear of untethered capitalism sprang from his astute assessment that a system instinctively rooted in private profit was unworthy of trust for the impoverished masses. How true his instinct was can be glimpsed from the 800 million Indians on the food dole despite four decades of a World Bank- and IMF-prescribed free-market system.

Modi’s desperation to be deemed a worthy heir to his iconic compatriots relies on his near-total control of the media. The frustration with failing to fit into the oversized shoes of Jawaharlal Nehru as statesman and prime minister, respected and admired widely at home and abroad, however, is particularly galling. The self-advertised image as a culturally inclusive leader banks on the goodwill earned by India’s freedom heroes, none of whom came from the Hindutva fold.

Modi’s dual personality charge is occasionally reflected in his angry frown at home together with a free flow of invectives hurled at opponents and the ready laughter and embraces abroad. China and Russia would not be too worried by Modi’s dual personalities. What might perhaps concern them more is Hindutva’s deeply fraught investment in the West.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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Published in Dawn, September 8th, 2026