After being sworn in as prime minister for the third consecutive time, Narendra Modi has continued with his spree of foreign travel. He has already been to Italy, Russia, Austria, Poland, Ukraine, Brunei, Singapore and the United States of America. More sojourns are scheduled — for Laos, Samoa, Russia, Azerbaijan and Brazil — in the coming weeks. He fancies these foreign jaunts where he is welcomed by foreign leaders, gets to hug them, address the curated crowd of his supporters among the local Indian diaspora, and garner some nice pictures and choreographed videos to be posted on social media. The corporate-owned big media reports fawningly on the trivia around these visits, doing its best to create an impression of Modi as an iconic world leader.
In the past decade under Modi, the reality has been rather different. Take the case of his recent trip to Russia. The sole outcome highlighted by Indian officials after his meeting with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was the return of young Indian men fighting along with Russians on the Ukraine front. “Putin backs down over Modi’s mercenary demand” and “Putin accepts PM Modi’s request to release Indian military recruits on Russia-Ukraine warfront” proclaimed the breathless headlines. Three months later, nearly half of the 91 Indians remain trapped in Russia. The US was also not happy with Modi’s Moscow visit as it coincided with the NATO summit. A few days back, we witnessed the rather ignominious footage, released by Russian television, of the national security adviser, Ajit Doval, sitting on the edge of his chair like a supplicant, briefing an imperious Putin about all that transpired on Modi’s trip to Ukraine.
The purpose of Modi’s visit to Kyiv, six weeks after hugging Putin, has still not been explained by the Indian government. If it was meant to establish India as a credible peacemaker or negotiator between the two warring countries, the trip was an abysmal failure. Speaking with Indian journalists, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, ripped apart Modi even before he had left the country. In a curt message delivered in harsh language, Zelensky made it known that Kyiv considers India an enabler of Putin’s war effort. New Delhi’s response to the critical statements was timid with no public rebuttal from the government. The Ukrainian president met Modi again in New York but a day later, without naming anyone, said in his address to the United Nations General Assembly, “Maybe somebody wants a Nobel Prize for their political biography for [a] frozen truce instead of real peace, but the only prizes Putin will give you in return are more suffering and disasters.”
During his recent address to the Indian diaspora in New York, Modi claimed that after his self-evident quip, “this is not an era of war”, to Putin in 2022, the severity and the seriousness of the conflict were understood by everyone. The boast makes little sense but exaggeration and embellishment are the currency Modi deals in while addressing gullible audiences. His visit was about the summit of Quad leaders which was supposed to happen in New Delhi this year. But the foreign leaders didn’t agree with Modi’s desire to have them all during the Republic Day celebrations just before the general election. On his way out, President Joe Biden hosted the summit that had a lot of words in the joint statement but was limited in substance. It couldn't even mention China by name. The hype around the outcomes was created by the usual clutch of American think-tankers and their friends in Indian media who failed to note that a week earlier, speaking at a think-tank event, the US deputy secretary of state, Richard Verma, said that India is the only Quad member opposed to the securitisation of the grouping.
An unusual surprise during Modi’s New York visit was the absence of Doval in his entourage. By all accounts, this was the first time that the NSA had not travelled with Modi. During Manmohan Singh’s tenure, the only time his NSA didn’t accompany the prime minister abroad was when the NSA was unwell. Government sources said that Doval had stayed behind because of the Jammu and Kashmir elections, an unlikely story given that the Union home minister, Amit Shah, has the primary responsibility for ensuring law and order in the Union territory and the Election Commission conducts the polls. It is more likely that Doval wanted to avoid being presented with a court summons stemming from the lawsuit filed by the Khalistan advocate, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, in New York against Doval and the former RAW chief, Samant Goel, for an alleged assassination plot against Sikh extremists in the US. The premise gains credence because hours before Modi was to land in New York, the White House met with a group of Sikh activists whom the Modi government considers to be Khalistan sympathisers. The White House has also assured them "protection from any transnational aggression on its soil". This was the first time ever that the White House has officially engaged with such groups and the timing of the meeting did raise questions about the consideration it had for Modi and Doval.
Over the past decade, Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party have successfully sold his so-called foreign policy achievements to his domestic support base. The claim belies the fact about the Chinese ingress into Ladakh where since 2020 Indian soldiers have lost access to 26 of the 65 patrolling points on the border. Beijing now wants its patrols to go to areas in Arunachal Pradesh that have been in Indian control for decades. Violence has expanded into the Jammu region of Jammu and Kashmir and the officials continue to blame Pakistan without realising that it is an indictment of Modi’s Pakistan policy. Despite his surprise visit to Nawaz Sharif, his invitation to the ISI to visit the Pathankot airbase, the surgical strike or the Balakot airstrike, nothing has altered Pakistan’s calculations. The situation is no better with other South Asian countries. India’s unpopularity in Bangladesh is not a secret anymore. The Maldives elected a president who pushed Indian soldiers out of the archipelago and signed a defence agreement with China. Sri Lanka now has a Left-leaning leader whose party has been historically opposed to India. India’s reputation in Nepal remains in tatters while the Modi government’s support to the military junta in Myanmar and the Taliban in Afghanistan has led to India losing its traditional constituencies of support in these countries.
In the third term, a loss of parliamentary majority for the BJP has made things tougher for Modi. His government is now identified with numerous U-turns on major issues succumbing to pressure from the Opposition parties. The domestic situation is tough; his party is likely to be humiliated in the upcoming Haryana polls and is not contesting 28 seats in Kashmir. The civil society protests from Ladakh are on their way to Delhi. The deteriorating situation in Manipur, a state Modi has not visited, remains an albatross around his neck. Unemployment and price rise remain high, farmers, workers and aspiring soldiers are angry with his policies, while infrastructure collapse has become a regular occurrence.
Confronted with such grave domestic challenges, most of them of his own making, Modi is increasingly turning towards foreign lands. His uncritical supporters in the Indian diaspora may comfort him with the adulation and the adoration he craves but unless he can deal with the numerous internal crises India is engulfed with, these foreign sojourns will be fruitless. Modi’s problems are domestic; the answers will not come from curated pictures and choreographed clips in foreign lands.
Sushant Singh is lecturer at Yale University
