Fresh Winds May Blow Soon

Manmohan Singh and the Government he has only nominally led have frittered away the robust Vajpayee legacy in foreign affairs. If the BJP comes to power with Narendra Modi as Prime Minister, it could bring tectonic, positive changes in the country’s international relations

 In recent weeks, at least two prominent Indian commentators have opined that if Mr Narendra Modi becomes Prime Minister, as is widely expected, his biggest impact will be felt not so much on India’s economic policy but its foreign policy agenda. On April 9, soon after the BJP released its election manifesto, Firstpost editor R Jagannathan observed, “If Modi were to become PM, foreign and security policy could be in for another churn”, and go through a “sea change”. The same day, C Raja Mohan, one of the country’s most respected journalists and foreign policy analysts, wrote in The Indian Express that the “vagueness” in the BJP manifesto should allow Mr Modi “considerable freedom to put his own stamp on India’s foreign policy”. 

The focus on Mr Modi in the foreign policy sphere is interesting, given that the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate does not have a particularly active profile in this regard. Almost all his time as a senior politician has been spent in Gujarat and he has no experience with the processes that guide India’s engagement with the world. To the casual observer, he may, therefore, seem like an untested hand in foreign policy matters, and more so since Mr Modi has focussed only limited attention on the subject during his election campaign. This is not unusual since  foreign policy is hardly a talking point during elections.

But even as Mr Modi holds the cards close to him in this case, comparisons with Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee have already begun. The last BJP Prime Minister, Mr Vajpayee is credited with taking India’s foreign policy to new highs — he tested nuclear weapons that initially led to international sanctions but eventually brought India nuclear legitimacy; he significantly improved the country’s relations with Pakistan despite the process being disrupted by the Kargil conflict; the joint declaration with China that he signed during his landmark trip to the Middle Kingdom in 2003 still forms the basic framework for border dispute talks; and, finally, it was under his leadership that New Delhi shrugged off its Cold War inhibitions and vitalised ties with the US. Indeed, when Mr Vajpayee demitted the Prime Minister’s Office, he left his successor a rich legacy of global engagement.

Unfortunately, Mr Manmohan Singh and the Government he only nominally led frittered away that legacy in this past decade. As the BJP manifesto notes, “The Congress-led UPA has failed to establish enduring friendly and cooperative relations with India’s neighbours. India’s relations with traditional allies have turned cold. India and its neighbours have drifted apart”. In response, the BJP has vowed to “build a strong, self-reliant and self-confident India” that will “regain its rightful place in the comity of nations”.

This has been interpreted by many as indicative of a “muscular” foreign policy under Mr Modi, although what exactly that means is unclear. What can be expected though is that, if Mr Modi takes up the top job, he will be a strong and decisive leader and craft a foreign policy that furthers the country’s “best national interests” (to use a phrase from the manifesto). 

Similarly, analysts have also been talking about what the BJP means when it says that it will “create a web of allies to mutually further our interests”. Does this mean India may shed its non-alignment policies under Mr Modi? This is highly unlikely. In recent years, India has forged a series of strategic partnerships with different countries while still holding onto its strategic autonomy. There is no reason to believe that a Modi-led Government will stray from that path. However, one can expect a greater emphasis on India’s role as an Asian power — particularly in the strengthening of relations with Japan, China and, to a lesser extent, Singapore and South Korea. 

India’s relations with Japan are already on the upswing and will get another big push if Mr Modi comes to power. Japan has been doing a lot of business with Mr Modi’s Gujarat and those experiences will be carried forward to the national level. Also, Mr Modi has a close personal relationship with Mr Shinzo Abe, the staunchly pro-India Prime Minister of Japan. In 2007, during his first term as Prime Minister, Mr Abe gave a warm welcome to Mr Modi in Tokyo; when Mr Modi returned to Japan in 2012, Mr Abe was in the Opposition, but the duo still met; months later in December that year, when Mr Abe returned to power, Mr Modi personally called to congratulate — a noticeable event given that Mr Modi was not a national leader.  Moreover, both men are portrayed as nationalists focussed on the country’s economic resurgence which makes their partnership almost natural.  

As regards China, alarmists have already raised red flags about Mr Modi’s comments, made in Arunachal Pradesh, on protecting India’s territorial integrity. They have been quick to assume that this means India may take on a provocative stance against China, which it can ill-afford, even though the Chinese themselves dismissed the statements as catering to domestic concerns during an election campaign. Also, there is reason enough to assume that under his leadership, India’s relations with China will realise their full potential, especially in trade. Mr Modi has travelled to China four times already and, in 2011, was received in the Great Hall of the People, a landmark event largely ignored by the Indian media.  

The BJP manifesto also says, “Instead of being led by Big Power interests, we will engage proactively on our own with countries in the neighbourhood and beyond.” This again has been interpreted as a snub to the West, particularly the US which finds no mention in the manifesto. But before reading too much into it, let’s not forget that no other country is individually named in the manifesto. Also, given Mr Modi’s reputation as a realist politician, one can be reasonably sure that he will not allow relations between the two countries to deteriorate on his watch. If anything, given Mr Modi’s emphasis on economic ties, one can expect a significant strengthening of trade relations between the two countries which have plateaued in recent years. However, the US’s earlier insult of Mr Modi will remain in the backdrop — so do not be surprised if he drops by Tehran on his way to Washington, DC.

Finally, there has been a lot of hullabaloo over the BJP’s promise to design an “independent strategic nuclear programme” by updating the current doctrine in keeping with the challenges of time. This was being widely seen as the party’s code for junking the ‘no first use’ principle; and Modi-baiters conveniently used this to fuel fears of ‘war-mongering’ by the man commonly described as a ‘Hindu nationalist strongman’ — no matter that there is consensus across India’s strategic community that the NFU needs to be revisited at the earliest.

Their bubble of vacuous commentary burst as soon as BJP president Rajnath Singh put to rest all speculation about the NFU being revised. It remains unclear why Mr Singh made such a definitive statement; the nuclear doctrine is not a major electoral plank — but it is hoped that, if Mr Modi comes to power, he will update India’s nuclear policy, as promised in his party manifesto.

(This op-ed was published in The Pioneer on April 17, 2014)

Decade of Democracy in Kabul

The April 5 presidential election in Afghanistan is a landmark event in that’s country’s political transition. But it is only part of a much longer and larger process and will not change the Afghan political scene overnight, either for the better or worse

Pre-occupied with the Lok Sabha vote at home, there has understandably been only limited focus in India on the landmark election that is coming up in the neighbourhood this weekend. On Saturday, April 5, Afghanistan will be going to the polls to elect itself a new President. This will be the country’s third presidential election after the fall of the Taliban, and its first without incumbent Hamid Karzai in the fray. Since he took charge in 2001, President Karzai has ably shepherded Afghanistan through a tumultuous and challenging decade of national transition but now stands constitutionally debarred from seeking a popular mandate for a third time, thereby leaving the race for the top job wide open.

Moreover, the election will also be played out against the drawdown of Western troops from that country even as the Taliban continue to gain strength — and to that extent, important questions about security and stability loom large. Many worry if Afghanistan will disintegrate into small fiefdoms held by tribal warlords while others fear the return of the Taliban to Kabul. The Taliban have, as expected, promised to disrupt the election which they consider to be an American ploy and some are of the opinion that the April 5 vote will fuel violence and bloodshed that will quickly undo the supposedly fragile gains made in the last decade. Viewed together, it is easy to see how this election can arguably be the single-most important political transition process in Afghanistan since the Bonn Conference.

On the plus side, there is much that seems to be going right. One, there is a high level of public support for the democratic process despite the security concerns. In the past two months, since the candidates began campaigning, they have held large public rallies that have been attended by hundreds. Ordinary Afghans have spent hours standing in lines outside their local election commission offices to register for voting cards and there is reason enough to believe that they will exercise their democratic rights on April 5. Even women are expected to participate in large numbers.

Two, there are as many as eight candidates in the race for President (supported by two vice presidential candidates each) and at least three of them — Mr Abdullah Abdullah, Mr Ashraf Ghani and Mr Zalmai Rassoul — are considered to be in a close fight. Mr Abdullah, a prominent Opposition figure who heads the National Coalition for Afghanistan, was a front-runner in the 2009 election as well but later withdrew from the run-off against President Karzai. Mr Ghani is a technocrat, a former World Bank employee with a doctorate from Columbia University and vast experience in the development sector. His performance in the 2009 election was lacklustre, but this time around, he is expected to put up a tough fight. Mr Rassoul was Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister until October 2013 when he resigned from his position to run for President. Previously, he had also served as National Security Adviser and now enjoys the official support of President Karzai. Overall, the candidates’ profiles offer a good indicator of how the Afghan polity has matured over the years even though President Karzai may still remain the tallest of Afghan politicians.

Three, Afghan authorities have clearly learnt from previous electoral experiences, and especially the two main bodies responsible for the conduct of free and fair elections — the Independent Election Commission and the Independent Electoral Complaints Commission — have taken several steps to rectify past problems. These range from ground-level management details, such as the use of bar codes to track the movement of ballot material, to larger policy issues such as the enactment of electoral laws by Parliament for the first time instead of a Presidential decree, as had been done during the presidential and parliamentary elections in 2004 and 2005 and then in 2009 and 2010 respectively.

But having said all of this, it is also equally important to understand the limitations of the April 5 vote. For this, let us go back through the previous points for a more nuanced view of the situation. In the first case, the popular enthusiasm for democracy notwithstanding, one cannot ignore the fact that the unsavoury electoral experience of 2009 left the Afghan public with a bitter aftertaste. Large-scale ballot rigging tarnished President Karzai’s mandate and it remains unclear to what extent the situation may have improved this time around. Yes, efforts have been made to make the voting system tamper-proof but the Afghan state still simply does not have the massive infrastructure needed to conduct free and fair elections, especially when faced with serious security challenges.

For example, the Afghan Analysts Network has reported that anything between seven to 10 million additional voter identification cards are floating around the country. Exact figures are impossible to collate as Afghanistan does not do a head count for its people. Voting cards have also been sold in bulk while for women voters in conservative areas, they have been issued to male members of their families without adequate identification proof.

In previous elections, village elders have been known to vote en masse for their people, booth capturing has been common, and ballots routinely tampered with. Now, there are private armed contractors available for hire to do the dirty work. Indeed, as Mr Abdullah said recently, his biggest challenger is not his rival candidate but electoral fraud. In Afghanistan, the point of debate is not if the results will be rigged — that is a given — but to what extent they will be manipulated.

Similarly, when it comes to presidential candidates, it may seem like there is a lot of choose from on paper, but, in reality, all the front-runners are Establishment insiders expected to continue with the Karzai consensus on most matters. Also, they all belong to the dominant Pashtun community. True, some of them have taken on minority leaders as their running mates, but that is either for window dressing purposes (as in the case of some of the women candidates) or cynical vote bank calculations (for example, the influential Uzbek leader Abdul Rashid Dostum, accused of war crimes, who has tied up with Mr Ghani).

As for the Taliban factor, it is again unlikely that the insurgents will disrupt the process entirely. There may be isolated attacks, such as the ones in Hotel Serena and the IEC headquarters but, overall, the status quo should hold. The Taliban have publicly called for boycotting the election but in private are known to have struck deals with local leaders to allow polling activity so that they may influence the vote in return.

One must not expect any significant over-night changes, either for the better or worse. It is important to understand that the election is, at the end of the day, just another step in, what has been, a long road towards a stable, democratic, peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan in the post-Taliban era.

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on April 3, 2014)