When Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 13, also killing several Iranian scientists and military commanders, the attacks sparked concern from the United Nations nuclear watchdog and from much of the Global South. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which India is a member of along with China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Iran and Belarus, issued a scathing statement against Israel on June 14. Brazil and South Africa, key members of the BRICS grouping that India co-founded two decades ago, separately condemned Israel’s attacks as well.
India, on the other hand, formally distanced itself from the SCO statement. Instead, it adopted a position that made no mention of the attacker, Israel, and carried no criticism of the bombing. Fast forward a little more than a week and, on June 24, hours after the president of the United States of America, Donald Trump, announced a ceasefire between Iran and Israel, the BRICS as a collective issued a statement criticising the attacks on Iran. Tehran is now a part of BRICS. So far, India has not distanced itself from the BRICS condemnation. Why did India distance itself from the SCO statement but not the BRICS one?
A decade after the then foreign secretary and now external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, said that India under the prime minister, Narendra Modi, wanted to become a leading power and not just a balancing power, it increasingly appears like New Delhi is neither. It is a confused power. The world’s fourth-largest economy is today widely sought after as a partner by most nations. Its military is stronger than it has ever been. And for decades — and that includes the Modi government’s tenure — India’s foreign policy has carefully juggled multiple interests and even more varied relations, winning many friends and forming very few enmities. Not aligning with any major power meant being careful with words and actions. India was indeed a balancing power. But in trying to project that as evidence of India’s limitations in earlier years, the Modi government might be risking another facet of geopolitics that the country’s diplomats have long been masters at: strategic clarity.
Take a look at some recent examples.
In early May, Jaishankar was speaking in public about how Trump’s policies and approach to the world were in India’s interests. Days later, the US president challenged India’s longstanding position that all matters of dispute with Pakistan are to be settled bilaterally when he claimed that he mediated a ceasefire between the neighbours. That is a claim he has repeated on multiple occasions since — even after Modi told him, in a telephone call, that India disagreed with that interpretation. Meanwhile, Trump has hosted Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, at the White House. It is the first time that a US president has done so when the Pakistan army chief is not also the head of state. So has Trump blindsided India — and what are Team Modi’s plans to deal with him?
Just north of the US, Canada has been a bugbear for the Indian government over the past two years, since it asserted that gunmen hired by New Delhi killed the Sikh separatist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, outside Vancouver. As the host of the G7 this year, the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, issued an invitation to Modi only at the very last minute. Yet, despite the tensions with Canada, and even though Ottawa has made no known promises on pulling back from its accusations against India, Modi went to the summit. What was gained?
With the Iran-Israel conflict, what was lost was an opportunity to demonstrate India’s credentials as a rare nation that is friendly with both those countries and with the US. It could have played a proactive role in mediating the ceasefire. Instead, it left that role for Qatar, which — like India — has strong ties with the US and Iran but has a more complex relationship with Israel.
Modi and his allies have repeatedly projected the prime minister’s diplomacy as something aimed at turning India into a vishwaguru. But here is the bitter truth: no one likes a confused teacher.
Charu Sudan Kasturi is a journalist who writes on foreign policy and international relations