India left out of world power circle: Modi’s global vision under strain Article by The Atlantic

The US-based The Atlantic magazine has published an analysis, covering the declining role of India in global geopolitics. Caliber.Az reprints some excerpts from the article. 

“Pakistan is having a diplomatic moment, and India’s political elites are not enjoying it. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spent the past decade promoting the notion that India is the leader of the global South and, as such, is indispensable to world affairs. Now a conflict in the Middle East has thrown the global economy, and, with it, India’s, into crisis. On top of that, Islamabad, not New Delhi, has hosted at least one round of talks between the United States and Iran and is preparing to mediate others, leaving the Indian government to ponder its irrelevance.

Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar first dismissed Pakistan’s role in the U.S.-Iran talks, using a pejorative Hindi word for a kind of unsavory middleman. But in Indian political circles, particularly after the April 8 cease-fire was announced, criticism has been trained on the Modi government.

Jairam Ramesh, a spokesperson for the opposition Congress Party, wrote on X that Pakistan’s role was ‘a severe setback to both the substance and style of Mr. Modi’s highly personalised diplomacy.’ Ramesh mocked the Indian prime minister for calling himself vishwaguru, meaning ‘teacher of the world.” Asaduddin Owaisi, the country’s most prominent Muslim politician, lamented that India would have been the natural venue for the U.S.-Iran talks, if not for the Modi government’s missteps.

Modi’s troubles with the Trump administration began last spring. A terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir sparked a four-day conflict between India and Pakistan. President Trump announced a cease-fire that ended the fighting. But this unilateral declaration embarrassed Modi, who likes to project a strongman image. The Indian prime minister could not bring himself to acknowledge the American role in brokering the cease-fire. After that, his relationship with Trump steadily worsened. The U.S. president slapped 50 percent tariffs on India, among the highest anywhere in the world.

Pakistan, meanwhile, saw a window to repair its relationship with the United States. Last year Islamabad profusely thanked Trump for his role in the cease-fire with India, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif nominated the U.S. president for the Nobel Peace Prize. Pakistan signed a rare-earth-minerals deal with the U.S. and joined the president’s Board of Peace.

The first round of Islamabad talks ended without an agreement a little more than a week ago. No one was apparently happier than the members of New Delhi’s power circles. 

‘To all those who were hailing the Pakistan mediation and calling it a diplomatic coup. Hope the cake on your face was tasty,’ Priyanka Chaturvedi, a former member of Parliament, posted on X. 

But Pakistan has not abandoned the role, and a second round of talks in Islamabad is still possible this week.

Ordinary Indians have reason to want to see the U.S.-Israel-Iran war resolved, regardless of who does the mediating. The country procures half of its oil and 60 percent of its liquid petroleum gas from the Middle East, and much of both transits the Strait of Hormuz. The war has caused an oil shock that has rattled India’s economy. 

Restaurants have been closing early, or closing altogether. Rural migrants who eke out a fragile existence in India’s cities now flock to railway stations to return to their villages, on the grounds that living on farms and cooking on wood fires may be a decent alternative to starving in the city. Factories have closed because of the uncertainty around energy supplies. A scarcity of fertilizers imperils the country’s food security. And the Indian rupee has been in free fall. A United Nations report warned that the Iran war could push up to 2.5 million Indians into poverty.

Before the Modi years, India’s policy in the Middle East had been one of strategic balance. It maintained strong, civilizational ties with Iran that went back more than a millennium; at the same time, it pursued a relationship with Israel. 

‘India has been pretty irrelevant in the war,’ Aakar Patel, a prominent writer and columnist said. 

India’s inability to influence global events has much to do with the way Modi has managed domestic ones. Modi has empowered a virulently anti-Muslim Hindu nationalism that has helped diminish his country’s standing in the Middle East. And the lack of a constructive and serious public reckoning with the government’s missteps during this crisis or any other largely owes to Modi’s suppression of the Indian media. For the past decade, Modi has preferred to rule by spectacle, forbidding the country’s problems to be acknowledged, let alone confronted and solved.

On April 18, the same evening that Iran attacked the Indian-flagged vessels, Modi gave a prime-time address to the nation. He might have used that speech to lay out the government’s response to India’s geopolitical and economic predicament. But he didn’t: He devoted its entirety to attacking his political opponents, in the hope of swaying an upcoming election in West Bengal that has become a particular fixation for him.

Meanwhile, the Hindu-nationalist propaganda machine has carried on creating an alternate universe. Shortly after the Iran war began, the film Dhurandhar, about an undercover Indian spy in Pakistan who metes out brutal punishment to his nation’s enemies, became one of the highest-grossing Bollywood movies in history. The hypernationalist blockbuster is typical of India’s current public discourse in its detachment from reality. 

A country that once imagined itself a great power in waiting—a regional hegemon, dwarfing Pakistan, and a counterweight to China—now struggles to project power even within south Asia, having fought Pakistan to a draw last summer. The Iran crisis further suggests that India remains stuck as a middle power, defined by events rather than shaping them.

‘The ambition that India would be this global power is gone,’ Patel told me. ‘It’s only the pageantry that remains,’” the article reads.