For its growing economic weight and, above all, for the role of bulwark that we want it to play against China, immense India has made itself geopolitically indispensable to the Western powers. And the skilful Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is today the great beneficiary, he who was however for ten years persona non grata in the West for the complicities of which he was suspected in the anti-Muslim pogroms committed in 2002 in the State of Gujarat. Between liberal governments and Chinese dictatorship, India’s strategic positioning is, moreover, a reflection of the oxymoron that faithfully defines its domestic political life: an authoritarian democracy.
And this is how Mr. Modi, a dyed-in-the-wool populist, was received with all honors in Washington at the end of June by President Joe Biden, for whom everything depends on the grand design of containing Beijing. State visit, official dinner at the White House and multiple rapprochements in terms of industrial and military collaboration, starting with the announcement of a private American investment of 2.7 billion US dollars in the construction in India of a factory of microprocessors, nerves of war of the digital revolution. Omerta on the climate of intolerance that this religious ultranationalist has cultivated under his good-natured air since he came to power in 2014, and on the well-documented multifaceted human rights violations suffered by his opponents. The United States, whose proof is well established that the defense of democratic freedoms fluctuates according to their interests, rolled out the red carpet in front of Mr. Modi along its entire length.
No allusion either, it was to be expected, to Mr. Modi’s deviation from Indian democracy during his visit to Paris last Friday, where the President, Emmanuel Macron, who himself has a few beams in the eye with regard to collective dialogue, ostentatiously embraced his presence, in the extension of the welcome Biden had given him. It is that France, which has become India’s second supplier in terms of defense – behind Russia, but far ahead of the United States -, does not want to stop on such a good path, while the Indian army is in full reconstruction. An agreement in principle has therefore just been concluded with Delhi for the purchase of 26 Rafale fighter planes and three submarines.
Maybe, India is not China, and even less Myanmar or North Korea, but was it necessary for Mr. Macron to push the obsequiousness so far as to make Mr. Modi the guest of honor of the national holiday of July 14?
Mr. Modi’s visits to Washington and Paris are revealing of an organization of the world reduced to power relations and the imperatives of realpolitik. Those we elect, becoming more or less lobbyists for big business, ignore, by eloquent silences, the erosion of our democratic values, while illiberalism takes root everywhere. Ended up by resulting in a general posture dangerously resigned — of the political classes, of the citizens, of the media — to social violence and state violence.
Mr. Modi plays his cards terribly well on the international chessboard. Consummate opportunism, he takes advantage of the great disorder of the world. Will he ever burn his fingers on it? A practitioner of “multi-alignment”, like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, he is getting closer to the United States, with which he shares the desire to curb China, while he refuses to vote sanctions against Russia, whose oil he needs. He is an important partner in the Indo-Pacific strategy of the West, which Beijing considers a threat, while being part, alongside Xi Jinping, of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, of which Iran has just become a full member. Its stature has swelled in 2023: it plays an important role within the BRICS and will host a summit of the G20 countries in Delhi in September.
Which is not without inflating its popularity with the Hindu majority. Inside too, Mr. Modi has made himself indispensable. Charismatic, he built around him a veritable cult of personality, based on the promise of economic development and the promotion of Hindu supremacy (hindutva), breaking with the secular principle of modern India.What does its instrumentalization of justice and the intimidation and attacks of its activists against opponents and journalists matter; never mind the skyrocketing hate crimes against Muslim and Christian minorities. Never mind the fact that his conception of the country’s economic modernization widens inequalities and exacerbates the environmental crisis. Everything indicates that he will be re-elected in the general elections next spring. That the world’s most populous democracy becomes what some call an “electoral autocracy” doesn’t bother Indian voters or their Western friends.