QUITE a few in India, America and Europe seem to have sighted a terrifying apparition with horns and canines as it were. A faux debate has been unleashed over Narendra Modi’s televised pictures with the Chinese and Russian presidents at the SCO summit.
Who lost India to China? The question is a non sequitur but it’s doing fervent rounds even in a wryly smiling Pakistan. It’s not clear from the visuals if Modi had cracked a joke to amuse the other two, if so in which language. Or whether the Russian or the Chinese had said something funny to make him guffaw. The truer picture could well be that a jilted Modi hijacked the occasion to thumb his nose at Donald Trump, accused of ‘pushing’ India into China’s embrace.
Those accusing Trump of betraying India haven’t learnt from history. They can’t seem to see from the past what other Trumps have done to other Modis. Not unlike them Modi too is not ditching Trump for Xi Jinping or any other. Nor is India under Hindutva’s watch walking away from the US.
Let’s consider a few memorable examples of those that were stabbed in the back by the US but who still never had the courage to walk away. Take Europe. Nato? Closest allies? Of course, they are not. Look closely at the charade orchestrated to serve the interest of the UK and the US principally. Three remaining members of the Anglosphere from the Five Eyes — Canada, Australia and New Zealand —- might be included if it interests the main two. Nato and Europe stand wrecked.
Thanks to Edward Snowden we learnt through documents he revealed that the US intelligence was monitoring chancellor Merkel’s personal mobile phone. The surveillance reportedly began as early as 2002, before she even became chancellor, and continued until at least 2013. Merkel was reported to be furious, famously telling president Obama: “Spying among friends is never acceptable.”
It didn’t end there for Germany. Joe Biden, according to compelling insights shared by Pulitzer winning Seymour Hersh, blew up the undersea gas lifeline from Russia, choking Germany into obsequious submission to America.
Those accusing Trump of betraying India haven’t learnt from history.
WikiLeaks revealed how multiple French presidents and high-level French government officials were spied on over a period of years. The reports did not always specify which presidents, but the timeline suggests it included the administrations of Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, and François Hollande.
Targeting France didn’t end there. The US and the UK joined hands to set up AUKUS, a shell company with Australia, specifically to exclude France and stab President Macron in the back to steal a multibillion-dollar French submarine deal for the Anglo duo. Macron winced but that was that. When capitalism is in crisis it devours its own. Europe is experiencing it first-hand.
Why would Modi not walk away from Trump? It’s not only because a key capitalist friend is facing criminal charges in the US and might need the White House for presidential help if it came to that. Besides, the US has also named Indian intelligence as accomplices in a plot to assassinate Sikh Americans in America who Delhi sees as terrorists. (A worried Canada, evidently responding to the terror of Modi’s pictures out of Tianjin, last week released an intelligence report singling out certain Sikh groups as fomenting terrorism in India. Advantage Modi.)
However, Modi has an overriding ideological affinity with the US. Hindutva groups derive financial and political sustenance from their presence in certain parts of the world, the US being the hub. If these groups were to try to set up shop in China, for example, they would likely be committed to a re-education regime à la Muslim extremists of Xinjiang.
The BJP is America’s oldest ally in India, occasionally embarrassingly so. Remember Atal Bihari Vajpayee shooting off a secret letter to Bill Clinton confiding how the 1998 nuclear tests were aimed at China. Clinton needed China’s support at the time, and the letter got duly leaked. With Hindutva in the saddle in India, the country is not going anywhere without the US, never mind the insults and threats from the current White House.
What is likelier to happen is that as BRICS chairperson next year, India, if it is still under Modi’s spell, would use the occasion to water down the challenge the US rightly sees from BRICS. Modi’s mantra is that BRICS is a bridge between the Global South and the West, which it is not. That’s the role of G20. But that’s the only way Modi can explain India’s membership to Trump and his aides.
To the Indian middle classes, raised in the post-USSR crucible of free markets (which needs Hindutva to divert attention from the outcome — 800 million on food dole) — the question needs to be posed another way. What were other ‘friendlier’ post-Cold War US presidents doing while courting India? Clinton destroyed Yugoslavia. Bush ran amok in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama dismantled Libya. Biden declared himself a Zionist and supervised the slaughter of Palestinians while starting a prairie fire in Ukraine to singe Russia. They all embraced India as a bulwark against China albeit with varying emphasis. There’s a delectable line that comes to mind from Habib Jalib’s versified description of Ziaul Haq’s brutal dictatorship.
“Apne kharch par hain qaid, log tere raj mein.” (‘The masses are so delighted with you that they spend their own money to be lodged in your prisons’) Jalib’s line sits nicely with India arming itself to the teeth, paying an exorbitant price for foreign weapons to become a bulwark for a country that keeps no permanent friends.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, September 9th, 2025
