The police action against a dozen TISS students – detentions and invoking serious criminal charges – for commemorating a memorial gathering with posters and candles for Prof. G.N. Saibaba, who spent a decade in jail before the courts acquitted him. The wheelchair bound professor who was denied medical treatment during his wrongful incarceration died months after his release a year ago.
The police action came after right-wing students tore down Saibaba's photos and tagged authorities on social media, accusing the assembly of raising slogans in support of the jailed students Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, which the participants denied. The student leaders were jailed over five years ago for protesting against discriminatory laws that threaten to disenfranchise Muslims. Even if slogans were raised, neither remembering Saibaba nor expressing solidarity with Umar Khalid and others can be construed as a crime, by any stretch of imagination.
The incident that exposes the RSS-BJP-led state’s intolerance of freedom of expression and its discriminatory politics, which are already too well documented in everyday violence perpetrated by the vigilante mobs patronized by the state actors, coincided with another interesting development that has caught the nation’s eyeballs – the red-carpet visit of the Taliban foreign minister. If anyone thought that India’s royal salute to the very Taliban that the RSS-BJP have used consistently as a punching bag in the past was odd, think again. Watching the TISS incident and the welcome to the Taliban in New Delhi in adjacent frames demonstrates how, in their ideological moorings and their actions, the Hindu right-wing and the Taliban are two of a kind.
Of late, India, under the Hindu right-wing, and Afghanistan, under the Taliban, are being pulled into each other’s embrace. While the Taliban II positions itself as a more pragmatic and reasonable version of its old self, make no mistakes: a leopard doesn’t change its spots. India, however, has transformed immensely in the last decade under the control of the Hindu Right-wing – from a quasi-liberal democracy to one slipping into authoritarianism. But, what brings them together is not their mutual ideological admiration for each other’s worldview. They survive on ‘othering’, not in coming together at a distant cousins’ reunion. The Indian government would like us to believe that it is geopolitical strategy and diplomacy at play.
Given Afghanistan’s geographical location – bordering Pakistan, Iran, Central Asia and China – and India’s historic ties with the country before the Taliban came on the scene, that should have made sense. But it doesn’t.
Afghanistan is a small piece in the larger geopolitical puzzle. Any assessment of India’s reconciliation bid with Afghanistan needs to be weighed in light of how it is moving its other chess pieces across the board – in its partnerships or neglect of other major powers, and more importantly, its neighbourhood.
On that count, India's foreign policy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been marked by troubling contradictions, lack of vision, and missed opportunities that have undermined the country's strategic interests.
While Modi's government has engaged in chest-thumping rhetoric about India as "a Vishwaguru” and "Mother of Democracy", the reality is that rising tariffs are keeping India out of global supply chains. During his tenure, while India virtually propped itself in the American lap, its heavy reliance on the Quad partnership has come at the cost of ignoring, even irking its neighbourhood, especially China. At the same time, it has hampered its reliability as a partner in the Quad on the Ukraine war question and the massive oil purchases from Russia.
Though it positions itself as an economic competitor of China, under Modi, India has allowed much of South Asia to slip away from it and fall into China’s embrace.
Relations with Pakistan were never smooth, but there was a peace process between the two countries, leading to normalisation of relations, which snapped shortly before Modi took over the reins of power. Instead of resuming the process for healthy bilateral ties, Modi demolished whatever was left of the edifices of the abandoned process. With 2003 ceasefire in complete disarray, followed by the 2019 ‘Surgical Strikes’ and the more recent ‘Operation Sindoor’, there is little that is left that can be recovered, especially as such actions and policies have given the Pakistan military a shot in the arm and helped make it more powerful than it ever was. Much worse, the recent conflagration has brought China even closer to Pakistan, its traditional ally.
Modi has horrifyingly mishandled Bangladesh and Nepal for its own domestic vote bank politics by batting for the Hasina regime and the monarchy, respectively, in the two countries. Though there is a belated attempt to mend fences with Sri Lanka and enter into significant defence and economic pacts, the ties remain fragile over Ram Setu bridge, over the worsening India-Pakistan relations and other ticklish issues.
India's strategy towards its east, particularly on Myanmar, fundamentally contradicts its domestic security approach in the north-eastern states. While it is engaging with ethnic armed rebels who control the borders, it is imposing a restrictive border control policy, alienating trans-border communities. The policy has further deepened the ethnic strife in Manipur, which is seen as patronised by the Hindu Right-wing with the tacit support of the Indian government.
Siding with the Taliban may not directly appeal to the RSS-BJP’s voter base, but it indirectly does, owing to deepening friction between Pakistan and Afghanistan under Taliban II. This reversal in India’s policy towards Taliban is reminiscent of another major foreign policy transformation with respect to Israel-Palestine conflict. From a nation that voted against the 1947 UN partition plan creating Israel, recognised the PLO in 1974 as one of the first non-Arab countries, and championed Palestinian statehood within the Non-Aligned Movement, India has transformed into Israel's largest arms customer, with over 42.1% of Israeli weapons exports flowing to New Delhi since 2014.
Since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack and Israel's subsequent campaign that has killed over 43,000 Palestinians and now pushed the survivors to starvation, India has maintained a conspicuous and hypocritical silence, with Prime Minister Modi expressing "complete solidarity" with Israel against terrorism while offering no comparable condemnation of Israeli actions in Gaza and West Bank.
Both the Israel and Afghanistan tilts reflect Modi’s Hindu nationalist government’s ideological convergence with Netanyahu's right-wing regime and the fanatic Taliban. Both the Israeli model of suppressing Muslims and the Taliban model of discrimination and ruthless stamping of civil liberties appeal to the Hindu nationalists, even as the Taliban subscribe to an extreme, distorted Islamist ideology.
A look around the globe would reveal that Modi's foreign policy appears driven more by domestic political posturing than by the hard realities of India's position as a country that has fallen further behind China and desperately needs regional cooperation and global integration. The narratives it articulates internationally and the foreign policy it weaves reveal a tendency to appeal to a Hindu nationalist base. The newfound friendship with the Taliban also demonstrates that the other yardstick for India’s architecture of foreign policy is its desire to get even with its enemy by befriending an enemy’s enemy.
Yet, in a multipolar and altering geo-political environment, notwithstanding what the Taliban stand for, it may make some sense for India to enter into a cautionary engagement that gives more heft to India’s global stature. But the reasons that guide Modi’s Hindu nationalist government and the manner in which this friendship is blooming are far more frightening than what pragmatic diplomatic relations with Afghanistan under Taliban can achieve.
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