Modi's China ploy

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been having quite a rocky ride of late. Of course, if one were to go purely by the way much of the mainstream India media (pejoratively called "Godi media" by many non-BJP supporters in India) Modi can still do no wrong.

However, the situation for him on social media, in particular, where the BJP Troll Army used to hold sway till not too long ago, seems to have changed considerably.

Several things have contributed to this, and all of these have given rise to very popular memes. The first relates to Operation Sindoor and how the Indians basically ran to the US and asked it to request Pakistan for a ceasefire. The US obliged, and US President Trump deftly played the trade deal card and got both sides to stop.

However, soon after relations between India and the US, specifically between Modi and Trump, soured, with the former refusing to publicly acknowledge any American role in the ceasefire.

In the weeks that have followed, Trump has said on record that he was the one who stopped the war, which he has repeated could have gone nuclear — a war in which between five to seven jets were shot down (he has used the figure of five, six and most recently seven) after he persuaded both countries to end it and in return the US would offer them a trade deal.

Pakistan played its cards deftly, with its army chief even being invited to a one-on-one lunch by the most powerful man in the world, to getting a relatively low tariff of 19% — compared to India’s at 50%. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) also followed this up by approving investment in Pakistan, and in particular, a $410 million financing for the Reko Diq project.

The ADB stated that this was the first financing of its kind under the new Critical Minerals-to-Manufacturing Value Chains approach and marked the bank's first financing of a mining project in decades.

And more potential rewards followed for Pakistan, with the US resuming fisheries imports after a several-year prohibition.

The rocky ride, so to speak, is of course not entirely related to America’s improving ties with Pakistan. It has a lot to do with India’s own faults, in particular Modi’s insecure and paranoid personality. According to a German publication, he did not take at least four phone calls from the US president, and while much of India's mainstream media takes that as a sign of Modi standing up to a bully, the fact is that Modi doesn't want to be confronted by the truth.

After all, he cannot admit before his right-wing Hindutva followers that it was India which requested a ceasefire with Pakistan — that would be a major no-no and could cost him the right-wing vote.

There is also the tariff issue, but it stems mainly from Modi's mishandling of the Operation Sindoor fiasco and his refusal to acknowledge the role played by the US and in particular President Trump. This was further exacerbated by its oil imports from Russia, which is then refined by companies owned by Modi's friends and sold at a sizeable profit.

The consequence of this chain of events and the rapid deterioration in ties between India and the US has seen Modi cosying up with the presidents of Russia and China at last week’s SCO summit. While the Godi media has made much of his photo ops holding the hands of Presidents Putin and Xi, the Indian prime minister has been severely ridiculed and mocked for now running to express solidarity with a country that has defeated it at least twice in war recently.

One is, of course, speaking of China, where in Galwan in 2020-21 its military inflicted an embarrassing loss on India’s military. And the other is the conflict with Pakistan in May this year, where missiles and fighter jets supplied to Pakistan by China were behind the shooting down of as many as seven Indian Air Force (IAF) fighter jets, including three Rafales.

One can and should ask how Modi can now justify coddling up to China. And the answer to that is that this is a face-saving exercise for him because the only reason for him to act the way he did during the SCO summit was because India and US ties are now at an abysmal low and look likely unsalvageable, at least for the remainder of President Trump's second term.

The photo ops at the SCO summit are just that — optics — and they don't define a bilateral relationship. And in the not-too-distant past, India has tried to cosy up to the US while simultaneously leading alliances like BRICS, which the US sees as working against its interests.

That duplicity has now been called out, and it won't be seen as duplicitous only by America but by China as well. Pakistan's own relationship with China is very strong and as the May conflict showed, it’s at a level militarily with no other such example elsewhere in the world. And it is unlikely that there would be space for India in this.

India is clearly eyeing a trade relationship with China, which means it doesn’t see itself fighting a war with it. That is a positive development because by extension, it should seek the same kind of relationship with Pakistan as well. That would be a potentially win-win situation for both countries. But it will take more than someone like Modi to do that.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this piece are the writer's own and don't necessarily reflect Geo.tv's editorial policy.

The writer is a journalist based in Karachi. He posts @omar_quraishi and can be reached at: [email protected]

Originally published in The News