misc

The war of winning hearts

When former Maoist commander Badranna is not tending to plants at the public park in Chhattisgarh’s Jagdalpur town, he likes to spend time with his ten-year-old daughter Manisha and her pet parrot at their small house. Badranna’s wife, Latakka, once a Maoist guerrilla herself, works with the State police after the couple surrendered in the year 2000.

Badranna, now in his late forties, was among the first batch of men to be recruited in Chhattisgarh by the Maoists. He is from the Dorla tribe and comes from Bijapur district’s Pamed village, close to Andhra Pradesh.

In 1980, after the formation of the CPI-ML (People’s War), its Andhra-based leader Kondapalli Seetharamaiah sent Maoist squads to four areas in the State’s Telangana region: Khammam, Karimnagar, Warangal and Adilabad. Three other squads went across the Godavari river, one of them to Gadchiroli in Maharashtra, while two of them went to Chhattisgarh’s Bastar region (then a part of Madhya Pradesh). The idea was to create a rear base where safe guerrilla zones could be created.

One of these squads reached Badranna’s village. Badranna, a teenager then, recalls how the villagers would initially run away upon spotting the guerrillas. “We were all scared of them. Elders would caution us not to go near them; it was rumoured that the Maoists carried some potion that could make people follow them,” says Badranna.

Badranna’s family and others lived a difficult life. Most of them earned a pittance by collecting tenduleaves, used in the manufacture of beedi . For a pack of 100 leaves, the contractor paid them a few paise. “We would put the leaves in a string and the contractor used his head’s circumference to measure it,” says Badranna.

A change in strategy

After their inability to approach the young, the Maoists changed their strategy. They instead sought to communicate with the elders, or prominent people in the village — like the Sarpanch (village-head) or the Patel, a police informer of sorts. “The Maoists befriended them,” says Badranna. Gradually, the young became comfortable around them as well.

The Maoists would buy food from villagers and sometimes request them for an odd meal. “To test us, the people sometimes offered us stale food, that would almost be on the verge of decay,” says Badranna, “but we would eat it with a smile.” Around the same time, the Maoist cultural troupe, Jana Natya Mandali began extensive tours in the area. The troupe adopted local folk forms to revolutionary themes that Badranna says galvanised the youth.

Badranna was the first one to join the Maoist fold, along with two other men, Bimanna and Deva. The Maoists were keen to recruit women as well but decided to go slow and not approach them immediately. First, Badranna says, they chose to fight for better wages.

In those days, the Maoist guerrillas had access to few rudimentary firearms like the Bharmar (muzzle-loading gun). But they were enough to scare tendu contractors and forest guards who often exploited tribals, threatening to jail them under archaic forest laws, looting their chicken and goats. The Maoists began confronting them. Many were caught and beaten up. The contractors were forced to pay better wages.

In the next stage, the Maoists targeted landlords and distributed their land among the landless peasants. By this time, the Maoists had won the trust of the people. They no longer required the help of a Sarpanch or a Patel.

Once entrenched, the Maoists found a cause that would enable them to find support among women. In tribal societies, menstruation was considered some kind of curse. Once their menstrual cycle commenced, the women were forced to stay in a separate house on the outskirts of the village. They were required to hide and not show their face to a man in case the men happened to pass by. The other custom was to get women married to men much younger. This was to ensure an extra hand for work. Once the woman grew old, the man, still young, would remarry. The Maoists gradually convinced the village elders to discontinue these practices.

These struggles made the Maoists extremely popular among the women. Many joined them to escape the patriarchal and feudal setups.

In 1987, the Maoists burnt down over a dozen houses belonging to upper-caste Thakurs in Chintalnar, who had settled down in this area from western Uttar Pradesh. According to Badranna, there had been cases of ill-treatment of the tribals at their hands. This led to another surge of recruitment, especially of women. It was from here that Badranna’s future wife Latakka joined the Maoists.

By the 1990s, the Maoists had intensified their movement in the whole Dandakaranya forest. The entire Bastar region and Gadchiroli in Maharashtra had become their stronghold. Today, this area forms the main guerrilla zone of the Maoists, the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee (DKSZC).

In 1995, Badranna led a group of 30 Maoists to attack the Thalagudda police station in Bhopalpatnam block. The attack was a failure since Badranna could not properly study the map made by the local Maoist squad. The policemen retaliated, and Badranna had to retreat. One policeman and five Maoists died in this attack, including Badranna’s old friend Bimanna and a woman guerrilla called Kamalakka.

But soon enough, Badranna’s squad was launching many audacious attacks against the police. In Golapalli, Badranna laid an ambush for a police party that resulted in the death of 19 policemen. In 2000, another ambush executed by Badranna in Basaguda block’s Tarem village killed 16 policemen.

It is Basaguda that remained Badranna’s operational area from the mid-1990s till his surrender in 2000. It is here that the Maoists undertook many developmental works in villages. Under Badranna’s guidance, people from nine villagers worked together to dig a large pond and construct a check dam. “I am extremely popular in Basaguda area,” says Badranna, smiling.

In 1999, Badranna says he met a fair-complexioned woman who had come from the city and spoke in English to a few other senior Maoist leaders. Her party name was Jankiakka. “She was extremely brave but suffered immensely because of some illness,” says Badranna. While travelling once along with her, Badranna’s squad came under fire from the police. “I provided cover fire, enabling all of them to flee to safety,” says Badranna.

Jankiakka was senior Maoist leader Anuradha Ghandy, who later died of malaria in April, 2008.

Fourteen years later

I decide to check Badranna’s claim of popularity. It has been 14 years since his surrender. I land up in Sarkeguda, under Basaguda police station. It was here in May 2012 that the Central Reserve Police Force’s Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) troops opened fire on a gathering of villagers, killing 17 people. There is a CRPF camp right at the beginning of the village.

I speak with many about the events of that night in May. On the clearing outside the village, where the killings took place, an old man stops upon seeing me and sits to converse. He is scratching deep marks on his thigh that are bleeding now. “I hate the force,” he says, referring to the CoBRA troops. “They have beaten up so many of us; we are unable to go to the forest anymore.” Gesturing with my hand, I ask him to stop scratching. He does not; he looks at me puzzlingly.

“Badranna, do you know him?”

The scratching stops. “I know him,” he says, getting very excited. “ Idhar bohot aata tha (he used to come here very often).” The man recounts how Badranna and his men built that pond. “I worked in that project, too.” He is still excited. “ Mere ko jaanta hai Badranna (Badranna knows me),” he says loudly.

In 2000, Badranna decided to surrender along with his wife. “I am almost illiterate and it was causing an impediment in my way up in the party ranks,” he says. He got his vasectomy reversed to become a father.

After his surrender, the police would call Badranna over sometimes to acquaint themselves with the Maoists’ strategy. “I always told them: don’t study Maoists. Study yourselves first. Study your weakness.”

“They do not call me any longer.”

rahul.p@thehindu.co.in

Development is intrinsic to a secular project’

Arch rivals the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party continue to trade accusations against each other of playing the communal card in the campaign to the general elections. These are classic instances of the confusion over what secularism is in India. Restoring clarity on the conceptual aspects is critical to rescue the theory and practice of secularism, from the crisis it has encountered internationally over the decades, argues Rajeev Bhargava, senior fellow and former director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, in an exclusive interview.

The exercise is imperative, says Dr. Bhargava, as the only realistic future for secularism, both in India and in western democracies, is to articulate and consolidate the indigenous strand of the doctrine that is found in our Constitution.

Model of Indian secularism

Indian secularism advocates a particularly distinct stance of separation between state and religion, which Dr. Bhargava dubs the model of principled distance. This is most unlike the absolute two-way separation practised in the U.S., or one-sided state interference in religious matters, as it obtains in France. The Indian Constitution, on the other hand, authorises active state intervention to protect the freedom of religion for all and to eliminate caste and gender inequalities sanctioned by religion, as well as complete non-interference in religious affairs. The legal prohibition of untouchability is the most audacious example of state intervention in religion in a caste-ridden society, Dr. Bhargava points out. The provision of state funding of educational institutions, regardless of religious affiliation, is an instance of the commitment to protect the freedom of religion.

In a scrupulous adherence to the principled-distance model lies the future of secularism in a multi-religious society such as India. Embracing this model would enable western democracies to better reconcile religious pluralism, given that inter-religious diversity is a more recent, post-world-war phenomenon in those countries, he asserts.

Now, the Congress’ charge of communalism against the BJP was occasioned when the founder of the Art of Living, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, allegedly made politically endearing observations on that party’s prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar also averred that it was difficult to be at once spiritual, apolitical and socially active in India, in response to accusations that his organisation was backing the BJP candidate from East Delhi.

The BJP’s counter-attack on the Congress was triggered following the party president Sonia Gandhi’s recent meeting with the Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid, supposedly to prevent any potential split in the Muslim vote. On Dr. Bhargava’s reading of Indian secularism, the actions of neither Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, nor Ms Gandhi would be legally liable to the charge of communalism.

The author of The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy (2010), is categorical that “In any democracy, on the basis of any interest or identity, people can start a political movement and also form a political party. So, the mere fact that a party says that it stands for Hindu or Muslim interests and takes part in democratic politics does not make such a party communal.” Indian secularism is violated only when religious identity is politicised in a manner that causes injustice to other communities.

These are communitarian parties, says Dr. Bhargava. However, “a party becomes communal if it does not observe the constraints imposed by the secular part of the Constitution. Indian secularism, within the Constitution, does not encourage any public expression, or any pursuit of interest of any community which is necessarily at the expense of another community; which articulates its interests in a way which deliberately causes harm to another community; which offends another community in a serious way which will be upheld by the judges of the courts and so on.”

The ongoing election campaign is replete with examples that Dr. Bhargava would bracket as cases when the communitarian turns communal. The most notorious of them all are the provocative utterances of Azam Khan of the Samajwadi Party government in Uttar Pradesh. The hate speeches and personal threat from Imran Masood, the Congress candidate of Saharanpur, against Mr. Modi, or the equally venomous remarks of BJP leader, Amit Shah, are the others.

  The latter’s exhortations at a rally in Shamli in Western U.P. to the electorate to caste a revenge vote in the polls is clearly not innocent in the context of the 2013 communal riots in Muzaffarnagar.

Secularism as political theme

Dr. Bhargava offers a strong rebuttal of the secularism versus development binary that has come to dominate the current electoral debates. “Development is intrinsic to the secular project in a religiously diverse society, to caste in a caste-ridden society and to class in a class-divided society,” he affirmed. “If some communities have been denied the benefits of development on grounds of religion, then we should say that this development is anti-secular.”

The implications of this position are obvious enough, considering how often governments and political parties trumpet claims of development or inclusive growth, largely without evidence in terms of community disaggregated data. A high proportion of Muslims are engaged in the informal sector of the economy, according to the report of the 2005 High Level Committee under Justice Rajinder Sachar. The implications of this scenario are especially acute, given India’s abysmally low provision of social protection for the general population.

In the event, secularism as a political and electoral theme has returned to centre-stage, unmasked by the rhetoric on development and governance. The BJP’s manifesto contains all the contentious and polarising promises that once went to make it the party with a difference. The construction of the Ram temple at Ayodhya, abrogation of Article 370 and the adoption of a uniform civil code — issues that in one way or another appear to be unjust to Indian Muslims. These could never be abandoned by the BJP, given its implacable opposition to India’s pluralism, and constitutional guarantees to the minorities. Secularism is a prerequisite to religious freedom.

Change and continuity

One pundit in the aftermath of the Indian elections has described the Prime Minister-elect as seeking to “reshape the entire political universe of India” (Ashutosh Varshney in The Guardian ). It is in the nature of public life in the modern period that even just the rhetoric and pretence of “change” can bestow upon a politician an ersatz glamour. In the drumbeat of electioneering over several recent months that rhetoric and pretence on the lips of Mr. Narendra Modi was flamboyantly yet carefully cultivated and, above all, purchased at obscene expense. The media, funded and controlled by the same corporate sources that paid for this public relations achievement, acquiesced with conviction in the pretence and repeated the rhetoric each day both in print and on screen.

The strategy has paid off; the man now has the added glamour of the nation’s most exalted office which, suppressing his natural swagger, he has approached with an affectation of humility and express concern for the poor and working people of the country, the very people that the policies and politics he stands for will sink into ever-increasing poverty and insecurity.

Declaration of change a pretence?

These unstintingly negative remarks I have made are intended to recoil from the charitable and hopeful responses that even some of those made anxious by Mr. Modi’s election have resigned themselves to. A belief in democracy requires two things: an acceptance of the upshot of an election and a refusal to blame the electorate if the upshot fills one with dread. Beyond this no graciousness is required, least of all a slackening of the critical powers one brings to assessing the upshot. In particular, there is no reason to surrender to some hope that a deeply tainted victor is going to revise his convictions or his character, simply because of the reality of having to live with his victory. Such realism, like much realism, is better described as complacence. It pacifies the effort and struggle that is called for to oppose what he represents. This pacification was already being advised prior to his election by political commentators who chastised Mr. Modi’s critics as unintelligent for applying the term “fascist,” with its European connotations, to what Mr. Modi represents in the Indian context.

In the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s, the term “fascist” came to be associated with two defining features. First, the finding of an external enemy within a nation (in the case of Germany, the Jews, the gypsies) and despising and subjugating them. Second, what Mussolini offered as an explicit definition of fascism: the fusion of the interests of corporations and the state. I ask the reader to look at Mr. Modi’s record with Muslims and his avowed economic programme and decide for herself where the lack of intelligence really lies.

Why am I calling Mr. Modi’s declaration of change and a new future for India an empty rhetoric and pretence? Because what it proposes as change and novelty is entirely continuous with policies that Manmohan Singh and his economic advisers have put into place. If there is any change, it is, as so often with the BJP, a more clear-eyed and unqualified pursuit of what the Congress had first generated. This had happened earlier, too — though not on the economic front — when Indira Gandhi first and then Rajiv Gandhi had introduced majoritarian and communal elements into the political arena. The BJP was then able to pursue that to its logical end without the lip service to secularism that the Congress was bound, by its more honourable past, to retain. And similarly now the neo-liberal policies of the UPA government will be extended by the BJP, unhampered by the former’s lip service to an employment scheme and food security programme that, for the most part, remained unimplemented. For anyone without amnesia, even as a regional messiah, Mr. Modi has had antecedents who similarly promised fabulous transformations. The euphoria around the “Gujarat Model” had its premonition in Chandrababu Naidu’s “Andhra model,” whose lopsided metropolitan development at the cost of ignoring the rest of his region eventually led to his steep downfall in a subsequent election and then later to the Balkanisation of his state. A few truthful commentators have already observed just how much the “Gujarat model” pursues growth at the cost of what is called “human development.”

Finally, the proposal that the BJP will seek to change the large-scale corruption that came to be associated with the Congress is also pretence. This same pretence was adopted by an earlier BJP government and exposed to be so then, proving that corruption is now built into the kind of thing that Indian capitalism has become in the last two decades, no matter who is in power.

Indifference to immiseration

Another pundit (Victor Mallet, Financial Times , May 22) revealingly says: “Educated Muslims in India are willing to give Modi a chance.” It reveals first of all that the educated urban Muslim stands politically apart from the mass of other Muslims, a fact that goes back a long time. Jinnah’s form of nationalist politics as it developed in the post-Khilafat period (indeed it was motivated to combat the dynamic effects of the mass mobilisation of Muslims during the Khilafat movement) represented precisely such careerist Muslims, mostly from Uttar Pradesh, continuing, as Maulana Azad had pointed out, an aspiration that Sir Syed Ahmed Khan had first formulated many decades earlier. But what it further reveals is that those same educated urban Muslims who in their separatist politics under Jinnah were expressing an anxiety about their prospects for jobs in a united India dominated by a Hindu majority, are now confusedly expecting that a Hindu majoritarian ideologue because of his zeal for metropolitan “development” will create a scenario that provides them with jobs.

The zeal for this particular form of development is not a novelty of Mr. Modi’s either. It was an explicit aspiration of the previous government, with P. Chidambaram preposterously declaring ( Tehelkainterview, May 31, 2008) that he wanted 85 per cent of India to become cities. Preposterous not only because of the impertinence of an aspiration to transform within a few years the agrarian forms of livelihood that have defined a society for millennia, but because of its brazen indifference to the immiseration that it brings in its wake through the dispossession of countless people of their land and their livelihood.

Neo-liberalism and dissatisfaction

Given these deep continuities passing themselves off as a promise of change, one needs a diagnosis of the striking difference between the outcome of the present elections and that of the elections in 2004. In 2004, the mass of Indian people repudiated the pretence of an emergent and luminous India. This time they have not. The diagnosis is not hard to find. It is true that in 2004 the Congress party was galvanised by an impressively energetic campaign almost single-handedly by Sonia Gandhi, a form of leadership it wholly lacked in the current election. But the underlying explanation is to be found in the very continuities I have been insisting on. The effects of neo-liberal economic policies pursued by both major parties and their coalitional partners over this entire span have created deep dissatisfaction among the Indian electorate with whichever of them held power. The dissatisfaction may not be articulated explicitly as one against neo-liberal policies because those policies are seldom identified by the media and the pundits as the causes of those effects. But even just a little knowledgeable and honest analysis would reveal them to be so.

The point, however, is that so long as those effects are with us, this pattern of failure and dissatisfaction will continue until the political parties who oppose rather than promote neo-liberalism emerge out of their abject weakness and begin to assert their political energies and will. The prospect of this happening may seem bleak at the moment, but the continuing failure of the policies adopted in the last two decades, which Mr. Modi now offers in their most unconstrained form, can be safely predicted and it is bound to breed the stimulus for a genuine rather than pretence at change.

It is not as if this has never happened in other parts of the world. Some of the countries in South America, such as Bolivia for instance, which the international media utterly ignores precisely because these countries are striving to remove themselves from the orbit of neo-liberalism, are exemplary. Against overwhelming odds, their people have generated movements which elected governments that have creatively resisted the insistent weight of globalised finance and are gradually uplifting the poorest sections of their societies. What sort of politics allowed such governments to be elected? How was such a politics constructed and mobilised among the people? How exactly are they resisting the pressures to succumb to neo-liberal policies? We would be well advised to study these polities and political economies and seek detailed and careful answers to these questions for ourselves.

Against developmental fundamentalism

There is hope in the air: years of corruption, ‘policy paralysis’ and a non-functioning government are gone and there is a forceful, efficient, decisive leader at the helm. However, while joining in the national mood of hope and expectation, may one add a word of caution about the current emphasis on “quick project clearances”? The argument is that “green clearances” are responsible for delaying large projects and that the process should be made fast and easy.

Delays in project clearances can arise from several causes: plain inefficiency in the functioning of the clearance agency, poor project formulation necessitating a demand to reformulate the project, inadequate information necessitating a number of queries and demands for clarifications and additional material, a prolonged debate between the project proponents and the examining agency in those cases where a negative decision seems likely and so on. While delays caused by inefficiency can and should be eliminated, other delays are not really delays if they serve a useful purpose. The examination of projects that are likely to have serious environmental, social and human impacts, and demand heavy investments, cannot be rushed through. No more than the necessary time should be taken, but equally, not less than the necessary time must be taken. To cut that short would be to turn the entire clearance process into a mockery.

Giving clearances to projects

Why are “green clearances” in particular blamed for delays? The reason is that most project proponents and the ministries concerned regard a clearance under the Environment (Protection) Act a tiresome formality. The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) is unpopular with the so-called ‘developmental’ ministries; it is regarded as a ‘negative’ force that impedes ‘development.’ A development-environment dichotomy is posited, with the former being accorded primacy and the latter relegated to a secondary position.

The holders of the “primacy of development” argument would say: “The protection of the environment is important, but not at the cost of development.” Let us reverse that proposition: can we really have development at the cost of the environment? When we have destroyed all aquifers, turned all rivers into sewers, denuded all forests and reduced bio-diversity drastically, what development can there be? Faced with that question, the advocates of development might say: “Let us be moderate; let us not go overboard and become eco-fundamentalists.” What can be more basic than our habitat, our water and the air? Profound concern about them should not be deprecated as fundamentalism. What we have in fact had is developmental fundamentalism, accompanied by an angry impatience with environmental concerns.

Dare one hope that the negative attitude to environmental concerns will not continue in the new government? In the new government, the environment ministry is headed not by a Cabinet minister, but by a Minister of State with independent charge, Prakash Javadekar. He is reported to have said that the environment ministry will not be obstructionist. That is a revealing statement. It implies that any minister who implements the Environment (Protection) Act faithfully and effectively is being obstructionist and that he or she should moderate the implementation to avoid being so. It is also a defensive statement seeking to reassure everyone that he will try and not trouble anyone. Why does such a reassurance become necessary? The reason is that the Act seriously tries to protect the environment and contains provisions for the purpose, which means that if rigorously implemented, it is bound to bite in some cases. It follows that the bland statement often heard that there need be no conflict between the environment and development is not true. An effort needs to be made to reconcile the requirements of the Act and the demands of development, and it will not be an easy effort.

It is in that context that the advocates of development generally call for a ‘balancing’ of environment and development. ‘Balancing’ implies action on both sides, but in the ‘development versus environment’ debate, the demand is always for a compromise on environmental concerns, never for a moderation of developmental activities. However, perhaps one is being unduly alarmist. One hopes that the Modi government will be as earnest about environmental and ecological concerns as about what goes in the name of development. One also hopes that there will be an agonising reappraisal of what constitutes true development.

Another source of worry is in relation to land acquisition, displacement and rehabilitation. Many feel that the Rehabilitation Act of 2013 is deficient in several respects, but it offers some limited protection against unfair alienation of agricultural land, and a modest rehabilitation provision. In the drive for the quick implementation of ‘developmental’ projects, one hopes that the government will not be unduly influenced by the neoliberal economic view — that this act is a serious impediment to development.

Restoring the Ganga

Reports to the effect that the new government proposes to restore the Ganga to its pristine condition are encouraging, but one must hope that it will not be a cosmetic exercise like the ‘revival’ of the Sabarmati in Gujarat. More disturbing is the fact that during his election campaign, the present Prime Minister talked about the Inter-Linking of Rivers Project, a controversial project. That the Prime Minister is predisposed in favour of the project is hardly reassuring, and one fervently hopes that he will study the weighty objections that many critics have raised before taking a decision on the project. It seems strange to want to restore the Ganga and at the same time undertake a project that will do great harm to several other rivers.

One shares the widespread hope that a single-party majority and a decisive Prime Minister will mark a new beginning. The Prime Minister’s statement — “Let us together dream of a strong, developed and inclusive India” — needs to be expanded to include ecological sustainability and harmony, not only between groups, States and countries, but also between humanity and Nature.

Claude Smadja: India's moment, at long last?

I will be a little personal here: as someone who has been coming to India for 43 years now and who considers himself a good friend of the country, I cannot but be thrilled by the opportunities that have been opened by Narendra Modi's rise to power. At the same time, I cannot escape a sense of awe at the magnitude of the challenges facing the new Bharatiya Janata Party government. So far, one can say that, overall, the prime minister has made the right moves, sent the right signals and said the right things. However, after years of debilitating stagnation, the impatience is so great and the expectations so high that the new government has to ensure that the Budget - to be announced on July 10 - is spot on.

Going by what has come out so far, this new Budget will, at long last, put a lot of emphasis on revitalising and boosting the manufacturing sector. Contributing a little more than 15 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), the sector is abnormally small for a country with such a large population and at the stage of development as India's. By comparison, manufacturing represents about 32 per cent of China's GDP. There is no way that with such a narrow manufacturing base, India could achieve double-digit growth rates or develop the kind of jobs creation capability required to absorb the nearly 12 million people who enter the employment market every year.

This renewed attention to manufacturing as a driver of growth and jobs creation will, of course, be more than welcome. But we also know that industry and manufacturing and infrastructure development are closely intertwined. Launching - and sustaining - a wide infrastructure development drive is clearly a top priority for Mr Modi if he wants to make good on his electoral promises. We have been hearing and reading for years about the hundreds of billions of dollars that India would need to spend over the next 10, 20 or 30 years on infrastructure development, although none of the objectives enunciated in successive Five-Year Plans was ever achieved.

Infrastructure is absolutely key. It is a domain that will turn very fast into a credibility test for the prime minister. However, given the fiscal constraints on India, there is no way that a major infrastructure drive - of the scale that meets the needs of the country - can be launched without the strong involvement of the private sector. Here, beyond the policy announcements that many expect to be part of the July Budget, there is an urgent need to address in a very pragmatic way the number of choke points that have been preventing a full mobilisation of private sector resources. Everybody realises the need for more extensive public-private partnerships (PPPs); at the same time, the difficulties and obstacles that constrain the development of new PPPs remain almost unchanged. For example, the way the arbitration of conflict has been implemented so far is in itself a strong enough deterrent, preventing many corporations from getting involved as much as they could be. The new government has a tremendous opportunity to look for the best practices in this domain, and to quickly create an environment conducive to both the domestic and the foreign private sector interested in infrastructure development in India.

Similarly, it might be time to consider some new ways to address a number of issues regarding intellectual property protection, which have so far proved a major issue for foreign corporations in India - and a permanent source of friction with the United States. While the cost of medicine for the poorer segments of the population is a legitimate concern that no Indian government can be seen as neglecting, there is today a new reality to take into consideration: that is, an increasing number of Indian corporations are themselves becoming a source of intellectual property creation, and will increasingly need that kind of protection.

In the same way, some key state-of-the-art sectors in India, such as aerospace, engineering and information technology, could benefit more from the fast-expanding US-India defence relationship if a number of measures, such as increasing the limit on foreign direct investment, would allow for greater collaboration between companies in the two nations involved in defence and defence-related technologies.

The new mood created by the victory of Mr Modi and his party and the kind of mindset that the new prime minister brings with him to Race Course Road mean there is a unique opportunity to reshape the way India engages with the world and, more importantly, how it looks at itself. For years, too many impatient people in India and in India's friend-countries around the world have watched with sad bewilderment. It seemed that the country would never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. And it seemed that a country endowed with so many assets and resources - human and natural - would fail to actualise its potential, thereby consigning to mediocre prospects millions of people who deserve much better.

India is, in fact, a country that has been for too long betrayed by its politicians - and by a political culture in which personal interests, political expediency, greed and short-term calculations have almost always prevailed over the national interest. Mr Modi has been able to ride on the popular rejection of this political culture in order to capture the hunger for some kind of leadership capable of translating a vision of the future into efficient policies. For him, as for most elected leaders, the first 100 days are crucial in shaping perceptions and in setting the tone for the next five years.

There is no underestimating the difficulties and challenges ahead as the new prime minister endeavours to implement his reform programme. The latest surge in inflation and the prospect of a poor monsoon harvest illustrate the limits of the government as it strives to revive the economy. However, Mr Modi has at least two major assets that his predecessor did not have or lost: his reputation and record on decisiveness, and the fact that the private sector - both domestic and foreign - is eager to play ball with him. It is India's moment. Seize it.

C. Raja Mohan | Managing strategic partnerships

Instead of obsessing with nonalignment, New Delhi must strengthen its comprehensive national power

Illustration:Jayachandran/Mint

The new government faces many difficult foreign policy challenges. Restoring the lost dynamism in India’s vital strategic partnerships and regaining a firm handle on some of its traditionally fraught relationships must be at the top of the diplomatic agenda.

India’s impressive foreign policy run, which began with the nuclear tests of May 1998, petered out in the second term of Manmohan Singh. Thanks to purposeful and imaginative diplomacy on the part of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, international condemnation of the tests quickly yielded to an improvement in India’s relations with all of the major powers, raising New Delhi’s profile in Asia and on the global stage. If Singh inherited an India that was running forward full tilt, he has left an India that is sputtering on all fronts.

In the first term of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), Singh had the luxury of basking in the glory of economic growth generated by earlier reforms. While he was unwilling to push for new reforms from 2004 to 2009, Singh seemed confident enough to take forward Vajpayee’s many foreign policy initiatives—including those towards the US, China, and Pakistan. Singh’s second term, however, turned out to be disappointing on both the economic and diplomatic fronts. His government’s missteps on economic policy were compounded by maladroit diplomacy and wishful strategic thinking. Together they undermined the narrative of India’s rise that had gained so much traction in the earlier decade. The new government, then, must return to the basics.

Above all, it must restore the authority of the prime minister and his leadership over the cabinet system of government so critical for the conduct of any national policy. On foreign policy, it must end the confusion that the UPA government brought to India’s external goals, revive domestic political consensus on an effective strategy, and address the multiple structural constraints and institutional weaknesses that have hampered India’s rise.

Veering off course

Singh began with a bold determination to press ahead with five fundamental policy innovations launched by the Vajpayee government. Taken together, these innovations helped transform India’s geopolitical condition and secure its ascent in Asia and the world.

The first was in the domain of nuclear diplomacy. In testing five nuclear weapons in May 1998 in defiance of global opinion, the Vajpayee government ended India’s prolonged nuclear ambiguity and the many long-term costs that came with it.

The second innovation involved neighbourhood policy. Vajpayee sought to limit India’s extended conflicts with Pakistan and China and build more cooperative relations with its smaller neighbours.

Next, Vajpayee broadened the nation’s foreign field of vision and defined India’s interests as extending from Aden to Malacca. The new approach provided the basis for intensifying India’s Look East policy and its engagement with the Middle East.

The transformation of relations with all the major powers, especially the US, was the fourth innovation. Discarding the old baggage of non-alignment, Vajpayee reached out to the US and declared to an initially sceptical American audience and a visibly nervous Indian one that New Delhi and Washington were natural allies.

Finally, Vajpayee began to discard the ideological inheritance in the multilateral arena, departing from the canon in the nuclear domain, supporting the US on missile defence, and starting to focus on India’s interests rather than on ideological posturing at the United Nations and other multilateral forums.

These five approaches broke the rigidity that had taken hold of India’s foreign policy and they energized Indian diplomacy in ways not seen since the 1950s under Jawaharlal Nehru.

In 2004, Singh thus inherited a robust foreign agenda and an improved regional and global standing. Despite a constricting coalition with the Communist parties and the deep aversion of his own Congress party to political risk, Singh was eager to press ahead with Vajpayee’s innovations. During the first two years of his government, New Delhi clinched defence and nuclear deals with the US, outlined the terms of a boundary settlement with China, initiated negotiations on the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan, and articulated a new vision for regional integration within the subcontinent. But for the rest of his tenure, Singh struggled to sustain these initiatives amid an internal political backlash and the lack of support within his own party.

The re-election of the Congress in 2009 with an increased number of seats raised hopes that the government would be bolder on the economic and foreign fronts. But the party leadership imposed even stronger constraints on Singh’s room to manoeuvre politically. Delays, setbacks, and paralysis on virtually all foreign policy fronts were the result.

He raised extraordinary expectations in the beginning, but Singh is ending his two terms with a whimper.

Structural challenges

In seeking to revive the momentum of India’s foreign policy, the new government will have to address several important structural challenges:

•Rescue foreign policy from old ideological demons : Instead of the obsession with the mythical principles of non-alignment, New Delhi must strengthen its comprehensive national power and help redefine the external environment. The quest for global strategic influence is an unavoidable imperative, given that nearly 50% of the national economy is tied to imports and exports. Thus, India’s ability to secure growing levels of prosperity for its people depends upon its capacity to shape its regional security environment; contribute to stable great-power relations; become an indispensable element of the Asian balance of power; and ensure favourable international regimes on trade, climate change, and other pressing multilateral matters.

•Bring clarity and dexterity to India’s engagement with great powers: New Delhi must come to terms with an important reality: India’s core objective of expanding its comprehensive national power is more likely to be achieved in collaboration with the US and the West than with China. Yet it has to further that end without provoking Beijing.

•Deepen New Delhi’s regional engagement: Economic integration within the subcontinent and with the abutting regions, regional stability, and defence cooperation must all be pursued with greater vigour.

•Strengthen government and policy institutions: To take full advantage of emerging opportunities abroad, New Delhi must accelerate the growth of its diplomatic corps, raise the quality of government personnel, and support the development of policy and research institutions.

•Restore the prime minister’s authority over the entire government: An unprecedented power sharing agreement with Congress leaderSonia Gandhi severely undermined Singh’s influence as well as that of the cabinet secretary. Restoring the prime minister’s authority and strengthening the cabinet secretary’s position are critically important.

•Reclaim the central government’s prerogative, vis-à-vis the states, to conduct foreign policy: In Singh’s second term, New Delhi seemed paralysed by state government protests with regard to Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere.

Key priorities

The new government must make the revival of economic growth its most important priority. An emphasis on economy first will have significant benefits for the conduct of foreign policy. Concluding India’s free trade negotiations with Europe, contributing to the construction of an Asian economic community through the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, and initiating negotiations on free trade with the US should be at the top of the foreign economic agenda.

The new government will also need to focus on a number of other areas:

The US: Revitalizing the strategic partnership with the US must be the foundation on which New Delhi pursues its great-power relationships. While differences will remain, more intensive political cooperation with the US is essential if India is to cope with turbulence in the Middle East, uncertainty in Afghanistan, and prospects of a non-peaceful Chinese rise in East Asia.

China: India must expand economic cooperation with China and press Beijing for better market access to India’s manufactured goods and services. Since China is a challenge as well as an opportunity, New Delhi must learn to walk on two legs, combining productive bilateral cooperation and effective competition.

Asia: In the East, New Delhi must respond more effectively to the demand for greater economic and military cooperation. In the West, it must end the neglect of the Middle East and build strong ties to all key nations in the region.

The subcontinent: India must lead the promotion of peace, prosperity, and stability in the subcontinent. It must open its markets to smaller neighbours, promote greater transborder connectivity, and modernize its infrastructure to facilitate trade.

Defence: India must find ways to quickly respond to the growing demands for defence cooperation in different parts of the world, especially in the Indo-Pacific littoral. The new government must make defence diplomacy a high priority with major powers as well as regional partners. Equally important is the need to create a strong domestic defence industrial base that facilitates the export of defence hardware and services.

Terrorism: The new government must resolutely confront the challenges of extremism and terrorism that not only seek to destabilize India but also to undermine Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Soft power: Finally, India can no longer waste its natural strengths in the domain of soft power. Whether it is promotion of tourism or cultural diplomacy, expanding the global footprint of Indian media, or cultivating political constituencies around the world, New Delhi has performed far below its potential. Now it must forge a strong public-private partnership to promote India’s culture and perspectives abroad.

If the new government takes these priorities to heart and acts quickly and forcefully to implement them, New Delhi’s foreign policy will come to life again, reclaiming its dynamism and once more furthering India’s place in the world.

PM calls for UNSC, IMF reform

China’s President Xi Jinping on Tuesday invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit China in November and called for a “negotiated resolution” to the boundary dispute “at an early date” as the two leaders held their first ever meeting in Brazil.

In Fortaleza to attend the BRICS Summit, Mr. Modi and Mr. Xi met for 80 minutes — extending beyond the scheduled 40 minutes — in what was described by officials as a substantive and frank discussion. Mr. Modi termed the meeting “very fruitful” and said on Twitter that “a wide range of issues” had been discussed.

Mr. Xi said he was looking forward to his September visit to India, and also welcomed Mr. Modi to visit China in November when Beijing will host the APEC leaders’ meeting. It is possible that Mr. Modi may visit Beijing in December. The Chinese President said he was willing to work with Mr. Modi to “constantly enhance the China-India strategic and cooperative partnership to a higher level and jointly safeguard our strategic period of opportunities.” Both countries, he said, were “long lasting strategic and cooperative partners, rather than rivals.” “If the two countries speak in one voice, the whole world will attentively listen; if the two countries join hand in hand, the whole world will closely watch,” he said. Mr. Xi called for a “negotiated solution to the border issues at an early date,” says the Xinhuanews agency.

Mr. Modi said there was a need for finding a solution and maintaining peace on the borderHe made the point that incidents on the border should not undermine relations.