Riddle me this: India-US ties ‘span seas to stars’ and BJP goes after deep state and Foggy Bottom
A most important event in our politico-strategic history passed with somewhat less debate than it deserved. It was the BJP’s attack not merely on the ‘deep state’ now seen as a formidable, undefinable and mysterious pan-national demon, but also on the US State Department.
When the BJP’s official Twitter (sorry Elon, X) handle posts a 16-part thread attacking the US ‘deep state’ for launching an all-out war on India and its Modi government, you’d normally be inclined to say: ‘It’s OK. Trump is the new president. He’s railing against the same monster. So it’s just as well that the BJP also joins in. Be on the winning side.’ Except, the 13th of these posts went beyond the ‘deep state’ and accused the US State Department of leading this conspiratorial cabal.
The key lines: “It has always been the US State Department behind this agenda….The ‘deep state’ had a clear objective to destabilise India by targeting Prime Minister Modi..the French investigative media group Mediapart revealed that OCCRP (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project) is funded by the US State Department’s USAID…In fact, 50 percent of OCCRP’s funding comes from the US State Department.”
There are specific mentions of the Pegasus controversy, several exposés on the Adani Group and also, obviously, references to other ‘deep state’ figures like George Soros. The substantively new thing here was the BJP launching a direct and unqualified attack on the US State Department.
Please note that Mediapart is also the hard-Left French platform that led the investigations into the Indian Rafale deal, providing the Congress and Modi critics much ammunition to attack him. So far, for the BJP, it might have been part of some French Left deep-state plot to undermine India and the Modi government. Now, it’s a credible ally. That irony just died isn’t a phrase that works in hard politics. Here, irony dies and resurrects, just like the serial storyteller of Vikram aur Betaal.
In this latest avatar, Betaal Mediapart’s story was actually quite damaging to the US establishment. It isn’t just too clever by half, but also cynical in the extreme to be funding (without disclosure) investigative journalism across the world while also keeping a veto on appointments of key personnel and issues, as revealed by Mediapart. Cynicism, however, must be the core requirement for becoming a superpower.
Equally, a political party was within its rights to question it, if it felt its government was hurt by this US government-funded initiative. Complications, however, arise at a more substantive level. It isn’t the first time a ruling party in India has attacked the ‘foreign hand’ or specifically the US. The Congress did so routinely in the Indira era.
In the early 1970s, as Mrs Gandhi came under pressure from the Opposition, she and her party routinely accused their opponents of being CIA agents. It was then that Rajya Sabha member Piloo Mody, who had been a founding member of the Swatantra Party, walked into the House one day wearing a badge saying, “I am a CIA agent.” Later, Rajiv Gandhi and even P.V. Narasimha Rao attacked America routinely when under pressure. Rajiv with his ‘nani yaad kara denge’ (we will make them remember their grandmothers) and Rao in a Parliament intervention. Sidelight: later, the MEA tried explaining this to the US embassy by dismissing it as a slip of the tongue. In a conversation with some of us editors, a furious William Clark Jr, the US ambassador at the time, asked, “Was his (Rao’s) tongue slipping for 15 minutes?”
So far, so good, but those times were different. This was India’s Cold War anti-Americanism. Now, we live in a different era, when three successive Indian prime ministers and five US presidents have hailed ours as the most consequential bilateral relationship of the 21st century.
India and America now hail each other as strategic partners if not allies. Some lines spoken at Modi’s official state visit to Washington in 2023 are relevant here. Modi said, “Our… important decisions have added a new chapter to our comprehensive and global strategic partnership.” Biden had described this as “a partnership that is among the most consequential in the world, that is stronger, closer and more dynamic than any time in history”. And this, from the 6,500-word joint statement, was the cherry on the cake or kalakand: “No corner of human enterprise is untouched by the partnership between our two great countries, which spans the seas to the stars.”
This gives context to the BJP’s attack on the US State Department now. Of course, diplomatically, both sides maintain at the highest levels that there’s no problem with the relationship.
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So how do two great powers, who mutually and repeatedly hail each other as a most vital strategic partner, reconcile this contradiction?
That the Congress party has now latched on to this by accusing Modi of ruining a vital strategic relationship to “protect his friend Adani” is just another in this season of ironies, given its traditional anti-Americanism that Manmohan Singh had to defy for that epochal nuclear deal.
It’s the Opposition’s job to prey on the government’s contradictions. But how does the government balance this without sacrificing a relationship it says it values? The answer won’t be as simple as saying the party has its view and the government will keep doing its thing. India and America may have become friends, but anti-Americanism has always survived in popular opinion.
Lately, it’s been turbocharged with Trump railing over his ‘deep state’ and its many “conspiracies”. Woven into it is the curious new sex appeal in the idea of de-dollarisation, something Jaishankar has tried to squash unambiguously more than once.
So strong is our anti-Americanism that many smart and influential people are seduced by the idea of a BRICS currency, never mind that it would just be another name for the Chinese yuan. It goes without saying that anti-Americanism is probably the safest and sexiest ideology to flaunt.
Doubts and disputes will arise in the closest partnerships. As Biden winds up, each side thinks it has caught the other with its hands in the cookie jar: the US on the Pannun issue and India now paying it back over the OCCRP. How can you do such a thing to a friend? That’s the question each is asking the other.
Could the Modi government/BJP have handled it differently? Would they have spoken differently had Kamala Harris won? You can speculate. My point would instead be, has the US handled this much better?
See some of the statements of Ambassador Eric Garcetti. Was it really necessary—or diplomatic—for him to talk of the “red lines” on the Pannun issue when India was already responding to it in a very different manner compared to Nijjar-Canada?
Or his statement to The Times of India that the US made a distinction between talk and acts of terrorism. His country knows as well as ours how terror talk can turn into action. These were among the most insensitive words spoken in India by a US ambassador in three decades; sort of on par with Colin Powell, describing the bombing of the state assembly in Srinagar as an attack on an Indian “facility”. Friends can deliver hard messages softly, without public shaming.
We acknowledge that Garcetti’s Bollywood dancing moves are way better than the bhangra we saw from Justin Trudeau even if their costumes seemed tailored by the same guy in Palika Bazar. Dancing to Bollywood music or dholak is no way to win the hearts and minds of Indians in the 21st century. Especially not when you are schooling them on the “difference” between terror talk and action.
No one individual, institution or action is to blame for this, but this relationship has gone into a stressful phase towards the last months of the Biden administration. The BJP, I’d guess, is responding in kind. Definitely not without checking with its government. And they wait for Trump.
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