An American in Delhi

Symbolism matters. And the Republic Day is all about symbolism: the military masculinity of the state; the cultural kaleidoscope that is India; a patriotic pageant for the masses. In showing off our republican prowess, we are more French than anyone else in a democracy. We always have a foreign guest at the Parade, a guest who is compatible with the political ethos of the host. So, for a long time, invariably, the guest was a bloated Third World totem, a comrade of non-alignment. Africa, Arabia, and occasionally the neighbourhood were the chosen places whenever India, the self-styled leader of postcolonial brotherhood, looked for a potential guest. It did not matter whether the guest was a liberator-turned-dictator or a medalled kleptocrat—he was, after all, a soulmate of the socialist, Third World, non-aligned India. It was the symbolism of tribal solidarity, misplaced and meaningless.

Delhi has changed. So has the guest list—and the symbolism. Prime Minister Modi never misses an opportunity to make a statement, and he prefers to make it from a stage larger than the proverbial India of Third World vintage would have ever granted him. At home, at a time when we are busy measuring the pace of his revolution, he is cautious, restrained, lest it be seen as a circus. He would rather do it from New York, or, wait, London. He loves theatre, and it will have only one performer: he’s a cult in progress, chiselling his own iconography to perfection. We are not surprised, for that is what leaders who think they alone know the answer—their action is a nation’s destiny—do. Still, the theatre requires props that accentuate his performance as well as his message. It has to be rich in symbolism.

That is why President Barack Obama at this Republic Day Parade is all about Modi’s mission on his own mythology— and his India. The host and the guest have a few qualities in common. Their struggle for power essayed an outsider’s journey. For Modi, it began from the embers of Gujarat 2002, a moment of adversity and stigmatisation, and en route, he had to overcome his own party and his caricatured image as a Hindutva bogeyman. Obama was not a Washington insider, and after six years in power, he does not look like one even now. He came from elsewhere, a freshman senator with an ambition larger than what history would have allowed an African American in another age. Both Modi and Obama led one of the longest campaigns in modern politics, two loners who in the end created the machine that would brook no resistance. Both played with the mass mind with their eloquence on the stump; the American prophetic and evangelical, the Indian entertaining and inspiring. And both made their life story a winner’s weapon in the struggle for the future. They were two ambitious men with a reasonable amount of opacity.

In power, though, they are a study in contrast. Once in the White House, Obama looked bored and boring. If power is a permanent high for Modi, Obama handles power with philosophical aloofness, as if the exigencies of office are in direct conflict with his personal value system. For Modi, India is an invocation without an end, and in his self-portraits, he is just the prime servant of Mother India. India First, Make in India and more of India later—Modi wears his nationalist pride on his starched half sleeves. No America First for the 44th; a mighty America of extraterritorial ambition spreading its monochromatic moral system across the New Bad World is not the Obama way. His America is introspective, tentative, and in no hurry to build nations or to civilise the barbarians in far-flung places. There were ready-made situations in the Middle East and elsewhere during his presidency calling for Wilsonian intervention, but Obama was not sure; he was weighing options rather than exercising them. Obama wants the state to be the redeemer; he is a socialist at heart (read his State of the Union speech). Modi intends to downsize the state. Modi in power talks to India and to the world. Obama in power talks to himself, mostly.

Still, Obama in India on 26 January marks another dramatic Modi statement. On his first Republic Day as Prime Minister, Modi does not want to be seen sitting next to a lesser leader from a lesser country. This shift in symbolism announces that India has come a long way from the anti-Americanism of the Cold War vintage (still lingering among sections of the Establishment), that India, the natural ally of the US in an ideal democratic world, has a leader who is confident enough to display his internationalism, whether it is in Delhi or in Manhattan. Then there is the politics of irony. The erstwhile America’s Unwanted has already had his blockbuster debut as an Indian performer; and now he wants to play gracious host to the formerly cynical American in a show of the East’s generosity.

Obama has little to gain from this, but Modi has a lot by making use of him.

Barack ObamaIndo-US relationsNarendra ModiRepublic Day