THE late poet and film lyricist Kaifi Azmi described a strange method of writing film songs, which has come to bear a close resemblance to the method in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign policy.

Kaifi said that he, like other great songwriters, was required to pen the lyrics — including several chartbusters — along prescribed tunes pre-set by the film’s music director. “It was akin to digging the grave first and then looking for a body to fit the size.”

Modi’s diplomacy plies along a similar prefabricated rut of right-wing ideology. Instead of leaning on flexibility and creativity of seasoned diplomats to pick and choose what accords best with national interest, it seems more concerned with running Modi’s saffron agenda.

When national interest gets to be determined by the size of the pro-Hindutva NRI crowds, for example, which the prime minister must attract on foreign visits, or when diplomacy submits to the overreach of the leader’s crony capitalist friends, canvassing support for the tycoons at the highest levels, leaning on India’s diplomatic capital, the result could see India being left at the mercy of global carpetbaggers.

This is what happened in the wake of the recent flare-up with Pakistan. Except for Israel, which is being turned by Benjamin Netanyahu into a fascist state, was there one country that stood by India, or which saw it as an ally deserving solidarity? And now the Indian government is sending a team of MPs on a junket to explain to foreign governments India’s point of view. Has it come to this?

Even the secular military is being reportedly harnessed to accord with the government’s ideological preferences. Defence analyst Pravin Sawhney has been saying this for years and questioning the Modi government for turning the army into a terrorism-fighting outfit in Kashmir, which only widens the gap with China’s advance in high-tech warfare capability.

It was again the ideological expediency with little thought to its diplomatic consequences — and only to fulfil a pending Hindutva agenda — that the government subverted a delicate political arrangement in Jammu and Kashmir, which brought China into the diplomatic-military frame on an issue that had been hitherto handled as a bilateral matter with Pakistan.

Modi’s bullock cart of Hindutva is bound to clash with the guardrails of secular democracy prescribed by Gandhi and Nehru.

Eventually, the edifice, created with great political care in the Simla Agreement by Indira Gandhi and Z.A. Bhutto, would give way to President Donald Trump pressing to mediate between India and Pakistan. Things have happened that Modi’s foreign policy objectives find themselves incapable of negotiating.

To tend to his ideological needs, Modi even embarrassed himself and the country by obsequiously canvassing support for Trump’s second term, which, by the way, Joe Biden won. Now, Trump is rewarding him for the help — by hyphenating India and Pakistan as equal nations worthy of America’s friendship, a hyphen that Indian diplomacy see as infra dig.

As the old movie song goes: “Na khuda hi mila, na visaal e sanam/ Na idhar ke rahey na udhar ke rahey” (Pursuing holiness and carnal love at once/ I lost them both like a dunce). Pursuing friendship with Trump’s America as a primary goal, Modi found himself courting trouble with the rising powers of Asia — Russia and China. Which explains even if it doesn’t justify the Shashi Tharoor-led junket.

What can Tharoor with his complicated English do that External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar could not? On the other hand, rather than reflecting on the futility of demonising Pakistan, the BJP is busy drumming up an election rally for Bihar, foregrounding Modi as the victor despite there being no endorsement of that verdict from any foreign quarter.

If anything, foreign governments are busy counting the exact number of planes that Pakistan says it had downed in aerial combat following the Indian attack on Pakistani sites on May 7. They are using the experience from the aerial combat to glean their own lessons for future war strategies. That’s the lot of the Global South, sadly — to be used as guinea pigs for war machines vended by Great Powers. What is the alternative?

As Modi plies the bullock cart of Hindutva along the antediluvian ruts of narrow imagination, the cart is bound to clash with the guardrails of secular democracy prescribed by Gandhi and Nehru, and which Subhash Bose and Bhagat Singh died for. The multicultural, scientifically spirited cornucopia of a nation, the kind that made the world envious, among them Churchill who believed the free India would be ungovernable, needs urgent restoration. That would be opposite of where India is currently headed. Hindutva, unlike Kaifi’s songs, needs a mass grave of not one but all democratic institutions to fit its narrow ideology in.

The world has changed, however, and rightwing governments are facing resistance, be it in Israel or the US. Hindutva can no longer be offered as a synonym for national interest at home or abroad. What foreign policy then is in India’s national interest?

Modi might want to look around and resume stalled friendships, not across the Atlantic or abutting the Pacific Ocean, but in the neighbourhood where India needs to re-earn the respect and fellowship of the countries that once considered it a friendly neighbour, and didn’t see its leaders as hectoring big brothers. This is also what China is doing with its own neighbours, including Vietnam and Japan. Mend fences at home, before launching the blue water naval capability. And don’t launch it if it only serves someone else’s interest.

In other words, India might consider starting anew with the resumption of a great platform that was created by South Asian countries to sort out their mutual problems in Dhaka in 1985, including terrorism. The seven-member club came to be called Saarc, which grew to eight with the inclusion of Afghanistan.

Modi initially made a welcome gesture to invite Saarc leaders to his inaugural, but then took the view perhaps that India had outgrown the neighbourhood. There’s no rocket, however, that can launch itself into outer space without the assurance of a firm ground beneath.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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Published in Dawn, May 20th, 2025