PUBLIC PRAISE COSTS NOTHING FOR THE WEST
For many Indians, none of that matters. The crucial thing is that the world seems to be backing up Modi’s claims.
Members of India’s vast Western diaspora, who are among Modi’s strongest supporters, loudly echo the BJP’s narrative. The prime minister himself told a diaspora crowd once that while they may have been ashamed of the backward country they had left, he had transformed their Indianness into a source of pride.
More to the point, last year’s Group of Twenty (G20) summit in New Delhi seemed to showcase a parade of world leaders lining up to praise India.
It matters little what they may have been saying in private. (Behind closed doors at that same summit, for example, US President Joe Biden was reportedly raising the difficult question of India’s possible involvement in assassinations on Western soil.) Before the cameras, Biden and others lauded India – and, by implication, Modi – for demonstrating global leadership at a fraught geopolitical moment.
For Western nations, such fulsome public tributes cost nothing, and they have the considerable benefit of keeping New Delhi on-side diplomatically. The dangers of withholding such approbation to populists is well-known: Consider how Türkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan basked in European adulation early on, and how much of a thorn in his neighbours’ sides he became when those encomiums turned to criticism.
