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By Roger Cohen
Photographs by Mauricio Lima
Roger Cohen, the head of the Paris office, and Mauricio Lima spent nearly two weeks in India, traveling between New Delhi, Varanasi and Chennai, to write and photograph this piece.
Sitting in the red sandstone-domed government building inaugurated by the British Raj less than two decades before India got rid of imperial rule, S. Jaishankar, India’s foreign minister, doesn’t want to see the tides of history sweep away replaced systems to usher in. The new one.
This, he believes, is today’s transformative moment. A “global order that is still very, very deeply Western,” as he put it in an interview, is being driven out of life by the effect of the war in Ukraine, to be replaced by a “multi-alignment” world where countries will decide on their own “policies, personal tastes and special interests. “
In fact, this is what India has been doing since the beginning of the war in Ukraine on February 24. He rejected American and European pressure at the United Nations to condemn the Russian invasion, made Moscow his biggest oil supplier, and rejected the perceived hypocrisy of the West. . Far from apologizing, his cheeky tone and his selfishness largely naked.
“I would still like to see a more rules-based world,” Mr. JaishankarThat point, I’m concerned that it’s to challenge that and, if necessary, denounce it. “
In other words, with its nearly 1400 million inhabitants, which will soon overtake China as the world’s most populous country, India wants reasonable Russian oil to maintain its 7% annual growth and lift millions out of poverty. This need is non-negotiable. India gobbles up all the Russian oil it wants, even a little more to export. For Jaishankar, the time has come to think that “the disorders of Europe are the disorders of the world, but the disorders of the world are those of Europe,” as he said in June.
The war in Ukraine, which sparked ethical outrage in the West over Russian atrocities, provoked another anger elsewhere, centered on a skewed and global distribution of power. While Western sanctions against Russia have pushed up energy, food and fertilizer prices, causing severe economic hardship in poorer countries, resentment in the United States and Europe has sparked in Asia and Africa.
Trench warfare on European soil is a distant alien affair. Its economic burden is prompt and palpable.
“Since February, Europe has imported six times more fossil energy from Russia than from India,” he said. Jaishankar. ” So if a $60,000 per capita society feels like it wants to take care of itself, and I’m content for that to be legitimate, they expect a $2,000 per capita society to take a hit. “
Here comes Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India, pursuing its own interests with new security, rejecting any feeling of inferiority and rejecting unmixed alignment with the West. Do you feel the influence?
The country is at a crossroads, between the colorful plurality of its democracy since independence in 1947 and a turn toward illiberalism under M. Modi. Sa “Hindu Renaissance” threatened some of the basic pillars of Indian democracy: equivalent remedy for all citizens, the right to dissent, the independence of the courts and the media.
Democracy and debate remain: the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party of M. J. . Modi lost a mayoral election in Delhi this month, and the prime minister’s popularity remains strong. For many, India is too vast and varied to succumb to any unitary nationalist dictates. .
The post-war order had no standing for India at the most sensible side of the table. But now, at a time when the aggression of the Russian army under President Vladimir V. Putin provided a brilliant representation of what a world of strongmen and imperial rivalry would look like. , India may have the strength to tip the balance towards an order governed through democratic pluralism or repressive rulers.
It remains to be seen in which direction M. Modi will lean. It has restored the country’s new pride for many Indians and strengthened the country’s foreign stature, while weakening the country’s pluralistic and secular model.
India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, himself an attaché of East and West through schooling and schooling, described the country as “an ancient palimpsest in which layer upon layer of ideas and daydreams had been inscribed” erasing any of those layers.
He was convinced that a secular India would embrace all the diversity bequeathed by repeated invasions. Above all, it meant conciliation with the country’s gigantic Muslim minority, which now numbers some two hundred million people.
Today, however, Nehru is vilified through the Hindu nationalist Nationalist party. Modi. No there are Muslims in M. Modi’s cabinet. The Hindu mafia’s attacks on Muslims were met with silence from the prime minister.
“Hatred has penetrated society to a terrifying level,” said famed Indian novelist Arundhati Roy.
That might be the case, but for now, Mr. India. Modi seems to be full of confidence.
The war in Ukraine, which aggravated the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, has fueled the country’s rise. Together, they pushed corporations to make global supply chains less risky by diversifying into an open India far from China’s surveillance state. They have exacerbated the global economic turbulence, from which India is alienated through its huge domestic market.
These points have contributed to dynamic projections that India, now ranked No. 5, will be the world’s third-largest economy until 2030, the United States and China.
During a recent visit to India, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the U. S. was not yet in India. The U. S. needs to “diversify away from countries that pose geopolitical and security dangers to our supply chain,” and named India as one of the “reliable trading partners. “
However, India is in no mood to sever ties with M’s Russia. Putin, who has subsidized the country with weapons during decades of non-alignment, while the United States has coddled India’s archenemy, Pakistan. Even in a country deeply divided by Mr. According to Modi, this technique has gained almost universal support.
“For many years, the United States did not make us, unlike Moscow,” Amitabh Kant, head of India’s presidency of the Group of 20 that began this month, said in an interview. New Delhi has enough rivals, he said: “Try, in addition to China and Pakistan, to turn Russia against you!”
Modi’s India will do so in an emerging world characterized by Jaishankar as “more fragmented, more tense, more razor-edge and more under strain” as the war in Ukraine intensifies.
“Paradoxically, the war in Ukraine has reduced acceptance as truth by Western powers and focused on people’s minds on how to hedge bets,” said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a leading Indian political theorist. “India feels that the United States has understood: yes, you will be upset, but you are not in a position to do anything about it. “
This has proven to be a gamble so far. ” The era of India’s significant global stature is just beginning,” said Preeti Dawra, Indian-born director of global marketing at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Arriving in Varanasi, Hinduism’s holiest city, in 1896, Mark Twain saw the “bewildering and magnificent confusion of stone platforms, temples, stairs and majestic palaces” emerging on the cliff above the Ganges, the river of life.
Modi, 72, who followed the city as his political constituency in 2014 as he embarked on his crusade to lead India, saying he had been “called through Mother Ganges,” cut a pink sandstone wound in the sacred jumble of devotion.
Known as the “corridor” and opened a year ago, the assignment connects the temple of Kashi Vishwanath, to the Hindu god Shiva, to the riverbank a quarter of a mile.
The vast almost eerily flawless pedestrian expanse, with its museum and other tourist facilities, connects the city’s most respected temple to the river where Hindus wash away their sins. This is the epitome of Modi.
Crossed by a labyrinth of more than three hundred houses that have been destroyed to make way, the passage mixes the political life of the prime minister with the most intimate Hindu traditions. At the same time, it proclaims its willingness to boost India through ambitious projects that break with chaos and decay. Modi, a Hindu nationalist and tech enthusiast, is a disruptor.
Self-taught, of modest origin in the western state of Gujarat and of a lower level in the formula of castes or social hierarchy of India, M. Modi has come to include an ambitious India.
Through what Srinath Raghavan, a historian, has called “an incorruptible genius for orchestrating public narratives,” he turned out to have imbued India with the confidence to forge the singular trail so evident in the 10 months since Russia went to war.
“Modi’s social mobility is, in some tactics, India’s promise today,” Raghavan said in an interview.
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