India must challenge Modi’s capitulation to Trump (plus Rekindle the spirit of India’s anti-imperialist nationalism)
First published at CPI(ML) Liberation.
Trump 2.0 has begun on a tempestuous note. Compared to the narrow margins of his 2016 victory and 2020 defeat, this time round the Trump victory was quite thumping. And since being sworn in for the second term of his Presidency, Donald Trump has lost no time to unleash his agenda like a global bully gone berserk. From declaration of a tariff war in global trade and deportation in shackles of hundreds of foreign nationals calling them illegal immigrants to the televised bullying of Ukraine President Zelenskyy and several other visiting leaders and making frequent outrageous statements like turning Gaza into an obscene Trump-themed tourist destination emptied of Palestinians and incorporating Canada as the 51st state of the US — Trump has kicked up a veritable global storm.
In his first term Trump had surfaced as a toxic symbol of white supremacist misogynistic politics with a strong Christian fundamentalist streak. He is now following up on the aggressive nationalist overtone of his slogan of MAGA (Make America Great Again). Tariff and deportation are his favourite weapons to bolster his “nationalist” image by projecting himself as the saviour of US trade and US labour from so-called “unfair” trade barriers and “immigrant job-snatchers”.
In this project, Trump has found a close ally in the world's richest person, ironically an immigrant US citizen of white South African origin, Elon Musk. Unlike the Modi-Adani nexus, where Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi prefers to keep the partnership secret, Trump brazenly flaunts his alliance with Musk, acknowledges Musk’s massive corporate contribution to his campaign and has reciprocated by putting Musk in charge of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. And now as Musk’s shares have begun to crash, Trump has jumped to his rescue, asking Americans to support Musk’s electric vehicle model Tesla.
While Trump’s domestic agenda has been along predictable lines, it is in the foreign policy domain that Trump appears to be making some drastic shifts. The televised showdown with Zelenskyy was the most pronounced example of this shift when Trump accused Ukraine of gambling with a possible third world war and appeared ready to risk a rupture with Europe and rock the NATO alliance in pressuring Zelenskyy to accept a so-called “peace deal”. It is common to come across commentators seeing Trump’s bullying tactics as just part of his maverick style, and some even see it as Trump working at the behest of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In other words, these commentators view the Trump phenomenon as a freak development, something not organically connected to the historical trajectory and current priorities of US imperialism.
A closer look would however reveal that what Trump is trying to do is to concentrate on China as the US’ current number one strategic target. The Cold War era when the US had the Soviet Union as its principal adversary has long ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. NATO was a product of the Cold War period and should have also been dismantled after the USSR’s disintegration. Europe and the US however maintained this military alliance to contain Russia and also serve the common hegemonic interests of the Western world. But the dominant opinion in the US ruling elite now believes that the challenge from China has reached a level where encircling and containing China must take precedence over other strategic imperatives. Hence the desperate US attempt to “untie” Russia from China and declare the BRICS “dead”. Meanwhile, importantly there is continuity in US policy on Israel, with Trump continuing to back Israel to the hilt in its genocidal occupation of Palestine and escalating ruthless persecution of pro-Palestine voices in the US.
Where does India figure in the unfolding Trump agenda? Over the past two decades and especially since the signing of the Indo-US nuclear deal, India has considered itself a key strategic ally of the US. Since his ascent to power in 2014, Modi has tried to sell the illusion that there has been a qualitative jump in India’s international stature and particularly in India’s friendship with the US, as well as a special intimacy with fellow supremacist Trump. Trump is now openly snubbing Modi and humiliating India at every opportunity. The treatment meted out to Indian citizens who were found residing in the US without necessary documents has been among the harshest and most humiliating. Trump has also accused India of being a tariff abuser in Modi’s presence and is now showcasing the drastic import duty reductions being announced by the Modi government as a US victory.
The US surely values India as a major market and as a strategic ally in its policy of containing China. But the Indian hype over the rise of the Indian-American community and the so-called special bond between Trump and Modi has clearly been exposed as wishful Sangh-BJP propaganda. India had a trade surplus with the US, and Trump clearly wants to reverse that and wants a much bigger market access for US products in the Indian market. This has alarming implications for Indian exports to the US, especially in pharmaceutical and IT sectors, as well as for India’s domestic producers including those in agriculture. If the US’ highly subsidised agricultural produce is allowed to swamp the Indian market, it will be a death blow to Indian agriculture. The Modi government has already announced huge concessions to the US auto industry, especially for Musk’s electric vehicle venture Tesla. India’s Telecom giants, Jio and Airtel, are signing accords with Musk’s telecom arm SpaceX to sell Starlink internet service in India.
While the US’ continental neighbours in North and South America are standing up to the Trump administration’s tariff threats and arrogant posturing, the Modi government has adopted a policy of quiet capitulation. At stake is not just India’s national pride as a sovereign country, which attained independence through protracted anti-colonial resistance, but also India’s vital economic interests and strategic autonomy to pursue domestic and foreign policies needed for India’s own development. The Trump presidency represents an aggressive trend of unilateralism that has begun to defy the entire post-war framework of multilateralism beginning with the United Nations. The whole world will have to find an answer to this growing US threat to global peace and stability, sustainable development and climate justice.
Rekindle the spirit of India’s anti-imperialist nationalism
First published at CPI(ML) Liberation.
More than three hundred Indian citizens were deported to India in chains on US military aircraft in February. A list of 18,000 Indians who are liable to be deported in the coming days has reportedly already been handed over to the Narendra Modi government. Private estimates put the figure of Indians in the US facing the risk of deportation at over seven hundred thousand. India’s foreign minister has defended the US action in the Indian Parliament. Prime Minister Modi repeated the same line during his joint press conference with US President Donald Trump. Contrast this shameful capitulation to the position taken by countries such as Colombia and Mexico, which have denied permission to US military aircraft and brought their nationals back in their own planes with full dignity.
Let us now take a look at recent reports from Bhubaneswar which reflect the conditions for Nepali students in India. A Nepali woman student in the Bhubaneswar-based Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) was found dead in her hostel room on February 16. This was apparently a case of suicide triggered by an abusive relationship with a male student hailing from a powerful BJP family in Uttar Pradesh. When students started protesting in the campus demanding fair investigation and justice for the victim, the KIIT authorities responded by declaring the Institute closed sine die for Nepali students, asking them to immediately vacate the campus and dropping many of them off at Cuttack railway station. Viral videos show KIIT officials humiliating Nepali students as an “ungrateful lot”, taunting them about Nepal’s low GDP and telling them to go back to Nepal.
Do we find any similarity and connection between the Modi government’s acquiescence to the ill-treatment meted out to Indian citizens by the Trump administration and the KIIT administration’s racist arrogance towards students from Nepal? Capitulation to US domination and bullying of small neighbouring countries are in fact two sides of the same coin. The RSS responds to reports of attacks on members of the minority Hindu community in Bangladesh with a global cry of “Hindus in danger”. The Modi government presents India as a Hindu-majority country encircled by hostile Islamic neighbours and has even amended India’s citizenship law with a discriminatory and divisive clause to exclude Muslims. But here are students from even Hindu-majority Nepal being ill-treated in a BJP-ruled state. Appeasement of the self-proclaimed global big bully and attempts to play the regional big brother go hand in hand.
India’s protracted struggle for freedom from British rule had given rise to a nationalist consciousness that despised oppression in any part of the world and empathised with revolutions and national liberation movements the world over. Bhagat Singh famously combined the two slogans “inquilab zindabad” (long live revolution) and “samrajyavad murdabad” (down with imperialism) into an integrated clarion call for worldwide freedom for the oppressed. Even Mahatma Gandhi, having personally experienced racism during his stay in South Africa before his return to India, could easily identify with the cause of a free Palestine. Jawaharlal Nehru saw himself primarily as a representative of the emerging third world and shaped a foreign policy on the basis of anti-imperialist solidarity and cooperation among all the newly liberated countries of the world.
The anti-imperialist nationalism that arose from our freedom movement and defined India’s identity — internally as an inclusive multi-religious, multilingual nation, and externally as a champion of national liberation and third world unity — is now under attack from the Sangh brigade’s model of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism. This model of aggressive nationalism seeks to coerce India’s old model of “unity in diversity” (more accurately unity through diversity) into the straitjacket of Hindu supremacist uniformity. It finds common cause with Israel’s Zionist genocidal campaign in Gaza and with the anti-immigrant xenophobic, Islamophobic, racist frenzy of the far-right across the world, even if undocumented Indians find themselves at the receiving end of this xenophobia, as we now see in the US.
The preamble to our Constitution describes “we the people of India” as the originating power of the Indian Republic. The use of the word “people” instead of nation marked a conscious realisation of the Constituent Assembly that India was not yet a cohesive nation, it was only a nation in the making. The Constituent Assembly firmly rejected the idea of religion-based national identity. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was categorical that since Hinduism, the religion followed by the majority of Indians, provides religious legitimacy to the most entrenched form of social inequality and injustice in the shape of the obnoxious order of castes, a Hindu Raj, if it ever becomes a fact, would prove to be calamitous for India. Ambedkar considered caste to be the biggest obstruction to India becoming a really cohesive nation. The Constitution of course did not compromise with the idea of any kind of exclusion or discrimination, either on the basis of religion or caste, and promised comprehensive justice, equality, freedom and fraternity for all.
In the Modi era, the Sangh brigade invokes its own image of the nation and brand of nationalism to enforce its agenda of transforming secular democratic India into a fascist Hindu Rashtra. True to the old Golwalkar doctrine of reducing Muslims to second grade citizens, the Sangh brigade is busy exploring all possible opportunities to spew venom and unleash violence targeting the Muslim community. While various strategies of voter suppression are already being employed against the Muslim electorate, the Hindu Rashtra constitution draft, which was set to be released in the ongoing Prayagraj Kumbh advocates outright disenfranchisement of the Muslim community. Every voice of dissent within India risks being persecuted as part of an “anti-national conspiracy”, while members of the Indian diaspora who are critical of the Modi regime are also being denied visas and stripped of their status as Overseas Citizens of India.
In the seventy-fifth anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution and foundation of the Indian republic, we the people of India will have to take up the challenge of reigniting the anti-imperialist nationalism that had united us as a modern democracy and opened up the vistas for a future where every Indian could live a life of dignity. Without that the Indian economy is liable to get more vulnerable to the vagaries of imperialist dependence and remain permanently enmeshed in the disastrous trappings of crony capitalism, where India’s corrupt corporate billionaires will continue to appropriate ever bigger shares of India’s wealth and income while the bottom half will have to survive on a sub-subsistence level deprived of even the basic necessities of life.
From the 1857 anthem “ham hain iske malik, Hindustan hamara” (India is ours, we own this land) to the constitutional affirmation of popular sovereignty defining India as a socialist secular democratic republic founded by “we the people of India”, our freedom movement was driven by the power of progressive nationalism. Fascism is today out to tarnish the glorious legacy of the freedom movement and destroy the democratic constitutional foundation that emerged from it. This calamity must be avoided by all means.