Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s forthcoming visit to the United Arab Emirates on Sunday creates a sickening feeling about where the foreign policy is heading.
The itinerary of the visit has a familiar ring to it – a roadshow at the cricket ground in Dubai and a visit to a mosque thrown in as afterthought, and a couple of courtesy calls on the leaders of the host country.
We have been told Modi will discuss oil trade and UAE investments in India with his hosts and that the visit would have “major strategic, economic dimensions”. Don’t laugh. I am not kidding – that’s what some of our papers actually claimed in their curtain raisers.
For the UAE newspapers, the Modi visit is apparently inconsequential. The main draw for them is the show in the Dubai cricket stadium and those Indians interested in turning up are being advised by the newspapers to register their names with the Indian Mission and to duly collect their invitation cards. Of course, it is a massive effort – issuing some 30000 invitation cards in a matter of 4-5 days and verifying the credentials of the applicants.
The roadshow nonetheless promises to be a thumping success, since Dubai has a huge Indian population of one million. Dubai is a unique city, in fact, insofar as Indians perhaps form the majority population.
The mosque visit
And amongst the Indians in Dubai, Malayalis form a big majority. The politicians from Kerala – belonging to the ruling Congress-led front as well as the opposition Left front – frequently travel to the UAE for what is euphemistically called “fund collection”. No one knows how much they collect, or where the money finally ends up.
Hopefully, the time has come for the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Sangh Parivar also to henceforth regard the Indian community in the UAE as milch cows – more productive, perhaps, than their high-yielding North American cows.
Modi’s mosque visit becomes intriguing, however. His intended audience is surely the domestic Muslim audience in India. His tour of the mosque will be telecast widely in the country.
Could it be that Modi wants to project himself as a secular-minded person? I doubt it. To my mind, the real clincher will be if he finally agrees to wear a “skull cap” for the occasion.
But then, assuming he indeed does, do we take the Indian Muslims to be such absolute duffers? Don’t they know Modi boycotts Iftar parties?
Don’t they know that under his watch, the incidents of communal violence have sharply increased in our country – as per our Home Ministry figures – and the government seems incapable or unwilling (or both) to do anything about it? I can bet that the Muslim from Kerala won’t be hoodwinked. He’s educated; he is politically literate; he is addicted to newspapers and television; and, he understands fully well the desperate politics practiced by the BJP in his home state – polarising the Hindus by turning them against Muslims (and Christians).
Only the other day, a statement was attributed to the BJP that the Muslims of Kerala are breeding so dreadfully fast that the Hindus cannot cope with them and Kerala could be inching perilously close to becoming a Muslim-majority state.
However, Modi is sure to have plentiful photo-ops with the Muslim tycoons from Malabar living in the Gulf. They are savvy folks with big business interests.
The best hope of the BJP could be that those visual images just might create a perception in Kerala that Muslims are Modi-friendly – or, vice versa.
The calculation would be that the image of Muslim-friendly Modi beamed into the Malayali homes could have political dividends in the upcoming state assembly elections.
But that will remain a pipe-dream. The plain truth is that the BJP will forever remain an “also-ran” in the state elections, forever polling impressively but never quite winning a single seat, until and unless it can find electoral allies in the fractious Kerala politics – and the harsh reality is that given its abysmal record of indulging in communal politics, no political party likes to be seen holding its hand.
But the overarching question here is something else. Is this what India’s foreign policy has increasingly come to be in the Modi era?
Is India’s foreign policy all about burnishing Modi’s personal image and/or enhancing the BJP’s electoral prospects?
The Saudi angle
Modi is no more a greenhorn in international diplomacy. He would have understood by now that West Asia is on the cusp of historic changes. Simply put, how does his UAE visit fit into the emergent paradigm?
Has anyone given thought to it? If so, this should at least have been a combined visit to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The latter is a key country in the region and by far the most important country within the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Probably, the Saudis might have discouraged a grand road show being organised in Riyadh or Jeddah for Modi – after all, the Islamic State is watching. But, never mind, even without a roadshow, it still remains a relationship that India has been carefully nurturing.
Saudi Arabia by far outweighs the other GCC states in India’s West Asia policies. The best spin one can, perhaps, give to this strange “stand-alone” visit to the UAE, bypassing Saudi Arabia, is that South Block probably tried hard to arrange a visit for Modi to Riyadh and Jeddah as well, but, understandably enough, the Custodian of the Holy Places pleaded “scheduling difficulty”.
To be sure, India has so far been buying its oil from the UAE on commercial terms. It remains to be seen if Modi will succeed in negotiating concessional price for India’s oil imports from that country. What about investments by the UAE in India?
True, the UAE claims to have a sovereign wealth fund of $800 billion, and it has been a significant investor in Pakistan. But it has shown hardly any interest in investing in India.
As for trade figures, they may look appreciable on surface, but then, delving deeper, it becomes obvious that Dubai is a convenient trans-shipment point for the Indian exporter to reach his goods to other countries in the West Asian region and even beyond to countries in other regions.
Working class Indians
Suffice it to say, the India-UAE relationship ultimately devolves upon the two million strong Indian community.
Unlike the upper class Indians who migrated to North America, the bulk of the Indian community in the UAE belong to the working class – over 80 percent are involved in unskilled, semi-skilled or medium-skilled jobs.
But the charming thing about these faceless, obscure Indians, who are mostly from Kerala, is that they are thrifty people who fulfil their huge obligations to their families at home by repatriating all their savings to India.
And at the end of the day, it works out to a massive remittance exceeding $12 billion annually. Yes, it is incredible that these "Malayali Indians" in the UAE could be accounting for one-third of all remittances being made by the so-called non-resident Indians to India – by far exceeding the remittances from their rich North American cousins.
However, unsurprisingly, the Indian political elites have traditionally paid far more attention to their wealthier North American cousins, with whom they have social kinship felt in the blood and felt along the heart.
Will Modi correct this glaring injustice? If he announces some meaningful measures to alleviate the longstanding grievances of the toiling Malayali in the Gulf, his visit to the UAE, the first by an Indian prime minister in 34 years, will make sense.
Otherwise, it will be all about a roadshow and an hour or so before TV cameras wearing (or not wearing) a skullcap, while the India-UAE ties as such will continue to remain on autopilot.
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The itinerary of the visit has a familiar ring to it – a roadshow at the cricket ground in Dubai and a visit to a mosque thrown in as afterthought, and a couple of courtesy calls on the leaders of the host country.
We have been told Modi will discuss oil trade and UAE investments in India with his hosts and that the visit would have “major strategic, economic dimensions”. Don’t laugh. I am not kidding – that’s what some of our papers actually claimed in their curtain raisers.
For the UAE newspapers, the Modi visit is apparently inconsequential. The main draw for them is the show in the Dubai cricket stadium and those Indians interested in turning up are being advised by the newspapers to register their names with the Indian Mission and to duly collect their invitation cards. Of course, it is a massive effort – issuing some 30000 invitation cards in a matter of 4-5 days and verifying the credentials of the applicants.
The roadshow nonetheless promises to be a thumping success, since Dubai has a huge Indian population of one million. Dubai is a unique city, in fact, insofar as Indians perhaps form the majority population.
The mosque visit
And amongst the Indians in Dubai, Malayalis form a big majority. The politicians from Kerala – belonging to the ruling Congress-led front as well as the opposition Left front – frequently travel to the UAE for what is euphemistically called “fund collection”. No one knows how much they collect, or where the money finally ends up.
Hopefully, the time has come for the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Sangh Parivar also to henceforth regard the Indian community in the UAE as milch cows – more productive, perhaps, than their high-yielding North American cows.
Modi’s mosque visit becomes intriguing, however. His intended audience is surely the domestic Muslim audience in India. His tour of the mosque will be telecast widely in the country.
Could it be that Modi wants to project himself as a secular-minded person? I doubt it. To my mind, the real clincher will be if he finally agrees to wear a “skull cap” for the occasion.
But then, assuming he indeed does, do we take the Indian Muslims to be such absolute duffers? Don’t they know Modi boycotts Iftar parties?
Don’t they know that under his watch, the incidents of communal violence have sharply increased in our country – as per our Home Ministry figures – and the government seems incapable or unwilling (or both) to do anything about it? I can bet that the Muslim from Kerala won’t be hoodwinked. He’s educated; he is politically literate; he is addicted to newspapers and television; and, he understands fully well the desperate politics practiced by the BJP in his home state – polarising the Hindus by turning them against Muslims (and Christians).
Only the other day, a statement was attributed to the BJP that the Muslims of Kerala are breeding so dreadfully fast that the Hindus cannot cope with them and Kerala could be inching perilously close to becoming a Muslim-majority state.
However, Modi is sure to have plentiful photo-ops with the Muslim tycoons from Malabar living in the Gulf. They are savvy folks with big business interests.
The best hope of the BJP could be that those visual images just might create a perception in Kerala that Muslims are Modi-friendly – or, vice versa.
The calculation would be that the image of Muslim-friendly Modi beamed into the Malayali homes could have political dividends in the upcoming state assembly elections.
But that will remain a pipe-dream. The plain truth is that the BJP will forever remain an “also-ran” in the state elections, forever polling impressively but never quite winning a single seat, until and unless it can find electoral allies in the fractious Kerala politics – and the harsh reality is that given its abysmal record of indulging in communal politics, no political party likes to be seen holding its hand.
But the overarching question here is something else. Is this what India’s foreign policy has increasingly come to be in the Modi era?
Is India’s foreign policy all about burnishing Modi’s personal image and/or enhancing the BJP’s electoral prospects?
The Saudi angle
Modi is no more a greenhorn in international diplomacy. He would have understood by now that West Asia is on the cusp of historic changes. Simply put, how does his UAE visit fit into the emergent paradigm?
Has anyone given thought to it? If so, this should at least have been a combined visit to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The latter is a key country in the region and by far the most important country within the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Probably, the Saudis might have discouraged a grand road show being organised in Riyadh or Jeddah for Modi – after all, the Islamic State is watching. But, never mind, even without a roadshow, it still remains a relationship that India has been carefully nurturing.
Saudi Arabia by far outweighs the other GCC states in India’s West Asia policies. The best spin one can, perhaps, give to this strange “stand-alone” visit to the UAE, bypassing Saudi Arabia, is that South Block probably tried hard to arrange a visit for Modi to Riyadh and Jeddah as well, but, understandably enough, the Custodian of the Holy Places pleaded “scheduling difficulty”.
To be sure, India has so far been buying its oil from the UAE on commercial terms. It remains to be seen if Modi will succeed in negotiating concessional price for India’s oil imports from that country. What about investments by the UAE in India?
True, the UAE claims to have a sovereign wealth fund of $800 billion, and it has been a significant investor in Pakistan. But it has shown hardly any interest in investing in India.
As for trade figures, they may look appreciable on surface, but then, delving deeper, it becomes obvious that Dubai is a convenient trans-shipment point for the Indian exporter to reach his goods to other countries in the West Asian region and even beyond to countries in other regions.
Working class Indians
Suffice it to say, the India-UAE relationship ultimately devolves upon the two million strong Indian community.
Unlike the upper class Indians who migrated to North America, the bulk of the Indian community in the UAE belong to the working class – over 80 percent are involved in unskilled, semi-skilled or medium-skilled jobs.
But the charming thing about these faceless, obscure Indians, who are mostly from Kerala, is that they are thrifty people who fulfil their huge obligations to their families at home by repatriating all their savings to India.
And at the end of the day, it works out to a massive remittance exceeding $12 billion annually. Yes, it is incredible that these "Malayali Indians" in the UAE could be accounting for one-third of all remittances being made by the so-called non-resident Indians to India – by far exceeding the remittances from their rich North American cousins.
However, unsurprisingly, the Indian political elites have traditionally paid far more attention to their wealthier North American cousins, with whom they have social kinship felt in the blood and felt along the heart.
Will Modi correct this glaring injustice? If he announces some meaningful measures to alleviate the longstanding grievances of the toiling Malayali in the Gulf, his visit to the UAE, the first by an Indian prime minister in 34 years, will make sense.
Otherwise, it will be all about a roadshow and an hour or so before TV cameras wearing (or not wearing) a skullcap, while the India-UAE ties as such will continue to remain on autopilot.
