After Modi’s Return to Office

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

How will India relate to its Asian neighbours following its recent general election?

Although the election results saw a downturn in support for his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Narendra Modi has been returned to office as India’s prime minister for a third term. His National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition won the general election with 293 seats.

The BJP won 240 seats on its own in the election, several seats short of the 272 required to get a majority in India's 543-member parliament. However, two key BJP allies, the Telugu Desam Party and the Janata Dal (United), won 16 and 12 seats each in their respective states, pushing the NDA comfortably over the half-way mark.

First and foremost, India faces an ever more powerful China. As its economy soared, China began flexing its muscles, investing heavily in its Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, which India saw as threatening its security and spheres of influence, and moving more aggressively on its borders and in the Indian Ocean.

Ever since 1962, China has occupied Indian territory in the Himalayan region. Continued border incursions that threatened to lead to all-out war flared into a border clash in 2020 in the disputed Eastern Ladakh region, which lies along the disputed 3,440-kilometre-long de facto border along the Himalayas and is poorly demarcated.

Beijing didn’t recognise the creation of Ladakh as a federally-governed Indian territory in 2019. Nearly two dozen rounds of negotiations have failed to bring disengagement.

Over the past five years, more than 3,500 kilometres of roads have been built along the border. In the Kashmir region, over 2,000 workers have been digging a high-altitude tunnel that will improve connectivity to Ladakh.

China also claims all of India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, which it considers to be part of Tibet and calls Zangnan. New Delhi has rejected the renaming of places in the state, in response to a statement by the Chinese Civil Affairs Ministry that gave new official names to geographical features in the territory.

Without any Chinese concessions on the border issue, New Delhi is unlikely to improve relations.

Meanwhile, China is strengthening its friendship with Pakistan, pumping billions of dollars into the country via the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to build roads and ports. India, understandably, is wary of Beijing’s growing influence there.

After all, India’s most tense relationship remains with its archrival and neighbour to the west. The two countries have been in a permanent state of semi-hostility, punctuated by wars and border skirmishes, particularly over Kashmir, since 1947.

Relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbours have remained tense over the past few years. Modi’s government has refused to engage with Pakistan since accusing Islamabad of cross-border terrorism.

The recent Indian election didn’t help, with Modi engaging in attacks on India’s large Muslim minority. “From Pakistan’s perspective, one question will be whether Modi, who engaged in anti-Pakistan rhetoric in the election campaign, doubles down on it or backs away from it,” according to Madiha Afzal, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s former representative to the United Nations, feels that it’s not a “favourable climate” for India-Pakistan re-engagement. “Pakistan expects little change, if any, from Modi’s third term in power. Prospects for any normalisation of ties between India and Pakistan are at best uncertain,” she said.

In recent years, Sri Lanka has become an arena of geopolitical rivalry and maritime competition between India and China. The country is strategically located at the crossroads of busy shipping routes. But India and Sri Lanka share ethnic and religious ties as well as close trade relations.

Under Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe, these have strengthened over the past couple of years. India has emerged as the foremost partner for Sri Lanka in the endeavor to revitalize its economy and reform its bureaucracy. Trade between the two countries have grown particularly rapidly after the signing of the India-Sri Lanka Free Trade Agreement in March 2000. 

In Bangladesh, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s pro-Indian Awami League secured a fourth consecutive term in power in January. “We are committed to further strengthen our enduring and people-centric partnership with Bangladesh,” Modi stated, after the result was announced. After all, Bengalis live on both sides of the border, with the Indian state of West Bengal next to Bangladesh, so this will likely continue.