President Barack Obama shakes hands with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2014, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. President Barack Obama and India's new Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Tuesday that "it is time to set a new agenda" between their countries, addressing concerns that the world's two largest democracies have grown apart. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)The Associated Press
These days everybody wants to be Narendra Modi's friend.
India's new prime minister can't travel abroad without getting bear-hugged by admiring foreign leaders, such as Japan's Shinzo Abe. His coronation in Delhi was packed with leaders anxious to benefit from Mr. Modi's promised regional economic growth, including Nawaz Sharif from neighbouring Pakistan, marking an early diplomatic coup. And Xi Jinping, China's president, rushed to visit New Delhi recently, paying back years of China visits from Mr. Modi when he was chief minister of the state of Gujarat.
Now, after having wrapped up his first trip to the United States, Mr. Modi has received his audience with U.S. President Barack Obama. Not only that, he sold out New York's Madison Square Garden on Sunday to a jubilant slice of India's thriving diaspora.
That's quite a long journey from being denied a U.S. visa because of allegations his administration was somehow complicit in Gujarat's anti-Muslim riots in 2002. But aside from a few protests, criticism has been scarce on these types of visits, while global adulation has been palpable for what increasingly resembles a prolonged coming out party for a more proud, more determined, more economically hopeful India.
Wherever he goes, Mr. Modi attracts attention. He exhorts business leaders to come and invest in India, to manufacture things in India, to build roads and other infrastructure in India.
And the businesspeople look at Mr. Modi as an embodiment of their hope that India – its huge market, its vast populace, its skilled business class – might finally be liberated from dysfunction and chaos. Few in India expect all the grandiose pronouncements from Mr. Modi's speeches to come true, but they hope he can at least get things moving again. At the same time, India's strident new leader has focused on the mundane little things, using lofty platforms to talk about tragically common Indian realities – such as public defecation and violence against women – that his predecessors rarely acknowledged.
In the U.S., as elsewhere, he achieved small, predictable successes: Promises of future collaboration, closer security ties, some promises of investment. But unlike in Japan or on Mr. Xi's visit to Delhi, where Mr. Modi secured big ticket deals and billions in infrastructure investment, there were no clear break-throughs in Washington.
In part, this might have been because Mr. Modi's maiden voyage to the centre of world politics comes after some serious strife – cooled relations, a major diplomatic spat involving a strip-searched Indian envoy accused of exploiting a maid, and a World Trade Organization deal that Mr. Modi scuttled because of domestic politics.
Mr. Modi had been denied U.S. visas since 2005. The supposed complicity of his state government in vicious, anti-Muslim riots that shook Gujarat in 2002 left many, in India and abroad, wondering whether Mr. Modi was guilty of crimes against humanity.
In Gujarat, police stood by as Hindu nationalist mobs killed, raped women, set people alight and torched mosques, as well as Muslim homes and businesses. One group that picketed Mr. Modi's appearance at Madison Square Garden this weekend said Indian-Americans would, by their presence at the event, "disregard the memories of the thousands who were killed, raped and displaced in Gujarat in 2002 and excuse genocidal Islamophobia."
Mr. Modi was cleared by the Supreme Court of India and this type of criticism, prevalent when he was elected in May, has started to fade – although it remains strong among overseas human-rights activists and sophisticated but detached Indian liberals, whose Indian National Congress Party lost handily to Mr. Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party at the polls.
When Mr. Modi was a chief minister, it was possible to ignore him, possible to deny him visas; it was also possible to ignore India, which at the time was an economically weakened, corrupted state that seemed mired in insurmountable problems.
But everybody now wants to be Mr. Modi's friend for a very good reason: India is on the rise again, and the neighbourhood has never been more troubled – with the U.S. pulling out of Afghanistan, China menacing neighbours like Vietnam and Japan, and the Islamic State luring recruits from Muslim Southeast Asia.
The world needs more India – more democracy, more pluralism, more vibrant economic opportunities that do not necessitate dealing with unpredictable geopolitics. Mr. Modi is a complex personification of these things: He's imbued with them as India's leader – a former son of a tea-seller, who now leads the ultra emerging market; but he also contradicts them as the autocratic former ruler of Gujarat, who has at times been surrounded by polarizing hardline Hindu nationalists, and wooed business and investment to Gujarat even as some social indicators in his state worsened.
Everybody wants to be Mr. Modi's friend, now that he is no longer completely toxic, and now that they need him. The handshakes, of course, are not completely meaningless, since Mr. Modi needs to revive foreign investor interest in India. But that is the easy part. Foreign policy, although it has seemingly dominated Mr. Modi's brief tenure thus far, is not his priority. He is firmly fixated on building India. Those who have shaken his hand abroad might want to keep an eye on the sort of India he is building at home.