Like meets like: Both Trump and Modi are given to rabble-rousing to serve their end.

KC Singh

THIS week in the US, the oldest and most powerful democracy of the world, and in India, the largest, domestic politics and national security challenges ran on parallel tracks. Coincidently, both are led by right-wing leaders not above rabble-rousing for electoral advantage.In Alabama, US President Donald Trump faced a crucial election to a Senate seat which his party had held for two decades. However, the Republican Party nominee Roy Moore, twice removed in the past from the post of Alabama’s Chief Justice and now saddled with charges of sexual misconduct, was trounced by a genial Democrat who had been a successful prosecutor of members of the Ku Klux Klan.The Alabama contest acquired an edge because Trump threw his full weight behind Moore despite serious charges against him and his known bigotry. The loss narrows Republican lead in Senate to 51-49. In Gujarat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi likewise took the low road to campaigning by abandoning talk of development and the “Gujarat Model”, which he marketed to propel himself to power at the Centre in 2014, for bigoted charges about Pakistan hand in a Congress conspiracy to appoint a Muslim as the CM of Gujarat. Not resting there, he further saw more seditious activity when a former PM, a recently retired Vice-President, a former foreign minister and sundry retired distinguished diplomats attended a private dinner in honour of an erstwhile Pakistani foreign minister Kasuri. The narrow win by the BJP in a state taken as Modi base and where, as someone put it in an ironical reference to Mahatma Gandhi, he conducted his experiments with truth, is a warning that his magic is dissipating, especially  in rural India, which still forms two-thirds of the nation.India and the US this week also had reason to assess geopolitical changes that colour their external environment. The US released its National Security Strategy, which outlines the challenges and possible “Priority Action”. In line with Trumpian rhetoric it begins by reiterating an “America-First Foreign Policy”. The new slogan is “peace through strength”, to be achieved by principled realism. It exposes the false belief that US power could be self-sustaining without constant vigil, effort and innovation. Thereafter follows a frank assessment of who and how is countering US hegemony.The document claims that the US stood by as others “subsidised their industries, forced technology transfers and distorted markets”. The obvious reference is to China. Free enterprise it adds is “history’s greatest antidote to poverty”. Thus the US will react to political, military and economic competition it faces globally. Then the antagonists are listed. Russia wishes to restore its great power status and establish its influence near its borders. China, on the other hand, more assertively, wants to displace the US in the Indo-Pacific and expand the reach of its state-driven economic model. While both, it is surmised, aspire to project power worldwide, they are currently engaged in overturning regional balances of power. The third force seen as posing a threat to the US is Islamic militancy.The US counter strategy is to work with allies and partners. India is seen as a force for stability in the Central and South Asian paradigm, which contains a quarter of the global population, one- fifth of US-designated terror groups and two nuclear armed states. Even more significantly, India is seen as relevant in the Indo-Pacific theatre, which is incidentally defined as stretching from India’s west coast to the “western shores of the US”.  The paper surmises that the competition is between “free and repressive visions of world order” and the US thus must counter these shifts in the Indo-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.The challenges are frankly identified but the solutions are thin and skirt over the gap between US rhetoric and action. If China is indeed the challenge, the US cannot be seen as sending contradictory signals to its allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific, like withdrawing from the Trans Pacific Partnership. Leading from behind cannot be the way forward as all regional powers suspect that Trump may be just bargain-hunting with the Chinese, using them to goad the dragon and not necessarily contain it.The Indian encirclement by China has become more palpable in the past month or so while the Modi government has been entirely fixated on Gujarat. The handing over of Hambantota port in Sri Lanka to China on a 99-year lease, despite assurances that it is only for civilian use, creates a security challenge. It will, at the very least, be a listening post for the Chinese from where naval activities of rival powers can be monitored. A free trade agreement signed in unseemly hurry by the Maldives with China again brings its trade and influence to India’s west coast. The most troublesome is the success of the two main communist parties in Nepal. The likely ascent of KP Oli as Prime Minister augurs ill for India. In an earlier incarnation, he had caused consternation by his pro-China tilt. India should expect his anti-India bias, exacerbated by the Modi government’s blockade in 2015, to manifest in closer integration with Chinese economy and mainland by subscribing to the Belt and Road connectivity project. This hardly provides solace when combined with reports that unlike what the Modi government marketed as Chinese withdrawal at Doklam, the Chinese have, in fact, bivouacked in larger numbers for a permanent pressure point on Bhutan and India.The lesson that both India and the US need to imbibe is that there is a vast difference between perceiving a threat and devising a strategy to counter it. For instance, Trump cannot hope for de-radicalisation of Islam if he simultaneously does not stop feeding its radicalisation by recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital without first a peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestine dispute. Similarly, Modi cannot begin to counter China without first securing India’s immediate periphery, which includes Pakistan. Using an imaginary Pakistan hand in Indian domestic politics is picking up the worst from Indira Gandhi’s election playbook. It helped neither her nor perhaps Modi. But it certainly signalled that he has no desire to engage Pakistan at least in his current term as PM.Meanwhile, The Economist has devised a new term, “sharp power”, for nations actually attempting to interfere in domestic politics of other countries. The US is seeing a special prosecutor investigating the possible role of Russia in the US presidential election. In Australia, Sam Dastyari, a Labour MP, had to resign for suspected lobbying for China. A New Zealand MP was discovered as having taught at a Chinese spy school. Germany has detected an outreach by Chinese agencies to opinion makers. China has nearly 500 government-funded and staffed Confucius schools abroad which function more than soft power peddlers. Europe is just starting to see that China is not just a benign trade destination. It is a rising competitor poaching technologies and equipment, using annual foreign investment now of over $150 billion.It is high time that rulers of major democracies wised-up to the real challenge, which is without and not within their nations. “Sharp powers” need a sharp response.The writer is a former Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs