Pearls and Irritations

Despite flourishing relations, Australia is governed by a ruling elite whose commitment to a rules based order is suspect, selective and risks dragging India into a catastrophic conflict with China.

Speaking on ABC RN Breakfast on 9 March, as PM Anthony Albanese headed for his first meeting with India’s PM Narendra Modi, Shadow Foreign Minister Simon Birmingham urged Albanese to raise issues of India’s close ties with Russia. Under the rotating presidency of the G20, India is in the chair this year. Birmingham added: ‘Critically, of course, we do wish to see the G20 used as a platform to try to continue to put pressure on Russia to cease the war in Ukraine’.

Just pause for a moment to reflect on the political hubris, intellectual arrogance and subconscious racism that underlies that simple and apparently innocuous statement.

India has taken a distinctive approach to the war in Ukraine that differs from Australia’s. Birmingham could have suggested that Albanese try to understand why. If India had sound reasons, the PM could introspect on the need to modify Australia’s policy. Or else he could engage with Modi to convince him where and why Australia’s policy was the better approach.

But no, the very idea that India could be right and Australia wrong is alien and anathema to him.

Similarly, to his way of thinking, the G20 is just another instrument of global governance to consolidate Western values and priorities and implement Western policies against geopolitical rivals. And as chair India should take instructions from the leaders of the Anglosphere and do their bidding against those pesky upstarts Russia and China. But as indicated by their membership of the BRICS grouping, China, India and Russia have a common interest in redesigning the institutions of global governance so that the control nodes are not all located in the major Western capitals.

Aaron Patrick’s article in the Australian Financial Review last week is of a piece with that mentality.

For decades, India was a vibrant democracy with a political system that closely resembles Australia’s. It was also routinely ignored by Australia’s political, economic and cultural elites. Why? Because of its persistent poverty, modest GDP and military weakness as brutally demonstrated in the brief 1962 war with China.

Even while India committed itself to constitutional values of equality of all citizens regardless of caste, religion and gender (gaps in implementation is not peculiar to India), Australia pursued a White Australia policy. It remained a strong supporter of apartheid South Africa for decades while India was one of the world’s leading campaigners against apartheid. Australia backed the European powers Britain and France in their ill-fated colonial military adventure in the 1956 Suez crisis. It joined in the doomed neocolonial war in Vietnam to deny agency to the Vietnamese to determine their own destiny in favour of a regime to be installed and propped up by Washington.

Fast forward to this century and Australia joined Britain and the US in the illegal war of aggression against Iraq in 2003 for which no Australian leader has been held to criminal account. Australia was vociferous in condemning Russia and demanding international accountability for the downing of a Malaysian Airlines flight over a known active war zone. But it kept quiet in the 1980s when a commercial Iran Air flight was brought down by a US warship while flying in its designated civilian corridor.

Australia backs action by the International Criminal Court against President Vladimir Putin but maintained radio silence when the Trump administration threatened the same ICC with sanctions and arrests for the temerity to suggest that some US and Israeli actions could constitute war crimes and should be investigated to that end.

Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar has been forceful in highlighting Western double standards, insisting in June last year that ‘Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems’. Jaishankar’s quote was included in the Munich Security Conference report last month. And Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri has been equally blunt in insisting that India’s primary moral duty is to its own consumers. Where for high-income populations in the West rising energy prices impose lifestyle inconvenience, they can have life and death consequences for millions of poor Indians.

Australia facilitated the conduct of British atomic tests on Australian soil – only Aboriginal peoples lived in those areas and really, how important are their lives and welfare?; still shelters under the US nuclear umbrella; hosts ‘joint facilities’ that are integral to the US global deterrence infrastructure; was willing to sell uranium to full-fledged nuclear-armed communist countries China and Russia; but refused to sell it for many years to democratic India and had the chutzpah to criticise India’s nuclear tests in 1998. With the decision on the AUKUS submarines, not only does Australia join the ranks of the handful of countries operating nuclear-powered vessels. More critically, it risks creating a self-fulfilling enemy of China and a war that could prove catastrophic for the region and the world.

Why exactly should India subordinate its own calculations to join the posse with the US as sheriff and Australia as its deputy? It cannot be that when Australia subordinates principles to national interests, its realism, but when India does it, it’s loss of moral compass.

Now that India has joined the ranks of the rapidly growing big emerging markets and has many commercial and geopolitical attractions for Australia’s strategic and economic elites, suddenly it is shared political values that is the critical glue holding together the bilateral relationship?

Spare me.

Yes, India has been backsliding in democratic practices. I have written very critically of that and also of Modi’s failure to protect the Muslim minority in particular against threats from Hindu supremacists.

An important reason for the current sorry state of affairs is the extent to which the constitutional values and institutional pillars of India’s democracy were corrupted during the several decades in which the Congress Party held dominant sway both federally and in several states. The institutions of state were steadily politicised even as the reach of the administrative state grew stronger. Investigative and law enforcement agencies, and a pliant judiciary, were used to harass and pursue Modi when he was Chief Minister of Gujarat.

When Modi became PM in 2014, the tables were turned and it was suddenly payback time. The once independent and impartial state institutions had been so weakened and compromised that they could not stand up to the demands of the changed government. On 23 March Rahul Gandhi was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for remarks made in the context of state elections (in Gujarat, appropriately enough). His appeal will likely be successful. It’s called karma.

The above was deliberately written as a provocative polemic. If Aaron Patrick finds it offensive, good. Because I found his article condescending, offensive and unbecoming a civil discourse between friends and partners (not allies) with their own distinctive histories, worldviews, values and geopolitical circumstances. Respect and understanding is a two-way street.

As for deficiencies in and setbacks to India’s democracy, yes, they are very real and indeed cause for concern. But for 75 years the self-correcting mechanisms have shown time and again that there is nothing wrong with India’s democracy that cannot be fixed by all that is right with it.

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