Rahul Gandhi’s visit to the US next week presents a long-term opportunity and a short-term challenge for the Congress Party. As the party regains ground in India, there is now growing global interest in the persona of India’s Leader of Opposition, as well as his economic vision and worldview.
Rahul Gandhi is scheduled to address an Indian community event in Dallas, Texas, and meet a wide range of actors in Washington next week. His latest trip to the US follows his travels in America, Britain, and Europe last year and suggests that the Congress is eager to rebuild its global links, including with the diaspora. The visit also raises tricky questions about Rahul Gandhi taking his sharp critique at home of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP government to foreign soil. The PM is set to visit the US two weeks after Rahul Gandhi and both leaders are scheduled to address the Indian diaspora.
As they compete for the affection of the diaspora amid deepening domestic polarisation, could the relationship between the internal and external in our political life come into sharp view this month in America? Or could Congress and BJP arrive at an informal compact on separating their natural domestic contestation from activity abroad?
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Beyond the diaspora, there is the larger question of revitalising India’s internationalism. India has never been as connected to the world as it is now, but its political classes appear a lot less engaged globally than they ought to be.
India’s two-way trade in goods and services is now around 40 per cent of India’s GDP, which is close to 3.8 trillion. Besides expanding business volumes, Indian tourists, students, and professionals travel abroad in ever larger numbers. As the world seeks out Indian talent, the diaspora, now said to be around thirty-six million, will continue to grow.
As India rises to be a major economy and a military power, the global interest in its markets and geopolitics has inevitably grown. This national response in the form of intensified engagement with the world is mediated more by government agencies, the corporate sector, academia, media, think tanks, and non-governmental organisations.
But the decline in the engagement of our political class with their international peers is unfortunate given the unprecedented changes unfolding in the world. This limited interest stands in contrast to India’s expansive internationalism from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. As India’s consciousness of the world rose in the late 19th century, all major global ideas had a powerful impact on the Indian elite, including nationalism, socialism, communism, Asianism, and liberal humanism. Contact and communication with the political forces around the world laid the foundations for India’s internationalism in the early decades of the 20th century.
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An important part of it was engagement with the Indian labour and capital that spread across the vast British empire since the early 19th century. As the national movement acquired greater traction, so did the mobilisation of the diaspora in favour of Indian independence.
As the nation’s leading political force, the Indian National Congress was at the forefront of this international engagement. So were the Communists and socialists; their global ideological affiliations and mass organisations brought a more structured relationship with the international left.
The weakening organisational structure of the Congress party since the 1960s steadily diminished its capacity to engage the world. Although the personal relations of Nehru and Indira with Western leaders sustained a measure of continuity, the Congress party’s inward economic turn and its strategic drift to the Soviet Union eroded its widespread contacts in the West. Meanwhile, the fragmentation and marginalisation of Indian communists and socialists undermined the channels of communication with the world’s political parties.
It is interesting to recall that the Muslim leadership of the undivided India was sensitive to the developments in the Middle East and reacted to them vigorously. The growing global footprint of Islam continues to be an important source of Muslim internationalism in the Subcontinent.
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While the rising Hindu elite eagerly engaged the world through radical and secular ideas prevalent at the European heart of the modern world, the conservative Hindu society remained suspicious of the external world. Although some of its leaders began to look outwards and find ways to overcome the perceived weaknesses of Indian society, political Hinduism remained a nativist phenomenon.
It is no surprise then that the BJP has the least lineage in terms of internationalism. As it gained ground in the last three decades, the party began to reach out to the world more purposefully. Over the last few years, the BJP’s connections with political parties globally, including in the neighbourhood, are expanding.
Congress and other parties have a lot to catch up with; and they are, at least in one domain, the outreach to the diaspora. Connecting with Indian communities abroad has been a major preoccupation of the BJP in the 21st century. The Overseas Friends of the BJP in the 1990s has helped grow the party’s presence around the world, especially in the Western democracies, where a substantial portion of the Indian diaspora is concentrated.
The Congress has reactivated its Indian Overseas Congress, which is organising Rahul Gandhi’s visit next week. Engaging the diaspora is also now a major activity for regional parties and their chief ministers. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin was in the US last week connecting with the Tamil diaspora and mobilising investments for his state.
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While outreach to the diaspora has helped build bridges with other countries, it is also generating new problems. The divisions within the nation affect its diaspora and intersect with the domestic politics of their adopted homelands. As Indian political engagement with the diaspora grows, there is increasing scrutiny of this activity by the security establishments of the host countries.
In the end, Indian political outreach to the diaspora, important as it is, is not a substitute for sustained interaction with the key political formations in major countries. Viewing key nations through the prism of the diaspora could lead to misperceptions of global reality and an unwanted policy bias in Delhi. Direct political communication with foreign parties will also help the Indian political class avoid the dangers of “groupthink” from self-selected expert communities and the toxic extremism of social media that distorts reality.
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On its part, the BJP has accelerated efforts to connect with the world. The Congress needs to revitalise its foreign affairs department and make it an effective instrument of global engagement. Back in 1936, when he became the president of the Indian National Congress for the second time, Jawaharlal Nehru set up the foreign affairs committee of the party and appointed Ram Manohar Lohia as the secretary.
If the great churn of the inter-war period persuaded Nehru to set up the committee, the rapidly changing global order today demands that the oldest party in the country is better equipped to deal with it. One also hopes that Lohia’s legatees in our political class who are also regaining domestic political ground will rediscover, sooner than later, the virtues of internationalism.
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The writer is a visiting professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore and a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express
