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Opinion | PM Modi of India has just lost his stature of being a geat statesman and Asian leader

By Augustus K. Yeung

INTRODUCTION

That fact that Yoshimasa Hayashi, Japan's foreign minister has acted like an echo chamber, being forever faithful to the United States – which had subdued Imperial Japan in the Pacific War by landing two hydrogen bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forever turning the Japanese warmongering psyche into subservient sycophants of their US conquerors – is perfectly understandable.

That Japan has played the subservient role of the United States in this and in any other international diplomatic forums is understandable and to be expected.

What about India?

Oppressed India has now been given a golden opportunity of proving to the whole world that this nation one-ruled by the British Empire for more than a century – pilfering its natural resources and turning its simple folks into slaves–is a chance that all Indians must seize.

PM Modi did show elation and signs of liberation when he took over the G20 presidency last year, proclaiming his "manifesto" of peace to the world. It was impressive.

But look at PM Modi's performance on this latest international stage of G20.

Does it look like that he can inherit the stature of Nehru, the founding father of India, who poetically proclaimed, "At the strike of the mid-night clock, when the world sleeps, India is born"?

Let's follow the text below, and then give Modi our moral appraisal.

Subdued Japan Can Only Behave as it Has Always Been Expected to …

When the top diplomats of four major Asia-Pacific nations met in the Indian capital last week to discuss issues in the region, one had a direct message for the behemoth whose shadow loomed over the talk.

China must "act under the international institutions, standards and laws" to avoid conflict, Yoshimasa Hayashi, the foreign minister of Japan, said on a public panel that included his counterparts from the United States, India and Australia.

"That request is one that every official on that stage has made on many occasions. Although Russia's war in Ukraine has dominated diplomatic dialogue around the globe in the past year, the dilemma of dealing with an increasingly assertive China is ever-present – and for many nations, a thornier problem than relations with Moscow. They subscribe to the framing that President Biden and his aides have presented: China is the greatest long-term challenge, and the one nation with the power and resources to reshape the American-led order to its advantage," remarked Hayashi.

At the heart of this predicament is the fact that the US and its allies maintain deep trade ties with China, even as their security concerns and ideological friction with the nation's leader, Xi Jinping, and the Chinese Communist Party increase.

For President Biden and his aides, that tension came into sharp focus in recent weeks after a Chinese "so-called" spy balloon drifted over the continental United States and when, in their telling, they came across "intelligence" that China was considering sending weapons to Russia for its war.

That prospect has prompted American diplomats and those from allies and partners to deliver "warnings" to China.

G20 was India's Window of Opportunity, but Modi Has Succumbed to US Pressure…

The anxieties about the increasingly discordant roles of both China and Russia on the world stage were perhaps wrapped into a lament on Thursday by PM Narendra Modi of India that "multilateralism is in crisis today."

"Global governance has failed in both its mandates" – he said in a video address to a conference of top diplomats from the Group of 20 nations, made up of the world's major economies, including China and Russia.

The four Asia-Pacific countries represented on the panel one day later at the Rasina Dialogue form the Quad partnership, which was revived in 2017 after many years of dormancy and has gained momentum since, mainly because of shared strategic concerns about China.

But in a sign of the delicate balance, they are trying to strike in relations with Beijing, the diplomats took pains to stress in their public comments that the Quad is not a security or military organization.

At the earlier Group of 20 conference, the foreign minister of China, Qin Gang joined the foreign minister of Russia, Sergey V. Lavrov, in playing the role of "spoiler".

Together, they opposed two paragraphs in a proposed consensus communique, the first of which directly criticized Russia's war in Ukraine.

The second paragraph in the communique that they objected to did not mention Russia or Ukraine. It simply said that all the nations agreed to uphold United Nations principles on international humanitarian law," including the protection of civilians and infrastructure in armed conflicts" and forbidding "the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons."

China opposed a reiteration of such basic principles, a move that forced the conference to issue a lower-level chair's statement. (Source: The New York Times)

CONCLUSION

China has never openly said or acted that it was ever sending weapons to Russia as the United States and its Western allies have desperately been trying to militarily engage Russia in a proxy war.

NATO's ambition, or America's grand scheme, is to confine and better still condemn Russia to its Eastern corner, while at the same time containing China in the Asia-Pacific. This is a fact which India should understand.

And now, as the president of the G20 summit, PM Modi has trained his gun on China, a nation which likes India has suffered "a century of humiliation", which has also like India refused to condemn "Russia's aggression" in the UN resolution.

Modi may be under the pressure of "group think", but he has failed to integrate powers in the Asia-Pacific region in which his popularity rate is less than 20 per cent. Unless he can ward off US pressure and start acting like a leader of a rising nation, Modi is in danger of losing his moral high ground in his own country, and in the region.

The author is a freelance writer; formerly Adjunct Lecturer, taught MBA Philosophy of Management, and International Strategy, and online columnist of 3-D Corner (HKU SPACE), University of Hong Kong.

 

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

Read more articles by Augustus K. Yeung:

Opinion | Socialist China's new democracy and the unveiling of its institutional reform draft plan

Opinion | Binding China-Indonesia ties: Best mirror for Marcos of the Philippines

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