Trump's MAGA Meets Modi's Vishwaguru

HE hemispheres of global politics are divided by a guild of alliances that are a salmagundi of nationalist interests.

- PRABHU CHAWLA

America First and Viksit Bharat are two examples. This week, when the 78-year-old Donald Trump moves into the White House for the second time—after bucking the impossible odds of scandal, impeachment and criminal conviction, just a few months after Narendra Modi 3.0 happened—four years of unpredictable U-turns and conflict of ideologies will again be par for the course.

Sometimes, diplomacy is dinner by other means and humble pie is often served. India's diplomat turned semi-politician, foreign minister S Jaishankar, will break bread at Trump's inauguration feast. On the new geopolitical menu, the minister will have to read between the lines of the world's most powerful leader's speech. Trump will be taking his victory lap a phrase farther—Make America Great Again and Again or MAGAA.

In the other hemisphere, Modi's mission is to make Bharat an economic, social and cultural Vishwaguru. America is a global strategic and economic power. But after Modi's ascension, India's international bourne has shifted. More assertive and unwilling to surrender its legitimate place at the global high table, Modi's Bharat engages in diplomatic doublespeak to be flexibly aggressive. To paraphrase the present populist paradigm, 'there are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent ambition'.

Trump is the anarchic alchemist of contradictions: an anti-elitist elite buoyed by redneck support and oligarchs' camaraderie. To untie the Gordian knot of his thought, Indian diplomats, foreign policy experts and corporate leaders with US establishment ties have been twisting and trysting in India and the US. Trump and his advisors are bent on dismantling Washington's globalist, democratic edifice. American and Indian diplomats have been criss-crossing the Pacific to firm up a road-map for mutual engagement.