Indian Premier Narendra Modi is one political leader who finds it difficult to anchor himself to his home soil for too long and keeps flying out frequently on foreign tours, completing 16 trips in 11 months in office thus far. Several eyebrows were therefore raised when the same Modi politely refused an invitation from Indonesian President Joko Widodo to attend the 60th anniversary of the “1955 Bandung Conference” and the 10th anniversary of the new Asian-African strategic partnership.
Held on April 24 in Bandung, this historic event was preceded by an Asian-African ministerial summit in Jakarta. Modi cited his preoccupation with the ongoing parliamentary session in India that coincided with the Bandung anniversary, though he did skip Parliament previously to attend important multilateral meeting like the SAARC summit in Nepal. In Modi’s absence, India was represented in the event by Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj and his deputy V.K. Singh. No doubt, Swaraj’s deep commitment toward Asian solidarity is beyond question. But, was it appropriate for New Delhi to downgrade the level of its representation in a diplomatic conference that aimed to consolidate collaboration between “South, South nations” to make them more influential in today’s one-superpower world?
Could the president of India, in the least, not have attended the summit along with the foreign minister to uphold the sanctity of this event with which stalwart like Jawaharlal Nehru was involved deeply? How can a sensible nation, having co-sponsored this historically significant gathering of reputed African and Asian leaders that led to the emergence of the third world, possibly undermine the importance of Bandung, which continues to bear lessons for nations seeking to stand on their own feet?
More importantly, what did the Modi government achieve by virtually ignoring the end-April get-together of developing countries seeking to reinvigorate the historic spirit of Bandung? Let us not forget that Bandung was an alliance of newly liberated likeminded people across the Asian and African continent who pledged to jointly struggle for prosperity, stability and solidarity and the non-aligned movement was born out of the womb of the “1955-Bandung-Conference.” And why did this meeting in the volatile 1950s unite no less than 30 influential leaders from developing world?
In the words of African-American author Richard Wright, a Bandung conference attendee, “the despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed — in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting. Here were class and racial and religious consciousness on a global scale. Who had thought of organizing such a meeting? And what had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the western world had made them feel. This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon the western world!”
Indeed, these very people who were opposed to colonialism and the unethical dominance of the “Cold War superpowers” wanted to strengthen their hard achieved political independence from western imperialism while keeping the Soviet bloc at a comfortable distance simultaneously, though they ultimately took sides compellingly as the whole world was sucked into the Cold War vortex. Even, the US, anxious about the consequences of Afro-Asian solidarity on its effort to contain communism, ended up gathering intelligence from Bandung in the guise of journalism. Undoubtedly, it was a critical political period that witnessed the world’s strategic transition to a neo-colonial framework. But then, a myopic Modi is loath to looking back at the past or revere leaders who laid the foundation upon which a new India is being erected bit-by-bit. As journalist-cum-black-nationalist Marcus Garvey once said, “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots,” and Modi is desperate to bury the national past so as to erase the contribution of India’s first premier Nehru from people’s mind.
As one of Modi’s political associates once told this writer, “Modi is pathologically allergic to Nehruvian legacy.” In fact, Modi admitted to his biographer Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay that “mid-1950s intense anti-Congress sentiment impacted even the mind of the child that I was at the time.” Such was his hatred toward Nehru that Modi would often talk about his “childhood being framed by the trauma of being ruled by the Congress party.”
Hence, it is no surprise that neither Foreign Minister Swaraj nor her deputy Singh bothered to name or acknowledge Nehru’s contribution in Bandung for once. This simple omission reflects the nature of governance in India today. Even, Bandung conference’s chronicler Wright found Nehru to be “logical, quick, observant and knowing.” Wright honestly accepted that Nehru’s pivotal presence at the conference was of great significance because his credibility as a spokesperson for neutrality, on behalf of Asian and African nations, during the early Cold War era was unquestionable. In fact, the attendance at the “1927-Congress of Oppressed Nationalities” in Brussels — touted as a major pre-cursor to Bandung — shaped Nehru’s subsequent thinking so much that in the first “Asian Relations Conference” he hosted in 1947, “Asia’s special responsibility to Africa” became the focus of his inaugural speech.
It is a pity that when the Indonesian leadership was seeking to utilize the Asian-African conference to stitch together a new coalition of developing nations based upon the “1955 Bandung Conference” spirit, Modi chose to give little importance to this idea. Rather, he seems to be more interested in aligning India with “big powers” as a lackey. New Delhi may harbor great power aspirations in the present context, but reaching the pinnacle is impossible if Modi’s India dances to others’ tune.
