Quote:India feels short-changed

The Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip to the US has been a stunning success from his point of view, but what has India got in the bargain? Modi is not India — at least, not yet. But Modi nonetheless confused his political interests with the country’s. The country feels cheated, as he brings back with him this appalling document called the ‘Joint Statement’ as the outcome of his 5-day sojourn in the US.
The picture that is bound to be silhouetted in memory for a long time will be that bewildered look on the face of Obama as he kept staring intensely at the face of Modi when the latter was reading out his media statement in Hindi language after their meeting. ‘Is this India’s new ruler?“, he seemed to be wondering — and with good reason, having known Manmohan Singh rather well.
The Indian media persons have drawn comparison between Modi and Obama and scripted fairy tales. It’s all rubbish. Obama is everything that Modi is not — a highly educated, intelligent, cerebral intellectual on his own merit — and he’d never ever have helped himself to such a crude and vulgar spectacle as the one that Modi helped himself to in the Madison Square Garden.
If Modi goes on this MSG track further, he runs the risk of becoming the joker in the G20 and BRICS pack sooner than we think and that will do no good to India’s reputation. In fairness to the country he leads. Modi should have clinically segregated his own political agenda from India’s “enlightened national interests.”
By all means he could have twinned his visit to the UN General Assembly, a veritable circus anyway, with a second one one at Madison Square Garden.
But the India-US relationship, which has been in the doldrums, deserved a ’stand-alone’ visit with sufficient planning and preparation to back it. Another visit by Modi to Obama’s White House is improbable and an Obama visit to the Delhi darbar can be safely ruled out. Which means Modi lost a big opportunity to transform the relationship and make it contemporaneous with the post-2008 financial crisis in the world economy and to attune it to the imperatives of the development agenda on which he won a huge mandate in the elections in April-May.
What actually has happened is that Modi may showcase in Ahmedabad that Obama greeted him saying Khem Cho. But then, India has been left waiting in the ante-room in the White House. This is disgraceful and is contradictory to what Modi himself professed about foreign policy, namely, that the country’s interests come first.