Davos Offers Modi Stage to Push Muscular Vision for India
January 21 2018 - 12:12PM
Dow Jones News
By Eric Bellman
NEW DELHI -- Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi prepares this
week to address global business and political leaders in Davos,
Switzerland, as his country passes France and the United Kingdom to
become the world's fifth-largest economy, underscoring the South
Asian nation's drive for recognition as a great power.
Some economists calculate that India's gross domestic product
jumped into the top five last quarter as it continued to outgrow
every country in Europe -- and for that matter most of the rest of
the world.
The World Economic Forum in Davos will be another venue for Mr.
Modi to push India's geopolitical agenda to win a more prominent
place in the circles that shape the world's rules and
institutions.
"India can't be a spectator. India doesn't want to be just a
participant, " said Ram Madhav, general secretary of Mr. Modi's
Bharatiya Janata Party at a conference last week. "India wants to
be a stakeholder."
Since taking office in 2015, Mr. Modi has been trying to change
the conversation around India. He wants it to be seen as the next
China in terms of economic opportunities as well as a bastion of
democracy. He is battling perceptions that depict India as a messy
democracy, bogged down by poverty at home and the rivalry with its
nuclear-armed neighbor Pakistan.
The linchpin of this new assertiveness has been the uptick in
economic growth that started slowly with reforms in the 1990s but
has accelerated over the last decade.
In the Alps, Mr. Modi will be elbow to elbow with President
Donald Trump as Mr. Trump and others try to rewrite the rules of
globalization.
India's economic ascent was predicted late last year by The
Centre for Economics and Business Research in London. The country's
GDP has been in the top five as measured by purchasing-power parity
-- which adjusts for domestic prices -- and for years it has been
much further down the rankings in terms of GDP per capita. But this
is the highest its GDP has reached in modern times in terms of
current real dollars.
The official numbers won't be in until the end of February, but
it looks as if India leapfrogged the U.K. and France last quarter,
a position it will maintain this year, said Doug McWilliams, deputy
chairman of the center. The CEBR predicts India will continue to
rise in the rankings and become the world's third largest economy
by 2027.
China arrived at No. 5 in 2005 and garnered attention as a top
market and manufacturer, its economy becoming a new engine of
global growth. While India isn't a trade-dependent great power, it
stands at a similar crossroads today, said Alyssa Ayres, former
deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia and author of a
book published last month, "Our Time Has Come: How India is Making
its Place in the World."
"(Chinese president) Xi Jinping was the talk of the town last
year." she said. "Well, Modi is going to be the big curtain raiser
at Davos this year. That's India saying, 'We want to be seen
here.'"
Since Mr. Modi came to power, India has taken a more muscular
stance on the global stage. At the World Trade Organization, it won
concessions over India's food-stockpiling program, and it has
joined the International Missile Technology Control Regime, which
tries to control missile trade. India was the world's biggest
importers of defense equipment in the five years through 2016,
according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute,
a Swedish think tank.
Mr. Modi has wooed global leaders, tightened military ties with
the U.S. and even backed the creation of the International Day of
Yoga.
Last week, he bought Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu and his
wife to fly kites and visit Mahatma Gandhi's ashram in his home
state of Gujarat. He has invited the leaders of the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations later this month to New Delhi for India's
Republic Day celebrations. Through this projection of soft power,
India is already starting to promote its position on Pakistan, its
most important geopolitical quandary. It is also strengthening its
stance vis-à-vis China, whose rise it wants to emulate but also an
increasingly assertive neighbor with which it has border
disputes.
India's endgame, analysts and insiders say, is a role that
better reflects its strong economic position. It has long pushed
for a seat as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, and
it hopes to become part of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which would
help it more easily gain access to nuclear fuel and technology. It
would also like a greater say in the decisions of other
international organizations including the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund.
One of Mr. Modi's allies in raising India's profile abroad has
been the country's diaspora, which includes many of the executives
of the world's top companies who will be at Davos. Mr. Modi has
activated his supporters among the more than 15 million Indians
living around the world.
"You might have realized that in the last three-four years, the
perception of India has changed," he told a gathering earlier this
month of powerful Indian expatriates invited to Delhi. "The focus
is on us, the world's attitude towards us is changing. This is the
main reason is that India itself is changing. It is transforming
itself."
--Niharika Mandhana and Bill Spindle contributed this
article.
Write to Eric Bellman at eric.bellman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 21, 2018 11:57 ET (16:57 GMT)
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