Deal or No Deal

In a telling moment in the BBC documentary on the anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002, Narendra Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat, tells a correspondent that the only mistake he made in the pogrom was in failing to handle the media. It is a lesson that the former Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh apparatchik has learned since, an aspect of his governance style that Indians have repeatedly witnessed since he became the prime minister in 2014. Aided in great measure by a compromised propagandist media, Modi’s biggest successes have been in managing the headlines, using them to massage the minds of the masses into believing whatever suits his personal agenda. From the economy to social justice, this has been a recurring feature of his domestic politics. But it is detectible even more in Modi’s conduct of India’s foreign policy.

The latest evidence came on 21 October 2024, when the foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, announced that the India–China border crisis had been resolved. The government did not issue an official statement or conduct a full-fledged media briefing about this significant development. Misri uttered a couple of sentences in the midst of a briefing on Modi’s visit to attend the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, to reveal that an “agreement has been arrived at patrolling arrangements along the line of actual control” with China, “leading to disengagement and a resolution of the issues” in Ladakh. “Next steps” will be taken on this, he added. A border crisis that has been brewing since 2020, during which at least twenty Indian soldiers lost their lives, and which greatly threatened New Delhi’s ties with its trade partner and neighbourhood Goliath—not to mention Indian sovereignty—was supposedly resolved. But the government did not deem it useful to provide Indians any details.

No additional information was forthcoming from his boss, S Jaishankar, the minister for external affairs, who spoke at an event hosted by NDTV soon after Misri’s briefing. Besides describing the development with the inane platitude “positive development,” Jaishankar also pushed everything into the future by saying, “It has just happened. There will be meetings to see what the next steps will be.” The only substantive detail he could confirm was that Indian soldiers would be able to resume patrolling in areas they had not been able to access since 2020.

Over two days in Kazan, Misri clarified in media briefings that the latest arrangement did not touch the buffer zones established after disengagement in 2021 and 2022, which meant that Indian personnel would not be able to patrol in those areas. According to a report by the superintendent of police of Leh, in January 2023, 26 of the 65 patrolling points were beyond the reach of Indian soldiers either because Chinese soldiers had blocked Indian soldiers, or the Modi government had agreed to create no-patrolling buffer zones as part of a disengagement process. The Indian side plans to increase the number of patrolling points in Ladakh to 72.