Two years ago, the whole world was coming down on Narendra Modi like a tonne of bricks for not having condemned Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, and for buying the bad guy’s oil. So Modi flew to Samarkand, pulled aside the big bad Russian to a corner at the Shanghai gang-up, and told him bluntly—look here big boy, "Today's era is not of war.”
As discussed in this column then, to most of us undiplomatic mortals, what Modi said was just another truism. What else could he say?—‘Good show, Vladimir! Pound them till kingdom come’? God and Joe Biden forbid!
Last month, Modi blotted the western moralists’ copybook again. He went to Moscow and hugged Vladimir the vile. Blame it on the stars that guide the affairs of men, or on the satellites that guide the flight paths of missiles, that very day one of Vladimir’s darts hit a kids’ hospital in Kiev.
All hell broke loose, Putin became a butcher of babies “to every Christian eye”, and Modi his apprentice. “A huge disappointment... to see the leader of the world’s largest democracy hug the world’s most bloody criminal in Moscow on such a day,” shock-tweeted Volodymyr Zelensky.
The sin having been graver this time, Modi decided the penitence would have to be like in Canossa. Last week he pilgrimaged to Poland, took a train to Kiev, gave a tighter hug to the t-shirted president than the one he had given Putin, and recounted how he had looked “Putin in the eye” when he had given him an earful.
Now this is being touted as another “balancing act”, though Zelensky doesn’t seem impressed. Can’t blame him. Fighting with his back to the NATO wall, he thinks that if you are not with him, you are with his enemy.
But what we can’t understand is how these diplomats and statesmen read so much in these gestures and statements, most of it between the lines, find meanings in hugs and handshakes, toast over sweet nothings, trip over commas in the wrong place, interpret body language, and even talk of body chemistry.
Our foreign office mandarins say, Modi invests a lot of energy in personal diplomacy. Don't we know? He almost plucked out poor Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo De Sousa's arm in a long and almost violent handshake four years ago. Britain's Prince Harry had his hand held in such a grip that one could see marks on the back of the princely palm long after Modi let him go.
Handshakes and hugs are hot currencies in diplomacy. The world remembers several such—the minute-long handshake with which Deng Xiaoping received the young Rajiv Gandhi, commando-general Pervez Musharraf's lunge-and-grab handshake with a demurring A.B. Vajpayee at the Kathmandu SAARC, I.K. Gujral’s bear-hug of Kuwait conqueror Saddam Hussein, Elizabeth Regina's gloved handshake with Martin McGuinness whose Irish Republican Army had killed her favourite cousin Lord Mountbatten, and Donald Trump’s 13-second handshake with North Korea's Kim Jong-Un.
The Covid era provided some relief from these vice-like grips. Suddenly, everybody became untouchable to everybody else, and the world adopted the good old Indian hand-folded namaste in place of the western handshake and the largely middle-eastern hug. Thus we saw everyone from King (then Prince) Charles to the Spanish royals, Benjamin Netanyahu, Angela Merkel and even Donald Trump folding hands. But the moment the virus vanished, so did the new normal of namaste.
Come to think of it, would Modi have landed in this soup if he had stuck to the Indian namaste? Everyone would have been happy—Putin, Zelensky, Biden, Xi and even Mohan Bhagwat who swears by everything Bharatiya.
prasannan@theweek.in