Modi visit yields mixed results but is well worth celebrating
INDIA’S Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “pilgrimage” to the Pietermaritzburg railway station where Mahatma Gandhi was infamously evicted as a ticket holder from a first-class train compartment because he was a “non-European”, his visit to Gandhiji’s home at Phoenix, and his appearances before an audience of 12 000 at the CocaCola dome in Johannesburg and at the Durban City Hall, were a neat conjunction between the interests of South Africa and India.
The invitation – an outcome of a bipartisan recognition of one another’s growing importance – has been viewed by Modi and his host, President Jacob Zuma, as an overriding priority. It’s a tribute to the Zuma administration that it raised bilateral relations with India to the levels of the UK, the US and China.
Diplomacy, greater mutual investment opportunities and friendly relationships are to be celebrated. Besides, closer integration of two influential nations has to be a source of contentment.
There was much to celebrate. As Modi and Zuma stated at the South Africa-India Business Forum joint media conference, they did not believe the two countries had realised the true potential of this relationship.
The focus of Zuma’s statement was on money, and the financial benefits of greater links between South African and Indian business. But it was also about historical, cultural and strategic bonds, and how cricket shapes each’s perception of the other.
However, amid this backslapping mood was an air of prickliness in Durban, where King Goodwill Zwelithini reminded Modi to count Indian South Africans among his 1.25 billion countrymen – which one expects would have failed to resonate with the non-expat Indian diaspora.
The monarch’s repeated assertions of harmonious co-existence between South Africans of Indian origin and his subjects, and a moment he took to remind us about how royalty should be invited to a podium, were greeted with embarrassed silence.
His message arose in the context of a special coded language that appears to have evolved in international relations policy and strategic affairs circles. Some may have noted the remarkable frequency with which some expressions recur.
When it comes to dealing with India-South Africa relations, it seems every policy initiative is either deftly calibrated or nuanced.
It would hardly be an exaggeration to suggest that if India figures in King Zwelithini’s imagination, it would be for its agricultural prowess – including the rearing of its goats.
India’s initial window to South Africa was the capture of its citizens as slaves to work in the gardens of the Dutch settlement in the Cape, followed by more Indians 26 years after the abolition of slavery in 1834, as “indentured labour” on the British sugar cane plantations in the Zulu kingdom.
Modi played the role of international statesman to the hilt. Not only was he feted by Zuma, Durban mayor James Nxumalo, KZN Premier Willies Mchunu and the king, but he also showed how India, whose gross domestic product is growing at a rate of 7.5%, enjoys the global influence and respects due to a nation its size.
In South Africa, Indian firms have created more than 30 000 jobs, while at the India-Africa forum held in New Delhi last October, India, the economic powerhouse that it is, offered Africa 50 000 scholarships over the next five years.
Against this backdrop, the Modi visit yielded mixed, but on the whole positive, results. Like any politician, he played to the galleries by telling his hosts what a great country South Africa is – a time-tested formula calculated to win the hearts of a country anxious for gushing testimonials.
In contrast, some of the local media’s banal reports have tended to append a cautionary note about his record on communal relations. Isolated incidents of attacks on Africans were put under the spotlight.
Like South Africa’s constitutional obligations, India’s constitutional democracy and its values of liberal secularism are underpinned by its institutions – a free press, an independent judiciary, electoral commission, etc.
For Modi, the line “India is the land of Gandhi – the Mahatma who, incidentally, South Africa transformed” has been trotted out to any suggestions that his political career has been tarnished by communalism.
In dealing with India, South Africa cannot avoid institutional memory. It may have changed, become nonracial, democratic and global, but across the Indian Ocean the mindset is of Gandhi’s liberating influence, and its indebtedness to India for placing South Africa’s race policy on the UN agenda as a crime against humanity and its subsequent isolation from world affairs.