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India’s Prime Minister has certainly the right domestic priorities and best intentions herein. Implementing his election campaign promise of better governance, he has started to courageously and forcefully tackle endemic corruption, which is the major obstacle to development. Development should be and is Modi’s ultimate goal. The basic requirement for development is massively improved infrastructure; one of the most urgent infrastructural tasks is revolutionising sanitation of a nation whose majority is said still to be lacking toilets. When giving priority to building toilets over building temples, he is obviously remembering the great other Gujarati leader and fighter for independence, Mohandas Gandhi, who once said that good sanitation was more important than independence. A completely different challenge, however, is India’s place in the world and its relations with the big partners, competitors and adversaries. Those who observe have fresh impressions of the Chinese president’s visit. When the two Asian giants meet and seem to get along well with each other, the World, and more so the neighbourhood, are well advised to carefully assess what has been said and agreed. Population wise, the two Asian giants are the world’s giants, since together they account for more than a third of the world population. If they agree on how to combine their complementarities for reaching out to world markets, those markets should be warned. Prime Minister Modi’s friendly attitude towards his visitor could have been a warning, if he had been silent about the lasting conflict on the Himalayan border between India and China. But he was not. He addressed the controversial topic even in the presence of his State guest. Chinese president Xi Jinping’s intentions to instrumentalize India’s economic potential in order to enhance China’s global market power could have been a warning. But it was not, since Chinese intentions and promises were kept on a lesser scale than what had been expected. Yes, the Chinese will invest in Indian infrastructure, they will cooperate in relevant fields, but they pledged less than what observers had predicted. A maximum exploitation of the combined economic potential (under Chinese leadership) is not the outcome of the two giants’ agreements. Whatever the political or economic reasons for a “missed opportunity”, it demonstrates the Indian leader’s intention and ability to keep his strategic options open and multi-fold. He is preparing to reap the main reward for having succeeded to win the position of Head of Government of the world’s largest democracy, when meeting soon the Head of State of the world’s oldest democracy, the United States. The US had offered Modi’s predecessors in Government a strategic partnership, which had been received with enthusiasm by India’s élite. Modi will not give up this asset. It appears that the “Chinese card” will not trump the “US card”. Likewise, Modi has considered the other, and recently almost forgotten, economic Asian giant, Japan, and has demonstrated to the world, during a recent visit to his Japanese counterpart, Shinze Abe, in Tokyo, that a good rapport with Japan is in India’s interest, too. Most probably, Modi will continue to cautiously assess the benefits of political alliances in international relations. That is a relief for those in the world, like Europeans, who demand policies of containment against China’s growing global weight. Modi’s response to such demands is obviously a balanced approach to strategic partnerships. A cause for concern for Europeans, however, is the absence of Europe, for the time being, among strategic partners of India.

23st September 2014 / Philippe Welti

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