Modi – With Covid-19 causing a domestic crisis, PM Narendra Modi has had to rein in plans to position India as an alternative to China for vaccine production. The brutal truth is that New Delhi is not yet ready to compete with Beijing.
India is suffering a catastrophic second wave of Covid-19. With the number of new cases averaging nearly 250,000 a day over the past week, the country’s healthcare system has been pushed to the brink and deaths are on the rise, forcing several cities and states to go into lockdown.Prime Minister Narendra Modi has sought to avoid another national shutdown, but is under pressure, having been accused of complacency in his handling of the outbreak, even mistakenly assuming the country already had herd immunity. In the space of a month, India has transformed from an exporter to importer of vaccines as it scrambles to inoculate its enormous population.
But while the scale of human tragedy is high, the geopolitical stakes are too – and the two factors are interconnected. Modi has essentially done too much too soon by attempting to pitch India as an international peer competitor to China, tilting toward the West, and dramatically overselling his country’s capabilities in both supply chains and vaccines. The result has been a disaster at home which has forced an unavoidable retreat inward, reminding the world that whilst India has enormous potential, it has a long way to go.
Modi is a Trumpian guru. A Hindu nationalist, his political ethos has been pinned on attempting to dramatically transform India’s fortunes through protectionism and depicting China as responsible for the country’s economic woes and lack of development.
It’s low hanging fruit; the two countries are of similar population sizes and potential, yet have enjoyed very different fortunes for the past 40 years. From a relatively similar starting point, China’s GDP is now five times that of India’s. This has led Modi’s government to promote manufacturing in India as an alternative to China in supply chains. It is obvious some countries themselves shared this strategic idea; why else was UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson so determined to visit?
This thinking has extended toward vaccines too. India has extensive capacity to produce vaccines, and it teamed up with its partners in the Quad – the United States, Japan and Australia – to set a goal that its production would beat back China’s so-called ‘vaccine diplomacy’.
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