The physical absence of Narendra Modi from the recent ASEAN summit has raised eyebrows. He was also absent from the UN General Assembly, during which US President Donald Trump met the Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and the Pakistani Army chief.

Modi, for all his bluster, is a coward. It is a line that runs through his whole political career.

It is hard to forget him sipping water to dodge questions from Karan Thapar during the one tough interview he has ever faced. He fled in fear after Rahul Gandhi hugged him in parliament. He did the same from Punjab at the sight of protestors, and avoided the civil strife in Manipur for more than two years.

During the second wave of the pandemic, when crematoria buckled under the stress of countless funeral pyres, the whole of the government went into hiding as citizens desperately scrambled for oxygen cylinders. After the confrontation between Indian and Chinese troops in Galwan all of his erstwhile bonhomie with Xi Jinping, with whom he sat on a jhoola in Gujarat disappeared, and he did not publicly utter China’s name in the aftermath, or for years afterward.

It is, therefore, no surprise that he should choose to hide while Trump publicly claims that he stopped a war between India and Pakistan through bullying. Unfortunately, the lack of testicular fortitude in the Indian prime minister comes at a time when the global order is being unmade, much to the detriment of the country’s strategic interests.

The US has backed Israel’s genocidal actions in the Gaza Strip and participated in the bombing of Iran in an unprovoked war. It is murdering people in South American waters with no legal backing and assembling a massive force with the possible aim of toppling Venezuela’s government. The use of tariffs to manipulate other countries is yet another challenge to a rules-based order. In the meanwhile, Russia continues its brutal invasion of Ukraine with no end in sight. Globally, we are breaching the 1.5°C limit over the pre-industrial world, opening the way for more catastrophic and ruinous environmental disasters.

Throughout all of this, India has kept a very low profile, maybe gambling that these issues – most of them far from Indian shores except for climate change – would not impact the country unduly.

If this was the calculation, then the recent Saudi-Pakistan pact should have been a wake-up call. While the issue had little direct linkage to India-Pakistan relations, it is part and parcel of how countries are manoeuvring as the old order crumbles. As a recent article on Saudi Arabia’s evolving nuclear posture states, “If Tehran accelerates its path to the bomb, and Israel continues to leverage its own undeclared capabilities to reshape regional geopolitics by force, Riyadh will feel stronger pressure to keep the nuclear option on the agenda.”

In an unstable global order, an arms race – and even nuclear proliferation – seems not just likely, but even rational. Both Israeli/US and Russian impunity are underwritten by nuclear weapons. The attack on Iran has underscored that latent nuclear ability is not enough to act as a deterrent. The Israeli attack on Qatar has demonstrated that bystander nations with no such weapons of their own – or the guarantee from another nuclear power – may be attacked at whim. It is no surprise that the Gulf states, as well as the rest of the world, are looking increasingly to bolster their defences.

In this new world disorder, Pakistan has played it fast and loose with its diplomacy – praising Trump one day, condemning the strikes on Iran the next, while bartering its military for Gulf Arab favours.

But, at the end of the day, Pakistan does not really matter all that much for India except for our strategic community’s obsession with it. What matters more for us is an open trade network, safety for our migrant population that sends us back major remittances, and a world where we do not get sucked into major international entanglements for little gain.

For that, we need an answer to the Trump administration – one that asserts that the functioning of the world order cannot simply happen on the whims of whoever sits in the White House. Indian security, safety and prosperity do not stop at our borders, since economics and natural disasters easily sweep past them. For a prosperous and secure India, we need a prosperous and secure world.

So far, we have done nothing. China has pushed back robustly against US tariffs while looking at other markets, meaning that it has paid little cost due to the tariff war, and forced the US to the table. Europe, despite its strategic dependence on the US, is large enough that Trump has pushed a little, but not more. The EU has the wherewithal to develop an independent security framework, and is (very) slowly moving in that direction.

India has folded. In the first Trump administration it stopped buying Iran oil, now it is tapering off from Russian supplies. None of it seems to be strategically thought out. Instead, we seem to be merely accepting diktats in a world where India and its concerns seem to matter little.

For more than a decade, India has suffered from the excessive personalisation of its foreign policy in the figure of the prime minister. It has rejoiced at numerous hugs, and the foregettable moment when we hosted the G20 in our turn. Today, as that same prime minister beats a hasty retreat from a world that is getting too much from him, we realise what we have lost. There is no strategy, no plan, merely a retreat from a world that we can neither influence, or understand.

Omair Ahmad is an author. His last novel, Jimmy the Terrorist, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and won the Crossword Award.

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