India under Narendra Modi as Prime Minister will claim its rightful place in Asia as one of its true leaders, politically, economically and even militarily, and in order to demonstrate these credentials India can be expected to abandon gleefully its current policy of servility and unconditional subservience to the West. It will do so in the full knowledge that continuing subservience to its former colonial masters and their allies i.e. the new sponsors of colonialism, will severely undercut any Indian claim to lead the once colonized but now liberated nations of Asia.

India will discard its junior partner status in any relationship with USA and retaliate in a more effectual manner if the American gaffe we saw in the recent past involving Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade were to be repeated.

India will reclaim its ancient spiritual and cultural heritage and take pride in its civilisational achievements in a way that will put to shame the negative attitudes being adopted currently by the Indian establishment, including its mass media and burgeoning film industry, lacking vision, sense of country’s purpose and more importantly, pride in its own history and heroes.

The upsurge of the view that India has nothing much to offer other that material goods and services and entertainment in this modern age has diminished India’s moral standing in a world long used, particularly in the pre-colonial past, to be the beneficiary of Indian philosophical thought, wisdom and outspokenness that had no equal.

India will mend any strains it has in its relationship with China and will not allow interfering outsiders, particularly from the West, to identify India’s friends and potential enemies and teach India how to conduct itself vis-à-vis imagined foes. India will take comfort from an historical fact that India and China despite being neighbours on the Asian continent had never gone to war with each other for over 5000 years except on one dismal occasion in contemporary history (1962) when it clashed over a border issue that has its roots in British colonial mischief.

India will set its own foreign policy agenda and goals from a central government perspective, rather than from a regional government perspective, which today has unfortunately contributed to India’s almost total isolation from its immediate neighbours in South Asia. This anticipated posture will contribute immensely to improvement of India’s ties with Sri Lanka. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, the popular freedom fighter and nationalist leader that India never had as its Prime Minister, will come alive in the form of Narendra Modi and will revolutionise India’s national and international image.

India will no longer be the country that the West, particularly USA, would take for granted with contempt for both its leaders and people, but a new India conscious of its place in the world and obligations to both humanity and all other living beings. India’s Constitutional provision that “it shall be the duty of every citizen of India to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wild life and to have compassion for living creatures” (Article 51 A (g)) will gain a new lease of life. This is the vision that India’s great son, Gautam Buddha, had for Bharat and its greatest Chakravarti Emperor Asoka faithfully strove to establish in the form of a compassionate society.

India’s moral voice can be expected to be heard again in the far flung corners of the world in a manner that the Buddha, Mahavira, Asoka, Nagarjuna, Swami Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, and Mahatma Gandhi and the like resounded to the serene joy and delight of humankind. Idealism will return to India and in turn help to re-charge the batteries of a largely spiritually weakened Asia, now increasingly despoiled by unbridled crass materialism.  

We must gratefully acknowledge that it was India more than any other country that originally provided the value system for the moral and ethical foundations of Asia, through the spread of the influence of Buddhism and Hinduism. Are we in Sri Lanka ready to meet the challenge of foreseeable radical changes in our closest neighbour, India?

The author is a Sri Lankan lawyer