Welcoming Modi

NARENDRA Modi’s visit, beginning today, July 3, is about bilateral relations between India and Trinidad and Tobago, but it is also about the place of both countries within a shifting global order.

It was only eight months ago the Indian PM was in our neck of the woods, attending the Caricom-India conference held in Georgetown, Guyana. That event took place days after Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.

Mr Trump’s assumption of the Oval Office has since shattered the halcyon days of summits and diplomacy, exploded the global economic order and opened a Pandora’s box of uncertainty in which a figure like Mr Modi, leading the world’s most populous country, its largest democracy, its fastest-growing economy and one of its newest nuclear powers, assumes even greater significance.

Cordiality between Mr Modi and Mr Trump is such that the Indian leader, in a visit to the White House in February, turned MAGA into MIGA: Make India Great Again. In May, Mr Trump claimed to have mediated a ceasefire between India and Pakistan when violence flared, yet again, over Kashmir. That impasse was eerily anticipatory of June’s blistering Israel-Iran conflict in which Mr Trump’s role was again evident. More chaotic is the theatre of war, more dangerous some of the players.

Mr Modi is visiting as part of a five-nation tour that includes his participation in the BRICS summit in Brazil. BRICS, which has been expanding, sees itself as a counter to the influence of the Global North on international affairs. But Mr Trump this year declared the group dead. (Xi Jinping is not attending.)

However, don’t expect to hear about any of this in the coming days from Mr Modi or any local politician.

“This visit will provide an opportunity to rejuvenate the special bonds of ancestry and kinship that unite us,” the Indian PM said in a statement on July 2, noting the arrival of East Indians to these shores 180 years ago.

Included in that rejuvenation is the bestowing of the ORTT on Mr Modi, the first time the country’s highest award has gone to a non-national since 1993 when Derek Walcott received it. (Both Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and President Christine Kangaloo have been awarded India’s highest honour for non-nationals, the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award.)

Besides the prospect of deepening trade and policy co-operation, a rare address of the houses of Parliament will gift the TT government an opportunity to soothe, momentarily, fractious divisions within partisan politics and the fallout from mass firings. Mr Modi’s warm welcome here is also a message to Venezuela. Last November, the Indian PM used an acrostic to spell out future co-operation with Caricom. His visit this week is similarly symbolic and strategic for all concerned.