Gifts make frequent appearances in the diplomatic interactions of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. During the concluding days of the BRICS summit, Modi made a series of unilateral gifts to his summit counterparts. These gifts, all regional handicrafts, included a ‘Sohrai’ painting to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, a Mother-of-Pearl encrusted sea-shell vase to Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, and a ‘Warli’ painting to Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. These gifts were immediately followed by exclusive bilateral talks among each of the three leaders on trade, commerce, and security. The gift of local handicrafts is an ideological move in its own right as it invokes the idea of authenticity. With handicrafts as gifts, Modi can self-fashion as a patron and advocate of swadeshi (indigenous) goods on the international stage while these diplomatic gestures are received with greater enthusiasm domestically. Thus, such gift exchanges contribute to building Modi’s legitimacy as a beneficent global visionary, on the one hand, and as a resolutely national leader on the other. Such image-building exercises are common to Modi’s diplomatic conduct and have become identifiable through its characteristically performative and personalistic approach.
The Backdrop
There are two diplomatic contexts within which Modi’s gifts can be situated. First, their exchange coincides with an increase in direct relations with regional leaders and selective diplomatic ‘partnerships’ in Eurasia, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific. This signals India’s efforts to mitigate China’s growing influence. Challenges notwithstanding, this recent foreign policy push indicates that India endeavours to gain dominance in an emerging multipolar regional system.
Second, under Modi’s leadership, Hinduism is increasingly being pushed as the face and frame of India on the international stage. While India’s foreign policy position has been couched in terms of its civilisational exceptionalism, its pitch and intensity have changed with the dominance of the Hindu right. These claims of civilisational superiority, at the international level, help consolidate the Hindu rashtra (nation) at the national level.
It goes without saying that both these objectives—interregional dominance and civilisational superiority—require legitimacy, internal and external. These aims are reflected in Modi’s diplomatic stance which Ian Hall, author of Modi and the Reinvention of Indian Foreign Policy, argues is moving in a cultural and religious direction. Gifts are part of a growing repertoire of Modi’s diplomatic practices which range from the advocacy for yoga and the embrace of Buddhism,environmentalism, to the creation of a class of religious diplomats (rashtradoots). These count as attempts to saffronise diplomatic practice and consolidate the image of India as a civilisation-state.
Saffronisation in Broad Strokes
‘Saffronisation’ is a nominalism of the colour saffron—a colour with sacred associations in Hindu culture. It figures under the larger framework of Hindutva, which is understood as the essence of Hinduism and is a socio-political project. Saffronisation, writ large, is a process of reconfiguring ‘Indian’ identity around the supposed unity of a primal Hindu community (sangathan) that shares a common history and civilisation. At its core, saffronisation is tied to the realisation and consolidation of an ethno-nationalist project—a Hindu rashtra. According to Hindutva ideologues, saffronisation is to be carried out in two ways. First, by reviving ancient traditions from an essentially ‘Hindu’ past. Second, by ridding all ‘foreign’ elements from India and disempowering the institutions and practices that represent it. It is important to remember that the Hindu Right routinely frames the liberal-minded, secular, Western, ‘cosmopolitan elite’ as a ‘corrupting’ influence and embodies a distinctly ‘foreign’ ethos. According to this worldview, the diplomat, fashioned out of cosmopolitan ideals, shares an affinity with all that is ‘foreign’ and becomes a natural target of saffronisation strategies.
Evidently, saffronisation strategies are not circumscribed to domestic politics, alone—diplomacy and international relations are well within the compass of its visions. Saffronisation of diplomacy can look like a revival of practices from the past or an acceleration of existing ones with a new key. Modi’s gift diplomacy is an amalgamation of both, that is, it changes the frame and pitch of the time-honoured practice of diplomatic gift-giving and banks on its revivalist, ‘civilisational’ messaging. Even the substance of the gift—regional handicrafts—conveys this tenor.
The Diplomatic Gift, General and Particular
It is difficult to understand the evolution of diplomacy without accounting for gift exchanges. Gifts are central to the material culture of diplomacy. Through their exchange, gifts become a medium of political communicationbetween state representatives, strengthening existing relations or helping establish new ones. And yet, diplomatic gifts are Janus-faced, since they can be both strategically-loaded ideological instruments and benign extensions of inter-state goodwill. In other words, they can be, and are, both part of diplomatic protocols and a response against it. Without overstating the case, gifts, being the centrepiece of diplomatic negotiations, are immensely political and not mere symbolic tokens.
The definitive theory of the politics of gift exchange comes from the sociologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950). In his 1925 essay, ‘The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies’, Mauss combined anthropologicalinsights with comparative philological research to argue that gifts were a systematic, institutional, and rational mode of exchange among non-Western societies. It governed relations between political groups and created obligations between exchanging parties—establishing reciprocity, mutuality, and harmony, in the process.
Mauss even argued that gifts provided an antidote to the self-interested, impersonal, transactional logic of exchange that is common in Western society and suggested that it should serve as a model for international relations in the postwar global order. But no matter how expansive and significant, the Maussian conception of the political gift does not neatly fit the politics of Modi’s diplomatic gift.
To understand what Modi’s unilateral gift entails, it is important to think through Indic frames of reference. Since they inform not just statecraft, but also analyses of it. This is also not misplaced because Modi’s political communication takes recourse to revivalist themes, vernacular references, indigenous sources, and ingrained ethnic and religious symbols. In fact, nativism is the pith and marrow of the larger ideology of Modi’s BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling party in India). Such frames of reference help contextualise Modi and his milieu.
As such, to grasp these gifts, the Indic conception of dana is more expressive of its implications. Dana is well-lodged in South Asian imagination and has been a prevalent social, political, and religious practice, across time. When understood as dana, the diplomatic gift becomes more intelligible.
The Dynamics of Dana
In the Hindu, Jaina, and Buddhist philosophical tradition, dana is a type of gift characterised by a refusal of reciprocation. The dana is situated in an environment where the position of the donor and the recipient, the procedure of exchange, and the substance of the gift are interrelated components which together make the ‘ideal’ gift. The asymmetrical, unreciprocated nature of dana constitutes, for the anthropologist Anderson Parry, its very ‘spirit’. Hierarchy and dependency are fundamentally built into the conception of dana. In a stratified context, dana plays on structural relationships of power and status, and serves to bring ethical and moral legitimacy to its donor.
Ancient political treatises and religious scriptures framed dana as a tool of political legitimation, linked with prestige, power, and patronage. Dana was important for statecraft in early India. Gifts made as dana were meant to display a king’s political, ritual, and moral authority. Gifts made as dana were also tied up with an element of spectacle; less for its promise of reciprocity, and more for its ability to enact symbolic domination. In dana, religiosity, politics, and power were brought together and, most importantly, put on display.
Why would be Modi interested in dana? To create dependencies on its recipients or leverage the spirit of the ‘Indian’ gift to project India, as a vishwaguru (world teacher), a civilisational touchstone for the world to follow. These gifts build an image of the donor as magnanimous and, by virtue of their asymmetrical nature, orchestrate a pattern of hierarchy through generosity. The substance of the gift (indigenous handicrafts) and the larger rhetoric that surrounds it, also throw its populist associations in sharp relief. It is clear that gifts are in line with Modi’s general diplomatic conduct, that is, they face both ‘inward’ and ‘outward’. These gifts outline the changing culture of diplomacy under Hindu nationalism with the cresting of the ‘Saffron Wave’.As this is part of a contingent and unfolding phenomenon, it is difficult to assess the full magnitude of Modi’s diplomatic gift. This is also because such practices, as consistent as they might be, are not codified into foreign policy doctrines. Rather, these shifts are encoded and diffused in diplomatic practices, exchanges, and interactions. The religious connotations and nationalist undertones of Modi’s diplomatic gifts point to the ideological leverage of such gifts beyond their ability to facilitate diplomatic communication. This urges us to attend to the entanglement of populism with diplomacy, and international relations with national(ist) agendas.