The unprecedented diplomatic backlash against India just a few days ago over the derogatory remarks made by the now-suspended spokespersons of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) against Islam highlights the tenuous limits of a carefully calibrated and politically useful binary that the BJP-led government in New Delhi has been pursuing in conducting its relationship with the West Asian states: dismiss the growing anti-Muslim sentiments in the country as either a fringe or a ‘domestic matter’ while proactively improving India’s relations with the Muslim-majority states. The backlash has clearly put the Government on the back foot, which is now struggling to contain the diplomatic fallout.
While none of the Muslim-majority states in West Asia can claim to teach India the virtues of religious tolerance or pluralism — going by the despicable standards they adopt in their own counties — for India, this is not just a lesson in religious tolerance and pluralism but one that should drive home the stark lesson that vicious domestic politics has foreign policy implications. More so, when bilateral relationships carefully built over decades by professional diplomats start getting undermined by communal politics and electoral calculations, hate speech can no longer be dismissed as “our internal matter”; it becomes a matter of national interest.
