THE legendary public intellectual and political analyst Abdul Ghafoor Noorani, who passed away at 93 in Mumbai last week, had believed that Narendra Modi’s foreign policy flowed from his ideological prejudice cradled in Hindutva.

What that entailed was threefold: making India umbilically inseparable from the West given Hindutva’s visceral hatred of communism from its inception. It is another matter that the Cold War is over and the hatred of communism has outlived its utility. The US is courting communist Vietnam without giving up entirely on communist China. Second — even though it required a marked paring down of Hindutva’s love of Hitler — a fawning relationship with Islamophobic Israel has defined India’s recent policy preferences.

Modi’s seeking a second term for Donald Trump in 2020 was of a piece with his anti-Muslim politics. India’s recently unveiled citizenship laws came from this prejudice. A third constant in the Modi foreign policy, according to Noorani sahib, was the lure of acceptance with the Indian diaspora, chiefly the type managed and plied by Hindutva’s overseas infrastructures. The Howdy Modi element has thus remained a mainstay of the policy.

How does the South Asia neighbourhood appear in this preordained ideological posture?

“The era of uninterrupted dialogue is over,” says India’s foreign minister although the claim is problematic on two grounds. First, there’s scant evidence of any uninterrupted dialogue happening ever with Pakistan. Two, who will talk to Pakistan about issues raised by........

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