How politics of convenience mars Modi-Merkel bonhomie

The feel-good story doing the rounds in the German press about Chancellor Angela Merkel's India trip is that of the return of the tenth century "Stuttgart Durga", stolen from a temple in Jammu and Kashmir and rediscovered in the possession of the Linden-Museum in Stuttgart, to India. The right-wing tabloid, the Bild-Zeitung, turned the tale into a detective thriller with Frau Merkel as heroine; another news source quoted Narendra Modi as saying the sculpture symbolised the "victory of good over evil".

That this bonhomie between a pogrom-scarred Indian prime minister and a post-Holocaust German chancellor does not have more disturbing overtones given the lessons of history is surprising. But the Bild-Zeitung politely explains at the end of its story that beyond trading links, the two countries, India, the "greatest democracy in the world", and Germany, have a common interest in the reform of the UN Security Council: both countries want permanent seats.

This makes sense: the new Germany, and especially under Merkel, has been quietly pushing for a new role befitting its world status as trade, technological and manufacturing giant, the Volkswagen scam notwithstanding. Pursuing this goal has meant interpreting the anti-military aggression clauses of its Grundgesetz, the nearest equivalent it has to a Constitution, most liberally. It was not long ago, in 2004,that a German defence minister, the Social Democrat Peter Struck, spoke without irony of "defending German security in the Hindukush". In 2010 a German president, the conservative Horst Köhler, much like his Indian counterpart a constitutional head of state rather than a head of government, found himself compelled to resign after saying that the German Army could be deployed in the interests of defending German trade, jobs and incomes, which ought also to be considered "defence". India's international ambitions have been growing no slower.

Could it be said that in the interests of realpolitik there need be no discussion on the dangerously majoritarian and increasingly violent nature of the Indian regime? The US president managed to throw in some relatively mild but nonetheless unambiguous remarks on the dangers of excluding minorities within a polity on his India visit. Frau Merkel will in all probability do no such thing. And indeed, just like the US state, the German state has in recent years hardly been the exemplar of anti-discriminatory democracy that it would have the world believe, as it harps on the success of its "grappling with the past" (Vergangenheitsbewältigung). It would, of course, be impolite to remember that her party once campaigned on the slogan "Kinder stattInder" - the rhyming words implying it was better to have children than to allow in Indian immigrants - in opposition to Indian professionals entering Germany to work in an economy with a falling birth rate and an ageing population. Germany's current PR wave of claiming to welcome Asian and African refugees while at the same time suspending the Schengen agreement on free movement across internal borders within the Schengen Area to curtail their numbers entering Germany, is a paradox that awaits comment. (In one of history's great ironies, chronic housing shortages, now manifested in various municipalities' inability to accommodate the influx of refugees, have been overcome by reopening parts of Nazi-era concentration camps and using them as housing.) This, again, in a country that has over a long period of time refused to address the growing xenophobia of its population or its institutions.

What this suggests is not that all invocations of ethics would be futile and hypocritical given all countries' poor record at accommodating difference. The two states are, indeed, very different. The current Indian regime is not bound by any of the rules of civility that make a direct call to a pogrom or an instigation of a riot by members of the ruling party unthinkable. And indeed it is for that reason that there is an expectation that Germany, more than other diplomatic interlocutors, would not simply treat the current Indian regime as another manifestation of the Great Indian Democracy Show.

But there is another problem: despite a "Year of Germany" in India and a "Year of India" in Germany, and a number of highly publicised and heavily funded state-level contacts and celebrations, replete with academic conferences funded by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (these were all under the previous Indian government), no really critical knowledge of India has developed in Germany. There are contacts, of course, among activists in India and Germany, who talk to each other. And there are academics who study India. But not much emerges from this. German academic discourse is cautious, highly self-reproducing, and not very original. As a consequence of a top-heavy system in which only full professors have permanent jobs (and are civil servants of the state), insecure lesser mortals pull their punches, play safe, and stay close to those who can offer favours, contracts, or work of any description. The professorial chairs are filled by "successors" on the retirement or death of the incumbent, whose work is more or less expected to follow in the footsteps of their predecessors' work. This produces a drag over time which is now irreparable, causing a general academic backwardness which is even more acute in particular fields that have hitherto not been considered a priority: for instance, the "study of South Asia".

Historically, academics working on India within Germany have had a quasi-diplomatic role, and often an advisory role to governments. In divided Germany, this was more important than today. But in contrast to "Indologie" chairs that often dealt in ancient texts and were relatively numerous, work on contemporary or modern India was rarer. Today numbers are higher, but the top-heavy system led by relatively untalented academics continues to be unable to produce really critical scholarship. It is this scholarship that would have been able to provide, in Germany, an account of contemporary India that could be critical and empathetic at the same time, not the sometimes-bad-tempered cultural stereotypes that are heard off the record in the corridors of the AuswärtigesAmt (foreign office). It is fortunately rarer than before to hear in old Indology circles some of the stereotypes that the current BJP-RSS combination comes up with in cruder versions (Indology was, after all, an important subject to the Nazis, as it dealt with "Aryan" civilisation). But they are still around. A combination of the structural problems of German academia and the weakness of the field of South Asian Studies has not been overcome by new research institutes that rehearse government paranoia about "Muslim threats" and "new frontiers" in their academic agendas, funded by foreign offices and secret services (and this new phenomenon of marrying statist agendas to academic research is hardly peculiar to Germany).

In the circumstances, it is to be expected that history or social justice are not themes on the agenda during this visit. This is only diplomatic; but the silence of intellectuals is notable.