The recurring theme of the court jesters of PM Modi — including diplomats, academics et al — has been that our beloved leader has succeeded in placing India at the heart of the world stage. This tall claim proved to be a damp squib after Operation Sindoor; not a single country came out openly to endorse India’s action; the United States, world’s most powerful country and deemed to be our close ally in the joint project for containment of China, resurrected the malevolent proposition of India-Pakistan equivalence, an equivalence that India had worked hard to dispel and had succeeded in sidestepping it in the diplomatic communications for years; after 2008, no country, let alone the US, had spoken of India and Pakistan in the same vein. India is a rising world economy but Pakistan is an economic basket case: that was the usual refrain.
But it was the worst hour of Indian diplomacy when the US President went on to repeatedly put India and Pakistan on the same pedestal after Operation Sindoor; what is equally galling is that no other country — small or large, poor or rich — came forward to defend India against President Trump’s attempt at drawing a false equivalence between a rogue, military-governed country and a proud democratic nation.
That showed how Modi’s India has become a pariah state. It was evident: our confrontational wolf warrior diplomacy has left India with no friend.
Operation Sindoor was not an one-off event — though it was the most consequential one as it concerned India’s security — that showed India’s grim isolation; the ‘no invite’ to the G 7 summit in Canada is a stark pointer in that direction. After all, India had been invited consecutively for six times since 2019 ( the 2020 summit was eventually cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic); but in 2025 India has been shown the door while the countries like South Africa, Australia, Ukraine, Mexico and Brazil have been extended a warm welcome to the summit.
Apologist media houses in India have tried to deflect the loss of face by saying that PM Modi would not have, in any case, travelled to Canada to attend the summit, given the testy relationship between both the countries. But then it was Trudeau’s Canada which had become hostile to India over the murder of a Khalistani Canadian Sikh, Hardeep Singh Nijjer; PM Trudeau had accused India of masterminding that murder. But Justin Trudeau is no more the Canadian Prime Minister; in the new Mark Carney administration, an Indian-Canadian Anita Anand is the foreign affairs minister; both Carney and Anand have made initial noises about rebuilding ties with India. Still the invite didn’t come.
The other pretext that is adduced is that PM Modi is too busy with bigger national and security issues to spare time for the summit; this is a bogus excuse. PM Modi would have jumped at the invite that gave him a photo-opportunity to rub shoulders with the high and mighty of the world politics.
Don’t you remember how hard he tried to wangle an invite to President Trump’s inauguration ceremony? .Foreign Minister Jaishankar stationed himself for almost a week in Washington DC to lobby with the Trump Team to procure a last-minute invitation for his boss, but to no avail.
And, in any case, had the invite come, if the domestic compulsions would have compelled the leader not to step out, so be it. At least we would not have been in the ignoble list of non-invitees! After all, President of Mexico received the invite more than two weeks ago but she had then made it clear that she would decide closer to the date of summit, i.e. 15th June, if she would travel to Atlanta to attend the summit.
Getting an invite for the summit but not able to make it — that would have enhanced India’s profile in the world stage; but not getting an invite after six consecutive years — and that too, when India is on the threshold of being crowned as the 4th largest economy of the world, overtaking Japan — is a tight slap on India’s face. Don’t you agree?
