What Merkel told Modi about religious intolerance in India

Of the five billion inhabitants of the nineteen G20 member states, more than half were citizens of just two countries: China had 1.39 billion, and India 1.35 billion. In the ten years since the 2007 summit in Heiligendamm, Chinese GDP per capita had more than tripled, and that of India had doubled.By way of comparison, in the same time period, American GDP per capita had risen only by 25 percent, but was still almost seven times higher than the Chinese, and more than thirty times higher than the Indian.I had long been convinced that the economic successes of China and India would shift international power relations significantly in their direction. That’s why I wanted to develop closer relationships with both countries.In 2010, I suggested to President Hu [Jintao] and Prime Minister [Manmohan] Singh that we hold regular bilateral intergovernmental consultations. Both agreed. The first German-Indian intergovernmental consultations took place in early June 2011 in New Delhi, and the first German-Chinese one in late June 2011 in Berlin. Five further meetings with China and four with India were to follow.India was the most populous democracy in the world. The first two German-Indian intergovernmental consultations of 2011 and 2013 were led on the Indian side by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. I had met Singh in April 2006 when we officially opened the Hannover Messe together, where India was the partner country. medium115968585Singh was born in 1932, and after reading economics, among other subjects, at Cambridge and Oxford, he worked for the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and was elected prime minister in 2004. He belonged to the Congress party, and, as a member of the Sikh religion, was the first non-Hindu premier. His primary aim was to improve living standards for the two-thirds of India’s 1.2 billion population who lived in rural areas. This amounted to 800 million people, ten times Germany’s entire population.In my conversations with him, I came to better understand the misgivings of the emerging countries toward us, the affluent countries. From his perspective, we expected them to take great interest in our problems, but we weren’t prepared to offer them the same courtesy. I could see his point, and began to study more closely the challenges faced by the emerging countries.Singh told me about the cultural diversity of his country, a sub-continent with more than five thousand years of history. The Indian constitution alone recognizes twenty-two official languages. The country’s unity arises from its diversity. In this respect, India is more comparable with the European Union as a whole than with one of its member states.In May 2014, Singh was succeeded by Narendra Modi. He belonged to the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and preferred to speak Hindi, India’s official language, alongside English. We had met for the first time in April 2015, also during the opening of the Hannover Messe, when India was partner country for a second time. Under the motto “Make in India,” four hundred companies were exhibiting their products.At the opening ceremony, Modi emphatically promoted India as a location for investment, speaking English as an exception, and impressed everyone there with a cultural program that contained elements of augmented reality. I held my breath as a deceptively real-looking Asiatic lion stepped out of the back wall, roared loudly, padded downstage toward the audience, and promenaded through the middle aisle of the Hanover Congress Center. medium115968620Modi loved visual effects. He told me about election campaigns in which he’d spoken in a studio and had his image projected as a hologram to more than fifty different locations, where thousands of people were listening to him in each. I asked how the listeners had responded to that kind of virtual presence. He reported that many people had waited for him at the end of his speech, wanting to shake his hand, even though they knew he wasn’t really there.Modi’s focus was also on improving Indians’ living standards, especially for the rural population. He boosted economic growth, in particular by tackling the countless bureaucratic hurdles that lurked everywhere. He appointed a staff member in his office as a contact person for companies experiencing difficulties with their projects. This gave rise to a so-called fast track for investments. India’s economy grew by 6 to 7 percent over a number of years.In October 2015, the third German-Indian intergovernmental consultations took place in New Delhi. Because Modi had heard about my love of classical music, he arranged a small concert for all the participants after the lunch. He had a piece of music composed especially for the occasion. It was premiered by an orchestra playing on both Indian and European instruments — a symbol of our cultural ties.I loved moments like this on my official appointments; they not only gave me the opportunity to better understand my conversation partners and their views, but also exposed me to new cultural worlds. This also gave rise to an atmosphere of intimacy from which it was easier to find political compromises.On the second day of my visit, we went to Bangalore together to visit a German-Indian economic forum — 170 German companies had relocated there — and also a Bosch innovation center, where we met with Indian apprentices. Under the motto “Skill India,” Modi was working to give young Indians improved opportunities through education, hence why he was interested in collaborating with us. medium nocaptionWe spoke regularly about climate protection whenever we met. Modi reproached me and the industrialized countries as a whole for concealing the fact that India had so far contributed little to global warming and had a great need for development aid. I accepted both arguments, but pointed out that India’s contribution to global warming was no longer on a scale that could be ignored.Even though, in 2017, India had a significantly lower per capita emission of CO2, with 1.8 tons, than China with 7.1 tons or the US with 15.8 tons, it was now, after these two countries, the third largest emitter of CO2, with a more than 7 percent share in global emissions. India’s path to climate neutrality was, therefore, of considerable importance. We agreed to work together closely on strengthening renewable energies, in particular solar energy.Four years later, at the climate conference in Glasgow in November 2021, Modi would announce that India aimed to be climate neutral by 2070, and to derive half of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.On the evening before the fourth German-Indian intergovernmental consultations in late May 2017, just a few weeks before the Hamburg G20 summit, Modi and I spoke extensively in the German government’s guest house at Schloss Meseberg about the EU’s free trade agreement with India. The negotiations had begun in 2007, and came to a standstill in 2013. It didn’t prove possible during my time in office to kick-start them again. Here, too, differences in opinion within the field of agriculture were insurmountable.I followed with concern the reports that, since Modi had taken office, an increasing number of members of other religions, predominantly Muslims and Christians, were being attacked by Hindu nationalists. When I broached the subject with Modi, he vehemently denied it and emphasized that India was and would remain a country of religious tolerance. Unfortunately, the facts said otherwise. We were unable to agree on this point. My worries remained — religious freedom is, after all, a key component of every democracy.Excerpted with permission from Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021 (published by Pan Macmillan).