Letter from the Editors

Welcome to the April 2021 issue of The Diplomat Magazine!

Modern politics, both domestic and international, is all about brand building. In India, Modi’s brand is strong; in Nepal, the Nepal Communist Party’s brand is in tatters. In Australia, China’s name is mud, and across Asia meme-wielding youth are taking to the streets to go toe-to-toe with history.

For now, writes Asim Ali in our cover story, “Brand Modi seems to have escaped into the political stratosphere.” Untouched by political competition, unscatched by the pandemic, various protest movements, or economic calamities, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is at the top of his game. Ali, a political researcher with the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi, explains the making and evolution of Brand Modi in light of a spate of critical elections in five states to take place in April and May. But Ali also underscores that the making of Brand Modi could sow the seeds of its own undoing, even if we don’t see a full unraveling for years to come.

Meanwhile, in neighboring Nepal voters hoped for stability, at last, after 2017’s election saw the Nepal Communist Party win a decisive victory. But as Peter Gill explains, three and a half years later the party is split on the back of personality clashes. Once again, instability reigns in Nepal. Gill, a Nepal-based journalist, writes that if you asked five Nepalis what the root causes of their government’s instability are, “you might get five different answers.” But beneath it all is a persistent sense that Nepal’s instability masks uncanny consistency in the elite class, the so-called “permanent establishment,” which seems to have little concern for the welfare of Nepalis.

Australia is one of the countries where China’s image has been hit hardest in 2020. Economic tariffs, in particular, fed into negative perceptions of China and advanced the narrative that Australia is overly reliant on China. The data, however, tell a more complicated story, as Jane Golley, director of the Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW) at the Australian National University, shows. While nearly everyone agrees that the Australia-China relationship is heading in the wrong direction, there’s no agreement on why, what the economic impact has been thus far, and – most importantly – what to do about it.

Finally, as Nicholas Farrelly writes, across Asia – in Thailand, Myanmar, and Hong Kong, especially – the region’s youth are going “toe-to-toe with history, in a cycle of political and cultural showdowns as old as the very notion of elite power.” But they’re doing it with new technology and greater cross-cultural awareness of the broader struggle. Farrelly, a professor and head of social sciences at the University of Tasmania, explains that while the circumstances in each country are unique, there’s no escaping the shared sentiment among Asia’s youth that rising inequality, political stagnation, and violent authoritarianism don’t need to be part of the future they inherit.

We hope you enjoy these stories, and more, in the following pages.