The Red Carpet and the Gold Star

The Red Carpet and the Gold Star, How We Are Legitimising a New World Order

Anthony Albanese and Narendra Modi enter the Marvel arena on Thursday night. Photo credit: Jesse Thompson

The image is indelible. Twenty-five thousand people at Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium, phone lights flickering like fireflies, chanting “Modi, Modi, Modi.” In Jakarta, a day earlier, President Prabowo Subianto pinned Indonesia’s highest civilian honour—the Bintang Republik Indonesia Adipurna—on the chest of the same man.

A red carpet here. A gold star there. And somewhere in the shadows of these spectacular affirmations, the ghosts of Gujarat 2002 stir, the cries of Kashmir are muffled, and the architecture of the post-Cold War liberal order quietly collapses under the weight of its own strategic contradictions.

This is not merely a story of diplomatic pragmatism. This is the emergence of a transnational ethno-nationalist bloc—an informal but potent ideological coalition where majoritarian rule is celebrated, where minority rights are transactional, and where atrocity, if packaged with strategic indispensability, travels first class.

The honours bestowed upon Narendra Modi by Australia and Indonesia are not isolated gestures; they are the building blocks of a new world order in which impunity is the currency of power.

Consider the arithmetic of forgetting. Between 1,200 and 2,000 people—overwhelmingly Muslims—perished in the Gujarat pogrom of 2002. Women were raped. Neighbourhoods were incinerated. Human Rights Watch documented that police “led the charge of the mobs.” A police officer candidly admitted there were “no orders to save Muslims.” This was the furnace in which Modi forged his political ascent.

Yet he is now received in Melbourne not as a figure stained by communal violence, but as a statesman whose visit adds “vigour” to bilateral ties. Australia, which once refused him entry in the immediate aftermath of those horrors, now rolls out the red carpet and finalises a landmark uranium deal to power India’s data centres.

The cognitive dissonance is staggering. And yet, it is entirely logical within the new strategic grammar. Among Australia’s major strategic partners, India now commands the highest levels of public trust. Trust, however, is a curious thing when it is untethered from accountability. Only five per cent of Australians expect India to be the world’s most important power a decade from now, against fifty-four per cent for China. Strategic anxiety, not genuine conviction, is driving this embrace.

India is the “democratic” counterweight to Beijing, the southwestern anchor of the Quad, a fellow defender of a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” The internal character of the regime—the bulldozing of Muslim homes, the systematic discrimination, the suffocation of Kashmir—becomes a manageable complexity, relegated to private démarches while public hands are shaken.

If Australia’s embrace is strategic, Indonesia’s is existential. As the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, Jakarta’s decision to confer its highest honour upon a leader whose tenure has been marked by escalating persecution of Muslims is a rupture of profound consequence. Amnesty International Indonesia has condemned the award, noting that under Indonesian law, state honours must be grounded in humanitarian principles.

The 2025/2026 Amnesty report documents that India’s human rights situation has “sharply deteriorated” under Modi, with sedition and anti-terrorism laws weaponised against journalists, activists, and academics. Yet Prabowo cited Modi’s contributions to strengthening bilateral relations—trade, investment, technology transfer, and the protection of Indonesian migrant workers.

This is the geoeconomic eclipse of human rights. The moral calculus has been inverted: economic interdependence is no longer a parallel logic to humanitarian norms; it has become the dominant moral logic itself. Indonesia needs Indian investment for its downstream nickel and bauxite industries.

Australia needs a non-China Asian market of unprecedented scale. India, under Modi, has skilfully positioned itself as the indispensable partner, the “Vishwa Mitra” who extracts honour from both an Anglo-American treaty ally and the leader of the Muslim world’s largest democracy simultaneously.

The ideological engine of this new architecture is the deepening Indo-Israeli axis. India is the biggest buyer of Israeli defence equipment. The two nations have elevated their relationship to a “Special Strategic Partnership,” covering co-production of defence systems, joint development of next-generation military technologies, and emergency procurement mechanisms.

This is not merely transactional; it is ideological. Analysts have long noted the structural resemblances between Hindutva nationalism and Israeli ethno-nationalism: both envision the state as the vehicle of a specific civilisational-religious community; both view a minority population as a demographic and security threat requiring differential legal and spatial containment.

When these two projects validate each other on the world stage, a transnational ideological bloc emerges—one that rewires global norms around minority rights and democratic pluralism.

The implications for international law are severe. The Genocide Convention, the Rome Statute, the Fourth Geneva Convention—these instruments rely on a consensus that even geopolitical allies must be restrained. But when India and Israel mutually reinforce narratives that dismiss allegations of systematic discrimination, the enforcement mechanism fractures.

The vocabulary of “genocide” and “war crimes” loses diplomatic weight unless backed by great power interests, leaving the most vulnerable populations without even the fragile shield of international censure.

What is being constructed here is a new binary: forces of national-identity sovereignty versus forces of liberal-cosmopolitan interventionism. The tragedy is that the most vulnerable—the Kashmiri child exposed to pellet guns, the Palestinian family under the rubble, the Muslim family whose home is bulldozed in Uttar Pradesh—are ground between these tectonic plates. Their blood becomes the lubricant for strategic handshakes.

The world order is being remade not at grand peace conferences, but in the accumulation of photo opportunities, where a red carpet and a gold star quietly announce that impunity now travels first class. The philosophical question that remains is whether the edifice of international law and human rights—built on the graves of the twentieth century’s horrors—can survive a twenty-first century where the architects of the new order have decided that those horrors were just the cost of doing business.

Or worse, that they were not horrors at all, but the birth pangs of resurrected nations.