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Our past will always be an influence, but no longer a determinant of our future. Forging ahead will mean taking risks and refraining from passing off timidity as strategy or indecision as wisdom.
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We will count, not because of the largesse of the world, but due to our strengths. And our role will not just reflect that, but also our convergences with other interested powers.
But for two decades, China had been winning without fighting, while the US was fighting without winning.
As a result, along the way, America lost its famous optimism. Something had to give and it did, in the 2016 American presidential election.
One might well ask what a Bernie Sanders foreign policy would have looked like. But in its earlier version, it was not yet an America of global magnitude and that is the real difference.
Part of the contest revolves around the utilization of big data. Equally consequential is control over key emerging technologies. The new contestation is about artificial intelligence and advanced computing, quantum information and sensing, additive robotics and brain-computer interface, advanced materials, hypersonics and biotechnology. Whoever harnesses disruptive technologies better will influence the world more.
But the era after the Indo-US nuclear deal of 2005 showed how excessive caution lost the chance to make more than incremental gains.
Single-minded pursuit of national interest will make our world look like a bazaar, with more players, less rules and greater volatility. As a result, goals are more immediate and approaches more tactical.
Whether it was targeting plumbers from Poland, caricaturing immigrants from Mexico or castigating refugees from Africa, politics mobilized around cultural threats and economic grievances. Doing so, it revealed that the thinking of established elites had become outdated.
The Trump outlook depicts global supply chains as taking jobs away from America, calling into question the logic on which global business has relied on for years.
The reality is that the US may have weakened, but China’s rise is still far from maturing. And together, the two processes have freed up room for others.
But this will also be a world of a Brazil and Japan, of Turkey and Iran, a Saudi Arabia, Indonesia or an Australia, with a greater say in their vicinity and even beyond.
India today has emerged as an industry leader of such plurilateral groups, because it occupies both the hedging and the emerging space at the same time.
No one doubts China’s influence on the world stage, even if they don’t ponder that it was achieved by running trade surpluses rather than by shedding blood. Financial instruments, displays of strength and connectivity projects have provided opportunities to assert power without physically clashing with competitors.
The US, for example, remains the world’s technological leader by a long stretch. But while behind on this score, China has used its financial and trading muscle to carve out for itself the number two slot.
Placing national prospects in a context of global events does not come easily to self-absorbed societies. Yet, divorced from the larger picture, they could misread their position or ignore their destiny. India’s current modernization is one of a series that goes back to the Meiji Restoration in Japan.
As India rises, questions will naturally be asked as to what kind of power it will be. If nothing else, the world’s experience with China’s rise will surely prompt such queries.
Eurocentric assumption that pluralism is a purely Western attribute. India, with a longer history of diversity and coexistence, defies that preconception.
A nationalistic India is willing to do more with the world, not less.
The Mahabharata is indisputably the most vivid distillation of Indian thoughts on statecraft. Unlike the Arthashastra, it is not a compendium of clinical principles of governance. Instead, it is a graphic account of real-life situations and their inherent choices.
The India of the Mahabharata era was also multipolar, with its leading powers balancing each other. But once the competition between its two major poles could not be contained, others perforce had to take sides.
It is only when a national elite has a strong and validated sense of its bottom lines that it will take a firm stand when these are challenged.
Asserting national interests and securing strategic goals through various means is the dharma of a state, as indeed it was of an individual warrior.
His willingness to forgive his cousin and rival Shishupala a hundred provocations before finally responding decisively is instructive. This too is a lesson for a nation with growing capabilities in the global arena.
Like most warriors, Duryodhana thought in an orthodox manner, while Arjuna also understood what was outside the box.
The Mahabharata also holds numerous examples of violations of codes of conduct, some more flagrant than others. The main protagonist Duryodhana is killed literally with a blow below the belt. Of the successive Kaurava commanders, one is brought down using a woman warrior as a shield, the second attacked after laying down weapons and the third decapitated when digging his chariot wheel out of the ground. Well-laid rules of individual combat fall by the wayside as stakes mount. Arjuna’s son Abhimanyu is attacked by multiple adversaries simultaneously, including from the rear. His own father,
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The value of the Uri and Balakot responses was that, finally, Indian policy could think for itself rather than let Pakistan condition its answers. And that, in many ways, was the role of Sri Krishna as well on the Pandava side.
Many of the most fateful battles in the modern world – Bosworth Field in England, Sekigahara in Japan or Plassey in India – have after all been decided by treachery.
One of India’s challenges is that its sense of an establishment is not fully developed. Competitive politics is so visceral that perhaps the only continuity is that those in opposition can be counted on to oppose.
The Pandavas are an excellent example of integration. Born of different mothers and each with a complex paternal origin, they function very well as a team overcoming internal tensions.
If we in India have acquired a reputation for operating with sub-optimal coordination, it is because our history is replete with examples that came at great cost. Individualism could be aggravated by a possessiveness which has been enhanced by shortages. Bureaucratism has also been entrenched in our society. What perhaps adds to all of this is a focus on process rather than concern over outcomes. The lack of integration comes in different forms, but it is only by attacking them in all their manifestations that Indian foreign policy can really change for the better.
The Russian relationship may have defied odds by remaining incredibly steady. But it is the exception, not the rule.
And the real obstacle to the rise of India is not any more the barriers of the world, but the dogmas of Delhi.
In India, we also meet an obsession with words and text. Form and process are often deemed more important than outcomes.
Broad concepts are not always easy to translate into policy, interests and outcomes. Non-alignment was no exception to the rule. India’s engagement with the West was heavily Eurocentric and did not cater adequately for the new American primacy. This contrasted with the determined cultivation of the new superpower by the Pakistani elite.
We tend to assume that the events in the period leading up to 1962 were predestined. In fact, the narrative of a ‘betrayal’ was designed to mitigate responsibility for a policy disaster at the highest levels.
