INDIANS DON’T UNDERSTAND HISTORY
Or, How India Can Reclaim Its Civilisational Destiny
[The print-friendly PDF version of this essay can be downloaded from here.]
Synopsis
Most Indians, even those who consider themselves savvy about current affairs, suffer from a shocking ignorance of India’s civilisational history.
The malaise afflicts analysts, commentators and policymakers as well, and it has serious negative consequences for the prospects of the Indian nation-state.
This paper lays out the scale of the problem, the impediments towards establishing a genuine civilisational narrative, and the epiphanies that can follow from such a narrative.
The implications for India’s foreign policy, and indeed India’s civilisational destiny, are mind-boggling.
Read on.
PART 1 — WHAT AILS INDIA
1.1 Wandering In The Wilderness Without A Compass
An external observer of India today would struggle to make sense of what the country stands for and where it is going. One does not see a confident nation striding forth with a clear sense of direction and purpose, its wealth and power steadily increasing.
India’s potential remains unrealised, its economy still fettered, its demographic dividend untapped, its society still riven by poverty and inequality, its world ranking abysmal on most developmental indices, its longstanding disputes with neighbours still unresolved, its old allies distancing themselves, its new ones playing difficult, and facing a number of recent setbacks to its influence both in its immediate neighbourhood and further beyond.
The net result is that the Indian ship of state is floundering in a geostrategic sense, forever falling short of its potential as an economic behemoth, a progressive and harmonious society, a benignly influential world power, and an inspiring role model to other nations.
I submit that the fundamental reason for India’s track record of never failing to disappoint is that Indians do not understand history. India is not just a country but a civilisation, yet Indians today lack an overarching civilisational narrative to orient and guide them.
A civilisational narrative is a broad-brush view of history that puts events into a coherent context and tells a meaningful story. Unfortunately, Indians have so far only had two kinds of history taught to them.
One is the history found in school textbooks, which provides a relatively aseptic chronicle of events and biographies of personalities, without an underlying context to explain how these have shaped them as a people, and what they imply for their future. This kind of history is academic and not actionable. It provides a collection of facts but leaves a person wondering, “So what?”
The other kind is the overly simplistic interpretation of history provided by ideological narratives such as Communism and Hindutva, which selectively play up certain angles (e.g., class warfare or threats to religious identity) and ignore others, with the sole purpose of achieving certain present-day political objectives. This is of course actionable. Its fundamental purpose is in fact social mobilisation through polarisation, and hence it is action-oriented but ultimately self-harming. The compulsion to manufacture enemies and create internal divisions in the pursuit of political power weakens a society, in contrast to a civilisational narrative that unites and strengthens it.
What India sorely needs in its civilisational narrative is a history that is evidence-based and faithful to all facts, yet holistic and multidisciplinary in being able to pull together an understanding of geography, genetics, socio-economics, psychology, technology, and every other factor that has shaped the evolution of its people, informed their values, endowed them with unique strengths and advantages, and suggests at the various opportunities and constraints that will shape their destiny into the future.
With a common understanding of their civilisational narrative, both India’s leaders and the population at large would know how to interpret what is happening in the world around them, and what the country needs to do to further its interests. It is particularly tragic when a sixth of humanity remains ignorant about who they are and of their place in the world.
1.2 A Social Experiment That Illustrates The Problem
The case may be illustrated with an informal survey that anyone can perform and verify.
1. Ask any random Indian who professes to be well-informed on current affairs which country or countries pose the greatest threat to India today. The answer will be either China or Pakistan, or the two combined.
2. Ask them who was responsible for the decline of Indian civilisation. Their response will generally be the Muslim invaders, and secondarily the British Raj. Present-day trends such as Westernisation/globalisation may be a weak third.
3. Ask them whether they view the West as India’s friend or enemy. Enthusiasm about the West in its own right may vary, but citing the shared threat to both India and the West from China (and additionally from Islamic fundamentalism), an alliance with the West may be pronounced unavoidable. “An enemy’s enemy is a friend” may sum up the attitude.
4. Ask them about the strategy of “divide and rule” employed by foreign powers against Indians. They will probably recount the historical examples of Jaichand and Mir Jafar, but in present-day terms, they may struggle to provide a factual example involving India. (Let us ignore conspiracy theories!)
Such typical answers betray a shocking ignorance of civilisational history. Why do I say so? We will explore this in greater depth later, but for now, just consider the attitude towards China in these responses.
India and China are both ancient civilisations, having coexisted for millennia. Has there been a single recorded conflict between the two civilisations in all these millennia until the war of 1962? And what was the 1962 clash about? It wasn’t historical enmity, a fundamental conflict of interests, or a competition for resources. It was simply a dispute over the delineation of their common border. The territory (still) under dispute isn’t fertile, habitable, or particularly resource-rich, but desolate and inhospitable mountain terrain. Further, the area of the territory in dispute is an insignificant fraction of the total land area of either of the two claimants.
From the standpoint of both history and geography, it is fairly self-evident that two ancient and supposedly wise civilisations should not have allowed a relatively recent dispute over a small patch of arid land to impact their relationship, yet most Indians today have formed the view that China is a dangerous enemy with abiding ill-will towards their country. Millennia of peaceful coexistence have rather abruptly given way to unallayable suspicion and deep hostility because of a dispute over a few thousand square kilometres of inhospitable terrain.
Does this situation not strike one as being utterly ludicrous? It’s like two cousins in their sixties, cordial but not close, suddenly becoming estranged in a single week after a series of minor misunderstandings over a pencil, and now utterly convinced of each other’s fundamental untrustworthiness and bad character!
The example of China is just one of many that shows Indians have no civilisational perspective to help them interpret history. That is what leads to attitudes and situations that seem inevitable but are entirely avoidable.
How would a civilisational narrative help to overcome such Greek tragedies? How else could an Indian answer the above survey?
PART 2 — A SOLUTION TOOLKIT
Before we provide these alternative answers, let us step back a bit to explore the critical notion of identity, which would lie at the core of any civilisational narrative.
2.1 The Notion Of Identity
Broadly speaking, identity is the meaning we give to the situations in which we find ourselves. Two people in the same situation could view it in very different ways, and their identities would consequently differ.
Two men looked out from prison bars; one saw the mud, the other stars.
Identity is important because it is the story we each tell ourselves. Identity explains how each of us got to where we are, and it helps us decide where to go from here.
You see where I am going with this. A civilisational narrative can give meaning to an entire society’s existence and guide the actions of its people and its leaders, so we need to understand the components of individual identity that form a civilisational narrative.
Individuals have multiple, simultaneous identities, e.g., gender, ethnicity, language, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, etc. These interact in complex ways.
For the purpose of this discussion, let us restrict ourselves to a few relevant ones.
Nation-states come and go, and hence national identities are relatively ephemeral. For example, a person living in Dhaka who considered themselves Indian before 1947 may have considered themselves Pakistani between 1947 and 1971, and Bangladeshi thereafter.
National identities are also coloured by context. An Indian may see themselves as very different from a Pakistani, often in an extreme “us versus them” sense, but the same Indian living in a Western country might feel a sense of kinship with a Pakistani if they were the only two South Asians in a room full of Western people. This suggests that cultural identity may be a richer and more subtle marker than national identity in terms of telling people who they are. As we will discuss later, shared cultural identity can also help win friends and influence people in complex situations involving many diverse players.
Cultural identities are also more durable than national identities, as we saw with the example of the person from Dhaka, whose identity as a Bengali and perhaps as a Muslim remained constant even as their national identity changed over the years. Linguistic and religious cultural identities are powerful and deep-rooted. So are identities rooted in genetics, such as the notions of race and ethnicity, since physical appearance strongly influences how people see themselves and others.
2.2 The Power Of A Civilisational Identity
By far the most composite form of cultural identity is what we could call a civilisational identity. Civilisational identity encompasses but also transcends genetics, geographical origin, language and religion. In addition, civilisational identities are associated with long histories, and naturally tell a story about who a people are, where they came from, the forces that moulded their philosophy, their idea of their place in the world, and how they wish to be seen by others.
To avoid confusion with the modern Indian nation-state, I will hereafter use the term “Indic” rather than “Indian” to refer to the civilisation, especially since around a dozen other nation-states in South and South-east Asia share India’s civilisational roots. They are all Indic.
(It is important to be clear about the differences between the related concepts of the Indian nation-state, the Indic civilisation, and the Hindu religion. Conflating the three, whether as part of a deliberate political ideology or out of ignorance, can stymie the development of a civilisational narrative.)
Civilisational identity is powerful, and when channelled positively, can give people and nation-states existential meaning while also influencing their affinities and guiding their actions and decisions. Civilisational identity gives every individual within a country an equal feeling of belonging, as opposed to a feeling of exclusion or alienation that can arise from more sectarian identities. This power of affinity can extend beyond national borders as well, and lead to influential alliances and groupings.
Let’s explore Indian history afresh, through a civilisational lens.
PART 3 — A CIVILISATIONAL VIEW OF INDIAN HISTORY
As we have seen, there are many aspects to civilisational identity, so let’s explore these one by one in the context of India.
3.1 Geography
The Indic civilisation has been fundamentally shaped by geography. The impassable Himalayas and Hindukush mountains to the north and northwest, with their extension into the mountainous Rakhine forests to the east, have enclosed and bounded off a certain region of Asia, which is the Indian subcontinent. The Indian Ocean is another forbidding geographical boundary that separates this landmass from other regions of the world. These geographical boundaries that isolate the Indian subcontinent had long ago laid the foundation for the development of a unique society within.
The civilisation did not remain completely isolated though, because from time to time, other peoples did manage to cross the “impassable” geographical boundaries of the subcontinent, mainly from the northwest, and influence its history. Also, conquerors and traders from the subcontinent ventured out to other geographies, and extended the reach of the Indic civilisation, notably to South-east Asia.
3.2 Population
The Indic civilisation, although fated by geography to be isolated and unique, has never been small in terms of numbers. The fertile Indo-Gangetic plain and the other river systems within this bounded geographical area have had the ability to provide sustenance for a very large population.
It is no wonder that one of the most populous civilisations in the world arose in this region.
In a later section, we will see why the size of the Indic civilisation’s population has been a fateful factor in determining its history, and why it will play a crucial role in shaping its destiny.
3.3 Genetics
In recent decades, one particular aspect of Indian history has become unnecessarily mired in ideological battles. Although genetic research has conclusively established that there were three distinct groups of people who migrated to India in successive waves and contributed to its current genetic profile, there has been ideologically based resistance from the Hindu right wing to these findings.
Genetically and culturally, the Indic civilisation has received contributions from these three groups of people:
- South Asian hunter-gatherers, who arrived from Africa at least 50,000 years ago
- Iranian agriculturalists, who arrived between 10,000 BCE and 4,000 BCE
- Steppes pastoralists (popularly called “Aryans”), who arrived around 2,000 BCE
While the actual picture is not as simplistic as Aryans conquering Dravidians, that picture is not completely inaccurate either. Between 10,000 BCE and 4,000 BCE, Iranian agriculturists intermixed with the aboriginal South Asian hunter-gatherers to form what are known as “Ancestral South Indians” (ASI), who are also popularly known as “Dravidians”. Around 2,000 BCE, Steppes pastoralists, popularly known as “Aryans”, then intermixed with the ASI people in more than one wave, creating groups of people called “Ancestral North Indians” (ANI). ANI and ASI people further intermixed over the coming years, resulting in the genetic profile of Indians that persists to this day.
All modern Indians have a mix of ANI and ASI genes, with the exception of the inhabitants of the Andaman islands, who are “Ancient Ancestral South Indians” (AASI). So there is some truth to the statement that all Indians have a similar genetic profile. However, the opposite is also simultaneously true! North Indians have more ANI than ASI, and South Indians have more ASI than ANI, so there is a genetic difference between North Indians and South Indians after all, although it is just a matter of degree.
There is also a caste angle to this. The so-called “upper castes” tend to have more ANI than ASI, and vice-versa. Genetic research has also established that “strict endogamy”, or the rules against inter-marriage between genetic groups, began 1900 years ago. Strict endogamy laid the foundations of the caste system that endures to this day.
These are now matters of scientific record.
All that being said, the cultural impact of the Aryans on the Indic civilisation was much higher than their genetic influence.
The ideological resistance to these findings from Hindutva proponents is because they would like to believe that “Vedic culture” originated within India. The genetic evidence that Aryans (i.e., Steppes pastoralists) came to India from outside, bringing with them a proto-Sanskritic language, culture and rituals, torpedoes their narrative of an autochthonous Hindu culture that has a superior claim to the territory of India compared to other religious groups.
Understanding India’s civilisational history requires a repudiation of the ideological pseudo-science propagated by Hindutva culture warriors, who will even deny scientific evidence in order to hold on to their cherished narrative of the Indic civilisation being synonymous with the Hindu religion.
So this is the first, and perhaps most difficult, step when establishing a civilisational narrative for India. We have to unlearn motivated ideological narratives that have no basis in scientific fact. Genetics has settled the issue, and Indians must learn to accept facts and move on.
3.4 Culture
The Steppes pastoralists (“Aryans”) brought with them a culture that formed the basis of Hindu society, which was the earliest form of Indic society. The pre-existing “Dravidian” culture fused with the Aryan, contributing to its pantheon of gods (Shiva was most probably a Dravidian god) and to various cultural practices. This became the basis of what is called “Vedic” culture, which then became for a time the dominant culture of the Indic civilisation. Other smaller ethnic influences lapped at this Indic civilisation, influencing it around the edges. Greeks (called “Yavanas”), as well as various Himalayan groups (the Sakyas, Huns, and Kushanas), all integrated with the Indic civilisation. The Greek influence on Indic culture can be seen in the Gandhara school of art used in Buddhism. The Buddha himself was a Sakya prince, and the subsequent interplay between Buddhism and Vedic Hinduism forms a fascinating side-story of its own.
When we talk about the Indic civilisation in antiquity (i.e., from about 10,000 BCE until the first contact with Islam around 700 CE), we are referring to the crucible that took in genetic and cultural components in three major waves (and a few minor ones), and established a society distinct from others in the world.
Hinduism as a set of cultural beliefs and practices was an important aspect of this civilisation, but as we have seen, there was nothing autochthonous about it. The civilisation has been a melting pot with some indigenous elements and further cultural layers added from external sources. This is why “Indic” is not the same as “Hindu”, and why conflating the two is ideological mischief. The civilisation has always been Indic by definition, but only a specific hybrid culture from a certain period onwards could be recognisably called Hindu. Talking about a “Hindu civilisation” right from antiquity achieves important present-day political goals for certain ideological groups, but the Hindu cultural identity is only one strand within the Indic civilisational identity, albeit an important one.
This is a viewpoint contrary to most mainstream narratives, so it may take some time to assimilate. However, the results of this shift in thinking are worthwhile, not just because it can heal the frayed fabric of contemporary Indian society and strengthen its cohesiveness, but also because of the complex world that lies outside its national boundaries, even beyond the confines of the subcontinent. There will soon come a need for India to leverage its civilisational affinity with Indic nation-states that are non-Hindu, in order to expand its influence and resist the dominance of other civilisations. More on this later.
Let’s now explore this larger world by crossing one of these geographical boundaries.
3.5 The ‘Sinificant’ Other
The Himalayas, the geographical feature that forms the northern boundary of the Indic civilisation, separates the plains of India from the Tibetan plateau. This region is the world’s largest reservoir of freshwater outside the polar regions, and feeds the southward-flowing river systems that are critical to the Indic civilisation — the Indus, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. It also gives birth to rivers that flow northwards and eastwards, and this has simultaneously provided the conditions for another civilisation to develop. This other civilisation also happens to be geographically isolated, by vast deserts to its west, by barren, frozen wastes to its north, and by ocean to its east. This is the Sinic civilisation that developed in its own isolated crucible.
From a geographical perspective therefore, it should not be surprising that the towering Himalayan ranges and the Tibetan plateau with their glacier-fed river systems should be simultaneously capable of nurturing and mutually isolating two unique civilisations, the Indic and the Sinic. Neither should it be surprising that the two civilisations are of roughly equal age, or have sustained equally large populations from time immemorial.
Just like the Indic civilisation, the history of the Sinic civilisation too has been influenced by geography, population, genetics and culture. Its geographical isolation has been similarly imperfect. Invasion and subjugation by Mongols (the Yuan dynasty) and Manchus (the Qing dynasty) at various points of time in its history have influenced its genetics and culture. Over the centuries, it too managed to fold those external influences into its rich cultural tapestry, and the many innovations that these then-foreign rulers ushered in have only served to aid China’s progress as a civilisation.
The Indic and the Sinic civilisations have both been around for over 3000 years, perhaps 4000. They developed in close proximity, yet remained separated by the impassable Himalayas. In all these millennia (before the fateful encounter of 1962), there was little contact between the two, let alone any conflict. A Bodhidharma may have crossed the Himalayas to spread Buddhism in China, a Fahien (Fa Xian) or a Hiuen Tsang (Xuan Zang) may have done the same in the opposite direction to chronicle life in India in their time, and some trade in tea and spices may have taken place through land and sea. Apart from these peripheral interactions, the two great civilisations of the East have had little mass contact throughout their histories. They may not have been friends, but they were not enemies, and they were certainly not existential threats to each other.
Importantly though, for most of recorded history (except for the last three centuries), the two civilisations have together contributed over 50% of world GDP and 50% of global trade, with each accounting for about half of those numbers. Thanks to the rich and fertile alluvial plains of their perennial rivers, these two civilisations have been the most populous on the planet, which in turn served to elevate them to being among the most significant. Over the many thousands of years of their history, it is also little wonder that these prosperous societies were able to host thriving cultures boasting advances in literature, philosophy, science, technology and the arts.
The uniqueness, size, wealth, prosperity and rich culture of both the Indic and Sinic civilisations were in a sense foreordained by geography.
But then something happened two to three centuries ago that tragically reversed the fortunes of both.
3.6 The Turning Point?
How did India stumble and fall? A commonly held belief is that the wave of Muslim invasions starting from about 700 CE destroyed the original character of the Indic civilisation and initiated its decline, which was then hastened by the later advent of European colonialism.
However, when we view this chapter of history not from a religio-cultural standpoint but from a civilisational one, i.e., the fortunes of the society that lived within those never-changing geographical boundaries, we see a very different picture.
India suffered invasion at the hands of three Muslim rulers — Mahmud of Ghazni, Timur (Tamerlane) of Samarkand, and Nader Shah of Persia, who plundered the wealth of the subcontinent and carted it off to their capitals. These Muslim invaders certainly damaged the Indic civilisation.
However, the overwhelming majority of India’s Muslim rulers did not plunder India’s wealth to cart it away. On the contrary, the subcontinent’s wealth and power increased manifold under them. They were in effect naturalised Indians because they stayed on and ruled local kingdoms. Akbar’s empire in 1583 was far richer and stronger than the England of Queen Elizabeth I. Alauddin Khilji fought off a fearsome Mongol threat and saved the subcontinent from a fate that other victims of the Mongols took centuries to recover from. Rather than being invaders and plunderers, most Muslim rulers of the subcontinent were its defenders and builders. The civilisation had co-opted them, such that they worked for it rather than against it.
To be sure, not all of India’s Muslim rulers were benevolent and wise. Some were cruel and tyrannical, and often religiously intolerant. But from a civilisational standpoint, this is irrelevant. What is important is that these rulers all advanced the interests of their kingdoms that existed within the geographical boundaries of the Indic civilisation. Far from it being the case that India was weakened by its contact with Islam, Indic civilisation, over a few centuries, succeeded in absorbing and integrating Islamic elements into its already rich culture, and continued to develop and progress as a composite civilisation.
It is important to understand that while Hindutva proponents view the influence of Islam as a “pollutant” to the prevalent Hindu culture, it did not weaken the Indic civilisation. On the contrary, it served to enrich it in every way, from economic wealth to military power, from administrative structures to transport and communications, from agriculture to philosophy, from cuisine to the arts. Hybrids are richer and more successful than purebreds, and India as a hybrid society has been no exception. Remember that the Aryans, the Greeks, the Sakyas, Kushanas and Huns had all been folded into the Indic civilisation in earlier centuries, and subcontinental Islam was just the latest fold in the civilisation’s cultural tapestry.
Apart from the occasional hiccup of invasions, Indic civilisation in fact progressed to greater heights by integrating the Islamic influence. Islam, as it turned out, was not disruptive to the continued progress of the Indic civilisation in terms of its wealth, power and dynamism. (This is an important example of how a civilisational narrative differs from an ideological one. Civilisations develop through the assimilation of external influences. They are therefore dynamic and evolving. Ideologies are fixated on idealised and unrealistic notions of purity, are wistful about an imagined past that may never have existed, and are therefore resistant to cultural evolution.)
The bottomline is that after centuries of Muslim rule, India still contributed 24% of world GDP in the year 1700. So it wasn’t the Muslims who brought about the downfall of the Indic civilisation after all. Who was it then?
3.7 Whodunnit
The answer stares us in the face. There was one — and only one — power responsible for reducing India, from an ancient, rich and proud civilisation accounting for a quarter of world GDP, to a wretchedly poor “Third World” country with a paltry 3% of world GDP in 1947, one that could not even feed its own people.
Although the Indic civilisation had seen many tumultuous events over the millennia of its existence, from the Aryan invasion to the advent of Islam, British colonial rule was a fundamentally different juncture in its history, one that was without precedent. It was a rupture in the otherwise continuous evolution of the Indic civilisation, and it is this aspect of civilisational history that even educated Indians find hard to grasp.
The crucial lesson that Indians need to understand from their civilisational history is this.
The relationship between the Indic and Sinic civilisations was arms-length and of equals, neither hostile nor overly friendly. India was not seen in China as a tributary state but as a civilisational equal.
The relationship between the Indic and Islamic civilisations (whether Persian, Turkic, Mongol or Arab) was one of adaptation and integration, resulting in a new cultural strain of “subcontinental Islam” that is as Indic as it is Islamic. India did not become Muslim, since the overwhelming majority of its population remained Hindu. It was Islam that became Indic, within the subcontinent. The Sufi strain of Islam has deep links to the subcontinent, and Sufism has also influenced the Barelvi school of Islam that the majority of South Asian Muslims follow. It’s also interesting that nowhere else in the world do Muslims (or others) speak Urdu. The language is unique to the subcontinent. Likewise, Mughal architecture and Mughlai cuisine are unique to the subcontinent. The two civilisations have thus influenced each other in equal measure and produced a rich and unique hybrid culture which has been folded back to form yet another layer of the Indic civilisation.
In contrast to all these prior interactions with peer-equal civilisations, the relationship between the Indic and Western civilisations that began with the advent of the British was one where the Indic civilisation very rapidly shrank to an inferior position, and where Western civilisation became dominant and exploitative. The British chose what they wanted to take from India, i.e., not only its natural resources but also elements of its culture, cuisine and vocabulary when it suited them. Britain too was hence influenced by India, but it was not the interaction of equals.
To be fair, the Indic civilisation did evolve in a progressive direction in many respects as a result of the interaction with Western civilisation. The improvement in the treatment of women, especially widows, the sensitisation to the undesirability of caste-based discrimination, and to individual rights in general, were all the result of Western influence. The modern Indian nation-state as defined by the Indian constitution and jurisprudence, the English language, as well as “modern” ways of thinking in general, all reflect the positive influence of Western civilisation.
However, the power imbalance between East and West that oversaw these influences had the unfortunate side-effect of creating a deep cultural insecurity among the people of the Indic civilisation. To this day, the attitude of Indians (and other colonised people) towards Western civilisation betrays an inferiority/superiority complex, with feelings of inadequacy alternating with feelings of jingoism. The popularity of Hindutva — a heady cocktail of cultural insecurity, historical resentments, convenient scapegoats, overblown notions of past achievements, and a belief in shortcuts to glory — is a symptom of the Indian hunger for acceptance and respect that cuts across all classes, including the educated elite. An equilibrium in terms of cultural security has yet to be reached, and will probably not be reached until the Indic civilisation finds a viable way to regain its place in the world, with its uniqueness acknowledged and respected by all.
How that happy situation can be achieved will be discussed a bit later, but let us first digest the important lesson here. It’s that the Indic civilisation has had interactions with many others over the centuries, and even when the fortunes of individual rulers and kingdoms within it waxed and waned, the overall growth and progress of the civilisation as a whole were never impeded. It was the last of these civilisational interactions — with Western civilisation — that brought about its comprehensive downfall.
Although painful, this chapter of Indian civilisational history is therefore important enough to study in greater detail.
3.8 The Gory Details
Let us return to that crucial period in the history of the Indic civilisation when the British began to strengthen their foothold in the subcontinent, to see how the power asymmetry between East and West was reversed from the time of Akbar and Elizabeth I.
In a happy coincidence for Britain (but not for India!), colonial expansion and the Industrial Revolution took place at around the same time. For a time, England was not even a great European power. France and Prussia were traditional land powers, while Spain was a naval power. Once Britain decisively defeated Spain at sea in 1588 and France on land in 1815, it became a great European power and thereafter a global power.
Step by step, by exploiting rivalries and imposing obligations on the parties that they assisted in defeating their rivals, the British gradually gained control over the entire territory of India. The parts of India that were not directly under the crown were ruled by vassal kings who only wielded nominal control. The British strategy of “divide and rule” proved phenomenally successful in delivering an entire civilisation into the hands of a colonial power in little more than a century.
In the late eighteenth, the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, Britain fuelled its Industrial Revolution with raw material from its richest colony, India. India was known as the “Jewel in the Crown” of the British Empire, not as a respectful acknowledgement of its cultural greatness, but purely as a measure of its economic benefit to the Empire. Indian coal, iron ore, timber and cotton powered the industrial cities of England. This was not trade, nor was it an equitable purchase. Indian citizens (subjects of the British Empire after 1857) received no compensation for these resources that Britain helped itself to. On the contrary, Britain’s Indian subjects even paid taxes to the crown. To this day, junior officials in the Indian civil service are called “collectors”, illustrating the exploitative nature of the bureaucracy that Britain put in place. The roads, railways, and ports that the British built in India were not for the benefit of Indians, except incidentally. They were all built to facilitate the export of India’s natural resources in the service of Britain’s Industrial Revolution.
Moreover, Britain designed a tax system for India that ensured British monopoly on manufactured goods, favoured British imports over local production (the Salt Tax being a particularly infamous example), and discouraged Indian investments in industry. These measures not only disadvantaged India during British rule, they caused a significant atrophy of the economy, leaving the country unable to compete on the global stage for quite a while after the British left.
It was such a comprehensive loot and plunder of the civilisation that reduced it from wealth and glory to utter poverty in a span of just two centuries. Economist Utsa Patnaik estimates the magnitude of the loot to be US $45 trillion at 2017 prices. Britain used that loot to raise itself to the status of an advanced country. (A trivia item loaded with meta irony is that “loot” is itself an Indian word that the English language has generously helped itself to.)
To put it in starkly evocative terms, Britain stood on India’s back to climb higher, while simultaneously pushing India down into poverty and backwardness. The “Jewel in the Crown” was bled dry.
3.9 A Baffling Acquittal
India was robbed blind, stripped of its civilisational greatness, its economic wealth, and its cultural self-respect. Yet strangely enough, Indians today bear no rancour towards Britain. They are proud to send their offspring to study at the London School of Economics, and will happily show off that photo album from their last UK visit. They think nothing of paying 30 pounds to enter the Tower of London for the privilege of viewing the Kohinoor diamond that the British stole from their country.
No, the animosity of many Indians today is directed only towards Muslims and towards China, even though, as we have seen, India’s Muslim rulers and China have done nothing to the civilisation that even remotely compares with the damage inflicted by Great Britain!
Hence the thesis of this document that Indians do not understand history.
The Hindutva narrative has politicised religious identity using historical grievances so as to set Indian against Indian. The ideology is hugely successful at raising passions and winning elections, but Indian society as a whole has ended up divided against itself and weakened. Although this ideology regularly uses the word “civilisation”, it is only focused on its Hindu cultural strand, not the whole of the civilisation. Those blinded by the Hindutva ideology are incapable of seeing the bigger picture and its obvious conclusions.
In similar fashion, nationalism alone without a civilisational perspective leads one down a different cul-de-sac. One is reduced to reacting to immediate events on their country’s borders without deeper reflection. Those trapped in nationalistic rhetoric are unable to break out of the cycle of suspicion and hostility to re-examine their premises , educate themselves about historical events that have been kept deliberately hidden by their own governments, and gain a more balanced understanding of the positions of their own and other countries.
If Indians cannot even comprehend the nature and circumstances of their civilisation’s downfall, how can they hope to restore its greatness?
3.10 A Double Murder
And here’s another side-story. What Britain did to India, it did to China too, hand in hand with other colonial powers. Britain fought two “Opium Wars” against China, and won them both. Essentially, the British Empire was a drug mafia that pushed drugs onto an unwilling country by military force. What’s more, the opium was grown in colonial India, Indian business houses like the Tatas were involved in the opium trade, and Indian sepoys were used to put down revolts in China. The British used one subjugated Eastern civilisation to oppress another.
China has not forgotten its Century of Humiliation when six colonial powers, including Britain, dictated terms to its powerless emperor. On the contrary, every Chinese schoolchild is taught this history. That sense of history has resulted in an abiding sentiment among Chinese people that they are going to recover the greatness that was robbed from them, and further, that no foreign power will ever again dictate terms to them.
3.11 A Fortuitous Escape
While the shared sufferings of the Indic and Sinic civilisations at the hands of Western civilisation have been written about and discussed a great deal, what has often escaped attention is the fortuitous survival of both, on account of a crucial civilisational trait that they share — the size of their populations. We touched upon population size earlier when talking about the attributes of a civilisational identity, but we can only now begin to appreciate its significance given the context of colonial plunder.
Both civilisations endured a period of colonial oppression, and after that period, their colonisers withdrew and left them alone once more. This did not happen by accident. Their liberation only occurred thanks to the size of their population. To see what might have been, we need look no further than what is known as the New World (the Americas and Australia), where the original inhabitants of the land were not very populous relative to the new settlers. In hindsight, we can see that these groups of people fell below a certain critical mass required for civilisational survival. That is why Native Americans and Australian Aboriginal people are now an insignificant minority in their ancestral lands, and these lands have now morphed into being predominantly Western in terms of their civilisational characteristics.
New Zealand is perhaps the unique example of a native population being of exactly the critical mass required for survival. The Maoris were strong enough and populous enough to avoid being wiped out, but not enough to push the colonialists out. It was in effect a civilisational stalemate. The two cultures coexist today, in perhaps the only country belonging to the Western civilisation that shares power on a semi-equal basis with an indigenous culture.
Western civilisation, which originated in a small continent called Europe, spread to three larger continents — North America, South America, and Australia/New Zealand — over the span of five centuries by conquering and displacing their native peoples. Four continents today belong to the Western civilisation thanks to this displacement. (Latin America has a complicated relationship with the West. Its culture is predominantly Spanish/Portuguese and hence technically Western, but it is widely considered to belong to the Global South.)
But for the crucial civilisational trait of overwhelming population size, it’s entirely possible that India and China too may have suffered such demographic displacement and become Western. Western colonialists may never have left these fertile lands rich in natural resources. The bulk of the indigenous population may have been wiped out, and modern India and China could be white countries today, with the native populations confined to reservations. The cultures of the Indic and Sinic civilisations may only have lived on in short memorial speeches, such as those regularly made in Australia today to briefly acknowledge the “traditional owners of the land”, before the business of Western civilisation resumes.
In short, when civilisations are viewed from the perspective of the whole of human history, it is clear that Western civilisation has been the most virulent and rapacious of all the civilisations that have ever existed. Other civilisations fought against their immediate neighbours and saw their boundaries pushed back and forth, but it was only Western civilisation that expanded across the globe to permanently occupy vast territories belonging to other peoples, wiping them out when it had a numerical advantage, and plundering their resources for the longest possible time when it didn’t.
The realisation that the two modern nation-states of India and China have managed to survive with their populations and cultural identities intact even after the tsunami of Western colonialism — only thanks to one shared civilisational trait — is a sobering thought.
A chilling thought, in fact.
3.12 The Accused — Reformed or Remorseless?
The deeds of the West over the past few centuries are indeed damning. But is all of that still relevant, or should it be viewed as just ancient history? As we know, the baton of leadership within the West has passed from the UK and other European colonial powers to the US, and Western societies have also become much more enlightened and progressive, so today’s West is not the same as the one responsible for the colonisation and humiliation of the East, or the genocide of smaller native populations elsewhere.
Should we really be digging up old grievances? Can’t we let bygones be bygones?
It depends on whether the West has fundamentally changed in its attitude towards other civilisations.
For example, the West claims to be a like-minded democratic ally that will support India against the threat from an authoritarian and expansionist China. Should we take this claim at face value, or is the West once again playing the cynical, time-tested game of “divide and rule” by pitting the two former civilisational giants against each other, so as to remain on top? In the cold calculus of geopolitical power, internal systems of government are irrelevant, hence it would be unwise to let the emotive bond of shared democratic traditions between India and the West distract us from more fundamental conflicts of interest that may exist.
Prima facie, there is a plethora of circumstantial evidence that the overarching strategic objective of the West is to retain its primacy in world affairs against all challengers. It’s telling that, although the West accounts for just 12% of the world’s population, most articles and books by Western authors and think-tanks talk about how the West can “manage the rise” of emerging economies, not about how the West should graciously cede power to them. The unspoken reason is that a world in which the West no longer makes the rules or calls the shots is an absolutely terrifying prospect to every Westerner, right from their political leaders and intellectual elites down to the average citizen. We didn’t come all this way just to let the barbarians take over!
Circumstantial evidence aside, the United States is the superpower whose lead all other Western nations follow, so let’s study the fundamental drivers of US foreign policy today, so as to gauge if the “new” West is fundamentally different from the West that damaged the rest of the world so severely in the recent past. (In doing so, we will disregard the Monroe Doctrine, which could be considered a mere assertion of “turf” against remote powers. We are looking to understand the attitude of the US towards countries in other parts of the world that have no interest in interfering in the Americas.)
The following is not mere conjecture on my part. More than one independent enunciation of American geopolitical strategy describes it in such similar and unambiguous detail that it cannot be dismissed as a fringe ideology. Moreover, the history of US interventions around the world provides ample real-world evidence that these views reflect actual American policy.
- A monograph from the American geopolitical consultancy Stratfor “The Geopolitics of the United States (Part 1)”: The American polity has a set of imperatives to be a successful nation. Although rarely declared elements of national policy, they are a set of guidelines that most governments — regardless of composition or ideology — find themselves following. The most important of these is “Prevent any Potential Challengers from Rising”. The most likely region from where a threat to the US is likely to arise is Eurasia. The imperative of the US is to ensure that Eurasian unity never happens, to keep Eurasia divided among as many different (preferably mutually hostile) powers as possible.
- American political scientist and international relations scholar John Mearsheimer’s theory of Offensive Realism: The greater the military advantage one state has over other states, the more secure it is. States seek to increase their military strength to the detriment of other states within the system with hegemony, i.e., being the only great power in the state system, as their ultimate goal. Great powers recognize that the best way to ensure their security is to achieve hegemony now, thus eliminating any possibility of a challenge by another great power — a “peer competitor”. Only a misguided state would pass up an opportunity to be the hegemon in the system because it thought it already had sufficient power to survive. Accordingly, a state’s best strategy to increase its relative power to the point of achieving hegemony is to rely on offensive tactics. Provided that it is rational for them to act aggressively, great powers will likely pursue expansionist policies, which will bring them closer to hegemony.
- Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives”: In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geostrategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term preservation of its unique global power and in the long run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.
- Former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy Elbridge Colby’s book “The Strategy of Denial”: The fundamental purpose of American strategy is to provide Americans with physical security, freedom, and prosperity. The US has to retain a favorable balance of power with respect to its key interests, i.e., remain the most powerful state in all respects, everywhere. The most effective way to check another from doing something one does not want to abide is to be more powerful than the other. Physical force, especially the ability to kill, is the ultimate form of coercive leverage. While there are other sources of influence, they are all dominated by the power to kill. One with the ability to kill another can, if willing, escalate any dispute to that level and thus prevail. Left unaddressed, might trumps right. Therefore, to protect its interests, the US must be especially concerned about the use of physical force.
It should be clear from the remarkable congruence of these independent policy voices that the culture of paranoia structurally ingrained within US foreign policy mandates a view of rising nations as potential threats to the US. Why is this so? It is once again the core civilisational trait of population size that plays a fateful role in determining how these two Eastern civilisations are viewed by another.
The population of China is four times that of the US, and so is the population of India. If China and India wish their citizens to enjoy a standard of living comparable to that of US citizens (a perfectly reasonable desire), the parity in per-capita wealth that this implies would translate to each of these economies being four times bigger than that of the US. There is nothing inherently threatening in this. Yet according to the geopolitical principles that govern the approach of the US to other powers, the US simply cannot allow peer competitors to emerge! Relatively small countries such as Switzerland may attain higher per-capita levels of wealth without being seen as threats, but large countries cannot, by definition, rise peacefully. Their very emergence out of poverty would trigger alarm bells in the US as they crossed certain wealth thresholds.
The US can therefore be expected to do whatever it takes to thwart the rise of China and India. Note that this is a conclusion based not on personal prejudice but on stated US geopolitical doctrine — a doctrine that says the US must be willing to use any means necessary, including pre-emptive force, to prevent the rise of a peer competitor.
How would the US deal with such a perceived threat from China and India? As the Stratfor monograph makes clear in the context of Eurasia, US strategy should be to keep these two powers divided and mutually hostile. Et voilà! That is indeed the situation we see today — India and China as mutual antagonists, and the US allying with the smaller power to balance the larger.
It is not implausible that the US played a role in fomenting or exacerbating tensions between the new republics of India and China in the early 1950s so as to set them on a course of mutual suspicion and simmering conflict. The role of the CIA in aiding Tibetan rebels is well-known. The incentives and actions of the US are a factor that India and China need to consider when contemplating the state of their relationship.
As a thought experiment, if the positions of India and China were switched, with India being the bigger power, the US would right now be allying with China to contain India. That is the classic way in which the game of “divide and rule” is played.
And so, with this unblinkered comprehension of American geopolitical doctrine as enunciated by their own influential policy figures, we have to regretfully conclude that the West has not in fact changed at all in its attitude towards other civilisations. A past generation was responsible for barefacedly robbing the East of its wealth and glory. The current generation wears a more civilised mask, but crucially, is unwilling to cede the civilisational primacy it has inherited. The baton may have passed from Europe to the US, but Western civilisation as a whole remains an oppressive power that will jealously guard its primacy.
There is a pecking order among the countries of the Western civilisation, which we will examine shortly, but non-Western civilisations will always remain the “other”, to be used as pawns against one another and never allowed to develop into credible challengers. The willingness to act remorselessly and with extreme violence to prevent the rise of a peer competitor can only be described as psychopathic.
We — the non-Western world — need to look past the benign façade of the West’s liberal and democratic societies, and instead focus on its geopolitical behaviour, in order to understand the true nature of the state that we’re dealing with.
To put it bluntly, we’re dealing with a psychopath.
PART 4 — SEEING THE WORLD ANEW
The world appears quite different when history is seen through the lens of civilisational interactions.
We can now summarise India’s civilisational history in a paragraph:
The Indic civilisation’s wealth and power have been steadily growing over the millennia of its existence, while remaining roughly unchanged in relative terms (i.e., a share of world GDP and global trade commensurate with its relative population). Its various interactions with peer civilisations (mainly the Sinic and the Islamic) contributed to its evolution but did not diminish it. Around three centuries ago, the Indic civilisation (along with the Sinic) suffered an unprecedented collapse, when Western civilisation wrested its wealth and power by force, and established its global dominance that continues to this day.
Viewed more generally and not just from an Indic viewpoint,
The old world order was multipolar, where civilisations jostled with one another on a co-equal basis for domination of one or another region of the world. The new world order is unipolar and globally dominated by a single civilisation, one that sets limits on how high other societies can rise based on a civilisational pecking order, and that has the will and (thus far) the means to cut down perceived challengers through a variety of instruments.
In fact, seen from a civilisational perspective, everything that Indians seem to take for granted gets stood on its head — not just India’s own history but the very nature of the modern world. With this new understanding, we can then begin to comprehend what stands in the way of India’s rise, and the path India needs to follow to retake its rightful place on the global stage.
The most fundamental of these misconceptions pertains to the equitable treatment that India expects as it develops, not comprehending that in a unipolar world dominated by one civilisation and one nation-state within that civilisation, the concept of exceptionalism coupled with paranoia about rising powers dictates an extremely inequitable world order, one where a civilisational outsider like India cannot hope to rise beyond a point, and will even face existential threats beyond a certain threshold of its development.
So how does this world work?
4.1 The Rules Of The Game
There are rules that have governed the relations of kingdoms and nation-states from antiquity, rules that are meant to be fair and equitable. In modern parlance, these are referred to as “International Law”.
However, in recent times, we have begun to hear a different term — the “Rules-Based International Order”.
What does this new term mean, and how is it different from International Law, if it is at all different? Does it make any difference to India which term is used?
A civilisational perspective makes the distinction between these terms glaringly obvious. International Law is relatively easy to understand. There is a common set of rules that apply to all countries. All of them are expected to behave in similar ways, and any punishment for violating the rules is to be applied impartially. In other words, International Law is a level playing field, and is “civilisation-blind”.
The diagram below illustrates this concept.
One would expect that International Law would be governed by the United Nations, and that all countries would submit to its authority. It is here that the assertion of “exceptionalism” by the US sets its behaviour outside of International Law.
For example,
- Despite projecting itself as the champion of human rights, the US has not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which even North Korea has done.
- The US has not ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, even though it asserts Freedom of Navigation through Indian waters.
- The US has not itself ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty adopted by the UN general assembly, which it expects India to sign and ratify.
- The US has not only not ratified the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court, it has also withdrawn its signature from the original statute. The ICC was specifically set up to bring to justice perpetrators of genocide, war crimes, and “crimes against humanity”. The US has further underlined that the ICC has no jurisdiction over US military personnel accused of war crimes by passing the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, popularly referred to as the “Hague Invasion Act” because it empowers the US to use military force to invade the Netherlands where the ICC is headquartered, and to rescue members of its military who may be held in custody undergoing trial for war crimes.
It’s clear why the US prefers to use the term “Rules-Based International Order” instead of “International Law”. International Law would put the US at par with all the other nations of the world in being answerable to a higher body, which runs counter to the principle of exceptionalism that the US asserts with regard to itself. Further, this constrains its ability to respond with unilateral force against nations that threaten to become peer competitors, yet behave in accordance with International Law, such as China.
The Rules-Based International Order appears to imply a common set of rules for all countries, but the term is deliberately left undefined and vague because it is meant to accommodate exceptions for the US and for the countries the US deems worthy. This is not a level playing field with an impartial referee, but a pecking order unilaterally defined by some of the players, which other players are expected to abide by.
Recall the stark terminology employed by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives”, where he listed the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy:
- To prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals
- To keep tributaries pliant and protected
- To keep the barbarians from coming together
We can now see who these terms refer to:
- vassals — the Anglosphere and Europe
- tributaries — non-Western “allies”, i.e., client states
- barbarians — potential peer competitors
We are now able to see that the deliberately undefined term “Rules-Based International Order” is in fact a pecking order based on civilisational characteristics, and can illustrate its operating model in the form of a diagram.
It’s clear from the diagram above that the “Rules-Based International Order” is emphatically not the same as International Law.
What Indians in particular need to understand is that the best position India, as a non-Western civilisation, can hope to attain is in the second-outermost circle of client states or “tributaries”. (Russia and China are currently in the outermost circle of enemies or “barbarians”.) Only Western countries can be allies or “vassals”. India can never hope to cross the civilisational “moat” that the US-defined “Rules-Based International Order” implicitly defines. Submitting to this order places India at a systemic disadvantage that can never be overcome, because of its civilisational roots.
Equitable treatment is not on the menu.
This should not in fact be surprising when one sizes up the West in terms of its behavioural traits, or in other words, its civilisational identity.
4.2 The Civilisational Identity Of The West
If Western civilisation over the last 5 to 6 centuries could be personified by a single individual, a good representation would perhaps be Francis Drake.
As any honest biography of Francis Drake will retell, his personal origins were modest and agrarian. He eschewed the life of a farmer and began his career in the merchant navy instead. Those initial years were spent peacefully in shipping legal merchandise, but he soon moved into a more militant role, first as a privateer (a pirate with official sanction), and later as a full-fledged naval officer. His accomplishments included exploration of new lands, and he was the second person in history to circumnavigate the globe. His long career in the navy (both private and under commission) went beyond regular trade to include raids for treasure, the plunder of other lands, slave-trading, armed conflicts with other navies, and war crimes such as the slaughter of conquered civilians.
In short, Drake’s personal biography reads remarkably like the history of the West itself, foreshadowing the age of exploration and colonialism. Europeans began to venture abroad as they acquired oceanfaring abilities, and they then discovered new lands and new routes to old ones. Many Eastern civilisations were initially approached by Western merchants seeking trade, and were then conquered by privately owned armies (such as those of the French, Dutch and English East India companies), before being taken over as formal colonies by European governments. (The lands of the “New World” were simply taken over and their peoples displaced by force.) All these regions suffered unlimited plunder of their wealth and their natural resouces, including their human resources, who were often taken away as slaves or as indentured labour. They were treated with little humanity, often sustaining massacres, especially as reprisals for resistance. They often saw rival colonial powers competing for control of their land and their resources, such as the Anglo-French wars on the Indian subcontinent and the Anglo-Dutch rivalry in the Malay region.
In spite of the innumerable and horrific crimes committed against non-Western peoples, the perpetrators have never been punished or made to offer reparations. Rather, we see another remarkable parallel with the life of “Sir” Francis Drake, who was not just gentrified but actually knighted and raised to the status of nobility!
After centuries of plunder and slavery, massacres and genocide, conquest and permanent occupation of other peoples’ territories, the West has in effect knighted itself and now struts about as nobility in a world of plebians. What’s more, the rest of the world has been awed into not questioning the legitimacy of this self-awarded social elevation. When “Sir” West commands, the rest still leap to obey.
Interestingly, the justification provided by Western scholars for the vaunted civilisational superiority of the West is the European Enlightenment. The West claims a value system derived from Judeo-Christian ethics and morality, Greek philosophy and Roman law, all significantly modernised through the influence of Enlightenment principles such as the elevation of reason over superstition, the separation of church and state, the rights of the individual, and tolerance for diverse views. It is this civilisational bedrock upon which modern Western nation-states are based, and since these societies are largely peaceful, stable and congenial to live in, the superiority of Western civilisation seems self-evident.
Not so fast.
4.3 Civilisational Values Old And New
For a start, ancient civilisations do have some evolved values to show for their millennia of existence.
The innovations of the non-Western world, whether the numerical place-value system and the concept of zero from the Indic civilisation, the invention of paper, printing, the compass and gunpowder by the Sinic, or the advances in algebra and alchemy by the Islamic, show that reason and the scientific method were not fresh discoveries of the European Enlightenment but had been in existence in the world for centuries earlier.
Numerous schools of philosophy have existed in the East, along with traditions of intellectual debate. Philosophy and tolerance are not Western innovations either.
Ethics and morality have played a role in every Eastern civilisation, such as the concept of dharma (righteousness) in the Indic and the Confucian notion of 义 Yì (inherent goodness) in the Sinic.
Compassion, a concept beyond mere tolerance, has been part of the Eastern ethos since before the time of Christ. Both Buddhism and Jainism from the Indic civilisation stress ahimsa (non-violence) towards all living beings, which also finds an echo in the Confucian virtue of 仁 Rén (benevolence).
In a predominantly feudal world, a classless society based on the equality of all men (although admittedly not women) was a novel egalitarian concept introduced by the Islamic civilisation.
With the significant contact and cultural cross-pollination witnessed between Eastern civilisations, it is not inconceivable that the ideas known as “Enlightenment values” could have come about and been widely adopted in due course even without the influence of the West.
Besides, Western Enlightenment values were applied rather differently at home and abroad. While European society progressed as a result of these values, the same could not be said of the societies dominated by the West.
Perhaps the best description of what happened was that Western values, both pre- and post-Enlightenment, were weaponised by the West for use against other societies.
Judeo-Christian concepts did not result in other societies being treated with love-thy-neighbour brotherhood. Rather, they fostered an attitude of saved believer versus damned heathen, which then justified the most abhorrent treatment of the latter.
The Roman tradition of law did not mean justice but just legal sophistry to legitimise criminal acts, such as when the legal concept of Terra Nullius was invoked to usurp the lands of Australian Aboriginal people, or when the Doctrine of Lapse was employed to usurp the kingdoms of Indian monarchs who died without a male heir, or when the concept of Manifest Destiny was invoked to justify the westward expansion of the United States and the usurpation of the lands of Native American people. What’s more, the legal concept called the Statute of Limitations ensures that the right to property can be asserted by its current owner, but cannot be challenged by those whose ancestors may have been cheated of that property. (Thus, white farmers of European colonial descent who account for less than 10% of the population of an African country like South Africa or Zimbabwe can legally own 70–85% of the country’s arable land, but the government of such an African country that attempts to transfer that land back to the black people to whom it originally belonged is considered uncivilised for committing such unlawful acts.)
Finally, reason and scientific thinking were not used to improve the quality of life of all peoples. Science and technology were instead weaponised to provide the West with industrial-scale warmaking capability, which sealed the dominance of Western civilisation over all others.
To summarise, the history of the last five to six centuries is not a validation of Western civilisation’s moral superiority over all others. It only demonstrates that might is right.
The ancient civilisations of the East need not suffer from any sense of inferiority with regard to the West, except in a military and political sense. We are not barbarians being gradually civilised by a more enlightened society. We have been outgunned and outmanoeuvred by a ruthless and resourceful adversary, that is all.
The current unipolar world order has been established through unjust and unlawful means. It can and must be replaced by a more equitable, multipolar world order, which is the way the world had always been run before the West’s takeover.
Intuition suggests that India will be in a far better position within a multipolar world order governed by International Law than where it stands within the pecking order of the current Western-dominated “Rules-Based International Order”. But how do we assess this more objectively?
Let’s first look at the types of threats faced by a nation-state to comprehend the situation India is in.
4.4 The Real Threat To India
In general, these are the three types of threats that a nation-state may face, in decreasing order of severity:
1. Existential — a country may cease to exist, by political dissolution if not by genocide, e.g., what happened to the erstwhile Soviet Union or Yugoslavia.
2. Denial of destiny — a country may be prevented from attaining the degree of power, wealth and control of its destiny that it otherwise could achieve.
3. Threats to territorial integrity and/or internal security — a country’s territory may be claimed by others, and there could be security threats such as terrorist attacks, which don’t do much damage in real terms, but have a disproportionate psychological impact.
It is perhaps safe to say the Indian nation-state is currently not under an existential threat of any kind. There are, however, constant threats to territorial integrity (e.g., border incursions) and periodic breaches of internal security (e.g., terror attacks), which dominate the headlines, and thereby distract the attention of policymakers and the public.
By far the most effective threat to India though, has been the denial of its destiny. This is not as obvious as an existential or security threat, because it is hard to point at what is missing. However, this denial has been in effect ever since India’s civilisational downfall.
Denial of destiny is a much bigger threat than threats to territorial integrity or internal security, but much harder to recognise. If your wallet is stolen, you will realise it at once and feel outraged, but if you are quietly cheated of an inheritance of millions that you didn’t know you were in line to receive, you will remain in blissful ignorance of the life you could have had, even though the loss to you is far greater.
To understand the significance of the denial of India’s destiny, consider that the Indian Ocean was the centre of the world economy from ancient times up until 500 years ago, with busy trade routes linking Africa and the Middle East with the Far East. Throughout history, the Indian peninsula has been jutting out into the Indian Ocean like an unsinkable aircraft carrier. One would therefore expect India to be a major naval power, indeed the pre-eminent Indian Ocean power, in total control of the waters from the east coast of Africa to the west coast of Australia. And unsurprisingly, that was in fact the case, the Chola imperial navy providing dramatic examples of Indic power projection far afield.
Why is this not the case anymore? India today has been confined within its subcontinental landmass, unable to play its civilisational role as the pre-eminent naval power in one of the most important economic regions of the world. Even today, the combined population of the nations that form the Indian Ocean rim is 2.5 billion, or a third of humanity. Yet Indian power is conspicuously missing in its own backyard, while the navy of a Western power (the US) rules these waves. This starkly epitomises the denial of destiny that the Indic civilisation has been suffering even after notional independence.
This is why it is important to have a civilisational view of history. One then understands exactly how one has been robbed, and who one’s adversaries and potential allies are.
This shift of worldview based on civilisational history has enormous implications for India’s approach to China and the West. It turns India’s threat perceptions around 180 degrees.
4.5 The Social Experiment Redone
To answer the survey questions we posed at the beginning,
- The countries that are the greatest threat to India today are those of the West, specifically the US-led countries of the Anglosphere. The nature of the threat is the US compulsion to thwart the rise of a peer competitor in a united Eurasia, a corollary of which is the denial of India’s destiny as the pre-eminent power in the Indian Ocean region. (If this seems a stretch, just ask yourself which incumbent Indian Ocean power would be most threatened if India reasserted its historical control. That power is India’s strategic adversary.) Furthermore, if India’s wealth and power relative to the rest of the world ever began to re-approach its historical levels, it would automatically be seen by the US as a peer competitor in its own right, and the resulting threat to India would escalate to an existential one as the US deployed every weapon in its arsenal to neutralise it.
- The one and only entity responsible for the calamitous decline of the Indic civilisation was Great Britain. (This is not an incitement to hate the UK, merely a reminder of the facts, as a rebuttal to the convenient trope that the culprit was Muslim rule, and that present-day Indian Muslims are somehow to blame.)
- The intentions of the West towards India are hardly benign. Any putative friendship with India has the ulterior motive of securing Western primacy at any cost. India’s role is to be cannon fodder in the West’s struggle to contain China, because China is the immediate peer competitor that the US has in its crosshairs.
- “Divide and rule” is happening right now, on a civilisational scale. The Indic and Sinic civilisations that have historically never been in conflict are being encouraged to fight, in order to serve the interests of a third, the Western civilisation. History is repeating itself, and Indians must not fall for it this time.
These new answers are not just refreshingly different; they are immediately actionable and suggest a logical way forward.
PART 5 — THE WAY FORWARD
It has often been argued that political decisions need to be made in the here and now, and that civilisational history does not have much of a bearing on present-day alliances or conflicts. It is a valid viewpoint that there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies, only permanent interests.
However, as Robert D Kaplan has argued in his book “The Revenge of Geography”, even the most modern nation-states cannot fight the forces of history that have determined their destinies.
Hence it may not be a case of civilisational history itself directly influencing present-day policy as much as the recognition that the forces that have shaped a civilisation continue to cast a long shadow on the choices and constraints faced by the modern nation-state that is the civilisation’s heir.
To make this abstract argument concrete, let us look at a remarkable textbook example of civilisational thinking applied to national strategy.
5.1 An Example Of Civilisational Thinking In The Modern World
China provides a case study for the ages. This is a country that has not only understood its civilisational identity, but has also worked out how to leverage its civilisational traits in the service of its future.
China’s civilisational identity is that of The Middle Kingdom. (This is in fact an indelible part of the Chinese identity. The Chinese word for China is 中国 zhōng guó, where the ideographs themselves graphically illustrate the terms “middle” by a rectangle sliced in half, and “kingdom” by a box around the word for jade. Jade is the material from which the seal of the Chinese emperor was traditionally made, and the box therefore represents the bounded region under the emperor’s writ. Pictorially and phonetically, the Chinese are reminded of their civilisational identity whenever they refer to their country by name.)
“The Middle Kingdom” is not just a poetic or allegorical phrase. In its modern interpretation, China’s vision is to be the engine room of the world’s economy, and the central hub of the world’s trade network. That’s how China sees itself — The Middle Kingdom is the beating heart of the Earth itself — economically, culturally, perhaps even politically. China’s ambition is to reclaim its position of old as a powerful and universally respected civilisation at the centre of the world.
And how does China plan to realise this vision? A large part of its strategy is by reviving an ancient civilisational legacy — the Silk Road. The old overland and maritime Silk Roads are now recast as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a sprawling trade network with China as its hub, which promises to rejuvenate the Chinese civilisation-state, while also delivering economic growth to all the other lands through which the network passes.
What’s more, the Silk Road (whether in its ancient or modern form) is part of the familiar civilisational architecture of the Old World — Asia, Europe and Africa. It is not a threat to any of the modern nation-states that lie along the BRI’s many routes, because they were once part of this architecture, and they had prospered on account of it. They can prosper once again by aligning with The Middle Kingdom. It’s a compelling vision from a modern nation-state that is based on sound civilisational foundations.
China has a win-win model for its development that promises to carry along all the civilisations of the Old World. The only modern nation-states that would struggle to find their place in this time-honoured economic architecture are those of the New World, primarily the United States. It is little wonder that the US sees a threat not just in China’s rise, but in the very mechanism that China is employing to effect that rise, which shows the US up as a parvenu in the comity of civilisations.
Interestingly, the United States is not an inherent threat from China’s perspective. It is merely a new land to the East of the Middle Kingdom, across the Pacific Ocean — a potential new trading partner and nothing more. But to the United States, whose civilisational identity is based on its own exceptionalism, being relegated to the periphery of another empire is almost an existential threat! It will be a painful adjustment for the US to learn to think of itself as just another country, if China succeeds in re-establishing itself as The Middle Kingdom.
Will it? I personally believe that China’s vision will prevail, because it goes along the grain of civilisational history. The powers that oppose it are going against that grain, and will therefore likely fail.
5.2 India’s Civilisational Destiny Spelt Out
With that elegant and powerful example of civilisational thinking in its own immediate neighbourhood, it should not be difficult for India to look at its own civilisational history for similar clues.
Finding a short and evocative phrase like “The Middle Kingdom” to capture India’s civilisational identity is an interesting creative exercise that I will leave to my readers, but that is not a prerequisite to working out either India’s civilisational destiny, or a suitable strategy to achieve it.
Remembering that the core traits of a civilisation are geography, size, genetics and culture, India’s civilisational destiny begins to suggest itself.
A reasonable version of this could be:
- to grow to the point where the Indian economy contributes a sixth of global GDP and trade, in line with the historical norm that reflects its share of the world’s population;
- to be the pre-eminent Indian Ocean power, which is virtually dictated by its strategic geographical location and by the size of its population and economy;
- to provide leadership and be the cultural fountainhead for a dozen Asian countries that share its civilisational roots and aspects of its culture.
Needless to say, India should find it easier to achieve this destiny in a multipolar world than in the current Western-dominated unipolar one.
The impediments that would still remain are India’s own characteristic blind spots and consequent choices.
- Creating internal enemies helps political parties win elections, but the resulting social disharmony impedes the ability of Indian society to progress towards these goals. “United we stand; divided we fall” is a saying rooted in deep wisdom.
- Antagonism with China (and by corollary, with Pakistan) serves to consume a disproportionate share of India’s resources towards defending contested land borders, and to divert attention away from developing its economy and naval power.
- Aligning with the West does not help to achieve this destiny, since the US will only tolerate India as a client state that serves its own interests, and will never allow India to rise to a position resembling that of a peer competitor. And in any event, there is little possibility of the US willingly ceding control of the Indian Ocean. India needs powerful allies with a congruence of interests to push the US out.
- Far more actionable than the amorphous goal of being a “vishwa-guru” (Teacher to the World) is leadership of the nations belonging to the Indic civilisation, through cultural or soft power.
- There are no shortcuts to gaining global respect. Harping on past glory, especially through fake claims, only makes the country a laughing stock. Respect will naturally follow on the heels of Comprehensive National Power, because no one respects a poor and powerless nation, no matter how culturally rich it may be.
So what is the way forward?
5.3 The Opportunity
Normally, it would be extremely dangerous to even attempt to escape the clutches of an intelligent and powerful psychopath, which is what the US-dominated world order is. However, a remarkable opportunity has recently opened up, thanks to two fortuitous occurrences.
5.3.1 The Emerging Schism Within The West
The Ukraine crisis, while seemingly driving Europe and the US even closer together, has in fact exposed a deep schism between the two. This comprehensive analysis of the roots of the crisis, as observed from the Global South, offers much more insightful detail than the conventional (and superficial) Western narrative of Russian aggression.
The bottomline is that the crisis in Europe (precipitated by none other than the US, as it turns out) has succeeded in driving a wedge between Russia and its European customers. Europe is forced to abandon a willing supplier of inexpensive energy, fertiliser and agricultural products as a result of having to take the side of Ukraine. The US has gained enormously, by being able to sell energy, arms and other products to Europe, at much higher prices than Europe is traditionally used to paying. Europe’s dependence on the US has also greatly increased, reducing the Eurozone’s independence and global influence.
As the initial outrage at Russia wanes and Europe adjusts to a less comfortable existence for the long haul, more clearheaded analysis may give rise to feelings of resentment against the US. Europeans can now see the downside of the US-imposed pecking order. Europe has been enjoying a share of the spoils as long as the non-Western world was being exploited, but can now see how readily it will itself be thrown under the bus when the interests of the US are threatened.
This is a schism that the Global South can exploit, as we will discuss later.
5.3.2 The Distraction Of The US
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to three decades of unchallenged US power. In hindsight, it appears that this period without a credible peer competitor created a sense of complacency that led the US into committing three costly blunders:
- Allowing foreign policy to be guided by the interests of the capitalist class rather than national interest
- Being distracted by the bogeyman of Islamic terror
- Failing to keep Russia onside
In short, the US oligarchy saw its interests best served by outsourcing manufacturing to China, even acquiescing in the transfer of intellectual property to Chinese companies. This funnelled hundreds of billions of dollars of US investment into China, which helped build it up into the peer competitor that rational geopolitical strategy should never have allowed. China deliberately kept a low and non-threatening profile even as it grew in strength, while the US remained distracted for a decade by Al Qaeda, and the next decade by ISIS. Finally, the US forgot the crucial strategy of “divide and rule” when it came to Russia and China. By targetting both of them simultaneously, the US effectively forced an alliance between its two main adversaries.
The rise of China and the formation of the powerful Russia-China axis have also provided the Global South a unique opportunity to escape the psychopathic clutches of the unipolar, Western-controlled world order.
(A glimmer of hope also comes from the biography of the murderous nobleman Francis Drake, our allegory for Western civilisation. Once he passed his prime, he suffered a string of defeats and finally died of dysentery.)
5.4 The Strategy
India needs to draw key lessons from the nation-building strategy of Otto von Bismarck, the architect of modern Germany. In 7 short years and with 3 decisive wars against Denmark, Austria and France in that order, Bismarck succeeded in uniting several Germanic states under the leadership of Prussia to form the German Empire.
The key takeaway from Bismarck’s strategy is that a country in a state of tension with many others must line up its conflicts in the right order.
- India’s first conflict is already in progress and needs an immediate ceasefire. The conflagration is politically motivated, and is being waged against imaginary internal enemies. And so, India should first heal its own internal divisions by imbibing the harmony inherent in its civilisational unity. All Indians belong to the Indic civilisation (No, not the fake ideological construct of the “Hindu civilisation”, but the larger Indic civilisation.) Indian Muslims and Indian Christians are not aliens or enemies, but are as Indic as Indian Hindus. Indians of all religions, all castes, and all linguistic groups, are Indic. Internal unity is the essential first step of the Bismarckian plan.
- India should next align with other Eurasian powers (Iran and Russia) under China’s umbrella to exploit the schism in the West and end the hegemony of the US. The current unipolar world order dominated by the West is the biggest threat responsible for the denial of destiny of the Eastern civilisations, as well as a potential existential threat as they continue to rise. Asian unity against Western domination is the second step in the Bismarckian plan.
- India should grow its strength over a generation or so, to the point where it is able to lead the Indic nations out of China’s tent into its own cultural sphere of influence. Indic unity against Sinic domination is the third step in the Bismarckian plan.
Let’s look at these steps in detail.
5.4.1 China — The Key To India’s Tryst With Destiny
The Indic civilisation was once a participant in China’s ancient Silk Road. India exported gold and spices to Rome through this overland route before the sea route overtook it in popularity. The fact that India views the BRI as a new threat rather than as a familiar opportunity is yet another indication that Indian policymakers are ignorant of civilisational history.
From India’s point of view, China should be seen as (1) an equally ancient and great civilisation, (2) a fellow sufferer at the hands of Western exploitation, (3) a familiar trading partner and (4) a powerful potential ally in re-establishing a multipolar world order.
5.4.2 Is China Really A Threat?
If China appears to be India’s enemy today, it is because India has decided that China is its enemy. China will just as easily be an ally of India if India is willing to be an ally of China. It’s that simple. There is no structurally irreconcilable set of differences between the two nation-states, nor is there any historical baggage between the two civilisations that have coexisted peacefully for millennia. The bogeyman of India-China rivalry is something cooked up by Western analysts for consumption by insecure Indians, and it has contributed, conveniently but unfortunately, into turning a minor border clash into a situation of enduring suspicion and hostility.
In actual fact, the threat from China is real — but only to the West. The power struggle between the West and China is zero-sum in nature because of the framing of the relationship by the US as a security struggle between peer competitors. Hence if China wins, the West loses. However, India’s situation is not the same as the West’s at all! As we have seen, Western geopolitical strategy implies blocking India’s path to achieving its civilisational destiny. In contrast, a path to that destiny can potentially be negotiated with China, since the history of peaceful coexistence over the past millennia supports a myriad of win-win solutions.
There is a corollary to the realisation that denial of destiny is a far more serious threat to a nation than threats to territorial integrity or internal security. If a country can trade some territory for a chance to regain its civilisational destiny, it is a very small price to pay. Yet the knee-jerk “nationalist” response is exactly the opposite. To lesser minds, a small but tangible loss outweighs a large but intangible gain. The unthinking would rather condemn their country to an indefinitely stalemated destiny than “part with an inch of land”.
From a civilisational perspective, events like the India-China border clash of 1962 pale into insignificance. What is more important — a few thousand square kilometres of land, or the restoration of civilisational greatnesss and geostrategic importance for both peoples? Why should the latter be held to ransom by the former? Wouldn’t collaboration and concerted action deliver much richer dividends than mutual suspicion? The India-China border dispute has festered over time and begun to assume seemingly intractable proportions, yet it’s nothing that wise statesmanship shouldn’t be able to resolve in a jiffy.
This does not mean that India must yield territory to China. It only means that India should assign less importance to territory than to the benefits of an alliance with China.
It could well be that China sees India’s willingness to ally as sufficient quid pro quo to settle the border along previously proposed terms, with both sides just keeping what they already hold, and not having to exchange fresh territory.
The “threat” from China to India can be neutralised very simply. The best way to destroy one’s enemy is to make them your friend.
5.4.3 Choosing Sides
Meanwhile, the battle lines have already been drawn. The West, especially the Anglosphere countries, have tightened their alliance against the Chinese threat to their global primacy. (The Quad is just a decoy. AUKUS is the real deal. The difference between the two organisations is obvious from their civilisational make-up.)
On the other side, China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan have closed ranks.
To put it bluntly, India is on the wrong side. Ignorant of history, it is allying with those who seek to perpetuate a civilisation-based pecking order where non-Western civilisations are kept suppressed and inferior. India should instead be working closely with China to ensure that the great civilisations of Eurasia (including Persia (Iran) and Russia) rise again and take their place in the sun.
There are irresponsible analysts in India today who blithely talk about a “two-front war” with China and Pakistan, with no apparent concern for the devastating setback to India’s progress from such a conflict. Instead of fatalistically preparing for such a two-front war, India would be better off working to establish a peaceful and multipolar world governed by International Law.
This is not possible by aligning with the forces that run the current unipolar world order. Non-alignment between East and West (which some Indians favour) is also a non-strategy. India needs to see Asia through unblinkered Western eyes. The Asian Century is a threat to the US, and its natural reaction is to thwart this rise. The US-led West is therefore a strategic adversary, and India’s engagement with the West needs to be informed by an understanding of the inherent conflict between an established power and a rising power.
Hence an alliance of the non-Western powers is the only way forward. Imagine Russia, India, Iran and Pakistan all standing together on the same side as China. They form a Fortress Eurasia that no external civilisational power can break. Indeed, India will need the protection of such an alliance as it grows in wealth and power, since even a peaceful rise will cause it to be seen by the US as a peer competitor to be cut down.
Today, India’s refusal to join hands with its natural civilisational allies is a source of much relief and glee in the West, since India is unknowingly playing along in their geostrategic game of “divide and rule”. India needs to switch sides, and fast. Not just India but all the non-Western civilisations will immediately start to regain the control over their destiny that they have not had for the last three centuries.
Indeed, the East now has the opportunity to play the “divide and rule” game against the West! As we discussed before, there is already a schism developing between the US and Europe, and it is likely to deepen as life gets harder for Europeans following the rupture of ties with Russia that has been forced on them by the US. If India throws its considerable heft behind Russia and China, it could provide Europe the critical impetus to break with the US and engage with this compellingly large Eastern bloc that represents more than a third of humanity. Europe should be able to see the benefits of a truly multipolar world order as opposed to the current pecking order where Europe’s interests are sacrificed if they conflict with those of the US. If Europe asserts its independence and begins to re-engage with Asia, the Stratfor nightmare of a Eurasian peer competitor to the US will become reality, and the Global South will be free.
India’s switch can be the decisive moment that ends the US-dominated unipolar world, and ushers in a truly multipolar world governed by International Law.
5.4.4 The Parable Of The Indian Crab
A fisherman had a basket of live crabs displayed in the market. A curious customer asked him why he didn’t cover the basket to keep the crabs from escaping. He answered with a laugh that they were Indian crabs. If one ever tried to climb up the side of the basket to escape, the others could be trusted to pull it back down.
The tendency to pull down the most successful of their own kind is a trait that Indians self-disparagingly acknowledge.
There are over a hundred crabs belonging to the Global South trapped in the basket of the current world order. (The Ukraine conflict has revealed that European crabs too might be in the same basket with no more hope of freedom than the others!) China, the biggest crab of all, is climbing up the side of the basket and is about to escape. The Chinese crab is so big that when it climbs over the top, the entire basket is going to tip over, allowing all the other crabs to flee.
India should not fear the escape of China from the fisherman’s basket, because it too will be free once the basket tips over. The fisherman expects India to be a good Indian crab and pull China back down, but it is very important that India fight its innate tendency and help the Chinese crab over the top instead.
5.4.5 From Guns To Butter
An alliance with China can immediately settle both of India’s longstanding and vexatious border disputes, not just the dispute with China itself. India will gain much-needed breathing space to grow its economy instead.
India has already shown in past negotiations with Pakistan that it is willing to accept the Line of Control (LOC) as the international border between the two countries. India is opposing China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on the grounds that part of it (the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor or CPEC) passes through “disputed” territory in Kashmir. So this is a deal waiting to be made. Formalise the LOC as the international border, and India drops its objections to the CPEC.
As a side-benefit to rapprochement with China, India’s problems with Pakistan can also be solved. China has enormous influence over Pakistani policy. A Pax Sinica will tame the Pakistani threat to India because China does not want any conflict to disrupt the trade network it is putting in place. The transformation in India-Pakistan relations will be unrecognisable and unprecedented.
Going even further, India should recognise its own historical part in the Old Silk Road, and use the BRI to re-establish itself as an important link between China and Rome (or in today’s terms, Europe). India should offer to connect its Golden Quadrilateral transport network to the BRI through the Karakoram Highway and the BCIM Corridor, to provide China a much more reliable path to the Indian Ocean through a choice of 13 Indian ports, and to gain an overland access route to Europe. The synergy between the two Asian giants will benefit both of them immensely. Not only that, India would be taking a leaf out of China’s own playbook. By enmeshing itself inextricably into China’s economy, India will effectively be tying China’s hands against future hostility. Just as Western countries are finding that the entanglement of their economies and supply chains with China is preventing them from taking any hard steps against China, China could one day find itself in the same position, if India plays its cards right.
With a clear understanding of its civilisational destiny, India can bargain with China for its piece of the pie. Freed from the constant need to watch over contested land borders, and in return for India’s support for China in all of China’s theatres of conflict with the West, India must negotiate an acknowledgement of its pre-eminence in the Indian Ocean region. Each civilisation then gets back what belongs to it. Rather than view China’s “necklace of pearls” as a threat, India should ask to become its pendant, securing the entire Indian Ocean region on behalf of the Eastern civilisations.
We could be looking at a new era of peace, stability, infrastructure development and explosive economic growth in South Asia once India and China join hands.
5.4.6 Beyond The Immediate Future — Jostling Within The Fold
Many more wrinkles will appear as events unfold.
In the future, after the Western threat has been beaten back and Asia emerges out of the shadow of Western dominance, there will be some inevitable jostling for influence between the civilisations of the East. Civilisations exist in a continuous state of “co-opetition”, and so the allies of today could become the rivals of tomorrow.
Apart from the Indic civilisation of South and South-east Asia, and the Sinic and its closely related civilisations of East and North-east Asia, there is also the Turkic civilisation of North-west Asia, and the Persian and Arab civilisations of South-west Asia.
Of these, the Sinic civilisation looks set to be the most dominant because of its combined population and wealth, but the others have their own unique civilisational identity that will not be co-opted by the Sinic civilisation, no matter how rich and powerful it becomes.
India needs to develop a Bismarckian plan not just for a marriage of convenience with China in the immediate future, but also for a velvet divorce after a generation or so.
Strength respects strength. If India is to gain China’s genuine respect as opposed to being valued merely for its contribution to the alliance, it first needs to grow its own strength. Both hard and soft power depend on economic growth, and India needs to spend the next few decades of peace with China building up its economy. That’s another leaf from China’s own playbook, when the country acted deferential towards the West and gained valuable time to grow its strength.
As the flagship nation-state of the Indic civilisation, India has to raise the civilisation’s brand value so that other nation-states within the subcontinent and ASEAN are inspired to identify as Indic. This is where a shared cultural identity helps to win friends and influence people. To take some obvious examples, Thailand is Buddhist, Indonesia is Muslim, and the Philippines is Christian. However, all of them have Indic roots, and can be drawn into affinity with a strong and prosperous India.
Even Pakistan can potentially be weaned away from China using soft civilisational power, given time and diplomatic wisdom. As a further example of the superiority of civilisational thinking over ideology, treating Urdu as the shared Indic language that it is, instead of viewing it as alien, helps to exploit common ground and build bridges.
All this may superficially resemble the Hindutva ideology’s concept of “Akhand Bharat” (undivided India), but there is a crucial difference. The affinity being sought between nation-states is on the basis of a civilisational identity that unifies, not a politico-religious identity that isolates and divides. If India wishes to one day gather a dozen Indic nations, not just Hindu Nepal, under its own tent and break away from China’s dominance, it will need to emphasise the inclusionary rather than the exclusionary aspects of its civilisation.
But that is a struggle for another day.
5.5 The Risks Of Inaction
India’s current antagonistic stance towards China carries growing risk. China is a rapidly growing power that shows no signs of slowing down, regardless of the relentless propaganda from the West predicting “the coming collapse of China”. That collapse has been predicted to happen “any time now” for the last two decades but has been belied again and again. It is a risky strategy for a smaller and weaker neighbour to believe such Western propaganda. As time goes by and China gets even stronger, India’s already limited options will become even bleaker.
India is sleepwalking into a defence and foreign policy nightmare with its current stance. This is not just foolish but completely avoidable.
China appears to have understood both the nature of the threat from the West, and the need for India and China to be united against it. India has not yet woken up.
Time is of the essence, and India can strike a good bargain right now at a time when China is facing a concerted, multi-pronged attack from the West and could use its support. Once China triumphs over the West, or after its power crosses a certain threshold, it will no longer care about India’s support, and India will have no bargaining power left.
There is no explanation for India’s current anti-China and pro-Western foreign policy except an ignorance of civilisational identity and history, and the related inability to think in civilisational terms, which renders both its leaders and its citizens vulnerable to superficial narratives that suit the ends of other powers.
PART 6 — SUMMARY AND CALL TO ACTION
The Indian ship of state is rudderless and adrift, its potential and promise perpetually belied. It needs to find its bearings and follow a determined course to reach its destiny.
A civilisational narrative is imperative to be able to see what is not apparent either from a contextless reading of history, or through the lens of self-serving political ideologies.
Ignorance of India’s civilisational identity has set Indian against Indian internally, and Asian against Asian externally. This ignorance is costing India nothing less than the attainment of its civilisational destiny.
In the near term, a polarised society and a shortsighted view of China as an enemy lead to nothing but growing internal strife and the prospect of humiliating external setbacks.
Internal unity is the essential prerequisite for India to achieve its destiny. All Indians need to be united by a common civilisational identity, not divided by sectarian ideological identities.
Indians must also see that a diabolical game of “divide and rule” is being played right now, under which they have been led to think of China as their enemy and of the West as their ally and benefactor. This brainwashing is pervasive and frightening in its extent. In actual fact, the strategic adversary of both India and China is the US-led West, which fundamentally acts to retain its global primacy, maintain an inequitable pecking order, and thereby deny them both their civilisational destiny.
India must switch sides post-haste so that the civilisations of the East can jointly wrest back control of their destiny and re-establish a multipolar world order.
India must thereafter grow its strength and bide its time until it can establish its own sphere of influence, and the Indic civilisation can finally find its place in the sun.
When will Indians learn the lessons of their civilisation’s history and do themselves the greatest favour at this critical juncture?
