India as Enigma of Tomorrow’s World
11:29 17.12.2024 (Updated: 13:47 09.01.2025)
© Sputnik / Mikhail Klimentyev
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Two essays have met and embraced in the rarefied ether of global ideas about the future world. One essay is Russian, the other… shall we say, an Indo- Canadian one.
Two writers almost for sure have no idea about each other’s existence. But, still, their thoughts if not coincide, then gently brush with each other. Both are writing about the role India may, or will, or should play in tomorrow’s world. And both are obviously thinking that tomorrow’s world will be very different from what we saw only tomorrow.
Let’s start with the Canadian lady, Manjari Chatterjee Miller, Professor of International Relations and the inaugural Munk Chair in Global India at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. She is also a Senior Fellow at the American Council on Foreign Relations, says the Foreign Affairs magazine, publishing her essay India Will Carve Its Own Path: How a Rising New Delhi Will Shift the Global Balance of Power.
Being Canadian or residing in Canada is not a crime, and although the lady does mention that incongruous case of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, that’s not exactly what she writes about.
Now, how to put a good article’s ideas in three simple paragraphs? Easy, and let us try.
First: “the United States hardly considers the possibility that India might pose a challenge of its own. Instead, American officials have reached out to India as a partner and encouraged its rise, hoping New Delhi will amass enough power to counterbalance Beijing. They seem to want India to become a regional power, perhaps even something akin to a “third pole” in the global order.
American officials should consider a more complex strategy. New Delhi is a valuable partner in many domains, including the competition with Beijing. But India is notoriously intransigent in world politics. Its behavior on the global stage sometimes worries even those countries that want or need to develop friendly relations with it. Should India acquire the heft to become, as U.S. officials hope, a true counterbalance to China, it will likely also consider itself a counterbalance to the United States”.
Second: “In short, a tripolar world, with India as the third pole, will not strengthen Washington’s or Beijing’s hand. Instead, it will produce a more unstable global dynamic”. And, later on – the same: “A tripolar relationship between China, India, and the United States would instead be plagued by constant uncertainty and flux”.
Third: “For now, placing any kind of limits on cooperation with India may seem at best premature and at worst counterproductive. But given India’s foreign policy characteristics, Washington must draw up a strategy for handling New Delhi—no matter how much it wants to obsess about Beijing. Otherwise, the United States not only risks falling behind in Asia. It risks being sidelined altogether”.
Simply speaking, America does not know what she’s doing, thinking that Indian policy is solely about China. Oh, no, it’s about India, too, and it’s time to start thinking about it.
Now, in Russia we have a conservative thinker Vladimir Mozhegov, who has, this week, published an essay on building up a peaceful Europe (as if it’s ever been peaceful in all its history). Here is the link, if you read in Russian. And, suddenly, he adds at the end that you cannot limit your task to Europe only, you have to rearrange all the global affairs, too.
So, how to do it? No use wasting America’s effort on splitting Russia and China, Mozhegov says, not to mention a crazy dream of arranging a conflict between Moscow and Beijing, military or not very military one.
Oh, isn’t that something very similar to Ms. Chatterjee’s warnings to the US about futility of only seeing India as a tool against China? It sure is.
So, instead, the Russian thinker is proposing an alternative – a tripolar world. Yes, he is very close to Ms. Chatterjee’s idea, but his tripod consists of China, the West in general, and – imagine that – the “non-aligned” Russia, India, Iran, some or all the Arabs and, maybe, plenty of European nations, collectively wishing to be careful. In any case, he says, that construct looks safer than what we see today.
A lone thinker Mozhegov is not, he says that the tripod idea has been officially adopted by the Izborsk club in Moscow, which is not exactly a replica of Vivekanand foundation, but could find a couple of things in common with it.
What do we have here, in both essays? First and most obvious, we have a part of a strong movement to create an entirely different post-war world. I mean that madness that is spanning the globe currently and looking very much like the Third World War, fought with certain caution and using all kind of hybrid tactics, as in pitting Ukraine against Russia or Taiwan against China.
You don’t have to love the nuclear bomb, but you have to admit it has put some caution in warfare methods. Nevertheless, it’s still the Third World War, fought because it’s no longer possible, at least for the former masters of the world, to dominate it as before.
Earlier this year I wrote a column, saying that we already live in a world after that war – mentally, at least, though not so many people may be aware of that. It’s something like the year 1944 in the previous world war, when quite a lot of folks have already been contemplating the desirable shape of the world to come. More, they were already shaping that future world, even though battles were still raging on in Europe or in Pacific. So that’s exactly what we see now, and our two authors both do their bit of world-shaping, though in a different way.
But the second thing that makes their approach similar is about India being treated by too many people as a passive object of possible external pressure. India is obviously a big and somnolent enigma for the Russian thinker, who expects that huge nation to stay quiet and non-aligned for uncertain period of time. Mozhegov’s idea about Russia’s desirable behavior is essentially the same. We are supposed to stay away, together with most of the world, from the China-America’s rivalry and get into the open by the end of that battle.
While the Indo-Canadian lady’s approach is of course different, she is advising the future US administration against treating India as, to repat, a passive object of pressure. In fact, the title of her essay is India Will Carve Its Own Path.
To me, that’s the main problem of the future world order (if order it will be). A lot depends on exactly how India will carve its own path, while now we do not know it.
I also suspect that the Middle East will be carving something new and unexpected even to itself, an entirely new world with both total modernism of the Emirates and antique stubbornness of Afghanistan. And we have not even started to understand what Africa and Latin America want from that brave world of tomorrow.
So, if we want to see the shape of that new era to come, we should ask Indians to tell us loudly what kind of a world that should be, and maybe help others to speak up.
Dmitry Kosyrev is a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com
