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| A dated report card |
| Jyoti Malhotra / New Delhi Sep 30, 2009, 00:35 IST |
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The world has significantly changed since India’s government-owned, premier think tank, the Institute for Defence Studies & Analyses (IDSA) held a conference in February 2008 to discuss the strategic transition in Asia, from which a collection of papers were collated to bring out this book. Unfortunately for IDSA, the world has moved on since February 2008 — and it doesn’t really matter if IDSA noticed or not — as a result of which positions argued by some of the writers are stale, while some facts have irrevocably changed.
Arguably, IDSA is a think tank, not a newspaper that withers away after 24 hours, so several authors and their arguments remain enormously interesting. Among them Xu Xin, who in the paper titled “The Chinese Concept of ‘Twenty Years’ Strategic Opportunities” points out that the Mandarin equivalent of the English word “crisis” is weiji, which is actually made up of two Chinese words, weixian, meaning “danger”, and jihui, meaning “opportunity”. Clearly, with Beijing having inherited the “mandate of heaven” that is as old as the Qing dynasty, every crisis is a worthwhile risk because it allows the ruler to push the national interest in ways that were not possible before.
Xu Xin, an associate professor at Cornell University’s Department of Government, contextualises China’s rise to the top with statements from Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin that have large doses of weiji. As the Soviet Union’s destruction seemed imminent, Deng worried what would happen to his beloved China. “The problem now is not whether the banner of the Soviet Union will fall — there is bound to be unrest there — but whether the banner of China will fall.” Even the mighty Deng wasn’t sure, a whole decade after he instituted his economic reform, whether the end of the Cold War wouldn’t also strike a wayward blow against the all-powerful Communist Party of China.
Deng’s prescription was to reinforce the Party and “open wider to the outside” (Left parties in India, please note). Jiang followed in 1991 with his 28-character directive, whose simplicity of thought continues to surprise: “Keep cool-headed to observe, be composed to make reactions, stand firmly, hide our capabilities and bide our time, be good at keeping the low profile, never try to take the lead, and be able to accomplish something.” It’s like the Arthashastra and the Panchatantra all rolled into one.
Jiang went on, in 2002, to talk about the first two decades of the 21st century as an “important period of strategic opportunities” or IPSO. When combined with China’s determination to undertake a “peaceful rise” (heping jueqi), it’s easy to see how “facto” follows. Ipso facto, then, China has leveraged both ideology and globalisation to become the world’s No 2 power today, arguing that multi-polarity is actually a good thing because it will put a brake on the major powers.
The evidence is there for all to see. As Barack Obama prepares to undertake a major visit to Beijing in November and focuses his mind on the trillion dollar bonds that the Chinese own in the US Treasury, Beijing lifted internal travel restrictions to Macau, the world’s biggest gambling hot-spot. As casino stocks soared, the recession was, at least temporarily, forgotten.
Most of the rest of the book is typical conference talk, with little to lift it. Several Indian authors, save for Sujit Dutta, C Raja Mohan and Abanti Bhattacharya, write as if they’re talking to students in a mofussil town college, droning on and on in the heat with mosquitoes for company. There is little attempt to analyse facts from an Indian or any other perspective. This is a major problem that commonly afflicts Indian so-called knowledge centres and think tanks, and IDSA, despite the several crore rupees it gets from the government to spend, seems unable to rise above this mediocrity.
Dutta, a well-known China hand, is kind about India’s emerging strategic vision, arguing that although India’s rise is not as strident as that of China, it is nevertheless crucial because it is a “balancer and a stabilizer” in this age of uncertainties. C Raja Mohan, who has already moved on from his Singapore habitat to Washington DC (another small fact that ages the book) is much more brutal, arguing that India today is the “least consequential” for Asian security, the “weakest of the major powers” in Asia — then, expelling a sigh of relief, points out that India, “the once anaemic nation,” could actually be getting its act together, one which could have the potential of reordering the continent’s security architecture if it keeps with the 8-9 per cent economic growth.
Raja Mohan’s extremist language makes you pay attention, and one suspects that some of it is there to grab attention. He gets it, then goes on to profusely commend Curzon’s world view in which India ruled the roost and the seas from Aden to Malacca. It’s a bit unsettling, this approval of a man who divided Bengal in 1905 because he felt like it, but Mohan’s thesis is really about the need for weak powers (India) to tie up with strong powers (the US), in the hope that some of the great power’s ability to think big is passed on. He was, of course, vindicated by the passage of the Indo-US nuclear deal which made the world sit up last year and look at India anew. But he concludes, somewhat ruefully, that the guiding principle in India’s foreign policy remains non-alignment, because it continues to be understood as independent foreign policy.
Buy the book? Sure, although the IDSA library must have several copies to borrow.
GLOBAL POWER SHIFTS AND STRATEGIC TRANSITION IN ASIA
Ed NS Sisodia and V Krishnappa
Academic Foundation, with IDSA; 390pp
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