Abstract
It would be tedious to go into all the instances and details of events treated with much care in this study. The general argument is summarised by the author in the concluding part of the book. The author’s credentials are impeccable: He has published several studies which should have prepared us for the present study. His acquaintance with the source material is complete. His writing is forthright and clear in its meaning and import. The publisher too has done a good job of bringing out the book in a pleasant form. One wishes, though, that he had made more use of an editor’s services.
Generally, the author gives us an impression that he set out to heap praises on Vivekananda, whom he almost invariably refers to as Swamiji [italics mine]. In this day and age, it is difficult to go along with such eulogistic approach to historical personages. We have grown out of the practice of using phrases like Mahatmaji and Panditji: We are quite comfortable with Gandhi and Nehru. It would feel like a piece of historical research, which it set out to be, if its author had been able to get over his adoration for his subject. He might then have achieved freedom from his seeming proclivity to build the relevance of ideas propounded by Vivekananda.
The author assures us that his focus remains on the period since WWII and especially on the post-cold war period. This makes it an almost contemporary subject. It may be thought that he deals in the main with the period from 1991 onwards, with some attention to post-war events and movements. He takes us through processes like the collapse of the Soviet Union and for a while uni-polarity in world affairs. But even the USA appears to have made a relative withdrawal from world power, followed by the rise of China. The author has some large ideas about cooperation between several powers, some long established, some newly risen, some still rising and the majority of other countries rather struggling for a place in the sun.
India and China are civilisational states which contain in them numerous communities defined by ethnicity, culture, religion, history and geography. It is important that as modern states they should organise their mutual relations and their relations with other countries in a manner that promotes goodwill and does not provoke thoughts of undermining or hurting each other—or any other. In any case, both are at a stage in history when they are engaged in development activities for their people. This hardly leaves scope for anything other than peaceful ways of conducting their foreign relations and their mutual relations.
Both have suffered at the hands of colonial powers and both achieved national independence about the same time—1947/49. Since then both have been engaged in building better life for their people. As in any bilateral relationship there have been ups and downs and there has been one outright war in 1962 because of disputed boundary. The boundary problem remains and still awaits solution.
They were both placed in a specific environmental situation in which they sought to build relations with other countries. It is all right for both to claim that their relations with other countries are not intended to cause hurt to the other but there is hardly any doubt that the choices that the two countries made in the past and those that they will make in the future shall have implications for the security of each other.
There is much that can be said for the case of each country in the matter of the boundary problem, which has numerous offshoots in several directions. For more than half a century these questions have been studied and debated by officials and scholars in both the countries and in other countries. The result has been an enormous corpus of writing on the subject which throws light on the problem from many points of view. By now everything has been studied in detail and people in both countries have a sound understanding how the problem can be resolved. If officials were left alone, unhampered by instructions from governments, there is no doubt that they shall be able to hammer out a boundary settlement in a reasonable time. The two governments need to take a political decision that the boundary question needs to be resolved.
Nothing much shall be gained by entering into endless debates on the minutiae of ideas and considerations that must govern boundary making. Perhaps a beginning may be made by taking up the current ground situation and by examining how the current ground situation can be made the basis, with modifications perhaps, of a settlement. The point is that the two countries should decide that a boundary settlement is desirable.
There is no point in appealing to history of thousands of years to argue the case for either side. That kind of an effort shall prove endless and useless from a practical point of view. Considerations of national prestige and people’s expectations need to be laid aside by both in the interest of better relations between the two countries and for bringing about adjustment in their foreign policy choices, with due regard for their concerns and interests. Besides, this is a world in an age when international relations cannot be governed by any old or new hegemon seeking to dominate the world. It may be nearer the mark to work for better relations, eschewing ideas like one-upmanship or pulling each other down.
As oriental civilisations, China and India have little affinity with Western ideas of democracy. Because of India’s historical experience during about two centuries before its Independence, India has since been experimenting with the democratic system of governance but India has found the Western system rather alien to its culture. Sooner or later India may have to move away from Western democracy, whether presidential or parliamentary, and devise its own amalgam which may perhaps be some kind of a mixture of the two but one which may be more in consonance with India’s past governmental experience, which used to subsist around a samrata, an ekarata, or any other such being. Those systems revolved around the strong personality of a central figure who more or less called the tune and prescribed the path that society had to take for the good of their people.
China’s preference has been for a highly centralised system which operates for the good of the people, without being hamstrung by considerations of the demands of a so-called democratic system or a multi-party system. China has made enormous strides in every sphere of state activity. There is no doubt that China is on its way to taking its place among the foremost countries of the world state system. It is a familiar sight to see old states and empires fade out and new ones take their place. It is a matter of empirical experience that many of the Western colonial powers have been in decline, especially after WWII, which itself was result of rivalries between states and empires.
Several countries of the world, mainly in the West, seem inclined to attempt to prolong what used to be their hegemony over large parts of the world. The current Western Great Powers appear to be moving in a direction which spells continued Western dominance, with little regard for the interests and aspirations of Eastern societies. Since WWII in any case, and perhaps from earlier on, Western countries have been throwing their weight on countries and states of the Middle East and North Africa, with scant regard for the welfare and interests of Middle Eastern and African nations. The result has been that in all the years since WWII Western countries have attempted all kinds of efforts and methods to dominate the oil-producing countries of this region. Regime change has been attempted a little too often, with no concern for the wishes and inclination of the people concerned in each case: their opinion was never asked. Arab countries and other Islamic countries have been ground under the boots of Western powers to an extent that younger generations saw little room for the fulfilment of their hopes and aspirations. Since those younger people had little to lose, they became fodder for the teaching of those who were ready to preach violence and jihad, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, reinforced by the ouster of the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2001.
It is the shared experience of many of the countries of the Middle East and North Africa that they have been at the receiving end of unwelcome attention from Western powers, who have not been reluctant to use force in pursuit of their own interests and objectives. In view of such experiences of a large number of countries, who are in no position to stand up to the power of the Western countries, there is need to devise a world order which shall ensure the freedom and stability of the countries of this region as well as other regions. As important countries of the East, China and India need to use their resources and ingenuity to forge better relations between them and to seek to devise a just world order.
There is no inherent conflict of interests between China and India. The world is large enough for the two of them to pursue their common objectives of better economic results alongside a judicious and reliable system of security. Both of them need to ensure that their actions, choices and policies do not operate to the disadvantage of the other. If other countries see China or India acting in a manner that hurts the other, there is hardly any doubt that other countries shall try to exploit the situation to their advantage, which naturally shall operate to the disadvantage of both. As former victims of colonialist exploitation over prolonged periods of time, the two should give no opportunity to the quondam colonial powers or new candidates for colonial or imperial exploitation to fish in troubled waters.
USA, China and India need to work together, perhaps along with some others. There is no reason to think that there is a clash of interests between any two of the three in any part of the world, least of all in the South China Sea and the East China Sea, where China has natural interests, or in the IOR, which is vital to Indian security. The world has begun to see that China has graduated out of a period in its life when it was seen as an obstruction to the growth and stability of the world order. The world is long past the time when some nations of the world could treat the rest of the world as hewers of wood and drawers of water for some who were determined to act as masters or overlords or world leaders. The rest of the world is not waiting hat in hand to applaud at every act and word emanating from a world leader. Perhaps the world has come to a point when it could do with objectives like shared prosperity and readiness of the developed countries to give a helping hand to the less fortunate of humankind.
Mr Obama’s Indian visit in January 2015 seemed to suggest that there is much that USA and India can achieve if they work together. USA had made more than a beginning with China in the matter of climate change and other areas to evince a keen desire for US–China cooperation and partnership. It is about time India started advanced thinking about promoting and working for India–China cooperation and partnership—to complete the third arm of the triangle. Mr Modi has done a considerable amount of work with Mr Xi Jinping’s visit to India in September 2014.
It is difficult to subscribe to the author’s view that Indo-US relations are based on democratic traditions and liberal values. This is a superficial view of both. If the USA had been so firmly democratic and liberal it would not have been possible for an unabashedly racialist person to emerge as a major player in US politics. Nor is India a paragon of democratic and liberal ideas and practices: seven decades after Independence the country is still struggling to give succour to the lower orders who continue to suffer at the hands of the so-called upper classes. The democratic tradition is not innate to the Indian ethos where in the main states and governments of the past have rotated around the personality of a masterful figure: where such a personality did not arise, the state or empire went into decline. It is an exaggeration to celebrate India’s democratic tradition. The present system of democracy in India is inherently a parenthetic imposition brought in by a class of people educated in the West but basically alien to the Indian ethos built over centuries. That calls into question the fundamentals of the approach adopted by the Constituent Assembly (1946–50).
It is equally futile to talk of the primacy of secular and liberal ideas in social relations in the USA and India. By now we are unpleasantly aware of the hollowness of such ideas in both the countries where racial and caste considerations override other ideas in both society and the state. It is all right to argue for closer Indo-US relations as a pragmatic dimension of the present phase of international relations. We should, however, stop paying ourselves large compliments contained in phrases like ‘the two leading democracies—the US and India’. This is rather overdone. The same thing applies to an expression like India described as ‘the natural ally of the US’: the phrase was popularised by Mr A.B. Vajpayee but never adequately acknowledged or affirmed by the USA. It is an instance of premature glee to speak of China and Pakistan as strangers to democratic and liberal principles.
We need to recognise that in spite of being far from democratic China has posted phenomenal economic and military achievement, including nuclear and missile development. The one-party system in China made for some quick decision and departure from the earlier doctrinaire approach which Deng Xiaoping abandoned in favour of what looked like capitalist ideas. The Chinese leadership since has achieved a balance in its ideological and practical approaches, making for greatly respectable performance in terms of economic and commercial and industrial progress. The absence of democratic ideas in the practices of the Chinese state has not been an unmitigated disaster.
Countries do not come together for cultural and democratic considerations. They are more concerned with realpolitik and national self-interests. Two countries will come together if their interests happen to coalesce into a compatible bilateral arrangement. The two may work together as long as their interests are common to both, although even then one has to allow for the influence of the several lobbies that operate in the US establishment. At times the USA has taken decisions which seemed to be suicidal but there was no way of getting US decision makers to modify their policy preferences for the sake of cultural or democratic ideals.
The author seems to live in a strange world in which he thinks China, India and Russia are going to check the dominance of Western countries in world affairs. The USA has made some withdrawal from world power but it is not in decline: there is no point in prognosticating that the USA is about to be knocked out of its dominant position by the combination of China, India and Russia. For one thing, Russia is down and out: those who ran the Former Soviet Union from 1917 to 1990 did everything except to attend to the needs of ordinary Russian people. The Former Soviet Union built enormous quantities of nuclear weapons and missiles but did not attend to economic development as much as was needed. In the course of 1990–91 the Soviet Union collapsed: the present-day Russia is not even a shadow of the Former Soviet Union. It still has nuclear weapons and missiles but it does not have the economic base which would justify its nuclear and military power beyond a point. By contrast, China and India have been attending to economic development seriously over the last 70 years.
Vivekananda’s speeches in the USA were stirring indeed but his ideas of ethics and moral excellence could not have been—and are not today regarded as—the sheet anchor of international relations. What may work in the field of international relations is a combination of the USA, China and India along with several other powers like Russia, Japan, Australia and several others to construct a new world order to take the place of the present decaying and almost moribund world order. It depends on the intellectual calibre of leaders in the several countries who may be called upon to contribute to the making of a new world order. In that exercise, though, Vivekananda’s ideas are unlikely to figure prominently.