Because India is such a paradox, it makes for great arguments. Here is a country that is developing one of the world's greatest navies, has a formidable air force, sends military satellites into space, will send a space probe to Mars and has a large warehouse of state-of-the-art nuclear weapons. Here is also a country of riots, ramshackle infrastructure and electricity blackouts on an epic scale; cities that lead the world in dirt, noise and air pollution; and a country that is, in many respects, a disorganized mess. Traveling from the dynamic capitals of East Asia, with their bullet trains, perfectly pruned highway verges, stage-lit boulevards and cutting-edge architecture, to New Delhi or Kolkata, with their wheezing old taxis weaving around beggars and the occasional elephant on broken roads, is like going from the First World to the Third.

Geography offers a partial explanation, albeit a very deterministic one: India has (along with Southeast Asia) the hottest climate and most abundant and luxuriant landscape of all the Eurasian population hubs, and therefore its inhabitants may have lacked the need to build political structures for the organization of resources, at least in comparison to the temperate zone-Chinese and Europeans. And yet this geographical insight conveys little of the overall story. For example, perhaps no civilization in our early 21st century world has helped produce writers as brilliant and eclectic as India. Nineteenth century Britain, at the height of its imperial glory, led the world in literature with the likes of Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Twentieth century America did likewise with Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. And now, I would argue, India is the ancestral and, after a fashion, the spiritual home of writers who have achieved global renown: witness the novels of Amitav Ghosh, the journalism and criticism of Pankaj Mishra, the humanist tradition of Amartya Sen (who also has roots in Bangladesh) and the geostrategic ruminations of C. Raja Mohan.

Because of information technology, hard power is not everything anymore. A nation's or region's intellectual force can give it moral strength -- that is, the strength to lead and influence. Qatar punches above its weight because of the creative ways it has leveraged its energy wealth: for example, it has Al Jazeera television and arguably the world's best airline. The fact that writers of Indian descent are now everywhere in the great intellectual discussions of our age is significant, especially when one combines that fact with where India is located on the map.

India stands astride the Indian Ocean, creating with its inverted triangular shape the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, which are respectively the maritime organizing principles of the Middle East and Southeast Asia. As for the Indian Ocean, it is the world's energy interstate, the link for megaships carrying hydrocarbons from the Middle East to the consumers in the burgeoning middle-classconcentrations of East Asia. India, thus, with the help of the Indian Ocean, fuses the geopolitics of the Greater Middle East with the geopolitics of East Asia -- creating an increasingly unified and organic geography of conflict and competition across the navigable southern rim of Eurasia.

K.M. Panikkar, the great Indian statesman and historian of the mid-20th century, wrote that navigator Vasco da Gama brought a "singular unity" to the landmasses of Asia by virtue of Portuguese sea power. That era, in which it becomes impossible to disaggregate South Asia from either the Middle East or East Asia, is, on account of globalization, with its emphasis on maritime activity, now returning after 500 years.

And India's favored position is not only in the maritime area, for the Indian subcontinent is no island. For example the northern one-third of India has since the medieval centuries been the repository of language, religion and traditions emanating from the Middle East, particularly from Iran. The fact that Persian words in one form or another are spoken as far eastward as Bangladesh, and the fact that India's glittering late-medieval and early-modern Mughal dynasty originated in Central Asia, proves the robust connectivity between the subcontinent and contiguous parts of Eurasia.

Indeed, as technology shrinks distance, the demographic and economic behemoth that is India becomes more of a factor in both the Middle East and East Asia. Indian warships may outnumber American ones in the Persian Gulf in several decades and are already apresence in the South China Sea. India competes with China over influence in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and in the far-flung islands of the Indian Ocean close to East Africa, playing a great game of sorts with the Middle Kingdom. It is India that is a quiet bastion of support for the Sultanate of Oman at the southeast tip of Arabia. Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, British viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, may have been ahead of his time when he conceived of the Indian subcontinent as being at the center of global geopolitics.

For as the United States and China become great power rivals, the direction in which India tilts could determine the course of geopolitics in Eurasia in the 21st century. India, in other words, looms as the ultimate pivot state. But the U.S.-India relationship can never be transactional: that is to say, Washington cannot expect New Delhi to equally reciprocate its friendship. This is because of the political climate inside India itself, which India's aforementioned intellectuals help influence. Because of India's nonaligned position during the Cold War, and the attendant philosophical legacy of Nehruvian socialism -- as well as the sheer pride among the Indian elite of their country constituting an independent power in its own right -- an overt alliance with the United States will certainly be rejected.

Thus the United States should not think that if it ratchets up tension with China because, for example, of disputes in the South China Sea, that India will automatically be by its side. Rather, the opposite may occur: for India will not be taken for granted. Because New Delhi must maintain cordial relations with Beijing, it might be forced to move closer to China in the event of a crisis between China and the United States. But were the United States to forge closer ties with China, then India might feel threatened and left out and thus feel a greater need for American friendship. India can help the United States, but only if the United States always plays its hand subtly.

Also, once Myanmar will start to open up to the world, a whole new region of commerce and trade routes will unite India with China in Southeast Asia, even as India could eventually play a bigger role in Iran. India has a considerable appetite for Iranian oil, even as the attractor force of Indian culture -- from Bollywood films to New Delhi and Kolkata intellectual life -- may over time, along with Turkish culture, prove more central to the Iranian experience than some forms of Western influence: Indeed, a more liberal Iranian regime would help recreate the synthesis linking Iran with cultures from the Mediterranean to the border of Indochina, obviously including both India and Pakistan. Curzon saw an Indian zone of influence extending from the Iranian plateau to the Gulf of Thailand. I would put it another way: As authoritarian regimes weaken in Eurasia, Indian influence will slowly, over time, partially seep into the vacuum. Globalization may be over-sold, but it matters. That is why following India's trials and tribulations -- however exasperating -- is a requirement for contemporary geopoliticians. It is not that South Asia is necessarily more important than any other region; rather, it is that now every place in Eurasia can affect every other place profoundly.

 

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