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From
Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 29, Dated 21 July 2012 |
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| CULTURE & SOCIETY |
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NON-FICTION |
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The World According to Shashi
In his latest book Pax Indica, the former Minister of State for External Affairs discusses the need for a robust foreign policy. He tells Shougat Dasgupta about India’s leadership potential in a multipolar world
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Photo: Garima Jain |
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SHASHI THAROOR’s schedule in the days before the launch of his latest book, a globe-hopping treatise on Indian diplomacy, is a reflection of his worldly preoccupations. He is the sort of interview subject who emails regrets from Bilbao, but promises to find time a day or two later from Dubai. We eventually talk over a precarious phone line, the conversation competing with the ambient noise of our respective lives, urbane in his case — “Darling, did you remember to tip?” — and in mine, a bellowing fruit seller determined to shift his mouldering pomegranates and pears. Tharoor, 56, is in fluent form: apologetically greeting visitors (“I’m just doing an interview”), before returning to the subject of Pakistan being “deeply ambivalent about its sponsorship of terror from within its own soil”, all in his affable lyric baritone, the accent straight out of the pages of Wodehouse.
We are discussing Pax Indica, which alongside the biography of Nehru, the trenchant critical study of Indira Gandhi’s foreign policy, and India: From Midnight to the Millennium, let alone the fiction or the essay collections, is part of a significant body of work; though set alongside a career in the United Nations that stopped just short of secretary general and a stint as Minister of State for External Affairs, and his current role in Parliament, Tharoor’s literary productivity (prolixity, the uncharitable might say) becomes wondrous.
But Pax Indica suffers a little from Tharoor’s likely parcelled attention, the prose too often lapsing into the commonplace, the formulaic construction. There is too much quasi business-speak (“instrument of opportunity in our mutual growth story”), too much filler (“Our region has been blessed with an abundance of natural and human resources, a rich spiritual and civilizational heritage, a demography where youth is preponderant and a creative zeal manifest in all spheres of human endeavor”). Pursuits in Pax Indica are always dogged, dialogue always meaningful. The macro lens does no favours to Tharoor, magnifying his occasional glibness and burying his impish turn of phrase and way with an anecdote beneath pages of cant. A slimmer book, narrower in its focus, more personal in tone — in essence, a good editor —would have rescued Tharoor’s observations rooted in experience, his passionate advocacy of a multipolar world in which India can play an exemplary role, from the morass of journalistic synthesis and primerstyle explanation in which Pax Indica is almost sunk.
None of this is to say that Tharoor’s book is not valuable or important. His view of the world and India’s role in it is hearteningly sane; he has a diplomat’s faith in dialogue and cooperation effecting incremental benefits. And it’s impossible not to agree with his vision of foreign policy as a means “to enable the domestic transformation of India by accelerating our growth, preserving our strategic autonomy, [and] protecting our people”. India’s purpose in foreign affairs, Tharoor tells me from Dubai, “must always be the security and well-being of people, to serving domestic objectives.”
In the first chapter in Pax Indica, Tharoor writes: “[W]e must make possible the transformation of India’s economy and society through our engagement with the world, while promoting our own national values (of pluralism, democracy, social justice and secularism) within our society. What I expect from my national leaders is that they work for a global environment that is supportive of these internal priorities, an environment that would permit us to concentrate on our domestic tasks.” By focussing on the domestic effects of foreign policy, Tharoor frees India from American-style evangelism, a need to spread its stated national values aro und the world. It also frees India from too overt a claim to global leadership. Tharoor notes that in the immediate aftermath of Independence, “a newly independent land’s pride in its own civilization, led to India pronouncing itself on world affairs as if from a moral high ground, not a posture guaranteed to win friends and influence other (supposedly morally inferior) nations.” He quotes the former foreign secretary and national security adviser JN Dixit’s view of India’s “catalytic role… in establishing a moral and just world order ensuring peace and cooperation all over the world.”
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Pax Indica
Shashi Tharoor
Penguin
456pp;Rs 799 |
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Tharoor is aware that it is this sort of sententious pronouncement that makes it easy for critics to dismiss the non-aligned movement. He is, though, a Nehruvian cosmopolitan in spirit (if not exactly ideology) and cannot find it in his heart to discard non-alignment entirely, recasting it instead as the more savvy “series of multilateral networks”. His idea of India’s global relationships, he tells me, “is modelled on the worldwide web, on overlapping roles and different configurations that allow us to be both non-aligned and support the community of democracies.” He dismisses my suggestion that this sounds like hedging, pointing out the obvious need to “leverage” relationships at various levels to accommodate com plexity, ambiguity. I ask Tharoor about Iran, a country to which he devotes barely a half-page, and he assures me that there is no conflict between on the one hand respecting international sanctions and maintaining “vigorous bilateral relations”.
THE ECONOMIC growth of the last couple of decades, Tharoor says, means “India is now potentially a rulemaker, can play a global role promoting an overall set of rules of the road.” He sees the future as multipolar, in which a number of powers of differing strengths “cooperate over compatible interests”. It means diplomacy is about finding areas of agreement. A multipolar world, Tharoor insists, has much to recommend it: “India is going to find it more useful to find a series of forums in which it has its own influence.” Such a world would require strong supra-national institutions, an idea, given his career in the UN, that is close to his heart. I imagine a scenario like in George Orwell’s 1984 in which the world is divided up between massive, amorphic regional blocs. But Tharoor says Orwell was “extrapolating from 1948”, that he couldn’t have envisioned “the onset and growth of democracy around the world.”
A multipolar world, says Tharoor, has clear advantages over more recent models — the bipolar world of the Cold War, or the shortlived unipolar world before the rise of China. “The Cold War,” he tells me, “could have ended in the destruction of the world. So there’s no argument that a multipolar world is better. And if the world is unipolar, only one country calls the shots.” He adds that even with China’s rise as a counter to the briefly unchecked power of the US, it is different from the bipolar world controlled by the US and the USSR: “China and the US are interdependent, enmeshed. One can’t survive economically without the other.”
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Illustration: Samia Singh |
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Trade, Tharoor argues, “also keeps the peace”. In the chapter on China in Pax Indica, he draws an instructive comparison between India and China, rejecting the Western media’s ‘Chindia’ twinning, “as if the two are joined at the hip in the international imagination”. He resists the pressure for India to compete with China, recommending cooperation rather than the antagonism of competition. Trade, he writes, “contributes to a positive atmosphere between two countries… it ensures that China has far too high a stake in the Indian economy to contemplate engaging in any military adventurism against India. There are some strategic advantages to offering a potential adversary a large market: it is more likely that the Chinese establishment will learn to see Indians as consumers rather than enemies.” Not that Tharoor suggests India prostrate itself before Chinese power. He is, as he has described himself in the context of Pakistan, something of a “hawkish dove”. He doesn’t flinch from recommending a military show of strength, “taking proactive steps of our own to strengthen our border infrastructure… and to deepen our maritime capabilities in the Indian Ocean while China is still focused on the northern waters closer to its shores.”
Achieving this without offending China requires skilful diplomacy, as does his other suggestion to strengthen ties with Taiwan. It requires diplomats to build, as Tharoor points out again and again in the course of Pax Indica, effective networks with states on the basis of mutual interest. He returns to this refrain in the chapter on the US, writing about “strategic partnerships” and how they are “tricky to conceive and implement”. Tharoor is particularly good on the prickly relationship between Washington and Delhi, on their mutual and competing interests, on the countries’ natural affinities and shared values and, at the same time, their Cold War-inflected suspicion of the strength of their growing friendship.
In Pax Indica, Tharoor makes a strong case for the necessity of a rigorous foreign policy and the book is at its best when he exposes the chronic underfunding and neglect of the Indian Foreign Service. Tharoor is, he tells me, a “great fan” of India’s diplomats who are “by and large outstanding”. But he describes as “simply silly, for want of a stronger word”, a “notoriously overstaffed government except for foreign affairs, so that India’s diplomatic corps is a quarter the size of the Chinese and more in keeping with a country the size of Singapore”. It is only in describing this “level of shortsightedness” that Tharoor becomes briefly ruffled. I ask him if he envisages a return to the Ministry of External Affairs. His answer is instantly, impressively smooth: “That would be presumptuous of me. It is, of course, a field I am passionate about.” In other words, come and get me!
Shougat Dasgupta is an Assistant Editor with Tehelka.
shougat@tehelka.com
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