India: From self-important to important

One of the reasons I declined accepting the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) when I was selected was the wise words of an avuncular and highly-regarded IFS officer whom I approached for advice. He said, “India today is more self-important than it is important. We have an exaggerated notion of ourselves on the global stage, so we are just another one among 180-odd countries in the world.” Today’s India is more important than it is self- important and  The India Way is a brilliant and timely treatise that charts a remarkable blueprint in a world that is both nationalistic (nay, jingoistic?) and globalised (nay, un-globalised?), fragile and anti-fragile, all at once. 

S Jaishankar is by a long margin regarded as the brightest diplomat of his generation and he stands at a unique confluence of history — a resurgent India led by a determined and bold prime minister (if there is one person who has absorbed the nuances and the practice of Arthashastra better than Kautilya it is Narendra Modi) wanting to claim its place in the world, a rising, expansionist China and a very different, divided United States. The book is not just a window into India’s foreign policy but about India itself, the “New India” from the lens of a practitioner of policy who is at the cutting edge of it. 

The book talks about how in the past, India was always “hedging” , refusing to view the world through the lens of realpolitik and power, has nonetheless had to face serious consequences of this approach which has been rather conveniently explained away through lazy, laid-back diplomacy and irresponsible, short-sighted politics that disguises deliberation as fatalism.

The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World 

Author: S. Jaishankar

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 226

Price: Rs 699

 

Mr Jaishankar persuasively uses the Mahabharata to illustrate how we have not got the world to be interested enough or invested enough in India in the past, to understand the Indian way and the Indian mind. From frenemies and hyper competitiveness (which is the nature of much of international relations today) to regime change and non-alignment, it’s all there in the Mahabharata, which the book uses to illustrate pithily modern co-opetitive global interchange. Mr Jaishankar argues that Indian statecraft has universal relevance, without saying that it is superior to Western ones, but has been ignored for long. 

The other core message of the book is that unless India is strong domestically, especially when it comes to the economy, there is no way it can engage with global business chains. These are not mutually exclusive, but the former is a sine qua non for the latter to happen. 

The one area where the book doesn’t say as much as it could have is on digital sovereignty — and that’s my gripe. There are two broad world views on the new economy and the technology industry. One is the US-led view of extreme hyper competitiveness with free access to global markets for its own firms (but not always the case conversely); the other is the China-led view of the “Walled Garden” that stiffly regulates foreign technology companies from leveraging its rich market (but encourages its own companies to leverage global markets and also indulge in bloodshed competition with each other). What is the India Way here? 

Given that two decades after liberalisation we have hardly any global technology products with a Made in India label on them, with the newest China border aggression, is this India’s moment in history to leap at that opportunity? Or are we simply not there yet when it comes to delivering a global product from India, even though we have one of the finest technology industries in the world here? 

It is ironic that we can launch affordable space programmes and join elite hypersonic missile clubs but can’t create a WhatsApp or WeChat or a Facebook or TikTok that can engage the world and leverage our domestic market to its fullest! China and US have about 80 per cent of the world’s tech unicorns, at 227 and 233 (about three dozen of these are of “Indian” origin), respectively at last count, whereas India has just about 21. 

There is no rigorous academic evaluation to show that any of the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) of which India is a part has yielded rich benefits in the past, than it has for its other partners. We don’t have an FTA with even the United States yet, and rightly backed off from one with China at the last minute. 

India has never had a “winner takes all” outlook to foreign policy but is now confronted with an aggressive global order, where interests and positions are skewed towards a “winner take all” system practised both by the US and China. How Messrs Modi and Jaishankar will navigate this complex, continuously swirling world will be the fascinating discourse of our times. The rear-view mirror is smaller than the windscreen for a reason: What is behind us is so much less important than what is in front of us. Mr Jaishankar’s book is a timely, thoughtful and extraordinarily well written reminder of this. 

The reviewer is an IAS officer. These views are personal. @srivatsakrishna