Any scholar attempting to focus on an entire continent, particularly one as varied as Asia, risks spreading his light so wide that nothing is really illuminated. Brahma Chellaney's fourth book, after an optimistic preface in which the author congratulates himself on a book that "can rightly claim to be a cut above other volumes on Asian issues", wanders quickly off into the quicksand of irrelevance. |
Asian Juggernaut sets out to examine how Asia can build cooperative approaches to tackle the security, energy and environmental challenges that particularly confront its three biggest states. China and India are symbolised in the book by the Dragon and the Tiger; Japan, for some reason, is represented by Godzilla. Circling high over this bellicose menagerie is the American Eagle. Distracted, perhaps, by the wildlife he has conjured up, the author barely touches on cooperative approaches, recounting instead a 300-page complaint-list of Chinese perfidy in its march towards global dominance. |
Chellaney belongs to a dwindling coterie of Indian analysts who purvey a gloomy, 20th century outlook where a spineless India is bottled up in every way by the scheming of implacable adversaries, particularly China and, its sidekick, Pakistan. While strategic conservatism is a valid outlook, the author's record on China does not inspire confidence. In 2003, after Atal Bihari Vajpayee got China to drop its claim over Sikkim, Chellaney publicly attacked the NDA government for being a dupe to Beijing's duplicity. Just two years later, Chinese maps showed Sikkim as a part of India. Understanding Beijing is a skill at which Chellaney, alas, has established himself as a bungler. |
The book provides a wealth of facts about Asia, most of them culled from newspapers and journals of the past two years. While these would be illuminating for someone relatively uninformed about the region, there is little to benefit a regular newspaper reader. The superficiality of research is evident from the footnoting: in a sample chapter, "Why Asia is Dissimilar to Europe", 21 out of 22 footnotes are from recent newspapers or periodicals or surveys published on the internet. Just one footnote is from a book, and that too a biography. |
While facts and figures float freely through the world wide web, incisive assessments are less easily googled. This barrage of information is filtered through Chellaney's unifocal worldview, of an immoral and hegemonic China, determined to trample its neighbours in its climb to superpower. With cloying sanctimony, he laments how an "opportunistic" China had no hesitation in buying up a 40 per cent stake in Sudan's Greater Nile Petroleum, bankrolling the deaths of 200,000 Sudanese in the Darfur genocide. India's stake in that same oilfield is mentioned without comment. Chellaney excoriates China for its "avaricious acquisition of energy assets in pariah or problem states" like Burma (sic); eleven pages later, he unblushingly recommends that India push through a pipeline bringing in gas from that country. |
There is no discussion of alternative views. An entire school of China-watchers have critically examined Beijing's official line that China's rise is a peaceful one; the author does not even consider that possibility. Chellaney just knows that China is a malevolent power and the alternative is not worth discussing, even if only to reject it. The reader ends up feeling assaulted by a pamphlet that rails at China, rather than having savoured a serious academic work. Pamphlets, mercifully, are short and sharp; this one ploughs on repetitively. |
For those wishing to save time and teeth-gnashing, the entire meaning of the book is here, in just one of Chellaney's inelegant sentences: "Beijing strives to be the sole pole in Asia, so that it is free to limit US influence, keep India in check, bully Taiwan, shame Japan, divide ASEAN and make use of semi-failed states that serve as its clients." |
Setting out to address the "China-India-Japan strategic triangle", Chellaney quickly bumps up against the realisation that "pan-Asianism" is a long way off. His promise to examine Asia in its totality is then diluted to a more simplistic China-and-Pakistan-bashing. Like so many Indian strategists, intellectually shackled by a sense of victimisation, Brahma Chellaney's commitment to an old ideological position stands in the way of dispassionate strategic analysis. |
Instead of any new and incisive examination of the Dragon, the Tiger and Godzilla, Chellaney is content to cry Wolf, singing a frightened song.
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Asian Juggernaut The Rise of China, India and Japan |
Brahma Chellaney HarperCollins Price: Rs 395; Pages: 348 |