SUPER ECONOMIES: AMERICA, INDIA, CHINA AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD
Raghav Bahl
Penguin Books India;
416 pages; Rs 699
The cover of Raghav Bahl's new book Super Economies: America, India, China and the Future of the World is replete with endorsements from the likes of Fareed Zakaria and Shashi Tharoor, calling it "fresh" and "insightful". But, within the first 10 pages or so, one gathers there is little within the covers to merit these glowing endorsements - which may have been, charitably, intended for the striking cover design.
Ostensibly this book claims to explain the vastly changed nature of the world since the Cold War, the movement from bipolar hostility to atomic balancing -involving much more talk than fighting, largely through multilateralism or rather through small, flexible, purpose built "mini-lateral" groupings. According to Mr Bahl, the basis for much of this is apparently the emergence of the "super economy" of the 21st century, in place of the "superpower" of the 20th. This is not that clear to a reader, though - not till right at the end does the author's narrative become comprehensible.
Compounding this confusing lack of narrative is the bizarre and disruptive style of writing. On many pages, 60 to 70 per cent of each paragraph is taken up with extensive quoting - sometimes two in a single sentence - of everyone under the sun from Bill Gates to some irrelevant reporter of an irrelevant Canadian business magazine with an awe-inducing circulation of 80,000. The referencing follows no recognisable style - be it Chicago or Timbuktu - and does not allow for easy double-checking.
The superficiality that plagues this book becomes obvious soon. First up is the historically puzzling reference to Deng Xiaoping as an "outsider" (while drawing a Narendra Modi analogy). The second is the geopolitically inaccurate claim that India refused to invite Japan for the 2008 Malabar naval exercises following a rebuke from China in 2007 - which ignores the fact that both Japan and Australia were equally rattled by the 2007 demarche, which led to Australia exiting the quadrilateral. The third is the rather wishful reading of economics - Mr Bahl seeing the slight jump in foreign direct investment after the 2014 elections as symbolising a decisive and market-friendly government.
He goes on to define a "super economy" as one possessing innovation, vast swathes of territory, low unemployment, improving infrastructure, strong currency and a significant military/nuclear capability. The book briefly sketches how each of the BRICS fare on this score - with China declared a super economy and India arbitrarily proclaimed a "sleeper super economy" despite scoring abysmally on everything except a large military. If you expect the following chapters to explain this classification, forget about it.
The next set of chapters spanning some 200 pages could be described as "interdisciplinary", or perhaps as utterly pointless. The bumping off of Osama, 9/11, the history of India-US and Pakistan-US ties are all dealt with cursorily and far from engagingly. Particularly patronising is a chapter on Burma, with an exceptionally condescending quote from international relations expert Parag Khanna on how Myanmar is finally beginning to play the multi-alignment game. In fact, Burma since day one has been adept at playing its neighbours off against each other - it takes a certain genius to be able to develop close friendships with Indira Gandhi and Nehru while dispossessing and kicking out hundreds of thousands of Indians simultaneously.
The narrative goes back and forth in history, guided by some vague notions about economics and some equally vague notions about geopolitics. The lack of serious research demonstrated in the introduction becomes painfully clear subsequently, with groan-inducing generalisations like "the US sided with Pakistan before the Abbottabad raid and with India after". Innovation, unemployment, demographics, natural resources, trade flows, infrastructure and other issues that should have been analysed in a book that carries the title "super-economies" are all skipped, and far too much space dedicated to cliches like the diaspora.
Finally we are treated to Mr Bahl's sweeping conclusions, none of which is supported factually or analytically by the 258 preceding pages. For example, he claims that a "PATO" and "PAFTA" to mirror NATO and NAFTA will form; and that a robust India will team up with the US super-economy to dwarf the China. There is far too much wishful thinking here based on potentialities - and since the commonalities and divergences were not explored in sufficient depth by the book, no convincing case is made.
Every conclusion seems a casual throwaway claim, which reaches its nadir with the claim that the US, India and China will come together against Islamic terrorism. Even leaving aside for the moment the fact that "Islamic terrorism" has many facets, the three countries in question can't even agree on a common threat matrix. For India, Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia are the fount of all evil; for the US it is Shi'ism and Iran; and China wants to stamp out the Uighur insurgency while continuing to use Pakistani-sponsored terrorism to keep India off-balance.
In 2007, after watching a particularly anodyne televised debate on Network 18 with Rajdeep Sardesai at the end of which one was none the wiser, I decided to give up watching TV and have never owned a TV since. Mr Bahl's book is like a written distillate of all that's gone wrong with our TV news: few facts, less analysis, zero contextualisation - and conclusions that have nothing to do with the discussion.
The writer is at Observer Research Foundation
