The present time is one of the most intriguing and unusual for any curious Indian, born and living in this country. The past is being forgotten rapidly, the present, while puzzling, is full of promise, and the future, as is usually the case, is substantially unpredictable. If one reckons that our civilization is 5,000 years old, it ran a normal course for 4,000 of these before a cataclysmic encounter with alien forces and influences debilitated it to such an extent that by the end (Muhammad bin Qasim invasion of Sindh in 712 till our Independence in 1947) its very existence as a civilization had come under serious threat. Unexpectedly, the last decade has seen a fundamental shift in the way many Indians, living in their country, perceive it.
This perception is not political, although it is easy enough to dismiss it as such. I would say it is rather a matter of feeling a unifying identity as an Indian, an inhabitant of an ancient land coming to terms with living an honourable life in a new multireligious country. India in 2025 is part of a world that was organised in a very specific and tight way during the past eight decades following the end of World War II, and which organization is now rapidly unravelling. This organization was largely economic, and used technological prowess and military power to enforce an American rules-based order that secured the economic interests of the powerful Western world, essentially the G7 countries and their auxiliaries.
The Soviet bloc played some role in limiting the total hegemony of the West but their experiment did not last long and by 1990, one was talking about a monopolar American world. If nothing had changed, India with its “Hindu rate of growth” would have eventually succumbed to its natural disadvantages, and become a client of the West in one way or another. It was at this stage (late 1990s) that the remarkable rise of China, facilitated ironically by America, brought in new economic equations into the global geopolitical scenario and the world, once again, was assuming a bipolar character.
Simultaneously, and possibly because of the rise of China, India came below the radar level of the West, and in its inimitable way began a slow and painful climb up the economic ladder, helpfully ignored by the West. The better economic position of India today and its projected rise is largely due to its demographic dividend paying off to some limited extent, and also in part to the fact that the chances of any Congress dominated dispensation at the central government level are now rather slim. India is not a rich country in 2025, but it is not poor either.
China and America will try their best to slow down its economic growth and it will need all our geostrategic skills to thwart these two superpowers at least till we touch the $7-8 trillion level, for after that, our rapid rise cannot be stopped. In the interim, it is the duty of any central government to strike a balance between rapid economic growth and the rise of income disparities. No country has come up economically totally avoiding income disparities. India simply cannot rise economically if the outmoded doctrine of socialism is given a free run. On the other hand, and in a positive sense, every increase in our GDP will reduce the likelihood of fissiparous tendencies like caste, language and religion taking the front seat in our socio-economic discourse, making these negative factors rapidly irrelevant. Combining economic and civilizational factors, it is fair in my view to suggest that it is the present awakening of our national consciousness that will provide the unique fillip that will precede a nonlinear upward rise of our economy.
Each country that became powerful did so by using a peculiar advantage that it alone possessed. This was manufacturing and commerce for America, colonial-based mercantilism in Britain, militarism in Germany and possibly cultural outreach in France. We will need to leverage our civilizational heft as we enter the higher reaches of S&T that alone can guarantee admittance into the world of the economic and military great powers. The gradual though not complete decline in pelf and prestige of America and China and the hopefully concomitant rise of India will see more parity in international relationships during the next decade.
By 2035 I foresee a world that will become the playground of four empires, America, China, India and Russia, rather than a patchwork of nation-states, organic or artificial. Quadrilaterals are more flexible than triangles, straight lines or single points, because the behaviour of each vertex is influenced by the three others—and so it will be with empires. If one defines an empire as a domain where a country’s influence extends beyond its political borders, the four empires of the 21st century need be neither friendly nor inimical with respect to one another. They will act merely according to their economic interests.
The concept of the nationstate, itself an idea that was exclusively European, has become less important with the dwindling of Europe as a dominant influence in world affairs. Europe faces hard choices and needs to position itself between the Amerisphere and the Eurasian sphere. Mackinder’s geographical pivot of history is being remade but rather than being Eurocentric it is now geocentric. The exact course of events in the mediumterm future will be determined by the nature of the leaders that are thrown up in different parts of the world, and completely unpredictable events, unpredictable not in the events themselves but in terms of their long-term consequences.
Mehmet II’s capture of Constantinople in 1453, the forced abdication of King James II in England in 1688, Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 and the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese military in 1941 come to mind. It is in the prediction of such events that the acumen of skilled dispassionate observers will be put to test. As the famous HungarianAmerican nuclear physicist Leo Szilard put it, it is not necessary to be more intelligent than others, but just faster in expressing one’s thoughts. And this need not be difficult if one realises that we live in a world of four turnings, one that is characterized by a cyclical time of High, Awakening, Unravelling and Crisis, rather than in a linear time of gradual all round improvement, and further that India is just entering the fourth and critical turning of its 80- year saeculum now.
Gautam Desiraju is in IISc Bengaluru and UPES Dehradun.
