India has a template to weather the global storm

WE live in absolutely unprecedented times. Antonio Gramsci, writing nearly a century ago, captured such global shifts with prophetic clarity: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

That diagnosis now feels less philosophical and more predictive. We are not witnessing a managed transition from one global order to another. We are living through an interregnum; a turbulent pause with no promise of resolution.

Perhaps for the first time in the past 80 years, after the end of World War II, humankind is witness to a four-continent conflict playing itself out concurrently. These confrontations are the rise of unprecedented trade tensions across the world, triggered by US President Donald Trump’s attempt to destructure the international architecture of commerce.

The Russia-Ukraine war that began in February 2022, the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah-Houthi-Iran conflict that broke out in October 2023 and the rise of China since the early 1990s that has attained portentous overtones in broad sections of the world’s political geography. The added dynamics are the latest India-Pakistan standoff — the worst after the Kargil war 26 years ago and the US bombing of Iran. Thailand and Cambodia are also having a go at each other.

The United Nations-led multilateralism is dead. Its obituary was very eloquently written in 2020 when the world was struck by the Covid-19 epidemic. In March that year, when close to six billion people were under some form of lockdown, the UN Security Council (UNSC) could not meet to discuss this global epidemic because China held the rotating presidency for that month and scuttled any discussion for fear of being called out. The UN system could do nothing about it. The UNSC finally met for the first time to discuss the pandemic on April 9, 2020, only after the Dominican Republic took over the rotating presidency. When humankind required global leadership, it was missing in action.

In more ways than one, therefore, the doctrinal concepts that underpin international relations are regressing back to the 17th century, when Cardinal Richelieu intellectualised raison d’état, i.e. each nation will act in its own best interest and the doctrine of balance of power — the alliance system hypothesised by Hugo Grotius and implemented by King William III of England.

How does India navigate this global meltdown, especially when President Trump seems hell bent on gaslighting the international trading order and countries are at each other’s throats, both figuratively and literally? Trump’s reciprocal tariff order, which will come into effect this week, seeks to impose punitive tariffs on nearly 70 countries. The US average tariff that began this year at 2.5 per cent will sit at an average of 18.4 per cent once the new levies take effect. Canada, the largest trading partner of the US, has been hit with a tariff of 35 per cent. India will be taxed at 25 per cent plus a yet indeterminate penalty for buying armaments and energy from Trump’s ‘friend’, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

India, fortunately, is not in uncharted waters. It has a template that goes back to 1947. Once the dust had settled on three decades of the most ferocious bloodletting between 1914 and 1945 that left a 100 million people dead, the victorious allies then decided to fight against each other.

They split the world into two blocs — the Soviet Union-led Eastern bloc, a Communist dystopia, and the US-led Western bloc, a democratic phantasm. The Western bloc had no compunction about supporting the most brutal dictators on the planet and the Eastern bloc the most revanchist capitalists when and wherever it suited them.

India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, realised very early in the new global game that formally commenced with Winston Churchill’s speech at Fulton Falls on March 5, 1946, that the liberating nations of Asia, Africa and South America were looking for a third way, away from bloc politics. Nehru, along with a couple of other leaders, crafted the exceptionalism called non-alignment that is now called multi-alignment.

As the Cold War intensified and various denial regimes from food to technology were weaponised by bloc politics, India’s third Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, focused on self-reliance, now rechristened Atmanirbharta.

These two strategic continuums still hold the field and need to be re-energised with full vigour as large sections of the world are completely adrift in an uncharted ocean. They are looking for leadership.

India, like many other nations, had to adjust and even reset its trajectory in international relations in the early 1990s as the swirl of global events created unprecedented situations that were pregnant with both possibility and catastrophe. India rode out these storms successfully. It is now better placed than ever to provide this leadership because of its $4-trillion economy and its organic place in the Global South.

Oxymoronically, it is the United States of America that is providing that opportunity to China, India and a host of other countries by the inconsistent behaviour of its current dispensation. This window will perhaps close in another two years when the US mid-term elections are held. The American people are realising that this Make America Great Again (MAGA) is harming them more than doing any good.

In Trump’s tariff wars lies a huge opportunity to remake the international politico-economic and strategic architecture. The US will not fade away or be isolated and neither should it be but it will be rebalanced, given that it is diffident about taking any further responsibility of being the single biggest balancer of power — a task that it has ably shouldered uptil now.

Beyond the “he said, she said” of Parliament, which, unfortunately, is how it has evolved over the decades — a gladiatorial arena to score brownie points, rather than a forum for informed discourse or discussion — as well as large sections of the media which refused to soberly report the May 7-10 India-Pakistan conflict, “serious folks” must realise that we are living in exceptional times.

It is not easy to navigate these uncharted and choppy waters of a world unmoored. To say that Indian foreign policy has succeeded or failed is a specious and a needlessly imprudent binary.

If indeed there was ever a realm of fifty shades of grey, it is here and now. Application of mind, an understanding of the multi-dimensional transformations that are playing themselves out concurrently, nuance and constant calibration of positions will see us through these ‘interesting times’.

Manish Tewari is Lok Sabha MP and former I&B minister.

Comments