The Unsaturated Reader

Tag: politics

  • A New India in the eyes of the world

    (Originally published on December 16th 2024)

    Last Sunday afternoon, I had the good fortune to attend the launch of a magazine that broaches India’s outlook on world affairs, appropriately titled, “India’s World.” Listening to the always insightful and upbeat Honourable Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar speak was a pleasant experience. The pearls of wisdom he shared on the nuances of (new) India’s foreign policy was illuminating. I will not deny the sense of pride and thrill I felt to be a part of the 1.4 billion people driving the new narrative about India.  

    Prof. Happymon Jacob, one of the founders of the magazine, remarked in his welcome note, “arguments and narratives matter in world politics.” Perhaps Britain’s Keir Starmer needs reminding of this fact whose government has been accused of lacking idealism and crucially a plan. The prim man is averse to media-swashbuckling but a little touch with reality (and politics) wouldn’t hurt. Often more than the work on the ground, it is how you shape the narrative around it that influences public perception and determines the measure of your success. Going back to Prof. Jacob’s remark, the simple adage struck me for its forthrightness. It’s a truth that is sometimes overlooked, and sometimes for its own sake misinterpreted and taken too literally, to the satisfaction of any shrewd world leader who perhaps intended to provoke such a reaction — take Trump’s statement on Ukraine for instance. He proclaimed he will end the war in a day; geopolitics analysts have proven too naive in reading too much into it and basing their (which will soon turn out to be baseless) theories of probable outcomes for Ukraine. 

    That said, returning to the plot line, and the bottomline, of Jaishankar’s speech, which was that India’s current undeniably proactive foreign policy is rooted in pragmatism and historical context. Times have changed, actors in the international arena have ebbed and flowed, the tools for conducting geopolitics have upgraded making space for new unlikely but welcome entrants in the field.  Keeping pace with this rapidly changing kshana-kshana world, the way India leads its foreign policy must also change. The present model is neither a break from the past nor an attack on it. It underlines how foreign policies are shaped by contexts, and why a strict adherence to age-old principles that may be outdated for the present, is misguided. It is perhaps time, a section of thinkers, commentators, academicians changed their mindsets. 

    India boasts of a 4-trillion dollar economy and its growth looks unstoppable. To take a tiny statistic, there are around 13 million Indians working abroad and several more, if we add the Indian-origin workers to it — a sign of India’s growing global cultural footprint. She’s a strong, assertive power with significant clout— even a sought-after player in conflict mediation— and the much vaunted (and equally challenged) ‘strategic autonomy’, the shining light. But this is no new-found success. It is buttressed by decades of careful policy-making, calibrating and timely decisions, that set it up for the success it is known for today. 

    Ideally, this burgeoning economy that burst into the global scene in 1991 needs an equally ambitious foreign policy, along the lines of a Viksit Bharat we envision for 2047. That demands proactivity in a world slowly manifesting multi-polarity. We are far from the days of a revamped version of an old-school bipolar world —the place of the diminished Soviet Union being occupied by People’s Republic of China — and may never see it materialise either, at least in our lifetimes. 

    The push into the whirlwind of geopolitics known for its brute realism, is not without its risks and anxieties. As Jaishankar aptly put it, it requires a multifaceted approach which involves striking the right balance between elements of hedging, prudence, collaboration, accelerating multipolarity, juggling between the West and the non-Western world and so on. India is now at a place where it can lead a dialogue on the Global South, find a seat in a G7 meeting, while maintaining its principled-distance and play the role of a peacemaker in the wars and conflicts that ravage the world. 

    On the other end of the spectrum, there are thorny issues or “hangovers” from the past that still ruffle us once in a while, notably the issue of border security. It is imprudent to expect of a country to peacefully pursue its developmental goals insularly while forming well-meaning alliances across the world like your standard homogenous European country, when 38,000 square kilometres of its area has been encroached upon by, if I may drive up the emotional overtone here, an over-bearing neighbour that is on a mission make its mark in every sphere, for good and bad, across the world. 

    Alas, as with any pragmatic relationship, much of the quandary is also about money. China is our biggest trading partner and with whom we run a widening trade deficit. It is definitely a cause for concern but it’s also a fact that cannot be overwritten by ‘hawkish’ narratives, as much as narratives matter. This is why economic diplomacy is just as important. Supply chain remodulation, digital era, enhancing mobility and connectivity for an intermingling world et al are some of the new kids on the block, governments need to be alert and cater to. 

    In the beginning of the lecture Jaishankar noted how Track 1 diplomacy had outpaced Track 2 in the last decade and that too for the good. Think tanks are after all an outlet for ideas of several people that closely tune in to this field. As with any individual therefore, their aggregates too suffer from biases and vestiges of conservatism.

    We should think for the long term and plan for the generations ahead because much is at stake. Importantly, far removed from the elite foreign policy discussion circles and (sometimes) aloof spaces of think tanks and academia, it wouldn’t go amiss to lend a ear to the voice on the Indian street, what the plain old common sense of ordinary folk reveals about India’s role in the world. 

    These are neither trivial nor easy objectives. The truth often lies in the plain and simple, and requires an approach that is direct and discerns the truth and enlivens it. It has only been less than a century since this little nation home to more than a billion, became independent. To have soared so high and outlived the colonial baggage is an indelible achievement. As befits her legacy, a regional hegemon status will add to her laurels. 

  • A no-nonsense 2025

    Saying out loud ‘2024’ has a certain ring to it. 2024 set out with the grand claim of being the year nearly half the world’s population would go to the polling booths. As we close in on the year, the events of the past eleven months have surely satiated the prophesiers. On July 13th, at a rally in Pennsylvania, we were witness to an attempt to assassinate Trump, a worn-out character then. Now here we are. Kopites at the Anfield (yes we are diverting) wept when Jurgen Klopp during that emotional (fawn-y) afternoon on May 20th bid farewell to Liverpool Football Club. The sentimental ones thought he was irreplaceable,  whose fist bumps thundered down the four stands of the Anfield. But here we are. It looks like the bald Dutch-nobody who was slotted into his place (pun intended) isn’t having a bad time after all. Nor is Mr. Trump. 

    To call 2024 eventful in an abstract sense would be trite, for every year is a treasury of events. The four numerals on paper are defined and remembered by the events that make it; it would be a non-existential semantic nonsense without it. Asymmetry of information from different parts of the world and a fundamental distrust are the themes that stood out to me this year. A “mad-man” at the helm of the most powerful country on earth to top it all. And perhaps his tech-genius square-faced acolyte (also known as X-lord). That the electorate has moved to the right is what political observers would say — from the perspective of centrist political parties, there’s some “catching up” to do (Macron comes to mind). Hardcore leftists will say centrists are radical right-wingers disguised in the garb of neo-progressive-conservatism. Maybe they’re right. Maybe not. It is not productive to dwell on such political (nonsense-) semantics again. Practically, it hasn’t reaped much. In the academia, perhaps some fodder for closed-door theoretical debates in unreadable, unaccessible, lofty journals. 

    The big predictions for 2025 have arrived. Did the predictions for 2024 age well? One thing is clear, while at the start of December last year Trump seemed like a remote possibility, the repercussions of such an incident being discussed in a jiffy as a non-negotiable ritual, now it’s become an indigestible reality. The entertainer has catapulted the masses to clinch a soaring victory. No more “didn’t win the popular vote” nonsense, he may have thought; he showed up at the heavy blue states, like his beloved New York for instance, to tilt the popular vote in his favour. Everything that has happened in 2024 appears hazy in comparison to the results on November 4th, for that has and will change the course of everything that is set to happen and gives everything that came before it a bittersweet flavour — on a lighter note, it is the feeling when kids who don’t quite know each other are thrust into the same room as a burly old man. They do not quite belong, yet history will sew them in the grand narrative of the events that preceded (and shaped) the biggest comeback in political history. 

    We all agree on this: Trump is the mad-man in the room. The theory was hypothesised during the time of Richard Nixon to play up his supposed irrationality and volatility in making decisions so that the communist bloc would scamper to avoid a negative reaction from him by cobbling a mutually non-adversarial settlement. This could happen well again, albeit with his NATO or even Chinese counterparts. But make no mistake, because his close aides (who are now off his books) claim that he is pragmatic despite the occasional crankiness and volatility. He’s a supreme entertainer who speaks ‘truth’ the way masses want to hear it. There’s more to Trump than there is, and 2025 will be a testament to that, be it for the good or the bad. 

    A politically suave deal-maker with an incorrigible belief in transactional alliances. Mr. Trump’s economic principles are clear: he wants to make America great again — harkening back to a non-existent mythical past — he’ll not let the trade partners who are apparently ‘cheating’ on America go scot-free, and his answer to any country that may pose a threat to the American economy? Tariffs. How about meeting America’s skyrocketing debt levels? Tariffs; making up for proposed tax cuts in revenue? Tariffs. As Tom Standage, the Economist’s deputy editor put it, Trump thinks Tariffs are some kind of magic money tree. The less exciting aspect of it is that it’s going to drive up prices for ordinary Americans. Legend has it that many of his supporters figured out what tariffs meant after the election. 

    All in all, the US has become an overstretched power. The gap between what the US is capable of, and the demands placed on it — which is usually expected of it — will grow in 2025. A snarky White House establishment will have much reckoning to do with a non-quite-in-its-control world order. 

    A big player, if not the big player, in that hitherto novel world order is China. To be fair, for all its autocracy and anti-western ideals, China does boast of some good ideas and achievements. That it may have gorged on coal is one thing, but it is at the forefront in the adoption of renewable energy technologies. It is host to the world’s biggest reserves of rare earth. Just how the US closed its doors to exports of semiconductor technology to Beijing, the latter is pepped up for a tit-for-tat. The imposition of tariffs next year could mark the intensification of an already fierce trading rivalry. Companies in the US can still boast of an edge in chip-making — they’re designed in America and manufactured in China’s estranged sibling, Taiwan — but this has only emboldened China to produce better (even less pricier) alternatives. Some of the best semiconductor models in the industry are Chinese. The US may no longer have a monopoly over, simply, chips. 

    It has become trendy for world leaders to proclaim that they must decouple their economies. Often the villain is China. But Europe has also been quietly insisting on becoming independent from the big guy across the Atlantic too. The idealistic centrist Macron has been the most vociferous advocate of it. Alas, only if the efforts to realise it could compare to the grand pronouncements. Decoupling is hard; factories and industries are not lego blocks to be removed and propped up anywhere we please. We are talking about cars and electronics. There are costs, contracts, relations, and even livelihoods at stake. Companies can’t jet off to any country as soon as it shows prospects of a burgeoning, cheap labour force. 

    Therefore, whether we like it or not, it is an interconnected world, with a few destructible walls erected here and there. Europe this year has been strikingly averse to tourism; Catalans with heads in their hands are storming the streets every month or so with anti-tourist protests. The main argument is that tourists are driving up local rental prices; more like rentiers want to lease rooms and apartments to once-in-a-lifetime visitors who are willing to pay more than local inhabitants. In this writer’s opinion, it should be a matter of regulative policies and incentives. The angst is misdirected. But this emotional disequilibrium has cleared the way for new entrants: enter the oil-giants of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has been promoting tourism in a bid to diversify its oil-dependent economy. Along with hosting football world cup, Usyk vs Fury, a 38-something Cristiano Ronaldo… choke, choke, did I mention LIV Golf? 

    Global debts have swelled, in large part fuelled by pandemic-era spending. Many advanced economies have unsustainable deficits (honourable mention: USA) — could this entice a move to austerity? America under Trump will like to remain aloof, oblivious to the wars of the world — some of which it has had a tiny hand in — and as solipsists would have it, focus inwards. This will prompt many countries to jack up their spending on defence. Space is becoming militarised (and cluttered). This turn of events will not dent the US economy or the image of its strong economy however. Expect a capital influx into Uncle Sam’s economy; the dopamine shot of a MAGA homecoming has been irresistible for investors. 

    The fate of Crypto is a little shaky. Artificial intelligence has not (yet) lived up to its hype. More than $1 trillion have been poured into AI infrastructure. The investors are becoming wary . But it could be precisely when the latter becomes disillusioned that the technology might pick up — the same was said of crypto, but again, here we are. It could make or break the future. The bottomline, as with domestic and geo-politics, is to expect the unbelievable. For one, who thought the sponge-bob-faced Elon Musk who starred in a sensible guest role in the mighty Big Bang Theory years ago would head a government department titled ‘DOGE’ with another square-faced (slightly smaller) pretentious eccentric (you-know-who)? 

    Hardcore realism is the fad — why would the plebeian not fancy a bit of combative politics? — with its attendant unnerving social phenomena — hear ‘racismo’? A transactional world than an ideological world; differences in ideology does not necessarily beget a reset in trade ties unlike alignments in the cold war era. Putin doesn’t think the rules apply to him, much to the delight of his autocrat-admirers around the world. The BRICS truly are a motley of strange bedfellows; the only principle that holds them together is their shared suspicion of the West regardless of their internal skirmishes — China was sitting in India’s backyard until very recently a deescalation-agreement of sorts was cobbled up. 

    And lastly, but certainly the irritant Democrats had at the top of their heads during the middle of the year— Biden’s age and his fragility and as with age, his adamance to step down from candidature. In a survey reported by The Economist, more rich/democratic/both countries around the world seem to favour younger leaders. A breath of fresh air, youth, dynamism is being preferred to the same-old-stock of politicians. The notable exception of course is America. Well, if Trump thinks he is as young as JD Vance, and his supporters chime in, who’s stopping him? Coming to the practical aspect of the issue, much of the rich world is ageing and China seeks to work around it by encouraging a silver economy — a market economy that caters to the old. The point is to shift the perception about them being a ‘burden’ on the economy by accommodating them in economically productive ways. Japan’s baby boomers, who’ll cross an average age of 75 next year, can look forward to something similar if the plan materialises as intended. 

    There it is, fresh perspectives for an unrevealed, neatly packed 2025. Change, turbulence, technological optimism (and doomsaying) are expected to prevail, but what unites humans from across the political spectrum is hope. The hope for change. What may be progress for one lot, could be destruction for the other. But it’s hope in its positive connotation that dones different hats that’s the shared emotion. Every person has an ideology, for indifference is also an ideology. And for all that 2024 has given us, we can be certain (and if you’re into that sort of thing,’hope’) that 2025 will be no less interesting, if not more. We are humans and it doesn’t hurt to be incorrigible optimists—at least until you reach the last word of this muse— so here’s to a no-nonsense 2025! 

  • A Trump 2.0 shouldn’t be a surprise

    With just over four days to go for the election, much is at stake for the United States and the world. The numbers are confounding, and the race painfully close. If it’s abortion for Harris, for Trump it’s immigration. Two subjects the Pope is displeased with (as the Pope expressed last month . the former more so than the latter. He exhorted the Catholic faithful to choose the “lesser of two evils.” 

    While it may seem inarguable that many would want someone prudent helming the White House, voter choices go beyond mere testimonies of competency and sound policies. Donald Trump may be all wack and rubbish to the dispassionate observer sitting afar on the other side of the globe. But to his domestic conservative-leaning audience, he’s a messiah. Somehow he has mastered the art of discerning people’s fears and putting them in sensible*, digestible terms even if it may sound stupid. GDP, growth, figures, indices etc are important in governance but they matter less when it comes to the behavioural influences that make up a voter’s mind. It’s easy to blame the economy’s woes on the people who don’t look like you, even if it is neither rational nor ideal — concepts that matter little to those running the Republican campaign. A quick-fix solution by throwing sand on people’s eyes. These are the classic tricks and manoeuvres every demagogue has up their sleeve. 

    Trump has the uncanny ability to translate the banal to one that pricks the collective conscience, like in the case of Haitians allegedly eating pets. His simplistic rhetorical style, that could only vie with that of a middle-schooler, void of any turn of phrase, something similar to rambling, IS for all its shortcomings, appealing to voters. It appeals to the average red-neck American who looks at the glitzy Democratic National Conventions with a feeling of derision and envy. He may be a tycoon, but his assurances speak to countless working-class Americans, home-makers, unemployed youth and reflect their deepest concerns. 

     It would be hard to deny there’s also a tinge of sexism at play here albeit in indiscernible ways since Harris took over. An increasing number of African-Americans, Latinos, even Indian-Americans too have been flocking to the Republican camp.

    As much as one may haver on about the economy, what voters irrespective of their education or financial status immediately understand without any subject-specific prerequisites and might have an opinion about are social issues. The age of wokeism has begun receding and people are becoming more conservative in their social outlook. Had this been only a phenomenon observed in boomers it would have been less a cause for concern. But data suggests that young men are moving to the right (while young women are among the most progressive cohorts). A polarisation in worldviews across genders and age-groups await us. 

    All of which points to why a second Trump presidency is not unthinkable. Harris is also seen as being light on policies and harping on the abortion narrative excessively despite its growing irrelevance for a fair share of the women population. Contrary to conventional thinking, abortion rates have declined since Roe v. Wade in 1971. Nor are all women hinged on the liberal women’s rights outlook. The sneer at ‘childless cat ladies’ has found favour among many middle-aged women in the US, Swifties’ lamentations regardless.

    A second Trump homecoming was touted to be dark and dangerous for the future of the country during the start of Harris’ campaign, and given how she had catapulted into fame after the gigantic convention at Chicago, Trump 2.0 seemed like an impossibility. Now the world is looking at the face of the very same darkness and danger that Americans seem to have unabashedly embraced. MAGA may not have seen its time yet.