Time to dream really big

The old world order is changing, but no one is yet quite sure of what the emerging global power architecture will look like in the 21st century. But a few things will remain constant. The United States, the European Union and Japan will remain dominant players; China, which has emerged as a new pole, will definitely become more important in the years and decades to come; and a rejuvenated Russia will reclaim its position as a Class I power. Where does that leave India? And what can New Delhi do to project itself more forcefully on the world stage?

The beginning and end of every epoch has been marked by a major crisis—usually a decisive war—and widespread chaos. In the latter half of the 16th century, Spain, under King Philip, was clearly the dominant global power. But his ill-fated plan to invade England led to a decisive defeat of the 130-ship Spanish Armada in 1588 and catapulted Elizabethan England into the ranks of global superpowers— a position she consolidated and held—despite challenges from Napoleonite France in the early 19th century, the Ottoman Empire off and on and Czarist Russia during Queen Victoria’s reign.

Pax Britannica, during which England was the unchallenged master of the world following the Battle of Waterloo (1815), courtesy its control of all the world’s major sea lanes, prevailed for a little more than the next 100 years, till the end of World War II when it was replaced by a two-power system. This, in turn, gave way to “Pax Americana” in the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union and the entire Stalinistcommunist architecture collapsed into chaos under the weight of its own weaknesses.

In many ways, the global financial meltdown we are witnessing now could presage the passing of the American epoch. Already, the US is showing every sign of imperial overreach—its much vaunted military is bogged down in two attritional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its industrial and financial might will, without doubt, get emasculated by the fallout from the subprime crisis. It is in this context that the Indo-US nuclear deal assumes importance beyond the obvious. The letter of the pact deals with energy security, an important ingredient of temporal authority, but it is the spirit of the deal that can, potentially, lift India into the club of the world’s major powers—as a full member. By recognising, albeit indirectly, India’s right to maintain and develop nuclear weapons (under the deal, only the right to test N-weapons is a grey area), the world has, in one step, de-hyphenated India from Pakistan and coupled it with China.

From here on, whether the Left and other assorted bleeding hearts like it or not, India will be seen as a counterweight to the communist giant—something the leadership in Beijing has spent more than half a century trying to stop. In the early years of India’s Independence, when Jawaharlal Nehru’s prestige and vision was positing India as China’s rival for leadership of what was disparagingly called the Third World, Mao Tse Tung and Zhou Enlai conspired to inflict a crushing military defeat on this country in 1962 and put paid to its ambitions of emerging as the Asian leader.

Now, as China’s rise causes disquiet and unease in capitals from Washington to Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur to Tokyo, the global economic crisis and the nuclear deal present India a unique opportunity to project both hard and soft power and establish its own sphere of influence. The government should not only focus on “weathering the storm” as Finance Minister P. Chidambaram has promised, it should utilise the power vacuum, however small, that will inevitably emerge from the global meltdown and the prestige it has gained from the N-deal to position India as yet another major pole in world affairs. But for that, it will have to show more of the spunk Prime Minister Manmohan Singh displayed in pushing the N-deal through. Now is the time to dream really big.