India's Riveting Centrality

India's Riveting Centrality

Because India is such a paradox,

it makes for great arguments.

Here is a country that is developing

one of the world's greatest navies,

has a formidable air force, sends military

satellites into space, will send a

space probe to Mars and has a large

warehouse of state-of-the-art nuclear

weapons. Here is also a country of riots,

ramshackle infrastructure and electricity

blackouts on an epic scale; cities that

lead the world in dirt, noise and air pollution;

and a country that is, in many respects,

a disorganized mess. Traveling

from the dynamic capitals of East Asia,

with their bullet trains, perfectly pruned

highway verges, stage-lit boulevards and

cutting-edge architecture, to New Delhi

or Kolkata, with their wheezing old taxis

weaving around beggars and the occasional

elephant on broken roads, is like

going from the First World to the Third.

Geography offers a partial explanation,

albeit a very deterministic one:

India has (along with Southeast Asia)

the hottest climate and most abundant

and luxuriant landscape of all the

Eurasian population hubs, and therefore

its inhabitants may have lacked the

need to build political structures for the

organization of resources, at least in

comparison to the temperate zone-Chinese

and Europeans. And yet this geographical

insight conveys little of the

overall story. For example, perhaps no

civilization in our early 21st century

world has helped produce writers as

brilliant and eclectic as India. Nineteenth

century Britain, at the height of

its imperial glory, led the world in literature

with the likes of Charles Dickens

and George Eliot. Twentieth century

America did likewise with Ernest Hemingway,

William Faulkner and Saul Bellow.

And now, I would argue, India is the

ancestral and, after a fashion, the spiritual

home of writers who have achieved

global renown: witness the novels of

Amitav Ghosh, the journalism and criticism

of Pankaj Mishra, the humanist tradition

of Amartya Sen (who also has

roots in Bangladesh) and the geostrategic

ruminations of C. Raja Mohan.

And this matters. If geopolitics fo-

cuses on geography and economics to

the exclusion of everything else, then it

is a crude calling without texture (albeit

a very necessary one). Because of information

technology, hard power is not

everything anymore. A nation's or region's

intellectual force can give it moral

strength – that is, the strength to lead

and influence. Qatar punches above its

weight because of the creative ways it

has leveraged its energy wealth: for example,

it has Al Jazeera television and

arguably the world's best airline. The

fact that writers of Indian descent are

now everywhere in the great intellectual

discussions of our age is significant, especially

when one combines that fact

with where India is located on the map.

India stands astride the Indian Ocean,

creating with its inverted triangular

shape the Arabian Sea and the Bay of

Bengal, which are respectively the maritime

organizing principles of the Middle

East and Southeast Asia. As for the

Indian Ocean, it is the world's energy interstate,

the link for megaships carrying

hydrocarbons from the Middle East to

the consumers in the burgeoning middle-

class concentrations of East Asia.

India, thus, with the help of the Indian

Ocean, fuses the geopolitics of the

Greater Middle East with the geopolitics

of East Asia – creating an increasingly

unified and organic geography of conflict

and competition across the navigable

southern rim of Eurasia.

K.M. Panikkar, the great Indian statesman

and historian of the mid-20th century,

wrote that navigator Vasco da

Gama brought a "singular unity" to the

landmasses of Asia by virtue of Portuguese

sea power. That era, in which it

becomes impossible to disaggregate

South Asia from either the Middle East

or East Asia, is, on account of globalization,

with its emphasis on maritime activity,

now returning after 500 years.

And India's favored position is not

only in the maritime area, for the Indian

subcontinent is no island – as the

scholar Andre Wink comprehensively

demonstrates in his three-volume Al-

Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic

World (1990-2004). Wink shows, among

other things, how the northern onethird

of India has since the medieval

centuries been the repository of language,

religion and traditions emanating

from the Middle East, particularly

from Iran. The fact that Persian words in

one form or another are spoken as far

eastward as Bangladesh, and the fact

that India's glittering late-medieval and

early-modern Mughal dynasty originated

in Central Asia, proves the robust

connectivity between the subcontinent

and contiguous parts of Eurasia.

Indeed, as technology shrinks distance,

the demographic and economic

behemoth that is India becomes more of

a factor in both the Middle East and East

Asia. Indian warships may outnumber

American ones in the Persian Gulf in

several decades and are already a presence

in the South China Sea. India competes

with China over influence in

Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and in

the far-flung islands of the Indian Ocean

close to East Africa, playing a great game

of sorts with the Middle Kingdom. It is

India that is a quiet bastion of support

for the Sultanate of Oman at the southeast

tip of Arabia. Lord George

Nathaniel Curzon, British viceroy of

India from 1899 to 1905, may have been

ahead of his time when he conceived of

the Indian subcontinent as being at the

center of global geopolitics.

For as the United States and China become

great power rivals, the direction in

which India tilts could determine the

course of geopolitics in Eurasia in the

21st century. India, in other words,

looms as the ultimate pivot state. But

the U.S.-India relationship can never be

transactional: that is to say, Washington

cannot expect New Delhi to equally reciprocate

its friendship. This is because

of the political climate inside India itself,

which India's aforementioned intellectuals

help influence. Because of India's

nonaligned position during the Cold

War, and the attendant philosophical

legacy of Nehruvian socialism -- as well

as the sheer pride among the Indian

elite of their country constituting an independent

power in its own right -- an

overt alliance with the United States will

certainly be rejected. It would be rejected

as though it were a disease germ

in the body politic. For the U.S.-India alliance

to work it must be subjective and

somewhat covert: a matter of quiet, regular

bilateral military training exercises

rather than of loud public statements

and summitry.

It is not a matter of what India can do

for the United States. Rather, it is the

very fact that India's rise, militarily and

economically, automatically balances

against China because of India's proximate

position on the map. Thus, the rise

of India, however uneven and admittedly

over-hyped, has been the best

piece of strategic good luck the United

States has had since the end of the Cold

War. But the United States should not

think that if it ratchets up tension with

China because, for example, of disputes

in the South China Sea, that India will

automatically be by its side. Rather, the

opposite may occur: for India will not be

taken for granted. Because New Delhi

must maintain cordial relations with

Beijing, it might be forced to move

closer to China in the event of a crisis

between China and the United States.

But were the United States to forge

closer ties with China, then India might

feel threatened and left out and thus feel

a greater need for American friendship.

India can help the United States, but

only if the United States always plays its

hand subtly.

Meanwhile, as Myanmar slowly opens

up to the world, a whole new region of

commerce and trade routes will unite

India with China in Southeast Asia, even

as India could eventually play a bigger

role in Iran, especially if events in Syria

start a long process leading to the collapse

of the mullahs' calcifying regime.

India has a considerable appetite for

Iranian oil, even as the attractor force of

Indian culture – from Bollywood films to

New Delhi and Kolkata intellectual life –

may over time, along with Turkish culture,

prove more central to the Iranian

experience than some forms of Western

influence: Indeed, a more liberal Iranian

regime would help recreate the synthesis

linking Iran with cultures from the

Mediterranean to the border of Indochina,

obviously including both India

and Pakistan. Curzon saw an Indian

zone of influence extending from the

Iranian plateau to the Gulf of Thailand.

I would put it another way: As authoritarian

regimes weaken in Eurasia, Indian

influence will slowly, over time,

partially seep into the vacuum. Globalization

may be over-sold, but it matters.

That is why following India's trials and

tribulations – however exasperating – is

a requirement for contemporary

geopoliticians. It is not that South Asia

is necessarily more important than any

other region; rather, it is that now every

place in Eurasia can affect every other

place profoundly.