Book Review: The New World

By Simran Sodhi

Ram Madhav’s book, The New World, is an ambitious take on India and the existing world order. The book draws on history to explain to the reader the origins of the present world order and the rise of a multilateral world. The book is ambitious in the agenda it lays out for India, to rise to the challenge of becoming a world power in itself.

But India and much of the world today is in the midst of a fast-changing world, courtesy the United States President Donald Trump, who is changing the post-World War II power structures and institutions faster than one can keep up with the news. India, with one of the world’s fastest growing economies also faces challenges not just from the rise of China but also from its immediate neighborhood that seems to be getting distant over time.

“Despite all these efforts, India’s neighbourhood remains a challenge for the country’s strategic elite. China’s growing influence, coupled with the tendency of regional leaders to play both sides, is testing India’s resolve to establish itself as a regional power. Some strategic thinkers even suggest that India should look beyond South Asia since ‘in contemporary Indian strategic thinking, South Asia is at best a small place and at worst a limitation.’ They argue:

There is little value for India in pouring in resources to either regain exclusive primacy or balance China in a space in which it is geopolitically weaker and somewhat contained. Although New Delhi’s concerns about Beijing’s growing power are understandable, frantic attempts to win back South Asia or compete with China for regional dominance are unlikely to work. Another option available to India is to work with China in the region, as many of India’s neighbours would prefer, but it won’t be too long before an ambitious and aggressive China seeks to relegate India to the rank of a second-rate power in South Asia.

Obviously, India cannot and should not take such a drastic view about its immediate neighbourhood, not only because of geostrategic reasons but also due to the long and established geocultural and civilizational bonds it enjoys with the people in the region. Most of India’s neighbours are civilizational cousins, sharing historical connections that can never be erased from popular memory. India should strive to build on that natural sentiment of brotherhood and bonhomie to develop a strong immediate neighbourhood coalition on the principle of sovereign equality and civilizational fraternity,” writes Madhav in his book. So, while the first two paras here rightly point out the issues facing India in its neighbourhood, the third and the last para where he argues that civilizational fraternity will or should help India in its neighbourhood policy gets problematic. We live in a world today that is shaped more by economics and less by nostalgia about shared pasts.

Madhav writes about China, the United States, and topics like climate change that are actively debated on global forums today. The final chapters of the book are devoted to ten things India should do in order to become an important player and a ‘significant contributor to shaping the new world order’. Again, Madhav’s points like; India should give up its romanticism, focus on economic growth, ramp up on education and research, build a strong neighbourhood, among others are good points from an academic viewpoint. But it lacks any concrete policy frameworks.

“Today, the world is marked by several minilateral regional organizations. India is also a member of several of them, besides of course being the founder member of two—SAARC and BIMSTEC. India’s membership in organizations like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), BRICS and IORA, as well as regional arrangements like the Quad, makes it a participant in regional multilateralism. However, to emerge as a regional power, India needs to build a functional regional multilateralism with itself in the driver’s seat, rather than being ‘also there’. The Indian Ocean Region is the natural region in which India strives to build such a coalition of like-minded nations in the twenty-first century,” writes the author.

SAARC today seems to be a dead forum for all practical purposes. Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently travelled to Brazil to attend the BRICS summit which was given a miss by both the Chinese and Russian leaders. Some even made the argument that India should now pull out of BRICS and SCO since they seem to be broadly driven by China and India’s interests are not being taken on board. So, all in all, the point here is that the world and the world order of the last many decades is fast-changing. India should and must assert its rightful place in this new emerging order and that is where the book makes a compelling argument and makes for an interesting read. But the problem with the book and with India’s rise is the lack of a clear framework and the absence of a clear foreign policy formulation as how to make that leap.