Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century

Abstract

Sashi Tharoor, Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century, (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2012), Pages: 456, Price: Rs. 799.The title of Shashi Tharoor's new book, Pax Indica, can mislead an unwary reader. The book does not offer a blueprint for India's rise to imperial status in the current century. A more modest role is envisaged for India, that of helping to define the norms of tomorrow's new networked world, write the rules and have a voice in their application. But the book is not really about this either. It is more an overview of India's relations with neighbours, South- East Asia, China, the US, the Arab countries, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, with separate chapters on India and the UN and SoftPower and Public Diplomacy, and a final chapter on Multi-Alignment as a Grand Strategy for India in the decades ahead.The new norms and rules that India would work on, how they would be different from the ones that the West considers universal, and the means India will deploy to achieve success are not spelt out in the book. In actual fact, the author believes that the world having been made safe of democracy, India's vocation should be the promotion of democracy and human rights world wide along with major allies like the US. This suggests adjusting to Western norms more than redefining them, which is in fact the West expects of others.The reader would have greater than usual interest in Tharoor's latest book because he would be writing from a double perspective - that of his long experience in international as a UN civil servant and a brief exposure at the political level to India's foreign-policymaking as a junior Minister in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). However, rather than this double experience combining to give more cohesion to his analysis of India's foreign policy in the current century, it produces some inconsistencies.An instance of this is the disproportionate attention given to groups such as BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) and the IOC-ARC (the Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation) and the exaggerated enthusiasm with which their potential is described. The eight pages devoted to BIMSTEC contrast with one paragraph each that Japan and South Korea merit, and the less than three pages of superficial treatment of Russia. While Europe gets the same space as BIMSTEC, the author considers the continent irrelevant to India's strategic interests. He claims that there's nothing like the IOC-ARC in the annals of global diplomacy and rhapsodizes thus in UN-speak:When the IOC-ARC meets, new windows are opened between countries separated by distance as well as politics. Malaysians talk with Mauritians, Arabs with Australians, South Africans with Sri Lankans, Iranians with Indonesians. The India Ocean serves as both a sea separating them and a bridge binding them together.Doesn't the UN at New York do all this too?Some other inconsistencies in the book probably derive from the author's reluctance as a former Minister and Congress Member of Parliament to criticize the government's policies. Tharoor's analysis of the roots of Pakistan's deep-seated hostility towards India is most perspicacious and hard-headed, but even as the reader is being convinced that Pakistan cannot be trusted and dialoguing with it would not be productive, the author dutifully purveys all the contestable arguments of the government to justify resuming the dialogue, adding some jejune ones of his own, such as what we say when we talk that will make the difference and that a dialogue allows India to make clear to Pakistan its bottom lines and minimum standards of civilized conduct. He is very dismissive about the India-Pakistan Track-2 dialogues, but slips into candlelight phraseology in advocating a show of magnanimity and generosity of spirit that in itself stands an outside chance of persuading Pakistanis to rethink their attitude to us. …

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