印度不懂历史或者印度如何才能夺回其文明命运

INDIANS DON’T UNDERSTAND HISTORY 

Or, How India Can Reclaim Its Civilisational Destiny

原文链接：

https://medium.com/@g.c.prasad/indians-dont-understand-history-fe1902e78e18

     

Ganesh C Prasad

Synopsis

Most Indians, even those who consider themselves savvy about current affairs, suffer from a shocking ignorance of India’s civilizational history.

The malaise afflicts analysts, commentators and policymakers as well, and it has serious negative consequences for the prospects of the Indian nation-state.

This paper lays out the scale of the problem, the impediments towards establishing a genuine civilizational narrative, and the epiphanies that can follow from such a narrative.

The implications for India’s foreign policy, and indeed India’s civilizational destiny, are mind-boggling.

Read on.

[The PDF version of this essay can be downloaded from here.]

PART 1 — WHAT AILS INDIA

1.1 Wandering In The Wilderness Without A Compass

An external observer of India today would struggle to make sense of what the country stands for and where it is going. One does not see a confident nation striding forth with a clear sense of direction and purpose, its wealth and power steadily increasing.

India’s potential remains unrealised, its economy still fettered, its demographic dividend untapped, its society still riven by poverty and inequality, its world ranking abysmal on most developmental indices, its longstanding disputes with neighbours still unresolved, its old allies distancing themselves, its new ones playing difficult, and facing a number of recent setbacks to its influence both in its immediate neighborhood and further beyond.

The net result is that the Indian ship of state is floundering in a geostrategic sense, forever falling short of its potential as an economic behemoth, a progressive and harmonious society, a benignly influential world power, and an inspiring role model to other nations.

I submit that the fundamental reason for India’s track record of never failing to disappoint is that Indians do not understand history. India is not just a country but a civilization, yet Indians today lack an overarching civilizational narrative to orient and guide them.

A civilizational narrative is a broad-brush view of history that puts events into a coherent context and tells a meaningful story. Unfortunately, Indians have so far only had two kinds of history taught to them.

One is the history found in school textbooks, which provides a relatively aseptic chronicle of events and biographies of personalities, without an overarching context to explain how these have shaped them as a people, and what they imply for their future. This kind of history is academic and not actionable. It provides a collection of facts but leaves a person wondering, “So what?”

The other kind is the overly simplistic interpretation of history provided by ideological narratives such as Communism and Hindutva, which selectively play up certain angles (e.g., class warfare or threats to religious identity) and ignore others, with the sole purpose of achieving certain present-day political objectives. This is of course actionable. Its fundamental purpose is in fact social mobilization through polarization, and hence it is action-oriented but ultimately self-harming. The compulsion to manufacture enemies and create internal divisions in the pursuit of political power weakens a society, in contrast to a civilizational narrative that unites and strengthens it.

What India sorely needs in its civilizational narrative is a history that is evidence-based and faithful to all facts, yet holistic and multidisciplinary in being able to pull together an understanding of geography, genetics, socio-economics, psychology, technology, and every other factor that has shaped the evolution of its people, informed their values, endowed them with unique strengths and advantages, and suggests at the various opportunities and constraints that will shape their destiny into the future.

With a common understanding of their civilizational narrative, both India’s leaders and the population at large would know how to interpret what is happening in the world around them, and what the country needs to do to further its interests. It is particularly tragic when a sixth of humanity remains ignorant about who they are and of their place in the world.

1.2 A Social Experiment That Illustrates The Problem

The case may be illustrated with an informal survey that anyone can perform and verify.

1. Ask any random Indian who professes to be well-informed on current affairs which country or countries pose the greatest threat to India today. The answer will be either China or Pakistan, or the two combined.

2. Ask them who was responsible for the decline of Indian civilization. Their response will generally be the Muslim invaders, and secondarily the British Raj. Present-day trends such as Westernization/globalization may be a weak third.

3. Ask them whether they view the West as India’s friend or enemy. Enthusiasm about the West in its own right may vary, but citing the shared threat to both India and the West from China, an alliance with the West may be pronounced unavoidable. “An enemy’s enemy is a friend” may sum up the attitude.

4. Ask them about the strategy of “divide and rule” employed by foreign powers against Indians. They will probably recount the historical examples of Jaichand and Mir Jafar, but in present-day terms, they may struggle to provide a factual example involving India. (Let us ignore conspiracy theories!)

Such typical answers betray a shocking ignorance of civilizational history. Why do I say so? We will explore this in greater depth later, but for now, just consider the attitude towards China in these responses.

India and China are both ancient civilizations, having coexisted for millennia. Has there been a single recorded conflict between the two civilizations in all these millennia until the war of 1962? And what was the 1962 clash about? It was simply a dispute over the delineation of their common border. It wasn’t historical enmity, a fundamental conflict of interests, or a competition for resources. The territory (still) under dispute isn’t fertile, habitable, or particularly resource-rich, but desolate and inhospitable mountain terrain. Further, the area of the territory in dispute is an insignificant fraction of the total land area of either of the two claimants.

From the standpoint of both history and geography, it is fairly self-evident that two ancient and supposedly wise civilizations should not have allowed a relatively recent dispute over a small patch of arid land to impact their relationship, yet most Indians today have formed the view that China is a dangerous enemy with abiding ill-will towards their country. Millennia of peaceful coexistence have rather abruptly given way to unallayable suspicion and deep hostility because of a dispute over a few thousand square kilometers of inhospitable terrain.

Does this situation not strike one as being utterly ludicrous? It’s like two cousins in their sixties, cordial but not close, suddenly becoming estranged in a single week after a series of minor misunderstandings over a pencil, and now utterly convinced of each other’s fundamental untrustworthiness and bad character!

The example of China is just one of many that shows Indians have no civilizational perspective to help them interpret history. That is what leads to attitudes and situations that seem inevitable but are entirely avoidable. How would a civilizational narrative help to overcome such Greek tragedies? How else could an Indian answer the above survey?

PART 2 — A SOLUTION TOOLKIT

Before we provide these alternative answers, let us step back a bit to explore the critical notion of identity, which would lie at the core of any civilizational narrative.

2.1 The Notion Of Identity

Broadly speaking, identity is the meaning we give to the situations in which we find ourselves. Two people in the same situation could view it in very different ways, and their identities would consequently differ.

Two men looked out from prison bars; one saw the mud, the other stars.

Identity is important because it is the story we each tell ourselves. Identity explains how each of us got to where we are, and it helps us decide where to go from here.

You see where I am going with this. A civilizational narrative can give meaning to an entire society’s existence and guide the actions of its people and its leaders, so we need to understand the components of individual identity that form a civilizational narrative.

Individuals have multiple, simultaneous identities, e.g., gender, ethnicity, language, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, etc. These interact in complex ways.

For the purpose of this discussion, let us restrict ourselves to a few relevant ones.

Nation-states come and go, and hence national identities are relatively ephemeral. For example, a person living in Dhaka who considered themselves Indian before 1947 may have considered themselves Pakistani between 1947 and 1971, and Bangladeshi thereafter.

National identities are also colored by context. An Indian may see themselves as very different from a Pakistani, often in an extreme “us versus them” sense, but the same Indian living in a Western country might feel a sense of kinship with a Pakistani if they were the only two South Asians in a room full of Western people. That example suggests that cultural identity may be a richer and more subtle marker than national identity in terms of telling people who they are. As we will discuss later, shared cultural identity can also help us win friends and influence people in complex situations involving many diverse players.

Cultural identities are also more durable than national identities, as we saw with the example of the person from Dhaka, whose identity as a Bengali and perhaps as a Muslim remained constant even as their national identity changed over the years. Linguistic and religious cultural identities are powerful and deep-rooted. So are identities rooted in genetics, such as the notions of race and ethnicity, since physical appearance strongly influences how people see themselves and others.

2.2 The Power Of A Civilisational Identity

By far the most composite form of cultural identity is what we could call a civilizational identity. Civilisational identity encompasses but also transcends genetics, geographical origin, language and religion. In addition, civilizational identities are associated with long histories, and naturally tell a story about who a people are, where they came from, the forces that molded their philosophy, their idea of their place in the world, and how they wish to be seen by others.

To avoid confusion with the modern Indian nation-state, I will hereafter use the term “Indic” rather than “Indian” to refer to the civilization, especially since around a dozen other nation-states in South and South-east Asia share India’s civilizational roots. They are all Indic.

(It is important to be clear about the differences between the related concepts of the Indian nation-state, the Indic civilization, and the Hindu religion. Conflating the three, whether as part of a deliberate political ideology or out of ignorance, can stymie the development of a civilizational narrative.)

Civilisational identity is powerful, and when channeled positively, can give people and nation-states existential meaning while also influencing their affinities and guiding their actions and decisions. Civilisational identity gives every individual within a country an equal feeling of belonging, as opposed to a feeling of exclusion or alienation that can arise from more sectarian identities. This power of affinity can extend beyond national borders as well, and lead to influential alliances and groupings.

Let’s explore Indian history afresh, through a civilizational lens.

PART 3 — A CIVILISATIONAL VIEW OF INDIAN HISTORY

As we have seen, there are many aspects to civilizational identity, so let’s explore these one by one in the context of India.

3.1 Geography

The Indic civilization has been fundamentally shaped by geography. The impassable Himalayas and Hindukush mountains to the north and northwest, with their extension into the mountainous Rakhine forests on the east, have enclosed and bounded off a certain region of Asia, which is the Indian subcontinent. The Indian Ocean is another forbidding geographical boundary that separates this landmass from other regions of the world. These geographical boundaries that isolate the Indian subcontinent had long ago laid the foundation for the development of a unique society within.

The civilization did not remain completely isolated though, because from time to time, other peoples did manage to cross the “impassable” geographical boundaries of the subcontinent, mainly from the northwest, and influence its history. Also, conquerors and traders from the subcontinent ventured out to other geographies, and extended the reach of the Indic civilization, notably to South-east Asia.

3.2 Population

The Indic civilization, although fated by geography to be isolated and unique, has never been small in terms of numbers. The fertile Indo-Gangetic plain and the other river systems within this bounded geographical area have had the ability to provide sustenance for a very large population.

It is no wonder that one of the most populous civilizations in the world arose in this region.

In a later section, we will see why the size of the Indic civilization’s population has been a fateful factor in determining its history, and why it will play a crucial role in shaping its destiny.

3.3 Genetics

In recent decades, one particular aspect of Indian history has become unnecessarily mired in ideological battles. Although genetic research has conclusively established that there were three distinct groups of people who migrated to India in successive waves and contributed to its current genetic profile, there has been ideologically based resistance from the Hindu right wing to these findings.

Genetically and culturally, the Indic civilization has received contributions from these three groups of people:

· South Asian hunter-gatherers, who arrived from Africa at least 50,000 years ago

· Iranian agriculturalists, who arrived between 10,000 BCE and 4,000 BCE

· Steppes pastoralists (popularly called “Aryans”), who arrived around 2,000 BCE

While the actual picture is not as simplistic as Aryans conquering Dravidians, that picture is not completely inaccurate either. Between 10,000 BCE and 4,000 BCE, Iranian agriculturists intermixed with the aboriginal South Asian hunter-gatherers to form what are known as “Ancestral South Indians” (ASI), who are also popularly known as “Dravidians”. Around 2,000 BCE, Steppes pastoralists, popularly known as “Aryans”, then intermixed with the ASI people in more than one wave, creating groups of people called “Ancestral North Indians” (ANI). ANI and ASI people further intermixed over the coming years, resulting in the genetic profile of Indians that persists to this day.

All modern Indians have a mix of ANI and ASI genes, with the exception of the inhabitants of the Andaman islands, who are “Ancient Ancestral South Indians” (AASI). So there is some truth to the saying that all Indians have a similar genetic profile. However, the opposite is also simultaneously true! North Indians have more ANI than ASI, and South Indians have more ASI than ANI, so there is a genetic difference between North Indians and South Indians after all, although it is just a matter of degree. There is also a caste angle to this. The so-called “upper castes” tend to have more ANI than ASI, and vice-versa.

Genetic research has also established that “strict endogamy”, or the rules against inter-marriage between genetic groups, began 1900 years ago. Strict endogamy laid the foundations of the caste system that endures to this day.

These are now matters of scientific record.

All that being said, the cultural impact of the Aryans on the Indic civilization was much higher than their genetic influence.

The ideological resistance to these findings from Hindutva proponents is because they would like to believe that “Vedic culture” originated within India. The genetic evidence that Aryans (i.e., Steppes pastoralists) came to India from outside, bringing with them a proto-Sanskritic language, culture and rituals, torpedoes their narrative of an autochthonous Hindu culture that has a superior claim to the territory of India compared to other religious groups.

Understanding India’s civilizational history requires a repudiation of the ideological pseudo-science propagated by Hindutva culture warriors, who will even deny scientific evidence in order to hold on to their cherished narrative of the Indic civilization being synonymous with the Hindu religion.

So this is the first, and perhaps most difficult, step when establishing a civilisational narrative for India. We have to unlearn motivated ideological narratives that have no basis in scientific fact. Genetics has settled the issue, and Indians must learn to accept facts and move on.

3.4 Culture

The Steppes pastoralists (“Aryans”) brought with them a culture that formed the basis of Hindu society, which was the earliest form of Indic society. The pre-existing “Dravidian” culture fused with the Aryan, contributing to its pantheon of gods (Shiva was most probably a Dravidian god) and to various cultural practices. This became the basis of what is called “Vedic” culture, which then became for a time the dominant culture of the Indic civilization. Other smaller ethnic influences lapped at this Indic civilization, influencing it around the edges. Greeks (called “Yavanas”), as well as various Himalayan groups (the Sakyas, Huns, and Kushanas), all integrated with the Indic civilization. The Greek influence on Indic culture can be seen in the Gandhara school of art used in Buddhism. The Buddha himself was a Sakya prince, and the subsequent interplay between Buddhism and Vedic Hinduism forms a fascinating side-story of its own.

When we talk about the Indic civilization in antiquity (i.e., from about 10,000 BCE until the first contact with Islam around 700 CE), we are referring to the crucible that took in genetic and cultural components in three major waves (and a few minor ones), and established a society distinct from others in the world.

Hinduism as a set of cultural beliefs and practices was an important aspect of this civilization, but as we have seen, there was nothing autochthonous about it. The civilization has been a melting pot with some indigenous elements and further cultural layers added from external sources. This is why “Indic” is not the same as “Hindu”, and why conflating the two is ideological mischief. The civilization has always been Indic by definition, but only a specific hybrid culture from a certain period onwards could be recognizably called Hindu. Talking about a “Hindu civilization” right from antiquity achieves important present-day political goals for certain ideological groups, but the Hindu cultural identity is only one strand within the Indic civilizational identity, albeit an important one.

This is a viewpoint contrary to most mainstream narratives, so it may take some time to assimilate. However, the results of this shift in thinking are worthwhile, not just because it can heal the frayed fabric of contemporary Indian society and strengthen its cohesiveness, but also because of the complex world that lies outside its national boundaries, even beyond the confines of the subcontinent. There will soon come a need for India to leverage its civilizational affinity with Indic nation-states that are non-Hindu, in order to expand its influence and resist the dominance of other civilizations. More on this later.

Let’s now explore this larger world by crossing one of these geographical boundaries.

3.5 The ‘Significant’ Other

The Himalayas, the geographical feature that forms the northern boundary of the Indic civilization, separates the plains of India from the Tibetan plateau. This region is the world’s largest reservoir of freshwater outside the polar regions, and feeds the southward-flowing river systems that are critical to the Indic civilization — the Indus, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. It also gives birth to rivers that flow northwards, and this has simultaneously provided the conditions for another civilization to develop. This other civilization also happens to be geographically isolated, by vast deserts to its west, by barren, frozen wastes to its north, and by ocean to its east. This is the Sinic civilization that developed in its own isolated crucible.

From a geographical perspective therefore, it should not be surprising that the towering Himalayan ranges and the Tibetan plateau with their glacier-fed river systems should be simultaneously capable of nurturing and mutually isolating two unique civilizations, the Indic and the Sinic. Neither should it be surprising that the two civilizations are of roughly equal age, or have sustained equally large populations from time immemorial.

Just like the Indic civilization, the history of the Sinic civilization too has been influenced by geography, population, genetics and culture. Its geographical isolation has been similarly imperfect. Invasion and subjugation by Mongols (the Yuan dynasty) and Manchus (the Qing dynasty) at various points of time in its history have influenced its genetics and culture. Over the centuries, it too managed to fold those external influences into its rich cultural tapestry, and the many innovations that these then-foreign rulers ushered in have only served to aid China’s progress as a civilization.

The Indic and the Sinic civilizations have both been around for over 3000 years, perhaps 4000. They developed in close proximity, yet remained separated by the impassable Himalayas. In all these millennia (before the fateful encounter of 1962), there was little contact between the two, let alone any conflict. A Bodhidharma may have crossed the Himalayas to spread Buddhism in China, a Fahien (Fa Xian) or a Hiuen Tsang (Xuan Zang) may have done the same in the opposite direction to chronicle life in India in their time, and some trade in tea and spices may have taken place through land and sea. Apart from these peripheral interactions, the two great civilizations of the East have had little mass contact throughout their histories. They may not have been friends, but they were not enemies, and they were certainly not existential threats to each other.

Importantly though, for most of recorded history (except for the last three centuries), the two civilizations have together contributed over 50% of world GDP and 50% of global trade, with each accounting for about half of those numbers. Thanks to the rich and fertile alluvial plains of their perennial rivers, these two civilizations have been the most populous on the planet, which in turn served to elevate them to being among the most significant. Over the many thousands of years of their history, it is also little wonder that these prosperous societies were able to host thriving cultures boasting advances in literature, philosophy, science, technology and the arts.

The uniqueness, size, wealth, prosperity and rich culture of both the Indic and Sinic civilizations were in a sense foreordained by geography.

But then something happened two to three centuries ago that tragically reversed the fortunes of both.

3.6 The Turning Point?

How did India stumble and fall? A commonly held belief is that the wave of Muslim invasions starting from about 700 CE destroyed the original character of the Indic civilization and initiated its decline, which was then hastened by the later advent of European colonialism.

However, when we view this chapter of history not from a religio-cultural standpoint but from a civilizational one, i.e., the fortunes of the society that lived within those never-changing geographical boundaries, we see a very different picture.

India suffered invasion at the hands of three Muslim rulers — Mahmud of Ghazni, Timur (Tamerlane) of Samarkand, and Nader Shah of Persia, who plundered the wealth of the subcontinent and carted it off to their capitals. These Muslim invaders certainly damaged the Indic civilization.

However, the overwhelming majority of India’s Muslim rulers did not plunder India’s wealth to cart it away. On the contrary, the subcontinent’s wealth and power increased manifold under them. They were in effect naturalized Indians because they stayed on and ruled local kingdoms. Akbar’s empire in 1583 was far richer and stronger than the England of Queen Elizabeth I. Alauddin Khilji fought off a fearsome Mongol threat and saved the subcontinent from a fate that other victims of the Mongols took centuries to recover from. Rather than being invaders and plunderers, most Muslim rulers of the subcontinent were its defenders and builders. The civilization had co-opted them, such that they worked for it rather than against it.

To be sure, not all of India’s Muslim rulers were benevolent and wise. Some were cruel and tyrannical, and often religiously intolerant. But from a civilizational standpoint, this is irrelevant. What is important is that these rulers all advanced the interests of their kingdoms that existed within the geographical boundaries of the Indic civilization. Far from it being the case that India was weakened by its contact with Islam, Indic civilization, over a few centuries, succeeded in absorbing and integrating Islamic elements into its already rich culture, and continued to develop and progress as a composite civilization.

It is important to understand that while Hindutva proponents view the influence of Islam as a “pollutant” to the prevalent Hindu culture, it did not weaken the Indic civilization. On the contrary, it served to enrich it in every way, from economic wealth to military power, from administrative structures to transport and communications, from agriculture to philosophy, from cuisine to the arts. Hybrids are richer and more successful than purebreds, and India as a hybrid society has been no exception. Remember that the Aryans, the Greeks, the Sakyas, Kushanas and Huns had all been folded into the Indic civilization in earlier centuries, and subcontinental Islam was just the latest fold in the civilization's cultural tapestry.

Apart from the occasional hiccup of invasions, Indic civilization in fact progressed to greater heights by integrating the Islamic influence. Islam, as it turned out, was not disruptive to the continued progress of the Indic civilization in terms of its wealth, power and dynamism. (This is an important example of how a civilizational narrative differs from an ideological one. Civilizations develop through the assimilation of external influences. They are therefore dynamic and evolving. Ideologies are fixated on idealized and unrealistic notions of purity, are wistful about an imagined past that may never have existed, and are therefore resistant to cultural evolution.)

The bottom line is that after centuries of Muslim rule, India still contributed 24% of world GDP in the year 1700. So it wasn’t the Muslims who brought about the downfall of the Indic civilization after all. Who was it then?

3.7 Whodunnit

The answer stares us in the face. There was one — and only one — power responsible for reducing India, from an ancient, rich and proud civilization accounting for a quarter of world GDP, to a wretchedly poor “Third World” country with a paltry 3% of world GDP in 1947, one that could not even feed its own people.

That power was Great Britain.

Although the Indic civilization has seen many tumultuous events over the millennia of its existence, from the Aryan invasion to the advent of Islam, British colonial rule was a fundamentally different juncture in its history, one that was without precedent. It was a rupture in the otherwise continuous evolution of the Indic civilization, and this is the aspect of civilizational history that even educated Indians find hard to grasp.

The crucial lesson that Indians need to understand from their civilizational history is this.

The relationship between the Indic and Sinic civilizations was arms-length and of equals, neither hostile nor overly friendly. India was not seen in China as a tributary state but as a civilizational equal.

The relationship between the Indic and Islamic civilizations (whether Persian, Turkic, Mongol or Arab) was one of adaptation and integration, resulting in a new cultural strain of “subcontinental Islam” that is as Indic as it is Islamic. India did not become Muslim, since the overwhelming majority of its population remained Hindu. It was Islam that became Indic, within the subcontinent. The Sufi strain of Islam has deep links to the subcontinent, and Sufism has also influenced the Barelvi school of Islam that the majority of South Asian Muslims follow. It’s also interesting that nowhere else in the world do Muslims (or others) speak Urdu. The language is unique to the subcontinent. Likewise, Mughal architecture and Mughlai cuisine are unique to the subcontinent. The two civilizations have thus influenced each other in equal measure and produced a rich and unique hybrid culture which has been folded back to form yet another layer of the Indic civilization.

In contrast to all these prior interactions with peer-equal civilizations, the relationship between the Indic and Western civilizations that began with the advent of the British was one where the Indic civilization very rapidly shrank to an inferior position, and where Western civilization became dominant and exploitative. The British chose what they wanted to take from India, i.e., not only its natural resources but also elements of its culture, cuisine and vocabulary when it suited them. Britain too was hence influenced by India, but it was not the interaction of equals.

To be fair, the Indic civilization did evolve in a progressive direction in many respects as a result of the interaction with Western civilization. The improvement in the treatment of women, especially widows, the sensitization to the undesirability of caste-based discrimination, and to individual rights in general, were all the result of Western influence. The modern Indian nation-state as defined by the Indian constitution and jurisprudence, the English language, as well as “modern” ways of thinking in general, all reflect the positive influence of Western civilization.

However, the power imbalance between East and West that oversaw these influences had the unfortunate side-effect of creating a deep cultural insecurity among the people of the Indic civilization. To this day, the attitude of Indians (and other subcontinental people) towards Western civilization betrays an inferiority/superiority complex, with feelings of inadequacy alternating with feelings of jingoism. The popularity of Hindutva — a heady cocktail of cultural insecurity, historical resentments, convenient scapegoats, overblown notions of past achievements, and a belief in shortcuts to glory — is a symptom of the Indian hunger for acceptance and respect that cuts across all classes, including the educated elite. An equilibrium in terms of cultural security has yet to be reached, and will probably not be reached until the Indic civilization finds a viable way to regain its place in the world, with its uniqueness acknowledged and respected by all.

How that happy situation can be achieved will be discussed a bit later, but we first need to study the downfall of the Indic civilization in greater detail.

3.8 The Gory Details

Let us return to that crucial period in the history of the Indic civilization when the British began to strengthen their foothold in the subcontinent, to see how the power asymmetry between East and West was reversed from the time of Akbar and Elizabeth I.

In a happy coincidence for Britain (but not for India!), colonial expansion and the Industrial Revolution took place at around the same time. For a time, England was not even a great European power. France and Prussia were traditional land powers, while Spain was a naval power. Once Britain decisively defeated Spain at sea in 1588 and France on land in 1815, it became a great European power and thereafter a global power.

Step by step, by exploiting rivalries and imposing obligations on the parties that they assisted in defeating their rivals, the British gradually gained control over the entire territory of India. The parts of India that were not directly under the crown were ruled by vassal kings who only wielded nominal control. The British strategy of “divide and rule” proved phenomenally successful in delivering an entire civilization into the hands of a colonial power in little more than a century.

In the late eighteenth, the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, Britain fueled its Industrial Revolution with raw material from its richest colony, India. India was known as the “Jewel in the Crown” of the British Empire, not as a respectful acknowledgement of its cultural greatness, but purely as a measure of its economic benefit to the Empire. Indian coal, iron ore, timber and cotton powered the industrial cities of England. This was not trade, nor was it an equitable purchase. Indian citizens (subjects of the British Empire after 1857) received no compensation for these resources that Britain helped itself to. On the contrary, Britain’s Indian subjects even paid taxes to the crown. To this day, junior officials in the Indian civil service are called “collectors”, illustrating the exploitative nature of the bureaucracy that Britain put in place. The roads, railways, and ports that the British built in India were not for the benefit of Indians, except incidentally. They were all built to facilitate the export of India’s natural resources in the service of Britain’s Industrial Revolution.

Moreover, Britain designed a tax system for India that ensured British monopoly over industrial goods, favored British imports over locally produced goods (the Salt Tax being a particularly infamous example), and disincentivized Indian investments in industrialization. These measures not only disadvantaged India during British rule, they caused a significant atrophy of the economy, leaving the country unable to compete on the global stage for quite a while after the British left.

It was such a comprehensive loot and plunder of the civilization that reduced it from wealth and glory to utter poverty in a span of just two centuries. Economist Utsa Patnaik estimates the magnitude of the loot to be US $45 trillion at 2017 prices. Britain used that loot to raise itself to the status of an advanced country.

To put it in starkly evocative terms, Britain stood on India’s back to climb higher, while simultaneously pushing India down into poverty and backwardness. The “Jewel in the Crown” was bled dry.

3.9 A Baffling Acquittal

India was robbed blind, stripped of its civilizational greatness, its economic wealth, and its cultural self-respect. Yet strangely enough, Indians today bear no rancor towards Britain. They are proud to send their offspring to study at the London School of Economics, and will happily show off that photo album from their last UK visit. They think nothing of paying 30 pounds to enter the Tower of London for the privilege of viewing the Kohinoor diamond that the British stole from their country.

No, the animosity of many Indians today is directed only towards Muslims and towards China, even though, as we have seen, India’s Muslim rulers and China have done nothing to the civilization that even remotely compares with the damage inflicted by Great Britain!

Hence the thesis of this document that Indians do not understand history.

The Hindutva narrative has politicized religious identity using historical grievances so as to set Indian against Indian. The ideology is hugely successful at raising passions and winning elections, but Indian society as a whole has ended up divided against itself and weakened. Although this ideology regularly uses the word “civilization”, it is only focused on its Hindu cultural strand, not the whole of the civilization. Those blinded by the Hindutva ideology are incapable of seeing the bigger picture and its obvious conclusions.

In similar fashion, nationalism alone without a civilizational perspective leads one down a different cul-de-sac. One is reduced to reacting to events on the country’s borders without deeper reflection. Those trapped in nationalistic rhetoric are unable to break out of the cycle of suspicion and hostility to re-examine their premises and see the bigger picture.

If Indians cannot even comprehend the nature and circumstances of their civilization’s downfall, how can they hope to restore its greatness?

3.10 A Double Murder

And here’s another side-story. What Britain did to India, it did to China too, hand in hand with other colonial powers. Britain fought two “Opium Wars” against China, and won them both. Essentially, the British Empire was a drug mafia that pushed drugs onto an unwilling country by military force. What’s more, the opium was grown in colonial India, Indian business houses like the Tatas were involved in the opium trade, and Indian sepoys were used to put down revolts in China. The British used one subjugated Eastern civilization to oppress another.

China has not forgotten its Century of Humiliation when six colonial powers, including Britain, dictated terms to its powerless emperor. On the contrary, every Chinese schoolchild is taught this history. That sense of history has resulted in an abiding sentiment among Chinese people that they are going to recover the greatness that was robbed from them, and further, that no foreign power will ever again dictate terms to them.

3.11 A Fortuitous Escape

While the shared sufferings of the Indic and Sinic civilizations at the hands of Western civilization have been written about and discussed a great deal, what has often escaped attention is the fortuitous survival of both, on account of a crucial civilizational trait that they share — the size of their populations. We touched upon population size earlier when talking about the attributes of a civilizational identity, but we can only now begin to appreciate its significance given the context of colonial plunder.

Both civilizations endured a period of colonial oppression, and after that period, their colonizers withdrew and left them alone once more. This did not happen by accident. Their liberation was thanks to their population. To see what might have been, we need look no further than what is known as the New World (the Americas and Australia), where the original inhabitants of the land were not very populous relative to the new settlers. In hindsight, we can see that these groups of people fell below a certain critical mass required for civilizational survival. That is why Native Americans and Australian Aboriginal people are now an insignificant minority in their ancestral lands, and these lands have now morphed into being predominantly Western in terms of their civilizational characteristics.

New Zealand is perhaps the unique example of a native population being of exactly the critical mass required for survival. The Maoris were strong enough and populous enough to avoid being wiped out, but not enough to push the colonialists out. It was in effect a civilizational stalemate. The two cultures coexist today, perhaps the only country belonging to the Western civilization that shares power on a semi-equal basis with an indigenous culture.

But for the crucial civilizational trait of overwhelming population size, it’s entirely possible that Western colonialists would never have left either India or China. The bulk of the indigenous population may well have been wiped out, and modern India and China could have been white countries, with the native populations confined to reservations. The cultures of the Indic and Sinic civilizations might only have lived on in short memorial speeches, such as those regularly made in Australia today to briefly acknowledge the “traditional owners of the land”, before the business of Western civilization resumes.

The idea that these two modern nation-states still exist with their populations and cultural identities intact, only thanks to this one shared civilizational trait, is a sobering thought.

A chilling thought, in fact.

3.12 The Smiling Assassin

Is all of that just ancient history that is no longer relevant? As we know, the baton of leadership within the West has passed from the UK to the US, and Western societies have also become much more progressive, so today’s West is not the same as the one responsible for the colonization and humiliation of the East, or the genocide of smaller native populations elsewhere. Should we really be digging up old grievances? Can’t we let bygones be bygones?

It depends on whether the West has really changed. The West claims to be a like-minded democratic ally that will support India against the threat from an authoritarian and expansionist China. Is that true, or is it once again playing the cynical, time-tested game of “divide and rule” by pitting the two former civilizational giants against each other, so as to remain on top? In the cold calculus of geopolitical power, systems of government are irrelevant, hence the emotive “bond” of shared democratic traditions between India and the West is nothing but a convenient distraction from their fundamental conflict of interests.

There is a plethora of evidence that the overarching strategic objective of the West is to retain its primacy in world affairs against all challengers. It’s telling that, although the West accounts for just 12% of the world’s population, most articles and books by Western authors and think-tanks talk about how the West can “manage the rise” of emerging economies, not about how the West should graciously cede power to them. This is because a world in which the West no longer makes the rules or calls the shots is a terrifying prospect to every Westerner, right from their political leaders down to the average citizen.

Think about it. If the positions of India and China were switched, with India being the far bigger power today, is it not conceivable that the West would right now be allying with China to contain India? That is how the game of “divide and rule” is played. The West has not in fact changed at all. A past generation was responsible for barefacedly robbing the East of its wealth and glory. The current generation wears a more civilized mask, but crucially, is unwilling to cede the civilizational primacy it has inherited.

While the evidence is largely circumstantial, it is clear to any student of geopolitical history that the rational course of action for the West is to do whatever it takes to maintain its ill-gotten advantages over other civilizations. There may be wrinkles within Western civilization, such as the Anglosphere nations forming their own privileged inner clique, but non-Western civilizations are always the “other”, to be used as pawns against one another and never allowed to develop into credible challengers.

PART 4 — SEEING THE WORLD ANEW

So, seen from this civilizational perspective, everything that Indians seem to take for granted gets stood on its head.

What does this imply in terms of national policy?

4.1 A Fresh Assessment Of Threat

In general, these are the three types of threats that a nation-state may face, in descending order of severity:

1. Existential — a country may cease to exist, by political dissolution if not by genocide, e.g., what happened to the erstwhile Soviet Union or Yugoslavia.

2. Denial of destiny — a country may be prevented from attaining the degree of power, wealth and control of its destiny that it otherwise could achieve.

3. Threats to territorial integrity and/or internal security — a country’s territory may be claimed by others, and there could be security threats such as terrorist attacks, which don’t do much damage in real terms, but have a disproportionate psychological impact.

It is safe to say the Indian nation-state is not under an existential threat of any kind. There are, however, constant threats to territorial integrity and periodic breaches of internal security (e.g., terror attacks), which dominate the headlines, and thereby distract the attention of policymakers and the public.

By far the most effective threat to India though, has been the denial of its destiny. This is not as obvious as an existential or security threat, because it is hard to point at what is missing. However, this denial has been in effect ever since India’s civilisational downfall.

Denial of destiny is a much bigger threat than threats to territorial integrity or internal security, but much harder to recognize. If your wallet is stolen, you will realize it at once and feel outraged, but if you are quietly cheated of an inheritance of millions that you didn’t know you were in line to receive, you will remain in blissful ignorance of the life you could have had, even though the loss to you is far greater.

To understand the significance of the denial of India’s destiny, consider that the Indian Ocean was the centre of the world economy from ancient times up until 500 years ago, with busy trade routes linking Africa and the Middle East with the Far East. Throughout history, the Indian peninsula has been jutting out into the Indian Ocean like an unsinkable aircraft carrier. One would therefore expect India to be a major naval power, indeed the pre-eminent Indian Ocean power, in total control of the waters from the east coast of Africa to the west coast of Australia. And unsurprisingly, that was in fact the case, the Chola imperial navy providing dramatic examples of Indic power projection far afield.

Why is this not the case anymore? India today has been confined within its subcontinental landmass, unable to play its civilizational role as the pre-eminent naval power in one of the most important economic regions of the world. Even today, the combined population of the nations that form the Indian Ocean rim is 2.5 billion, or a third of humanity. Yet Indian power is conspicuously missing in its own backyard, while the navy of a Western power (the US) rules these waves. This starkly epitomizes the denial of destiny that the Indic civilization has been suffering even after notional independence.

This is why it is important to have a civilizational view of history. One then understands exactly how one has been robbed, and who one’s adversaries and potential allies are.

This shift of worldview based on civilizational history has enormous implications for India’s approach to China and the West. It turns India’s threat perceptions around 180 degrees.

4.2 The Social Experiment Redone

To answer the survey questions we posed at the beginning,

1. The countries that are the greatest threat to India today are those of the West, specifically the countries of the Anglosphere. The nature of the threat is their desire to thwart or delay the rise of a competitor in a united Asia, a corollary of which is the denial of India’s destiny as the pre-eminent power in the Indian Ocean region. (If this seems a stretch, just ask yourself which incumbent Indian Ocean power would be most threatened if India reasserted its historical control. That power is India’s strategic adversary.)

2. The one and only entity responsible for the calamitous decline of the Indic civilization was Great Britain. (This is not an incitement to hate the UK, merely a reminder of the facts, as a rebuttal to the convenient trope that the culprit was Muslim rule, and that present-day Indian Muslims are somehow to blame.)

3. The intention of the West towards India is not benign. Any putative friendship with India is aimed at securing Western primacy at any cost. India is to be cannon fodder in the West’s struggle to contain China.

4. “Divide and rule” is happening right now, on a civilizational scale. The Indic and Sinic civilizations that have historically never been in conflict are being encouraged to fight, in order to serve the interests of a third, the Western civilization. History is repeating itself, and Indians must not fall for it this time.

These new answers are not just refreshingly different; they are immediately actionable and suggest a logical way forward.

PART 5 — THE WAY FORWARD

It has often been argued that political decisions need to be made in the here and now, and that civilizational history does not have much of a bearing on present-day alliances or conflicts. It is a valid viewpoint that there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies, only permanent interests.

However, as Robert D Kaplan has argued in his book “The Revenge of Geography”, even the most modern nation-states cannot fight the forces of history that have determined their destinies.

Hence it may not be a case of civilizational history itself directly influencing present-day policy as much as the recognition that the forces that have shaped a civilization continue to cast a long shadow on the choices and constraints faced by the modern nation-state that is the civilization’s heir.

To make this abstract argument concrete, let us look at a remarkable textbook example of civilizational thinking applied to national strategy.

5.1 An Example Of Civilisational Thinking In The Modern World

China provides a case study for the ages. This is a country that has not only understood its civilizational identity, but has also worked out how to leverage its civilizational traits in the service of its future.

China’s civilizational identity is that of The Middle Kingdom. (This is in fact an indelible part of the Chinese identity. The Chinese word for China is 中国 zhōng guó, where the ideographs themselves graphically illustrate the terms “middle” by a rectangle sliced in half, and “kingdom” by a boundary around the word for jade. Jade is the material from which the seal of the Chinese emperor was traditionally made, and the boundary therefore represents the territory under the emperor’s writ. Pictorially and phonetically, the Chinese are reminded of their civilizational identity whenever they refer to their country by name.)

“The Middle Kingdom” is not just a poetic or allegorical phrase. In its modern interpretation, China’s vision is to be the engine room of the world’s economy, and the central hub of the world’s trade network. That’s how China sees itself — The Middle Kingdom is the beating heart of the Earth itself — economically, culturally, perhaps even politically. China’s ambition is to reclaim its position of old as a powerful and universally respected civilization at the center of the world.

And how does China plan to realize this vision? A large part of its strategy is by reviving an old civilizational legacy — the Silk Road. The old overland and maritime Silk Roads are now recast as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a sprawling trade network with China as its hub, which promises to rejuvenate the Chinese civilization-state, while also delivering economic growth to all the other lands through which the network passes.

What’s more, the Silk Road (whether in its ancient or modern form) is part of the familiar civilizational architecture of the Old World — Asia, Europe and Africa. It is not a threat to any of the modern nation-states that lie along the BRI’s many routes, because they were once part of this architecture, and they had prospered on account of it. They can prosper once again by aligning with The Middle Kingdom. It’s a compelling vision from a modern nation-state that is based on sound civilizational foundations.

China has a win-win model for its development that promises to carry along all the civilizations of the Old World. The only modern nation-states that would struggle to find their place in this time-honored economic architecture are those of the New World, primarily the United States. It is little wonder that the US sees a threat not just in China’s rise, but in the very mechanism that China is employing to affect that rise.

Interestingly, the United States does not pose an inherent threat to China’s civilizational vision. It is merely a new land to the East of the Middle Kingdom, across the Pacific Ocean — a potential new trading partner and nothing more. But to the United States, whose civilisational identity is based on its own exceptionalism, being relegated to the periphery of another empire is almost an existential threat! It will be a painful adjustment for the US to learn to think of itself as just another country, if China succeeds in re-establishing itself as The Middle Kingdom.

Will it? I personally believe that China’s vision will prevail, because it goes along the grain of civilizational history. The powers that oppose it are going against that grain, and will therefore likely fail.

5.2 India’s Civilisational Destiny Spelt Out

With that elegant and powerful example of civilizational thinking in its own immediate neighborhood, it should not be difficult for India to look at its own civilizational history for similar clues.

Finding a short and evocative phrase like “The Middle Kingdom” to capture India’s civilizational identity is an interesting creative exercise that I will leave to my readers, but that is not a prerequisite to working out either India’s civilizational destiny, or a suitable strategy to achieve it.

Remembering that the core traits of a civilization are geography, size, genetics and culture, India’s civilizational destiny begins to suggest itself.

A reasonable version of this could be:

1. to grow to the point where the Indian economy contributes a sixth of global GDP and trade, in line with the historical norm that reflects its share of the world’s population;

2. to be the pre-eminent Indian Ocean power, which is virtually dictated by its strategic geographical location and by the size of its population and economy;

3. to provide leadership and be the cultural fountainhead for a dozen Asian countries that share its civilizational roots and aspects of its culture.

Peninsular India as an unsinkable aircraft carrier. With a sixth of the world’s population and a commensurate share of the world economy, India’s strategic geographical location dictates that it be the pre-eminent Indian Ocean power and the flagship nation-state among the countries of the Indic civilization

What stands in the way of India achieving this destiny are its own blind spots and consequent choices.

· Creating internal enemies helps political parties win elections, but the resulting social disharmony impedes the ability of Indian society to progress towards these goals. “United we stand; divided we fall” is a saying rooted in deep wisdom.

· Antagonism with China (and by corollary, with Pakistan) serves to consume a disproportionate share of India’s resources towards defending contested land borders, and to divert attention away from developing its economy and naval power.

· Aligning with the West does not help to achieve this destiny, since the US will never willingly cede its dominance of the Indian Ocean to India or any other power. India cannot hope to push the US out of the Indian Ocean on its own. It needs powerful allies with a congruence of interests.

· Far more actionable than the amorphous goal of being a “vishwa-guru” (Teacher to the World) is leadership of the nations belonging to the Indic civilization through cultural or soft power.

· There are no shortcuts to gaining global respect. Harping on past glory, especially through fake claims, only makes the country a laughing stock. Respect will naturally follow on the heels of Comprehensive National Power, because no one respects a poor and powerless nation, no matter how culturally rich it may be.

So what is the way forward?

5.3 The Strategy

India needs to draw key lessons from the nation-building strategy of Otto von Bismarck, the architect of modern Germany. In 7 short years and with 3 decisive wars against Denmark, Austria and France in that order, Bismarck succeeded in uniting several Germanic states under the leadership of Prussia to form the German Empire.

The key takeaway from Bismarck’s strategy is that a country in a state of tension with many others must line up its conflicts in the right order.

1. India’s first conflict is already in progress and needs an immediate ceasefire. The conflagration is politically motivated, and is being waged against imaginary internal enemies. And so, India should first heal its own internal divisions by imbibing the harmony inherent in its civilizational unity. All Indians belong to the Indic civilization (No, not the fake ideological construct of the “Hindu civilization”, but the larger Indic civilization.) Indian Muslims and Indian Christians are not aliens or enemies, but are as Indic as Indian Hindus. Indians of all religions, all castes, and all linguistic groups, are Indic. Internal unity is the essential first step of the Bismarckian plan.

2. India should next align with other Eurasian powers (Iran and Russia) under China’s umbrella to shake off the domination of the West. The West (especially the Anglosphere) is the biggest threat responsible for the denial of destiny of the Eastern civilizations. Asian unity against Western domination is the second step in the Bismarckian plan.

3. India should grow its strength over a generation or so, to the point where it is able to lead the Indic nations out of China’s tent into its own cultural sphere of influence. Indic unity against Sinic domination is the third step in the Bismarckian plan.

Let’s look at these steps in detail.

5.3.1 China — The Key To India’s Tryst With Destiny

The Indic civilisation was once a participant in China’s ancient Silk Road. India exported gold and spices to Rome through this overland route before the sea route overtook it in popularity. The fact that India views the BRI as a new threat rather than as a familiar opportunity is yet another indication that Indian policymakers are ignorant of civilizational history.

From India’s point of view, China should be seen as (1) an equally ancient and great civilization, (2) a fellow sufferer at the hands of Western exploitation, (3) a familiar trading partner and (4) a powerful potential ally in wresting back what was stolen from both civilizations.

5.3.2 Is China Really A Threat?

If China appears to be India’s enemy today, it is because India has decided that China is its enemy. China will just as easily be an ally of India if India is willing to be an ally of China. It’s that simple. There is no structurally irreconcilable set of differences between the two nation-states, nor is there any historical baggage between the two civilizations that have coexisted peacefully for millennia. The bogeyman of India-China rivalry is something cooked up by Western analysts for consumption by insecure Indians, and it has contributed, conveniently but unfortunately, into turning a minor border clash into a situation of enduring suspicion and hostility.

In actual fact, the threat from China is real — but only to the West. The power struggle between the West and China is zero-sum in nature. If China wins, the West loses. However, India is not in the same situation as the West. India has a win-win option that the West does not have. India can choose to ally with China and prosper.

There is a corollary to the realization that denial of destiny is a far more serious threat to a nation than threats to territorial integrity or internal security. If a country can trade some territory for a chance to regain its civilizational destiny, it is a very small price to pay. Yet the knee-jerk “nationalist” response is exactly the opposite. To lesser minds, a small but tangible loss outweighs a large but intangible gain. The unthinking would rather condemn their country to an indefinitely stalemated destiny than “part with an inch of land”.

From a civilizational perspective, events like the India-China border clash of 1962 pale into insignificance. What is more important — a few thousand square kilometers of land, or the restoration of civilizational greatness and geostrategic importance for both peoples? Why should the latter be held to ransom by the former? Wouldn’t collaboration and concerted action deliver much richer dividends than mutual suspicion? The India-China border dispute has festered over time and begun to assume seemingly intractable proportions, yet it’s nothing that wise statesmanship shouldn’t be able to resolve in a jiffy.

This does not mean that India must yield territory to China. It only means that India should assign less importance to territory than to the benefits of an alliance with China.

It could well be that China sees India’s willingness to ally as sufficient quid pro quo to settle the border along previously proposed terms, with both sides just keeping what they already hold, and not having to exchange fresh territory.

The “threat” from China to India can be neutralized very simply. The best way to destroy one’s enemy is to make them your friend.

5.3.3 Choosing Sides

Meanwhile, the battle lines have already been drawn. The West, especially the Anglosphere countries, have tightened their alliance against the Chinese threat to their global primacy. (The Quad is a mere stalking horse. AUKUS is the real deal.)

On the other side, China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan have closed ranks.

To put it bluntly, India is on the wrong side. Ignorant of history, it is allying with those who seek to keep the ancient civilizations of the East suppressed and inferior. India should be working closely with China to ensure that the great civilizations of Eurasia, including Persia (Iran) and Russia, rise again and take their place in the sun.

There are irresponsible analysts in India calmly talking about a “two-front war” with China and Pakistan, with no apparent understanding of the damage it will cause to India. Instead of a two-front war, India should be preparing for a multifaceted peace.

An alliance with China is the way forward — an outright alliance, not just non-alignment between the two rival blocs of East and West. Imagine Russia, India, Iran and Pakistan all standing together on the same side as China. They form a Fortress Eurasia that no external civilizational power can break.

Non-alignment is a non-strategy. India needs to see Asia through unblinkered Western eyes. The rise of Asia threatens to eclipse the West, and hence the West’s natural reaction is to thwart or at least delay this rise. The West is therefore a strategic adversary, and while India may not need to go to war, its engagement with the West needs to be informed by an understanding of the inherent conflict between an established power and a rising power.

Today, India’s refusal to join hands with its natural civilizational allies is a source of much relief and glee in the West, since India is unknowingly playing along in their geostrategic game of “divide and rule”. India needs to switch sides, and fast. The entire tone and texture of the future will change from negative to positive.

Indeed, the East now has the opportunity to play the “divide and rule” game against the West! There is already a schism between the Anglosphere countries of the US, the UK and Australia (with Canada and New Zealand as halfhearted members) on the one hand, and the rest of Europe on the other. The European Union is dithering on whether to toe the hard US line against Russia and China, or to trade with these countries. If India throws its considerable heft behind Russia and China, it could provide Europe the critical impetus to break with the US and engage with this compellingly large Eastern bloc that represents more than a third of humanity. That will isolate the Anglosphere countries, weaken the US, and thereby thwart the containment strategy of the Western alliance.

India’s switch can be the decisive moment that enables the long-delayed rise of Asia.

5.3.4 From Guns To Butter

An alliance with China can immediately settle both of India’s longstanding and vexatious border disputes, not just the dispute with China itself. India will gain much-needed breathing space to grow its economy instead.

India has already shown in past negotiations with Pakistan that it is willing to accept the Line of Control (LOC) as the international border between the two countries. India is opposing China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on the grounds that part of it (the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor or CPEC) passes through “disputed” territory in Kashmir. So this is a deal waiting to be made. Formalize the LOC as the international border, and India drops its objections to the CPEC.

As a side-benefit to rapprochement with China, India’s problems with Pakistan can also be solved. China has enormous influence over Pakistani policy. A Pax Sinica will tame the Pakistani threat to India because China does not want any conflict to disrupt the trade network it is putting in place. The transformation in India-Pakistan relations will be unrecognizable and unprecedented.

Going even further, India should recognize its own historical part in the Old Silk Road, and use the BRI to re-establish itself as an important link between China and Rome (or in today’s terms, Europe). India should be offering to connect its Golden Quadrilateral transport network to the BRI through the Karakoram Highway, to give China a much more reliable access route to the Indian Ocean through a choice of 13 Indian ports, and to gain access to Europe through an overland route. The synergy between the two Asian giants will benefit both of them immensely. Not only that, India would be taking a leaf out of China’s own playbook. By enmeshing itself inextricably into China’s economy, India will effectively be tying China’s hands against future hostility. Just as Western countries are finding that the entanglement of their economies and supply chains with China is preventing them from taking any hard steps against China, China could one day find itself in the same position, if India plays its cards right.

With a clear understanding of its civilizational destiny, India can bargain with China for its piece of the pie. Freed from the constant need to watch over contested land borders, and in return for India’s support for China in all of China’s theatres of conflict with the West, India must negotiate an acknowledgement of its pre-eminence in the Indian Ocean region. Each civilization then gets back what belongs to it. Rather than view China’s “necklace of pearls” as a threat, India should ask to become its pendant, securing the entire Indian Ocean region on behalf of the Eastern civilizations.

We could be looking at a new era of peace, stability, infrastructure development and explosive economic growth in South Asia once India and China join hands.

5.3.5 Beyond The Immediate Future — Jostling Within The Fold

Many more wrinkles will appear as events unfold.

In the future, after the Western threat has been beaten back and Asia emerges out of the shadow of Western dominance, there will be some inevitable jostling for influence between the civilizations of the East. Civilizations exist in a continuous state of “co-opetition”, and so the allies of today could become the rivals of tomorrow.

Apart from the Indic civilization of South and South-east Asia, and the Sinic and its closely related civilizations of East and North-east Asia, there is also the Turkic civilization of North-west Asia and the Persian civilization of South-west Asia.

Of these, the Sinic civilization looks set to be the most dominant because of its combined population and wealth, but the others have their own unique civilizational identity that will not be co-opted by the Sinic civilization, no matter how rich and powerful it becomes.

India needs to develop a Bismarckian plan not just for a marriage of convenience with China in the immediate future, but also for a velvet divorce after a generation or so.

Strength respects strength. If India is to gain China’s genuine respect as opposed to being valued merely for its contribution to the alliance, it first needs to grow its own strength. Both hard and soft power depend on economic growth, and India needs to spend the next few decades of peace with China building up its economy. That’s another leaf from China’s own playbook, when the country acted deferential towards the West and gained valuable time to grow its strength.

As the flagship nation-state of the Indic civilization, India has to raise the civilization’s brand value so that other nation-states within the subcontinent and ASEAN are inspired to identify as Indic. This is where a shared cultural identity helps to win friends and influence people. To take some obvious examples, Thailand is Buddhist, Indonesia is Muslim, and the Philippines is Christian. However, all of them have Indic roots, and can be drawn into affinity with a strong and prosperous India.

Even Pakistan can potentially be weaned away from China using soft civilizational power, given time and diplomatic wisdom. As a further example of the superiority of civilizational thinking over ideology, treating Urdu as the shared Indic language that it is, instead of viewing it as alien, helps to exploit common ground and build bridges.

All this may superficially resemble the Hindutva ideology’s concept of “Akhand Bharat” (undivided India), but there is a crucial difference. The affinity being sought between nation-states is on the basis of a civilizational identity that unifies, not a politico-religious identity that isolates and divides. If India wishes to one day gather a dozen Indic nations, not just Hindu Nepal, under its own tent and break away from China’s dominance, it will need to emphasize the inclusionary rather than the exclusionary aspects of its civilization.

But that is a struggle for another day.

5.4 The Risks Of Inaction

India’s current antagonistic stance towards China carries growing risk. China is a rapidly growing power that shows no signs of slowing down, regardless of the relentless propaganda from the West predicting “the coming collapse of China”. That collapse has been predicted to happen “any time now” for the last two decades but has been belied again and again. It is a risky strategy for a smaller and weaker neighbor to believe such Western propaganda. As time goes by and China gets even stronger, India’s already limited options will become even bleaker.

India is sleepwalking into a defence and foreign policy nightmare with its current stance. This is not just foolish but completely avoidable.

China appears to have understood both the nature of the threat from the West, and the need for India and China to be united against it. India has not yet woken up.

Time is of the essence, and India can strike a good bargain right now at a time when China is facing a concerted, multi-pronged attack from the West and could use its support. Once China triumphs over the West, or after its power crosses a certain threshold, it will no longer care about India’s support, and India will have no bargaining power left.

There is no explanation for India’s current anti-China and pro-Western foreign policy except an ignorance of civilizational identity and history, and the related inability to think in civilizational terms, which renders both its leaders and its citizens vulnerable to superficial narratives that suit the ends of other powers.

PART 6 — SUMMARY AND CALL TO ACTION

The Indian ship of state is rudderless and adrift, its potential and promise perpetually belied. It needs to find its bearings and follow a determined course to reach its destiny.

A civilizational narrative is imperative to be able to see what is not apparent either from a contextless reading of history, or through the lens of self-serving political ideologies. Ignorance of India’s civilizational identity has set Indian against Indian internally, and Asian against Asian externally. This ignorance is costing India nothing less than the achievement of its civilizational destiny. In the near term, a polarized society and a shortsighted view of China as an enemy lead to nothing but growing internal strife and the prospect of humiliating external setbacks.

Internal unity is the essential prerequisite for India to achieve its destiny. All Indians need to be united by a common civilizational identity, not divided by sectarian ideological identities.

Indians must also see that a diabolical game of “divide and rule” is being played right now, under which they have been led to think of China as their enemy and of the West as their ally. This brainwashing is pervasive and frightening in its extent. In actual fact, the strategic adversary of both India and China is the West, which fundamentally acts to retain its global primacy and thereby deny them both their civilizational destiny.

India must switch sides post-haste so that the civilizations of the East can jointly wrest back control of their destiny.

India must thereafter grow its strength and bide its time until it can establish its own sphere of influence, and the Indic civilization can finally find its place in the sun.

When will Indians learn the lessons of their civilization’s history and do themselves the greatest favor at this critical juncture?