Sunday Posts

Prediction is a perilous business but it pays to be ready. If 2016 was the start of a worldwide reconfiguration of ideas, institutions and alliances, 2020 is poised to be the year when the contours of the new future become visible. When Brexit finally happens and Trump betters Biden, the benign post-imperial configuration of the twentieth century would give way to a muscular reassertion of Anglo-American hegemony. The commercial and financial globalisation of the previous decades would now bring about a political one: The various regional entrepots melting into a politics of new spheres of influence. At the wake of Donald Trump's lovefest, many Indians - though not necessarily its government - want their country to belong to the Anglo-American camp. It's a country that loved the previous wave of globalisation and benefitted from it through the deployment of its English-speaking IT workers who brought home the Dollar. Its great hope for the future is, some argue, in be...

America finds India an unreliable ally, to its surprise.  George W Bush will be remembered for his many misadventures in Foreign Policy, but he claimed a legacy in this one important aspect - attempting to usher in a new American engagement in Asia through a deepening friendship with India. This hope was perhaps reciprocated at the time: India's outgoing Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, cites India's Nuclear Power cooperation with America as the biggest achievement of his ten years in power. At the time, the American engagement with India was hailed with an expectation to be as momentous as Nixon's engagement with China. However, this shift was contentious in America as in India. For Americans, it was some sort of a balancing act after decades of Pro-Pakistan stance after the inevitable seeding of democracy and street politics in that country. It is rather ironic that it was democracy that was cited as the reason for favouring India ever so suddenly: For Indians...

India faces a momentous election in approximately 18 months time, but next week, its first battles will be fought. Gujrat's enigmatic Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, will face elections in his own state, and most probably win. A big win, as predicted, will set him on course to be the Prime Ministerial candidate for the Hindu Chauvinist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), which will, given the woes of the current ruling coalition, put him in a pole position to win the premiership. This will be a tragedy for three reasons.  First, this will turn the debate about India's future into a debate about its past : Mr Modi, despite his new development-friendly avatar, represent a Hindu supremacist view of India. His track record, which he is desperate to leave behind, irreversibly features the pogrom he organized or encouraged or tolerated (depending on what one believes), which killed more than 2000 muslims and displaced ten times that number, making Gujrat a more homogeneous state tha...

There is talk of reviving the commonwealth, particularly among the British Tories, as they drift away from Europe. William Hague talks about putting the C back in FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and various advantages of doing business with commonwealth countries are mused about. There are sceptics, such as The Economist, who highlights the various roadblocks, and particularly laments that various commonwealth members are not compliant followers of the British, or Western, view of the world. [Read the article here ] The point, however, is not whether commonwealth is relevant from the point of view of Britain, but from its other members, particularly the old colonies. Unlike what the modern British citizens would like to believe (and a comment to that effect was made on The Economist article), Commonwealth was set up much before the liquidation of colonies, and not to assuage the post-colonial 'guilt'. Commonwealth was extended, after India's independence, with mo...