The Post-American World: Release 2.0 (20 page)

Sir Monier Monier-Williams, the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University from 1860 to 1899, was perhaps the first Westerner to study Hinduism comprehensively. Born in Bombay, he founded Oxford’s Indian Institute, which became a training ground for future leaders of the British Raj. His book
Hinduism
, first published in 1877, drew on ancient Sanskrit texts as well as practical knowledge of contemporary Hinduism. He wrote,

[Hinduism] is all tolerant. . . . It has its spiritual and its material aspect, its esoteric and exoteric, its subjective and objective, its rational and its irrational, its pure and its impure. It may be compared to a huge polygon. . . . It has one side for the practical, another for the severely moral, another for the devotional and imaginative, another for the sensuous and sensual, and another for the philosophical and speculative. Those who rest in ceremonial observances find it all-sufficient; those who deny the efficacy of works, and make faith the one requisite, need not wander from its pale; those who are addicted to sensual objects may have their tastes gratified; those who delight in meditating on the nature of God and Man, the relation of matter and spirit, the mystery of separate existence, and the origin of evil, may here indulge their love of speculation. And this capacity for almost endless expansion causes almost endless sectarian divisions even among the followers of any particular line of doctrine.

The most striking example of Hinduism’s absorptive powers is the way it incorporated Buddhism. Buddha was born on the Indian subcontinent, and Buddhism was founded in India, but there are virtually no Buddhists in the country today. This is not a consequence of persecution. In fact, the opposite. Hinduism so fully absorbed the message of Buddhism that it simply enveloped the creed. Now, if you want to find Buddhists, you must go thousands of miles from where it was founded, to Korea, Indonesia, and Japan.

The Bengali writer Nirad Chaudhuri was driven to exasperation by Hinduism’s complexity. “The more one studies the details of the religion the more bewildering does it seem,” he wrote. “It is not simply that one cannot form a clear-cut intellectual idea of the whole complex, it is not possible even to come away with a coherent emotional reaction.”
⁸
Hinduism is not really a “religion” in the Abrahamic sense of the word but a loose philosophy, one that has no answers but merely questions. The only clear guiding principle is
ambiguity
. If there is a central verse in Hinduism’s most important text, the
Rig Veda
, it is the Creation Hymn. It reads, in part,

Who really knows, and who can swear,

How creation came, when or where!

Even gods came after creation’s day,

Who really knows, who can truly say

When and how did creation start?

Did He do it? Or did He not?

Only He, up there, knows, maybe;

Or perhaps, not even He.

Compare that with the certainties of the Book of Genesis.

So what does all of this mean for the real world? Hindus are deeply practical. They can easily find an accommodation with the outside reality. Indian businessmen—who are still largely Hindu—can thrive in almost any atmosphere that allows for trade and commerce. Whether in America, Africa, or East Asia, Indian merchants have prospered in any country they live in. As long as they can place a small idol somewhere in their home for worship or meditation, their own sense of Hinduism is fulfilled. As with Buddhism, Hinduism promotes tolerance of differences but also absorption of them. Islam in India has been altered through its contact with Hinduism, becoming less Abrahamic and more spiritual. Indian Muslims worship saints and shrines, celebrate music and art, and have a more practical outlook on life than many of their coreligionists abroad. While the rise of Islamic fundamentalism over the last few decades has pushed Islam in India backward, as it has everywhere, there are still broader societal forces pulling it along with the Indian mainstream. That may explain the remarkable statistic (which may prove to be an exaggeration) that though there are 150 million Muslims in India who watched the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan, not one Indian Muslim has been found to be affiliated with Al Qaeda.

And what of foreign policy? It is clear that Indians are fundamentally more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty than many Westerners, certainly than Anglo-Americans. Indians are not likely to view foreign policy as a crusade or to see the conversion of others to democracy as a paramount national aspiration. The Hindu mind-set is to live and let live. So, Indians are also averse to public and binding commitments of the country’s basic orientation. India will be uncomfortable with a designation as America’s “chief ally” in Asia or as part of a new “special relationship.” This discomfort with stark and explicit definitions of friend and foe might be an Asian trait. NATO might have been the perfect alliance for a group of Western countries—a formal alliance against Soviet expansionism, with institutions and military exercises. In Asia most nations will resist such explicit balancing mechanisms. They might all hedge against China, but
none will ever admit it
. Whether because of culture or circumstance, it will be the power politics that dare not speak its name.

As in China, however, in India cultural DNA has to be layered with more recent history. In fact, India has lived through a unique Western experience as a part of the British Empire—learning English, adopting British political and legal institutions, running imperial policies. Liberal ideas now permeate Indian thought, to the point that they have become in many ways local. Nehru had his worldview and foreign policy formed of influences that were predominantly Western, liberal, and socialist. The debate about human rights and democracy that courses through the West today is one that finds a comfortable place in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai. Indian newspapers and NGOs raise the same concerns and alarms as Western ones do. They make the same critiques of government policy as those in London, Paris, and Washington. But these attitudes are most true of India’s English-speaking elite—still a minority in the country—that is in some ways more comfortable in the West’s world than in its own. (Ask an educated Indian businessman, scholar, scientist, or bureaucrat what was the last book he read in a language other than English.) Mahatma Gandhi was a more distinctly Indian figure. His foreign policy ideas were a mixture of Hindu nonviolence and Western radicalism, topped up with a shrewd practicality that was probably shaped by his merchant class background. When Nehru called himself the “last” Englishman to rule India, he sensed that as the country developed, its own cultural roots would begin showing more clearly and would be ruled by more “authentic” Indians. These crosscutting Western and Indian influences are playing themselves out on a very modern and fast-changing world stage, where economics and politics are pulling in sometimes different directions.

Nuclear Power

The proposed nuclear agreement between America and India offers a fascinating illustration of tension between a purely economic view of globalization, on the one hand, and power politics, on the other. In 2007, Washington put its relations with India onto a higher plane of cooperation with the negotiation of a nuclear agreement. This might sound like an issue for policy wonks, but the nuclear deal is actually a big deal. If successful, it will alter the strategic landscape, bringing India firmly and irrevocably onto the global stage as a major player, normalizing its furtive nuclear status, and cementing its partnership with the United States. It puts India on par with the other members of the nuclear club, America, Britain, France, Russia, and China.

According to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a country that had nuclear weapons in 1968 is a legitimate nuclear-weapon state, and any country that developed them later is an outlaw. (It was the mother of all grandfather clauses.) India, which exploded a nuclear device in 1974, is the most important country, and the only potential global power, that lies outside the nonproliferation system. The Bush administration has argued that bringing it in is crucial to the system’s survival. For similar reasons, Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (which is charged with monitoring and enforcing nonproliferation), has been a staunch supporter of the Indo-U.S. agreement.
⁹
The nuclear nonproliferation regime has always tempered idealism with a healthy dose of realism. The United States, after all, goes around the world telling countries that a few more nuclear warheads are dangerous and immoral—while holding on to thousands of nuclear weapons of its own.

For India, the nuclear deal comes down to something quite simple: Is India more like China or more like North Korea? New Delhi argues that the world should accept that India is a nuclear power, while India should in return be willing to make its program as safe and secure as possible. Until the Bush administration, for decades American policy was to try to reverse India’s weapons program, a fruitless task. India has spent thirty-three years under American sanctions without budging—even when it was a much poorer country—and anyone who understands the country knows that it would happily spend many more before even thinking about giving up its nuclear weapons.

From an economic point of view, the nuclear deal is not that crucial for India. It would provide the country with greater access to civilian nuclear technologies, which is important to its energy needs. But that’s a small part of its overall development trajectory. The incentives of globalization would seem to push New Delhi to stop wasting its time on this matter, focus on development while pushing off these concerns until a later date. There are many forms of alternative energy, and both Germany and Japan have managed to achieve great-power status without nuclear weapons.

India’s nuclear aspirations, however, are about national pride and geopolitical strategy. Many Indian politicians and diplomats resent the fact that India will always have second-class status compared with China, Russia, and the other major nuclear powers. In all those countries, not one reactor is under any inspection regime whatsoever, yet India would place at least two-thirds of its program under the eye of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The inequity with China especially offends New Delhi. Indian officials will quietly point out that China has a long history of abetting nuclear proliferation, most clearly through Pakistan. Yet the United States has an arrangement to share civilian nuclear technology with Beijing. India, they argue, is a democratic, transparent country with a perfect record of nonproliferation. Yet it has been denied such cooperation for the past thirty-six years.

On this issue, globalization and geopolitics operate on different levels. Many American advocates of nuclear disarmament—whom the Indians call “nonproliferation ayatollahs”—oppose the deal, or would settle for one only if India were to cap its production of fissile material. But, New Delhi says, look at a map: India is bordered by China and Pakistan, both nuclear-weapons states, neither of which has agreed to a mandatory cap. (China appears to have stopped producing plutonium, as have the other major powers, but this is a voluntary decision, made largely because it is awash in fissile material already.) India sees a mandatory cap as a one-sided nuclear freeze. This strategic reality figures into American calculations as well. The United States has long been opposed to a single hegemon dominating either Europe or Asia. Were India to be forced to cap its nuclear force—without corresponding constraints on China—the result would be a vast and growing imbalance of power in China’s favor. A former U.S. ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, has asked, Why is it in the United States’ long-term national interest to favor an arrangement by which China would become Asia’s dominant and unchallenged nuclear power?
¹⁰

Bizarrely, the real stumbling block to the deal has come not from Washington—Congress ratified the treaty in 2008—but from New Delhi. On being handed the offer of a lifetime, some leading Indian politicians and intellectuals have refused. “We don’t seem to know how to take yes for an answer,” a commentator observed on the Indian all-news channel NDTV. While the Indian prime minister and some others at the top of the Indian government saw the immense opportunities the deal would open up for India, others were blinded by old nostrums and prejudice. Many Indian elites have continued to view the world through a Nehruvian prism—India as a poor, virtuous Third World country, whose foreign policy was neutral and detached (and, one might add, unsuccessful). They understand how to operate in that world, whom to beg from and whom to be belligerent with. But a world in which India is a great power and moves confidently across the global stage, setting rules and not merely being shaped by them, and in which it is a partner of the most powerful country in history—that is an altogether new and unsettling proposition. “Why is the United States being nice to us now?” several such commentators have asked me. In 2007, they were still searching for the hidden hand.

China’s mandarin class has been able to rethink its country’s new role as a world power with skill and effectiveness. So far, India’s elites have not shown themselves the equals of their neighbors. The lower house of the Indian parliament finally ratified the treaty in August 2010, on the eve of a visit by President Obama, but the upper house has yet to approve it. Whichever way the nuclear deal goes, the difficulties of its passage in New Delhi highlight the central constraint on the exercise of Indian power in the years ahead. India is a strong society with a weak state. It cannot harness its national power for national purpose.