Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (31 page)

Neo-Curzonism is a tendency among those Indian strategic thinkers who anticipate continued economic growth in their country, and a foreign policy that should follow from it. It might be tempting to compare it to American neoconservatism. After all, it is an imperial-like vision that desires national greatness based on big ideas. But whereas neoconservatives seek to impose America’s ideals and system of governance abroad, neo-Curzonians are content with alliances with nondemocratic systems different from India’s own. Neo-Curzonians understand limits. They seek a return to Indian preeminence mainly within India’s geographical sphere of influence.

This is a vision less crude in spirit than the Greater India (Akhand Bharat) wished for by Hindu nationalists, and should not be confused with it. Whereas neo-Curzonians are more oriented to the Subcontinent’s
western frontier, seeking to expand India’s influence in the Middle East, Hindu nationalists are oriented toward the east—to Southeast Asia and Indonesia—which have been heavily influenced by India’s Sanskrit culture. Still, Curzon enjoyed especial prestige during the Hindu nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 1990s, when he was quoted frequently.

Quoting him served as a rebuke to India’s foreign policy during the Cold War, a time when (according to Jaswant Singh, the foreign minister from 1998 to 2002) India had lost much of its influence over the shadow zones of the Subcontinent because of Nehru’s preoccupation with non-alignment and third world liberation. The upshot was that nations such as Oman to the west and Malaysia to the east no longer took India seriously as a source of security. But with the end of the Cold War, and the unleashing of Indian capitalism in a globalized framework, neo-Curzonians have sought to define a new “forward” strategy for India that concentrates more specifically on Asia and the Indian Ocean, rather than on the world per se.

To be fair to Nehru, his foreign policy could emanate only from India’s domestic condition, which in the 1950s and 1960s was one of recent freedom from the British, with the wounds of imperialism still fresh. The result, explains Shashi Tharoor, a biographer of Nehru, was a foreign policy perhaps less appropriate for a state than for a liberation movement.
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But as the memory of British rule recedes, its more positive attributes can be appreciated. Hence a neo-Curzonian viewpoint represents much less an Indian variant of American neoconservatism than a return to the realpolitik of the viceroys who, while British, still operated from the same position on the map as India’s current rulers. Jayanta K. Ray of the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies in Kolkata told me that the viceroys “simply had great geopolitical sense in terms of projecting soft power throughout Asia, occasionally better sense than our own governments since 1947.”

A neo-Curzonian policy would seek to diminish the national borders of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma not through conquest, but through the revival of commercial cooperation with these countries, abetted by the development of roads and regional energy pipelines. Burma, especially, will likely be a zone of contention between India and China. China’s deepening transport and commercial links with Burma have compelled democratic India, starting in the late 1990s, to bid for
development projects there, train Burmese troops, and do less complaining about the plight of Burmese dissidents, despite the odious nature of the military regime there. If Burma were ever to liberalize and truly open its borders, geography and historical ties might favor India over China (notwithstanding local hostility toward the Indian merchant community early in the twentieth century).

“Greater connectivity” with India’s neighbors, declared Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh, can transform “each sub-region of the Subcontinent” into a web of “mutual dependencies for mutual benefit.” Translation: India’s economy is so much larger than any nearby state that a soft hegemony would be the natural consequence of greater economic cooperation. Asserting political primacy would not only be unnecessary, it would be counterproductive as well.

The difficulty with this vision is that it requires a society secure enough in its own domestic situation so it can dynamically focus outward. But that only partially describes India. While the American media have focused on the country’s high-tech “Bangalore” phenomenon, the more immediate reality is of a tumultuous third world society where a third of the population live on a dollar a day. As noted in
Chapter Seven
, India is beset with political violence between the government and various disaffected groups and castes, as well as by periodic eruptions of Islamic terrorism. Its eight northeastern states are home to no fewer than fifteen insurgencies manned by local tribes seeking self-rule. The country simply lacks the internal stability to open its borders to its neighbors in return for greater influence in its near abroad.

Take relations with Muslim Bangladesh, surrounded on three sides by India. People and goods could get from one part of India to the other most easily by passing through Bangladesh. This would aid economic development in India’s unstable northeast, as well as earn Bangladesh significant transit fees. In fact, a natural gas pipeline will be built bringing gas from Burma across Bangladesh to India. Because Bangladesh’s political system is in ruins, its only hope is through greater economic involvement with India. But that is precisely what people in Kolkata fear. Whereas an older generation that includes refugees from the 1947 partition harbors nostalgia for a lost hinterland, many others—especially the younger generation—see Bangladesh the way many Americans see Mexico: as a place you should literally erect a wall around. “Keep all those radical mullahs locked up on the other side of the border,” one prominent
Kolkata journalist told me. With more than ten million Bangladeshis living in India as economic refugees, Indians do not want more. There is also a certain historical comfort with the current border near Kolkata; as for many decades stretching deep into the nineteenth century, the Hindu elite in Calcutta and West Bengal looked down on the Muslim peasantry in East Bengal. By contrast, in the Punjab, there is an ecumenicalism of sorts toward fellow Punjabis living over India’s western border in Pakistan. In general, though, India is still struggling with the borders of partition.

A Greater India that projects its economic dynamism eastward into Southeast Asia, northward into China, and westward into the Middle East must do so first in its own subcontinental backyard. And that will take stores of courage and broad-mindedness that India presently lacks.

But beyond Greater India as a land power, there is the larger Indian Ocean littoral to consider. Curzon was focused on land power because in his day British control of the seas was taken for granted. But India, as we have seen, must now consider its role on the seas and the lands on the other side of them. India, writes Raja Mohan, is discarding the sentimentalism and third worldism with which it once considered eastern and southern Africa. Now it views Africa in terms of strategy and raw materials. The Indian navy currently patrols southern Africa’s Mozambique Channel, from where coal is transported to India’s increasingly energy-hungry, billion-plus population. When one considers that the Indian navy has occasionally escorted U.S. warships through the Malacca Strait, the picture is completed of a rising power, ever present from one end of the world’s third largest ocean to the other.

Of course, it is still the U.S. Navy that dominates the Indian Ocean. But because India’s navy is a significant presence in the region, yet obviously no match for America’s, neo-Curzonians require a de facto military alliance with the U.S. The word “de facto” is crucial. As I heard again and again in Kolkata, and in New Delhi, just as India was nonaligned during the Cold War, it must remain so in the future. Although it needs to tilt toward the United States to project its own power, it cannot afford to transparently alienate China, with which it will both compete for influence and do abundant trade.

Ultimately, more than any particular strategic vision, it may be the very fact of India’s mass democracy that will align it with the United States as well as gradually draw surrounding nations into its orbit, as
these nations struggle to replicate India’s own noncoercive, yet modestly effective governing authority. And that is something that the paternalistic Lord Curzon, who never thought in terms of Indian self-government, could not have imagined.

Yet, to be sure, Curzon will be a guiding spirit behind India’s foreign policy in the Indian Ocean and beyond. The strategic requirements of imperialism in his day are those of Indian nationalism in ours.

“Nationalism is a false god. It is unaesthetic,” said the Bengali poet, short story writer, novelist, and artist Rabindranath Tagore, who in 1913 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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The statement is highlighted among the exhibits at the poet’s rambling family home in north Kolkata. With its connecting courtyards softened by ranks of potted plants, and with the walls echoing the haunting sound of his poems put to music and adorned with iconic, modernistic paintings, the Tagore mansion has a small-scale, almost magical human quality to it that stands in opposition to the towering cold dimensions of Government House where Curzon worked.

Certainly there is a mystical quality to the long and white-bearded Tagore, yet to define him as a mystic—the messiah from the East, according to some—is to diminish him, by hinting that there is something windy and undisciplined about his work.
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The Harvard scholar Amartya Sen notes that to see Tagore, as many in the West have, as some sort of “sermonizing spiritual guru” is to take an astonishingly narrow view of him.
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In fact, what may give Tagore’s art a mystical quality is its studied yet natural universalism, anchored in a specific Indian and Bengali soil. Just as Curzon is the ultimate pragmatist for an age of Asia-centric, multi-polar balance-of-power politics, Tagore’s lifelong quest to get beyond nationalism establishes him as among the most relevant writers for an age of globalization even though he has been dead for almost seven decades.

Indeed, to express a deep regard for the work of Tagore is akin to expressing a deep regard for the work of the late Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin: it is a way of declaring the free and sanctified individual as the sovereign force in history. Tagore’s poems, more than ninety short
stories, and novels are the artistic equivalent of Berlin’s humanistic philosophy. Tagore’s output was that of a colossus. Human tears flow throughout his hypnotic stories like the monsoon rains. Like Berlin, he is never preachy; there is “no theory or philosophy” herein.
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His writings over the course of a lifetime are dominated by poignant tales of individual longing, often in an idyllic rural setting, that leave the heart uneasy: the young man who did not fulfill his ambition and yearns for the love of a woman he once could have had; the skeleton in a medical school that once belonged to a beautiful woman with hopes and dreams all her own; the poor clerk who spends the evenings in Sealdah station to save the cost of light; the ungainly teenage boy in Calcutta who gets critically ill and misses his mother in the countryside; the peddler who befriends a little girl because she reminds him of his own daughter back in Afghanistan; the nine-year-old child bride who takes refuge from her loneliness by writing in an exercise book; the woman who falls in love with a vagrant boy who shows up at her doorstep; a coughing naked boy in the cold who is slapped hard by his mother and thus, in Tagore’s vision, bears all the pain in the universe.

The stories go on, each one replete with compassion. Tagore’s humanism shines through by the totality of his concentration on small, seemingly insignificant individuals, whose hopes and dreams and fears fill an entire world. There is nothing grandiose about his work; rather, it is always defined by intimacy. A Bengali writer to the core, Tagore writes often of monsoons (“The Padma began to swallow up gardens, villages and fields in great hungry gulps”) and of ghats, the steps leading down to a river where people bathe, wash, and gossip, which also, in ways both concrete and symbolic in his literature, are places of arrivals and departures.
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Besides a comparison to Berlin, Tagore bears comparison to Leo Tolstoy for his mystical aspect and interest in education in a rural setting. Like Tagore, Tolstoy was the son of a landed noble family and, dissatisfied with formal education, established a school at Yasnaya Polyana just as Tagore did at Santiniketan in West Bengal, north of Calcutta. Both men were members of the gentry who glorified peasants while being somewhat less sympathetic to the rising middle class in the cities.

Above all, Tagore, as Amartya Sen suggests, because of the manner in which he harmonizes Hindu, Islamic, Persian, and British (that is, Western) culture, stands as a counterpoint to those who see the
contemporary world as a “clash of civilizations.”
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In a poem in his collection
Gitanjali
(“Song Offerings”), Tagore declares that he seeks a world

Tagore’s “narrow domestic walls” stand for a close-minded nationalism. Though he was a lover of Japanese culture, his words about Japan are inscribed on the wall of his Calcutta home: