Some books record the decline of civilisations from a safe and scholarly distance. Rajiv Dogra’s How Nations Fail isn’t one of them. He pulls you into the wreckage of history with both hands, refuses to let go, and insists you understand the nuances of his geopolitical meditation. This former diplomat who served in some of the world’s most contested posting grounds brings both the erudition of a voracious reader and the moral force of a man who has watched history being made, and then mishandled from the inside.
The book’s opening describes a tribal ritual of Bastar where every year the gods are held accountable for delivery. Failed gods are stripped of divinity and banished to a corner of the temple yard: “Without divine power, they are mere figurines made of wood and stone.” The implied question is: what happens if we apply the Bastar model to world leaders? This sums up civilisational accountability wrapped in tribal wisdom allegory and that power’s deepest truths live in folk traditions, ancient texts, and in parables not meant to be political, but in reality, are.
The book’s historical range spans Sumerian city-states, the collapse of Angkor Wat, the demonetisation fiasco; with eclectic skill Dogra channels Cicero’s essay on old age and Tony Schwartz’s confession about co-authoring The Art of the Deal. Dogra treats historical examples through subtle allegory: “great civilizations are not murdered. Instead, they take their own lives”—a line borrowed from Toynbee, but essayed through the density of surrounding evidence. The ghosts of past civilisations haunt the pages, examining humanity’s foibles: Gobekli Tepe (c. 8000 BCE), Teotihuacan, the Indus Valley’s patient adjustment to shifting rivers and the labour-market failure that drained Angkor Wat of the workers who maintained its irrigation canals. These clarify how civilizations are sustained not by genius alone but by the unglamorous continuity of collective maintenance, which can unravel quickly when that continuity is sundered.
The book’s historical range spans Sumerian city-states, the collapse of Angkor Wat, the demonetisation fiasco; with eclectic skill Dogra channels Cicero’s essay on old age and Tony Schwartz’s confession about co-authoring The Art of the Deal
About sitting on television panels and watching Modi’s first swearing-in ceremony, Dogra confesses to initial credulity. He recounts learning about the “Gujarat Model” from a veteran Hindi journalist, then chasing down what it actually meant by talking to a Baroda industrialist friend whose tariff dispute with the state electricity board was resolved swiftly after a single meeting with then-Chief Minister Modi. The anecdote frames the future: a governance style built on the spectacle of decisive individual action, supported by an echo chamber staffed by advisors who, as the author drily notes, “dare not whisper to him that he may be wrong.”
Modi’s demonetisation drive following a ninety-minute presentation by small-time Pune entrepreneur Anil Bokil is treated with appropriate horror. Bokil had famously remarked “Modi has done the surgery without administering anaesthesia.” Dogra sums it up: “In short, Bokil was remarking on the enormity of that blunder.” The restraint is perfect. On a different note, the author describes Donald Trump operating “on the global stage as a mafia don would, with unholstered pistol and ready invectives.” But he is sanguine about America’s predicament. “The problem is not so much the US’s failure to lead… the problem is the failure of its leadership.”
The chapter on lying politicians boasts electrifying irony: “A lying politician does not lie as ordinary men lie; he does not stumble into falsehood out of confusion or error. He constructs his lies with precision.” The most revealing of the author’s inner life is in the epilogue, which begins with Gandhari’s curse as Dogra braids together Hindu cosmological time. He parks the contemporary in a framework capacious enough to hold catastrophe without being consumed. “Intellectuals were never meant to govern the world, they were meant to guard its conscience. They do not command. They illuminate.” How Nations Fail illuminates the writer’s hard-won understanding of the many ways greatness is squandered, institutions hollowed out, and how the world keeps stumbling toward crossroads it is ill-equipped to navigate.