Don’t make a mistake. India is no longer a moral wimp. It doesn’t hold its horses anymore when armed Pakistani terrorists invade its financial capital, and massacre thousands. It doesn’t go for bilateral talks after terrorists kill its citizens and soldiers. Since it knows there are no permanent friends or enemies in foreign policy, it believes in sharp verbal and tactical responses to the slightest taunt. The MEA was castigated on social media for overdoing its response to a pop star’s tweet. But the lines between indicate that India is done with giving a pass, however small, to any provocation. At the beginning of a New Order, overkill is the play. The soft touch comes later when enemies disguised as friends raise a toast to wealth and weapons at banquets of gregarious distrust.
It is the natural tendency of empires to have enemies. History is an obituary of imperial dreams, a litany of war, conquest, civilisation and eventual decline. The Roman Empire lasted 1,000 years. The Soviet Empire a mere 69 years. Today is the age of the American Empire, which rose from the ashes of World War II to dominate the world scientifically, culturally, diplomatically and politically. China is its main challenger, although it isn’t really a superpower.
The word ‘superpower’ was coined by American international relations scholar William TR Fox in 1944. It is a powerful country with the global influence and ability to intervene militarily in any restive region where it has strategic interests and resolve conflicts in its favour. The Romans did it in Gaul and Brittany. Ashoka in Kalinga. Fox applies territorial influence as the index to determine a country’s superpower status: China, according to him, is a regional power, because its military and technological power is not global. Its military misadventure in Vietnam in 1979 is a devastating example of its limitations. Its production of warships can never outpace the US Navy’s power in the Indian Ocean.
Fox could call India, under its hawkish prime minister Narendra Modi, an emerging superpower. This is what is making its Western allies nervous: the Canadian crisis is an example of white nations ganging up against a country which, in spite of being their major counter to China, could be a future rival. Superpowers like powerful allies, but allies not too powerful with independent interests. Modi, using the showmanship of G20, BRICS and the UN signalled that India is no longer a handmaiden to international interests, however friendly they may be.
The birth of any empire is midwifed by the pain of change. Old institutions are shaken up, or even destroyed in the catharsis of transition. Old mores go out of the window and a new aesthetic, considered tasteless by many, comes into being. Established charters of governance and public conduct are extinguished. All new emperors are driven by their personal vision to father a new epoch by expanding their nation’s glory and their own. Getting a new constitution, changing the country’s name, delimitation of constituencies to sideline regions are all exercises to leave an imperial imprimatur for posterity. But posterity is a bitch. It is the dust of long gone empires that covers the inevitable treachery of the future. In the casino of history, where the chips fall mark both past losses and the start of a new power game.