For the two rising Asian giants, India and China, manufacturing consensus, even by means of re-inventing tradition, is no easy enterprise. However, a return to the civilisational roots can resolve most problems they face today. let's drop the savagery and become civilised again
Manufacturing consensus, even by means of reinventing tradition, is no easy enterprise, especially when it entails bringing together people from different communities and backgrounds into one fold. But for the two rising Asian giants — India and China — it seems to be the central objective at present. While the Chinese leadership has visualised its nationalist aspirations under the notions of the China dream (Zhongguo meng) and the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing), the Indian dream of reconstructing a new India (bhavya bharat) is still taking shape. As the two countries embark on the realisation of their respective historic missions, resonances from the past are tremendously striking.
To begin with, the Modi Government’s initiatives to transform India and reclaim its traditional grandeur seem to draw heavily on the customs of the Indus valley civilisation. For instance, the new smart cities initiative appears to be aimed at achieving the same level of urban planning as seen during the Indus valley civilisation. Narendra Modi’s obsession with toilets and the Swachch Bharat Abhiyan resonate a good deal of the acclaimed drainage/sanitation systems and the elaborate communal baths of the Bronze age civilisation. The drive for demonetisation, a reform which still remains not properly understood and has been the victim of much controversy, seems to be putting in place a society with low concentration of wealth as was the case in ancient India.
Even the norms of administration seem to change in favour of the traditional practice of the temple-priest administration as the preferred mode of governance and distributing social welfare, as was the case with the temple-granaries distribution network of ancient India. This is evident in the appointment of Yogi Adityanath as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.
Developing accountability framework through this mix of religion and administration remained steeped in antiquity. The hand of history also became evident in India’s increasing trade ties with Bahrain (Dilmun), the first historically recorded maritime trade route in the world, and Oman (Magan) in the Arabia.
The parallels are even more striking when we consider the case of China. The cradle of civilisation seems to be shifting to the central provinces of Shaanxi (the birth place of the Silk Road) and around the Huang He River as in ancient China. Its forays into construction of monumental architecture are shaping up in the proposals of building the Xiongan New Area (XNA) in Hebei Province as a new capital/sub-capital. With its One Belt One Road initiative, China has set the ball rolling for trade routes to connect it with Egypt and Arabia through Xinjiang via Central Asia.
The peacock now flies west to the Byzantine. The country that invented the gunpowder is back to being the biggest military power in recent times, endorsing a military strategy of ‘deterrence by threat’.
Of course, a kung fu panda may one day dump the peacock’s nuclear arsenal and weapons into the South China Sea and establish world peace, but that time is not yet. The inventor of the compass, paper-making and printing is back to having the largest number of patents on inventions and IPRs registered on its name. And even in the sphere of religion, the revival of Confucius, and the emphasis on filial piety have returned to haunt the ideological and cultural campaigns of the present.
Both, India and China seem to be at a critical stage of technological and cultural development that heralds a tectonic shift, China being the manufacturing factory of the world already and India catching up with its Make in India campaign. In fact, India has been the biggest beneficiary of an unconstrained growth story escaping from the gaze of the West, while China has been bracing the heat of containment by the US and its allies.
And though much ado has been made about China’s growing imperialist ambitions, it deserves some credit for fitting in the shoe as the US retreats, especially because there is a huge difference between China’s approach to Africa (which was interestingly also the source of material prosperity of the Bronze Age civilisations) and other nations and the imperialism of the West; at the time when the British colonised India it was still largely renowned for its wealth and splendour — ‘the golden bird’, which the British ruthlessly exploited, and so was the case with China before its ‘century of humiliation’ at the hands of the barbarians, but Africa is far from a prosperous country at the moment. Meanwhile, the US with its rising sectarian violence seems headed towards being reduced to the few sects of inter-fighting tribes that it had traditionally been.
In this change of the world order and revitalisations of nations, the question that arises now is not just whether this is the breakdown of the US hegemony and the institutions it helped to proliferate, but whether this is the breakdown of the entire Westphalian model of nation-state based on the idea of sovereignty and respecting boundaries entailing ‘good fences make good neighbours’, which has engendered nothing but conflicts and internecine warfare witnessed in the two world wars over the 350 years of its existence, a third one being desperately avoided.
With the rise of China and India, the return of the Egyptian and Babylonian civilisations, along with the Western peripheries of Meso America and South America (which combine to make the six great ancient civilisations) it seems history is coming full circle to the return of the civilisation, albeit in a highly modernised and digitised form of megalopolises abetted by changing technology or rather the advent of space age civilisations.
Even more overwhelming is the issue whether we are learning from history and using the past to serve the present or is history itself at playIJ Has the ‘wheel of history’ indeed come full circle over the last 4,000 yearsIJ If indeed it has, is this the victory of the civilisation paradigm, which reigned steadfast for more than 3,500 years over the nation-state paradigm which could barely last 350 yearsIJ
As far as China and India are concerned, the two need to concede that, if China has the mandate of heaven to rule the world, then India’s glorious traditions in science, technology and culture have also existed as old as time. The two have to learn to co-exist by accommodating each other’s interests if they wish to live side-by-side as good neighbours for another 4,000 years.
Threatening a military intervention would not procure for China what it seeks from India and upping the ante as far as Chinese Achilles’ heels in Tibet, Taiwan and Xinjiang are concerned would not obtain for India what it desires. The two have much to gain from mending the wall the ‘civilised’ way — a challenge they will face repeatedly sharing borders with each other.
The return to civilisation would in a sense then forebode the renegotiation of China’s frontiers by granting genuine autonomy to its restive frontiers through a system of tributes and trade and the return of the expatriates from the Tibetan (especially the Dalai lama) and Xinjiang communities back to their homeland and a true opportunity for India to resolve its Pakistan dilemma. let’s drop the savagery and become civilised again!
(The writer is author of China’s Discursive Nationalism: Contending in Softer Realms)