Drawing lessons from European conflicts
IN 2006, the Chinese were glued to a television documentary that was produced in China, The Rise of Great Powers. It noticed that there was no ‘fall’ of a great power. Rather, what once was a great power simply became irrelevant; the world changed and moved on, the once-great power continued to do whatever it was doing — sometimes with ever greater energy and ferocity — unaware that it had become irrelevant. Some of that seems to be playing out in the world currently. Are we in India prepared to deal with the consequent transformations? Or will we follow Indian tradition and remain unprepared?
As winter approaches, European countries might decide to force their will on those who hold the key to energy. Do remember that in four Indo-Pak wars, neither of the warring parties attacked any significant infrastructure in each other’s territory. In contrast, in Europe, within a few months of hostilities, the rivals are already inflicting mortal harm on each other, targeting civilians and even hospitals. The attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines and the Kerch Strait Bridge were just the beginning. The warring groups have already promised to intensify mutual destruction. Sometimes they promise limited annihilation; sometimes, total annihilation.
Today we just have to glance through European and American newspapers to realise that those societies and their leaders are already working out a prelude to another major bout of mutual destruction. “Serious, devastating and threatening” is how Pope Francis officially characterised the situation in Europe in his statement of October 2, 2022. No one paid heed to him.
For India to emerge as a winner in such a scenario would require us to be mentally prepared and understand that European conflicts quickly escalate into endgames. That has been the European way for many centuries and we ignore it at our own risk. The two Great European wars of the first half of the 20th century were not unique in their viciousness; they were in harmony with a long historical pattern that underlies the history of Europe in which the rivals try to destroy each other as completely as is physically possible. In those wars, India got embroiled because it did not have an option. However, while India may not get entangled in the European conflicts of tomorrow, their nature is likely to create problems for India. How India deals with those problems would significantly affect the lives of Indians.
For historical and cultural reasons, the Indian mindscape has great difficulty in imagining destruction, let alone one that is total. In the autumn of 1947, we were caught napping by the Pakistanis who invaded Kashmir. Over a decade later, in the autumn of 1962, we were caught unprepared and lost when China invaded. These defeats were quickly forgotten and reconstructed into an infructuous blame game. The thing to remember is that Indians tend to avoid threatening subjects. They prefer to ‘adjust’ to whatever comes their way rather than force changes. Adjusting to the other, adjusting to nature and finding the right balance are features that have characterised the Indian way of life. This ignores the possibility that there could be some challengers, some transformations, that might not be amenable to mutual adjustments. To the Indian mindscape, such a possibility never seems real.
In that sense, we have been significantly different from Europe and, much more fortunate. Muslim chroniclers do talk about the invasions of India from the 12th century onwards and boast that lakhs of non-Muslims were killed but, even those memories faded after a while, giving us the possibility of living in a country where a person’s belief system did not matter. On becoming our own master in 1947, we used a word of European origin, ‘secularism’, to describe this very Indian lived reality.
Few in India bothered to notice that even the idea of secularism emerged in Europe after hundreds of years of mutual killings in the name of religion. The people of Europe till the 17th century were condemned to have the same religion as their sovereign. Ultimately, after millions had been killed in the wars of religion, the Pope stepped in to suggest a more civilised way of life i.e., the people would not be compelled to be of the same religion as the sovereign. Over the years, this thought came to be called ‘secularism’. In India, people were always free to pursue whatever religion they wanted to.
This quality of life, of adjusting to differences in thought and belief, is something Indians take for granted. Till the East India Company showed us, we never even believed that rulers could have much impact on the life of the common man. We certainly never believed in annihilation.
Total annihilation with nothing to succeed it seems foreign to Indic thought. Even the mythological tandav performed by Shiva is said to be for the purpose of regeneration of the good.
With its billion-plus population, India survived as a democracy because there was a substantial but unstated consensus that we should not tread on each other’s toes, allow everyone space to grow, and if needed, use the authority of the State to stop those who try to, intend to, hope to, impose themselves on others. After Independence, we preferred to attribute this to our Constitution or our leadership. We forgot that similar so-called Constitutions in other once-colonised nations survived for barely a few years, before being replaced by dictatorship. That social consensus substantially continues to exist.
What seems wanting is a sense of self-esteem. We continue to evaluate ourselves primarily through western eyes. That would never do. Depending on our own judgements and appreciation of lived realities is always better. To be able to do that, we need greater confidence in ourselves. We also need a much stronger sense of ground reality.
An apocalypse might be around the corner. To get ready for it, physical resources in terms of food, money and munitions are not enough. We need to accept that others might be involved in an endgame. To survive as a society, we need to marshal our mental resources. Above all, we need to value our way of life and be ready to defend it.
