Indian Council of World Affairs

Fellow Panelists and Dear Friends!

Let me begin by expressing my gratitude to The Geojuristoday, a student organization, seeking to bring together the disciplines of international relations, diplomacy, defence, and law, for taking the timely initiative to organize Rakshamanthan in collaboration with the United Services Institution of India (USI), India’s oldest military think-tank and ICWA’s MoU partner.

2.  Friends, humanity stands at a cusp today. We see a multiplicity of conflicts around us. There is deep polarization. Ideological confrontations and radicalism refuse to let go. Inter-faith stress is growing. Social relations are fractured. And analysts are predicting a world-wide recession amidst sharpening geo-political divides.

3.  It is at such a time, amidst the geo-political shifts, that we stand here to ponder and give shape to a New World Order by drawing advantage from the situation we collectively find ourselves in, by refusing to accept our predicament as an inheritance of loss, and by harnessing our collective strengths to turn the tide.

4.  The generations living today are faced with a challenging task. We have to craft a people-centric International Order, the objective of which would be the absence of war; long-term peace, stability and security; harmonious and friendly inter-State relations premised on respect, trust, cooperation, inter-dependence, dialogue & diplomacy, & sovereign equality; and multipolarity.

5.  We know simply by observing the current realities today that the world is increasingly moving towards multipolarity. Analysts are also saying that world has already become multipolar in the wake of the multiplicity of changes taking place in world politics since 2008 – the year when the world hit the nadir with the international financial crisis being one of the key reflections of that.

6.  Let us try to visualize multipolarity. Let’s say the world is like a house on stilts, which must never be allowed to fall or collapse. While all the stilts have some inherent strength, the stilts are not same – some are thick, some thin, some weak, some strong. When a weak stilt gives way, all others share the burden to maintain the balance, especially the surrounding ones and the strong ones, until the weak one is repaired and made strong enough and the house remains intact and secure -forever. By ‘stilts’, I mean countries, the political and administrative units of the world, and by the ‘house on stilts’ I mean a multipolar world.

7.  Such a visualization of multipolarity lends itself to:

• long-term stability, and here we do not mean ‘long-term’ as in decades but as in centuries;
• distributed power, distributed responsibilities and better discharge of duties;
• maximizing the options available to the weakest (and not constrained to only one or either/or as has been the case since World War II).
• Diversity and pluralism.
• Sound balance between self-dependence and inter-dependence in the interest of the well-being of the people.
• A fairer world.

8.  In a multipolar world, different poles need not necessarily be of equal power but they need to be sufficiently capable to shoulder responsibilities all along the local-global continuum and along the politico-socio-eco-cultural spectrum individually or collectively. They have to be able to address crises at global, regional and national scale. The poles have to be capable to contribute to collective rule-making, norm-setting and implementation. Multilateralism and multi-polarity reinforce each other.

9.  The poles have to gain acceptance of others to be treated as a pole. In the Indian thought, which believes in the maxim of ‘vasudhaiva kutumbakam’ or the world is a family, the poles are like elders who you turn to for guidance in times of crises or otherwise. It is the pull of principles (and not capital) that attracts everyone to the poles – what we generally call as soft power or civilizational ethos. The poles themselves are expected to base their actions on morality, magnanimity, benevolence and a high sense of duty especially towards nurturing the not so strong. The Mahabharata, for instance, provides astute guidance for statecraft and the conduct of inter-state affairs with the objective of upholding the Dharma or the righteous order.

10.  Did India historically have a tryst with multipolarity? The answer to that is yes as the historians tell us. In the period around 6^th century BC, prior to the Buddha and prior to the rise of the Mauryan empire, 16 mahajanapadas (translated as ‘a large people’s realm’) co-existed in India spanning the space between what is presently northern Afghanistan and the borders of Myanmar. They included Gandhara, Kamboj, Kuru, Panchala, Avanti, Vajji, Anga. Magadha, Mathura, Kasi, Kosala, etc. Some of them were monarchies while others were republics with electoral democracy. These need to be studied for gaining deeper insights into history’s lessons for our future. I understand that Chanakya’s Arthashastra too provides a look into the inter-state relations among the mahajanapadas.

11.  Has the world ever been multipolar? To my mind, the answer to that is no. We have seen civilizations come and go at different points of time in history, empires have risen or fallen and have ceased to exist, we have seen a gradual decrease in kingdoms and monarchies over the centuries. Powerful individual civilizations, empires, and kingdoms have held sway for most part of world’s history. Battles and wars for establishing supremacy, for serving ambition and greed, for making another people subservient, have been the order of the day for far too long. Such a history, to my mind, represents an eternal search for stability and a political system at the global scale which will lend itself to long-term predictability, harmony and human upliftment. While rise in modern states and democracies have lent themselves to equity, the world today as we know it is a far cry from a fair and equitable world order. Given the possibilities, multipolarity is surely worth a try. This is the ‘yukti’ (strategy; policy), to my mind, for the world.

12.  If this is the yukti for the world, then what should be the yukti, or jugat as they say in spoken language, for India? Surely, the two have to be in harmony with each other. So, keeping history’s lessons in mind, India which is on the rise and whose rise is in accord with the world as is generally acknowledged, must make its contribution to building a multipolar world through devising and deploying diplomatic and defense strategies that accelerate such an outcome. And yes, one thing is for sure, jugat to lagaani hogi – strategies and ‘yuktis’ will have to be developed and deployed all along for the sake of improved living.

Thankyou!

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