We Indians, regardless of sub identity, revel in intrigue. We tend to be engrossed or enthralled by interplay of personalities, charisma, venality or baser instinct. Politics thus remains the topic that engages far more national attention than would be healthy. Even our mythos or histories are informed by recounting of most profound realpolitik and drama as exemplified in Mahabharata. Politics and politicking is deeply engrammed in our social and individual DNA.
Perhaps this is one of the fundamental reasons that this most ancient of civilizations and one of the youngest among free nation states, remains largely blind sided by a fundamental dictum of human society. Politics, or the process of acquiring and exercising power in all forms of organization, follows Geopolitics. Our politicians and bureaucrats, as author and keen geopolitical analyst Arindam Mukherjee points out in his latest book, ‘Contours of the Greater Game – Access, Control and Geopolitical Orders’, remain mired in reactive signals in response to epochal shifts which comprise geopolitical play and strategy formation between nations.
However, obsession with political events, processes and personalities is not an exclusively subcontinental phenomenon. It’s a feature of most civilizational States. Whether they are tiny ones like Israel, or monolithically authoritarian ones like China and Russia. All these nations, including current global Hegemon United States are mature hands at playing the Greater Game of power, the recipient of which game’s tide have been staid or hitherto meek entities like India.
India is the newest entrant in modern geopolitics to the game of control over global resources and access to its distribution. Its official approach, however stays wedded to lofty notions of morality or transactional manoeuvering.
This book acts as a beacon that shines the zero sum approach based geopolitical paradigms that inform decision making and approaches defining Western geopolitical games that developed in the 19th and 20th centuries.
I view this book at once as an excellent primer to understand the mind of the actors running the US led western deep state, as well as the influences that continue shaping private decisions and public reactions. The utility of this deeply researched and liberally referenced treatise by Mukherjee, a veteran at penning articles and books on the subject, is to be viewed in that context.
Overall, the substance of the book follows a singular narrative arc which leads to an inevitable conclusion, while flensing through the nerves and sinews of a simulated cadaver of British and American transnational intrigue and principal anatomical system within. The verbal scalpel used is precise, historically rooted and draws on multi disciplinary joining of dots and analysis.
The style is akin to panache employed by say, global financial market raconteur Michael Lewis, in deep diving to the core of reasons why global power gets exercised and responded to, as it does. This allows readers to stay engaged in a topic which would otherwise appear too dry and abstruse for most readers. Do not however expect a monograph, or pithy series of related articles. Prepare to spend hours of leisure or study in absorbing and researching further to truly grasp the import of this narrative. As mentioned, suggestions for further reading or viewing of digital sources such as podcasts are liberally strewn. Treat this tome as the starting reference compendium of a library of writing on the subject.
The author doesn’t shy from courting possible controversy in his two principled diagnosis.
A. The world as humanity has experienced it, from the European industrial revolution and the advent of the colonial project post treaty of Westphalia in 1648, is run by a group of ‘Global Nomads’, a catch-all phrase for nationally agnostic mercantile class which largely controls vast, principal levers of global finance, monetary flows, investments and seeks to influence all events via further control mechanisms such as diverse media, promotion or demotion of entire religions, political ideologies. Via controlling devices of mass influence, nation states are relegated to notional constructs, and politicians as puppets on strings, selected across political spectra to reinforce the notion of choice in democracies, or manifest national destiny drawing on history in other forms of governance
B. The Global Nomads have taken the hierarchy of competence, a notion fine-tuned and articulated by Jordan Peterson in his clinical psychology avatar, evolved from Roman meritocracy and diluted via Christianity, in turn framed by the author as a control device over low productivity masses, to the present, postmodern nihilism and cultural Marxism/ wokeism that celebrates mediocrity and low competence in favour of mass somnambulance of entitlements.
I support this contention, which is amply supported in the book. The Mercantile Colonial project didn’t extinguish itself. It evolved to a global network of capital-based control of production, consumption and social engineering. Multiple ideologies of the left and right as well as multiplicity of religious choice have been invented, with exclusivity or salience as features to keep masses divided and controlled. Conflicts are created and evergreened around these identities as a means to further agendas of access and control.
The book sticks to opening up how the world runs and works from a western prism. Dramatis personnae include the deepest influencers on western policy and include Halford McKinder, Mahan, Spykman to Kjellen, Mearsheimer, Kaplan, the Kagans and Victoria Nuland.
The historic arcs from Roman era down to colonial projects of Britain or post-World War American exceptionalism based imperial order, euphemistically titled ‘rules based order’, help establish the world in which we live.
The conclusion from the Indian perspective in such an analytical framework, boils down to two binary choices, according to the author. Create an Asian alliance of the type BRICS represents or wholeheartedly cast India’s lot with the West.
In my opinion, that is the reductionist logic the West and particularly the USA uses to cast the world in neat, convenient boxes. One remembers the apotheosis of this logic in George W Bush’s oversimplification to, “You’re either with us, or against us.”
That it is indeed the way the West would like to view us is certainly true. Are those India’s only choices implies capitulation to western binary thinking. Personally, as a one-time student of University Physics, I don’t consider we need be confined to western binaries. Qubits are better at processing vast amounts of real or imagined data than binary bits. I am comfortable with the fuzzy logic of behavioural manipulation and the existence of myriad choices. In observing them, I change them, bring them to life.
However, such further analysis would require addition of complex geo-economic perspectives that run the risk of losing several layers of audience which author Arindam Mukherjee prudently avoids.
In leaving us with the western geopolitical binary presented to India, the stark realpolitik Indian decision makers must confront, and resolve is brought to sharp relief.
An excellent follow up to his earlier ‘A Matter of Greed’, published in 2012, anybody with an active interest in how the world works and India’s place in it would benefit from.
‘Contours of the Greater Game’ is published by BluOne Ink and printed by Thompson India Press. It’s currently available hardbound, at 280 pages length, from all major bookstores and via Amazon.
