India must create her own Silk Routes

A very large class of authors of all hues have hinted in their work that India is intellectually richer than China. And vast bodies of works which have examined the past for their historical  and allegorical importance have indicated the same. While on such issues, hard empirical data may never be available, the purpose of this blog piece of mine is not really that. While the edge India may have in that arena not-withstanding, there is clearly another where China eminently excels India today, as much it did in the past and that is Geo-Politics.

While in the blog that I penned just a few days ago, I did say, just like the Soviets, the Indian army must modernize and sweat while in peace, so that it can be galvanised into action when needed in no time, just like Russia did, to dash the American dream of hegemonising Syria. 

Having said that, I believe, more than a well oiled, fleet footed and modern fighting machine, what India needs is a make over of its egregiously week willed geopolitical strategy. In fact it needs a complete re-think and make over, something that took off well with Modi’s ascendancy, but lost steam and direction somewhere down the road.

Post the cartographic mis-adventure that the British did with India, just before they decided to leave India to her destiny, carving out an amorphous Pakistan and Bangladesh from within her, one of the most brazen exercises of creation of nation states based not on ethnicity (which is usually the case) but based on religion, a robust geo-political strategy has become an imperative for the following reasons :

1.Creating a sphere of influence so that wars don’t take place, there is peace and prosperity

2.Ensuring that the 1.25 bn and growing Indians have more land and resources tied to land to live on than to constantly jostle with each other for the same piece 

Geopolitics today is a very subtle art of diplomacy and can help create a virtual sphere of influence and an ecosystem that attenuates the pressure on finite indigenous resources.

Vietnam, Lagos and Cambodia were under the Chinese sphere of influence once upon a time. Nepal and Tibet were under the Indian sphere of influence. While India has lost both, China has gained not only them, but Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Mongolia, parts of south eastern Russia, Pakistan, PoK, several African countries and much more.

While the American sphere of influence once upon a time followed its US Dollar denominated aid, direct or indirect military intervention, the Chinese model is far more sustainable as it rode on foreign investments, trade and the Chinese diaspora, which is what I call the modern silk routes.

Despite India being the spiritual beacon for centuries to several countries of SE Asia including Japan and China, she could never create her own silk routes, and consequently failed to perpetuate her sphere of influence. Despite her people being personally more productive and innovative, the state failed them, right from the time of Nehru, when a protracted political mis-judgement inflicted a humiliating defeat on India in the 1962 Indo-China war. 

If we want to alleviate poverty and suffering from the country and if we seek to provide a basic standard of living to the poor, whose number is increasing every year, the modern silk routes that we create which help us exploit resources overseas and would be as important a factor as growing the domestic economy.