Takshashila Institution - Indias Marathon: Reshaping the Post-Pandemic World Order

Praise for Indias Marathon

In a things-fall-apart world, where the geo-political and geo-economic stakes for an ascendant India are high, this book provides a compelling, out-of-the-box, arresting perspective of what the strategic choices are for the country. Its compass is forward-looking and its intellectual depth is profound as it traverses the key areas of Indias foreign policy engagement. The result is a high-resolution focus that straddles both the regional and global, enabling a clarity of vision and a range of policy alternatives that will strengthen our balancing capabilities in a situation of imbalanced multipolarity .

Ambassador Nirupama Menon Rao, former Foreign Secretary

Indias Marathon is a compelling vision of the challenges that India faces, and the potential it has to overcome them. It presents a clear, bold reform agenda and explains how India can leverage its strengths to influence the global stage while meeting the needs of its citizens. This timely book of the nations challenges and opportunities in a post-COVID world will be very insightful to policymakers and business leaders alike.

Nandan Nilekani, Chairman and co-Founder of Infosys,

Founding Chairman of UIDAI (Aadhaar)

COVID-19 introduced new unknown unknowns to the known unknowns of the emerging world order of earlier decades. This volume analyses this kaleidoscope of multiple variables and suggests an interesting menu of options for India to expand its footprint in a post-COVID world.

P.S. Raghavan, Chairman, National Security Advisory Board

Indias Marathon: Reshaping the Post-Pandemic World Order is that rare work of policy-oriented scholarship an ambitious tour of the future that delivers as much as it promises. Here is a truly multidisciplinary vision of plausible futures in our disrupted world, with an unapologetically India-centric worldview. It identifies how the complex shocks of the COVID-and-after era bring new risks but also fresh opportunities for India to shape the world order in ways that better reflect the interests of this exceptional nation and its one-sixth of humanity. This is a powerful contribution to global understandings of Indias critical place in the story of the 21st century.

Professor Rory Medcalf, Head of the National Security College, Australian National University

Author of Indo-Pacific Empire

As the worlds largest democracy, Indias rise as a major global power interests all democracies. This book lays out an India-centric quarter-century strategy for Indias transition to pre-eminence in the post-COVID world. The editors and contributors of Indias Marathon have laid out an elaborate plan of goals and reforms for anyone interested in Indias rise.

Husain Haqqani, Former Pakistan Ambassador to the U.S.

Indias Marathon is a bold and creative exercise in intellectual leadership. Its proposals for responding to a rapidly changing world order are both visionary and pragmatic, bursting with reforms and reappraisals that are India-focused but of global interest. Its contributors dare to reconsider foreign and domestic policy from the ground up without the false comforts of ideological certainties or nationalist delusions. All those concerned with the future of a nation representing one-sixth of humanity, as well the potential for clear-minded scholarship to influence policy, should pay attention to this book.

Jerry Taylor, President, The Niskanen Center

Indias Marathon: Reshaping the Post-Pandemic World Order
edited by Pranay Kotasthane, Anirudh Kanisetti, and Nitin Pai

The publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the Infosys Foundation.

Published in Bangalore, India by the Takshashila Institution Press

ISBN: 978-81-931976-7-7

Takshashila Institution Press 2020

www.takshashila.org.in

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the Takshashila Institution Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organisation.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Copy editing by Ganesh Chakravarthi

Cover image design and illustration and book formatting by

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Table of Contents

by Shivshankar Menon

by Anirudh Kanisetti, Pranay Kotasthane, Nitin Pai

PART I: INDIA IN THE POST-PANDEMIC WORLD ORDER

by Kunal Singh

byManoj Kewalramani

by Constantino Xavier

by James M. Dorsey

by Ameya Ashok Naik

by Raja Karthikeya

by Aparna Pande and Jakob Urda

by Akshay Alladi

PART II: INDIA FOR THE POST-PANDEMIC WORLD ORDER

by Shruti Rajagopalan

byAnupam Manur

by Alok Prasanna Kumar

by Kartik Shanker and Meera Anna Oommen

by Surya Prakash BS

by Avinash Tripathi

by Shambhavi Naik

by Pranay Kotasthane, Anirudh Kanisetti, Nitin Pai

Preface

Shivshankar Menon

T his volume poses questions which everyone wants answered but few dare to reply: how will the world order evolve and how can India deal with it? The Takshashila Institution has brought together some of the best minds to answer this question, and to give an Indian perspective on world order issues. Just for this the book deserves to be welcomed. This volume consists of coherent contributions from these scholars covering how India should manage its external relationships and the reforms that India needs to undertake domestically.

One normally opens a volume bringing together diverse scholars and papers with trepidation. Anthologies, or collections of papers, are often patchy in content, variable in quality, and of differing topicality and relevance. Strong editing could overcome this issue, as it has in this case.

More daunting is the substantive issue of defining what sort of world we are moving towards. It seems to be generally agreed that we are moving to a new world order, away from the moment of unilateral US dominance, the unipolar moment after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But there is little agreement on what we are moving to. In most commentary, as when some see a multipolar world order emerging, the wish seems to be the father of the thought, rather than evidence or objective reality. A multipolar world is only one possible outcome and, in my view, not the most likely. Todays world is already multipolar economically, is still unipolar tending to bipolarity militarily, and is confused politically, though many would agree that the principal contradiction is now between the US and China. These two most powerful states also seem to be revisionist under their present administrations. It is even possible to envisage the multiple contemporary revolutions in energy, technology and society resulting in an absence of a world order in a fragmented and regionalised world economy with highly localised authoritarian politics of emotion holding sway.

This volume has overcome both issues of coherence and of uncertainty in predicting the coming world by basing itself on a detailed and extensive scenario mapping exercise in the Takshashila Institution. By suggesting multiple world orders, and then getting the papers to examine how they would affect India and what India might do about it, some of uncertainty has been limited and the coherence of the book has been ensured. The reforms that it suggests become even more significant for, in most cases, they would serve India in multiple scenarios.

This is particularly important as uncertainty in the international system rises and as Indias own interdependence with the world increases. Both China and the USA are now on uncertain trajectories, and the roles they envisage for themselves in the international system are still evolving. The COVID-19 pandemic has ensured that there is no going back, and has raised uncertainty to levels unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. Hence, the ability to think through multiple scenarios is essential at this moment.