In part one of the conversation, the member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister talks about the unconventional 'other narrative' influencing India's history, economy, and geopolitical ties
Sanjeev Sanyal, member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM), is one of Asia's leading economists, historian, writer, environmentalist, and an urban theorist. In an exclusive and wide-ranging conversation on Forbes India Pathbreakers, Sanyal explains why and how complexity theory is the starting point of his intellectual framework. He presents the unconventional "other narrative" in critical areas relating to India's history, economy, geopolitical ties, and environmental challenges.
“There is an underlying framework in much of what I say, and I described it in many of my writings. It is called the complexity theory. The fundamental idea behind the complexity theory is that as the world evolves it is buffeted by a whole range of factors. These can be the actions of individual people, socio-economic forces, technology, geopolitics, etc. So, the entire idea is that you cannot see the world in silos,” Sanyal says. Edited excerpts:
This must be true of many other Indians. There are parts of the country that are not even mentioned. Like the northeast or Goa. I think there is a disjunction a lot of Indians feel about history, an angst that I myself felt. At one point, I began to do my own research, and I discovered that there is a lot of history and information. Actually, the sad part is that much of this history is lying around for one to find out and even amateur scratching will allow you to find a lot of this information everywhere.
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But if you take a maritime view, we have totally different neighbours. Of course, there are the near ones like Sri Lanka, but you can also think of Indonesia as a neighbour. Or Singapore, or Oman, UAE, east coast of Africa, even Australia is a neighbour. Unfortunately, people have a mental image of Australia as a pacific country but in fact it is also an Indian Ocean country.
I think this is important at multiple levels. We have very long cultural links to many of these countries. Indonesia is called Indonesia- named after us. Its national symbol is the Garuda—Vishnu’s Garuda. Its currency is rupiah. Then there is Singapore. Till the 1960s, the currency used in many of these countries was the Indian rupee. We should stop thinking of the world in this land-locked way because unfortunately it then locks our own world view unnecessarily. A maritime view is fluid, it allows us to build interesting linkages with all these countries and others as well. I think that is something we are beginning to do, finally, in the last few years, and it has borne results.
This is not to suggest that we want to go to war with them or that we will not trade with them. They are a part of the global supply chain so we will participate, trade, and compete with them, and also collaborate with them where our own interests coincide. But that does not mean that we will be blind to the fact that China- particularly an undemocratic China- can be a geostrategic challenge. We will make arrangements and protect our interests. Where necessary we will consequently build alliances of various kinds, Quad is the most obvious one.
For many individual countries this is already happening, like in China. We shouldn’t be surprised. This is also going to be the case with India. We are now going into the next quarter of a century that will be the ‘demographic dividend’ period or the ‘golden age’ where our dependency ratios will be declining and a large proportion of our population will be in the working age and we should hopefully be able to use that.
But do remember that we also are ageing and from around the middle of the century we will also have an ageing population and our population will begin to shrink somewhat later. I make this point because this will have a big influence in how the world dynamics work. We need to prepare for these changes which simply does not seem to occur in the calculations of policymakers anywhere in the world in the way it should.
(Don’t miss part two of the conversation as Sanjeev Sanyal talks about the state of the Indian economy)