‘India is the biggest New York in the world where anybody can come and be at home’

Shekhar Gupta: My guest this week is a historian who is also a rockstar academic.

Niall Ferguson: I think it’s a contradictory term because academics are boring people who write books and read books.

Shekhar Gupta: Except,if the academic is Niall Ferguson of Harvard University who writes about history and future and provokes us and challenges us all the time.

Niall Ferguson: I do try to provoke and when I am invited to Davos to speak,it’s a chance to remind all these politicians and business people that history has an important role to play in their life as much as it has in mine.

Shekhar Gupta: It is a fascinating thing. How does a historian think he is qualified to talk about the future?

Niall Ferguson: Well of course,there is no such thing as the future. There are futures. Philosophically,there is only one past which happened but what lies ahead of us really can’t be predicted. There are multiple futures. Part of the role that a historian has is to say to people,‘Look,on the basis of what has happened in the past,here are some possible futures that lie ahead of us.’ I am not a prophet and I don’t predict the future.

Shekhar Gupta: You remind me of a famous sentence that Richard Armitage spoke after 9/11. When the Pakistani ISI chief tried to explain to him the background to troubles in that region,Armitage said,“History begins today.”

Niall Ferguson: Well,that’s a very good way of thinking about it. Many people here are entirely focused on the future and they waste an awful lot of time making forecasts and predictions that are almost always wrong.

Shekhar Gupta: Tom Friedman says that the state of a society can be understood or judged by one simple fact: whether the weight of its memories is stronger or weaker or lighter than the weight of its dreams. Do you buy that? Because here,history and future again come in.

Niall Ferguson: I think there are some parts of the world that have too much history. The Middle East has too much history,so do the Balkans. I remember going to Sarajevo shortly after the civil war ended in Bosnia and somebody said to me,‘We don’t want any more history here. We’ve got enough. Please just don’t give us anymore’. There are other parts of the world in which the past plays a very small role. I am always struck by how selectively Americans remember their own past. They remember the founding fathers. They remember Abraham Lincoln and the civil war but they omit the First World War.

Shekhar Gupta: What about South Asia?

Niall Ferguson: You could hardly say that India lacks history. India has a vast history because of course,civilisation in India dates back as far as almost anywhere else in the world,except Mesopotamia.

Shekhar Gupta: And it is a continuing civilisation.

Niall Ferguson: There is something recognisably connected to the past in India. When I compare India and China,one of the things that strikes me is that there was a much bigger discontinuity in Chinese history in 1949. The destruction of much of China’s heritage in the cultural revolution by Mao means that China today has a kind of newness about it and a disconnection from its past. India has not had that. The continuity of Indian history is extraordinarily striking. Even the interruption of 200 years of British rule has not fundamentally altered India’s civilisations. Civilisations in plural,because I don’t think India has one civilisation. Whoever comes along to conquer,gets absorbed. It even happened to the British.

Shekhar Gupta: It happens to everybody in India. In fact,Matthew Hayden,the Australian cricketer,he is now pretending like he has become a resident Indian.

Niall Ferguson: One of the things that’s delightful about India is that it’s quite easy to be absorbed,compared with Japan where you could spend your entire life as an outsider and still on the day you die,be treated as a foreigner. So India has a wonderful capacity to absorb outsiders. That’s a wonderful quality to have in the age of globalisation. We think of New York in the US as one big melting pot where anybody can come and be a New Yorker,but perhaps India is a giant New York in that respect. The biggest New York in the world where anybody can come,be at home within a few years.

Shekhar Gupta: And dreams? Are we dreaming more now or are we still caught up in the past?

Niall Ferguson: I’ve just been to the Jaipur literary festival and I spent some time in Delhi too,talking to some business leaders there. And if I compare that experience to coming to India in the mid-1980s,before the economic reforms had begun,it is a very different country in outlook. I mean,some things haven’t changed—I am still more terrified on the road from Delhi to Jaipur than I am on any other road in the world. What’s really striking is that whoever you talk to,there is an optimism and that’s a wonderful thing. So there is a dream. And I think that dream is realisable.

Shekhar Gupta: What could ruin it?

Niall Ferguson: There are many things that could ruin it. India would be held back by the inadequacy of its basic education. It could be held back by inefficiencies in its bureaucracy,in the way it’s administered. But I think the underlying entrepreneurial drive of Indians and the ease of doing business for a foreigner compared with many Asian countries,these give India a great advantage.

Shekhar Gupta: The best thing to happen to India in the last ten years is that slowly,but now decisively,politics of grievance is yielding its place to politics of aspirations.

Niall Ferguson: When Manmohan Singh came to Oxford in 2005 and gave a lecture there in which he acknowledged that there were some positive legacies of the British Raj,that was a sign that India had got over the inferiority complex.

Shekhar Gupta: And India was shedding the baggage of history.

Niall Ferguson: I think if you can say that about your past and come to terms with that period,then you’re far better placed to move forward into a future where independence is more than just about grievance. I think it’s a very important change.

Shekhar Gupta: How do you look at Pakistan? I am not saying Af-Pak,which is the American expression. We still treat Pakistan as Pakistan. Afghanistan as Afghanistan.

Niall Ferguson: Well,you’ll have to say Af-Pak if you launch air strikes into a sovereign state. This is one of those amazing things about the US that Barack Obama can confidently,in the State of the Union address,boast about air strikes,drone attacks in Pakistan—a sovereign state with which the US is not at war,which in fact,is supposed to be an American ally. This is the same country that condemned the bombing of Cambodia by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger,which in many ways was almost an exact replica except in the accuracy of the bombing. Af-Pak doesn’t exist. There is Afghanistan,a country that the US,I think,has a moral responsibility to keep from the restoration of the Islamic fundamentalist rule. I think an outcome in Afghanistan that would put the Taliban back in power would be a dismal failure of American policy,on a par with Vietnam.

Shekhar Gupta: Have we begun to see some element of capitulation in the way the Americans and Europeans are speaking about Afghanistan?

Niall Ferguson: I am troubled by this. I don’t,however,think for a moment that NATO’s General Stanley McCrystal plans to surrender to the Taliban. I think his plan is to divide the Taliban by trying to find moderate elements that he can deal with. The problem,of course,is that right next door is Pakistan,a country that is fundamentally unstable. It is unstable in the sense that there are elements of radical Islamism embedded in the security forces,in the intelligence service and I don’t think that Pakistan can be regarded as being in any way on the road towards either a stable economic path or stable political situation. It’s really a much bigger problem than Afghanistan. And I don’t think anyone in the United States,including Richard Holbrooke,has an answer to the Pakistan problem. It is actually one of the most difficult problems that the US has to face right now.

Shekhar Gupta: Could that be because Pakistanis still haven’t got a framework of dreams that makes them shed the baggage of history?

Niall Ferguson: I am afraid that there is a dream in Pakistan that many people,though not a majority of people,adhere to. It’s a dream of a radical Islamist state.

Shekhar Gupta: Which is the exact opposite of Jinnah’s dream of a secular,modern democracy.

Niall Ferguson: All over the Muslim world,there is a contest between a radicalised minority,whose politics of grievance is so extreme that they are prepared to blow themselves up in pursuit of an Islamic utopia,and a majority of Muslims who naturally are attracted to modernity and see their neighbours in India,for example,prospering but don’t quite know how to legitimse that modernity. Today Muslim leaders feel they have to defer to radical Islamists and it’s that deference which one also sees in the Arabian world that’s so depressing.

Shekhar Gupta: Because it is very difficult to find someone in that universe who condemns terrorism without putting some qualification or a footnote.

Niall Ferguson: And when you think of some things that are done in the name of Islam,a straightforward condemnation whether from the Saudis or the leaders in Pakistan would make at least some difference. So at the heart of the Islamic world,there is a great double standard now.

Shekhar Gupta: You don’t buy the root-cause theory?

Niall Ferguson: It depends on what you mean. One thing that is not a root cause is poverty,because many of the people who are attracted to radical Islam are actually quite well off.

Shekhar Gupta: Exactly,because all the bombers who came to 9/11 were not poor people.

Niall Ferguson: The 9/11 bombers were not poor people. The man who tried to blow up an airline wasn’t poor. Throughout history,and here I’ll put my historian’s hat back on,the revolutionaries have very seldom been very poor. The revolutionaries have been disillusioned,disaffected members of the elite,who,for whatever reason,have turned against the conventional established wisdom of their fathers’ generation and embraced a very radical,violent doctrine of their own. So that’s the Islamic world’s problem. It has the equivalent of the Leninists today. Radicals used to be Marxists. You know Indians are saying goodbye to the generation of communist leaders who once hoped that they could take India down disastrous roads.

Shekhar Gupta: And many of them came from privileged backgrounds,including Jyoti Basu who just passed away. He was upper class British in so many ways.

Niall Ferguson: I was just thinking of him and reflecting on how ironic it is that so many of the radical Leftist leaders of the 20th century were in fact quite posh.

Shekhar Gupta: V.S. Naipaul said to me at a time when the Left was very powerful in India in the coalition that you guys don’t see the dangers of the Left because you were never a communist country.

Niall Ferguson: I spent some of my time in my 20s in Eastern Europe. To see communism in action in Russia and the Soviet Union,in East Germany,was to see a nightmare of un-freedom. I think it’s very important to have an experience like that. I worry a little bit that my students today would have to go to North Korea to experience communism.

Shekhar Gupta: Let them come to West Bengal or Kerala.

Niall Ferguson: The trouble is they might begin to enjoy themselves.

Shekhar Gupta: A taxi driver in Prague told me you guys keep electing communists because socialism deprived you economic freedom in India but socialism never deprived you of political freedom. So you don’t know how bad it was.

Niall Ferguson: Freedom was the thing that really was hardest to obtain in each European communism. Today the threat to freedom does not come from the followers of Marx and Lenin. It comes from the radical believers in the Quran. So instead of Das Kapital in the communist manifesto,we have radicals who believe that Quran is the basis for utopia. And I think there is a real parallel there. I am always struck when I read Osama bin Laden’s proclamations,periodically issued from his caves,by the almost Marxist tones.

Shekhar Gupta: And now you’ve heard his views on climate change and why the world should give up its reliance on the US dollar.

Niall Ferguson: He has even made a pitch for an Islamic finance as a solution to the financial crisis. So although at times they seem very different,I think radical Islamists have a lot in common with the radical Leftists of the 20th century.

Shekhar Gupta: You are not a fan of Obama,are you?

Niall Ferguson: I think that’s quite fair to say. I was campaign adviser for John McCain,though there is much about Barack Obama that I find admirable. Who could fail to be impressed about the story of a man with an African father who ends up as President of the United States? Nevertheless,one must acknowledge that there is a problem here. Here is a relatively inexperienced man whose knowledge of executive office is almost zero before he enters the White House,grappling with the most important job in the world at a time of great economic uncertainty and geo-political instability.

Shekhar Gupta: Nearly one year on,has he learnt in the job or has he disappointed you?

Niall Ferguson: Well,I think it is little early to say. He has made some steps in the right direction. After much dithering around,there are signs that he and his advisers recognise the need for some change to the financial system. I think this year we are going to see more radical reform of American banking than I might have predicted this time last year.

Shekhar Gupta: You talked of Chimerica in the past. Do you now think the marriage is on the rocks because America has to borrow so much from China?

Niall Ferguson: I coined the word Chimerica to try to explain that the relationship between China and America had become the most important economic relationship in the world because the Chinese were financing a rising share of American borrowing and that flow of savings from China to America was the key reason for the bubble. And it still raised the question whether China would continue financing the American borrowing.

Shekhar Gupta: Tell me something. You advised John McCain,you have a certain worldview,which doesn’t belong in Harvard. How do your students deal with you?

Niall Ferguson: I think it would be a very sad day for Harvard if we were to become politically monochrome. There are some great conservative thinkers like Harvey Mansfield in the government department,somebody who is not afraid to take on the feminists. And of course,at the business school or in the economics department,we have some of the most coherent and intelligent defenders of the free market system. My friend Ken Rogoff,I think,is one of the world’s most great economists. So Harvard is attractive to me precisely because of the intellectual diversity there.

Transcribed by Deepali Sharma

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