Indian politicians are out of touch with the currents of the world. They are still comfortable in the realm where India plays the victim and do not realise that the nation is actually on the verge of becoming one of the victors,said Fareed Zakaria,editor-at-large and columnist with Time magazine. In a freewheeling discussion at the Express Adda on Monday night,the former editor of Newsweek International discussed a variety of issues from the Iran-Israel crisis and the China question to the problems of a rising India and the perceived fall of the US in the global order. In conversation with Shekhar Gupta,Editor-in-Chief of The Indian Express,and Express Contributing Editor C Raja Mohan,Zakaria said that Indian politicians were unable to grasp the opportunity that the world was offering and were not in sync with the way the world was moving. This is a very comfortable realm where India is the victim of everyone. The whole game of the political class is to describe this process of victimhood in exquisite detail and try to find people to blame and potentially get reparations from,rather than realising that India is actually on the verge of being one of the victors,not the victims,and should be asking itself how it can accelerate that process, Zakaria said at the Express Adda. The Adda is a series of conversations with people at the centre of change. Its previous guests have included Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf,New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman,actors Shah Rukh Khan and Vidya Balan and BJP leader Arun Jaitley. Zakaria said he believed that change in India would come from a new generation of political leaders who represent the new reality of the nation. Perhaps if you have a new generation,that will come not as we have thought from big national parties but from Dalit parties and from every section of Indian society,we will see a change. But it would be very difficult,as we would still have the old Nehruvian state,the old socialist state in which everyone has enormous incentives to maintain control,to stop reforms,to maintain some process with which to say no to progress, he said before a gathering of distinguished guests. Talking about Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi,whom Time recently featured on the cover,Zakaria said the BJP leader represented one string of thought and was not the face of all of India. Modi is unlikely to become a national leader in India. He might not even be a regional leader in India by December, Zakaria said. Responding to a question from the audience on how to tackle the dichotomy of the two Indias including a growing affluent class and the vast section under the poverty line the analyst said the only solution was to organise the economy and make it more productive. Leaders need to rise above their narrow political games. India is unusual in the developing world in (the sense) that it is mired in this politics where good economics seems like bad politics and I think this is because of the cowardice of the political class, Zakaria said. However,in response to a question about the future of India,Zakaria said he was very optimistic that the life of an average Indian would be tremendously improved. At the same time,India needed to move away from the mindset that it would overtake China economically as the neighbour was bound to fail because of its policies,said Zakaria. We should not be approaching this from the perceptive of hoping that the Chinese will fail but rather from the perspective of what India can do of placing itself even if they dont. On Pakistan,Zakaria said the nation is basically a failed state but the world should support a civilian government there under any circumstances. Who in Pakistan thinks they have ownership of the country? There is bad economics,bad politics and on top of it all a country that had a very difficult founding rationale. He also said that the US needs to move away from its policy of encouraging development in Afghanistan and should not lose sight of its primary objective of ensuring that the nation does not become a haven for global terrorists. In an interesting take on the perceived decline of the US,Zakaria said America would continue to play a strong role in the world. In the geopolitical realm,the US is in a very comfortable position. It is the dominating power militarily and it is also the dominant power politically in Asia. It is the country most Asian nations want as their leading power. If you do a poll and say who should be the leading power,China or the US,it would be an easy win for the US. The real dynamic,Zakaria said,was the rise of many countries and not the fall of the US. When I look there (Asia),I see India and China and Japan and they dont like each other. So when you talk about the rise of China,it is rubbing up against these countries and they are looking at the US as an outside balancer in a very different role. The real challenge for the US,Zakaria said,was not a China that was assertive geopolitically but a China that would use its position as the worlds primary lender to rewrite the rules of global order that could change the view on human rights values and democracy.
