222 | Book Reviews Survival | vol. 63 no. 5 | October–November 2021 |
pp. 222–226
https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2021.1982210 South Asia
Teresita C. Schaffer
India
and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present Shivshankar Menon. Washington
DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2021. $39.99. 416 pp. Shivshankar
Menon is a man of many talents. Since he left Indian government service
in 2014 after an extraordinarily distinguished career, he has added
writing brilliant books on the global international order and India’s
place in it to his list of accomplishments. In 2017, I reviewed in these
pages his analysis of five key Indian foreign-policy decisions in which
he took part (Choices, 2016). India and Asian Geopolitics looks at the
same landscape from the perspective of a loftier mountaintop, reviewing
India’s strategic position from a pan-Asian perspective. Menon spent
three diplomatic tours of duty in China, the last of them as India’s
ambassador; headed India’s diplomatic missions in Israel, Pakistan and
Sri Lanka; played a critical role in negotiating the India–US civil
nuclear agreement; and served as foreign secretary and finally as
national security adviser to prime minister Manmohan Singh. This history
gives him a 360-degree view that not many practitioners have.
Menon’s
view of India’s core interests starts with the country’s internal
health – economic growth and distribution, and good governance. This is
the right starting point for a sound foreign policy, and adds to the
case that Asia is the right context in which to consider India’s place
in the world. India benefited strongly from the ‘great globalisation’ in
the decades that followed 1990. Perhaps as importantly, Asia is well on
its way to becoming the world’s economic centre of gravity. The
author’s prescription for India is what Jawaharlal Nehru might have come
up with if he were making policy today – minus Nehru’s more ideological
view of economics.
Menon is a firm believer in India’s
uniqueness, in the legacy the country bears from its 5,000-year-old
civilisation and the strategists who guided it in centuries past. He
remains committed to the idea of strategic autonomy – with the caveat
that for India to prosper in a world where supply chains and trade
require global relationships, its economy must be open to the world.
Both today’s much more intense India–US relationship and the hoped-for
improvement in India–China relations are critical to India’s future. He
argues – as he also did in his earlier book – for bold initiatives,
carried out with care and even caution.
This is an important
book, focused on the future and based on a clear-eyed analytical view of
the past. It is also a very good read: Menon writes with elegance, and
he is willing to be refreshingly blunt about what he considers the
policy missteps of India and others. He finished it before the
devastating second South Asia | 223 coronavirus wave struck India. He
notes that the virus has led to a turning inward in many countries’
trade policies. The additional wreckage the pandemic caused in India
after his draft was complete will complicate the task of restoring
India’s economic rise, perhaps even more than Menon projects. This book
is sure to make readers think hard about where India and the world are
going.
Pakistan’s Political Parties: Surviving Between
Dictatorship and Democracy Mariam Mufti, Sahar Shafqat and Niloufer
Siddiqui, eds. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2020.
£37.50/$49.95. 336 pp. I’m not normally enthusiastic about
edited volumes, but this one provides an exceptionally useful round-up
of Pakistan’s beleaguered and oft-maligned political parties. The three
editors are joined by another 15 authors, most of them Pakistani but
working at universities outside Pakistan. The book begins with chapters
devoted to each of the major parties – the only currently active
iteration of the Muslim League, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Imran
Khan’s Pakistan Justice Movement (PTI), the Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM)
– plus one chapter each about the more splintered leftist parties and
religious parties. These provide a wealth of information about their
respective ethnic ‘homes’, their governing and party-building style,
their ability to transition from opposition to government, and the types
of politicians they attract.
A second section is devoted to
in-depth discussion of the parties’ constituency-building style,
including how they do outreach, how they stay together after losing an
election and how they operate in opposition. The final section explores
how parties deal with the judiciary, foreign policy and, above all, the
military – or, to use the term preferred in Pakistan, ‘the
Establishment’.
This is a political scientist’s book, with a lot
of information packed into fewer than 300 pages of text. The chapter on
relations with the military is in my judgement the strongest in the
book – deservedly so, since this is a key aspect of any serious
discussion of Pakistani politics. As a group, the party chapters are
also strong and perceptive. The chapter on women in elective politics is
commendable, but would be more fun if it went into greater detail on
some of the colourful women who have succeeded in that world – not just
Benazir Bhutto, but also Abida Hussain and her daughter Sughra Imam,
among plenty of others.
The picture that emerges of Pakistani
politics is not particularly flattering – but then, no one interested
enough to be reading this review would have expected otherwise. There
are few heroes. This is a very difficult environment to navigate, one in
which politicians cannot be sure of their authority. The 224 | Book
Reviews country’s political issues are dominated by security and an
overpowering suspicion of neighbouring India. Still, the volume provides
an excellent view of the survival skills that Pakistani political
organisations have to develop.
If I were a young diplomat
heading to a political-reporting assignment in Pakistan, I would
definitely want this volume on my bookshelf. It has the strength one
expects from an academic work. Importantly, it conveys the tremendous
diversity of Pakistan’s ethnic and religious landscape, and the
complexity of all the parties’ relationships with the military.
The
Bhutto Dynasty: The Struggle for Power in Pakistan Owen Bennett-Jones.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. £20.00/$28.00. 319 pp. Owen
Bennett-Jones was the BBC correspondent in Pakistan for many years, and
like all good journalists has an eye for a good story. The one he’s
chosen to tell here is one of the best, and is not just about the two
Bhuttos who have led Pakistan. It is a book – and a clan – full of
larger-than-life characters. The author starts with the family’s ancient
history and seventeenth-century decision to settle close to Larkana,
the Sindhi town with which the Bhutto name is intertwined. The first
prominent member was Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto, born in 1888, who was the
chronicler of the family’s earlier days. The capstone to his colourful
career was his appointment, right after Partition, as dewan, or prime
minister, of the princely state of Junagadh. That linked him with the
early history of Pakistan: the state’s Muslim prince had acceded to
Pakistan, but its majority-Hindu population (with a little help from the
Indian Army) acceded to India.
The heart of the book is about
the Bhuttos who led Pakistan: first Zulfikar, son of Sir Shahnawaz, and
then his daughter Benazir. Both of them continued the traditions of the
Sindhi ‘feudals’ as illustrated in the lives of their forebears.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto never admitted fault and was ruthless with those who
crossed him. If anything, Bennett-Jones’s stories about how he dealt
with his political rivals are tamer than those that circulated when I
was serving at the US Embassy in Pakistan. Ahmed Raza Kasuri, a volatile
junior member of Bhutto’s PPP and the intended target of the bullet
that got Zulfikar hanged, had the habit of pulling up his trouser leg at
dinner parties to show the other guests the scars of knife wounds said
to have been inflicted by Bhutto’s goons. Another rival inside the PPP,
Sikander Raheem, was rumoured to have been shoved down a flight of
stairs.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was at his best – and worst – when
dealing with powerful leaders of other countries. Bennett-Jones
describes his manipulative relationships with Richard Nixon and the shah
of Iran. The author came to Pakistan too late to attend the dinner
Bhutto gave for the visiting Henry Kissinger in October 1974, South Asia
| 225 but had he been there he could have used the story. Kissinger, in
toasting Bhutto (with wine – prohibition came three years later), drew
on a speech that mined Bhutto’s old term papers at the University of
California for material that painted him as a great intellectual.
Bhutto’s response was equally creative – and obsequious: his speech
painted the newly remarried Kissinger as God’s gift to women.
Benazir
Bhutto, both in power and out, engaged Bennett-Jones’s attention and
curiosity more than any of the others. She was a modern woman – and yet,
very much her father’s daughter. She surrounded herself with people
from her father’s circle, but preferred those who were not old enough,
or senior enough, to refer to her as ‘daughter’, as is customary in
Pakistan.
Bennett-Jones’s discussion of the Bhuttos’
relationship with the army is probably the most important part of the
book. No one has yet been able to lead Pakistan without an alliance with
the army. That includes Zulfikar: the army had deep misgivings about
him, but he sent out the most troublesome generals to ambassadorial
posts. Nevertheless, the army – along with his own political overreach –
was to be his undoing. (When one of the ambassadorial generals showed
up at our house for tea, it was clear that Bhutto was in trouble.)
This
book is a wonderful read. Bennett-Jones occasionally gets carried away
recounting a colourful story, but that only makes the book more fun.
It’s easy to see the Bhuttos’ attraction, at their height, for Pakistani
voters, and equally easy to see how they came undone. I felt at the
time that Pakistan was not a big enough stage for Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
Bennett-Jones shows why.
To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to
Despotism Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2021. £20.00/$25.95. 320 pp.
This is an angry,
sometimes polemical book. It makes an argument that at the outset is
mainly about democracies in general, and then becomes more specifically
about India. The authors’ basic thesis is that democracy flourishes when
the underlying society is healthy, and is continually tended by the
government. The first half of the book includes chapters on health, food
security, access to basics such as land and water, transit, education
and the problem of ‘wage slavery’. The authors have developed
comparative data on other democracies, particularly the economically
successful ones in East Asia, all of which makes a compelling case that
social and democratic health often sustain each other.
The
second half examines India-specific institutional decline and problems
that include the role of money in elections, what the authors call
‘elective despotism’, the lack of independence in the judiciary, a
supine press and finally 226 | Book Reviews demagoguery that redefines
‘the people’ to exclude various minority groups. Unlike the first half,
which traces the source of the problem to India’s early years, most of
the discussion in this part is focused on Narendra Modi. Particularly in
the first half, the problems the authors chronicle are well known and
their description is accurate, if sometimes unbalanced. In the second
half, I believe that the authors have focused so relentlessly on the
defects that they have missed some genuine bright spots. My main
argument with the authors is that they have an aspirational – and
impossibly high – standard for democracy. Democracy is ‘freedom from
hunger’, ‘saying no to brazen arrogance’, ‘rejection of … every form of
human and non-human indignity’ (p. 30) – the definition goes on for a
full page. Every item they list is something that I would like to see,
but unless the democracy is made up solely of angels, I would not expect
to see it all together.
The authors’ discussion of how
democracies end is more compelling. Two models are on offer: the ‘sudden
death’ view, and a longer-term breakdown of democratic consensus, which
may take the form of a democratically elected government that sets out
to wreck democracy (pp. 21–5). This last view appears in the discussion
of ‘elective despotism’. The authors see in Modi’s government an
increasingly high-handed example of this type of despotism. They do
briefly discuss what they refer to as substantial countercurrents to
this depressing prognosis, including the relatively low aggregate vote
totals for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, the fragmented map of power at
the state level and above all India’s intrinsic pluralism – its many
languages, ethnicities, caste and class divisions, and more.
India
is a mosaic not because of the workings of the constitution or the
policies of a particular government, but because of thousands of years
of heritage. Added to this is the impact of 75 years of democracy. Jaded
as they are, the authors recognise that India’s embrace of democratic
ideals has awakened a yearning to draw closer to these ideals. An
important reason to read this book is not so much because of what it
recounts about India, but for the cautionary tale it offers about the
stresses on all democracies at this time in history. Relatively new
democracies have slipped into ‘elective despotism’ (the authors cite
Poland and Hungary). Countries we are accustomed to thinking of as
exemplars of robust democratic tradition and unbreakable institutions
now seem to have taken several steps in that direction (the authors do
not discuss recent trends in Germany or the United States under Donald
Trump). They close on a more hopeful note: ‘democracies foster hope
against hope’ (p. 290). If Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane are
thinking of a sequel, I would hope they will be able to observe how
countries have come back from the stresses they are undergoing now.