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Dr. Shashi Tharoor is a two-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, the former Union Minister of State for External Affairs and Human Resource Development and the former UN Under-Secretary-General. He has written 14 books, including, most recently, Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century.)
The year that has gone by paints a troubling picture of what, for lack of a better phrase, we can call the new world disorder. Take a random set of headlines from 2014 and what do we see? The world media was dominated by coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict in Gaza, the rise of ISIS and the horrors they are perpetrating in Syria and Iraq, the events between Russia and Ukraine and the shooting down of a Malaysian civilian airliner in the latter, and, most recently, the savage killing of 145 innocents, including 133 children, at a school in Peshawar by terrorists of the Pakistani Taliban.
If we wanted to move away from military conflict, we come across different signs of disorder: the spread of the deadly Ebola virus, with an accompanying sense of panic and the virtual quarantine of many countries in West Africa; mounting inequality within and between societies; the creation of a BRICS bank in reaction to the failure of the Bretton Woods Institutions (the World Bank and the IMF) to produce a more equitable global economic system; a fragile patch-up of the Doha round of world trade talks and the Lima conference on climate change, both with consensus hanging by a thread; and a sense of disunity among the Great Powers, as the G-8 goes back to being a G-7. Not to mention the disappearance of two civilian aircraft from Malaysia in still-unexplained circumstances mid-flight.
All these events transcend national boundaries with implications for the globe as a whole, but with no common agreed global mechanism to deal with them other than the UN and its agencies with all their limitations. Meanwhile, the UN's Millennium Development Goals reach their target date of 2015 largely unfulfilled in most of the developing world.
And yet it is not all bad news. Among the major global trends of 2014 was the growing spread of communication through the Internet. Some 600 million more people got online this year, taking the figure to 2.9 billion of the planet's 7 billion inhabitants using the Internet. Increasingly, people are accessing the Internet with their mobile phones. As connections in our country get cheaper and faster, Indians will be far more globally connected than ever before.
Another trend that continued from recent years was the increasing growth and economic power of China, just a generation ago a poor developing country whose GDP was the same as India's. A regimented polity and an export-driven economy has taken China to the point where, in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, it overtook the US in 2014 to become the largest economy in the world. Of course, in strict dollar terms the US, at $17.4 trillion, is still far ahead of China at $10.4 trillion (India is tenth in nominal terms at under $3 trillion but third in PP ranking.) But by current growth standards, China is likely to overtake the US in the conventional measurement as well by the mid-2020s. The world order is changing irreversibly.
And most recently, the price of oil has been plummeting faster than it rose in the last couple of years, from $128 a barrel when elections were called in India to around $60 today. This - the result of a price war between traditional producers in OPEC and the new producers of expensive shale oil in North America -- has been good news for those countries which are largely dependent on imported energy, like India, and less good for those who export oil.
So what does that leave us with? As 2014 ends, we see a messy world, with some hopeful auguries for our own development. New Delhi will have to be attentive and diplomatically agile to cope with the extension of these trends in the New Year.
The NDA government's emphasis on good relations with our neighbours is important, since restive borders will only distract us from our domestic priorities, and the foreign investors so assiduously courted by Prime Minister Modi will not come to a potential war-zone. At the same time it is important for India to develop key relations with the Great Powers, our equivalent of what the Chinese call their "major-country diplomacy". It is good that the first few months of the Modi government have featured useful meetings with all the top world leaders. The challenge is to ensure that these go beyond photo-ops designed to enhance the PM's acceptability to his new peers and become tangible platforms for a positive new evolution in issues of vital interest to us.
There are challenges ahead for us in all our vital relationships. On the subcontinent: to neutralize the threat of terror from Pakistan, to make progress on the intractable border issue with China, to continue strengthening our vastly improved relations with Bangladesh, to ensure Nepal does not erupt again, to play our part in keeping Sri Lanka and the Maldives closer to us than to the expanding Chinese sphere of influence that has reached out to them, and to remain closely attentive to the security and development needs of Afghanistan post the withdrawal of the Western forces there.
In the wider world: to start winning tangible economic benefits from countries like the US and Japan, where the feel-good atmospherics have often outstripped the concrete deliverables; to improve relations with a growing Africa, which is feeling snubbed by our decision to cancel this year's India-Africa Summit in the wake of the Ebola virus scare; to maintain the cordiality of our relations with Europe, including the UK, while deepening links to specific major European countries, notably Germany; and to expand our circle of friends, from Australia to Zambia, who feel that India's success is in their national interest too.
Finally, to play the internationalist role we have long played on issues of the global commons, taking in trade and climate change while ranging from cyber-space to outer space, protecting our own interests while leading the world in the direction of constructive change.
All this calls for skillful diplomacy led by a focused and attentive political leadership, monitored by a vigilant and well-informed citizenry. Yes, dear reader: you have a role too. This is your world, and you have as much stake as Mr Modi does in ensuring that we don't collectively fail to cope with it.
Happy New Year to all!
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