Six Transitions: What Is India Going To Do?

The crux of the matter: The world is witnessing unprecedented transitions, especially in the six key areas of geopolitics, geography, geoeconomy, technology, environment (transition from carbon to green energy), and the shift of economic power from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to the emerging economies of the Global South.

- DOLA MITRA

The argument: If India plays its cards right and can turn these transitions to its own advantage through careful assessment, its own ambitions of transitioning from an intermediate power to a global player could be entirely within the realm of possibility. In fact, India's future as far as the relative status quo is concerned sort of depends on it (this kind of meticulous scrutiny of the transitions).

But in order to take advantage of these transitions or make the assessments, India needs to understand them thoroughly and frame a policy which would put herself, if not in the centre of things, at least in its ambit.

The writers of "India and the Six Simultaneous Global Transitions: Everything All At Once," Rajiv Kumar and Ishan Joshi, go about providing this understanding. They examine each of the unfolding transitions in its present form and suggest a possible future course for India to take in order to navigate it, but not before doing a deep-rooted analysis of its past, tracing each back to its origin, thereby putting it in perfect context.

The six transitions are discussed/dissected in six separate chapters. Let's take the first (and possibly the one with the greatest significance): geopolitics. In their analysis, the writers trace the current trends in geopolitics back to the end of World War II and to the evolution of Pax Americana, when, following the Allied powers' victory, the US replaced Britain (and Pax Britannica) to emerge as the world's number one superpower in terms of military strength and economy. "From an empire on which the sun never set, Britain became a junior partner to the US with the rise of Pax Americana in the post-war era," they write.

Implicit within this newfound role for the US was the cooperation with (and hence domination over) nations around the globe, especially its Allied partners, who would, to put it in layman's terms, now be the beneficiaries of its magnanimity.