Deep disdain for India in Beijing has transformed into grudging admiration in recent years, especially as we have also withstood the global economic recession, despite our chaotic democracy. We need to ensure that complacency does not once again set in in China, by taking proactive steps of our own to strengthen our border infrastructure (woefully deficient by comparison with China’s on the other side) and to deepen our maritime capabilities in the Indian Ocean while China is still focused on the northern waters closer to its shores. Such naval capacity building could usefully be buttressed by diplomatic engagement with maritime states in our region, including building up a network of security cooperation arrangements with them. This does not (and should not) imply any belligerent intention; on the contrary, its motive should be purely preventive, for as the old maxim has it, ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’. New Delhi’s own diplomatic messaging should make it clear to Beijing that it has no hostile intentions in attending to its own security perimeter.
In his book Rivals, Bill Emmott quoted an unnamed senior Indian official as saying, ‘both of us [India and China] think that the future belongs to us. We can’t both be right.’ Actually they can both be right — it’s just that it will be two very different futures. And there can be room for both: the world is big enough for India and China, together and separately, to realize their developmental aspirations.
Chapter Five India’s ‘Near Abroad’: The Arab World and the Rest of Asia
During my brief stint as minister of state for external affairs, I had the privilege of being responsible in the ministry for India — Arab relations. It was a welcome challenge. The Arab world constitutes an integral part of India’s extended neighbourhood and is a region of critical importance to India in political, strategic, security and economic terms. It accounts for 63 per cent of our crude oil imports, trades with India to the tune of $93 billion and plays host to 6 million Indian expatriate workers who remitted over 65 per cent of the $57 billion that India received in 2011 in inward remittances. Yet, for all its significance, it cannot be said that the full potential of our relationship with the Arab world has yet been explored, let alone fulfilled.
My personal contacts with the Arab people have left me with a deep sense of appreciation of the historic, cultural and civilizational ties that bind India and the Arab countries. As a student of history as well as an ardent believer in the importance of history in shaping our destiny, I am conscious of the extent to which our ties pre-date our emergence as nation states. Not only did Arabs and Indians know each other before the advent of Islam, but it can be said that the Arabs played a crucial role in the emergence of the very notion of ‘Hindustan’ and even in giving a name to the religion of Hinduism. We can argue about whether it is to the Arabs, the Persians or the Greeks that we owe the concept of the ‘Hindu’—the people who live across the river Sindhu or Indus — but there is no doubt that the people of India were referred to as Hindus by the Arabs long before the Hindus themselves called themselves Hindus.
The Arabian Sea, which washes the shores of both our regions, and whose trade winds have carried vessels across since the days of antiquity, has played a crucial role in the cultivation of our relations. India’s cultural links with West Asia can be traced to the early years of recorded history. There is evidence, for instance, of trade links between the Harappan civilization and that of Dilmun in the Gulf. In pre-Islamic times, Arab traders acted as middlemen in trade between Bharuch in Gujarat and Puducherry and the Mediterranean through Alexandria, and even (as evidenced in archaeological finds of Roman coins and artefacts in southern India) as far south as through the Palakkad gap in Kerala. Ongoing excavations in and around the Red Sea coast continually produce fresh evidence of even older links. The idea of India has long flourished in the Arab imagination: it is no accident that so many distinguished Arab families in many different Arab countries bear the surname al-Hindi, or that ‘Hind’, as a term connoting beauty and desirability, is still a name given to many Arab women.
Indian learning was another factor that brought the civilizations together. Indian numerals reached the world through the Arabs (and so became known as ‘Arabic numerals’). Islamic scholars from the turn of the eighth century CE to al-Baruni in the mid-eleventh century have, in their writings, documented Indo-Arab cultural links, including Indian contributions to Arab thought and culture. Translations of Indian works were sponsored by the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad where, especially under the legendary Caliph Harun al-Rashid, Indian concepts in secular subjects ranging from medicine to mathematics and astronomy were absorbed into the corpus of Arab scientific writing. (Algebra, for instance, was an Indian invention perfected in the Arab world by Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. Working at Baghdad’s House of Wisdom around 825 CE, al-Khwarizmi wrote a book entitled The Book of Addition and Subtraction according to the Hindu Calculation extolling the virtues of the Indian decimal system that used the zero. He went on to expound the system we now know, in a transmutation of his name, as algebra.)
Indians discovering the new religion of Islam helped develop its philosophies and jurisprudence; some scholars trace Indian studies on the hadith to the early days of the arrival of Islam in India in the South in the seventh century and in the North in the eighth century CE. Scholars have also documented the compilation of a large number of Indian works in Quranic studies over the last 500 years as also in Islamic jurisprudence over a slightly longer period. Perhaps less remembered today is the contribution of Indians to Islamic scholarship in the medieval period. Among notable scholars was Shah Waliullah of Delhi and his descendants. Indeed, so important were these contributions from India during the centuries of Arab decline that the Lebanese scholar Rasheed Rada observed:
If our brothers, the Indian Ulema, had not taken care of the science of hadith in this period, the [hadith] would have disappeared from the Eastern countries, because that branch of knowledge had become weak in Egypt, Sham (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine), Iraq and Hijaz since the 16th century A.D. and it [had] reached its weakest point at the beginning of the 20th century A.D.