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omething equally important has occurred in the moral dimension. If anyone had suggested 15 years ago that Western countries would allow the use of torture, he would have been dismissed out of hand. But this has happened. In 2005, Irene Khan, the head of the Amnesty International, said: "Guantanamo is the gulag of our times." If her statement was untrue, there should have been a rush of denials from the West. If her statement was true, an equally strong chorus of voices would have demanded that this had to stop. Apart from a few flutters of regret, nothing really happened. The gulag continued.
This silence of the West has resulted in a profound shift in how leading Asian minds view the West. Instead of seeing the West as a paragon of virtue, they now see an emperor with no moral clothing.
The good news here is that many of these "Western" values may not be uniquely Western, and other custodians could emerge.
The West believes that it alone championed "freedom" and "tolerance." But Amartya Sen points to the Indian emperor Ashoka, "who during the third century BCE covered the country with inscriptions on stone tablets about good behaviour and wise governance, including a demand for basic freedoms for all—indeed, he did not exclude women and slaves as Aristotle did [4]
Sen’s point is that the great divide between the East and West may be artificial, that the values of freedom and tolerance, reason and logic, may not be uniquely Western.
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gainst this backdrop, let me offer concrete predictions about how India will emerge:
My first prediction is that Indians, unlike the Japanese, are going to wear less rather than more Western clothing. Clothing helps define one’s identity. Try to imagine another Mahatma Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru without their trademark Indian garb.
Second, India will gradually drift away from the West. The West will continue to lose the magical place it has enjoyed in the global imagination. Part of this is will be a result of relative economic performance. There was a time when many Asians believed that Westerners were inherently superior. Today, the cultural confidence of Asians is immense. Most people in the West have not noticed this because cultural confidence is intangible. But Asians are fully aware, no longer amazed to see Asians top the lists of leading global entrepreneurs or academic achievers in leading American universities.
But there is another practical reason why many in the West have not noticed the rising cultural confidence of Asians. Most Western opinions are generated by a small group of Western pundits—whether they be in
The New York Times or
Financial Times. A deep conviction of Western civilizational superiority seeps through their writings. Strangely enough, in our information-rich universe, Western voices continue to speak to other Western voices on the basis of deep-seated assumptions of Western superiority, while the rest of the world drifts from these assumptions.
With the West losing its magical place in the human imagination, it is also likely that the desire to emulate the West will diminish in India and the rest of the world. India will continue with some of the finest political traditions it has inherited from the West: Democracy, a respect for human rights and respect for the rule of law. But increasingly, Indians will claim these traditions as their own, just as Western philosophers happily accepted the work of Islamic rationalists and claimed their ideas as their own.
My third prediction is that, with the growing detachment between the West and the rest, India will once again resume its natural role as the meeting point for the great civilizations. At a time when many in the West are convinced that the West cannot co-exist in peace with the Islamic world, they will increasingly marvel at how India has accommodated many civilizations—including the Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic and Christian civilizations—and how most live in peace with one another most of the time.
A spirit of inclusiveness pervades Indian political and social culture. While the West often tries to discuss the world in black-and-white terms, the Indian mind sees the nuances.
T
ake Iran as a case study. The West cannot see beyond the relatively new and brief theocratic rule of Iran. Indians however see a rich and deep Persian civilization that has contributed so much to the development of both Asian and Indian cultures. Hence, while the West insists on cutting itself off from Iran, Indians naturally believe in engagement, even though the Indian government disapproves of the Iranian nuclear program.
This capacity for engaging other cultures may well mean that India could play a bridging role between the West and the East. Or, it could play a bigger role of convincing leading Western minds that they should stop seeing themselves as guardians of one leading civilization. A great crusade is needed to convince the West that it is essentially no different from the rest. India may well play a leading role in this crusade.