Indian Council of World Affairs

Unidentified Speaker: Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of the Indian Council of World Affairs, it is my pleasure to welcome you all this afternoon to the panel discussion on Civilizational State and the Remaking of Global Order: India’s Strategic Identity in Global Politics. We will start this program with Madam Nutan Kapoor Mahawar, Acting Director General, ICWA, delivering her welcome remarks. The panel discussion will be chaired by Shri Raghavendra Singh, Senior Fellow, Vivekananda International Foundation, Former Secretary, Ministry of Culture and Textile, Government of India, and Former Director General, National Archives of India, and Prime Minister Museum and Library. He has also written a book, India's Lost Frontiers, the Story of Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan.

Also on the panel discussion, we have Professor Shantanu Chakrabarti, a distinguished historian and author of the ICWA publication, Nation Branding in Non-Western Societies, Projecting India as a Civilization State, Professor Hindol Sengupta, a multiple award-winning historian and author of 12 acclaimed books who brings rich insights into India's historical and cultural imagination, and Shri Kanchan Gupta, a veteran journalist, author, political affairs analyst, television commentator, and blogger who currently serves as senior minister in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. This discussion will be followed by a brief Q&A session moderated by the chair.

May I now request Madam Nutan Kapoor Mahawar, Acting Director General, ICWA, to kindly give her welcome remarks. Thank you, Madam.

Nutan Kapoor Mahawar: Distinguished experts, members of the Diplomatic Corps, students, and friends, welcome to the ICWA panel discussion on Civilizational State and the Remaking of the Global Order: India's Strategic Identity in Global Politics. Avid scholars of political science, international relations, and history would have sensed that of late a narrative surrounding Civilizational states has been in the making. There are discussions and writings about what constitutes a CivilizationalL state? How do you brand different states as such?

Does this branding come in conflict with the understanding of the global order as it stands today? Or is it actually in harmony with the global order as it evolves amidst the geopolitical churn? Will such a narrative shift thinking towards overcoming the perils of geopolitics? What role should India assume in contemporary and shifting geopolitics as the grandmother of civilization and the great grandmother of tradition, what Mark Twain once meant to say? It is to have a grip on some of these budding thoughts that we curated today's panel discussion.

One thing is for sure, the idea of India as a civilizational state is not merely a theoretical concept. For India is one of the world's oldest living civilizations. Looking at India just as a post-colonial democratic republic severely constrains the world's view of it. Indian civilization has evolved over millennia of spiritual thought, plural traditions and cultural resilience. Every onslaught of time has meant growing maturity. Every celebration of time has meant quiet confidence. The sheer diversity of India's experiences, the good, the bad, the ugly, and its innate strength to learn from these has provided a strong foundation for survival amidst turmoil, foreign loot, plunder, invasion, and strife. The nation's experiences are embodied in its people. The manner in which they speak, talk, sing, dance, celebrate, mourn, feel, behave, and think. And as the turn of the millennium shows, India is more than just surviving. It is thriving, growing, rising, and preparing for global leadership.

Based on the Westphalian model of nation state, today's international order is unable to capture the essence of nations and countries like India whose legitimacy is derived not just from law and institutions, but also from Civilizational memory, cultural continuity, and moral authority. The narrative on Civilizational states is therefore taking a new birth amidst the crisis of the Western liberal order, the collapse of the Soviet order, and the stubborn remnants of the communist order of the last century.

I do not have to say this, but this is well understood, that India is a natural leader among Civilizational states. Nobody has to confer this role upon us. We are endowed with this role by our history, character, philosophy and above all, our destiny. India has already shaped the international order in quiet but meaningful ways. Our freedom struggle became a leading light for other countries under colonial oppression. Tagore's and Swami Vivekananda's internationalism reflected our inclusive and expansive vision. Non-alignment pioneered autonomy and dignity outside of rigid and contesting power blocks.

Through the principle of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, the world is one family, we brought a civilizational ethic into operative diplomacy. The pluralism of our democracy reflected our cultural diversity and has provided a living model for others. In giving voice to the Global South, we have challenged entrenched hierarchies while walking our talk with quiet confidence through nurturing development, security and cultural partnerships. We are living proof of multiculturalism and secularism in operation. These contributions of India are not isolated acts but flow from deeper ethical traditions. The dharmic vision of Sarvodaya, the welfare of all, or literally translated as a dawn everywhere, offers a universal ideal for governance.

The Bhagavad Gita reminds us that dharma, the code of conduct, is not only about rights but also about obligations to oneself, to others, to nature and to the cosmic order. At the end of the day, we have to learn to be more giving than seeking, more sharing than selfish and in the concept of Lok Sanghray, the holding together of the world and its peoples, India articulates a vision of responsibility that transcends self-interest. These principles remain profoundly relevant in addressing today's crisis of global governance, conflict and human insecurity.

From this foundation flows India's pluralist diplomacy. As the mother of democracy, India projects democratic values as soft power while pragmatically engaging with non-democratic states as needed. Our commitment to disarmament, rooted in Ahimsa and Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, rejects discriminatory regimes while affirming universal restraint. We promote interfaith inter-civilizational dialogue, fostering respect across traditions. The Panchsheel principles of coexistence sought to build relations on mutual respect and equality, even when tested by geopolitics. And at the heart of this vision lies Anekantavada, the Jain doctrine of manifold viewpoints, which teaches that truth is many-sided, and that diversity and disagreement are not threats, but strengths.

This spirit also guides India's environmental consciousness. In our worldview, nature is sacred, revered as mother and divine. Our reverence for rivers, mountains, trees reflects this recognition and association. Aparigraha, or non-possessiveness, is an ethical principle that promotes sufficiency and contentment above greed. Gandhiji's trusteeship concept asserts that resources are kept in trust for society and future generations, creating a moral foundation for sustainability.

And the philosophy of Panch Bhut, the five elements of earth, water, fire, air, and space, which make up the cosmic balance from within the human body to all of creation, reminds us that human life must remain in harmony with its environment, or that the order that exists within and between the human body and all of creation needs to be harmoniously re-established. Together, these ideas offer a civilizational paradigm for human security, sustainability, and responsible and stable progress.

This budding view of India as a civilizational state, this revival, is a rediscovery of India's enduring self. For too long, India has been seen through colonial and post-colonial lenses, misread as weak or passive. Today, amidst the geopolitical churn, it is time to reclaim our story with the confidence of tradition, the openness of intellect, and the promise of ethical leadership.

This rediscovery of India's civilizational identity that is underway is visible in the world's engagement with us. At the time of freedom struggle, Pandit Nehru's discovery of India gave the world a vision of our heritage and modern aspirations. Today, works like William Dalrymple's The Golden Road, Garcia and Mireles' Purusharth, The Four-Way Path, Purusharth means the meaning of being human, and many others are showing a renewed recognition of the universal relevance of India's wisdom.

May I also add that this revival, this assertion of India as a civilizational state, is not for India's good alone, which it surely is, but also for the global good. By emphasizing interdependence over hegemony, India offers a peaceful model of multipolarity. By showcasing pluralism, it provides lessons for managing diversity in divided societies and broken lives. By elevating ecological and spiritual traditions, it advances sustainability as a global as well as a very private ethic. This is a strategy that allows India to make clear to the rest of the world what its terms of engagement with the world are.

This is India's moment to lead, not loudly but wisely, not by imitation but by inspiration. India must be seen not only as a rising economy, a maturing polity, but as a civilization awakening with clarity and purpose. The current geopolitical churn, the manthan, does not only represent chaotic disorder on global scale, but also an opportunity to switch on the fog lights and search for ways individually and collectively to move towards stability, harmony, coexistence, or simply put, a better life.

At the end, I wish to say that there have been many civilizations in the world with which the Indian civilization has coexisted over time. Like India, there are many other countries with a civilizational sense of existence. A nation's collective sense of history and its contributions to international relations is an important determinant of its contemporary identity and future trajectories. Just as India is going through an awakening about itself and the world about India, other countries, too, need to go through a process of introspection and rediscovery.

With this, I hand over the proceedings to the chair. I look forward to a thought-provoking and fruitful discussion. I wish the panelists all the best.

Raghvendra Singh: Thank you. Thank you very much. The deliberations for today center around India as a civilizational state and its strategic identity. Of what I make out of this topic is whether India has been able to use the aspect of civilizational state as a strategic doctrine. There are a few questions which I would first like to pose for myself and then answer them, but they would nevertheless go out as questions to you too. Are we confusing India as a civilizational state and its aspects with soft power? Is strategy soft power? That's the question I would like to ask for myself.

Secondly, there are a couple of tools which people have been using, especially in the South Asian context. Communalism, say, for example, is a strategic tool which has been used against our state. Casteism is one strategic tool which is also being used against our state. It is not so benign an issue when the neighbors, India's Western neighbors, raise the issue of two-nation theory doctrine. It's been there since India got partitioned and since the whole question of Kashmir came up. It's a very thought-out issue which is raised by them as a strategic tool. Are we prepared to answer that? Do we answer it in a way so that we overcome and prevail that? Have we been able to prevail over it since 1947, since we were partitioned and since the issue of Jammu and Kashmir came up? Did we, with regard to Afghanistan, deal it with the way it should have been dealt with?

The whole horizon from Afghanistan down to the Southeast Asia was there for us around 1947. Has that sort of constricted or has it expanded? These are a few questions which I would like to pose and answer. Another thing which comes to my mind is actually one of the laws of nature, something which Sir Isaac Newton had said. I was actually reading about it this morning. One of the articles written long years ago, right, I think in 1950s or something, where he talks of the fact that the attraction between two land masses is directly proportional to its attraction and inversely proportional to its distance. He used the word square of the distance or something like that.

Now why do I say this? I say this because have we been mindful of nurturing this kind of a relationship in the immediate neighborhood or rather we've been fixated towards looking across the continents? To my mind, our neighborhood over a period of time needed more attention to be given and we as a civilizational state should have adopted this strategic doctrine to strengthen our relationship with these countries. We need to do it. We need to do it in a newer way. We have so many and I'm talking about specifics and I'm coming from where a person who has spent about 30, 40 years made a huge number of mistakes in making decisions, but have learned from it and have not shied away from admitting it and putting it forth in a way it should be dealt with.

Say for example, if we deal with Bangladesh from Delhi without using all the districts which are adjacent to Bangladesh in trying to sort of create a relationship whether it be West Dinajpur or Malda or South 24 Parganas or what have you, if we try and deal from here it will only be that much successful and not much. If we were dealing with Nepal, we need to deal with some provinces in our country and have them put forth a kind of a relationship where we could deal with Nepal and similarly with Bhutan and other places. And at one point in time when Afghanistan had a completely frayed relationship with our western neighbors, at that time what did we do to nurture our relationship with Afghanistan?

We let it sort of fall behind over a period of time in a way that now we find it difficult again to restart nurturing that relationship. Same is the case with Sri Lanka. So, to my mind, we should concentrate more on our neighborhood, we should concentrate more on the large masses, which is countries per se, say for example, China. And we don't need to, sorry Nutan, when we say that we are a civilizational state. You see, when we say we are a civilizational state, we can, obviously, each and every country would like to peg its national pride on something. China also pegs it on its civilizational aspects. So we are really not in competition. We are not in a sort of a bipartisan relationship.

So it should be done in a way that we are mindful of the fact that we cannot change our neighbors and people who are continents away, of course, they have the economic heft. They still have a kind of a heft, for example, Britain, that English is the most common language in South Asian region. And by virtue of that fact, that heft, still sort of carries a lot of weight. But we need to find, in terms of culture, culture is such an omnibus term that you can put your finger in any pie and use all the instruments of our governance synergize them. The way, say for example, on top of the defense setup, now you have the chief of the defense staff, I mean, the integrated staff.

Someone who integrates, whether it is the EPEDA, whether it is the National Institutes of Design, Fashion, whether it is the Gems and Jewelry, whether it is ICCR, whether it is Ministry of Culture, various arms, including Archaeological Survey of India, etc., anything and everything has to synergize and the synergy will release its own energy and someone should sit on top of all these things which are promotional arms of our government and use these in a very strategic way, both in our neighborhood as also areas far from it. So these are a few observations.

Now I would ask Professor Shantanu Chakrabarti, one of the panelists, to say a few words.

Shantanu Chakrabarti: Thank you, Jay. Let me begin by thanking the ICWA, the DG in particular, and the organizers for kindly extending an invitation to me to share some of my thoughts on the issue. Now when we are talking about civilizational state, nation branding, etc., we are essentially focusing on matters related to projection, acceptance, and of branding value. Now whenever we talk about projections and receptions, I'm often reminded of the joke about the conversation between Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin back in 1930s. No one is sure whether actually such a thing took place.

But the joke is that Einstein was a great fan of Charlie Chaplin during one of his trips to US during 1930s, he happens to meet Chaplin and says, oh, I am a great fan of yours. And when Chaplin said, why? Einstein says, look, in hardly any of your films you hardly talk, yet people all over the world appreciate you. You manage to articulate yourself so well that the world loves you so much. I think that's why I'm a fan of yours. The Chaplin immediately quipped, on that account, sir, you are greater to Einstein. He says, how come? You see, I may not speak most often in my movies, but at least I make gestures, etc., but look at you. I'm sure 99% of the people in the world do not understand either your equations or your mathematical constructions, yet everyone knows that you are one of the most famous scientists of the world. That is what perception and reception is perhaps all about.

But jokes apart, when we talk about civilizational state, usually, it's not something which has suddenly emerged in the post-Cold War period. This has been something here historically, but we seem to be talking more about it since the 1990s, and of course, with the publication of Huntington's famous clash of civilization thesis. If we manage to club together, the Western academic point of view about civilizational state is usually very critical. There are exceptions here and there. I wouldn't go into much details. But by and large, if we manage to club together the criticisms of this entire concept of civilizational state, I would argue these are essentially of three types.

Number one, why should we oppose the civilizational state? Because this essentially masks imposition of authoritarian value system. The countries which project themselves as civilizational states, usual countries to be blamed were Russia, China, to an extent there are authors who now have begun to mention India, and of course countries like Turkey, etc. So this essentially opposes the liberal international order which was established in post-45 period.

The second important criticism of this concept of civilizational state is essentially made by academics, social scientists, the states which do this essentially borrows from history, and essentially this involves cherry picking exercise. What you are choosing, as some scholars argue, is you by and large neglect proper academic history and instead use what has been termed as public or popular history. As a student of history, I don't know how should you really distinguish between what or if you should make a distinction between academic history, popular history, and public history.

But anyway, this is the argument that and then the state by using certain aspects of your historical heritage or historical trajectory tries to implement it in its current day policymaking and also in foreign affairs. The third major criticism, and this essentially is about India projecting herself as a civilizational state, that this is something which has been happening particularly since 2014 with the coming in of one political party. And essentially, this is projection of Hindutva.

Now, if we look back in history, one could see that use of what has been termed of increasing use of historical terms and idioms in your own current day projection, etc., this was nothing new. There is a pre-colonial history to it, and there is, of course, a post-47 history to it. But this is something very well established before 2014. Let me give you some quick examples. Mark Twain, the famous American author, he comes to India during a visit during 1890s. If you look at his account of his travels in India, it's generally critical. But even a person, because he essentially is dependent upon old colonial records about Indian social levels, etc. But even a person who has been like him, says that in India I have seen two most important things.

Number one, he mentions as Taj Mahal. And the second thing which he mentions is Swami Bhaskarananda Saraswati, one of the leading saints living in Varanasi during that time. And he says, to me probably Swami Bhaskarananda Saraswati is more important, because Taj Mahal after all is a specimen of architecture, whereas this is a living God, whom Indians live as a living God. Now if you look at Indian traditions, this is something which has continued. We have for instance, I wouldn't go into details about Bankimchandra and others, because this is something which will be mentioned perhaps by others.

Apart from Bankimchandra, let me take another scholar, Chandranath Basu, who perhaps first used the term Hindutva back in the first edition of his book in Bengali, was Hindutva Hindur Prokito Itihash, the authentic history of the Hindus. And the first edition came out in 1893. This is most unlike Savarkar's book on Hindutva, which would come out in 1923. But what he does is, he essentially writes his book as a reaction challenging the colonial contention of projecting Hinduism and Indic culture as backward and stagnant.

And he says if we have to recollect our past properly, he writes that I know being influenced by Western academia, a lot of people have turned to archaeology. But he says archaeology is about search of bones, and bones, I find bones rattle too much. So instead of bones, if we have to establish a proper history of India, we must have to trace it through proper study of our cultural texts and literature, rather than archaeology.

Another scholar, Vinay Kumar Sarkar, 1930s, says that our present quest has to be organically linked up with our previous achievements and the way in which to do it is we must need to use our traditional cults of Shakti Yoga, Energism, Charai Veti which he translates as march on and Digvijaya, conquest of the quarters. Now some of these traditions of using our examples from our own historical pasts etc., also continued post 1947. Major criticism against our conceptualization of civilizational state is this is something which is being encouraged since 2014. But if you look at our history between 1947 and 2014, again, I wouldn't go into much details, but I will use some examples.

There is one scholar Atrey Gupta who has written a book on India's contemporary art history and how state used certain versions of art history etc., and here she uses an interesting example in a thesis. She takes the example of Teen Murthi Bhavan for instance. Teen Murthi Bhavan as we know during colonial times it used to be the main residence of the commander in chief of the British Indian Army. Later on you know how it turned out into the residence of Pandit Nehru and later on how it turned it up into a museum.

Now when Pandit Nehru was living at that time he says that during any occasion, any public occasion or throwing a party, Gupta has discovered that Nehru in particular Indira Gandhi insisted on using Alpana as a symbolic mode of marking space and she in her thesis has used the recollections of the artist Shukumar Bose who was requested by Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi to redecorate the lawns etc., of Teen Murthi Bhavan with Alpana, the interior spaces of the Teen Murthi Bhavan also.

And why? Gupta argues that Alpana was probably used as a symbolic mode of marking space which resonated well with the post-independence nation-states need to reclaim and reframe the official spaces of the erstwhile colonial government. I will use a second example. During the late 1950s and 60s the United States Department of Health Education and Welfare thought that we do not seem to be knowing enough about India study programs related to India was neglecting about India's past. And what it did was it initiated a project to prepare a quality syllabus of lecture outlines and readings in 1964-65, which resulted in a compilation titled Lectures on Indian Civilization, which was published formally in 1970.

I will use one last example in this connection because this is not very well known. In about four or five years back, there were a group of Polish scholars from Jagiellonian University who came down to India. They did a very important research on Birla temples located all across India. And they were not studying the temples only for the sake of architectural development, etc. They were arguing that the Birla temples, the locations, were deliberately chosen because, I quote, several temples were built away from the main tourist or pilgrimage centers at the newly established industrial agglomerations that have grown up at factories belonging to the Birlas. These include, for example, Renukot, Shahat, Alibaug, Gwalior.

The most important Birla temple, which they refer to, is that of Bits Pilani, the Saraswati temple, because in this temple, they found a lot of statues, etc., which represented scientists. Apart from deities, there were a lot of statues, representations of scientists, teachers, and politicians, seem to have been chosen in order to pay the greatest homage to the goddess of knowledge and learning. So there are enough examples from pre-2014 in this case.

Now, in my book, what I did was I tried to link up this concept of civilizational state with the other concept of nation branding. Nation branding, essentially, was something which was brought up by scholars belonging to management studies, etc. One of the leading persons who did it was a British management specialist, Simon Arnhold. I happened to meet him once in Cambridge around 2019. He introduced this concept, he set up his own office, and during 1990s, early 2000, he was very important. He was a person who was selected by many countries, newly independent countries in Eastern and Central Europe, and in Africa. He was taken there, you know, how to project a nation state, etc.

Now, he slowly, however, began to change his views. His initial argument was nation state is just like a product in the market. You advertise carefully, you package it carefully, it's going to get you more brand value. Now he himself, when I met him in 2019, said I have begun to rethink. Initially during 1990s when I was talking about this concept of nation state, in one public seminar, one old lady confronted me and said, you know what you have done? You have turned something holy, the concept of the nation state, as just like a product in a shelf in the supermarket. He said I was a young researcher eager to defend my thesis. I just blasted her.

But later on now, back in 2019, he says probably I am beginning to think that she was more right than myself. And nowadays, he says that nation branding, you of course can brand a nation state, but ultimately, that branding would be dependent upon certain core values. Historical trajectory is one of the most important aspect of it.

Now, as the chair has already mentioned, so very briefly, what sort of historical, if we use our civilizational status as a sort of nation branding, what can we offer to the world? I think essentially we can offer to the world two things. One, that India historically has opposed binarism. India essentially has believed in developing consensus. We generally do not distinguish between this or that. In a sense, we try to assimilate. In this sense, if you look at present day problems, which UNDP recently has defined as uncertainty complex all around, and the differences between global order and disorder, is there a way out?

I have argued in one of my recent articles that there seems to be a way out. If you look at Indian history, the using indigenous concepts of pralaya, of matsya nyaya, and dandaniti, how these could be used in a sense, disorder doesn't meet complete end to us. It means there might be seeds of growth within the disorder also. And interestingly, all these idioms do not originate only in Hindu philosophy. Take another important concept, which used to be so important in Mughal times here, the Arabic term fitna. Fitna, which essentially means disorder, has been profusely used by most of the writers referring to rebellions, etc.

Very interestingly, fitna is a term is being used in current times. It was used prolifically during the Arab Spring in West Asia. Today, if you look at the Pakistani state, they are using the term fitna to describe the disturbances created by Baluch groups. There is a government's instruction now that the Baluch groups must be regarded as projecting fitna. They are doing that in case of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. But if you look at Indian tradition, even during Mughal times, because sometimes this term fitna would be used, as Andrew Wink has shown, even during the Maratha Confederacy also, that it might indicate a decline in the center, but it might coexist with growth in the peripheries also. So is that something which can be adopted to deal with the global crisis situation? This is just a suggestion.

And the second thing is that, of course, our tradition, our civilizational strength of using or projecting assimilation instead of destroying one concept in trying to project another concept, that might have something, which the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister often points out, our age-old concept of Vasudhaiva, Kutumbakam, etc. This consensus-based policymaking probably has an opportunity in this tri-form world today. So our civilizational focus, but this cannot be a state-driven enterprise and project only. This has to be a combination between state and private initiative, cultural initiatives. And this would, of course, require more study and research at different levels.

I think I will end.

Raghvendra Singh: Thank you, Professor Shantanu Chakravarti. In fact, you've given us quite a few interesting points to discuss, after our exposition from this side of the table is over. Especially, you talk of Mark Twain. So what I remember of Mark Twain is East is East and West is West, and the twain shall never meet. So how would you sort of reconcile this.

Secondly, on the archaeology bit, I always thought that it is more of a dynamics between architecture, between literature, and between painting. So whatever in our Indian civilization is missing from one side, if it is missing from the literature side, then it gets supplemented from the side of archaeology or sculptures. And they tell the story. And of course, from the painting side. It's really interesting to see that you talk about Alpna and Alpna as a symbolism for marking out nation states. Nation branding, of course, That is what the whole concept of Vasudev Kutumbakam is about. It's not about binarism.

But when you talk about the Baluch groups, there lies a civilizational challenge. And that is a challenge which, after we've spoken from this side, I would like to come back to.

So now, Professor Hindol Sengupta, the stage is all yours. And I'm so sorry I turned towards you. Instead of turning, my apologies.

Hindol Sengupta: No, no, not at all, sir. Thank you very much. I was delighted to accept this kind invitation from the ICWA because, as it so happens, I'm in the middle of my latest project, which has been going on for three years now. Probably takes some more time. My new book called India as a Civilizational State. Now, I'm going to start by agreeing and disagreeing with some of my colleagues on the panel who've spoken earlier.

I think the Indian state and India's sense of nationhood since 1947 has been sadly trapped in a few platitudes which, to me at least, have very little meaning. One of these platitudes is that India is special because India is diverse. Every other country in the world is diverse. There is nothing unique. Maybe India is slightly more diverse than many other countries. But in it and as itself, there is nothing special about this diversity, this so-called diversity that we keep tom-tomming as the basis of our nationhood. I put to you today that, as a civilizational state, the first idea that we must reject is this idea that the basis of our nationhood comes from something very special called diversity. It is a meaningless concept, number one.

Number two, the special ingredient of our nationhood comes from this thing called secular. India was plural as a lived experience, as students of social sciences are fond of saying, for thousands of years before the idea of secularism emanated in the French society. So this idea that India is special because it's secular is again an absolutely meaningless in some senses concept. By the way, all of this was debated. If you don't trust me, all you have to do is go read the Constitution Assembly debates.

Our founding fathers and mothers, usually say founding fathers too often, our founding fathers and mothers debated all of this very, very intensely, intrinsically, and decided, I have a new T-shirt which I bought for the book I'm writing. It is the original Constitution and the preamble of the Constitution of India. The original preamble to the Constitution of India, which our founding fathers and mothers decided was the right thing for our country.

I do not, of course, argue that diversity or a deeply, deeply held sense of pluralism is not important in our society. Of course it's important. I'm arguing that as fundamental ingredients that we keep tom-tomming, perhaps as nation branding, as my fellow scholar was saying, these are meaningless concepts, they don't mean anything. As a civilizational state, in my humble opinion, India's sense of self derives from much deeper truths. In fact, one of the great tragedies of India is that we, even today and even on this panel, always discuss everything in the English language. I do not believe the English language is the source of great strength for us. Like the Chinese have risen without the help of the English language, we could have risen without the help of the English language too.

In fact, I believe English language is a trap for millions of my country people. It is a trap, it is a new kind of hierarchy that we have created in our country. And in the world that is to come, in the world of artificial intelligence, this barrier becomes meaningless and I have great faith and trust that we will overcome this barrier. We do not need the English language, even though, of course, we are speaking today and I'm speaking to it in the English language.

Now, one of the great tragedies of India is that I was recently reading this wonderful, wonderful book, I think Africans are doing much more in this than Indians are. This wonderful book written by this African scholar called Zainab Badawi called An African History of Africa. It is India's true tragedy that a definitive Indian history of India is yet to be written. The only person who really tried it was Sir Jadunath Sarkar, as they would say in Delhi, who, of course, was one of India's great legendary historians. After him, nobody really has tried. But a definitive volume of an Indian history of India is yet to be written. Our reference points of Indian history still remain.

And I'm not saying they do a bad job or a good job. That's a different debate for a different panel. Still remain histories written by people who are not Indians. Think about this today. If you're talking about, if you want to do a panel on India as a civilizational state, it is incumbent upon all of us to think, is there a single history written about America by a non-American that America ever even considers? Number one, you'll never get published. No one is publishing you, right? You try writing a great history of America and say you're a great America scholar. If you're not American, they don't care.

You try writing a British history as a non-British person. As an Indian, you write a British history and say you've written a definitive volume. They don't care. It is India's great colonial yoke that we carry on even today, that every definitive counterpoint, or many, it has changed a lot, I must say, in the last 20, 30 years, but many points of reference remain what others say about us. It is almost as if we as a society still haven't figured out the confidence to say that what we say about ourselves is the truth about us. So I put to you again, a definitive Indian history of India is yet to be written.

Now, where do we come? What is this thing called a civilizational state? Why should we be one? What is a civilization, right? At the very least, let's accept that as far as exact definitions is concerned, what exactly is a civilization is an amorphous thing. It has never been clearly defined what a civilization is. However, in the concept of a civilizational state, we are on firmer ground because there is the distinction that is being made with the Westphalian model of statehood and the civilizational model of statehood. That's very clear, right? And what is the civilizational model of statehood?

Well, the civilizational model of statehood is simply this, as vital, important, respectable, and prized as our constitution is, and I would be the first person to say that it is absolutely sacrosanct for us. Our nationhood is not derived only from the constitution. Our sense of nationhood is derived from a very long history and an unbroken tradition and culture. It is quite funny, and you know, I was once at this panel with fellow Chinese scholars talking about civilizational states, and they were talking about China and so on and so forth. It occurred to me that it is quite funny that China was one of the first countries in the world in recent times to really push this idea of China as a civilizational state, even though the Chinese civilizational state is comprised of a broken civilization.

Please remember, Mao's great leap forward in the Cultural Revolution was an attempt to entirely break that society and build it afresh, whereas in India, as many, many scholars from Irfan Habib, to name the scholar who worked on this, all of them would agree, and this is in popular culture, in literature, this is best depicted by this great story called Shatranj Ki Khiladi, which the great filmmaker Satyajit Ray made into a film, that no matter who conquered us, no matter who was in power, Indian society remained in a continuous unbroken tradition. Which is why, in Italy, they are not spouting Latin today, but on the banks of the Ganga, even today, the mantras that have been spoken were the same mantras that were being spoken exactly with the same words and the same intonation at the very least 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. At the very least.

Now please remember, as new digs appear and new work happens in archaeology, we are getting a deeper and richer sense of the timeline of Indian history. We used to say 5,000 years, we used to teach our students and say 5,000 years, now with the Rakhigarhi digs not very far away from here, and Khiladi down south, we are getting a different perspective of how old our history is. I think two or three things are important in this. So if this is the civilization, if this is the unbroken sense of culture upon which our sense of nationhood is derived from, stands upon, rests upon, then what are its key ingredients? What are the distilled ingredients that we can talk about?

Well, one of them very clearly is that no matter how you look at it, India's sense of power projection has been non-iconoclastic. There is absolutely no debate about that. At one point, some leftist or hard leftist scholars in India and other places used to talk about the Chola conquests in Southeast Asia, but all research today is very clear. There's no sign of that kind of iconoclastic conquest that the Middle Ages are completely rife with in Indian history. So it is not that India, and I'm so glad that Binoy Kumar Sarkar was mentioned, there's always a sense and there is absolutely no doubt that there was power projection in India's history, but there is no history of this kind of iconoclastic destruction and attempt to completely subsume other cultures and make them in a different shape, form, idiom and grammar in Indian history.

So the first ingredient I would talk about is this sense of non-iconoclastic power projection. I think that's a very critical part of our sense of nationhood. The second thing I think is very, very important is this idea that what is India's moral conviction? India has a moral projection to make apart from power projection. And that moral projection in the past, when I was in school and also in college, every time one spoke about this, people would think of this as a very esoteric term. But I want to tell you this, I mean, this was mentioned that in the 90s, this idea that India as a civilization became important. But that's actually not true. You only have to go read Hind Swaraj and what is Gandhiji saying?

In fact, what is Nehru saying in Discovery of India? What is Aurobindo saying again and again? What is Vivekananda saying? You go from scholar to scholar and founding father to founding mother, you read what they are saying, they were united. There may be political differences within them, that's absolutely fine. But they were united in their conviction that there was something unique about India's civilization and that civilization had to be, in a sense, protected, nurtured, and in a sense, presented before the world.

Why? Because there was a moral consideration that India wanted to present to the world. And what is that moral consideration? I think today is the best moment to present that moral consideration because that consideration, because in science, finally, we're talking about this, that in the course of human evolution, we have come to a point where human beings must rise above a certain material self to a higher consciousness. If you look at all the conversations in quantum mechanics, in consciousness studies, you look at the entire plethora of work that's happening. There is a consistent, all the AI and quantum AI, there's a whole field called quantum AI, all of that that's being worked upon, quantum consciousness and all these various fields.

If you look at the sum total of the work that's happening there, it's very clear that as we come to, in a sense, the end of the pure anthropological age, as we come to a sort of machine-led anthropocene age, so to speak, human civilization or human beings must evolve to a higher sense of consciousness and a non-material sense of consciousness. Now, this idea, while it has been considered esoteric even among Indians for a long time, I do think this is a very fundamental idea that India has to present to the world. By the way, in economics, I was about to go to this conference in Norway to talk about this, but finally, for some reason, I couldn't go, but in economics, a lot of the degrowth conversation.

Many of you would have heard this new economic concept called de-growth. There's a lot of work happening in this de-growth field. If you look at a lot of this de-growth and ecological consciousness in economics kind of work that's happening, they're all talking about this non-material consciousness. And I think this non-material consciousness is at the very heart of the Indian proposition. Now we couch it and we present it in Indian terms. That's why sometimes it seems a bit esoteric to outsiders. We talk about the dharmic way. This was also mentioned on the panel. We talk about how to live a dharmic life and so on and so forth.

But if you shed the sort of Indian terminology, you will realize what we are coming to is this fundamentally post-anthropocentric non-material consciousness age. Because if we don't move to a post-anthropocentric way of thinking, the world is impossible. I mean we are coming to a place where it would be impossible for human beings to exploit their Anthropocene so to speak as much as they already do it. So this consciousness is at the very heart of India's projection as a moral attribute for what India as a civilizational state stands for. That's why in fact even in Indian politics you will see there is actually a unity somewhere, a post-bipartisan, sorry not a post-bipartisan, a bipartisan sort of consensus somewhere. And I always say this, in fact there is one group that agrees most with Gandhian economics and that is actually the RSS economics.

If you look at all the leading thinkers of the RSS in economics, people like Dattopanthi and all these other people, Dharampal and others who were thinking about this, Dindyalupadhyay, they were not uber-capitalist at all. They rejected those frameworks and in fact there is a commonality, again a bipartisan consensus that extremities including capitalistic extremes are not a fundamental way for India. India is concerned with this idea of balance where the material and the non-material must have a certain synchronous balance.

And to end with, I want to make one more point to you based on an essay I recently wrote, which actually was derived and was inspired and triggered really by a Chinese philosopher scholar at Rutgers who was talking about among nations what is the fundamental attribute of different nations, right? And he says well if the allegory of the cave, Plato's allegory of the cave, has shaped Western understandings of knowledge, truth and reality, ethics and politics. Then what is it, what fable represents Chinese civilization? That was his great question. If Western civilization is about Plato's allegory of the cave, where you move from the cave to enlightenment, knowledge and so on and so forth. Chinese civilization, Chinese nationhood also has a fable that best demonstrates them.

And he says that the fable that best represents China, because in the Western setup, the primary conception is, the cave is illusion and ignorance versus reality and knowledge that you move towards. Whereas in China, the fable of the frog in the well is the most important one. And why? And he says, well, the primary tension for China is between limitation and small mindedness and limitlessness and capaciousness. China wants to move from the well, please remember China's civilization, shut itself away. China wants to move from that shutting itself away from its quote unquote, 100 years of humiliation, as the Chinese are very fond of saying, to a world where its conception of power is limitless. And that made me think, what would the Indian fable be then?

Surely India also has a fable that best demonstrates the core of its nationhood, which it wants to project. And it occurred to me that the best representation of it is something called Gajendra Moksha. Many of you may remember the story of Gajendra Moksha from the Puranas. The elephant Gajendra is a great worshiper and a believer of Sri Vishnu. He's in a stream and suddenly the crocodile catches its leg. And the elephant cannot escape from the grasp of the crocodile, which it's trapped its leg between his jaws.

And as long as the elephant continues to struggle, the more the crocodile drags it into greater and greater depths of the water. Because the elephant is not being able to find the self-belief and the self-confidence to really extract itself. Until in the Puranic story, and the elephant is always looking down, when it's trying to extract itself. But finally, in a burst of inspiration, the elephant looks towards the heavens, finds the confidence and in the Puranic story, Vishnu comes to help his great devotee and the elephant is able to throw away the crocodile and emerge victorious from the cesspool in which it is being pulled into.

This in my mind is the most accurate representation of India. India's problem is that for a long time in its history, it has been trapped into the jaws of that crocodile, being pulled into the cesspool, constantly looking down. I think the moment has come today in India. We are in that moment of churn in India, where we are finally looking towards the heavens of beginning to look towards the heavens, and finally perhaps being able to take ourselves out from, and some of my colleagues spoke about the colonial yoke. Yes, that's a very vital part of it. Take us away from this burden, this trap that we are in, to a point where we will be able to free ourselves, finally, from always considering ourselves through the lenses of others. Thank you very much.

Raghvendra Singh: Thank you, Professor Hindol Sengupta. Very many, actually, truly interesting issues, important issues which you raised on Gajendra Moksha. I have something to say because one of the fault lines which I'll come to when we get into the discussion stage is a dichotomy between the hill and the forest people as against the plains people. And what we think in terms of people who lived in the caves or in the forest were people who were really elevated. So it runs quite counter to what the West have in mind where they go from the caves to, but anyway, so many interesting things. We will discuss it.

So now I come to Kanchan Gupta, a very dear colleague of mine. We worked together also many years back and I'm really waiting and looking forward to hearing him. Kanchan.

Kanchan Gupta: Thank you for the invitation, ICWA. The best thing of being the last speaker is that everything that needed to be said has been said. So you don't have to worry yourself too much. Let me begin by telling a few words about the place we are sitting in. Sapru House was named Sapru House, as probably all of us know, after Tej Bahadur Sapru. But what made Tej Bahadur Sapru so different was he was very keen that India should adopt a foreign policy perspective which is independent of others and it should be a sovereign perspective. And that is how Sapru House began. Unfortunately, for years it became captive to the CPI scholarship of the time and it became a Moscow House rather than Sapru House.

And the best thing that has happened is MEA taking control over the place. And a lot of good things, good research work, good scholarly work has been happening here. That said, let me just make some comments on what has already been said by my fellow panelists. A lot of it is very profound and I am not a scholar so I won't be able to comment on those things. But otherwise, let me just make a few points.

One, this whole thing about diversity in India. The way India historically has understood diversity, it is in a civilizational framework, it's in a cultural framework, and it's in a framework of traditions. Now there were the higher traditions and there were the lower traditions. So we don't need to go into the lower traditions because then we get into disputed zones. But if you look at the higher traditions of India, then you will see that diversity, or what we call pluralism today, was very much integral to those traditions.

India is a place where, at a time when people were being imprisoned, being burned at the stake for contesting popular or textual religion or religious beliefs, India is a place where you had a group which came out to question the wisdom of our ancient texts. And they were tolerated and they were, in fact, integrated into the larger Hindu community. Now why am I saying this? Because in the West, they have suddenly discovered something called DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion. And having discovered it, they are now jumping all over the world saying that the rest of the world should also adopt DEI.

But sorry, we have been into DEI for ages. It's your problem. You never looked at us. You never found out. Because you think all wisdom lies with you, which is not true. A reference was made to this popular line, East is East and the West is West and the twin shall never meet. It was Rudyard Kipling. So Rudyard Kipling, who was a white supremacist. his literature reeks of it, we don't need to use the honorific that he was a colonialist, he was a white supremacist and I say this having worked in the newspaper which he founded called the Pioneer.

So this whole perception that the East and the West are so separated that they don't need to look at each other is by itself a fault line that needs to be addressed. Now Hindol mentioned about why is it that the white man, I'm sorry I don't mean this as a racial slur but it is a fact of life. Why is it that a white man or a white person who's a part of the all-white academic grove of the West writes a book on India, on Aurangzeb for instance and we are expected to accept it as the correct history.

Now that doesn't work anymore because and this is something which the West is unable to internalize that it's not working anymore. If you just go to a couple of bookstores in Khan market, say Fakir Chand and Bari Sons and you will find how the whole published world has changed. The number of books on Indian history, on Indian culture, on Indian civilization, Indian food, I don't remember a couple of months ago I had gone to Bari Sons and I found a huge fat book on Indian masalas and how the history of Indian spices ties up with its civilizational history, its cultural history.

So there's a lot of exciting work that is happening and that work is reestablishing and sort of free casting the identity of India and here I will diverge from what the organizers call it. To my mind India is a civilizational nation, it is not a civilizational state. A state is one which is defined by the Westphalian concept of what constitutes a state and that doesn't apply to us. We as a nation and this is something which you can see, I mean for instance, Gandhari, she came from Gandhar and it is in today's Afghanistan. If you look at the spread of the Ramayana tradition down what is called Southeast Asia, I mean, if you are transiting through, I think, Bangkok and you go to have a cup of coffee in one of the restaurants and the first thing you will see is a Ganesh statue in an altar over there.

So this kind of cultural spread, I mean, Buddhism was not born outside India. It was India which sent Buddhism out to the world. And today when you see a revival of great global interest in Indian spiritualism, I mean, they call it Indian spiritualism, I think what they are referring to is Hinduism. Again it shows the resilience of who we are, where do we come from and it answers this whole skeptic who doubts that India ever existed before 1947.

Now if we then move on, I mean, what is this idea of continuity? Before that, it's very interesting, we are discussing this here today, on the first day of his three-day exposition, the Sarsang Chalak of the RSS raised this point and it was attended, it was an open forum where you had diplomats, you had everybody, scholars, intellectuals and mostly critics of the RSS and he explained it very well, that when we say Hindu Rashtra, we don't mean a theocratic state and Rashtra again does not translate directly into nation.

So we are looking at a larger concept of civilizational, cultural, historical structure which is what we call today India and that is why it is necessary and the Prime Minister has been working on it by introducing it in his speeches, that we should start referring to India as Bharat, not a country which Christopher Columbus set out to discover but ended up in America. So this concept of Sanatan, continuity, unbroken continuity to which Hindol referred to, that Chinese civilization is a fractured civilization. It is fractured over ages as emperors came and emperors went and the biggest fracture happened when the Long March and subsequently the Cultural Revolution brought about by Chairman Mao.

We don't have any such fracture in our Sanatan tradition. We do not have a fracture. We have fault lines. I mean no civilization, no nation, no entity in the world is without fault lines but there are no fracture lines. There are no breaks and that is primarily the reason why historically as a society, as a people, we have survived through conquests, through foreign rule and also internecine war. A second aspect which we should keep in mind is that although we were strong, our kingdoms were strong, they were rich, there was huge trade happening with the rest of the world.

We had a big share of the world's GDP and recently the recent studies have also broken another myth that India was never a ship manufacturing country and hence we were not a seafaring people which is not true. We were manufacturing ships, we were building ships and we had trade with the rest of the world and despite that and we had very strong armies. We even, I mean possibly India is the first country where you had mercenaries coming in from various countries of the world to enroll in the local armies and they brought with them knowledge with technology or whatever and that got integrated but despite that historically India has not been a conquering country. We have never ever conquered or we have never ever gone beyond our shores to conquer another nation, another people, another country.

So, what does it say? It says that we, as a people, we were very clear, again, I repeat myself, that who are we, where do we come from, and what do we wish to be. The point which I wanted to make about China, that if you just Google for it, you just use two words, original China, and you'll see that historically China was a very small piece of land. The rest of China which we see today are lands which China has occupied militarily. It is not a willful union that has happened, but it is a union using force. The best example, of course, is Tibet.

But if you just look north downwards, you have Inner Mongolia, you have Manchuria, you have Goetsu, you have Hokkien, you have Cantonia, you have Tibet, and then you have East Turkmenistan. Now, you take away these lands, what remains of China? So, they were never very sure about their identity, although they talk of 100 years of humiliation. We never spoke about humiliation. I mean, our humiliation, our sense of humiliation was, of course, there, but we calibrated our responses. We fought for our independence, we fought for our liberty in various ways.

But the humiliation which China talks about is because they saw themselves, or they were very acutely aware of their own inadequacies, their own inability to stand up and say, yes, we are what we are. They needed these additional lands as props to create the image of a civilizational nation. We didn't need that.

Lastly, if you look at, and I wanted to make this point, that often, whenever we use the word, or whenever we read the word Hindu, we refer to, or we think it refers to a specific religion, a specific belief system, but it is not, I mean, historically, that is not true. Where does the word Hindu come from? Nirad Chaudhary explains it very well, that all people across the river Sindhu were referred to as Hindus by the Greeks. And that is how it originates. And when you say that, I mean, the concept of a Hindu, the identity of a Hindu does not, I mean, sort of, it is not fragmented into other identities.

So that would be the validation of Hindu as an all-encompassing, all-embracing identity. And hence you say Hindu civilization or Indic civilization, if you prefer that. But the concept is the same. Chandranath Bose's Hindutva, which was referred to by our professor here, it actually was a response to the Brahmo Samaj movement, because people felt that Hinduism or the core ideas of Hinduism or popular ideas of Hinduism, the lower traditions of Hinduism, they were being shaken up, they were being sort of being shown in a poor light by the Brahmo Samajis and something needed to be done to sort of prop up the image of Hinduism. And that is how the book comes about.

He was a government writer. I mean, he used to copy documents. That was his job. But he then writes this book in which, with the alternate title of that Hindutva or Hindu Dharmeshesthota, that means the superiority, not the supremacy. I mean, we have to make this distinction very clear. He says the superiority of Hindu Dharma. And if you follow the graph of the Brahmo Samaj movement's growth, it then splinters with Keshav Chandra Sen trying to bring in elements of Islam, bringing in elements of Christianity. And then he gets thrown out of the Brahmo Samaj. And the Tagore family once again takes charge of the Brahmo Samaj because they never wanted the Brahmo Samaj to drift away from its Hindu core, from its, the core of the Upanishads, the Vedas, and the core ideas or the core knowledge of Hinduism.

And in Tagore's time, it gets further expanded to include Kabir, it gets, I mean, he brings in various other strands. And lastly, it's very interesting, we haven't had fractures, but we have had disruptions. And one of the biggest disruptions, like Hindol makes this point, that we lost track, we never found out who are we. And that's because, beginning with Noorul Hasan, and I say this with a purpose, before 1947, we were not masters of our own destiny, our academics, our course studies, everything was decided somewhere else by somebody else.

So that was the Macaulay period, and after that, the post-Macaulay period, what do you have? You have Noorul Hasan deciding that Indian history needs to be rewritten. And therein comes an entire new school of historians, funded by the government, funded by taxpayers' money, writing a new political history of India. And that excludes India's civilizational, India's cultural history, or past. And it also argues against the idea of India as a nation, and argues in support of India as a state. Over the last 10 years, 15 years, that stranglehold has gone, and slowly we are getting back to history as it should be.

And there will be more exciting ideas coming up, I'm sure, if not in my lifetime, after that, and there will be a reassessment of the real identity of India. Two more points. Two grandfathers. DG referred to India as a grandmother and grandfather, so I refer to two grandfathers. One is the grandfather of Amartya Sen, who possibly has caused an inflicted worst possible, imaginable damage to the Indian identity or Indian self-respect, that you are nobody, you are so low below the food chain that you are nobody.

So Amartya Sen's grandfather, Kirti Mohan Sen, has written, he was a Sanskrit scholar, he came from Benares, and he has written the finest exposition of Hinduism. It is just called Hinduism, and I think it's less than 100 pages, it's more a pamphlet than a book, but nothing, nothing can be a better exposition of this, of Sanatan Dharma. So that is one, and the second grandfather is the grandfather of Aurobindo, Sri Aurobindo. And Raj Narayan Bose, again, writes very eloquently on what is that thing that holds the nation together. I mean, of course, in those days, the idea of nation, nationhood, was mostly localized. But what is it that holds together, and he goes into it.

And later, Nehru, for all his faults, does say that it is the silken thread of culture that holds us together. So it also rejects this idea that there are a diversity of cultures in our country, because that would mean there's a diversity of races in our country. It is not true. I mean, the practices may differ, the traditions may differ, but the cultural idiom remains the same from the north to the south, from the east to the west.

So how to package all this into projecting India on the global stage? I think the last 10 years, we have seen that happening. And since I work for the government, I don't want to push this line, because that would seem like an oversell. But what the prime minister has done is that he has made India's civilizational, India's cultural, India's historical identity, he has pushed it on center stage. And he has done that through very aggressively and purposefully embracing everything that was rejected by the weirdly secular state in India, because India was never a secular, again, in terms of the Western concept of separation of government and religion, of the state and religion, temporal powers and spiritual space. No. Here, we had the concept of dharma, and it is the dharmic state which existed in India. So, we need to reconsider options available, and I will leave it at there. Thank you.

Raghvendra Singh: Thank you, Kanchan. So, the topic of the discussion today was India as a civilizational state and how that as a strategic identity would deal with the emerging global order. So, what I understand is that, and I'm now throwing it to the audience, is questions on how India would be more prepared to deal with the current geopolitics, how India would be better prepared using what we all spoke from this side of the table. So, is it possible if I now ask the audience to ask a question? Yeah, right. Please. Yes.

Sanjay Kumar: Hello, everyone. My name is Sanjay Kumar. I'm pursuing my PhD from Faculty of Law, University of Delhi. So, this is really wonderful topic, civilizational state and the remaking of the global order. So, basically, when we talk about our unique civilizational philosophy, which is different from China, Russia, and US, like Vasudevi Kutumbakam. So, I would like to ask, are we doing enough for the principle of Vasudevi Kutumbakam? Or can India give an alternate world order or global order, which will be different from China-led world order and US-led world order? Because we have a history of non-alignment.

India is the country which has most independent foreign policy on this planet. But when we talk about the international crisis, like Syria, sometime back happened in Syria, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza. So, this is happening can India play an important role in resolving this kind of international crisis when we talk about our civilizational principle, when we talk about to lead the India in this multipolar world order? So my question is to Raghavendra sir, can India give an alternate world order in this 21st century?

Raghvendra Singh: You see, anything doesn't really happen overnight, okay? So this pushback, which you are seeing currently, on tariff issues, etc., is what, it is actually a manifestation of India emerging. The more you emerge, the more there are others who come in conflict with you or they start seeing you as competitors and some such other phrase which you may like to use. So yes, I mean, India is actually playing a role to the extent possible, to the kind of heft it commands, which I see increasing over the years to come. I mean, we have set ourselves a target of 2047 and with each passing year, I think things will start becoming more clearer and more effective from India's point of view is how I feel. Anyone else?

Hindol Sengupta: I think we are already doing it. Number one, I think we shouldn't jump the gun. There is no strategic intervention in things like Syria and Gaza and stuff. First, what do you mean by strategic intervention? Do you mean boots on the ground? We can't do that. We are not in that situation. The world is not in that situation. We shouldn't do that. We won't do that and we shouldn't do that. But India has always contributed to peacekeeping operations of the UN, for instance. And we are not an interventionist. Our idea is not to be an interventionist power. I mean, we are seeing the flaws of this intervention. Look at America's interventions around the world. Look at what it has led to over the last 20, 30 years.

I feel my entire adulthood, I have only seen the repercussions of America's interventions in the world, from the Gulf War to, of course, what happened after 9-11, and now again. I mean, this is the whole trajectory. So we have to see comprehensive national strength as the first primary ingredient. In India, we jump the gun very quickly. How can we talk about comprehensive national strength until we have an entirely or largely entirely indigenous defense industrial complex? So we must build that first, right? I mean, the stories that you will hear, how we could not build certain kinds of aircrafts and what happened. I mean, I don't want to go into all of that because this is not the platform. But we have many lacuna that needs to be fixed, and these are historical lacuna, right?

So unless we build that power, and we are now working towards building that power, unless we build that power, you cannot become a great power with borrowed or bought weapons. No one has done that. No one can ever do that. This is a joke. So we have to reach a particular level of comprehensive national power. But we're doing what we can. Look at our vaccine diplomacy, for instance. Very, very different approach from America or from China. And we are continuing that spirit. If you look at from a country which once was dependent even on its food security on outsiders, today we are a net supplier of aid around the world, and a very effective net supplier of aid. So we're doing what we can.

And remember the other thing, which is important to mention about the civilization state, how does it map to today? Look at our contestation in the Indian Ocean. We say this is our ocean, not only is it called the Indian Ocean, but there's a whole Chola history there, 1,500 years. But the Chinese say that their Zhang He, the great naval general made or traveler made seven great journeys across these waters, and therefore they have a claim. So there is contestations of history in the Indian Ocean too.

Unidentified Participant: Gentleman. Yeah. Right. Shripati. Sorry, my question is more to a rejoinder to Dr. Sengupta's response. We are overkilling the Cholas. We are overusing the Cholas. Because when you really look at it, the Cholas were latecomers into the entire South Indian history. Whether it be in the near shores of what is today Sri Lanka and Maldives, or even Southeast Asia, you already had a relationship with these regions, predating Cholas and some of them go back all the way to Ashoka, a good thousand years before. From that it comes my question.

When we are talking about our civilization and as Mr. Kanchan Gupta said, the Chinese and by and large almost all other countries have had a clear-cut break in their civilization. Whether it be the Cultural Revolution, whether it be the Soviet Communism or the Renaissance and Reformation and also the Russian Revolution, there have been clear-cut breaks in that cultural stuff. Whereas in India, where do we find those breaks? Because going back to South Indian history, and since Cholas were mentioned, the 3rd to 7th century of Tamil history is known as the Dark Ages. There are very few literature records. Your Sangam literature is from 3rd century BC to 3rd century AD. Then you have got the Chera, Chola, Pallava, Pandya whose records are more clearer from the 7th century onwards.

So when you are actually looking at this civilization, which civilization are you looking at? I know it's a very provocative question, but there are inherent gaps, but there are no breakers, unlike in the rest of the world. Even in Japan, you have the Meiji Restoration. So that being the case, when you're looking at civilization, which point of civilization are we looking? Are we looking at civilization from a colonial western perspective? Which is the past few hundred years. Because even before that, there are breaks, when you take it at an all India level. So that's just an observation.

Raghvendra Singh: I don't quite understand when you say and overemphasize breaks in history, you see. I mean, okay, Mao may have done something and said that the power may be flowing from the barrels of the gun, etc. But you see, the fact of the matter is the history is evolving. And if there are accidents in history, and it changes, it's not really called a break in history, to my mind. So when Professor Hindolson Gupta says about cholas, perhaps he's saying in terms of our maritime history, and what the Chinese are claiming and what we tend to say in terms of what our history is like. So I think that's the limited point he wanted to make.

Hindol Sengupta: So let me clarify what I was saying. Thank you, sir. No, so I mean, number one, I didn't really understand the entire gist of what you said, but I thought you were agreeing with what you were saying. Look, I mean, we lack a maritime consciousness in our country. We are over obsessed with our land neighbors. But I would say we have many more maritime neighbors than land neighbors. We're over obsessed and over invested with Pakistan and definitely with Pakistan. I mean, there's no need to be so over obsessed with Pakistan. We should have a far greater, deeper, richer maritime consciousness.

Our maritime neighborhood is much larger, much deeper, much richer. We keep getting stuck with all this miserable Pakistan and Bangladesh day in and day out. It's a trap. We're getting trapped in this nonsense. Of course, I agree that the neighborhood has to be maintained, but at our size and scale, we cannot be over obsessed with our land neighbors. We have to be equally, if not more cognizant of our great maritime reach and influence and potential power projection and our maritime neighbors.

Raghvendra Singh: Anyone? Yes, please, the lady. The lady behind, sorry.

Unidentified Participant: Yeah. Thank you to everyone in the panel for the talk. So my question is related to what Professor Sengupta said regarding one of the key defining features of Indian civilization, non-material consciousness. You said rightly that there has been a bipartisan understanding of this since the time of Gandhi and Nehru. All of them talk about this non-material consciousness. But coming to the latter part of this, Indian strategic identities, how do you think that this non-materialness plays into India's strategic identity? I am a student of IAS, so I speak from that perspective.

There have been works in IAS which say that India's obsession with this non-materialness translates into its diplomacy being not defined by concrete material goals. Amrita Narlikar, for example, says that India's diplomacy does not prioritise attaining particular concrete goals but rather focuses on just showing that we are the big brother and we are letting this go in that sense. I want you to elaborate a bit on that.

Hindol Sengupta: Thank you. With great respect, Amrita Narlikar is wrong. Her understanding of the priorities of Indian foreign policy is wrong. Perhaps there is some understanding gap. Indian foreign policy has always been absolutely clear and distinct on certain parameters. Number one, this argument that you just made, it is a classic American argument. You cannot make up your own mind, why don't you ally with somebody else? If you ally with us, there are these benefits. Somebody else will say if you ally with us, there are these great benefits. We have always seen the wisdom of not doing that. From Pandit Nehru onwards, we have always seen a wisdom of not doing that.

As far as that being tied to this non-material consciousness, please remember, at independence, we had massive material deficiencies. So for us to at that time, I think there was a huge gap in our understanding of what was going on. At that time, I think we took the right strategic choices at that point in time and it is in the wisdom of the Indian MEA that in many cases, they have continued that wisdom. So this is a complete misunderstanding of the priorities of Indian foreign policy. of Indian foreign policy.

Raghvendra Singh: Let me take Kajal's on your behalf. Let me take Kajal's on your behalf. Suppose if I said that in 1947, when the invasion in Jammu and Kashmir took place, and then we went ahead perhaps and also said that we will ascertain the wishes of the people. Now, the moment you say ascertaining the wishes of the people, what does it imply? It basically implies the same kind of a situation where you ascertain the will of the people before 1947 and partitioned the country. Ascertain the will of the people in the northwest frontier province by offering them only two choices. And let that particular province go away. And then wanting to offer the same choice in Jammu and Kashmir, and what I am trying to ask you is these kind of things then get repeated in case of China, in case of Afghanistan, time and again.

So why don't we sort of have a policy which is far more focused that, okay, we will do this, but we'll do it our way. Perhaps I don't endorse what the Chinese did in Tibet at all or what they did in Xinjiang, but the fact of the matter is at the end of it, where are they and where are we? Am I sort of rephrasing your question the way you wanted it to?

Hindol Sengupta: No, there's a simple answer to that. As the last person, the last historian who worked on Sardar Patel, the answer to this question is very clear. It has nothing to do with non-material consciousness. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel said to Nehru and others that after the attack began in 1947 and '48, Indian treasury owed INR 55 crore to the Pakistani treasury. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel mentioned that we should bring the Pakistanis to the table and thrash out the Kashmir deal once and for all and ensure that the borders are completely sanctosanct, our sovereignty is maintained, and therefore then we will give them the money.

What happened after that? Pandit Nehru disagreed, everybody else disagreed, but Sardar Patel, being who he was, managed to really fight back to an extent. But after that, Gandhiji went on a fast about the issue and then we had to give the money unilaterally to them. I mean, let's talk about, if you're going to discuss these things, we have to be cognizant of what is the history of this. There is nothing, this is not because we had some great non-material consciousness. Sardar Patel is on record saying he wanted the army to go much further in 1947 and '48. No, no, wait, let me complete. Sardar Patel in his last letter to Girija Shankar Bajpai and to Pandit Nehru mentioned exactly this. If we read that letter, he mentions everything that the Indian state has been plagued with.

He mentions China, he mentions Northeast problems in the Northeast, every single problem of sovereignty that we are going to face after 1950. He died in December 1950. All of this are in these two letters that he wrote to Girija Shankar Bajpai and to Pandit Nehru. So we chose to not take the path and which is why I say the Patelian state would have been much better than the Nehruvian or the Gandhian state. I've said this many times before, I'll say it again on this platform. We needed the Patelian state. It is nothing, non-material consciousness is about entirely different set of things and we can discuss that at length, but this is not about such practical things.

In such practical things, we have to protect our sovereignty. That we chose differently is a different conversation. But we chose differently. It was a choice. We can't blame anyone else for it. Sardar Patel pointed out that we shouldn't make these choices. But we chose. Sardar Patel pointed out that we shouldn't take the Kashmir issue to the UNO.

Kanchan Gupta: Yeah, but Hindu, I mean, if you make a choice, supposing I make a choice when I'm 20 years old, and I live to regret it when I'm 40 years old, you can't say, sorry, you made a choice when you were 20 years old. And you have to live with it. So in any case, I think, and I think there will be some agreement on this, that the pandemic has changed this whole thing about alignments and groups, etc., to an extent where I don't think any country anywhere in the world is looking at any long-term engagement with any country anywhere in the world. So India is now very uniquely placed to push its envelope on strategic autonomy.

Raghvendra Singh: Thank you. We'll carry this on when we have a cup of tea. Yes, you, please. Yeah, young man.

Unidentified Participant: Hi, I wanted to focus on just a couple of points that all of you made at different points. You mentioned Kashmir. And sir mentioned that how, I mean, the crux of his argument was throughout history, India has always been this safeguard of Hindu-slash-Dharmic civilization. Now throughout global politics today, be it the state of Israel, be it the state of China, be it states of the post-Soviet states, he states weaponizing their civilizational heritage. That you mentioned China in Tibet and in other places. We could even use the case of Pakistan, how Pakistan uses Sufi music and Muslim heritage sites to sort of, quote unquote, claim Islam in the subcontinent, claim Jammu and Kashmir.

So do you think is it prudent for our Ministry of External Affairs, for our foreign policy, to present India, on the global stage, as what it is, a defender of Dharmic civilization? And take that issue of, for example, I would bring up Sharda Peeth. You mentioned Jammu and Kashmir. Why is it that India, while, sir has mentioned correctly, in the past 10 years we've grown so conscious of our civilizational heritage, why is it that we can't go to the United Nations and say, well, why is it that the Hindus of Jammu and Kashmir can't go to Sharda Peeth? Why is it that we can't go visit the temples in Pakistan? When we have a Kartarpur corridor, why is it that we are not weaponizing this civilizational, maybe weaponizing is not the right word, but why are we not using the civilizational consciousness in our foreign policy? It's to anyone. But weaponizing is the right word.

Raghvendra Singh: We should weaponize it. Okay. I mean, I don't think there's any doubt in that. I would much rather take this line. Say, for example, this attack which happened on our soil in Pahelgham. And the idea that we should now take the whole issue of Pakistan occupied Kashmir. Now, we as Indians should become more and more aware of what is happening in Bhimber, what is happening in Kotli, what is happening in Bagh, what is happening in Mirpur, or what is happening in Hunza and Nagar. So there should be more and more of this kind of awareness coming into the younger generation of Indians. So that unless we know more of what is on the other side, how can we even lay claim to it? That's the way to go.

Kanchan Gupta: I don't know, do you follow news on All India Radio?

Raghvendra Singh: No, I don't.

Kanchan Gupta: If you did, then you would know that both All India Radio and Doordarshan has a policy. We carry news on what's happening in what is called Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. And we carry it without referring to it as Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. We just name the place, and we say what happened over there. So it is bound to have some impact. It will take time, and it will happen. I mean, who was talking about Pakistan Occupied Kashmir 10 years ago? The prime minister then was talking about an open border. So this whole thing, again, it brings us back to this thing about, oh, we must always feel contrite and rub our hands before the world. No, we need not do that. We just need not do that. One question.

Hindol Sengupta: There was a time when pilgrim passes used to be given to Hindu pilgrims visiting Hinglaj. Has that been stopped?

Kanchan Gupta: Yes, no, no, it hasn't been stopped. I mean, it has been stopped in the recent past, but it is happening.

Hindol Sengupta: By the way, somebody mentioned Mirpur. Somebody mentioned Mirpur. There is a big lack of, there's another gap. A lot of people are very annoyed consistently that in England, for instance, there are a lot of… I was at Oxford when the Indian embassy was attacked twice by the Khalistanis and whatever. The biggest group that is against India in England are not the Khalistanis. They are the Mirpuris. They are the deadliest group against India, and they have been against India for decades. But I don't think we have that consciousness in India, apart from in sort of governance and stuff, that this is the biggest problem, and the Mirpuris are in every level now of British society, in Parliament, in every major institution, they are everywhere and they consistently work against India. They are the biggest poison pill against India in England.

Raghvendra Singh: I mean, going back to what Professor Hindol said, the whole history of how Jammu was actually taken, you know, the whole Punj Jageer, except for Punj, and all these Mirpur, etc., etc., they were taken incrementally. And we kept on sort of only focusing on the valley, and the valley came first. So that's another debate. I mean, this was a major, major thing, I mean, if you wanted to sort of, and at that time, the British didn't know which way the whole thing would swing.

And at that time, okay, they were sort of looking into each and every decision the Indian army was making. But the fact of the matter is, we should have been aware of this fact from, and we knew it, that it is coming. It's not that we didn't know it, Nehru, Patel, etc., we all knew it, we were leveraging it with Sheikh Abdullah, which we didn't. Anyway, but that's a separate story, I don't want to get into that. Anyone else? Yes, please.

Shabnam Singh Rana: Very good evening to the esteemed panelists. I'm Shabnam Singh Rana, I'm an assistant professor in Department of Geography, IP College for Women, University of Delhi. I'm here with my students of political geography. So firstly, I want you to elaborate a little more. My question is to Kanchan Gupta, sir. Could you elaborate a little more about the concept of state, nation, state and nation? Because we teach that as a part of our syllabus. And when it comes to the example of India, it's very challenging for the students to visualize India as a state if they look at it from 1947 onwards. They want to look at India as a nation, then also it's very challenging for them because then they sort of get confused between the idea of Akhand Bharat and Hindu Rashtra. So it confuses them.

And then they further get confused when I teach them about what is a nation state. So they just end up all over the place. Because obviously, we, I believe that, as a faculty of geography, I believe that we lack adequate knowledge about geography of not just India, but the entire South Asia. We speak about enhancing our relationship with India's neighborhood and extended neighborhood. We don't teach about India's extended neighborhood and its geography and its culture to the students anymore. They don't know what similarities we have with their culture. We teach them about the Himalayas. We have a paper on Himalayas, but we don't teach them about the trans-Himalayas. So they are not able to visualize the people, the life. So how do we go about that? If you could please explain them the nation, nation state?

Kanchan Gupta: Very quickly, when I say that India is a nation and not a state, and hence you really cannot have a civilizational state, because civilization by itself would say that it is not an artificial construct, which the Westphalian state is. So India has to be seen as a nation, not as a state. That is one. I think the foreign minister, early on in his term as foreign minister, gave two lectures in which he explained this very well, that in Europe, how did it happen? They first discovered that they need a geography of their own, they need a space of their own, so they created a state.

Then they realize that we need a language. So then they brought about homogeneity of language. Then they discovered they needed culture. So then they forced, retrofitted a culture into the state. So we are not that. There is no retrofitting which has happened in India. We are a nation, we are a republic, and the best way to define ourselves would be we are an ancient nation and a modern state, because ultimately we now function as a state under a constitution. So to my mind, there is no confusion on this, but we can, and also I mentioned that when this whole thing of Hindu Rashtra is mentioned, the concept of Rashtra does not translate into the concept of nation or a state. It's like the Hindi word Sukh.

So when you say Sukh or Sukhi, it does not translate into happiness or merriment. It's a much deeper idea. So we have to look at redefining these concepts, we have to look at making it very clear where we come from. I mean, after all, this is what we are. So it's a long thing and it can go on and on and on.

Raghvendra Singh: So I think we've had a good discussion today.

Unidentified Speaker: As we come to the end of the program, it is my pleasure to present a vote of thanks on behalf of the Council. I would like to express my gratitude to Distinguished Chair, Sri Raghavendra Singh, and our esteemed panelists, Professor Shantanu Chakrabarti, Professor Hindol Sengupta, and Sri Kanchan Gupta for sharing their thought-provoking perspectives that enriched our understanding of India's civilizational identity and its role in rapidly transforming global order. My special thanks to all the participants for your active participation. My special thanks to leadership of the Council, Madam Nutan Kapur Mahawar, Acting Director General, ICWA, and thanks to Director of Research for her help in conducting the program. I would also like to thank the IT team for their support. Please join us for tea in the foyer. Thank you.

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List of participants

1. Ms. Nutan Kapoor Mahawar, Acting Director General, ICWA
2. Shri Raghvendra Singh, Senior Fellow, Vivekananda International Foundation, Former Secretary, Culture and Textiles, Government of India (Chair)
3. Prof. Shantanu Chakrabarti, Department of History, University of Calcutta
4. Prof. Hindol Sengupta, Jindal School of International Affairs & Director, Jindal India Institute, O.P. Jindal Global University
5. Shri Kanchan Gupta, Veteran Journalist, Senior Advisor, Ministry of Information, and Broadcasting, Government of India