Change is good—or is it? In
recent years, some major
geopolitical shifts across the
world have affected many
countries, including India and
the United States. Here’s an
overview.
The long,
hot summer
was
punctuated
by seemingly
unconnected
world events
that may be,
on closer look,
indeed connected
by strains of similar phenomena—new global
realities, losses for the old guard, changing fealties, and
societal transformations.
In Great Britain, Brexit supporters won a decisive
victory and the hitherto unthinkable came to pass.
As the polling analysis revealed, two Britains had
emerged: the urban, more prospering (if not always
prosperous) multicultural elite, and their rural counterparts
who felt, wrongly or rightly, that the country
had left them behind. Regionally, the results were further
complicated.
In Turkey, a small section of the army attempted
(very ineffectively) to institute a coup against the
creeping dictatorship of President Erdogan’s government.
Although Erdogan blamed, without proof,
supporters of the cleric Fethullah Gülen (now living
in the U.S.) for the coup, his reprisal was swift, merciless
and widely overreaching. Much of Turkey’s secular
society and the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,
its modern founder, lie in a shambles as a result.
Deans across Turkey’s universities lost their jobs,
the army and the judiciary suffered purges and the
media is facing ever stricter controls. Although all
Turks came out against the coup initially, what is clear
now is that Erdogan has seized the opportunity to
deal the secularists a blow from which they are unlikely
to ever recover. Erdogan’s new Turkey will undoubtedly
be less democratic and less secular, and
the Middle East will be transformed as a result.
In the U.S., Donald Trump gained the Republican
nomination despite the opposition of not just
Democrats, but a sizeable number of Republicans, too.
The old-guard Republicans, whom he derisively referred
to as the out-of-touch elite, were horrified as
a bombastic, self-serving messiah with little knowledge
of foreign policy, legislative politics, or the economy
nevertheless managed to tap into a well of deep
resentment and hopelessness among a part of the
populace—in the Midwest, where shells of old factories
lay decaying, in small-town America where jobs that
once existed had evaporated. The rest of America was
stunned at Trump’s rise; two countries looked at each
other, suspiciously and without recognition.
India is waging its own internal battle. This time, it’s
not with terrorists or secessionists, although of course
these threats continue to loom. Rather, it’s the secular,
progressive India versus the traditionalist, more rightist
majority who lament the new boldness exhibited by
hitherto quiescent sections of Indian society: women,
gays, the irreligious, and nonreligious. Hindus who assert
their rights in what they see as a Hindu India under
attack by those who don’t share their values, versus
those who believe, for example, that beef can and
should be eaten in a democracy by those who wish to.
Everywhere, the old contracts are fraying. In Britain,
being a part of Europe once seemed obvious and
inevitable, but in the process some Britons seemed to
have lost themselves. The consensus that there was
strength in regional alliances has worn down and the
doubters have been strengthened. In Turkey, the liberal
secularists are in a fight for their lives, and appear to be
losing. Although the country is still divided, the traditionalists
(who include Islamists) are gaining ground,
and their values are anathema to the liberals who, if
they worshipped at all, worshipped first at the altar of
Atatürk. In the U.S., Donald Trump speaks in ways that
hitherto seemed out of the bounds of acceptable political
norms for leaders of the two major parties. The
existing concord, that the two parties (often referred to
by political scientists as Tweedledee and Tweedledum)
shared more in common than they held apart, has
crumbled. In India, there may always have been two
countries within one, but the old Congress coalition
dominated the socio-political landscape so that it appeared
that the country agreed on its secular, progressive,
post-Independence values even in the midst of
deeply-ingrained traditions. That national agreement
has now ruptured.
The world is in flux. Mass migrations of the kind
not seen since World War II are further changing landscapes.
These transformations will play themselves
out and a new consensus will emerge that will govern
these countries and world relations.
Tinaz Pavri is Professor of Political Science and
Director of the Asian Studies Program at Spelman
College, Atlanta. A recipient of the Donald Wells
Award from the Georgia Political Science Association,
she’s the author of the memoir Bombay in the Age
of Disco: City, Community, Life.