Book Spotlight: Rajeev Mantri | A New Idea of India: The Civilizational Republic

Motivation for the book

So, I had written about 120-130 columns in different newspapers and magazines and co-authored with my co-writer Harsh Madhusudan as well, some of them. And after a point, the impetus to write a book came from some of our mentors and colleagues in the world of non-fiction writing. So, they really encouraged me to sort of think of a bigger project.

So, people like Sanjeev Sanyal in particular and that was the genesis actually, because I never thought of myself as a writer to begin with. So, it was their kind of motivation, their kind of goading in some ways as well, which gave me the courage and gave me the confidence to take up the project. So, I have always had certain views about policy making and making a better country, making a prosperous, secure India and creating that within a certain time span.

Of course, one can kind of have that goal in perpetuity, but one always thinks what does it take to accomplish that within a certain time frame and what are the right policies which will get us there. So, after a lot of thinking and reading and researching on those aspects, the idea with the book was to create a coherent framework on how to kind of develop a country which was secure, prosperous, also more kind of equal and more capitalist, if you will. So, that was the kind of genesis of it and the book delves into all of these themes including tying back some of these themes to India's own cultural and civilizational ethos.

So, often many observers will see the two in conflict. In fact, many types of colonialist narratives also portray India as poor because of cultural reasons which obviously I believe is completely false and in fact even racist. So, my view has always been that with the right policies, India can do just as well as any other country and this book is an effort to kind of present the right policies in a certain format.

So, that is what the book covers in the second half and in the early parts of the book, the first half of the book goes into more philosophical and historical kind of overview of why India is the way it is. So, in the book, we have covered a very sweeping kind of canvas going from the philosophical aspect to the historical and cultural aspect and then getting into very specific ideas on economic policy, foreign policy, even defense and security and all kinds of other domestic policy issues. So, in that sense, the book is both ideational as well as prescriptive.

What question does the book answer?

The question I would say it addresses very succinctly, I mean it is a 380-page book, so maybe one cannot really call it succinct, but I think for the canvas that it covers, it is a very pretty precise book. The question it answers is what is in a nutshell the history and future of modern India. So, if you look at modern India over the last like let us say a century and a half roughly, why did India come to be the way it was and how do we take it into an orbit which is secure, secure, prosperous and also kind of defining the frontier in different fields across the world, be it science and technology, be it economics, be it leading the way in foreign policy and not just tagging someone else's line or being an importer of technology and so on.

So, we have tried to sort of provide the entire perspective in the book, like I said both through prescriptive policies and also through certain ideas which the book suggests have always been there in India.

Misconceptions challenged

I think the book in the first half really addresses this misconception that democracy and capitalism are foreign things and they are not Indian things. So, many foreign observers, many western observers will often say that oh how is the Indian experiment work, India is an outlier, it is an accident, such a diverse country cannot exist and so on.

But the reason they have such views is they are not accounting for the cultural ethos and the millennia old traditions of India and they frankly see it through a more Abrahamic lens and not an Indic lens and that is the key difference and key misunderstanding that many western observers in particular and similar to those western observers many kind of commentators, observers, analysts in India make the same mistake. So I think correcting that misconception somewhere that the ideas of individual freedom, democracy, market economics are somewhere incompatible, I think that is something which the book has made a strong case for.

Why the book matters today

So, I would say the reason the book really matters is it prevents, it provides that kind of very cohesive and consistent framework within which to understand India and as India is becoming a more and more important economy globally, it is becoming a kind of assertive and self-reliant country including kind of assertive country in defining its own foreign policy in particular.

So as India is taking that role internationally now, I think many people will want to understand that how does this country work, how does India operate, why does it operate the way it does and I think for all those kind of people who are trying to from the outside understand what is going on here and even from the outside many citizens, many residents over here may want to make sense of why India is the way it is and what India is looking to do and I think the kind of sweeping perspective provided by the book will help people gauge that and obtain that understanding, hence I think it is a pretty useful book for that purpose.

Takeaways for readers

I hope the reader does sort of imbibe the ideas that individual freedom and market economics are necessary even in stronger doses for India to keep succeeding and keep maintaining that level of growth and achieving that level of security and prosperity that we want and we should not have ifs and buts around this, I think as a country we have tried all the other options for better part of like 60 to 70 years, most of those options failed, there are ample examples of it, frankly nothing new is really being attempted in India, it is more about navigating the political economy of reforms and one really hopes that readers understand that idea, the bigger idea of why freedom matters and why that is necessary to kind of improve the state of the country in every dimension.