Kishore Mahbubani on India

The latest from CASI occasional papers, is a talk by Ambassador Kishore Mahbubani, Dean, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore:
"Will India Emerge as an Eastern or Western Power?" Occasional Paper No. 27. It is interesting to see the comments by a ethnic Indian of different nationality. There ia lot of feel good stuff in the talk. Some excerpts from the questions and answers session;
"Q: Let me offer a different view and get a reaction. Is it possible that we are all just
overreacting? If you turn the clock back to thirty-three years ago, the Soviet Union was an alternative pole perhaps, comparable to Islam in some ways, you had the Mai Lai disaster which was comparable to Guantanamo, you had a president of the United States who effectively almost had been impeached, and that too passed, and the West maintained a position of leadership for several decades back at a similar position. Is it conceivable that this too shall pass and perhaps pass quickly?
KM: Yes, that’s actually a very good question. I tell my Asian friends that the biggest danger they face is Asian triumphalism. Asian countries will take at least thirty to forty years more, at least. They haven’t arrived yet. China has got to make this tremendous transformation of its political system. It is not going to be easy. It’s going to be very difficult, very painful. Indeed along the way it’s quite conceivable that China may well stumble, and I think it’s also true of the other countries. Even India can stumble once or twice in its effort to get there, like other countries did. But they say you cannot make predictions about the future except in one dimension. If you can measure the amount of snow that’s fallen in the Himalayas, if you have enough information you can predict the level of floods in the Ganges six months later because there’s a correlation between the amount of snow that has fallen and the flood levels in the Ganges. Now a lot of snow has fallen on Asia already. The huge transformation in Asia is that the number of young people in Asia are the largest in the world. Europe literally has very few young people, and India has this huge demographic pool of young people. That’s one fact. That’s a fact, it’s a concrete reality. The second concrete reality is that this young generation is the most confident young generation of Asians seen in centuries. They believe tomorrow will be better than today. They believe that tomorrow is theirs, and that shift in mindset motivates you in a dramatic fashion. I think this explains fundamentally the tremendous energy you see in both China and India and the other Asian countries, too. ...."
"Q: .......On a more serious note, in terms of the moral dimension, in which the West has suffered a loss,especially the United States in the wake of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and other sorts of sad excesses, I have been very struck by something that I think is emerging in India in conversations that I’ve had with business leaders and social leaders over the last year. I think it is very interesting to look at the politics of inclusion that you were just talking about and the necessity of inclusiveness in the institutions of global order. India has been one of the champions of pushing for that, whether it’s in the WTO or the United Nations. Across the board India has been a leader of the nonaligned movement in previous decades, but domestically the politics of inclusion and a paradigm of inclusion have become very current in India. I can’t tell you the number of leading CEOs that I have spoken to recently who have talked about the importance of equity and of making sure that India’s economic takeoff includes all of the population. As Mukesh Ambani said to me, we have to do something that no one in the world has been able to do, and that is to grow equitably. I’ve heard this over and over again and I just wondered if you could comment on whether Asia is really the center of gravity as the world moves toward Asia materially, and what is the possibility of coming up with something that goes past Fukuyama’s final moment of history of Western liberalism in some kind of a new model that includes capitalism in some way but differently?
KM: ….
But the good news is that the great values of Western civilization, the enormous regard for human self-worth, the idea that every individual matters, are being adopted. Incidentally one reason why China and India are thriving today is because finally the Chinese and Indians also came to realize that the people at the very bottom are resources and not burdens. That’s a Western idea that has been captured by China and India. So many of the great Western values I believe should become universal values, but for them to become the universal values, the West must stop portraying them as Western values, the West should say that these are human values and we are all working together to defend not Western civilization but human civilization. Once the West speaks in that way, then I think it can be done, then the differences will disappear."