India’s rise and intellectual bankruptcy of West: Why Fukuyama's era should get over

It has almost become a trend for experts to give lessons to India on pluralism and democracy these days. In this week’s sermon, ‘The Spectator’ magazine has been able to get Francis Fukuyama, a noted American political scientist to tell India how their Prime Minister Modi isn’t treating the muslims fairly and has “disenfranchised” them. The attack by Fukuyama like all previous attacks by others of his tribe is baseless. The term ‘disenfranchise’ is a loaded one which means Muslims in India don’t have voting rights anymore. Anyone who lives in India would know how disconnected is Fukuyama from reality. But then facts are never supposed to interfere with what a Western intellectual wants to preach India about. Fukuyama is a professor whose reputation all these years has been built on rigorously done peer-reviewed research but when it comes to India, it is unfortunate that he chose to go by the propagandistic designs of Western media outlets instead of doing a reality check himself. This is a great fall for someone who commands a lot of academic power in institutions of global repute. But then Fukuyama isn’t someone who has got things wrong for the first time. All scholars of International Relations have a fascination with inventing grand theories about the ultimate fate of the international system. As a young student of International Relations, I was exposed to many. Two of the ones that have stuck are Francis Fukuyama’s thesis ‘End of History’ and Samuel P Huntington’s ‘Clash of civilisations’. For the uninitiated, Fukuyama’s End of History was written just after the end of the cold war when US’s ideological nemesis USSR had disintegrated and with that the arch rivalry between two ideological poles of Capitalism and Communism had also subsided. The victory of the capitalist ideology in the Cold War led Fukuyama to write a very famous book, ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ which predicted that the ideological evolution of human beings is now over and Western style liberal democracy has emerged as the eventual winner. For Fukuyama, this victory was final and the only thing that was remaining to happen was the universalisation of this liberal democracy as the ultimate form of government world over. As per Fukuyama’s predictions, the world was going to witness mushrooming of new liberal democracies with authoritarian states all set to transform into the cradle of democratic values in the next century. In response to Fukuyama, Huntington had penned a counter argument, first in the form of an essay and later in the form of a full-fledged book in 1996, ‘The Clash of Civilisations’. Huntington had argued that the post-Cold War future won’t be sans conflict as predicted by Fukuyama but it will take the form of a tussle between cultures and not so much between countries. Civilisations for Huntington were the highest category of cultural identity and hence, the future according to him involved conflicts on civilisational lines. He singled out Islam in his thesis which he referred to as having bloody borders and a potential to undermine Western civilisation due to its fundamental tensions with any other form of value system except the one propagated by Islam. If we look around today and test the formulations given by both Fukuyama and Huntington, then it is Huntington who wins by a broad margin. Whether we observe the recent events in far flung France or near home in Manipur, both have civilisational tensions written all over. In the case of France, his prediction about fundamentalism in Islam is right on point while in the case of Manipur, an ancient Hindu civilisation is reacting to the onslaught of Abrahamic intrusion of the past. Interestingly, Fukuyama had predicted that the authoritarian states in West Asia such as Iran and others will go the Turkey way to become a state which will acquire a liberal character despite their affiliation to Islam but ironically, Erdogan’s Turkey has actually put itself in a reverse gear to turn more Islamic instead. Clearly Fukuyama’s thesis failed. Not only the world didn’t turn out to be more liberal and democratic than before but with an authoritarian China’s stupendous rise, the capacity of Western countries to do democracy promotion or incentivisation of liberal values by them is under a serious challenge today. In a world where civilisational conflicts are rampant and are threatening the very law and order of the Western societies as evident in France and other countries, Fukuyama is clearly a loser to his own doctoral advisor, Huntington today. What also rubs salt further to his wound is the fact that communism didn’t end with the fall of the USSR but has a new patron in the form of China. Interestingly, Fukuyama wasn’t the only woolly-headed liberal who was invested in the transformation of authoritarian states. A whole section of the West had aided China’s rise believing that its entry in the liberal world order through capitalism will also transform it into a democracy some day. When Fukuyama and many others like him are lost to make sense of their own glaring mistakes, here is a country that’s rising consistently and that too with a reputation of being the largest democracy in the world. India’s rise has presented a credible hope to the actual liberal values and not only the Western conceptions of liberal international order. But people like Fukuyama are riding so high on their intellectual horses that they don’t want to understand the ground realities. As for me, the transition from a young student of IR to a scholar and a teacher today has been a sobering one. Old heroes are falling and a search for new ones is on. But this time, the search for grand propositions won’t end with Western knowledge systems. The era of Fukuyamas should get over. Indians must articulate their own grand visions. Isn’t it? The author is a PhD from the Department of International Relations, South Asian University. She writes on India’s foreign policy. Views expressed are personal. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.