Economic Power

There are so many types of power that countries wield: military power, soft power and economic power. Having or using only military power is very expensive: after all, weapons cost money, positioning troops in another country costs money. Ask the Americans how much the Iraq war cost. Soft power includes the non-military ways of creating a favourable opinion about one’s country abroad. Like American universities and Bollywood.

Economic power can work in many ways. It can be of the “I have this technology but won’t share it with you unless you do that” kind. Like the US did with super-computers decades back. Or it can be in the “Play by my rules or you won’t get access to our markets to sell your products”. Like what China does. And to a lesser extent, even India.

Three recent instances of how India is wielding its economic power would not have been possible even a decade back. The first one is the ongoing discussion with Blackberry on getting access to its data for security (read terrorism) reasons. The message is simple: Move your server from Canada to India, and give Indian security agencies access to the data on those servers. If you don’t, you won’t be allowed to operate in India, which means you’d lose a market of 1 million (and growing) Blackberry users.

The second instance of this power is in India’s talks with Japan to get nuclear power. Japan, given its experience at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is averse to the idea of sharing nuclear technology with a non-NPT signatory like India. India’s response: we are going to grow and need a lot of power. If you don’t give us that technology, we’ll get it from the Russians or Americans or French. You’d just be losing a big opportunity.

As India continues to grow as the economic darling of the West, its clout and ability to influence them grows. Why else do you think the British PM, David Cameron, during his recent visit to India, accused Pakistan of running with the terrorist hare and hunting with the NATO hound? Like he said, Britain needs Indian investments in Britain and access to the Indian market.

Economic power is a lot cheaper than military power. With it, we can even cause businesses in the target country to put pressure on their government to do what we want!

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 11, 2010 at 12:21 PM

    Good view.
    I would add that apart from economics strength, an aspiring nation would require a multi facet growth. India should also aim for all round growth. (For example, What respect people have of Saudi Arabia's wealth, all the rest being fundamental life?)
    Economics of course will aid in that and may actually be an essential ingredient.

    Kumar

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more