President Joe Biden would be the third United States President that Prime Minister Modi would be engaging with, at the head-of-government level, in his current visit to the United States. After Indira Gandhi, no Indian Prime Minister had this opportunity. But this statistic wouldn’t have been so important in itself had this not been the first in-person engagement at this critical juncture in history. On the agenda is also the first in-person QUAD summit which is taking place at a very remarkable time in the history. But before we return to the present, a brief context setting would not be out of place.
The New World Order is a much-used term and although its vintage is only a century old, it has been retrospectively applied to define eras even though the principal actors during that era may not have used the term. From the global perspective, we can define two distinct world orders in the last millennium and two reordering in the second world order.
The first world order took shape at the beginning of the last millennium, when the Islamic World gained a foothold in regions beyond the Arabian Peninsula – in the Indian subcontinent and a few centuries later conquering Constantinople. The second world order emerged with the rise of Europe, in the late second half of the last millennium and with it the rise of colonial empires. The second world order, went through its first reordering phase, if we can classify it as that after the second world war. Although it was still, what many Eurocentric writers call, “Western Civilization’ led, the center of gravity of this reordered world had shifted from Europe to the United States.
India, for a significant period of these thousand years successively battled Arabic, Mongol, Turkish, Persian and Afghan invasions. No invader could ever really conquer India for any sustained period or ever conquer it fully. Though the British colonized large parts of India, even they could never subdue India’s cultural and civilizational history in the way they did with other colonies.
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