MJ Akbar
AS I write, 45 years after that war, the Vietnamese Parliament has endorsed a railway line between Vietnam and China. Both are now pragmatic powers rather than ideological hothouses.
No one is infallible. No one is invincible. The proof of ideology lies in the pudding. Communism is dead in Russia and under house arrest in China, an ageing grandfather who cannot breathe but will not be buried. The Vietnamese, like the Chinese, offer titular fealty. Both have shifted towards capitalism sprinkled with a light dust of socialist characteristics.
Geopolitical tensions
Muscat is beautiful because the people are serene; and the people are serene because their leaders keep geography at a safe distance from politics. In the tensions of geopolitics, you may not be able to do much about geography, but you can do something about politics. The Sultanate of Oman is a neighbour of Yemen.
Could two regions be more alike and two countries more different? That is the difference that leaders can make.
The Omanis have been masters of the seas; their maritime empire between Gwadar and the Strait of Hormuz to Zanzibar checked British ambitions till the 18th century. India was a principal trading partner in an era when Mughal royalty like Nurjahan and Shahjahan owned merchant fleets. China and India were great manufacturing powers of the pre-colonial world; till 1750 China had roughly 30 per cent of the world manufacturing output, and India around 23 per cent. Africa was a principal market; Oman and Zanzibar were the gateways that took goods up to Italy and beyond.
A question I raised at the conference bears some consideration: why were there no major naval wars in the Indian Ocean before the Europeans turned up, beginning with Portugal and ending with Britain and France? Asian powers understood that peaceful trade was mutually beneficial; colonialism turned profits into one-way traffic.
Communism (de)merits
Alas, an Omani must share the blame for Europe’s rise. Portugal’s Vasco da Gama, who made his money and reputation by finding a sea route to Kerala, would have floundered again in 1498 but for an Omani navigator, Ibn Majid, who came aboard and showed Vasco da Gama the route to India. The rest is restless.
While discussing the merits or otherwise of communism, an Israeli friend pointed out, correctly, that the Jewish people had given us both Marxism and capitalism. Karl Marx was Jewish. Scotland’s Adam Smith might want to share the honours for free markets, but theory must be put into practice to make it credible. Jewish bankers, wizards of capital, invented modern capitalism.
It was my turn to point out that the credit for belief systems which dominate the 21st century must go to another great Jew, the prophet Abraham, a patriarch revered as the forefather of prophets by Christians and Muslims as well. The only major religions or ideologies of nonJewish origin come from India: Hinduism and Buddhism.
