POLITIC SHOCK

Recent events around the world
have shaken old certainties. Questions are being asked about the survival of
the Liberal Order, which has been dominant for over fifty years. The election
of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote have alarmed many commentators. Across
Europe too there have been developments—the emergence of fringe parties of
the left and right in France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Greece—which have
disturbed the liberal thought. In India, the arrival of Narendra Modi at the
head of the ‘Hindu nationalist’ Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014 had
raised fear similar to those in Trump’s case.In this perceptive account,
Meghnad Desai opens up the debate beyond the West and looks at parallels
between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump as two
outsiders who broke through the barriers to reach the top. He analyses Asia’s
challenge to Western hegemony and asks if the conventional wisdom about the
hegemony of free trade liberalism needs re-examination. He peers into the
future to look at the greatest challenge facing the world today: Will the
Liberal Order survive, collapse or mutate? Is the world at a cusp? Is
history—the old saga of blood, sweat and tears—about to resume its
course?Politicshock analyses Trump and Modi and other outsiders who have come
to the fore not as freaks but as results of systematic forces—economic,
social, political and cultural—who will now shape the critical destiny of the
time that we live in.