Cambridge: Polity Press; Hoboken: Wiley [distributor], 2014. x, 245 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-7456-6087-5.
This is an excellent comprehensive textbook that succeeds in presenting a nuanced story of India’s foreign engagement as an emerging power. It notes that the contradictions of India’s emergence lie in personalistic caste-based politics, rampant poverty, and an underfunded and poorly manned foreign service whose scale of operations far exceed the resources with which its objectives are pursued. The book succeeds as a description of the institutional setting and resources that undergird India’s diplomatic history. It deals with the performance of India’s foreign policy while engaging with both its external and domestic political roots.
Chapter 1 describes how India’s foreign policies are made. The Prime Minister’s Office is very powerful. The Parliament, ministries (including the Ministry of External Affairs, MEA), and think tanks are accorded a lesser role. This is a rather parsimonious view. Can we expect India to be very different from industrialized democracies where international relations occur to a much greater extent within the black box of government? What goes against the grain of too narrow a determination of Indian foreign policy are the many hotly debated issues such as the nuclear deal with the US, and economic agreements with organizations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the World Trade Organization, to name just a few. Policy movement in these and many other cases is slow largely because of the democratic impulse. The Indian prime minister today looks rather more like the American president or the British prime minister than the Chinese president or even the first Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Chapter 2 deals with the difficult topic of India’s strategic thinking and behaviour rather more deftly. It notes the importance of understanding strategic culture for explaining the roots of foreign policy. Does the ancient Indian text Arthashastra reveal more about India’s foreign policy than the country’s anti-colonial struggle? This chapter succeeds in describing India’s military and nuclear modernization more successfully than in explaining its grand strategy.
The chapter on India’s economic transformation is an impressive one. It is an authoritative story of India’s transition from a closed underperforming economy to one that has become the third-largest in terms of purchasing power parity. The chapter describes developmental challenges such as energy security, social development, and realization of the demographic dividend. There could have been a section on the rise of welfare and the rights-based approach to Indian development in the new millennium as well.
Is India a natural hegemon? Chapter 4 describes India’s relations with Pakistan and other South Asian neighbours, as well as its relations near Southeast Asian countries such as Myanmar. The coverage is more extensive than analytical. It is a lucid summary of developments in foreign relations. India-Pakistan and India-Myanmar relations have recently been overtaken by events beyond the publication of this book.
Chapter 5 is a fine-grained survey of India’s tryst with multilateral organizations ranging from the United Nations and the World Trade Organization to the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation, Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Shanghai Cooperation Council, and India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA). India has moved away from non-alignment to pursuing its own developmental interest. Despite this, policy autonomy and attending to developing country concerns have not totally vanished from India’s strategic imagination.
The chapter on India and the great powers—China, Russia, European Union (EU), and Japan—is a comprehensive survey of these relationships. The merit of this chapter is both its crispness and its historical detail. We learn how India-China relations moved from hostility towards pragmatic cooperation; how India-Russia (Soviet) relations evolved from almost an alliance relationship to a cooperative one; why Indo-EU relations are functioning considerably below potential; and, the significant strategic and commercial value of Indo-Japan relations.
The chapter on India and the US, like the other historical chapters, is both detailed and comprehensive. We learn how Indo-US relations survived the Cold War to become one of the major relationships in the twenty-first century. More nuanced attention could have been paid to the period between 1957 and 1962 when the US and the USSR were both cosying up to India for two diametrically opposite reasons. The US thought that India had to be secured from communism while the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) seemed convinced that India’s state-led import substitution and independent positions in foreign policy were clearly not the makings of a camp follower of the US. These were the hey days of non-alignment.
The last chapter, titled “India Emergent,” demonstrates how Indian foreign policy is able to deal deftly with countries ranging from Israel to Saudi Arabia and Iran. Perhaps the conclusion could have stressed that such diversity of relationships has something to do with India’s preservation of its non-aligned identity. The book scores higher marks as a comprehensive historical account that connects with ideas of grand strategy than one that provides the reader with a conceptual orientation. This is both the strength and the weakness of this book. This book is arguably the best introduction to Indian foreign policy available for readers today.
Rahul Mukherji
Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany
pp. 919-921