Oxford India Short Introductions. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015. 210 pp. (Figures.) US$14.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-19-808221-7.
India’s foreign policy can come across as enigmatic to those who are unfamiliar with the political context that underpins it. Apparent contradictions abound. The country of apostles of peace like Buddha and Gandhi, India is an unofficial member of the nuclear club. An impressive arsenal of conventional weapons complements India’s bombs and missiles, many of them indigenous in origin. However, despite the possession of this deadly stockpile, India does not have an explicit doctrine stating whom these weapons are aimed against. The Indian nuclear test of 1998, undertaken by a Hindu nationalist-led ruling coalition was not, as the subsequent events have shown, merely a flash in the pan. Despite the political bickering over details, a bipartisan consensus has grown over the need for India to acquire nuclear weapons and delivery capacity by a range of indigenously developed missiles. Nevertheless, official Indian policy systematically downplays the ownership of these deadly weapons of mass destruction. A similar incoherence marks India’s use of “coercive diplomacy,” launched against Pakistan following the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament in Operation Parakram of 2001–2002. It involved mobilizing a large number of troops who were then recalled, without any demonstrable goals having been achieved or explanations offered. This lack of clarity about broader goals affects the global perception of India’s foreign policy as a whole.
Sumit Ganguly’s compact and concise volume offers a guide through this labyrinth. The book is divided into five chapters. The first introduces the current debate on India’s foreign policy, focusing on the issues of “the precise role that India hopes to play in global politics” (13). The second discusses core ideas that underpin India’s foreign policy consisting of anti-colonialism, non-alignment, a world free of nuclear weapons, and a genuine search for a new world order. Ganguly discusses their pre-independence origin, evolution, and continuity during the post-independence years, leading up to India’s military debacle in the 1962 Sino-Indian war. At a time when it is fashionable to castigate Nehru, Ganguly stands by his admiration for him as the founder of modern India. That, however, does not stop him from criticising Nehru for failing “to undertake any measures to bolster the security of India’s northern borders despite Patel’s explicit sounding of the tocsin” (34). Nor does Ganguly overlook Nehru’s policy of “appeasing and accommodating the PRC [which] had, for all practical purposes, ended in a complete military debacle” (41). The third chapter focuses on the period during the disastrous 1962 war and the end of the Cold War, with the disappearance of the Soviet Union as India’s major global backer. Ganguly argues, Indian foreign policy straddled the contrary pulls of the “ideational” elements and the “recognition of the significance of and quest for material power” (4). “Incomplete acceptance of the importance of material capabilities” marked the fourth phase. The final section of the book discusses current trends and capabilities and the limitations of Indian foreign policy in meeting its stated objectives.
Ganguly’s analysis will provide much food for thought both to the general reader and the specialist. The former will benefit from the historical narrative that helps follow the unfolding of India’s foreign policy. For the latter, the real bonus lies in the cache of interviews conducted with the diplomatic corps and high-ranking military officers, who have been part of the story that he tells. One finds insights in these narratives that help us understand turns of events that normally remain shrouded in mystery.
With the robust clarity that marks his scholarship, Ganguly excoriates the government of India for keeping India’s diplomatic corps limited in size, causing in large part its inability to meet the challenges of a fast moving world. “In 2012 the Indian Foreign Service had a mere 600 odd officers, with 150 missions across the world. For the purpose of comparison, Belgium and Holland had similar size diplomatic corps” (18). He upbraids India’s numerous think tanks for their limited value in providing policy-relevant advice: “The vast majority of them lack a sufficient corpus of individuals who have adequate professional training in international affairs and strategic studies. Most, in fact, are autodidacts of varying quality and with differing levels of knowledge and expertise” (16). The consequences are to be seen in the “residual anti-Americanism in the foreign policy apparatus in New Delhi” (137), the Indian reaction, “at the arrest and apparent maltreatment of an Indian diplomat, Devyani Khobragade, in New York in December 2013…bordering on petulance and quite unbecoming of what one might reasonably expect of a strategic partner and an aspiring global power” (136), or India’s failure to develop a suitable strategy to cope with cross-border terrorism emanating from Pakistan in the face of the “nuclear overhang” (119).
The long shadow of Jawaharlal Nehru hangs heavily on Ganguly’s view of Indian foreign policy. His analysis stops with Manmohan Singh’s India. Prime Minister Modi has one entry in the book (19), but even this reference is to his time as Chief Minister of Gujarat. It is therefore not possible within this frame of analysis to situate Modi’s India and ask if India has reached a turning point, or whether one is still stuck with the famous aphorism of Stephen Cohen: “One is … tempted to ask whether India is destined always to be ‘emerging’ but never actually arriving” (India: Emerging Power [Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2001], 2). By recent indications, particularly, the multiple trips of Prime Minister Modi to the centres of power, and the reciprocation of some of these visits by the high and mighty to India, it might be argued that the direction of India’s foreign policy has taken a radical turn. The two figures most closely identified with emerging India—Prime Minister Modi and Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar—showcase a different profile of India. “A stage has come where no country can now think of treating India with contempt or condescension. Every country today is looking at us either with deference or as an equal” (Narendra Modi, http://indianexpress.com/article/india/politics 2014). Jaishankar adds: “India now aspires to be a leading power, rather than just a balancing power,” and carries with it “a willingness to shoulder greater global responsibilities” (Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, 20 July 2015, https://www.iiss.org). Readers of Ganguly’s elegant and incisive analysis will eagerly look forward to his evaluation of this new phase in the unfolding of India’s foreign policy.
Subrata K. Mitra
National University of Singapore, Singapore
pp. 386-388