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Indic Diplomacy

14 Sat Jan 2017

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making-of-indian-diplomacyDatta-Ray, Deep. The Making of Indian Diplomacy: A Critique of Eurocentrism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015. 380 pp.

Indian diplomacy has long vexed its observers, occidental and oriental alike. Lacking in a culture of periodical declassification and easy access to past and present practitioners, the workings of South Block remain impervious to methodical scholarship. In this environment, a book that promises to reveal not only how Indian diplomacy is conducted but also why it is such an enigma is a welcome arrival. As the title avers, The Making of Indian Diplomacy: A Critique of Eurocentrism seeks to properly establish the functioning of the members of the Indian Foreign Service in the culture and traditions of their homeland rather than in Christendom’s theories of statecraft.

Several things are of note in this project: first, Deep Datta-Ray, the author, is making a cultural approach to the study of diplomacy and foreign policy. While this may seem perfectly normal to most, it is a method that has had few takers in the historical profession. Though it has become more popular over the last decade, international relations remains firmly in the grip of abstract theories such as realism, constructivism, or Marxism. And yet, diplomats and their political masters do not leave their values and biases at home each day as they come in for work; they are enmeshed in a cultural web which cannot but inform their policies.

Second, Datta-Ray criticises scholars who complain that Indian foreign policy makes little sense for judging it by Western customs of politics, governance, and power. Despite nearly two centuries of British rule – between Crown and Company – over India, cultural transfer from metropole to periphery remained superficial at best. In other words, Thomas Macaulay failed to create brown Englishmen; Indians remain rooted in their traditions and understanding of the world.

Macaulay’s failure would not be a startling revelation in itself but Datta-Ray goes on to argue that the entire modern project in Europe is deeply rooted in its Christian heritage and incompatible to the Indian ethos. The binarism of exclusivist monotheistic cults transcends mere theology and permeates all aspects of culture, resulting in a fundamentally different understanding of the cosmos and man’s place in it. Islam, being an Abrahamic offspring, literally, meshes better with European notions of power relations and the state than dharmic religions do. Again, this is not a new argument: originally put forward in academic circles in the mid-1970s, it has percolated into the awareness of ordinary Indians perhaps a decade ago. However, Datta-Ray’s systematic application of this idea to foreign policy is a first and deserves careful consideration.

Unfortunately, The Making of Indian Diplomacy is filled with turgid prose that could impress only dissertation committees. Such jargon-laden, impenetrable language, the hallmark of cultural studies, is one of the reasons the humanities has lost respect in society. Datta-Ray commits such perversions upon the English language – the Queen was never meant to sound like this – that it would make Guillaume Apollinaire proud! Yet those who brave the presentation are rewarded with some fascinating insights into the workings of India’s Ministry of External Affairs.

Indian history remains, disappointingly, strongly entangled to privileged access and Datta-Ray, son of Sunanda K Datta-Ray, seems to have it. This project needed the personal intervention of then prime minister Manmohan Singh, such was the resistance of the bureaucracy against an interloper. Even then, one MEA mandarin asked the author, “What do you want with our documents? They only reveal process, not intent.” This gives an insight into Indian bureaucratic thinking that marks it different from Western practice. Fortunately, Datta-Ray has used his opportunity well – embedded with the Indian Foreign Service allowed him to observe, talk informally, and interview officially dozens of young aspirants, serving officials, and retired civil servants. The resulting monograph can be understood as discussing the structural and intellectual differences between Western and Indic diplomacy.

The Body of the Beast

Before looking at policies and attitudes, Datta-Ray asks who populates the service. He finds that many of the applicants come from modest backgrounds in the hinterland, some not even aware of the IFS until they had cleared the Union Public Service Commission examination! Many come to government service as a means to mediate between it and their village, or enlist its assistance to protect their region from the state. There is less suspicion of the state compared to Western countries, for one primary reason – it is present in the villages, where private corporations find it unprofitable to venture. Ironically, the failure of the state to adequately provide basic necessities for its citizens is also its greatest strength. Many of the incoming civil service cadre seem to hold an organic view of society in which the state remains a place people can come together and lift themselves up through the opportunities it provides. While the cosmopolitan disenchanted may scoff at such idealism, Datta-Ray has revealed an interesting undercurrent that will last as long as a government job is seen as a guarantor of upward mobility. However, is it necessarily different from the West? One would assume that governments world over attract service-minded people, some more fortunate than others, however cynical it may leave them at the end. A quick comparison to a small sampling of other countries would have helped the argument along much better.

The Making of Indian Diplomacy praises how several IFS officers left lucrative careers in the corporate world to enter into government service. Some officers, ironically, do not want to leave home; others see a civil service job as a badge of status despite working conditions that are less than adequate. For example, at one point during the negotiations over the civil nuclear cooperation with the United States, the Indian delegation consisting of a Joint Secretary from the MEA and two lawyers found itself matched by an American official and his team of 55 lawyers! The Joint Secretary in question, S Jaishankar, when quizzed by his astounded counterpart, simply shrugged and replied that Indians make do. Jugaad, the popular term nowadays for making do, seems romantic only to those who never had to resort to it. MK Narayanan, the national security advisor from 2005 to 2011, glibly dismisses this as Indians not being a litigious society. However, the truth might simply be insufficient resources, poor recruiting power, and a deterring application process. Western foreign service departments are a lot more casual about lateral entry hires from industry, ensuring adequate manpower and expertise available to their ministers and senior bureaucrats at all times. These are certainly factors that make the IFS stand out from Western services but perhaps not in a way to be desired!

Datta-Ray reveals an interesting tidbit about promotions in the civil services: everyone gets positive reviews. As a result, personnel files are useless when it comes time to raise one above his peers. One officer confided in the author that this was because seniors were afraid that they would be accused of casteism if they marked anyone down. Datta-Ray uses this state of affairs to argue for a peculiarly Indian “total evaluation” process that goes beyond words on paper to assess the suitability of an officer for a higher position. It is this system that allowed Shivshankar Menon, former national security advisor to Manmohan Singh and successor to Narayanan, to supercede 16 positions to become the foreign secretary in October 2006. Of course, a less charitable view might be that “total evaluation” is making a virtue out of necessity and that it merely conceals an egregious problem in Indian institutions, namely, using caste victimisation as a weapon to conceal incompetence.

Intellectual Weltanshauung

Datta-Ray recounts when Menon explains the role of a diplomat to the incoming batch of IFS recruits as that played by Krishna in the udyoga parva of the Mahabharata. Rather than launch into a scholarly evolution of diplomacy a la Harold Nicolson, Keith Hamilton, Richard Langhorne, Martin Wight, or Ernest Satow, the former NSA latched onto a text most Indians are intimately familiar with. The great epic remains the backbone of Indian political thinking, Datta-Ray argues, because it avoids the pitfalls of viewing the world in false dichotomies just as Indian foreign policy has shown a tendency to avoid.

This is a limited reading of the Mahabharata, and indeed, Indic thought. There are several incidents in the great epic that run counter to Menon’s portrayal that can be recounted: one, Krishna’s urging Yudhishtira to perform the Rajasuya yaga; two, his advocacy of war within 13 days of the Pandavas’ exile; three, when Krishna intercepted the elephant goad thrown by the king of Pragjyotisha, Bhagadatta, at Arjuna despite a promise not to participate in the war in any way except as charioteer/advisor to the third son of Pandu; or four, the infamous manner in which Drona was made to lay down his weapons. These roles do not, strictly speaking, fit our modern imagination of a diplomat’s task. Yet to restrict foreign policy strictly to conference room machinations and champagne is too narrow an understanding of the profession. A diplomat must also provide wise counsel to his political masters, something Krishna unfailingly did for the Pandavas. If the IFS is indeed inspired by the Mahabharata, one wonders if any of them have ever truly engaged with the text. Similarly, the breathtakingly amoral Arthashastra does not shy away from advocating the use of kutayuddha if the national interest required it.

The Making of Indian Diplomacy gets to the crux of the matter when it asks why India should become a Great Power. Datta-Ray asks this in the context of Menon’s meteoric elevation and an internal memorandum by Rajiv Sikri, one of the bypassed officers. Sikri, he finds, has fallen into the trap of Western modernity and advocates Great Power status for India for its own sake. This does not satisfy Datta-Ray, who declares such a quest as un-Indian. In support, he quotes former external affairs minister, Natwar Singh’s response – that India’s goal is to remove poverty, not become a Great Power – when US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that the United States intended to help India become a major power in the 21st century. According to Datta-Ray, Indian diplomacy avoids the anarchic and binary world of power politics by understanding the international community and India’s place within it as a unified cosmos. All states are interlinked and, therefore, foreign relations is not a zero-sum game. This explains why India continues to deal with Pakistan despite the constant terrorist attacks Islamabad supports against India, or why Delhi de-links its territorial dispute with China from other facets of its relationship. In essence, the view that vasudhaiva kutumbakam, or, the world is one family, guides Indian diplomacy.

This, continues, Datta-Ray, is seen even in India’s nuclear weapons policy – Nehru and Indira Gandhi both rejected Western rationality even at the risk of appearing irrational to pursue their own reasoning. In this, they did not even trust their senior-most bureaucrats for fear that they would push India into the same anarchic-binary world Nehru had avoided through his non-alignment. Finally pushed into crossing the nuclear rubicon, India refrained from weaponisation until 1998 when circumstances forced it to take the next step. Even then, Indian diplomacy maintained its traditional roots. K Subrahmanyam, one of the architects of India’s nuclear doctrine, echoed Nehru and his daughter when he reasoned that in the nuclear age, the main purpose of foreign policy should be to prevent wars; humanity must unite and cooperate to survive.

There are a host of problems with this interpretation of Indian foreign policy. The first is to use Nehru as the yardstick of Indianness. The first prime minister, influenced on the one hand by Mohandas Gandhi’s asceticism and on the other by British notions of progress, can hardly be an example of the traditional Indian values Datta-Ray has deployed throughout his argument. Nehru certainly did not view himself the way Datta-Ray seems to. As he himself wrote in The Discovery of India that he came to India as a foreigner; Nehru had also remarked to John Galbraith, the US ambassador to India, that he was the last Englishman to rule in India. In fact, the question arises that if the IFS really is imbued with the Nehruvian spirit, is it relying on the corpus of Indic works and experiences or on a Leftist, perhaps Christian socialist version of Western thinking?

It is unfortunate that public perception of India has been captured by Gandhi’s misinterpretation of dharmic values. Vasudhaiva kutumbakam was not, as Sarvesh Tiwari has ably shown, a recommendation but an admonition. Ashoka, the great renouncer became so only after he had conquered his enemies. Ahimsa, fashionably misappropriated by Gandhi against the British, was described in a very different context by Buddha and Mahavira. In fact, Indic ethics, which are carried more in the works of literature than philosophy, speak very much in a language of realism – about proportion, balance, alliances, caution, and strength.

If anything, the examples Datta-Ray gives shows the Indian diplomatic establishment in its worst light: not trusted even by prime ministers, animated by the values of an ingabanga leader, wracked by  the low quality of its recruits, unable to attract fresh talent, and riven by its own politics and demons, it mirrors much of what is wrong with Indian institutions and its polity. With decision-making centred around the prime minister’s office, foreign policy resembles more a fiefdom and India a flailing state rather than a robust and rising democracy. Did the Mahabharata, the text that informs so many IFS officers, not have counsel on governance, the limits of authority, and power?

Despite his questionable choice of examples, Datta-Ray does convince, with just his anecdote about Menon and the Mahabharata, that there is indeed an Indic way of thinking about foreign policy, even if the wrong lessons seem to have been drawn here. However, he must be cautious in making the jump from the IFS knowing about the epic, to actually following its precepts. Indeed, there is much folk wisdom and rhetoric on how Indians view themselves as part of a bigger cosmic whole; Man does not stand above nature but is a part of it. Yet it is unclear how much this thinking dictates everyday function. Despite such concerns about the environment, for example, the Ganga has turned into toxic sludge, tree cover is receding, and the air in urban centres is unbreathable. To know or to have read Aristotle is not to do as he advises.

In places, it seems Datta-Ray has created a straw man out of Western civilisation; the notion of acting with purpose rather than for its own sake that the author sees in Indic ethics sounds similar to the value Niall Ferguson sees in his very Western, Kantian Henry Kissinger. There are, indeed, differences between how Indic and Abrahamic traditions view the world but as most critics of the West are prone to do, Datta-Ray exaggerates the divergences and homogenises the West in a manner he finds problematic for India or the East.

A book must be judged not only on its argument but also the questions it tickles in the readers’ minds; in the latter, Datta-Ray has succeeded spectacularly. He is among the first to try and apply Indic frameworks to modern challenges, ambitiously threatening to subvert the normative understanding of modernity. It is perhaps too much to expect perfect coherence in the first attempt.

 

In Search of Great Power

07 Sat Jan 2017

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Why India is not a Great Power.jpgKarnad, Bharat. Why India Is Not A Great Power (Yet). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015. 564 pp.

If India were to ever look for a Kautilya in the 21st century, Bharat Karnad would undoubtedly be at the top of a very short list. Some have compared him to Niccolo Machiavelli, the Renaissance Florentine political thinker, but that would be a grave injustice to Karnad, whose majestic breadth of national ambition in Why India Is Not A Great Power (Yet) surpasses even the wildest interpretation of The Prince. In his latest book, now marginally over a year old (but reviewed again because it simply has not got the attention it deserves), Karnad asks the question a whole new generation of young Indians are also wondering – why is their country not counted as among the major powers of the world?

The question is not the fatuous pretension of a strategist born in the wrong country or era, but a potent one. Consider, for example, that India has detonated nuclear devices, sent missions to the Earth’s closest neighbours, the moon and Mars, developed missiles that can strike anywhere from Japan to Austria, built nuclear-powered submarines, satellites, and once the first jet fighter outside the West, and has an advanced nuclear energy programme that includes an indigenously designed and built a fast breeder nuclear reactor that is about to go critical as well as a thorium reactor in the wings. Yet Delhi also appears to lack the power to dissuade its tiny South Asian neighbours such as the Maldives, Nepal, or Sri Lanka from  adopting policies that potentially put Indian national security in jeopardy; India has generally shied away from ever taking a clear stance on world issues, even when its own interests are at stake, such as over Iran or joint training operations in the Indian Ocean and its environs with friendly navies; and Delhi just cannot learn to use its increasing economic clout to influence bilateral trade terms or global commercial regimes in its favour.

The root of this problem, Karnad argues, is that the Indian republic’s leaders have never thought strategically. This echoes RAND analyst George Tanham’s famous 1992 report, Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay, a much reviled essay in many Indian circles but with more truth than they care to admit: after all, if one has to think back 2,300 years to recall the last great strategic thinker in one’s culture, it might be prudent to concede the point. Karnad cites several public intellectuals and officials – Nobel laureate and economist Amartya Sen, historian Ramachandra Guha, former prime minister Manmohan Singh, former national security advisors MK Narayanan and Shivshankar Menon, Congress minister Shashi Tharoor – explicitly stating that India should not even attempt to become a great power in the traditional sense of the term. What makes India great, the argument runs, is its soft power and ancient civilisational values imbued with rich diversity that have much to offer the world by way of example – in essence, an Indian version of Puritan John Winthrop’s city upon a hill. In this Nehruvian strand of thinking, India is already great merely by dint of its long existence and the world must only be reminded of this. What little progress India has made in recent years in asserting itself on behalf of its national interests seems to be primarily at the urging of friendly powers invested in the idea of a normal India, with hard and soft power commensurate with its geographic size, location, population, and economy.

Karnad lays the genesis of such woolly thinking – bovine pacifism, he calls it – at the feet of Jawaharlal Nehru. Interestingly, his is not the simplistic assault on India’s first prime minister that one has become so accustomed to from the Indian “Right” in recent years, but a more nuanced understanding of the man. Karnad’s Nehru is an intellectual giant but a practical pygmy: according to Karnad, Nehru rightly saw the latent threat from China, envisioned a world order that would not leave three quarters of the world torn between American capitalism and Soviet communism, and articulated an important place for India and her interests on the world stage. Unfortunately, this was coupled with abject incompetence in implementation: Nehru abandoned his idea of an Asian Monroe Doctrine with India at its helm for fear of upsetting other newly independent third-world countries who only remembered the Indian military as agents of British imperialism, did not embrace the countries flanking China’s southern rim in a geopolitical and defensive association in an arrogant condescension towards geopolitics, rejected a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council over ideological vacuity, and failed to cross the nuclear Rubicon when the opportunity first presented itself in February 1964. Future leaders ossified Nehru’s vacillations much to India’s detriment.

Over seven chapters, Karnad discusses what it means to be a great power, India’s options in developing a coalition of littoral or rimland states to moderate Chinese aggression, Indian relations with the major powers – Russia and the United States – as well important countries in its near abroad – Israel, the Gulf states, Iran, the Central Asian Republics, the ASEAN, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Japan, the over-cautious, risk-averse nature of the Indian administration and its failure of strategic imagination, the shortcomings of the Indian military services in terms of procurement, silly and detrimental turf wars, silo-based decision-making, slow absorption of the latest technology, preference for short-term, tactical thinking over long-term, strategic planning, and organisational inelasticity, the weakness of Indian industry in not just developing but even assimilating technology, poor governmental policies favouring non-performing defence public sector undertakings, and the low motivation and budget for research and development, and finally the internal factors such as caste-driven politics, illiteracy, centre-state tensions, corrupt civil service, and socialist perpetuation of poverty.

Karnad regales the reader with ample anecdotes of stunted ambition, missed opportunities, and poor planning by Indian politicians, civil servants, and military brass that would make even the most committed teetotaler reach for a generous helping of liquid courage. The failure to become a founding member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the short-sightedness in not taking Vietnam up on developing a naval base at Nha Trang, the docile surrender of Indian national interests to American priorities in Iran, the absence of the armed forces in any higher echelon governmental decision-making, the turf wars between the Ministry of External Affairs and the military, the impossible logistics of the Indian Air Force, the exuberance over soft power in isolation, and the irresponsible comment repeated by senior bureaucrats that nuclear weapons are not weapons of war all make an appearance in this excoriation of seven decades of Indian policy. While it is not difficult to agree with the author’s simpler premise that India must shrug off its timidity and become a Great Power, it is the audacious road map offered to Great Power status that makes this book truly interesting.

Anyone who knows Karnad would not hesitate to peg him for a security hawk. Even those who have heard of him for the first time in this review would have by now probably come to agree with that sentiment. Fascinatingly, unlike most security hawks in India, Karnad suggests a reorientation of Indian military policy away from Pakistan and towards the real bête noire, China. His argument is simple – anything that can dissuade China from having its way with India will likely deter Pakistan too but not vice versa. With 60 percent of the Indian army and 90 percent of its armour deployed against Pakistan, India finds it difficult to come up with the resources for the urgently needed mountain regiments and other requirements along the Line of Actual Control. Karnad even goes so far as to suggest the removal of the nuclear-tipped short-range ballistic missiles pointed at Pakistan as a unilateral gesture of goodwill. In times of war, they are easy targets for the Pakistani air force and the break-away state is anyway amply covered by the Agni family of missiles deployed deeper and more safely in the hinterland. These measures would reassure Islamabad and allow the Pakistani army to save face in following the Indian example. Furthermore, India should incentivise its immediate neighbours, including Pakistan, with generous economic terms to plug into Indian markets and thereby cement the country’s role as a regional security provider as well as economic engine.

Putting China in India’s crosshairs has several layers in Karnad’s grand design, each to be initiated simultaneously. Delhi must reorient its military  towards China and order it to prepare for several scenarios, including pushing across the Himalayas and fighting China in Tibet, bombing the fragile ecology of the Tibetan plains and other high value targets such as the Three Gorges Dam, and setting up atomic demolition munitions in the Himalayan passes. Delhi should amplify its capability to prosecute expeditionary missions anywhere from Subic Bay to the Persian Gulf by establishing foreign military bases at Nha Trang, Agalegas, Farkhor, Ayni, Garden Island, and other important locations. This could be achieved in concert with other states of the Indian Ocean Region littoral, dissipating any resentment at India’s rise, increasing confidence in Delhi’s intentions, and forging a partnership for an Indian-led Asian Monroe Doctrine first envisioned by Nehru.

Yet to give its potential partners any confidence in India’s abilities, Delhi must actively seek to set up a defence-industrial complex led by the private sector that would initially absorb technology transfers and later further its own R&D. Defence independence would not only be good for India’s pocket book but it would also improve the Indian military’s operational readiness and psychologically nudge Southeast Asia towards betting on Delhi to balance China. If India emerges as an arms supplier to the Indian Ocean Region littoral, it would build long-term relations with the militaries Delhi hopes to partner with to contain China.

In its international relations, Karnad argues that India jettison the loaded vocabulary of non-alignment but actually behave in a manner Nehru had intended that term to describe. To this end, Delhi should side with the United States, Russia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Australia against China when it comes to curbing Beijing’s adventurism in the Himalayas or the Nine-Dash Line. However, India should also align with Iran, Russia, and China against the United States and its Western allies in matters of international trade pacts, environmental norms, labour agreements, and other structural treaties that prop up the status quo favouring the victors of World War II. As part of both groupings, India would become the balancer.

Finally, in what will certainly be considered the most outrageous policy recommendations, Karnad suggests that India resume nuclear testing to attain the thermonuclear grail as well as to make credible its fission designs. Further optimisation on existing designs to yield weapons of various payloads, from tactical to megaton-strategic would give India a richer nuclear palette of responses to an incoming attack. Furthermore, most egregious to prevailing nuclear morality, the author also advocates that Delhi arm Vietnam with nuclear weapons in a tit-for-tat policy to pay China back for supplying Pakistan with nuclear weapons and missile technology.

Karnad considers the argument that India’s best foreign and defence policy for the next two decades is nine percent annual economic growth as foolishly naïve. As he points out, past Great Powers did not become so once they became the industrial engines of their times but their military and economic trajectories complemented each other. Elizabethan England, Bismarckian Germany, and one might add the Soviet Union, Catherinian Russia, the Ottoman Empire, or Rome did not become empires after attaining economic hegemony but their military muscle supported their economic wherewithal and vice versa. Even China, though its rise has been noticed by the West only since Deng Xiaoping, was a military power not of little consequence before it embarked on a programme of economic rejuvenation.

Sometimes, however, Karnad appears to contradict himself. For example, he lambasts the set of treaties the United States has been pressuring India to sign, known as the Foundational Agreements, for coercing India into an American military geopolitical as well as operational order but at the same time admits to India’s own individual abysmal failure in these respects. Not only is communication between the different branches of the Indian military difficult, Karnad tells us, but even within the same service! Different procurement policies, short-term fixes, and the tendency of the different branches to exist in isolation from its sister services has necessitated several jugaads to make possible joint operations. India has also failed to take up offers to establish military supply stations on foreign soil on its on and working with Washington provides a medium-term fix. Similarly, Karnad is leery of the United States as a provider of military technology. Yet he also admits that Indian DPSUs and industry have been spectacularly unsuccessful at indigenous development of required equipment in quality or quantity. The Americans offer a route to plug the gaps in Indian defence more immediately that bringing domestic capability up to speed and then doing so indigenously.

While Karnad is undoubtedly correct about the necessity for credibility of the Indian nuclear deterrent, he does not consider the ramifications of renewed nuclear testing. India will most likely come under sanctions from at least some of its major economic and military partners – the United States, Japan, Britain, Germany, Canada, Australia – and that could effectively scuttle military modernisation and retard economic growth. Again, the lesson to learn here comes from China – economic indispensability provides a great cover for many sins.

Moreover, arming Vietnam with nuclear weapons is easier said than done – true nuclearisation of Vietnamese defence would require indigenous thinking on technical as well as geopolitical and strategic aspects of nuclear weapons, something  Hanoi will need time to develop. In addition, nuclear arms are financially unviable for Vietnam in its current status. It is not even clear if Vietnam perceives any need for its own nuclear arsenal. A case in point is Japan – despite its proximity to China and the regularity of anti-Japanese rhetoric in the Middle Kingdom, Tokyo feels comfortable even under an unsure American nuclear umbrella. Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has had an uphill battle in convincing his countrymen to make even the smallest of amendments to the constitution to allow a healthier defence outlook and there is great public opposition to all things nuclear.

Similarly, the author is completely correct in emphasising China over Pakistan as the greater security concern for India. One may even agree with Karnad’s logical assertion that preparing a security contingency against China would automatically enable India to curb Pakistan’s periodic tantrums. However, his sanguine views on incorporating Pakistan into an Indian co-prosperity sphere in South Asia would do well to get a reality check from the works of scholars and practitioners of diplomacy such as former Pakistani ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani and Georgetown professor Christine Fair who warn that the troubles India has with its western neighbour are not over territorial disputes but part of the Islamic republic’s very raison d’etre. Such deep-rooted hostility cannot be coopted by rationality, economic goodies, and unilateral nostalgia.

It is not the purpose of Why India Is Not A Great Power (Yet) to explore every policy option – for example, terrorism and cyber security are given short shrift – but to emphasise the lack of ambition in the Indian ruling elite, whence all other problems arise. Karnad’s heartwarming embrace of amoral machtpolitik is not for everyone, and for all his pessimism about the state of India’s affairs, he remains hopeful as the parenthetical part of the title indicates. Notwithstanding the provocations, disagreements, and the quibbles, the import of his argument should not be lost. This is a most important book anyone interested in Indian security policy should read; in fact, were the Indian prime minister, defence minister, and foreign minister to consider just one book in their entire term, this ought to be it.