Chapter four: curiouser and curiouser.(Great Powers in Wonderland)(Critical essay)

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"Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle."

FOR MUCH of its postindependence history, India was a frustrated power--the aspirations of its political elite consistently outstripped the country's material capabilities. That has changed as a result of the country's unprecedented economic growth and its declared nuclear status since 1998. Major transformations in how Indians discuss their role in the world have come with these advances.

In 1996, during intense domestic debate on the virtues of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, India's ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament, Arundhati Ghosh, for the first time publicly called for "nuclear realism." Although she did not repudiate the country's long-standing aim of global disarmament outright, it was clear that India was ready to trade off on the idealistic view of a nuclear-free world for its own future right to join the elite nuclear club. This opened the door to a discourse that now freely uses realist terminology that had been historically shunned up and down the political and intellectual spectrum. The new realists who have emerged on the scene--strategic analysts Bharad Karnad, Brahma Chellaney, and foreign-policy oriented members of the nationalist and assertive Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), for example--represent the biggest break with India's past. Within the military, the Indian navy's leadership has been quick to adopt a more realpolitik-influenced tone, too--the former Indian chief of naval staff, Admiral Arun Prakash, did not hesitate to invoke even Clausewitz in defining the country's strategic interests.

The new realists must still contend with those whose preference is for India to be a "bridging" state, deploying a variety of soft-power measures based on economic, political, cultural and civilizational attractiveness. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself and Congress Party stalwarts like former--Foreign Minister Natwar Singh have expressed such preferences. For this second group, the notion of India as a traditional great power preoccupied with military hard power and power politics sits rather uncomfortably. This dichotomy is captured in Lord Meghnad Desai's well-known pronouncement in 2003 that "China will again become a viable Great Power; India may become just a Great Democracy."

Both the realists and bridging proponents see good relations with the United States as indispensable for India to achieve developed-country status--but there are clear divergences on how far to go on security cooperation with the Americans, and whether India's posture should be more aligned or diversified and multilateral. Two main foreign-policy perspectives are at play today in India--those who see the value of cooperating with the United States almost across the board and those who believe in diversifying India's key partners and maintaining traditional friends, especially Russia and Iran, and even cultivating China.

Strategic-affairs expert C. Raja Mohan was one of the earliest among the new realists calling for closer ties to the United States in his book Crossing the Rubicon--the title alluding to the none-too-easy break that had to be made in the Indian ...