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Well before a multipolar world actually came into being, we believed in its desirability and even its inevitability. 1 India has long sought a multipolar international order. The majority view in its foreign and security policymaking elite is that such an order would be more conducive to India's interests and values than the
Visions of an Atmanirbhar Bharat or ‘self-resufficient India’ have guided the development of Indian sciences since its independence in 1947. In India, science has always been imagined across its multi-layered social divides as the key mechanism that would bestow the nation and its peoples the self-sufficiency it needed to determine the destiny of self and the nation therein. Each year millions of the nation's pupils sit the joint engineering examinations to become engineers, technologists, software developers. Science, for India's millions
‘I’m in love with the country’, the young Rudyard Kipling exulted soon after his arrival in India: ‘I find heat and smells and oils and spices, and puffs of temple incense, and sweat and darkness, and dirt and lust and cruelty, and above all, things wonderful and fascinating innumerable.’ 1 This response to India was transmuted by Kipling’s extraordinary creativity as
relative economic strengths of a range of participating countries, often for the first time. In such a vast sub-continent as India it would have been almost impossible for its own citizens to be familiar with all the different types of Indian silk available, let alone visitors from other countries. These displays celebrated nations and empire; they also revealed and created tensions
danger is not that it will disappear as a subject, but rather that the staging of its end will produce heroes and heroines in new, and newly seductive, romances of empire. In the case of Raj nostalgia, the challenge is to understand the ways in which the loss of India offers an apparently endless opportunity to see empire – the déjà disparu – one last time, as well as to experience (if not enjoy) its
8 India’s foreign policy and global politics This chapter argues that India’s foreign policy post-independence was based on idealism as well as realism and the desire to function as an autonomous actor in world politics after centuries of colonial rule. Events proved that states had to deal with diverse issues, some involving the management of bilateral relations and others involving international relations and multilateralism. Moreover, India was a developing state, not a major power, and had to contend with asymmetrical relations with the west, notwithstanding
9 India and Afghanistan: a test case for a rising power Welcoming Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in India in April 2015, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi underlined that “the relationship between India and Afghanistan is not just between two countries or governments. It is a timeless link of human hearts.”1 With that spirit Modi made it clear that India would support Afghanistan’s security forces and open the Attari checkpoint in Punjab to Afghan trucks in order to increase trade between the two countries. Modi stated: “India will walk shoulder to shoulder
4 India and Russia: convergence across time There are few examples of a relationship between countries that has been as stable as the one between India and Russia. Despite the momentous changes in the international environment after the end of the Cold War, there remains a continued convergence of interests that makes it advantageous for both India and Russia to maintain close ties. Barring a fleeting hiccup during Boris Yeltsin’s term as Russia’s president, New Delhi and Moscow have been extraordinarily successful in nurturing a friction-free relationship that
3 India and China: an uneasy relationship In recent years the world has grappled with the challenges posed by China’s rapid rise, and India is no exception. The peculiar nature of Sino-Indian ties has been underscored by a sudden downturn in bilateral relations. The relationship has become so ruptured that some Indian strategists were contemplating a “year of the Chinese attack on India,” suggesting that China would attack India by 2012 to divert attention from growing domestic troubles.1 The Indian media, rather than interrogating these claims, further
7 India and Bangladesh: a difficult partnership India’s relations with Bangladesh have suffered as New Delhi has failed to capitalize on the propitious political circumstances in Bangladesh in recent years with the coming to power of Sheikh Hasina of the Bangladesh Awami League (AL), who has taken great political risks to restore momentum in bilateral ties since 2008. Bureaucratic inertia and lack of political will on India’s part has prevented serious progress on outstanding bilateral issues. Bangladesh is seeking an expeditious Indian response to its demand