India's Neighbourhood: Challenges in the Next Two Decades

Rumel Dahiya and Ashok K. Behuria eds., India's Neighbourhood: Challenges in the Next Two Decades (New Delhi: Pentagon Security International, 2012), Pages: 226, Price: Rs. 995.

This edited volume is a welcome attempt to peep into the future of a large tract of land and its people containing nine countries surrounding India. Among these countries, one comes across a wide variety of political entities and economic systems with huge differentials in their size, governing structure, economic wherewithal and military capabilities.

Making trend analyses of all these assorted groups of countries is indubitably a staggering task, since the list includes an emerging superpower, a suspected failed state, a country facing existential threat due to coming environmental disaster, and a group of small states sharing borders with mighty neighbours. Nonetheless, a group of scholars from the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses has made a commendable effort to examine the challenges and opportunities for India in the next twenty years in its immediate neighbourhood. While seven out of the nine countries included in this volume are South Asian countries and are members of SARRC, the editors have rightly included China and Myanmar, which share land borders with India.

This volume has several positive elements. One of them is the methodological uniformity in that all of the chapters raise a set of relevant questions, seek to answer those queries, examine the main drivers that may affect the events and issues in those countries in the coming years, provide various scenarios that one could contemplate and, significantly, provide a set of recommendations to the Indian foreign policy establishment.

Secondly, different authors specializing in one country each and generating field data to complement their secondary data have done their best to analyse key issues in these countries that may affect Indian security and economy in the coming years. In a single-authored book, one scholar alone would have forecast the...