Content area
Full Text
Sashi Tharoor, Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century, (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2012), Pages: 456, Price: Rs. 799.
The title of Shashi Tharoor's new book, Pax Indica, can mislead an unwary reader. The book does not offer a blueprint for India's rise to imperial status in the current century. A more modest role is envisaged for India, that of helping to define the norms of tomorrow's new networked world, write the rules and have a voice in their application. But the book is not really about this either. It is more an overview of India's relations with its neighbours, South- East Asia, China, the US, the Arab countries, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, with separate chapters on India and the UN and SoftPower and Public Diplomacy, and a final chapter on Multi-Alignment as a "Grand Strategy" for India in the decades ahead.
The new norms and rules that India would work on, how they would be different from the ones that the West considers universal, and the means India will deploy to achieve success are not spelt out in the book. In actual fact, the author believes that the world having been made "safe of democracy", India's vocation should be the promotion of democracy and human rights world wide along with "major allies" like the US. This suggests adjusting to Western norms more than redefining them, which is in fact what the West expects of others.
The reader would have greater than usual interest in Tharoor's latest book because he would be writing from a double perspective - that of his long experience in international diplomacy as a UN civil servant and a brief exposure at the political level to India's foreign-policymaking as a junior Minister in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). However, rather than this double experience combining to give more cohesion to his analysis of India's foreign policy in the current century, it produces some inconsistencies.
An instance of this is the disproportionate attention given to groups such as BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) and the IOC-ARC (the Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation) and the exaggerated enthusiasm with which their potential is described. The eight pages devoted to...