Vishwa Shastra: A comprehensive guide to India's evolving foreign policy

Dhruva Jaishankar's book connects India's domestic decisions to its global role

Vishwa Shastra: India and the World

Author: Dhruva Jaishankar

Publisher: Penguin Viking

Pages: 440

Price: Rs 699

  In his latest book, Dhruva Jaishankar explains the origin and meaning of the Sanskrit words Vishwa Shastra, used in the title, as “treatise of the world”. As he writes, “For it to be India’s world, a Vishwa Shastra is necessary”. The book, however, is “a basic introduction to India and the world, one that remedies some of the shortcomings of the existing literature”. That’s exactly what the author achieves.

 

Vishwa Shastra is full of information and follows a linear approach to analyse the nuances of the Indian foreign policy. From ancient to modern, Mr Jaishankar attempts to highlight key events, decisions and policy shifts that have been crucial in moulding Indian foreign policy. The book paints a detailed picture of the path that India adopted to reach its current foreign policy paradigms, dwelling on the limitations as well as the challenges.

 

The book is a great addition to the literature on Indian foreign policy, principally because it provides a bird’s eye view. It is not focused on any one region or a specific time frame, and thus, offers a global perspective on India’s position in the international order. It also succeeds in explaining how major foreign policy decisions were curated and what motivated them. Most importantly, Mr Jaishankar combines India’s domestic policy decisions with its foreign policy decisions because, as he argues, “…to start, foreign policy will have to begin at home.” He adds, “Just as its foreign policy begins at home, India’s domestic policy will have to have an inherently international character.”

 

One of the most important domestic policy decisions that the book examines is India’s nuclear programme and ambitions. “India’s nuclear development both fuelled and was informed by the rivalry with Pakistan, but it had wider implications for India’s domestic development and relations with the superpowers,” he writes. This is well-known but the book offers a detailed account of how New Delhi managed to achieve this feat. “India experienced several fundamental changes in and around 1991 that sharply altered its international environment, its economy, its domestic politics, and its national security,” he writes, underscoring how domestic political changes and aspirations have had a direct impact on India’s foreign policy and its international positioning and posturing.

 

He also rightly argues that today’s globalised world order is not devoid of any kind of great power rivalries. The rise of China as a revisionist state and the challenges this poses to the American-led liberal world order has emerged as a major ideological conflict. This global rivalry puts India in a difficult position, given New Delhi’s growing closeness with the United States even as it tries to manage its conflictual relations with Beijing.

 

On India’s neighbourhood and policies, the author concludes that, “Greater diplomatic attention, better functioning regional cooperation, increased economic, and humanitarian assistance, and improved regional connectivity are a bare minimum for India if it seeks to retain a leadership role in the neighbourhood.” The book also dwells on the inroads made by China in South Asia and argues that, “Ultimately, the future well-being of India’s neighbourhood should matter far more to New Delhi than it does to any other major power.”

 

While discussing India-China relations and providing a detailed overview of this bilateral relationship, the author’s conclusion is that “unless China adopts a fundamentally different approach to its role in international affairs, New Delhi will have to continue to prepare for a much more competitive relationship with Beijing.”

 

The most pertinent challenge for Indian foreign policy has been its relationship with Pakistan. Since partition, Indo-Pakistan relations have witnessed a range of policies. Islamabad also poses a fundamental challenge to India’s security and domestic peace. From wars to cross-border terrorism and its closeness to China, all these decisions have proved a challenge for New Delhi’s foreign policymaking. The author suggests that, “For all these reasons, a nuclear-armed, terrorism-supporting, revisionist Pakistan is a problem to be managed by India over the medium-term, not necessarily one to be resolved.”

 

The book also focuses on India’s relations with the world with the help of changes within Indian domestic policies. The push for non-alignment and the challenges that emerge from that are discussed in detail and so are policies such as Look East and Act East, the acceptance of the concept of the Indo-Pacific and the Quad. For all these, the author emphasises there is a strong domestic component. This is as true of India’s relations with West Asia. Its participation in a variety of institutions from Brics to the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) shows how India is trying to emerge as a voice of the Global South.

 

To be sure, there is nothing new that the book discusses or promises to uncover. What it achieves instead is its ability to simplify and highlight many of the events that have had a pertinent impact on India as well as the global order. It juxtaposes Indian domestic politics with the way the country’s foreign policy has unfolded and suggests the direction it should take. India has come a long way, evolving from a newly independent state to one that plays a significant role in the global system.

 

However, the book, though exhaustive, pays less attention to regions such as the European Union, Latin America and Africa, underscoring the point that they remain peripheral to India’s world view.

 

The reviewer is associate professor, OP Jindal Global University