‘India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present’ review: India in a changing world
The Hindu
A former National Security Adviser and top diplomat traces the changes in India’s foreign policy, maps its present-day challenges, and suggests prescriptions for the future
Independent India’s foreign policy, according to Shivshankar Menon, has gone through three geopolitical phases and their transitions. From 1947 to the 1960s, a bipolar Cold War world; from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s, rapid changes in its neighbourhood such as China falling out with the Soviets and moving to the U.S. side; and the post-Cold War world when the U.S. emerged as the sole superpower in a unipolar world order. Menon, who was the Prime Minister’s National Security Adviser and Foreign Secretary, is exploring these phases in their historical context to tell the story of how India weathered the many geopolitical storms of the past in his latest book, India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present. The conventional wisdom about Jawaharlal Nehru’s conduct of foreign policy is that he was too idealistic to understand the changes in geopolitics. Francine Frankel, for example, portrays a Nehru who was a prisoner of his beliefs in her book, When Nehru Looked East. In The India Way, S. Jaishankar, the External Affairs Minister, blames “legacy issues” for India’s current China problem. Another argument by foreign policy writers is that Nehru did nothing when China took Tibet, bringing Chinese forces to the Indian border for the first time in history.More Related News
In 2021, five women from Mayithara, four of them MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) workers, found a common ground in their desire to create a sustainable livelihood by growing vegetables. Rajamma M., Mary Varkey, Valsala L., Elisho S., and Praseeda Sumesh, aged between 70 and 39, pooled their savings, rented a piece of land and began their collective vegetable farming journey under the Deepam Krishi group.