Field glasses to make you think

Aiming at a grand strategy for India through multiple strategic scenarios of net assessment, this book argues for an imaginative calculation of our various futures

The Long View From Delhi: To
Define the Indian Grand Strategy
for Foreign Policy;
Raja Menon, Rajiv Kumar
Academic Foundation
Pp 182; Rs 990

The title alone is enough to excite massive institutional and cultural teeth-clenching in India’s corridors of power. For when has New Delhi ever taken a “long view” of anything? It seems preternaturally predisposed to looking inward, to pass its views of India’s place in the future and its interests in possible alternative worlds through a set of powerful cultural filters that favour restraint, incremental movement, and long debates over competing alternatives. This at a time when the world around India is changing rapidly, with more actors flexing, converging or colliding strategies in pursuit of often antithetical objectives while boasting powerful capabilities. India’s half century of strategic introspection is a poor vista from which to address these challenges.

Institutional capacity for thinking “big” or “long” or “detailed” exists in only a few places in India’s sprawling bureaucracy. As Ashley Tellis notes, its few senior leaders, often diplomats, base their decisions about the world largely on intuition received from limited general education and good family ties, bereft of the kinds of special knowledge and training necessary for understanding today’s complex strategic dynamics. Moreover, the Berlin Wall that exists between the civilian and military sectors of Indian society discounts a critical mass of focused intellectual power that possesses strategy in spades, an anomaly among modern states with integrated security and strategic planning. Military people almost by definition draw sustenance from an appreciation of why and how states compete, and of their ability to harness power—a distinctly uncomfortable notion in New Delhi—to achieve objectives.

Full report here Outlook