Book Review-4

 INDIA Emerging Power 

Stephen P. Cohen
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002, Pages  377

ndia Emerging Power relates to a new transition in the international political system after the end of the Cold War, as the disintegration of the Soviet Union shattered the Cold War balance of power and created a wide power vacuum. Other contenders for influential and big power status aside, India forcefully campaigned for such recognition and demonstrated its nuclear capability, defying non-proliferation norms, to support its claim and capacity of great power. The Indian policy and decision makers are fully convinced that even though sustained economic growth and human resource development is an essential component of power,  the most convincing of all is the expanded and elaborate advanced high-tech tri-dimensional military power that endows upon a state a distinct status in the comity of nations. The composition of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is the best illustration of this notion and the sustained Indian campaign for a UNSC seat attests that it gives overwhelming weight to military power. It is the Indians who had coined the term nuclear weapons as Currency of Power. In the same line of thinking a stream of literature and wave of thinkers appeared that foresaw a greater Indian role in world politics over an extended period.

One of the widely admired books written on India, as emerging great power, is India Emerging Power by Stephen P. Cohen, who has the credentials of one of the authoritative writers on South Asian politics. This study appears to be an improvement upon his former co-study with Richard L. Park in 1979, when both of them wrote India: Emergent Power. He asserts that “we concluded that if one took a twenty-five years perspective, then India would loom large as a crucial factor in America’s policies toward all of Asia, and beyond. Sufficient evidence is now available to demonstrate that we were essentially correct.” Similarly this book again is an attempt to examine the proposition of Indian emergence as great a power and the extent to which it can affect American policies in and around Asia. The academia is divided on this issue. One stream of analysts conjectures that Indian emergence as a great power is matter of time and focuses on its brilliance in its technological development, economic openness, and democratic institutions that would stabilize it.  While the other stream of analysts contends otherwise and reach at certain pessimist predictions: that its democracy is fragile, federation is weak, poverty is rampant, its social fabric is divisive, and it is beset with all those ills that feature in most of the backward states.

Cohen says, “These two approaches, one optimistic about India’s prospects, and the other deeply pessimistic, have, when combined, created a bifurcated high-low American perception of India.” Scanning through vast literature on India, he opined that in one way or the other, all “studies offer a perspective on one of the puzzles of contemporary India: the large disparity between India’s own view of its “greatness” – past, present, and future – and the skepticism in this regard voiced by many others.” He further concluded that the contrast between the self-vision of the past and future power militates with a still poor reality that has confounded the American perception of India resulting into inconsistent policies towards it. Consistent with it, this book is another scholarly attempt that presents India more clearly for the benefits of American policy and decision-makers.

The book is a scholarly work on contemporary India by a non-Asian author who has given a very deep insight into Indian history, domestic and international politics, its disputes with neighboring states and the possibilities of nuclear war with Pakistan. It provides a guideline to those who are concerned with India.

Mazhar Hussain Shah

Assistant Research Officer, IPRI