ABSTRACT
India is emerging as a ranking power but is at a loss as to how to exercise that power. It allows itself to be pressurised by China and Pakistan in terms of intrusions and castigations by the former and terrorist attacks by the latter. A report 1 prepared by the United States’ National Intelligence Council and EU’s Institute of Security Studies in September 2010 points out that India has nearly 8 per cent of global power in 2010 and is likely to posses 10 per cent of global power in 2025. According to the report, India will be the fourth most powerful nation in the world by 2025, next only to the US, China and the EU. This assessment is more or less corroborated by the National Security Index 2010 produced by us for this volume. According to this index, India ranks as the fifth most powerful nation in a hierarchy of fifty top nations in the world.
