ABSTRACT
Indian foreign and strategic policy has changed markedly in the decade and a half since the Cold War ended. Sanjaya Barn’s work presents a critical benchmark for measuring India’s emergence on the international stage. The ‘discovery’ concerns the nature and heft of economic factors in India’s strategic calculations. In earlier decades, economic factors were looked on as one of India’s vulnerabilities, and its international economic objectives centred on maximising aid flows, maintaining full flexibility in using them, and preserving access to the ‘special and differential treatment’ accorded developing countries in international trade rules. Barn’s account reflects the importance Indian leaders are giving to relations with the United States, and the weight this relationship has in India’s international economic strategy. Baru moved into the prime minister’s office, and hence temporarily out of the column-writing business, before the US-India civil nuclear agreement was put on the table.
