Why India Is Not a Great Power Yet

India's rise and progress towards great power status is a subject usually discussed in terms of its emerging market characteristics, economic reforms, and up-tempo economic growth. There is growing literature on India's many soft power strengths: classical culture, art, dance, literature, music; and the relatively recently developed prowess in information technology. We hear of the West to being 'Bangalored'; Bollywood music and melodramas; elite engineering and managerial talent produced by IITs and IIMs; and "frugal engineering". There is, however, no study to-date about the alternative path India can take combining hard power and realpolitik policies that will allow India to achieve great power status and standing. It is the hard power aspects of India's rise, and the problems associated with it that this book examines, especially the deficits in the country's military capabilities and in the software relating to hard power, namely, the absence of vision and political will, leading to risk-averse and geo-strategically shallow thinking, over-cautious foreign policy, and passive-reactive military stance, and why this has prevented the country from rising to the top.

Bharat Karnad is Professor in National Security Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.