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Rajiv Sikri, Challenge and Strategy: Rethinking India's Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Sage, 2009), Pages: xx+317, Price: Rs. 595.00.
S.D. Muni, India's Foreign Policy: The Democracy Dimension (Delhi: Foundation Books, 2009), Pages: vii+178, Price: not mentioned.
Rajiv Sikri, a career diplomat for over thirty-six years, retired in 2006 and set to "rethink" India's foreign policy in 2007 while associated with the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) in the National University of Singapore. S.D. Muni, a distinguished scholar of Indian foreign policy and among the doyens of South Asia studies in India, who taught at the Jawaharlal Nehru University for thirty-three years, deciphers the democracy dimension in India's foreign policy. Currently Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies in the National University of Singapore, he also served as India's Special Envoy and Ambassador in South East Asian countries. The ability to combine deep academic analysis with a practitioner's insights binds these two works together. In a sense, it shows the maturity of Indian foreign policy writings that the two scholar-diplomats have written on specific challenges and dimensions of contemporary foreign policy of India.
In his Foreword to Sikri's book, the seasoned diplomat Chinmaya R. Gharekhan describes the author as a "realist"; his concerns therefore are mainly with promoting and protecting India's national interests. The author constantly talks of India developing varieties of leverages to increase its influence in the region and the wider world. S.D. Muni has similar concerns when he critically examines the democracy dimension in India's neighbourhood policy and the emergence of democracy as a norm in post-Cold War international relations.
Sikri's first concern is to identify the "challenge" before Indian foreign policy. In the twenty-first century old mindsets, shibboleths, institutions and ways of doing things are no more workable in a complex, dynamic and volatile world. The "mismatch" between the two is obviously worrisome and a challenge (p. 3). There is diffusion of power in a technology-driven world that is becoming economically interdependent and culturally diverse, leaving large populations alienated and angry. As concepts like national sovereignty come under increasing challenge of economic globalization and regionalization, transnational capital and firms and non-state actors, available international institutions including importantly the UN, IMF, WTO and a host of others are...