India, Transformed

Essays on howthe country liberalised and modernised its security, written in real time

MUCH TO ITS OWN disadvantage in the first decades after Indepen-dence, India kept its worlds of eco-nomic analysis and national security strategy separate and disconnected. Although Jawa-harlal Nehru clearly saw that foreign policy was above all a reflection of India8217;s economic interests, his countless followers, both on the economic and foreign policy fronts, had time only for one of these worlds.

Those who assessed world affairs and de-vised defence and foreign policy strategies re-mained largely illiterate in economics. The economists were too often dismissive of the national security discourse. For them, defence expenditure was simply a wasted resource.

As India confronted in the early 1990s the pressures of globalisation amidst the collapse of the old economic order at home and India8217;s foreign policy, had to deal with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a unipolar world, the discourses on money and power crashed into each other.

But there were few analysts in the govern-ment departments, think-tanks and the med-ia who could integrate the imperatives of the two worlds, and lay out the potential Indian responses in the unforgiving world that con-fronted India at the turn of the last decade.

Sanjaya Baru, currently media advisor to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, belonged to that rare breed who could straddle the two worlds credibly and with panache. Trained as an economist who moved between the uni-versities and think-tanks, Baru drifted into the media world at the very beginning of eco-nomic reforms.

Given the immense pressures on India to rapidly adapt its economic and foreign poli-cies in the early 1990s, many of the great de-bates of our time were fought in the pages of the newspapers rather than in universities and think-tanks. From his vantage point in the media, Baru was drawn into the broader national security discourse. As a conse-quence, we had a right man at the right time to make a lot of sense of the excitements that India confronted since the early 1990s.

Today it is easy to talk about India as a ris- ing great power. The India story8212;its arrival on the world stage8212;has been hot through this summer for the global media. But a decade-and-a-half ago, it needed a lot of in-sight as well as intellectual courage to stand up and propose new directions for India8217;s economic and foreign policies.

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It is that bold vision and conviction about a new India, which was being forged in the 1990s and early 2000s, that comes through in this collection of Baru8217;s essays and columns. As India continues its march forward to acquire 8220;comprehensive national power8221;, that brings together all the elements that con-stitute the strength of nations, the analytical path opened by Baru will remain an impor-tant one to emulate.