India, Transformed

As India confronted in the early 1990s the pressures of globalisation amidst the collapse of the old economic order at home and India’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 story—its arrival on the world stage—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 India’s economic and foreign policies.

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 Baru’s essays and columns. As India continues its march forward to acquire “comprehensive national power”, 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.