•JOHN CHIPMAN: For the last three or four years, people have talked about India as a rising power in a sort of an existential sense. India’s economy is growing; it continues to grow. It might even be decoupled with problems elsewhere in the world. People acknowledge challenges of infrastructure and of education that still need to be confronted if the acute angle of growth is to be maintained well into the future. However, there is a presumption universally shared that India is a rising power. Beyond that presumption there is not much analyses into what it actually means and what India might do with the assumption of a status that might approximate a great power of the past.

•PRANAB DHAL SAMANTA: How do you assess India’s level of preparedness to assume a greater role in international politics? Does the Indian leadership often shy away from contentious issues?

Let me make a general remark about historically what great powers do. Good great powers are seen as custodians of an international system from which they benefit. So they are interested in global commerce, security, and more recently, the environment. Bad great powers suffer from the strategic entrepreneurship of misguided leaders who have eccentric ideologies. Indifferent great powers suffer from strategic arthritis. Their leaders’ well-meaning attitude makes them reluctant to advance either principles or interest in international affairs.

I am sure India would be a unique great power. But India will need to develop a certain idea of what it wants to do in international affairs. At present it remains, at the highest level of formality, committed to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). But in practice it is interested in multiple alignments. It has a foreign policy that sees it want to maintain very good links with a number of different societies, cultures, countries, and people. Eventually these things bump into each other and choices need to be made. At present the Indian leadership is interested in progressing, deepening, and managing those multiple alignments outside of its neighborhood. And yet it would not be easy to deal with a neighborhood like the one you find yourself in and at the same time conduct an extrovert foreign policy. The Indian leadership is now caught between the requirement of its neighbourhood and the ambition of being seen as a global player.

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