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 •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.

•C. JAYANTHI: British and US academia have always talked about India as a sleeping giant. What do you think about it?

I don’t think India can be called sleeping. As for giant, maybe that’s a more neutral term. But India is not asleep, it’s dynamic, it’s moving. The question is if the dynamism of the economic growth is matched by an equivalent dynamism in political extroversion and, I think, that’s where there is still a question mark.

•MANU PUBBY: How do you see India’s relation with China working out in the future while it tries to project itself as a military power in the region?

Both India and China are investing substantially in defence. China more spectacularly so — 18 per cent (of GDP), by its own admission, last year. China wants to have capacities that will take it outside of its own region. India is doing the same. One sees in India’s defence diplomacy real activism towards two areas where it had little engagement before — South East Asia, where there is a great deal of interest in helping in the security of Malacca Strait; and the Persian Gulf, where India has large and expanding economic interests and where the security of Hormuz could affect its interests. It’s an objective fact that when you have three Asian powers rising at the same time, there will be competition. It will not be a competition that any of the three powers will want openly to talk about, because the nature of Asian diplomacy doesn’t permit that. But you have Japan wanting to be a more normal power. You have China wanting to be a global power and India wanting this role, too. Other countries in Asia will be playing these countries off against each other. The invitation to India to join the East Asia summit came from ASEAN states that wanted to have a diplomatic balance to Chinese presence at the summit. So it’s not only the case that India and China have border disputes and parallel ambitions but also that other regional countries perceive that and conduct their diplomacy with that perception.

•ZEENAT NAZIR: India has often been accused of having a big brother approach towards neighbouring SAARC countries. Do you think we need to change our approach towards our neighbours?

India will be competing with China in this area. But that will be a competition which will not speak its voice very publicly. This is perhaps an area where soft power becomes interesting — whether the magnetic attraction of India’s soft power is paradoxically greater or lesser than China’s will determine these dynamics.

•ESHA ROY: Do you think there is any solution to the China-Tibet stand-off?

It looks like the Chinese intelligence services did not do their job as well as they might have done. Protests across Tibet seem to have taken them by surprise and yet seem to be rather coordinated and fairly significant. There seems to have been a decision to present the Chinese official position in the face of the types of NGO and media concerns they are confronted by. The response of the Chinese authorities cannot be a mere reinstatement of their official position of the territorial integrity of China or the amount of economic development they have put into Tibet. It needs to be a more dynamic response. The opinion outside is that lines of communication with the Dalai Lama have to be established in some way. There are indications that China is trying to find a method which is, to use a classic agent phrase — face saving — and doesn’t derogate from their very official positions. What this recent crisis has showed is the tension between the government in Beijing and the legitimacy in public opinion of nationalistic sentiment.