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CROSSING THE RUBICON: THE SHAPING OF INDIA'S NEW FOREIGN POLICY BY C. RAJA MOHAN At a time when Indian Parliamentarians cannot find words in the English dictionary to express their ninda at the US-led war in Iraq, it may be distinctly out of place to write about India's new pragmatic foreign policy.

Raja Mohan's Crossing the Rubicon is not, however, about moments of legislative cacophony and confusion. Instead, Mohan argues, there are radical fresh trends, visible over the last decade or so, that are now shaping India's engagement with the outside world. And these new features, as the title suggests, display the same chutzpah that history witnessed when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C. What are the characteristics of India's 'journey from the uncertainties of the early 1990s to a more self-assured diplomatic posture' by the turn of the century? According to Mohan, five great transitions took place in the '90s that the philosophically inclined could describe as an epistemological rupture in India's foreign policy. RETURN TO THE WEST: A.B. Vajpayee with US President Bush (left)First, there was a move away from the national consensus on building a socialist society to a new agreement on constructing a capitalist order.

Raja Mohan, Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India’s New Foreign Policy. To view the rest of this content please follow the download PDF link above. Buy Crossing the Rubicon.

The second dramatic shift, not surprisingly, was the fresh emphasis on economics. The shedding of Third Worldism and the assertion of national self-interest was the third major change.

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Images Of Raja Mohan Rai

Related to the rejection of India's role as the permanent dissenter was the giving up of the anti-western mode of thinking, which had become a touchstone of India's international relations. It was a 'return to the West'. Finally, of course, was the real tectonic shift that forms the central basis for Crossing the Rubicon: the movement from idealism to pragmatism. Mohan argues that idealism defined India's foreign policy because of the experience of the freedom movement. Successive generations of the country's elite internalised this idealism, which had to be unlearned as the country confronted the brutal and anarchic world order of the '90s.

India had to shed its ideological baggage and move from its past emphasis on the 'power of argument' to a new stress on the 'argument of power'. But are these changes as irrevocable as Caesar's crossing centuries ago? On that score, Mohan is more guarded. He recognises the challenges from within, which he presents as the struggle for the soul of India, symbolised by the 'war of ideas' between N.R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys and K.S. Sudershan of the RSS.

And, of course, it is quite clear whose side Mohan will take in this battle.

Mohan, a New Delhi-based journalist, has written a well-researched and thoughtful account of the Indian government's reshaping of its policy orientations in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The leadership had to drop its commitment to a planned economy, its support of the Nonaligned Movement (tilted toward Moscow), and its tendency to demonize the West.

But just how far India had gone in abandoning old policies and embracing globalization and capitalism became clear only on September 12, 2001, when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee offered President Bush India's full political and logistical support in the war on terrorism. Mohan sets out to explain how India managed this transformation, with behind-the-scenes description of India's leadership reexamining its policies-which had left India far behind China (and most of the rest of eastern Asia) in terms of both economic growth and geopolitical influence-and adopting a new approach. His analysis treats India as a coherent, unitary international actor, attributing almost no importance to the domestic divisions and party differences that others see as central to India's policy choices. See all 219 rows on flyawaysimulation.com.