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their own growth. Yet as long as South Asia remains divided by futile rivalries and some continue to believe that terrorism can be a useful instrument of their strategic doctrines, that is bound to remain a distant prospect. That is why our neighbourhood will also be examined in a later chapter.
    As a result the structure of this book is rather like an onion; it begins with Pakistan and peels outwards, from South Asia and the neighbourhood to the broader world beyond. This method permits us to see starkly what overwhelmingly occupies our short-term thinking before engaging with the broader concerns that must occupy a more prominent place in our international reflection. In the process of peeling this onion, I hope (without too many tears!) to offer my readers, in particular the younger generation of Indians, a worldview that helps orient them to their national and global inheritance. The book deals much less with the history of India’s foreign policy than with contemporary trends and future prospects, partly because history has not always been a reliable guide to the present (who could have imagined in 1998 the signing of the Indo-US nuclear deal in 2008?), and partly because my concern isprincipally with tomorrow, not yesterday. While much of the book’s detail is anchored in 2012, its broad thrust is intended to be relevant for some time to come.
    I believe strongly that we must work to create a world in which Indians can prosper in safety and security, a world in which a transformed India can play a worthy part. This is a time in our national evolution when we must rethink the assumptions of our political philosophy, and rise to the need to refurbish our institutions with new ideas. An India led by rational, humane and open-minded ideas of itself must develop a view of the world that is also broad-minded, accommodative and responsible. That would be in keeping with the aspiration that Nehru launched us on when he spoke of our tryst with destiny. As we embark on the second decade of the twenty-first century, the time has indeed come for us to redeem his pledge.



Chapter Two
Brother Enemy
    Nearly six and a half decades after independence and Partition, Pakistan remains India’s biggest foreign policy challenge.
    Pakistan was hacked off the stooped shoulders of India by the departing British in 1947 as a homeland for India’s Muslims, but (at least until very recently, if one can extrapolate from the two countries’ population growth trends) more Muslims have remained in India than live in Pakistan. Pakistan’s relations with India have ever since been bedevilled by a festering dispute over the divided territory of Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state. Decades of open conflict and simmering hostility, punctuated by spasms of bonhomie that always seem to sputter out into recrimination, have characterized a relationship that has circumscribed India’s options and affected its strategic choices. The knowledge that our nearest neighbour, populated as it is by a people of a broadly similar ethnic mix and cultural heritage, defines itself in opposition to India and exercises its diplomatic and military energies principally to thwart and undermine us has inevitably coloured India’s actions and calculations on the regional and global stage. The resort by Pakistan to the sponsorship of militancy and terrorism within India as an instrument of state policy since the 1980s has made relations nearly as bad as in the immediate aftermath of independence.
    When Pakistan was created in the Partition of 1947, the 544 ‘princely states’ (nominally ruled by assorted potentates but owing allegiance to the British Raj) were required to accede to either of the two new states. The maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir—a Muslim-majority state with a Hindu ruler—dithered over which of the two to join, and flirted optimistically with the idea of remaining independent. Pakistan,determined to wrest the territory, sent in a band of