The Unfinished Quest: India’s Search for Major Power Status from Nehru to Modi

Book Review

A post-colonial quest

The quest for recognition by fellow humans is a fundamental human trait. The quest of a state for major-power status recognition is a manifestation of the same trait as a collective. “The Unfinished Quest: India’s Search for Major Power Status from Nehru to Modi” (“The Quest,” hereafter) by T.V. Paul, a professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, presents a comprehensive and insightful account of the quest towards major-power recognition in the world by post-colonial India.

Nations from antiquity have engaged in status recognition exercises. For a state to be considered a major power, it must be recognized by other states. The traditional understanding of major power rests with the military might of a nation or a ruler. Mr. Paul states, “Victory in great power wars was the most prominent mechanism through which a state gained or lost status that had already been conferred on it.” 

The nineteenth-century philologists argued that European languages were superior in character and access to scientific knowledge. This line of thinking, among other factors, gave rise to widespread colonization. Many European countries gained power recognition by owning colonies in faraway continents, such as Asia and Africa. 

Colonization

Besides political domination, colonization also involved elements of religious and racial supremacy. According to Mr. Paul, “Closeness to the Christian religious establishments was the key element in nineteenth-century Europe, based on the ideas of “standards of civilization.” The zeal of the colonial powers to establish the superiority of Christianity in the colonies became a byproduct of this power equation.

Post-World War II, and most notably since the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War in 1991, power and status recognition have shifted from war and military might to include other factors, such as the economy, knowledge and skills, etc.

“The Quest” by T.V. Paul is a comprehensive and insightful examination of India’s unfinished journey towards becoming a significant power on the global stage. The book provides a detailed and nuanced analysis of India’s political, economic, and strategic aspirations since its independence in 1947. On India’s power status quest, Mr. Paul claims that “no leader since the Nehru era has fundamentally reduced India’s hard-power asset acquisition.”

Hard power resources

Mr. Paul identifies ten critical elements in a nation’s quest for a major power status. He calls them “comprehensive national power capability.” They include four ‘hard-power resources’ – military, economy, technological/knowledge, and demographic. The other six are ‘soft-power resources’ – normative position, leadership role in international institutions, culture, state capacity, strategy and diplomacy, and effective national leadership. Based on these markers, Mr. Paul traces India’s trajectory from the Indian Republic’s early days under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to its current leader, Narendra Modi. The author skillfully weaves India’s internal political dynamics, economic growth, and strategic decisions to present a compelling account of India’s quest for status and recognition.

When V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel laureate, visited India in 1988 and began his book ‘India: A Million Mutinies Now,’ he found an India “full of pietistic Gandhian gloom. The talk among the talkers in the towns,” writes Naipaul, “was of degeneracy, a falling away from the standards of earlier times.” 

It was an all-pervasive gloom, perhaps due to nearly four decades of failed Nehruvian socialism.

A wounded nation rises

Hundreds of years of Islamic and British colonization had turned an entrepreneurial society that, for most of its existence, had been one of the most prosperous societies in the world, materially and intellectually, into a wounded, defeated, despondent, and fatalist one.

Today, a sense of optimism is sweeping across India. In a post-COVID world plagued with inflation, rising food and energy prices, and the specter of long drawn-out wars in Europe and the Middle East, Indians are brimming with hope and confidence. There is also a hunger among Indians, old and young, to put India back to its pre-colonial eminence, both economically and civilizationally. 

Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao pioneered the economic liberalization of the 1990s, opening up India’s foreign investment markets. However, after initial successes, the economic developments hit roadblocks. The nuclear tests of 1974 and 1998 and the Moon and Mars landings in recent years have helped India advance its international status significantly.

An outsider’s perspective

However, as “The Quest” concludes, despite all her achievements, India’s major power status still evades her, and the future looks uncertain in this context.

“The Quest” is an outstanding academic work by Mr. Paul. However, as with most Western academic works on India, it is from an outsider’s perspective. During colonial times, non-native Western scholars – from James Mill to Max Müller and Audrey Truschke – began to share information about India, its texts and culture, and its people with other non-native scholars. Increasingly, the non-native West started to control the intellectual discourse about India. Homegrown Marxist/Leftist intellectuals and scholars joined them in this exercise. Arun Shourie’s book ‘Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud’ details the techniques and frauds of leftist historians.

There are several mentions of “caste” and “Hindutva” in “The Quest.” However, Mr. Paul does not provide any framework to judge India’s status-quest on these parameters. “Jati” (“caste” proper) has always been part of Indian society, and India has been one of the most prosperous and knowledge-producing countries despite that. ‘Hindutva,’ on the other hand, is used as a smokescreen to demonize the assertive Hindu majority of India. The old guard academia, according to Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, “raises the spectre of Hindutva to scare off critics.” 

India’s statecraft

Mr. Paul finds fault – “religious-nationalist coloration” – in the naming of India’s weapons system based on “Sanskrit/Hindu mythological terms,” but not with ‘panchsheela,’ misspelled as ‘panschila’ in “The Quest.” Mr. Paul also talks of India’s “founding fathers.” India is a civilizational nation, not founded by a group of men in 1947.  

Imagine an academic work on India’s statecraft without mentioning Dharma and Kautilya. Dharma is the core Hindu philosophy of righteous deeds that guides the entire Hindu cosmology. Kautilya, also called Chanakya and Vishnugupta, was a 4th-century BCE Indian scholar known for his great work, the Arthashastra. Kautilya’s work provides a “potent non-Western theoretical and conceptual” framework for statecraft. According to Arshid Iqbal Dar, “Kautilya’s realism is there in the DNA of India’s strategic culture and has been the default strategy for South Asia.” Yet, “The Quest” has no reference to either.

Overall, “The Quest” is an excellent 21st-century academic work on India with a 19th/20th-century colonial-Western narrative and epistemology that overlooks native indigenous perspectives.