Sumit Ganguly and William Thompson’s new book comes at a timely moment, when we have a BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party)-led majority government headed by a Prime Minister keen to put India on the world stage as a great power. This is evident in domestic policies to strengthen India’s economy and its sustained efforts to improve its image in world politics. Hence, the central question addressed by the authors—whether and when India will achieve great power status and whether it has the required prerequisites and capacity for such status—is highly significant today. At the same time, over twelve comprehensive chapters that discuss India’s growth trajectory in detail, they ask what state capacity actually means, and how states achieve great power status. Their aim is to develop a robust and generalizable framework for assessing the concept of state capacity itself.

Reviewing recent literature on India’s emergence as a global player, they opine that it does not provide a systematic evaluation of the capacity of India’s institutions to maintain domestic political order, cope with the challenges of sustaining economic growth and guaranteeing national security. The authors argue that while the Indian state has successfully dealt with external challenges and internal insurgencies, the challenge today is whether the Indian economy is large enough and sufficiently strong to mobilize resources for rapid development, fashion a grand foreign policy, and build an army sufficient in strength to project itself as a great power. Placing existing states on a weak-strong continuum, the authors examine India as an “in-betweener” (p. 3), a category to which little attention has been paid. Thus, as a representation of state that is neither strong nor weak, India provides a good case to improve our theoretical understanding of state-making by simultaneously examining multiple dimensions of state capacity empirically.

Examining history to understand how many states in the west ascended to great power status and what are the required facilitating factors, the authors agree that the process is highly subjective. The lesson they draw is that while both internal and external factors matter, it is political leadership and state strength that matter the most in making this transition. A reasonably well-functioning state that can produce economic growth and technological development, can conquer illiteracy and poverty, and can remove corruption is required. The international situation matters at any point in time for achieving great power status; yet, once achieved, problems with state capacity can get in the way of operationalizing an elite position in world politics. Not many are able to do this and remain at the middle-income level. The authors point to multiple possibilities—China and Russia (two BRICS) already possess great power status without parallel elite status on the technological gradient; India and other BRIC countries such as Brazil could fall into the middle income trap, but they could become great powers along the way nonetheless.

To operationalize and measure state capacity Ganguly and Thompson employ a threefold framework: extraction of resources to carry out its tasks, a monopoly on violence throughout its boundaries, and being seen as legitimate by the population. Using these variables and the interactions between them, they show how state capacity can be measured and states can be ranked using various indicators of governance such as fiscal capacity, control over corruption, government effectiveness, voice and accountability, level of violence, rule of law, stability, etc. Applying these to India, they find that India’s extraction capacity is not well developed, and that while economic growth tends to expand fiscal capacity, this has been slow and halting. But unlike most middling states, India scores high on legitimacy due to fairly consistent democratic institutions despite social heterogeneity, poverty, and international conflict. Its record on the monopoly of violence is not as good; dealing with internal/external conflicts remains one of India’s greatest vulnerabilities and an important barometer of state strength.

Simultaneously, the authors use corollaries arising from the preceding core variables to measure state strength: the economy and infrastructure critical to sustain economic growth on which extraction capacity depends; inequality and democracy fundamental to legitimacy and monopolizing violence; and grand strategy which even in-between states like India could use in the absence of requisite capabilities to move towards great power status. On two counts, the economy and the presence of inequality, the authors provide a negative diagnosis. While there has been considerable growth of the Indian economy post-independence, and many observers expect India to join the top-ranking countries, Ganguly and Thompson are cautious about both the pace and likelihood of this happening due to serious obstacles: a large and impoverished population, lack of large-scale industry, poor infrastructure, shortage of energy, poor education and health policies, slow expansion of trade, and doubts about whether information technology can help make it a full-fledged competitor overcoming the middle-income trap.

Similarly, despite its commitment to socialism, India’s success in overcoming extreme poverty as well as the existence of numerous movements and pressures from civil society suggest that the state has not successfully intervened to remove traditional patterns of inequality. Nor have democratic institutions shown the institutional capacity necessary to deal with rising political consciousness, such as rising Maoism. Here, India could learn from South Korea, which by using a combination of economic growth and state intervention has moved up in Asia. Regarding grand strategy, although under Narendra Modi India has moved from an ideational to a more realist foreign policy—including efforts to improve relations with Pakistan and China---alternative visions held by India’s foreign policy elite and the limitations of its existing domestic institutions could constrain the fashioning of a new grand strategy.

Ganguly and Thompson provide a valuable, comprehensive addition to understanding India’s development, using multi-faceted internal and external measures to assess its quest for great power status. They conclude that, being neither weak nor strong, the Indian state has the potential of moving in either direction or getting stuck in the middle. Today, it is “running in place” when it requires “marathon racing” (p. 281) under a committed leadership. While agreeing with their prognosis on India, one can still ask: What is the decisive factor for middling states in the developing world to achieve great power status? This remains somewhat unclear in the current volume. The study suggests that in the case of developing countries such as India, which had a late start, internal strength arising out of institutional capacity and committed political leadership is critical to great power status. As Ganguly and Thompson agree, however, this may not have been as important historically for the western powers born out of total warfare, mobilized populations, and pressures to extract resources. For middling states, building internal state capacity rather than grand strategies seems to be the deciding factor without which these states will not be accorded serious attention by the great powers. Regarding the concept of state capacity, Ascending India and Its State Capacity shows that numerous and different kinds of dimensions are involved, and these may not be the same for all states. Indeed, different combinations may be needed in the case of individual states given their size, historical past, resources, and position in the world order. Therefore, for in-betweeners the quest for a grand theory or overarching framework for defining state capacity and achieving great power status seems unlikely.