“Brazil is the country of the future and always will be” is a quote that is widely attributed to Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer, who moved to Brazil in 1940. The quotation may well be apocryphal. However, it does effectively capture an important sentiment: namely that a country may never live up to its promise. Although Zweig may have expressed that view about Brazil, it could easily be applied to India and its future.

Since India's emergence from the end of the British empire in South Asia, more than one Indian leader has entertained hopes about the country's eventual emergence as a great power. Indeed, its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, one of the founders and key exponents of the nonaligned movement, even prior to the country's independence, had concluded that it would eventually arise as a great power in Asia. The strategy of nonalignment, despite the country's lack of material prowess, let it wield considerable influence in global affairs. Accordingly, in the first decade or so after the country's independence it managed to promote decolonization, place the question of nuclear disarmament on the global agenda, and play a significant role in international peacekeeping.

At home, Nehru's first priority was to embed democratic institutions in the nascent nation and simultaneously forge a distinctive national identity. There is little or no question that he largely succeeded in these endeavors. He played a vital role in fostering democratic norms and practices and tackled linguistic cleavages that could have rent the country apart. Yet he eschewed the pursuit of the more conventional trappings of great power status, such as the acquisition of military capabilities, choosing instead to contain defense spending, which he saw as wasteful. However, he did lay the foundations of industrialization through a process of economic planning and with a substantial role for the state in the developmental process.Footnote ¹

These steps did enable India to acquire a range of industrial capabilities, but they were not without cost. The planning process and the growth of the regulatory state resulted in a plethora of pathological outcomes. The emphasis on heavy industry led to an early neglect of agriculture, the highly regulated economy stifled innovation, and despite copious forms of intervention the state neglected key sectors. Among other matters, it did little to promote basic healthcare, public sanitation, and primary education, even as the country had a professed commitment to create a “socialistic pattern of society.” Yet despite poor outcomes in addressing poverty, public health, and literacy, the institutions that were created and the policies that were pursued became reified.

Worse still, Nehru and his successors only undertook piecemeal reforms when confronted with either exogenously or endogenously induced crises. For example, after India's dramatic defeat at the hands of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1962, Nehru reluctantly undertook a long-delayed process of military modernization. Later, only when faced with an acute agricultural crisis in the late 1960s did his daughter, Indira Gandhi, direct the country to adopt the new agricultural methods that contributed to the “green revolution,” thus staving off the prospect of a Malthusian nightmare.

As the country limped along at home, unable to promote significant economic growth or bring about a major reduction of poverty, its international standing also declined. The original imperatives of nonalignment were only partially met or, for all practical purposes, abandoned. India continued to make tedious pronouncements in global forums, but these were largely ignored. The influence that it had enjoyed in the initial years after independence was no longer in evidence.

Decades later, at the Cold War's end, when faced with an unprecedented fiscal crisis that had placed the country on the brink of a financial collapse, its policymakers finally abandoned the statist model of economic development that India had adopted after independence. Since then the country has steadily posted high rates of economic growth. Furthermore, it has made a significant dent in rural and urban poverty even though there is a vigorous debate about the exact scope of such poverty reduction.

Also, faced with a striking convergence of strategic circumstances that would have permanently hobbled its clandestine nuclear weapons program and left the country vulnerable to the possibility of Chinese nuclear blackmail, it crossed the nuclear Rubicon in 1998.Footnote ² In its wake, India faced, but managed to cope with, widespread international opprobrium and significant global sanctions.

Once again, it was significant exogenous shocks that induced these major domestic policy changes.Footnote ³ Despite alterations in governments, with differing ideological colorations, no structural policy changes have taken place in either of the two issue areas. Even the current government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while adopting a markedly different stance on domestic social policies, has not pursued sweeping changes in either foreign or economic policies. In the realm of foreign policy, there have been shifts in nuance and emphasis but no fundamental departures.Footnote ⁴

Why India Matters by Maya Chadda, India's Long Road by Vijay Joshi, and Why India Is Not a Great Power (Yet) by Bharat Karnad discuss India's present conjuncture in the realms of economic, foreign, and security policies; trace how it arrived at its present circumstances; and sketch out possible pathways for it to enhance its current status both at home and abroad. However, the works reviewed here are of distinctly varying quality. Joshi's book, India's Long Road, without a doubt, is easily the most striking contribution to a growing genre of literature that examines India's prospects as a great power. His analysis is confined to the arena of economic policy. Unlike a spate of other works on the subject, including those of fellow economists, his book is almost completely free of ideological bias or polemical taint. Instead, it is a reasoned, data-rich, theoretically grounded analysis of a range of economic issues that India confronts, the policies that it has pursued to tackle them, and possible alternative courses of action that it might consider in light of existing outcomes. The scope of his analysis is capacious, and his study encompasses discussions of the country's growth challenges, as well as its efforts to pursue economic inclusion, to provide education and healthcare, and to protect its environment.

Joshi's grasp of the challenges facing each one of these areas of policymaking is nothing short of extraordinary. He writes with both ease and felicity about the origins of these complex problems confronting the country, he eschews economic jargon, and he spells out clear and commonsensical policy prescriptions. The sheer scope of his analysis precludes a detailed discussion of all of the various policy areas that are tackled in the work. Instead a selection of the subjects he covers will exemplify the strengths of this work.

It needs to be underscored that Joshi is an advocate for market-based solutions. Yet his arguments do not reflect a naïve and uncritical faith in the efficacy of markets. Instead he clearly recognizes a role for circumspect and circumscribed state intervention. His overall conclusion is that the Indian state's interventions, however well-meaning, have had disproportionately perverse consequences for both growth and equity across a range of sectors.

For example, in the chapters dealing with growth, Joshi carefully outlines the key factors that have impeded both growth and employment. Until 1980, when the country undertook fitful steps toward economic liberalization, growth was downright anemic. The low rates of growth were also reflected in the weak expansion of economic output, employment, and output per worker. Even the initial steps toward liberalization led to a dramatic increase in both output and productivity. Interestingly enough, it did not result in a substantial growth in employment.

Joshi offers a compelling explanation for the absence of a commensurate growth in employment statistics. He attributes this failure to two factors. First, productive activity in organized industry shifted from labor-intensive to capital-intensive sectors. Even in the export sector, the country saw a similar shift. While there was dramatic growth in the services sector, this too relied on highly skilled labor. Consequently, it could not absorb substantial numbers of new workers. The second factor, which also impeded the growth of employment, was the existence of an excessive number of small firms with low rates of productivity, the result of flawed government policies that reserved entire swaths of the economy for small and inefficient firms.

Apart from these two factors, Joshi also shows that a common complaint of entrepreneurs about the difficulties of opening new enterprises has much validity. The sheer array of regulations that govern the entry of firms into the economy is downright onerous and deters many from starting new ventures. Some of this complex web of regulations has been dismantled, but bureaucratic sloth continues to be an important impediment.

Joshi also provides a cogent discussion of an extremely vexing issue that has long dogged India's economic performance. This deals with the role of state-owned firms, the vast majority of which are loss-making enterprises. Indeed, their annual losses amount to as much as $3.5 billion annually. What can be done to address this particular conundrum? Joshi has a number of pragmatic suggestions. One possible strategy is to pursue privatization. Although he grants that some firms may have to be retained in the public sector on the grounds of national security, such considerations apply only to a very small number of them. Even “natural monopolies” such as firms in infrastructure-related areas, he argues, can be effectively privatized without imposing significant costs on consumers. In this context, he demonstrates that he has no doctrinaire commitment to the market. Instead, he argues that such natural monopolies can be suitably regulated to ensure that consumers are not exploited.

Joshi's lack of ideological bias and his intellectual perspicacity are also evident in his discussions of other critical challenges that could hobble India's economic ascent. For example, he highlights some well-known shortcomings of primary education in his discussion of the state of education in India. More to the point, he suggests some imaginative and pragmatic policy recommendations for addressing the abysmal conditions that currently prevail. To that end, he suggests that India consider the use of education vouchers, which would enable parents to determine where to send their children to school. His preference for the use of such a system is strictly practical: he posits that it would enhance competition and thereby improve the quality of public schools while providing parents with viable alternatives.

Joshi's pragmatism is also evident in another critical arena, namely the provision of healthcare that the country must address if it is to improve the economic lot of a significant segment of its population. He explicitly recognizes a role for the state in this arena for considerations of equity as well as for the potential of market failure. In this context, he shows that since independence India has, ironically enough, moved away from a focus on traditional public health and focused on curative medicine. This neglect has had tragic consequences for a very substantial segment of the country's citizenry. Given the extremely uneven access to healthcare and the colossal neglect of traditional public health, Joshi suggests that India should not only increase overall spending but also focus its efforts on enhancing the quality of sanitation, increasing immunization, providing safe water, and boosting child nutrition—all elements of traditional public health.

The challenges of economic growth and equity that confront India are certainly daunting. However, Joshi has provided an extremely informed, accessible, and matter-of-fact roadmap for tackling them. Though rooted in economic analysis, his discussion is not oblivious of potential political constraints. That said, given the often contradictory demands of the complex politics of the country, even a blueprint as sensible as his confronts a daunting set of challenges in terms of implementation.

Chadda's book, Why India Matters, provides a deft discussion of the myriad political forces that can thwart the most commonsensical policy prescriptions. Chadda is interested in explaining a seeming paradox that the Indian state presents. Its democracy, though mostly robust, is also quite dysfunctional, as Joshi's adroit analysis of India's economic policymaking clearly demonstrates. Despite its many pathologies, as Joshi has shown, the country has made significant economic progress since its adoption of more market-friendly policies. Chadda, a political scientist, is more interested in India's domestic and international politics, especially its growing role in the international order.

Her central argument is that India's chaotic politics and its quest for economic growth and global recognition are not really at odds. Instead, they simply reflect a particular stage in the country's political development. Indeed, she contends that other rising European powers in the eighteenth century confronted similar circumstances: despite domestic turmoil they nevertheless managed to assert themselves in the global order.

India, she argues, has confronted four distinct dilemmas since its independence: unification, development, state formation, and foreign policy. The first, for the most part, has been successfully concluded. With the possible exception of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir, where successive Indian regimes have grossly mismanaged its affairs, India does not face any serious challenges to its national unity. The last embers of some secessionist movements in the northeast continue to burn, but they do not pose an existential threat to the Indian state.

As Joshi's book more than amply demonstrates, India still has a long way to go to solve the development dilemma. Chadda too recognizes that India has yet to solve this particular conundrum. Her discussion of the state formation dilemma, however, is far from satisfactory. She seems to be insufficiently cognizant of how Prime Minister Nehru had carefully built and sustained a range of institutions and how a process of rapid institutional decay took place under his daughter, Indira Gandhi. Instead, she focuses on the role of the Congress Party and dwells on how it mostly avoided the temptations of authoritarianism. Finally, in the realm of foreign policy, she returns to a concept that she had developed in an earlier work, “relational control”—a strategy of maintaining control over some key issues involving neighboring states. Using this concept, she argues that Indian foreign policy was only partially successful in meeting its expectations.

The remainder of the book mostly recapitulates the evolution of India's foreign and security policies in the past several decades, with useful discussions of the shifts that took place both under the left-of-center United Progressive Alliance and the more right-wing National Democratic Alliance. Chadda devotes a chapter to a discussion of India's increasing reliance on “soft power” to promote its position in the global order. She concludes by discussing the challenges that the Indian state still confronts, including class-based insurgencies across a substantial part of northern and central India, the issue of growing economic inequality against a backdrop of rapid economic growth, and the increasing demands for performance and governance. She claims, perhaps a bit too prematurely, that the electorate is now more interested in seeing better socioeconomic outcomes than in issues of identity politics. This proposition, while not bereft of supporting evidence, is hardly that clear-cut. If identity politics had undergone a secular decline, the Bharatiya Janata Party and its affiliated organizations would have long ceased to exploit the ethno-religious cleavages that characterize Indian society. These quibbles aside, Chadda's book is a worthwhile analysis and survey of where India stands in the global context and why its success as a politically democratic, economically prosperous, and socially stable country matters to the world.

The books by Joshi and Chadda are analytic; have a substantial empirical content; and, to varying degrees, proffer various policy recommendations. Karnad's Why India Is Not a Great Power (Yet) is a curious amalgam of analysis, polemics, and hortatory statements. More to the point, Karnad has rather idiosyncratic views of significant periods of India's post-independence era. However, before examining his particular (and controversial) claims, it is necessary to delineate the central argument of his book. Karnad asserts that there exist three distinct schools of thought about possible pathways for India to achieve great-power status. These involve the pursuit of soft power, a reliance on moral suasion, and finally eschewing any such quest given India's many domestic shortcomings. He is scathing in his view that all these approaches are fundamentally flawed and need to be discarded; they are the result of muddle-headed thought and a failure to harness India's inherent strengths.

Although Karnad finds fault with these three positions, apart from scattershot references to the importance of material power (and especially military prowess) he does not carefully sketch out an alternative avenue that India needs to follow to achieve great-power status. The subsequent chapters mostly focus on how India needs to dramatically reorient its foreign policy: moving away from its improving ties with the United States; courting Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia; boosting its existing ties with Israel; resurrecting ties with Russia, especially in the strategic realm; and adopting an unyielding stance toward the PRC. Elements of his analysis are based upon sound evidence. However, many of his claims, especially when it comes to pursuing a renewed defense relationship with Russia, overlook any number of inconvenient facts. Furthermore, he has a very trying tendency to mix analysis and advocacy.

This propensity, unfortunately, pervades the entire work. In his extended critique of India's military strategy, Karnad hammers away at what he deems to be a lack of Indian strategic imagination. However, instead of a careful discussion of India's military assets as well as their shortcomings, he launches a series of broadsides against what he deems to be a failure on the part of a range of Indian defense planners to pursue the requirements of hard power. Consequently, instead of an analysis that proffers a coherent vision of India's existing strategic limitations and possible remedies, the reader is left with a series of sweeping critiques of various aspects of India's recent military and strategic choices.

Worse still, despite recognizing the obvious strategic and technological limitations of the pursuit of some military technologies, such as ballistic missile defenses, Karnad argues that India should nevertheless persist with this endeavor. In a related vein, while highlighting the obvious asymmetries between Indian and Chinese ballistic missile capabilities, he uncritically calls for a dramatic expansion of India's missile programs. Such an expansion not only would impose significant economic opportunity costs, but also could lock India into an arms race with the PRC in which it is most unlikely to prevail.

His discussion of the various internal barriers to India's realization of its great power aspirations is equally slapdash. While expressing an unbridled enthusiasm for the adoption of laissez-faire economics, Karnad provides no coherent blueprint of how such a strategy might be adopted. Instead he snipes away at particular choices and policies that he deems to have been flawed and that have held India back.

All three books, in quite varying ways, highlight India's considerable potential to emerge as a great power. It has a burgeoning economy, it has working democratic institutions, it is a nuclear weapons state, and it has significantly modified its foreign policy since the hoary days of nonalignment. They also make clear that the country confronts significant ideational, institutional, and material limitations that could easily limit its quest to attain such a status. Of the three books, only Joshi's proffers careful, empirically sound, and theoretically grounded policy prescriptions that could enable India to overcome a range of extant economic barriers that constrain its ability to address fundamental issues of growth and equity. Chadda, while properly dwelling on several domestic political challenges, fails to adequately address the risks that a rising tide of ethno-national fervor poses to the Indian state. The rise of these forces poses a significant long-term challenge to India's social and political stability. India has, of course, dealt with similar challenges in earlier decades. However, until very recently they had never quite acquired the gale-force strength that they have now gained. Karnad, while dwelling on the many real and imagined shortcomings of the Indian state, also fails to address this gathering storm.

Finally, none of the three books under review adequately deal with the critical question of institutional capacity in India. Given the extraordinary range of societal demands that India's political system has generated, it is necessary to ask whether or not the country's political institutions can adequately cope with them. Unless they demonstrate suitable resilience and prove responsive to these demands, Zweig's mordant comment about Brazil may well come to apply to India's future.