In July 2009, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh attended the fifteenth meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Egypt, hosted a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, and attended the meetings of the G-8/G-5 in Italy. These varied engagements are good indicators of the diversity of India's current multilateral and bilateral foreign policy efforts. Some, like the NAM meetings, are legacies of an older world order. Others, like the ongoing attempts to expand permanently the ambit of the G-8 to the G-13 or G-14, are oriented to the future: such a move would give emerging countries like India a secure position in an important global forum that was once the exclusive purview of older industrial powers.

Harsh V. Pant addresses this multiplicity of foreign policy commitments in Contemporary Debates in Indian Foreign and Security Policy. The volume includes a carefully selected choice of topics within the broader category of Indian foreign policy issues. Arranged in four parts, Pant's book addresses India's foreign policy in the context of the global balance of power; India's nuclear status; the country's bilateral relations in the Middle East, specifically with reference to Iran and Israel; and India's current challenge of securing sufficient energy supplies to fuel rapid development, with particular emphasis on the prospects for competition and cooperation with China. References to the roles and perspectives of Pakistan, China, and the United States are found throughout the book. India's relations with Pakistan, unlike the latter two, are not treated in a stand-alone chapter. Pant's aim is to uncover the domestic debates that surround India's various foreign policy challenges and opportunities. The author suggests that India's “argumentative tradition,” illuminated by Amartya Sen in his 2005 book, The Argumentative Indian, historically has not extended to the realm of foreign policy. However, this exception ended with the demise of the Congress Party's hegemony and the rise of viable opposition parties and coalitions over the last two decades. Foreign policy, too, increasingly has become the subject of “intense debate in the Indian polity and the strategic community” (3). Despite this intense debate, however, there is remarkable continuity in foreign policy even as the state has changed hands among political coalitions of varied ideologies. Moreover, and perhaps more damning, these various scattered debates have not amounted to a fundamental clarification of India's foreign policy in the context of a coherent framework. For this to emerge, India has to engage in the “one big debate” (16) that, in Pant's view, is still pending.

Pant applies his strategy of uncovering the various opposing perspectives throughout the book's chapters, although the main actors that he focuses on are distinct in each debate. For example, in the first substantive chapter, on Indo-U.S. relations, Pant places the debate within India's political left-right spectrum. In the debate on the strategic triangle with Russia and China, he spends more time elaborating the foreign policy perspectives of each of the three countries. Representing each in a more-or-less monolithic way, he is less concerned with exploring underlying domestic political tensions. In large measure, the debates that he focuses on, whether in India or in other countries, take place among strategic analysts and often in the pages of the major English-language newspapers. There is somewhat less engagement with the voluminous academic literature on India's nuclear posture, foreign policy, and strategic relations that have emerged in the last two decades, particularly after the nuclear tests in South Asia in 1998. (For a reference to this body of work, see Karthika Sasikumar's review essay of new books on Indian nuclear policy by Kristen Frey and Bharat Karnad [India Review 8, no. 3 (2009)].)

It would have been interesting to note how the various issues that Pant takes up are represented in India's vernacular languages and presses. While the English-language press certainly contains among the most authoritative voices in the Indian strategic and political communities, turning to the Hindi and regional language presses might prove to be a productive way to take the pulse of these debates in the “Indian polity” or in “public discourse in India” (81), one of Pant's stated goals. Such research is perhaps more relevant in a country like India, where, despite the ubiquity and popularity of English-language materials, most of the widely read news outlets (in written and televised media) are in regional languages. The absence of any discussion on foreign policy in vernacular media would also be an important piece of evidence in light of Pant's thesis that foreign policy discussions were historically absent in India but have finally emerged, at least in the English media, beginning in the 1990s.

The volume makes an excellent contribution for teaching courses on South Asian security and foreign policy, as well as for international relations courses that seek to expand the traditional discussion about Great Power politics to include regional and emerging global powers. In several sections of the book, Pant includes references to broader theoretical literatures in international relations and discusses how useful or relevant these are for shedding light on India's foreign policy. For example, Pant has brief discussions of Waltz's “balancing tendencies” (41) with respect to the prospective emergence of a strategic triangle including India, China, and Russia; and the theoretical perspectives contained in the “optimist-pessimist debate” (67) and the “always/never dilemma” (87) that scholars use to discuss the impact of nuclear weapons. The volume is well written, clearly organized, and very accessible for students and researchers in the academic setting. It would be valuable as well for those in the policy community who seek to understand foreign and security policy from the Indian domestic perspective.