Book Reviews South Asia Economic Journal

19(1) 137–150
©2018 Research and Information
System for Developing Countries &
Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka
SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/1391561418765588
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Reeta Chowdhari Tremblay and Ashok Kapur, Modi’s Foreign Policy,

This book’s main argument is that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has instilled
Indian foreign policy with a ‘new direction’ and a ‘new pattern’. This marks a
‘radical departure’ with what the authors see as a history of ideological path
dependence and incrementalism, with past-Indian decisions sticking stubbornly to
the ‘cognitive structure of non-alignment or strategic autonomy’. Bereft of new
evidence, however, several parts of the book struggle with, and often also concede
to obvious lines of continuity. The book, therefore, reflects many of the problems
affecting much of the existing scholarship of India’s foreign and security policies:
It tends to judge rather than analyse, focuses on the present in detriment of the
past and confuses speech as evidence of practice.
Tremblay and Kapur argue that Nehru’s normative and moral view of the world
‘took a like of its own, becoming formally institutionalized’ until finally being
replaced, ‘without much fanfare’, by Modi’s ‘fluid, dynamic multilevel alignment
cognitive script strategy’. This new strategy, the authors argue, is based on a ‘new
discourse … about inter-linkages–alignments aimed at avoiding zero-sum out-
comes by pursuing a course of integrative bargaining’.
Jargon aside, they view Modi’s foreign policy to be innovatively focused on
flexible alignments, willing to engage in risk-taking, divorced from ideological
baggage, and open to transactional bargaining. As a consequence, they posit, the
prime minister has ‘been able to bring about a shift in the global thinking from a
perception of Indian foreign policy that lacks direction to one that is coherent,
well articulated and proactive’.
Remarking that most ‘observers are hesitant to acknowledge that Modi’s for-
eign policy world is different’ and thus ‘fail to see … (how) old concepts are being
radically displaced and the historical normative status quo has been abandoned’,
they set out to make this case in a missionary spirit, bent on converting the reader
to see Modi under the light of a ‘full-fledged paradigmatic shift’. The empirical
chapters of the book, however, fail to offer any significant evidence to back up
their grand assertions. Tremblay and Kapur offer a detailed overview of Modi’s
initiatives, speeches and promises, but do not track actual implementation and
progress on the ground.
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In the case of the neighbourhood (Chapter 3), they rightly identified regional
connectivity as a new priority, but this was already the case since the early 2000s,
or even the late 1990s, when BIMSTEC was first established as a sub-regional
alternative to SAARC, and as an innovative inter-regional attempt to link South
and Southeast Asia across the Bay of Bengal. In a telling example of their exces-
sive focus on Modi’s speeches, rather than actions, in at least one case they con-
fuse a project announcement with its conclusion: The 15 kilometres-long Eastern
rail link between Bangladesh and India (Agartala–Akhaura) was not ‘established’
in 2016 but, in fact, has been hit by repeated delays and is not expected to be
functional before 2019. Beyond the policy slogans of ‘neighbourhood first’, or
‘Act East’, the chapter fails to produce widely available evidence (e.g., on
connecting electricity grids or inland waterways) for what has actually changed
on the ground, in terms of Indian capacity to implement key connectivity and
infrastructure projects.
The section on India’s China policy (Chapter 4) is the weakest of the book,
offering a lengthy historical review of the relationship that runs across 20 pages,
and only covers Modi’s approach to China in a few, final paragraphs. The novelty
here, Tremblay and Kapur posit, lies in Modi’s focus on ‘massive investment in
military infrastructure of Himalaya border regions’. No evidence is offered that
this effort, which began at least 15 years ago, has accelerated after 2014.
More importantly, there is no mention of why Modi began his term by engag-
ing President Xi Jinping and then shifted towards a hardball approach, most
recently illustrated during the Doklam border standoff, in Bhutan. Was the prime
minister over-confident about his ability to deal transactionally with China? Did
he resent the 2014 border incident in Ladakh (Chumar/Demchok) while hosting
President Xi Jinping for a bilateral visit? Why was so much diplomatic capital
invested in India’s bid to join the NSG, in 2017, despite the low chances of suc-
cess due to China’s opposition? Besides the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor
(CPEC), what reasoning compelled India to stay away from the Belt and Road
Initiative? Answers to some of the questions would have helped explain how the
India–China relationship has deteriorated under Prime Minister Modi, whether
that was his strategic intent, and whether this can be considered a foreign policy
success, as argued by the authors.
The case of Pakistan (Chapter 5) does not fare much better. While the co-
authors begin by identifying a ‘slow and steady evolution towards a firm and
coherent Pakistan policy’ under Modi, they end up on a defensive note, listing a
variety of causes to explain failure and contradictions, including the 2014–2015
‘zig-zag’ of alternatively reaching out to, and then abruptly cutting relations with
the neighbour. This goes to the bizarre extent of putting the blame on Pakistan’s
turbulent civil–military relations, as if this was a new development, and arguing
that India’s shortcomings are due to ‘failure of policy instruments rather than of
policy goals’. Future leaders should take due note: your legacy shall be evaluated
by your capacity to set bold and beautiful goals, and not by your acumen to use or
develop existing instruments to implement them.
The empirical poverty of these three chapters betrays a deeper problem with
scholarship on Indian foreign and security policies. Tremblay and Kapur’s book
Book Reviews 139

pivots around an alleged ‘break with the past’ under Modi: until May 2014, we are
told, Indian foreign policy ‘lacked an insightful, coherent strategic formulation
and this resulted in political and bureaucratic inertia’. In one ‘historical’ chapter,
they sweep through almost 70 years to conclude that the period ‘showed idealistic
and reified Nehruvian rhetoric, (which) retarded geo-political engagements
because geo-politics and power politics did not inform the Indian political and
bureaucratic mindsets’.
Such linear narratives are backed up with an ossified three-period, evolutionary
and quasi-biological analysis of India’s foreign policy slowly ‘growing up’, as
popularly argued by Sumit Ganguly, from Indiana University. Summarized in one
sentence, after Nehruvian idealism (1947–1961), India suffered a Hobbesian wake-
up call with the ‘humiliating’ China war, then gravitated towards the Soviet Union
and normatively embraced the ideologies of third-world socialism and non-alignment
(1962–1991), and after the Cold War emerged as a ‘normal’ state, finally comfortable
with the politics of anarchy and power (after 1991). Tremblay and Kapur build on
this by amalgamating all these three phases and, instead, consider 2014 as a
definite cut with the past and the beginning of a second ‘Modi period’.
Not surprisingly, while quoting a variety of secondary sources and many ana-
lysts and journalists, the book fails to refer even once to the work of Srinath
Raghavan, who has produced path-breaking scholarship based on new historical
evidence that remained inaccessible for decades. Instead, blinded by presentism,
the book repeats the recent attempts by many others, including Sreeram Chaulia
and Nitin Gokhale, to identify a distinct ‘Modi doctrine’ and an admirable new
world under his leadership. Tremblay and Kapur name his approach as ‘multilevel
alignment strategy’, which they define as ‘pursuing a diversity of interests in
diverse settings with diverse powers’. For those who have studied the history of
India’s foreign and security policies, whether under Nehru, Indira Gandhi or A.B.
Vajpayee, this looks more like old wine in a new bottle.
This is not to say that, under Prime Minister Modi, Indian foreign policy has
undergone some changes. At the level of ideology and speech, which the book
focuses on, one could have explored Modi’s efforts to reclaim certain historical
battles as Indian, for example, by becoming the first Indian leader to visit several
cemeteries of the two World Wars, in France and the USA. In his speeches, he has
become the first Indian prime minister to openly align India’s pre-independent
interests with those of the free, liberal and democratic world.
Besides a fleeting mention of a ‘triangulation strategy’, there is hardly any
discussion of Modi’s strategic outreach to Japan, now informed by a greater appe-
tite to develop partnerships with middle powers to balance China. This is particu-
larly apparent in India’s immediate region: unlike in the past, when Delhi saw
South Asia as its exclusive sphere of influence, under Prime Minister Modi, there
has been a new push to coordinate and cooperate with extra-regional powers
across South Asia and the Indian Ocean regions. It could be argued that, beyond
strategic necessity, this new level of comfort, for example, with American eco-
nomic assistance to develop cross-border connectivity in Southern Nepal or the
Indo-Japanese partnership to develop the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor (AAGC)
across the Bay of Bengal, reflects a real break with the past.
140 Book Reviews

The book, however, prefers instead to argue that Modi ‘introduced a new for-
eign policy language’ by offering a detailed discourse analysis and a focus on
some more trivial issues such as the prime minister’s efforts to promote ‘brand
India’ through his foreign visits and diaspora policy. Describing him as a ‘policy
entrepreneur’ with ‘charismatic and persuasive manner of discourse’, the deeper
questions remain. Even if we witnessed a break with the past, is it all due to one
individual’s vision and ‘oratorical brilliance’? More importantly, does this betray
a dependence on personality and leadership for the country to achieve foreign
policy successes? Tremblay and Kapur discuss this as an interesting hypothesis,
suggesting that the alleged ‘break’ with the past, in 2014, was paradoxically pos-
sible because of the lack of institutionalized policymaking in India.
As a corollary of their focus on individual primacy as the single cause of
change, however, one should worry: Modi, the individual, will eventually become
legacy but will he leave an institutional legacy? Has he adopted economic and
administrative reforms that have strengthened the state’s internal capacity and its
ability to pursue its interests abroad, whether during a refugee crises in Myanmar,
a multilateral trade negotiation, or in face of a new development in artificial intel-
ligence? Has he strengthened the bureaucratic apparatus, in particularly the
Ministry of External Affairs, to carry on his vision and implement it? Until we
have evidence-based answers to these questions, the book’s suggestion that India
will benefit from ‘Modi’s legacy’ remains both premature and unfounded.

Constantino Xavier
Fellow
Carnegie India
New Delhi, India

Jayant Menon and T. N. Srinivasan (eds), Integrating South and East Asia:
Economics of Regional Cooperation and Development, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2018, pp. 397, `1,295, ISBN-13: 978-0-19-947412-7.
DOI: 10.1177/1391561418767444

The volume titled Integrating South and East Asia: Economics of Regional
Cooperation and Development, comprising 10 chapters and authored by several
experts, is the outcome of an Asian Development Bank (ADB) project jointly with
Indian Council for Research in International Economic Relations (ICRIER) and
the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP), to study the relevance
of domestic and regional policy or increasing trade and investment between South
Asia and Southeast Asia and also challenges faced by South Asia and other small
economies to catch up with other emerging countries in the region.
This volume begins with three chapters which provide an overview of the
general trends in inter-regional trade and investment between South Asia and East
Asia, and examine the potential role of free trade agreements (FTAs) in advancing
further integration. Moving from this general exploration of trade and investment
integration, the next three chapters examine the potential role of integration in