Review by James Crabtree
Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century, by Shashi Tharoor,
Penguin India/Allen Lane, RRPRs799/£19.99
He writes beautifully too,
and these gifts of style are best employed when he probes the weaknesses of
India’s diplomatic establishment, which he characterises as small and
disorganised. India has only 900 foreign service officers to staff its 120
missions around the world: “a diplomatic corps roughly equally to Singapore”,
and a fraction the size of most countries of comparable economic weight.
Tharoor thinks this apparatus must be completely revamped, if his country is to
prosper on its newly enlarged global stage. Yet while Pax Indica is admirably
frank on these bureaucratic weakness, it is sadly less so on the policies that
these institutions produce....
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