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India: Emerging Power

Stephen P. Cohen
Reviewed by By Lucian W. Pye
January/February 2002
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Stephen P. Cohen
Brookings Institution Press
2001
378 pp.
0815700067
$28.95

Cohen works from a grand geopolitical perspective, employing theories of international relations, to focus on India's trajectory in the 1990s. In that decade, the nation began moving away from the misguided policies of the past and toward a new status as a major Asian power. Cohen strives to be dispassionately analytical, but he cannot hide his soft spot for India. Thus he is eager to rationalize most Indian policies and quick to fault the actions of other powers, especially the United States. He is optimistic that India will continue to dismantle its old, bureaucratic way of doing things and expand its new, high-tech entrepreneurial economy. He skirts the question of how China's emergence will affect India but argues persuasively that Washington must carefully strengthen ties with New Delhi.

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