Until recently, few scholars—let alone former diplomats or analysts

 Until recently, few scholars—let alone former diplomats or analysts—made much attempt to draw on substantial theoretical literature to inform their discussions of India’s foreign policy. Instead, studies of New Delhi’s approach tended toward the descriptive or didactic. But this trend has given way to a new wave of scholarship that explicitly links international relations theory to case studies of India’s foreign and security policies.

Political scientist Rajesh Basrur is the latest to contribute to this emergent genre with his book Subcontinental Drift: Domestic Politics and India’s Foreign Policy. Basrur’s analysis follows neoclassical realism, which incorporates domestic factors to explain states’ foreign and security policies—unlike structural realism, which overlooks internal characteristics to focus on the distribution of power. Neoclassical realists contend that factors such as the efficacy of a state’s institutions shape its responses to external threats or impending shifts in the balance of power

Subcontinental Drift: Domestic Politics and India’s Foreign Policy, Rajesh Basrur, Georgetown University Press, 268 pp., .95, January 2023.

Subcontinental Drift: Domestic Politics and India’s Foreign Policy, Rajesh Basrur, Georgetown University Press, 268 pp., $44.95, January 2023.

Using this lens, Basrur argues that despite India’s long-standing goal to attain great-power status, its ambitions have so far been hobbled by so-called policy drift, in which factors such as political polarization impede the purposeful pursuit of policy.