Sixty years after the Raj, a new India is emerging, unable and unwilling to act as a regional power due to internal contradictions and geostrategic compulsions. A rising India is cohabiting with a poor cousin, the Other India. The end of the cold war, India’s economic reforms and nuclear tests have led to dramatic changes in foreign policy, not the least, the transformation of relations with the US from estrangement to strategic partnership, the cornerstone of which is the civil nuclear agreement – a backdoor entry for India into the nuclear club.

A rising India has the attributes of a growing world power. Soon, those younger than 25 will constitute more than half its population and it will have an annual growth rate of 9 per cent, becoming, by 2050, the world’s third-largest economy. By then, it is hoped, the Other India will catch up. Though the country has both hard and soft power, its leaders only reluctantly acknowledge it, still less, want to use it. Territorial disputes with China and Pakistan, a legacy of the British Raj, have been a drag on India’s rise. Its two rivals aim to keep it tied down to south Asia.