If politics is the last refuge of scoundrels, foreign policy is the first refuge of the erudite. So most foreign policy analysis, which is in reality individual opinion, is passed off as expertise.

There is another harsh reality as well. Policy is for those with means; opportunistic practice is for the rest. Until recently, India did not have the means. But its moral compass, which has now assumed a subordinate role to national interest, prevented opportunism. That meant extreme cosiness with a few and extreme prickliness to the rest.

That, if you ask me, was practice posing as policy. It also left me to wonder over all these years: at what point does practice become policy in South Block? But this variability has had one advantage: it has made talking about Indian foreign policy very easy. Everyone with a measure of erudition does it.

Writing sensibly about it, on the other hand, is altogether different and indeed very hard. This is because for every statement, there is an equal and opposite statement; for every assessment, there is an equally convincing negation; and for every prediction, there is the near-certainty of failure.

David's Goliath

A good book, I have always felt, should minimise these knee-jerk Newtonianisms. This one does so with knobs on — by the simple tactic of being absolutely comprehensive. All objections are pre-empted in it.

The result is that this big but precise book by David Malone, who served as Canada's ambassador to India for two years between 2008 and 2010, is at least a superb tour de horizon if not quite a tour de force . As a 360 degree survey goes, it is hard to surpass.

Mr Malone has taken great care to be accurate. So, by and large, the book is free of boo-boos. The index, however, is poor, though the bibliography makes up for it. Much of what Mr Malone read (or has cited) is dross; but that is probably inevitable in a project of this magnitude.

Confusion as strategy

I am not a professional foreign policy commentator. Nor am I a retired diplomat. Nevertheless, thanks to certain personal circumstances, I can claim more than a mere passing knowledge of several aspects of the practice of it. So I think I can quite fairly conclude that this book captures, almost perfectly, the main driver of India's foreign policy: Confusion. That confused thinking is a national trait is not to take away from Mr Malone's achievement.

His natural response to Indian foreign policy is one of bewilderment, which he tries very hard to conceal. But it seeps through the book like maple syrup on a pancake. He surely deserves a medal for his diplomatic detachment and nuanced prose and for resisting the temptation to say rude things.

The books starts with a chapter on methodology and sources, goes on into another chapter of potted history, then moves into India's security challenges before turning to questions of foreign policy in the next 10 chapters. These are written partly like a fully defensible Ph D thesis, partly like an in-depth story in newspapers with extensive quotes, and partly as a potential WikiLeak cable that ambassadors feel obliged to send to headquarters just to show they are alive and that they deserve a better posting next time.

Not flawless

There are, however, three major flaws in the book. Mr Malone can rectify them to the extent possible in the second edition, which is sure to come. First, Mr Malone seems inadequately acquainted with the way the Indian elite actually think about the rest of the world.

Perhaps because he spent so little time here or perhaps because his job brought him into contact only with the current affairs subset of the Indian elite, he has been unable to spot its defining characteristic: its intellectual ambivalence. Intellectually, it is neither fish nor fowl, neither wholly Indian nor wholly Western liberal. This deeply affects the categories in which it thinks — sometimes in morally absolute categories and sometimes in context-sensitive ones. Confusion is a natural consequence.

The second flaw is that Mr Malone attaches far too much importance to the views of commentators, who suffer from three disabilities as a group. First, they don't know enough about the background and the minutiae of the engagements between countries; so, second, they don't know when they are being used, by whom, and for what purpose; and third, their community is so small and so closed that no one but professional Indian diplomats can actually gauge the worth of their commentary, suggestions and analyses.

The expansiveness of the commentators is matched by the tightly shut mouths of the diplomats. Together, they form what in maths are called non-intersecting subsets.

The third flaw is a more serious one. Mr Malone has entirely missed a new feature of Indian foreign policy — its need to take into account the interest of the States, especially on economic matters, even though the treaty-making power is the Centre's alone.

(Dr Kripa Sridharan, formerly of the National University of Singapore, whom Mr Malone cites in the context of Asian regionalism, has written a path-breaking paper on the subject: http://onlinelibrary.wiley. com/doi/10.1046/j.1467-8403.2003. 00160.x/abstract ).

‘Bumbleo ergo sum'

Has policy confusion been part of a deliberate Indian strategy? Is it a mere tactic? Going by outcomes, it would appear so because, far from hindering, bumbling may have actually been very successful because others under-estimate you. You can get what you need by being a windy and silly bore.

The point is this: when you set aside the grumbling about small setbacks, little pinpricks and gratuitous insults to it and assess our policy towards the countries and regions that matter most to India, you get an astonishing result.

Pakistan is disintegrating from both sides. China is allowing India to import cheaply and thus helping growth accelerate. The US, along with Russia and West Asia, is firmly on India's side in a variety of ways. Trade with Latin America is booming.

What more can you ask for?

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