Book Review: Jayant Menon and T. N. Srinivasan (eds), Integrating South and East Asia: Economics of Regional Cooperation and Development

The book, however, prefers instead to argue that Modi ‘introduced a new foreign policy language’ by offering a detailed discourse analysis and a focus on some more trivial issues such as the prime minister’s efforts to promote ‘brand India’ through his foreign visits and diaspora policy. Describing him as a ‘policy entrepreneur’ with ‘charismatic and persuasive manner of discourse’, the deeper questions remain. Even if we witnessed a break with the past, is it all due to one individual’s vision and ‘oratorical brilliance’? More importantly, does this betray a dependence on personality and leadership for the country to achieve foreign policy successes? Tremblay and Kapur discuss this as an interesting hypothesis, suggesting that the alleged ‘break’ with the past, in 2014, was paradoxically possible because of the lack of institutionalized policymaking in India. As a corollary of their focus on individual primacy as the single cause of change, however, one should worry: Modi, the individual, will eventually become legacy but will he leave an institutional legacy? Has he adopted economic and administrative reforms that have strengthened the state’s internal capacity and its ability to pursue its interests abroad, whether during a refugee crises in Myanmar, a multilateral trade negotiation, or in face of a new development in artificial intelligence? Has he strengthened the bureaucratic apparatus, in particularly the Ministry of External Affairs, to carry on his vision and implement it? Until we have evidence-based answers to these questions, the book’s suggestion that India will benefit from ‘Modi’s legacy’ remains both premature and unfounded.