Book Review: The Unfinished Quest: India’s Search for Major Power Status from Nehru to Modi PaulT. V., The Unfinished Quest: India’s Search for Major Power Status from Nehru to Modi, Oxford University Press, New York, 2024; ISBN 9780197669990 (hardback), price $29.99, 280 pp.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
of McGill University, one of the leading scholars of India's international relations, analyses India's quest for major power status from independence to the present, from the leadership of Nehru to that of Modi, in this historically, theoretically and empirically rich book.He uses the term 'major power' instead of 'great power', a standard in the literature, and 'global power' rather than 'superpower' for the United States.India's rise since the early 1990s is well-known.Its rising status is captured from being the 16th largest economy in 1993 to the fifth largest by 2022, its nuclear tests of 1998 with its nuclear weapon power status legitimized by the global power United States in the 2005-08 civil nuclear agreement, its growing defence cooperation with the United States both bilaterally and multilaterally, and its presidency of the Group of 20 (G-20) in 2023.During the past three decades its search for status that began since independence accelerated.But what is status in international relations and why do states seek it?Status can be viewed as the collective beliefs about a state's ranking on valued attributes such as wealth, military strength, diplomatic clout, demographic position and socio-political organization.Status needs external acknowledgement, especially by peers.States seek status as it can bring benefits such as special rights or leverage.This is particularly so if status enables membership of exclusive clubs like permanent membership of the UN Security Council or being one of the few states that possess nuclear weapons.Status can bring a material advantage.Paul cites Gilpin in saying that prestige, over actual power, is the daily currency of international relations.Status in international affairs can also boost domestic legitimacy and power for leaders, governments and ruling parties.What are the ingredients of status?While military power has historically been considered the key ingredient, Paul updates status theorizing by outlining ten key elements that make for a comprehensive national power capability -the four main ones being military, economic, technological/knowledge and demographic attributes, the other six being the state's normative position, its leadership role in international institutions, its cultural attributes, its state capacity, and effective national leadership.Paul gives a detailed historical account of India's quest for status from Nehru onward.He analyses hard power -military strength, economic growth, scientific-technological and demographic attributes -and soft power factors such as culture, communication and democracy, in India's power composition and status-seeking diplomacy.He situates these in India's relations with the global and major powers, and with India's neighbours, over time and changing governments/leaders.Nehru, 1947-64, used India's soft power resources of the time to punch above its weight in promoting decolonization, anti-racism and nonalignment.These included its moral standing due to its successful non-violent independence movement, its civilisational heritage and its democratic credentials.However, it should be noted that the foundations for hard power were also quietly laid by Nehru in the form of a dual-purpose atomic energy programme from 1948, a space launch programme from 1962, and a heavy industrialization programme as well as a network of scientific and technological institutions.The India-China War of 1962 was a huge setback in India's perceived status.Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977 and 1980 to 1984, continued the nuclear and space programmes, won a major victory over Pakistan in 1971, conducted a one-off nuclear test in 1974, and launched a missile programme in 1983 while refusing to sign the 1968 Nonproliferation
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".