India's bureaucrats wedded to status quo: New book

WASHINGTON: The bureaucracy and institutions designed by the British rulers to maintain a colonial enterprise pose a challenge to restore India to its eminence in the new global order, according to a new book by an Indian-American author.

"India's bureaucrats are wedded to the status quo even when India's people want to enter the twenty-first century as part of a new global order," Washington DC-based Aparna Pande concludes in her latest book: 'From Chanakya to Modi: The evolution of India's Foreign policy'.

Pande from the prestigious Hudson Institute, a top American think-tank, writes that since his election in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has articulated a new vision, demonstrated the will to change things and is creating the networks that might bring about the change.


"But the institutions of governance created by the British, including the civil service and the armed forces, were trained to think within predetermined parameters. Leaders, from Nehru to Modi, have promised to restore India to its eminence," she writes.

India is, by all measures, an extremely significant country, she says.

"However, the experience of the last seventy years leads one to wonder whether greatness as envisaged by India's leaders can be made to materialize by institutions designed to maintain a colonial enterprise," Pande concludes in the nearly 200-page book published by Harper Collins.

While politics in India has come a long way, the governments still believe they need to appeal to identity politics and that economic reforms do not win elections, she says.