Despite the title of India and China At Odds in the Asian Century: A Diplomatic and Strategic History, Vappala Balachandran’s new book mostly  discusses internal Indian politics. Other than the first two chapters and the book’s conclusion which deal with the diplomatic and strategic history of Sino-Indian relations, the bulk of Balachandran’s observations are devoted to the “competing visions” of India represented by the conservative Hindu nationalist/populist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) political movement that supports current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the Indian National Congress (INC) or Congress Party that ruled India for decades after independence.

The author is a former special secretary to the Indian Cabinet Secretariat and has written four previous books on Indian strategy and intelligence. He is quite critical of Modi’s government and the BJP’s approach to global politics, viewing it as too aligned with the United States against China. The timing of the book’s publication is not propitious since Balachandran seeks to examine how India will relate to a “post-Trump America under President Joe Biden when democracy and human rights are reappearing as the cornerstones of US foreign policy.” Donald Trump is back as President, and Modi and Trump appeared to get along quite well in Trump’s first term. India, therefore, may grow closer to the United States during the next four years.

Balachandran sets forth the “long history” of cultural, religious, and political connections between China and India beginning in the second century BCE. Eventually, delegations of missionaries, scholars and merchants traveled between parts of China and India:

The most productive exchanges … were during the Tang Period (618-907) … when the whole of China came under one political  authority extending to Central Asia. Thousands of Indian missionaries and merchants ‘thronged’ China’s principal cities, while Chinese monks and royal emissaries came to India in the seventh century in greater numbers than during any other period.

Eventually, Chinese rulers established diplomatic relations with various Indian states, and trade flourished, but Balachandran views China’s approach to the Indian states then (especially during the Ming and Qing dynasties) as part of its “tributary system”. With the coming of what Halford Mackinder later characterized as the “Columbian epoch”, European powers extended their economic and political reach to India and China. British rule in India was followed by China’s “century of humiliation” at the hands of Western powers, Japan and Russia.Anti-colonialism and the Second World War brought renewed ties between Indian and Chinese nationalist movements. The immediate post-World War II period saw an independent India and a communist China participating in the non-aligned movement. The early-to-mid 1950s witnessed what the author calls a “spring” in the relations between the two countries, only to have those relations worsen and result in war in 1962. That war produced border disputes and an Asian nuclear arms race that continue to this day. And China’s rise in the 21st century has moved India closer to the United States, Japan, Australia, and other Western powers.

The lengthy and highly detailed chapters on Indian domestic politics seem like a digression from the Sino-Indian diplomatic and strategic history. In those chapters that focus on the RSS, Nehru’s vision of India, the United Progressive Alliance that ruled India between 2004 and 2014, and the National Democratic Alliance that has been in power since 2014, China is barely mentioned.

The India-China relationship only reappears in the conclusory chapter titled “Portents of a Storm Before 2047”. Here, the author discusses the relative strengths of China’s and India’s economic and military power, with China holding a significant edge in both categories. India, he writes, is too dependent on China for pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and semiconductor chips, and is behind China in science and technology research. India’s trade deficit with China has grown. The border problems remain. He believes that China is a revisionist power, yet he shrinks from advocating closer ties to the United States—the only power capable of providing a counterweight to China. One suspects that with Trump back in power in the United States, Modi will ignore the author’s advice.

Francis P Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century and America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War. His writings have appeared in The Diplomat, Joint Force Quarterly, the University Bookman, Modern Age, Providence magazine and other publications. He is an attorney, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, and columnist for Real Clear Defense.