About the Book: Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has left the shadows of non-alignment for the glare of great-power politics. It is a story of ambition honed by anxiety and confidence checked by constraint. Courted and contained, admired and admonished, India speaks for the Global South while bargaining with the North. It arms against two nuclear neighbours and still vows its rise will be peaceful, plural and prosperous.  India’s ascent is a study in contradictions. A nation of 1.4 billion seeks autonomy in a world of alliances. It demands reform of the UN, IMF, World Bank, and WTO while mastering the rules it calls obsolete. It builds ports and digital highways across continents, even as it holds a line in the Himalayas and a ceasefire in Kashmir. It exports vaccines and philosophy, endures sanctions and sermons, and claims a civilization at once ancient and impatient.  This book assumes nothing inevitable. Great powers are not crowned; they are forged under pressure. Pressures to India’s rise emanate from great power politics, a volatile neighbourhood, the weight of development, the pull of majoritarianism and a fracturing global order.  The Modi years gave these pressures a language — Vishwaguru, Atmanirbhar Bharat, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — and tools: assertive diplomacy, hard deterrence, diaspora reach and digital infrastructure. Whether that language becomes doctrine, and those tools yield enduring power, is a pertinent question which needs to be analysed by the students of statecraft rather than being celebrated or bemoaned as celebrants or sceptics do. The chapters in the book test India’s material rise against its institutions, its global aims against domestic anxieties and its promise to the world against the cost of power.  India’s great-power moment, if it comes, will not be bestowed. It will be earned — in labs and factories, in Parliament and Panchayats, on borders and in boardrooms. This book maps that climb: choices made, chances missed, crossroads ahead.  For a nation’s rise is measured not by GDP or missiles alone, but by the power it becomes — and the world it helps shape.
About the author:
Dr. Manoj Kumar Mishra
Author has a PhD from the Department of Political Science, University of Hyderabad, India. He qualified UGC-NET in Political Science in 2005 and currently, he is working as a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Swami Vivekananda Memorial (Autonomous) College, Odisha. He has many published articles and commentaries in journals and magazines such as the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs (Online Edition), Afro Eurasian Studies, World Affairs, South Asia Journal, The Geopolitics, New Delhi Post, Opinion Express, Countercurrents, The Diplomatist, Mainstream Weekly, Journal of Peace Studies, IDSA Issue Brief, Asia Times, The South Asian Times, Foreign Policy Research Journal, Modern Diplomacy, Counterview, Kashmir Observer, The Indian Journal of Political Science, Eurasia Review, World Focus, India Currents, Good Morning Kashmir and International Policy Digest. He has authored 5 books ranging from the Middle East War to Afghanistan, Russia-Ukraine War onto Identity Politics. For his persistent research work, the author has been awarded with Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan Gold Medal Award by Global Economic Progress and Research Association, New Delhi on 22nd May, 2021 and EET CRS, Research and Development Award in 2024 as Best Researcher.