Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s man steering India’s relationship with the world, external affairs minister S Jaishankar, predicted the choppy seas the nation and his government are currently navigating in a book he wrote in 2020 and updated in 2022. His ‘The India Way’ is practically a premonition of the turbulence India faces after US President Donald Trump’s whimsical retaliatory tariffs and India’s military showdown with Pakistan after the Pahalgam terror attack.

The good news is that the chaos would not have caught the Ministry of External Affairs and its boss by surprise. The better news is that much of what we see around us are signs of India’s steady rise in the world order.

The bad news is that in an increasingly multipolar world with two major powers, the US and China, fighting to retain their pre-eminence, India will face growing resistance as it grows.

“As a rising power, India will continuously rub against an international order, parts of which may not always be amenable to its rise. Indeed, Newton’s third law of politics dictates that the process of emergence will get tougher with time," Jaishankar writes in his updated preface to the book. “The challenge we face is not just from competing powers, but also a phenomenon of freezing advantageous moments by those dominant in an era. Even seventy-five years later, we are still operating in a 1945 framework from which India was excluded. It is manifested in multiple ways across broad domains. India is particularly disadvantaged in this regard vis-a-vis China."

In the next chapter, he evokes the imagery from Satyajit Ray’s iconic movie Shatranj Ke Khiladi of two nawabs engrossed in their chess game,........

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