About the book

The hundred-year ambition driving India's foreign policy

For decades, nonalignment has been read as a defensive posture. A young, poor, newly decolonized state kept its distance from both Cold War blocs because distance was all it could afford.

But a state socialized in the high tide of anti-imperialism did not keep its distance only because it was poor.

Distance was also a choice.

India After Nonalignment argues that at the heart of that caution lay an ambition that lived through colonialism, the Partition of India, the Cold War, the Soviet collapse, liberalization and the arrival of Chinese power on India's borders: the desire to become a pole in its own right, a centre of power, norms and geopolitical activity rather than a participant in someone else's order. It is the ambition that explains the India of today, at a moment when the old order is coming apart and pressure is mounting on Delhi to choose a side.

Happymon Jacob traces that ambition across a century of Indian thinking about itself and the world. He shows how three things usually treated as separate stories (nonalignment, strategic autonomy and multialignment) are better understood as successive expressions of the same underlying aspiration. His concept of functional multipolarity offers a way of telling who counts as a pole and who does not.

For anyone trying to make sense of Indian foreign policy on its own terms rather than through borrowed categories, this book offers a new vocabulary.

Penguin Viking, September 2026
Hardback, 320 pages