Book discussion | How India sees the World: Kautilya to the 21st Century

About the author

Shyam Saran is a former Foreign Secretary and has served as the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for Nuclear Affairs and Climate Change and as Chairman of the National Security Advisory Board.

About the book

In his book, part memoir and part thesis on India’s international relations since Independence, Shyam Saran discerns the threads that tie together his experiences as a diplomat.  Using the prism of Kautilya’s Arthashastra and other ancient treatises on statecraft, Saran shows the historical sources of India’s worldview. He looks at India’s neighbourhood and the changing wider world through this lens and arrives at fascinating conclusions — the claims that the world is hurtling towards Chinese unipolarity are overblown; international borders are becoming irrelevant as climate change and cyber terror bypass them; and India shouldn’t hold its breath for a resolution to its border disputes with China and Pakistan in the foreseeable future. The book also takes the reader behind the closed doors — from Barack Obama popping by a tense developing-country strategy meeting at the Copenhagen climate change summit to the private celebratory dinner thrown by then US President George W. Bush for then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the success of the nuclear deal.

Read the programme here.

Speakers

Harsh Pant, Distinguished Fellow and Head, Strategic Studies Programme, ORF

Shyam Saran, former Foreign Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs, India

Suhasini Haidar, Deputy Resident Editor & Diplomatic Affairs Editor, The Hindu

The timing of the event is from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.