The stubborn facts of history and politics are often hidden from the public gaze. Jawaharlal Nehru lifted the curtain a little on this in one of his statements, ‘ … It is very well to talk about foreign policy. But you will appreciate that no person charged with a country’s foreign policy can really say very much about it. He can sometimes say something general about it; he can say something specific about it when occasion arises. But there are many things connected with it which are supposed to lie as what are called Top Secret Files’.
The volume under review is the second in the series of documents on India’s foreign policy, which include selected documents reprinted from official sources like Foreign Affairs Record, for the year 1973. How far this collection will succeed in helping in ‘undertaking in-depth studies on various dimensions of India’s foreign policy in the total perspective of contemporary diplomacy’, an outlined objective of this collection, depends upon the extent to which the contents of the documents reflect the undercurrents in the foreign policies.