Edited by Milan Vaishnav

The volume concludes with three important, though controversial organizations—the Police, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the National Investigation Agency (NIA). The NIA is the newest of the three, which was created following the Mumbai terror attack in 2008. Akshay Mangla and Vineet Kapoor’s chapter analyses the administrative capacity of the police in terms of police/population ratio and other resources at their disposal


Reviewed by: Ajay K Mehra
By Bob Woodward
WAR
2024

Writing on high level decision-making while history is being made is never easy. Woodward has mastered the art of getting principals, including Trump in the past, to speak of what they knew and why they did what they did in near real time. The book is thus fascinating in what it reveals of the working of Biden Presidency on foreign and security policy. War is a blow-by-blow account of Biden administration’s response to the Ukraine and Palestine crises.


Reviewed by: Shivshankar Menon
By Avidit Acharya and Alexander Lee

hey start with a clean example of Neche and Gretna on the United States-Canada border, where the citizens of Neche are closer to Gretna across the border than to any other American town. While the Americans in Neche do their shopping and socializing in Gretna, they cannot avail the welfare services offered by the Canadian Government in Gretna. Similarly, another American town, Point Roberts


Reviewed by: Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr
By Sreeram Chaulia

Chaulia terms the India-Japan partnership as a ‘quasi-friendship’, which though encouraged by the US earlier, has its own logic and internal dynamics today. He says one reason for Japan to turn towards India is its fear that the US would not defend it in the case of a frontal attack by China and that together, India and Japan are alternatives to the other countries vis-à-vis China in the Indo-Pacific. He argues that Japan has helped India sustain its regional predominance in South Asia (p. 91).


Reviewed by: Uma Purushothaman
By Kallol Bhattacherjee

These were soon joined by direct recruits, chosen by the Union Public Service Commission. Three officials especially marked out by the author for their contributions are K Natwar Singh, Brajesh Mishra and JN Dixit. MK Rasgotra and Muchkund Dubey were among the several other stalwarts who significantly contributed to India’s conduct of its foreign relations.


Reviewed by: Jayant Prasad
By Peter Martin

During the initial years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), an important task for the Foreign Ministry was to implement a united front strategy in the countries that had kept their recognition of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang regime. Emerged from CPC’s experiences during the war against Japanese imperialists, the united front strategy sought to establish relations beyond the formal governmental level with political parties, civil society organizations and individuals.


Reviewed by: Parimal Maya Sudhakar