This book is likely to generate as much controversy in India as George Tanham's monograph ‘Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay’ did in 1992. However, in this case the author's approach is more empathetic to India. His argument is that there is an inflection and a duality in Indian foreign policy that makes India less inclined than most other countries to evaluate and justify its foreign policy purely in terms of its national interest and power considerations or even to distinguish clearly between ideal and interest, between pious hope and reality. In the International Institute for Strategic Studies and CITI India Global Forum held in Delhi on 18–20 April 2008, attention was focussed on the fact that it is a unique development in the history of the last three centuries that the emergent India is not looked upon as a threatening factor in the present day international system. One wonders whether the analysis in this book will provide a satisfactory answer to the question why India's emergence is considered benign.

In the author's view, India is still a nation in formation – nation defined in the classical sense. He is full of admiration for Gandhi and Nehru for the way they handled the nation-building process during the freedom struggle. This vast entity with such diversity of religions, languages and ethnicities could not have been welded into a nation without adopting secularism, tolerance and inclusiveness as a basic approach and invoking syncretic civilisational memories and values.