Protracted Contest: Sino–Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century. By John W. Garver. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001. 447p. $50.00.

Extract

India's nuclear tests in May 1998 came as a surprise to many observers and proved all the more puzzling when Indian Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee, in a letter to President Clinton, singled out China as the focal point of Indian security concerns. This statement and others led some, including Beijing's own foreign policy community, to view the tests as an effort to boost India's status internationally and to shore up domestic support for a new coalition government. John Garver's book challenges this domestic-driven interpretation of the tests by chronicling in detail a half-century of contentious relations between the world's two most populous states. Seen in historical perspective, India's nuclear tests were another episode in what Garver terms a “protracted conflict” (p. 3) between Beijing and Delhi. (The milder-sounding “protracted contest” serves as the book's title, but “protracted conflict,” a term Garver uses with some frequency, better captures the book's thesis.)