Singh, Jaswant

Summary
This is Jaswant Singh’s  eleventh known book, and here he keeps his focus on experiences rather than rhetoric to  deal with the complex design of  India’s security challenges. While relying judiciously on first-hand experiences, the author justifies his long eventful overtures in public life and also as an avid researcher, who has spent decades participating in and observing India’s security establishment from close quarters.
Primarily, this book enquires about why India has failed to respond adequately in meeting challenges to its national security. Such concern is not beyond the obvious, but the book chooses to bring back some of the past instances in which India’s security was challenged. However, while those existential challenges were overt, the responses remained surprisingly limited.
Singh appears perturbed about the conceptual fault lines and misdirected gov- ernance in handling security affairs. He holds these two factors accountable for the suffering India has faced on occasions since its independence in 1947. The mis- match of challenges and responses is far too wide to be ignored by any thinking mind; Singh is certainly more conscious than most, thus providing his book with quite stretched nomenclature. Having directly held the responsibility of managing a whole series of security-related challenges, Singh discusses and analyses the major security  issues  the  nation  has  faced  in  the  last  six  and  half  decades and  the repercussions of failures in handling them. The book aims to capture the unintentional mistakes as well as overt blunders of the past, in order for India to tread more carefully in the 21st century.