While China’s largest neighbor India is expected to overtake China by population within only a few years, it is struggling in most other areas to compete with the other giant emerging country. The recent border clashes only led the already complicated relations to deteriorate. As for most countries, India will have to balance furthering its economic potential – that it will not achieve without China – and opposing a China led region by offering other countries opportunities to collaborate.

Your host: Nico Luchsinger, Executive Director, Asia Society Switzerland
Moderator: Nico Luchsinger
Speakers:
Tanvi Madan, Director and Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
Samir Saran, President, Observer Research Foundation (ORF)
Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram and author
Production: Serena Jung, Program and Communications Director, Asia Society Switzerland
Editing: Denise Staubli, Program Manager, Asia Society Switzerland

Tanvi Madan is a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy in the Foreign Policy program, and director of The India Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.. Madan’s work explores India’s role in the world and its foreign policy, focusing in particular on India's relations with China and the United States. She also researches the intersection between Indian energy policies and its foreign and security policies. Madan is the author of the book Fateful Triangle: How China Shaped US-India Relations during the Cold War (Brookings Institution Press, 2020). She is currently completing a monograph on India’s foreign policy diversification strategy, and researching her next book on the China-India-U.S. triangle.

Samir Saran is the President of the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), one of Asia’s most influential think tanks. Working with the Board, he provides strategic direction and leadership to ORF’s multiple centers on fundraising, research projects, platform design and outreach initiatives including stakeholder engagement. He curates the Raisina Dialogue, India’s annual flagship platform on geopolitics and geo-economics, and chairs CyFy, India’s annual conference on cybersecurity and internet governance. He spearheads the foundation’s efforts to foster new international partnerships and globalize its platforms. Samir is also a Commissioner of The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace, a member of the Regional Stewardship Board of the World Economic Forum, and a part of its Global Future Council on Geopolitics. In 2019, Samir Saran published the book Pax Sinica: Implications for the Indian Dawn together with Akhil Deo.

Dr. Shashi Tharoor, a third-term Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram, is the bestselling author of twenty one books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and a former Minister of State for Human Resource Development and for External Affairs in the Government of India. He has won numerous awards, including the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019, Dr. Tharoor was also awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in the category of ‘English Non-Fiction’ for his book An Era of Darkness. He chairs Parliament’s Standing Committee on Information Technology.

Sources: 

Asia Society Switzerland State of Asia 2020: The Indian Imperative, November 27, 2020

Asia Society Switzerland Webcast 'The Relations Between China and India Have Seen a Stabilization, but No Resolution', April 16, 2020

Book Fateful Triangle: How China Shaped US-India Relations during the Cold War by Tanvi Madan, Brookings Institution Press, 2020

Book Pax Sinica: Implications for the Indian Dawn by Samir Saran and Akhil Deo, Rupa Publications 2019

Book The Battle Of Belonging: On Nationalism, Patriotism, And What It Means To Be Indian by Shashi Tharoor, 2020