Kanti Bajpai is one of India's most respected scholars of international relations and a leading authority on India-China relations. He served as the Wilmar Professor of Asian Studies at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore from 2011 to 2025, and is now Emeritus Professor there. He is currently Visiting Senior Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) in New Delhi and Visiting Professor in the Department of International Relations at Ashoka University. He has previously taught at Oxford and at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is the author of India Versus China: Why They Are Not Friends and How Realist is India's National Security Policy, and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of China-India Relations and India, the West and International Order. Bajpai writes a monthly column for The Times of India, and comes from a distinguished family of Indian diplomats. His grandfather, Girija Shankar Bajpai, was independent India's first Secretary General in the Ministry of External Affairs under Nehru, and a central figure in shaping the foreign policy of the new republic. In the second episode of Backpocket Pod, Kanti Bajpai joins us for a wide-ranging conversation on Indian foreign policy and the limits of strategic autonomy. We begin by asking what strategic autonomy actually means in practice, and work through how India has navigated its relationships with the four major centres of power: the United States, China, Russia, and the European Union. Bajpai walks us through where India has stood firm, where it has quietly bent, and why the term has remained deliberately undefined by successive governments. The conversation then turns to China. Bajpai unpacks Beijing's three historic demands on India, namely the Dalai Lama and Tibet, the border settlement, and the expectation that India stay out of a US-led containment structure in Asia. He explains why the economic relationship has only deepened since Galwan, why a settlement on the boundary question may still be possible under Modi and Xi, and what India's negotiating style reveals about a much older tension between forensic legalism and strategic pragmatism. We discuss the puzzle of how a closed political system has produced such an innovative economy, and where India's education system, R&D investment, and state capacity continue to fall short. We also explore Pakistan's diplomatic shrewdness and ask why a country India routinely dismisses continues to sit at tables we are excluded from. The episode closes with a personal turn. Bajpai reflects on the legacy of his grandfather G.S. Bajpai, the 1950 note that became the famous Sardar Patel letter to Nehru on China, and what it means to inherit a family tradition of thinking about India and the world. Find Kanti Bajpai's India Versus China: Why They Are Not Friends and How Realist is India's National Security Policy on Amazon. For more long-form conversations with scholars and thinkers, subscribe and stay tuned.
