Sanjaya Baru responds to C Raja Mohan: Getting multipolarity wrong

News Snapshot:

In a curious column (‘India’s multipolar myths’, May 24) dismissing as “myth” a widely held view that the emerging structure of power among nation-states is “multipolar”, namely distributed across more than one (unipolar) or two (bipolar) power centres, C Raja Mohan not only provides a misleading conceptualisation of multipolarity but also makes a questionable proposition about the Indian view of it. Raja Mohan is wrong to imply that the concept of multipolarity suggests an “even distribution of power between major powers”. Nowhere in the literature on multipolarity or even of bipolarity in the Cold War era is there any presumption...