India and Australia (New Horizons)

Global political and economic transformation had spurred India and Australia to shed their relationship conditioned by the cold war and start a process of rethinking about their past. Both the countries have initiated serious steps to rediscover each other and look beyond cricket and the Commonwealth heritage. The real deepening of the ties between India and Australia took an effective form after India went in for economic reforms in the early nineteen nineties. A comprehensive programme of action, New Horizons, launched in 1996, highlighted four areas of cooperation between the two countries: political and security cooperation; bilateral trade and investment; Indian ocean; and cultural exchange. Despite the Indian perception of Australia’s security options being overshadowed by the American global perspectives than by her own individual discretion both the countries have recently discerned a space to strengthen the bilateral relationship and earnest efforts to narrow the resultant chasm are beginning to take shape. This offers a promise for a very useful relationship in the days to come. Born out of an international seminar on Indo-Australian relations in February 2002, this book covers all aspects of these relations: political relations having a strong component of security concerns; regional strategies; bilateral economic cooperation; and the cultural interface. Some vital documents of relevance to both the countries add great value to this excellent study of Indo-Australian relations.

P.V. Rao (b. 1950) is Professof of Political Science and Director, Centre for Indian Ocean Studies, Osmania University, Hyderabad. He obtained a Ph.D. in European Integration from Centre for American and West European Studies, School of International Studie, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He was a British Council Scholar at London School of Economics: Fulbright Fellow, SAIS, Johns Hopkins University; Ford Foundation Visiting Fellow, BCIS, Colombo. His research contributions are on European Union, South Asia Regional Cooperation, Indo-US relations and Indian Ocean’s political and economic issues and he has published articles in these areas in national and international journals. He has authored and edited, Globalisation and New Regionalism in Indian Ocean (BCIS, Colombo, 1997); Indian Ocean: An Annotated Bibliography (Kalinga, 1997); Regional Cooperation in Indian Ocean: Trends and Perspective (South Asian Publishers, 2000); India and Indian Ocean: In the Twilight of the Millennium (South Asian Publisher, 2002). He is the editor of Indian Ocean Digest, a biannual publications of CIOS.