India occupies a double bind on the international stage---the West Otherizes India, yet attempts to project its own values onto its politics and relations---that erases the continuum of racial-colonial violence against India---turns case and causes serial policy failure.

This pattern of enthusiasm, followed by misunderstanding and ultimately failure, has been repeated over and over again by the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia when reaching out to India. Still, commentators and politicians across the English-speaking world have become immensely enthusiastic about India. India is known as 'the world’s largest democracy,' a 'natural ally' (in the war on terror and elsewhere), the possible 'democratic counterweight' to China, and a trading partner of 'massive economic potential.' In each case, India’s relationships with the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia are seen as finally emerging from decades of disappointment. India, it seems, has never quite lived up to the high expectations of the English-speaking world. This is the Anglosphere’s 'India problem': India does not fit the English-speaking world’s expectations of international behavior or its ideas of how international politics should operate. And yet, simultaneously, India shares many of the English-speaking world’s distinctive features: language, liberalism, and democracy. As a result, India has both confounded and beguiled the English-speaking world by engaging with Russia, refusing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty (NPT), testing a 'peaceful' nuclear device, and arguing against hierarchical forms of international order, all while seeking a 'polycentric' world order and rebuffing calls for new, closer relationships. There is little doubt that the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand share strong security relationships underpinned by a shared outlook on world affairs. They also share near-identical difficulties when reaching out to India. Indeed, India’s ambivalence towards the English-speaking world, as both an idea and a collection of states, has long defined its position in international affairs. The India problem can be seen in the way that India is talked about in mainstream Eurocentric International Relations (IR) theory, the foreign policy discourse of the Anglosphere states, but it is at its clearest in discourse which proclaims English-speaking unity. This is most certainly not India’s problem. The problem belongs to the English-speaking world. The idea of the unity of the English-speaking world has arisen repeatedly since Britain’s colonial expansion. In the mid-2000s, the idea of English-speaking unity arose again, in the form of the Anglosphere. Simultaneously, the Anglosphere states have again become obsessed with India, but in very troublesome ways. But what has not often been examined is how India relates to the English-speaking world, and why these relationships have each caused such continual disappointment. The 'India problem' lies in the English-speaking world’s understanding of India. It can be seen in the foreign policy discourse of the English-speaking states, in the idea of English-speaking unity as well as the way India is talked about in IR theory and in IR as a discipline. At the root of the India problem is the erasure of colonial violence from our understanding of international politics. In foreign policy discourse, seeing India as 'just like us,' sharing 'our' values or 'part of the Anglosphere' is premised on the erasure of colonial violence from the historical record. Similarly, seeing India as Edward Said’s Other, as an irrational, unknowable outsider who is fundamentally unlike us, reflects another side of the same problem. This characterizes India as unlike the English-speaking world, often emphasizing colonial and racialized ideas of India’s Otherness. This has now largely disappeared from foreign policy discourse, but was common in the period after Indian independence, in which India was seen as an unknowable, mysterious agent in international politics. Excluding India from the idea of the English-speaking world reflects its exclusive, racialized identity discussed by Srdjan Vucetic, and ignores the point that India shares much of what makes the English-speaking world. Including India in a superior Anglosphere, however, highlights only the positives of India’s colonial experience–an equally unacceptable proposition. Despite the obvious colonial overtones embedded within the idea of the Anglosphere, there remains a need to engage with the concept which results from its continued political/colonial power in international affairs. It is an idea and an identity. As an idea, it has long been debated and discussed by those who wish to see it embedded into the world order. It is as a political identity that the idea shapes foreign policy and contemporary international relations. Of course, debates on what the idea means feed into the political identity. The identity is predominantly felt by those atop the concept’s traditional hierarchy. As Vucetic has shown, this identity binds the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia together in defense of a US-led liberal/hierarchical world order. This form of order, frequently now referred to as 'rules-based order,' is presented by these states as benign, positive, ensuring stability, and as benefiting all states equally. India, however, views the US-led liberal hierarchical world order in a fundamentally different way to the Western-Anglosphere states. Rather than seeing this order as benign stability, India sees it as limiting its voice in international affairs and preventing the construction of a polycentric world order. Although we must bear these big-picture issues of global hierarchy in mind, they are not the focus of the book’s analysis. Rather, I analyze India-Anglosphere relations for the mutual perceptions of Otherness, seen in the context of the broader identity discourses circulating at key historical moments. On occasion, and particularly after 2001 and the emergence of the 'war on terror' narrative, this Otherness has transformed into a misplaced assertion of sameness and a shared identity. This shared identity, though, is made ambivalent by India and the Anglosphere’s different understandings of international hierarchy. As a result, although a shared identity has emerged, it has led the Western-Anglosphere states to reach out to India with very high expectations, which have continually been met with disappointment. These (mis)perceptions of Other are rooted in the long-term foreign policy arc of India and the Anglosphere and fundamentally related to hierarchy. Whereas the Western-Anglosphere states see their position atop international hierarchy as positive, benign, or even natural, India sees it as limiting its voice in international affairs, and at worst, as imperialist.