New Delhi, June 23 -- In democracies, we typically assume public opinion on issues like jobs, the economy, and inflation matters for shaping policy and politics. But public opinion on foreign policy is often treated as the preserve of elites, especially in a country like India. Yet, we know little about what ordinary Indians think about foreign policy, how stable their views are, and whether those views influence the choices that governments make. A new book, Indian Public Opinion toward the Major Powers, tackles these questions by examining more than six decades of Indian attitudes toward the United States, China, and the Soviet Union/Russia. The authors explore how Indians view the major powers, how those views have shifted over time, and what they reveal about democracy, accountability, and foreign policy in India. The book's authors, Aidan Milliff and Paul Staniland, discussed their findings on a recent episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Milliff is an assistant professor of political science at Florida State University. Staniland is professor of political science at the University of Chicago and a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Milliff and Staniland spoke with host Milan Vaishnav about the treasure trove of public opinion data they assembled and how Indian attitudes toward the US, China, and Russia varied over time and space. The authors noted that Indian views of Russia are remarkably straightforward. "Views have been consistently quite positive both during the Cold War and after the Cold War, before the Ukraine war and since the Ukraine war," said Staniland. Attitudes toward the US, by contrast, experienced a large dip around the 1971 war, when Washington actively backed Pakistan and took actions that were seen as deeply hostile toward India. "What is more surprising is that Indian views toward the US are quite positive other than that. Even during the 1960s, when there were periods of real tension between New Delhi and Washington, attitudes toward the US remained pretty favourable," he said. China presents a different trajectory. According to Staniland, the 1962 war instilled a deep distrust and suspicion of China that persisted for decades afterwards. "By the time we get to modern surveys in the early 21st century, Indian views of China are decently positive, or at least neutral. But then they really started dropping over the last 15 years," he said. Interestingly, Staniland noted that the decline in Indian views of China in the 2010s predated the hardening of elite attitudes in the late 2010s and especially after 2020. "In the early 2010s, both the UPA government and then the BJP-led government after 2014 were trying to create a stable modus vivendi with China," he explained. "But, according to the data, this did not stop the decline in Indian public opinion toward China, which began in the early 2010s and predates the 2017 or 2020 border crises." One of the book's most surprising findings is the relatively muted role of partisanship. "Indians' views of foreign countries have historically been independent of their partisan identity," said Milliff. "Foreign policy is just not something that, even in the 2010s, was really polarised effectively in domestic political competition." While the authors detect modest partisan differences in more recent years, Milliff said that there is no evidence that partisan cue-taking is driving Indian public attitudes....