The US, China, and India: The Future of the Indo-Pacific

Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series
Poster
Vijay Keshav Gokhale
32nd Foreign Secretary of India (2018-20); Ambassador of India, People’s Republic of China (2016-17)
Warburg Pincus LLC
450 Lexington Avenue
36th Floor
New York, NY 10017

[LECTURE OUTLINE]

Vijay Keshav Gokhale

Vijay Keshav Gokhale

Ambassador Vijay Keshav Gokhale is the former 32nd Foreign Secretary of India (2018-20). His diplomatic career with the Indian Foreign Service spans 39 years. Over the course of four decades, Ambassador Gokhale worked extensively on matters relating to the Indo-Pacific region with a special emphasis on Chinese politics and diplomacy. He has served as Ambassador of India to the People’s Republic of China (2016-17), Ambassador of India to the Federal Republic of Germany (2013-16), and India’s High Commissioner to Malaysia (2010-13). Since his retirement from the Foreign Service in 2020, he has contributed opinion pieces to numerous prominent media outlets and authored three books on China: Tiananmen Square: The Making of a Protest (2021), The Long Game: How the Chinese Negotiate with India (2021), and After Tiananmen: The Rise of China (2022). Ambassador Gokhale is currently the Distinguished Professor at Symbiosis International University, Pune, and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Carnegie India. In this lecture, Ambassador Gokhale outlines the convergences and divergences that India has with both the major global powers, and how the dynamics between the three will shape the Indo-Pacific in the coming decades.

The Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series is an endowed public program of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI). Launched in the 2007-08 academic year, and made possible through the generous support of the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, the series brings renowned India specialists to the Penn community and serves as a critical forum for analyzing and understanding the complex economic, political, social, and cultural changes that the world’s largest democracy is experiencing, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.
The Saluja Global Fellows Program has been made possible by the generous gift from Vishal Saluja ENG’89 W’89. CASI was excited to launch the program during the 2022–23 academic year, coinciding with the Center’s 30th Anniversary. This new program enables CASI to invite eminent leaders and rising experts on contemporary India preferably from the fields of media, culture, law, and contemporary history to be in residence for one to two weeks at CASI.