India, Nov. 30 -- Ever since I wrote the biography of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel ("The Man Who Saved India", 2017), I have argued that the Indian state must transition from using only Gandhian notions for selfreference to combining the aspiration of universal nonviolence with the practical application of hard security to protect sovereignty in a difficult geography and build a high trust society. The idea that India must use its own cultural history, including its foundational literature, as ideational sources for strategy has been deliberated more vividly in recent times, not least in the public utterances of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and foreign minister S. Jaishankar (including in his book "The India Way"). The completion of the Ram ...