Ours is an age of paradox. In science we are daily reaching ever greater achievements, overcoming time and space “and now nothing will be restrained from [us], which [we] have imagined to do.” We are literally reaching “unto Heaven.” These achievements in science are in large measure due to our ability to free ourselves of attachment to concrete “thinghood” and to advance toward ever greater abstraction. By contrast, in the humanities, in ethics, and in law, we are still deeply ingrained in a world of “things,” of the concrete and tangible, although a tendency toward abandonment of this orientation is increasingly noticeable. Personality values not tied to external, visible and tangible objects are emerging very slowly. In international law this process lags behind that observable in national legislation. Thus, for example, while spying on another state in the course of an authorized stay therein is widely practiced, there is deep resentment when the wrong consists in a wrongful “touching” of the territory of another state, for this violates “sovereignty” in an “immediate” rather than “consequential” manner, “sovereignty” being apparently conceived of as a physical entity rather than as the realm of a people’s privacy. This is reminiscent of early legal notions, such as the view that an action of trespass will lie only when there has been some direct physical contact, however slight, of the defendant with the body or property of the plaintiff, a view clearly rooted in belief in the magic of touching. A similarly “thinghood-bound” conception of international law is reflected in the recent United Nations Security Council resolution censuring Israel for the capture of Eichmann.

The Convention on the Continental Shelf of April 29, 1958—one of the works of the first United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea— declares in Article 2(1) that the “coastal State exercises over the continental shelf sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring it and exploiting its natural resources.” The fourth paragraph of the same article defines these resources as

One of the more significant, but inadequately recognized, developments in the field of the law of war which has occurred during the past half-century is that with respect to the institution of the Protecting Power. Surprisingly little has been written, especially in English, either on the general subject of the Protecting Power or on the specific subject of the Protecting Power and its relationship to the prisoner-of-war problem. This article will endeavor, to a necessarily limited extent, to fill that void, with the emphasis being placed on the gradual, but steady, expansion of the authority, responsibility, and functions of the Protecting Power in safeguarding the welfare of prisoners of war.

In this study of India’s recognition policy the cases of China, Israel, Spain, and Vietnam have been singled out. The reason for selecting these four cases is that they have been a subject of controversy either in India or in the world outside India. It is hoped that the cases might afford a fairly good glimpse of India’s general policy of recognition. The plan is to discuss these cases separately in the general context of India’s relationship with each of these countries, a method that is more likely than any other to help the reader appreciate her policy. Toward the end of the paper a brief statement of general principles of India’s policy is given by way of conclusion.