War and International Politics in South Asia. New Delhi: Routledge, 2014. xiv, 582 pp. (Tables.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-73965-8.
In 1992, George Tanham, a former RAND analyst with no prior background in South Asian politics, published a monograph Indian Strategic Culture: An Interpretive Essay. In his view, India lacked any intellectual tradition of strategic thought, a shortcoming that he mostly attributed to some putative features of the country’s Hindu cultural ethos.
Within the past decade there has been a renewed interest in India’s grand strategy. Most of these contributions, in the form of monographs, have emerged from think tanks in India. Their arguments and evidence clearly belie the rather bizarre and polemical claim that had undergirded Tanham’s analysis. Among the most recent contributions is the multi-authored Nonalignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the Twenty-First Century. Apart from its somewhat misleading title, as it does not suggest a resurrection of a moribund doctrine, the study is a curious amalgam of ideational and realist analyses. Despite its inherent tensions it did generate a much-needed discussion about the intellectual underpinnings of the future course of India’s foreign policy in a vastly changed post-Cold War world order.
The volume under review, India’s Grand Strategy: History, Theory, Cases, constitutes an attempt to examine both historical and contemporary features of India’s grand strategy. One of the distinguishing and welcome features of this volume is that it departs from the mostly policy-oriented work and instead seeks to provide more rigorous and scholarly analyses. Unfortunately, the volume suffers from two important limitations, both of which are the bane of most edited works. First, the contributions to this volume are uneven in quality. Second, despite the efforts of the editors to deal with historical, theoretical, and substantive issues under specific rubrics, there is little or no connective intellectual tissue between the various chapters.
Commenting on the features of every chapter in this substantial volume is simply beyond the scope of this brief review. However, a discussion of a number of salient chapters can illustrate both of the concerns alluded to above. One of the most perceptive, insightful and perspicacious essays in this volume is Rahul Sagar’s chapter, entitled “Jiski Lathi, Uski Bhains,” loosely translated from the Hindi as “whoever wields a stick owns the buffalo.” In this chapter, Sagar deftly traces the ideological and intellectual roots of the Hindu nationalist worldview through a careful and nuanced reading of the key works of two ideological stalwarts, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar. Central to their views, Sagar persuasively argues, were their pessimistic views about the possibilities of human confraternity and their consequent embrace of a constructed, primordial vision of nationalism.
Similarly, Siddharth Mallavarapu’s chapter, “Securing India: Gandhian Intuitions,” shows considerable sensitivity toward Gandhi’s views about the use of force in international politics. It is also to Mallavarapu’s credit that he effectively demolishes rather self-serving interpretations of Gandhi’s ideas of cowardice and self-defense.
In marked contrast to these analyses, Srinath Raghavan’s chapter in the historical section of the volume, “Liberal Thought and Colonial Military Institutions,” focuses mostly on the historical antecedents of civil-military relations in India from the colonial era onwards. However, he adds pitiably little about liberal ideas that animated a significant segment of the Indian nationalist movement. Parenthetically, he refers to Mohammed Ali Jinnah as a “liberal” owing to his early commitment to constitutional change and democracy. However, this characterization flies in the face of Jinnah’s feckless courtship of the most obscurantist religious authorities as he sought to bolster the claim for Pakistan.
Other chapters also underscore the unevenness of this volume. For example, there is much sound and fury about the need to highlight the existence of a non-Westphalian view of global order in Jayashree Vivekanandan’s “Strategy, Legitimacy and the Imperium: Framing the Mughal Strategic Discourse.” To her credit, she carefully outlines how the Mughal Empire did not enjoy a monopoly of violence in securing and maintaining political order. Instead it relied on various institutional innovations such as mobile durbars, on the co-optation of local potentates, and a degree of religious pluralism emanating from the emperor, Akbar, himself. Some of these governing precepts, especially the commitment to religious pluralism, clearly did not survive Akbar. Furthermore, empires, whatever virtues they may have once embodied, are anachronistic. Consequently, while these governing arrangements may have well served his reign it is difficult to see how they might inform today’s needs for global governance. For good or ill, the Westphalian order has proven to be rather durable and universal.
The case studies in this volume are also of varying quality. Ali Ahmed’s chapter, “Indian Strategic Culture: The Pakistan Dimension,” suggests that there has been a significant doctrinal shift in India’s strategic orientation toward Pakistan since 1971. More to the point, he correctly argues that it has taken on a strong coercive bent, a movement that he clearly laments. Ahmed traces this growing embrace of a more muscular strategy to the forces of cultural nationalism. However, his evidence suggests that the shift cannot be traced merely to an ideological shift in Indian domestic politics. Instead he shows that a series of provocations from Pakistan precipitated changes in India’s strategy.
Other case studies are more promising. Rudra Chaudhuri’s chapter, “Aberrant Conversationalists: India and the United States Since 1947,” reveals a firm grasp of the texture of Indo-US relations since independence. The historical material that he summarizes does not alter any prior understanding of key developments and turning points. However, he does provide a most useful dissection of Indian decision making when asked to provide a military contingent in support of the US-led military intervention in Iraq.
The limitations of this volume notwithstanding, it is nevertheless a worthwhile attempt to address multiple dimensions of the grand strategy of a state that may yet play a critical role in shaping the global order in the twenty-first century. Perhaps it will encourage further discussion of the subject to the benefit of both theory and policy.
Sumit Ganguly
Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
pp. 459-461