Routledge Studies in South Asian Politics, 4. London; New York: Routledge, 2014. xvi, 243 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$155.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-83068-3.
Over the last three decades, security studies has expanded its scope from focussing on state-level security issues to understanding how individuals are subjected to different kinds of insecurity. The establishment of the UN Commission on Human Security in 2001 is indicative of this shift to what are seen as “soft” security concerns. This volume covers this expanded terrain, by offering a collection of papers on different dimensions of the new frontiers of security studies in the context of India. The case of India, the editors explain, is significant given its size and the fact that it continues to have a strong democratic tradition. Further, the Indian state and sections of civil society have sought to project India as an emerging superpower on the back of relatively high levels of economic growth for nearly 15 years. This claim to a status of power fails to take on board India’s poor record in human development. Its health and nutrition parameters, for example, are lower than those of even some of the poorest countries in the world. Along with the growing income inequality in the country since the onset of economic reforms, such issues of human “illfare” pose a serious threat to individual security despite India’s economic performance. Further, the process of growth itself generates new risks and insecurities as demands made on energy and land resources can undermine the basis of livelihoods for many of its citizens.
While the editors do point to the dangers of securitizing socio-economic issues, they believe that non-securitization of some issues such as inequality, environmental degradation or rural dispossession may prevent policy making from devoting sufficient attention to these aspects. A basic premise of a security-based framework is that if left unattended, these issues may lead to potential situations of conflict in the future. Apart from academics working within the field of security studies, contributors include scholars working in other domains such as health and environment and also journalists covering issues of internal insurgency and illegal cross-border migration. The collection is organized under three sections: resource management, governance, and development. Papers in the section on resource management address insecurities emerging from poor management of what is referred to as the food-energy-water complex. Two chapters cover aspects of sustainable access to water ranging from insecurities arising from over-exploitation of ground water to how water interdependencies between the south Asian countries and China pave the way for an emerging hydropolitics in the region. Significantly, the section points to an important lacuna in collective action against depletion of water resources. While protests against contamination and extraction of groundwater by multi-national corporations like Coca Cola are relatively visible, there are hardly any protests against everyday illegal mining of water by a large number of actors which pose more serious risks for depletion of water resources. The need to look beyond productivity in agriculture to understand food insecurity and the need to link food policy with agricultural policy is stressed in another chapter. The need for power to propel growth and how that has led to destruction of land and livelihoods through setting up of thermal power plants in central India is the focus of the other chapter in this section. Though not explicitly stated, the chapters in this section clearly question the paradigm of development that generates these conflicts.
The section on governance deals with security risks posed by poor governance of internal insurgence in central and north-east India, risks posed by politicization of immigrations from Bangladesh and the state’s fragile efforts to work with Myanmar to secure certain geopolitical interests. While this section covers familiar territory for the most part, the paper on recent attempts to improve governance by developing a universal biometrics program makes an interesting point. The security risks of centrally pooling and coding such large quantities of information about individuals may actually pose far greater risks to national security than the advantages that it is supposed to have in terms of monitoring and tracking security threats. The last section, on development, addresses threats posed by insecurities generated by the pattern of development processes such as urbanization. The paper on urban stress makes a useful call to pay more attention to the small and medium towns where environmental degradation is acute and regulatory capacities are poor. Other papers look at insecurities arising from the reform process such as competition among state governments to attract private investments and rising income inequality in post-reform India. The incentive to compete among states to attract investments may be a race to the bottom as poorer states tend to offer more incentives to attract private capital.
Approaching issues of inequality and lack of human well-being from the perspective of security may well work to enhance policy attention on these dimensions. However, I am not too sure how securitizing issues of fundamental rights as citizens and studying the relationship between environmental degradation and economic growth from this angle provides new insights on the processes that generate them. Given the large-scale gender and caste-based violence and insecurity in the country, one is also left wondering how a framework of this kind can contribute to addressing such social violence.
M. Vijayabaskar
Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India
pp. 725-727