The protean polis and strategic surprises: Do changes within India affect South Asian strategic stability?

Contemporary South Asia

Volumn 14, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 219-231

  Sahni, Varun ^a  

^a JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY   (India)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GEOPOLITICS; NUCLEAR POWER; POLITICAL CONFLICT; STRATEGIC APPROACH; TERRORISM;

ASIA; EURASIA; INDIA; PAKISTAN; SOUTH ASIA;

PROTEA;

EID: 29244470257     PISSN: 09584935     EISSN: 1469364X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09584930500314334     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. As Robert O. Keohane points out, all realists share three core assumptions about international politics: That states are the basic units (the state-centric assumption), rational units (the rationality assumption), and power-maximising units (the power assumption). See Robert O. Keohane, 'Theory of world politics: Structural realism and beyond', in R.O. Keohane (ed), Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp 158-202.
2. However, realism is a divided house on the analytical issue of whether states can/should be treated as unitary. While classical/political realists like Hans Morgenthau emphasise the importance of internal factors on international outcomes, structural realists/neorealists (among whom Kenneth Waltz is the emblematic figure) seek explanations at the level of the international system rather than in domestic (intra-state) politics. See Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1948);
3. and Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1979).
4. On the notion of India as an emerging power, see Stephen Philip Cohen, India: Emerging Power (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2001);
5. Sumit Ganguly (ed), India as an Emerging Power (London: Frank Cass, 2003);
6. and Baldev Raj Nayar and T.V. Paul, India in the World Order: Searching for Major-Power Status (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
7. For a comparative perspective, see Varun Sahni, 'Brazil, India and South Africa: Three pathways to regional (in)security', Working Paper EI-46 (Mexico City: CIDE, 1999).
8. We borrow this conceptualisation from Latin American military politics and democratic transition literature, specifically Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
9. Ibid, pp 3-4.
10. Ibid, p 4.
11. Ibid, p 4.
12. The two sections that follow partly draw upon my earlier writings; see Varun Sahni, 'Necessary changes in Indian polity', in Polity and Governance: The Golden Jubilee of India's Independence (New Delhi: Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, 1998), pp 10-30;
13. and Varun Sahni, 'Explaining India-Pakistan crises: Beyond the stability-instability paradox', in Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema and Imtiaz H. Bokhari (eds), Arms Race and Nuclear Developments in South Asia (Islamabad: Islamabad Policy Research Institute/Hanns Siedel Foundation, 2004), pp 133-149.
14. Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (New York: McGraw Hill, 1936).
15. For an excellent study of the new politics of assertion, see Sudha Pai, Dalit Assertion and the Unfinished Democratic Revolution: The Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh (New Delhi: Sage, 2002).
16. In an opinion poll carried out in May 2004 by Outlook magazine and the Marketing and Development Research Associates (MDRA), India's leading market research organisation, 69% of the respondents said that the political parties were not serious about the future of the country. In response to another question, 75% felt let down by the country's political leaders. On corruption by political leaders, 34% expressed shock, 34% indifference, while the remaining 32% said that there was no alternative. See 'Outlook-MDRA opinion poll: Political leaders have let us down', Outlook, 10 May 2004, , accessed 2 October 2004.
17. A 'Mood of the Nation' poll conducted jointly by India Today and ORG-MARG (Operations Research Group-Marketing And Research Group) in February 2002, a moment when the India-Pakistan military standoff was at its height, reflects the split public attitude toward Pakistan. When asked what India should do if Pakistan did not take action against terrorists operating from its soil, 37% of the respondents advocated attacking Pakistan/Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, 19% counselled restraint and the initiation of talks with Pakistan, 16% argued for a diplomatic offensive at the United Nations, 8% suggested an invitation to the United States to intervene, while 4% proposed that India do nothing. In case war were to break out with Pakistan, 32 per cent of the respondents proposed limited strikes to destroy terrorist camps, 21% pushed for all-out war against Pakistan, 19% were in favour of recovering Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, with 14% insisting that no war should take place. See Swapan Dasgupta, 'The return of the Hawkish Hindu', India Today, 4 February 2002, pp 32-33.
18. The possibility of a flare-up in Hindu-Muslim violence in some part of India or the other is ubiquitous but frequently unpredictable. In the first nationwide opinion poll by the Gallup Organization in 1996, 24% of the respondents expected Hindu-Muslim conflict to increase over the succeeding 5 years, 29% expected it to decrease, 14% expected violence levels to remain constant, while the remaining 33% did not feel that it was a subject that they could predict. See The Gallup Survey of Consumer Attitudes, Lifestyle Trends and Public Opinion in India, 8 October 1996, The Gallup Organization, , accessed 29 January 2005.
19. On the reasons for Hindu-Muslim violence, see two recent books that take radically different positions: Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002);
20. and Paul R. Brass, The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).
21. A pioneering study suggests that the 'enemy image' may be fostered to an extent by the distorted historical narratives that young Indians (and Pakistanis) learn in their (respective) school history textbooks. See Krishna Kumar, Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan (New Delhi: Penguin, 2002).
22. From the perspective from the Indian Government, one of the critical lessons learnt from the Kargil conflict was proper management of the media: 'Kargil was the first war that Indian correspondents covered by going to the front in significant numbers. It was also the country's first television war and one in which the Indian Army had the handle the media right on the battlefront.' See Kargil Review Committee Report, From Surprise to Reckoning (New Delhi: Sage, 2000), p 260.
23. From the perspective of the media in the months after Kargil, there was 'some intense soul-searching' about the manner in which 'much of the national press meekly toed the government line and fanned war hysteria at the cost of objectivity and professional ethics'. See S.N.M. Abidi, 'Lies out of control', Himal, Vol 12, No 9, September 1999, Himal , accessed 31 January 2005.
24. The Gallup Survey, op cit, Ref 12.
25. Dasgupta, op cit, Ref 11, p 36.
26. New Delhi Television, , accessed 27 September 2004.
27. Outlook-MDRA opinion poll, op cit, Ref 10.
28. Some of the prominent India-Pakistan peace initiatives are the Pakistan-India People's Forum for Peace and Democracy, Hind-Pak Dosti Manch (India-Pakistan Friendship Forum), Women's Initiative for Peace in South Asia, the Association of the Peoples of South Asia, the South Asian Human Rights Association, the South Asia Free Media Association, and Soldiers for Peace. See Praful Bidwai, 'No peace without civil society', Frontline, Vol 21, No 18, 2004, , accessed 30 January 2005.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. For the official perspective, see High Level Committee, Report on the Indian Diaspora, , accessed on 12 December 2004.
32. According to Arvind Rajagopal, 'Hindutva's practices in its US sites reflect the aspirations of Hindu nationalism in India and vice versa; together they form an entity that reinforces each of these parts but it cannot be reduced to either of them'. See A. Rajagopal, 'Hindu nationalism in the US: Changing configurations of political practice', Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol 23, No 3, 2000, p 489.
33. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta incisively notes, 'Caste politics is the triumph of politics over caste'. See Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Burden of Democracy (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003), p 74.
34. The academic literature on the BJP and its sangh parivar (joint family of fellow traveller organisations) is vast, and mostly written in a critical vein. See Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996);
35. Walter K. Andersen and Shridhar D. Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1987);
36. Partha S. Ghosh, BJP and the Evolution of Hindu Nationalism: From periphery to centre (New Delhi: Manohar, 1999);
37. Tapan Basu et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993);
38. Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies, and Modern Myths (Oxford: Berg, 2001);
39. Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999);
40. A.G. Noorani, The RSS and the BJP: A Division of Labour (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2000);
41. Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001);
42. Jyotirmaya Sharma, Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism (New Delhi: Viking, 2003);
43. Antony Copley (ed), Hinduism in Public and Private: Reform, Hindutva, Gender, and Sampraday (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003);
44. and S.P. Udayakumar, Presenting the Past: Anxious History and Ancient Future in Hindutva India (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005).
45. See Katharine Adeney and Lawrence Saez (eds), Coalition Politics and Hindu Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 2005).
46. In 2004-05, India exported merchandise and services worth 3.62 trillion rupees and 2.29 trillion rupees respectively, adding up to 5.92 trillion rupees. The revised estimates of Indias GDP at market prices in 2004-05 were 31.05 trillion rupees. See Handbook of Statistics on the Indian Economy (Mumbai: Reserve Bank of India, 2005) p 5, 246.
47. One of the few pieces of documented evidence in this connection, albeit contentious, is Thomas Friedman, 'India, Pakistan and G.E.', The New York Times, 11 August 2002, , accessed 30 January 2005.
48. On military subordination to civilian authority in India, see Stephen P. Cohen, The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971);
49. Stephen Peter Rosen, Societies and Military Power: India and its Armies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996);
50. and Apurba Kundu, Militarism in India: The Army and Civil Society in Consensus (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998).
51. 'Ibobi salvo at army chief', The Telegraph (Kolkata), 20 September 2004, , accessed 30 January 2005.
52. The Gallup Survey, op cit, Ref 12.
53. Peter Douglas Feaver, Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p 12.
54. Also in this category is the Department of Space, under which the Indian Space Research Organisation falls, and the Defence Research and Development Organisation that reports to the defence minister.
55. Dhirendra Sharma, India's Nuclear Estate (New Delhi: Lancers, 1983).
56. Itty Abraham, on the other hand, terms the military-industrial complex as a 'strategic enclave'. See Itty Abraham, 'Security, technology and ideology: "strategic enclaves" in Brazil and India, 1945-1989', unpublished PhD thesis (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 1993).
57. 'Securitization' is the process through which a public issue is converted from a political issue - wherein it is subject to the normal bargaining processes of politics and administrative state control - to a security issue - whereby the issue is presented as an existential threat that justifies unorthodox manoeuvres and the breaking of rules. See Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), pp 24-25.
58. Kanti Bajpai insists that this is not a new phenomenon: 'Since independence, India has evolved a complex set of values, rules, and institutions that in effect place limits on the power of the central and other governments as well as potentially domineering social groups'. See Kanti P. Bajpai, Roots of Terrorism (New Delhi: Penguin, 2002), p 118.
59. I thank one of the anonymous referees of Contemporary South Asia for pointing out that these two concepts are not synonymous, and that their mutual relationship must therefore be explicitly stated.
60. The official Indian view of the Kargil Conflict can be found in the Kargil Review Committee Report, op cit, Ref 14.
61. See Kanti P. Bajpai, P.R. Chari, Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, Stephen P. Cohen and Sumit Ganguly, Brasstacks and Beyond: Perception and Management of Crisis in South Asia (New Delhi: Manohar, 1987).
62. For an insightful study of the 1990 crisis, see P.R. Chari, Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema and Stephen P. Cohen, Perception, Politics and Security in South Asia: The Compound Crisis of 1990 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003).
63. Scott D. Sagan, 'Why do states build nuclear weapons: Three models in search of a bomb', International Security, Vol 21, No 3, 1996-97, pp 55, 68.
64. William Walker, 'International nuclear relations after the Indian and Pakistani test explosions', International Affairs, Vol 74, No 3, 1998, p 512.
65. Deepa M. Ollapally, 'Mixed motives in India's search for nuclear status', Asian Survey, Vol 41, No 6, 2001, p 925.