Rising China in India's vicinity: a rivalry takes shape in Asia

New Delhi has been grappling with the challenge of China's rapid rise for some time now. Even as they sign loftily worded documents year after year, the distrust between China and India is actually growing at an alarming rate. True, economic cooperation and bilateral political as well as socio-cultural exchanges are at an all time high; China is India's largest trading partner. Yet this cooperation has done little to assuage each country's concerns about the other's intentions. The two sides are locked in a classic security dilemma, where any action taken by one is immediately interpreted by the other as a threat to its interests. This article examines the trajectory of contemporary Sino-Indian relations from India's perspective and argues that a troubled history coupled with the structural uncertainties engendered by their simultaneous rise is propelling the two Asian giants into a trajectory that they might find rather difficult to navigate in the coming years. This is an empirical analysis of India's changing approach towards China in the context of China's recent rise, not a theoretical exposition of the issue.     

Portugal and European Political Cooperation

India's approach to climate change has shifted dramatically in the span of a few years. Not only has India developed a comprehensive climate change program domestically, it has adopted a new stance in the international negotiations that has earned it the reputation of being a ‘deal maker’. This dramatic, and to many unexpected, shift in India's climate change strategy can be understood if seen in the context of India's economic and development aspirations and the changes occurring in the larger geopolitical landscape. Climate change, due to its multi-faceted nature, cuts across a spectrum of issues and India can benefit both domestically and internationally by addressing it.     

Indian counterterrorism policy and the influence of the Global War on Terror

India has been a major victim of Islamist terrorism and has long fought against an array of Islamist terrorist groups. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, India's previously lonely struggle against terrorism has taken place against the background of the US-led Global War on Terror (GWOT). After outlining India's Islamist terrorist challenge, this article examines India's evolving approach to counterterrorism and how the GWOT has influenced it. It concludes that India has adopted a localized, defensive, law-and-order approach to counterterrorism which has evolved in response to various attacks over the years but still remains seriously underdeveloped. The GWOT has influenced Indian counterterrorism in important ways, although its influence has been subtle and indirect rather than transformative. The GWOT has enhanced Indo-American counterterror cooperation, shaped India's terror environment by launching the war in Afghanistan and enriched Indian counterterrorism with American experience. Just as important, it has also had an impact on India's debate on counterterrorism, civil liberties and human rights.     

“India's Rasputin”?: V. K. Krishna Menon and Anglo–American Misperceptions of Indian Foreign Policymaking, 1947–1964

From 1947 until his political demise in late 1962, Vengalil Krishanan Krishna Menon stood at the forefront of India's international relations. One of Indian Premier Jawaharlal Nehru's closest political confidantes, Menon served variously as India's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, leader of its delegation to the United Nations, self-styled mediator in the Korea, Indo–China, and Suez crises of the 1950s and, from 1957, his country's Defence Minister. Vilified in the West as “India's Rasputin,” Menon's left-wing credentials, anti-colonial rhetoric, and willingness to engage with the Communist bloc were seen by Anglo–American diplomats as a threat to Western interests in South Asia. Drawing upon recently released British and American archival records, this article argues that Western misperceptions of Menon, and his role in the Indian foreign policy-making process, undermined Anglo–American relations with India for much of the early Cold War.     

The US–India nuclear deal: the beginning of a beautiful relationship?

The United States (US)–India nuclear pact has virtually rewritten the rules of the global nuclear regime by underlining India's credentials as a responsible nuclear state that should be integrated into the global nuclear order. The nuclear agreement creates a major exception to the US prohibition of nuclear assistance to any country that does not accept international monitoring of all its nuclear facilities. Given its far-reaching implications, the Indo-US nuclear agreement has sparked off a heated debate in India, the US and the larger international community. This article examines the debate surrounding the nuclear pact. It argues that the nuclear agreement is about much more than mere nuclear technicalities: it is about the emergence of a new configuration in the global balance of power and a broader need for a new international nuclear order in the face of a global nuclear non-proliferation regime that seems to have become ineffective in meeting the challenges confronting the international community today.     

India's Role in the South China Sea: Geopolitics and Geoeconomics in Play

This article looks at the South China Sea, an area of dispute between China and other littoral states, as a new area of geopolitical and geoeconomic interest for India. The article follows the strategic discourse on the South China Sea circulating in the Indian government and wider strategic community, and brings in Chinese responses and interpretations of India's involvement. India's role in the South China Sea is four-fold: first, naval deployments; second, increasing strategic-military links with littoral states like Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam; third, economic involvement of Indian energy companies in South China Sea waters; and fourth, discussions between India and other regional and extra-regional China-concerned powers about the South China Sea. India's involvement in the South China Sea represents a new development in its Look East Policy, a new balancing factor in the interplay of actors within these waters, and a new friction factor within India-China relations.     

Coercion and Control: Explaining India's Victory at Kargil

This article argues that most analyses of the Kargil conflict concede the important role played by the United States in understanding how India regained control of the Kargil heights, but fail to explain how India's intra-war compellent threat forced Washington to bring irresistible pressure to bear on Islamabad. The Indian decision to threaten asymmetrical escalation was the result of domestic pressures and military difficulties facing the Vajpayee-led caretaker government. The article shows that Washington pursued an “impartially” interventionist strategy until it came under Indian pressure to forsake its “balanced” approach towards ending the conflict. The article also shows how the “asymmetry of motivation” between New Delhi and Washington was an important factor in terminating hostilities in India's favor.     

Social cleavages and electoral competition in India

Given the great diversity in language, ethnicity, and caste in India, and the resulting millions of possible winning electoral combinations, why is it that in contemporary India we see large state-wide and inter-state political coalitions built around categories such as “Bahujan” or “Backward Caste” instead of thousands of separate caste parties competing at the regional or zila (district) level? This question is the focus of Christophe Jaffrelot's India's Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in India, Pradeep Chhibber's Democracy without Associations: Transformation of the Party System and Social Cleavages in India, and Anirudh Krishna's Active Social Capital: Tracing the roots of development and democracy. This review assesses how these works address the question of political organization and social cleavages in India, examining the differences in approaches and discussing what still needs to be addressed.     

How to Tame Your Dragon: An Evaluation of India's Foreign Policy Toward China

In the past 60 years, India-China relations have oscillated between friendship, hostility and indifference. In recent times, both countries have started competing for global economic gains and political status. In light of these events, the objective of this article is to analyze various strategies used by China against India, and India's policy response to these strategies. The article evaluates the process of foreign policy decision making in India, and traces the historical evolution of India's foreign policy towards China. It then deconstructs China's foreign policy towards India, and provides the rationale behind its strategies. The article suggests that after initial engagement with India on the question of boundary disputes, Chinese foreign policy has undergone a dramatic shift since 2007. It specifically evaluates the twin Chinese tactics of military incursions and denial of legitimacy to the Indian territories of Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh. Based on an analysis of China's previous boundary disputes resolution record with neighbors, these tactics are identified as an extension of China's new strategy for resolving such disputes. The article concludes by suggesting various policy options available to India to counter China's new strategy on the Sino-Indian border.     

The security dilemma in Sino‐Indian relations

With the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the collapse of the old economic order in India a dozen years ago, the outmoded methods New Delhi had employed for four decades to engage the world were no longer tenable. C. Raja Mohan, one of India's leading strategic thinkers, has traced the remarkable transformation in New Delhi's foreign policy during the 1990s in Crossing the Rubicon, a thoughtful new study of the ideas shaping Indian diplomacy. Mohan highlights five changes in the conceptual underpinnings guiding Indian foreign policy since the early 1990s: a shift from domestically focused socialism to a globalized free market economy; a de-emphasis on politics in favor of economics; an abandonment of New Delhi's earlier infatuation with “Third Worldism” and non-alignment; a rejection of anti-Westernism; and a loss of idealism. These new forces have left India, Mohan contends, with a foreign policy infinitely more suitable for meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century. New Delhi is now poised, he adds, to break out of the South Asian box in which it has been confined, and assume its rightful place among the world's leading powers.     

Britain and Kashmir, 1948: “The Arena of the UN”

The Jammu and Kashmir dispute of 1947–1949 between India and Pakistan became the first inter-state conflict to be discussed at the United Nations Security Council. This analysis looks at the views of the government and the delegation of Great Britain, one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, on Kashmir through the year of 1948. It argues that the British attitude was determined more by Imperial and Commonwealth strategic and ideological imperatives in South and Central Asia and the Middle East and less by the merits of the cases of the disputants. Operating within the twin backdrop of decolonisation and the Cold War, the British official mind juggled Kashmir's accession to India, India's complaint of aggression against Pakistan, and Pakistan's demand for a plebiscite in Kashmir with an eye to their own hopes and fears in a region that it understood as the key vantage on Communism and Islam.     

Indian Strategic Thinking About the Indian Ocean: Striving Towards Strategic Leadership

It is sometimes claimed that India has ambitions to become the leading power in the Indian Ocean. This article examines the different streams of Indian strategic thinking about the Indian Ocean and how they will likely contribute to future Indian strategic behavior. It argues that although many among its elite aspire for India to eventually become the leading power in the Indian Ocean, there is little conceptualization as to what India needs to do to achieve this. For several reasons, including an attachment to ideas of non-alignment and strategic autonomy, Indian strategic behavior in the Indian Ocean will likely continue to be relatively reactive and constrained.     

India's development partnership: key policy shifts and institutional evolution

This article examines the emerging trends in India's role as a provider of development assistance to the other developing countries of the global South. Though India has diversified the regional focus and has multiplied the quantum of development assistance, there remain several challenges at various levels. The expectations from the development partners have gone up but is India prepared with the institutional frameworks that would be required to administer the desired scale of response? Is there enough preparedness to undertake impact assessment? This article attempts to address some of these issues.     

India as a democracy promoter? New Delhi's involvement in Nepal's return to democracy

According to the theory of ‘democratic peace’, India, as the largest democracy in the world and as South Asia's predominant regional power, should be expected to promote democracy in neighbouring countries. However, New Delhi lacks any kind of official democracy-promotion policy, and its past record on democracy promotion efforts in the region is mixed at best. Against this background, the article analyses the substantial role India has come to play in the peace and democratization process in Nepal in the years 2005–2008, asking whether this constitutes a departure from New Delhi's traditional policy of non-interference in its neighbours' internal affairs and a move towards a more assertive approach to democracy promotion. However, the analysis shows that India's involvement in Nepal was the product of short-term stability concerns rather than being an indicator of a long-term change in strategy with the intention of becoming an active player in international democracy promotion.     

India's “potential” endgame in Kashmir

This article presents an Indian view of the endgame in Kashmir. It seeks to answer two essential, if prosaic, questions: Does India have a plan for the final settlement of Jammu and Kashmir? If so, what are its essential elements? While there may not be a publicly discernable Indian game-plan, there is the possibility of durable peace in Kashmir. Events subsequent to the Kargil war of 1999, the terror attacks against America on September 11, 2001, and a shift in international public opinion regarding Kashmir all provide an opportunity for India settle the Kashmir question. These factors are, however, rooted in deeper changes within the Indian polity, including the growing consensus on economic and political decentralization and an ambition to increase India's international influence, which may increase India's willingness to commit itself to a potentially more long-term and imaginative course for its Kashmir policy.     

China on the Horizon: India's ‘Look East’ Policy Gathers Momentum

While the world has been focusing on China's growing assertiveness in the South China Sea, Beijing and Delhi are also engaged in a quiet struggle in the contested waters. By putting up for international bidding the same oil block that India had obtained from Vietnam for exploration, China has thrown down a gauntlet.¹ By deciding to stay put in the assigned block, India has indicated it's ready to take up the Chinese challenge. At stake is Chinese opposition to India's claim to be a regional power in the larger Asian strategic setting. India is trying to emerge as a credible regional balancer but it has a long way to go.     

Film and Media Scholarship on Contemporary India: The Assemblage,the Narrative,and “Bollywood”

Reading the work of film scholars Anustup Basu, Amit Rai and Ravi Vasudevan together, this essay discusses contemporary film and media scholarship in India. It highlights the central differences between these works as pivoting on their research methodologies as well as the way each conceptualizes significant terms, namely, identity, ideology, hegemony, and assemblage. The essay shows that this scholarship proceeds along two routes: one eschews the primacy of the narrative and the concept of identity, focusing instead on the “assembling impulse” of the Hindi film, and the second is attentive to the axes that give form and consistency to the loose assemblages that define the Hindi film in India. As such, film scholarship also makes an argument about the shape of the social formation in contemporary India. While one mode assumes the newness of the contemporary period and argues for a looseness to its political assemblages, the other is invested in delineating what is new about the period and in tracing the hegemonic thrust that gives it shape.     

Intimate yet dysfunctional? The relationship between governance and conflict resolution in India and the European Union

The rise of India and the EU as global actors has sparked growing interest in their peace-building approaches. This paper compares the objectives and effects of the EU's and India's engagement in different conflict contexts within and alongside their borders. It examines whether their practices of conflict resolution or peace-building strive for more than conflict management or ‘governmentality’. This article asks whether there is sufficient consistency across either actors' governance interventions to even speak of a distinct ‘strategy’ or ‘governance culture’. It illustrates the close relationship between governance and conflict response initiatives but finds that the relationship is often dysfunctional.     

Italy Facing International Migration: Recent policy developments

There is no doubt that the Indian economy is one of the fastest growing in the world. However, such growth has been socially unbalanced, benefitting only a minority of the population. This, in turn, has brought about huge and increasingly dangerous social and political problems, such as an epidemic of suicides among farmers and the resurgence of the Maoist ‘people's war’. Nevertheless, while Indian growth is limited to a minority of the population, it is real and important. Only the future can tell if, true to some projections, India will become the third or first world economy by 2050. What is certain however is that, because of the rapid economic development of the past three decades, India has already become a key world player.     

Learning to Think the Unthinkable: Lessons from India’s Nuclear Tests

This article examines the impact that national economic policies adopted during Indira Gandhi's final term in office (1980–84) had on four “national” social groups, namely the big industrialists, the middle class, the rich peasantry, and the poor. The study argues that the Congress (I) chose the former two as its major allies, while the rich peasantry and the poor were relegated to a secondary position. In the process, the focus of India's strategy of development shifted from the agrarian to the industrial sector, and from the rural to the urban world.