Books
WAR AND PEACE IN MODERN INDIA: A Strategic History of the Nehru Years
by Srinath Raghavan. Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2010.THIS is a landmark book both for historians and for international relations scholars in India concerned with issues of war and peace. Srinath Raghavan, a former Indian Army officer, has turned his doctoral dissertation, written under the guidance of Lawrence Freedman at King’s College, London, into arguably the best book on India’s conflicts and wars with Pakistan and China. In doing so he has filled a vital gap in the emerging literature on contemporary history that is being pioneered by Ramachandra Guha and Sunil Khilnani and has shown international relations scholars in India what can be done in terms of rigorous empirical and analytical writing. Raghavan has set a benchmark, particularly for the latter. India’s IR community has found a leader – and a young one at that!
In 320 pages, a very succinct, accessible size for today’s busy world, Raghavan packs in a huge amount of material. The book examines all of the crises with Pakistan and China from 1947 to 1964, the entire Nehruvian period, except for the Goa crisis and India’s troop deployment on behalf of the UN in the Congo. A particularly attractive feature of the book is Raghavan’s disinterring of the crises that few care to remember – Junagadh and Hyderabad in 1947-48 at the founding moment of the Republic, the Bengal crisis of 1950 leading up to the Nehru-Liaquat Pact on the treatment of minorities in India and Pakistan, and Kashmir in the early 1950s. Raghavan makes the crucial point that these and the wars with Pakistan and China represent a continuity and that they were not discrete, separable events – Nehru and his advisors ‘learned’ from each episode and tried to apply the lessons they learned as they went along.
The central point of the book is to situate Nehru’s policies and approaches between two opposite and antagonistic points of view. The first is that Nehru was a fuzzy liberal internationalist who paid insufficient attention to India’s national interests and led the country into a series of mishaps with Pakistan and China which continue to adversely affect the nation sixty years later. The second is that the first prime minister was an all-too-familiar realist obsessed with India’s interests and power and that his hard stance on relations with India’s biggest neighbours served the nation’s and international interests badly. Raghavan shows, to my mind brilliantly and convincingly, through his meticulously researched and written narrative, that Nehru was something in between: a ‘liberal realist’. While the term ‘liberal realism’ may not be the happiest one in terms of international relations theorizing and political theory (and it should be said that the chapter on Indian strategic ideas and structures in this period is the weakest part of the book), it does rather accurately evoke Nehru’s preferences. Raghavan shows that the prime minister was a realist in his focus on India’s national interest and on the imperatives of power and force in a world where nationalism was more important than ideology; and he was a liberal in his conviction that force must be used as a last resort, that its application must be limited, that more often than not force begets force and leads to disastrous escalation, and that in any case the use of force must be governed by norms and legitimacy. These liberal concerns, as Raghavan notes, are signposts of considerable importance today as we survey the wreckage of Iraq and Afghanistan.
In depicting Nehru in this way, Raghavan is not necessarily endorsing Nehruvian policies (though one senses that the author is broadly sympathetic to the Nehruvian ‘project’). There is enough evidence and argumentation, particularly in respect of China, for the reader to sense that the first prime minister has things to answer for. Raghavan tells the reader that his objective is to describe and interpret and let the chips fall where they may rather than render judgment in a very ostensive sense. On the whole, he succeeds admirably. One might make the point that interpreting empirical materials in a particular sequence and narrative is almost to render judgment – it is to lead us horses to water! But this rather formal methodological point should not detain the reader too long, for obviously no history is without some standpoint. The great strength methodologically here is Raghavan’s insistence on reconstructing events as they must have unfolded themselves to Nehru and his advisors and to present the strategic choices as they appeared to the leadership. This is achieved by using the readily available public record as well as archival materials in Britain, India, and the United States that are revealing of the mind of Nehru and his cohort. Many of the archival sources have not been mined before, and it is one of the signal contributions of Raghavan’s study that he has assiduously tracked them down and deployed them. I have no doubt that this is reflective of the historian in him and in particular one can see here the hand of Lawrence Freedman and the influence of traditional British academic training – for all of which, hurrah!
It is worth saying in closing that this is not just an ambitious book; it is also a brave one. Raghavan at various places takes on academic authorities on Pakistan and China policy. Bêtes noires to Indians such as Alastair Lamb and Neville Maxwell are not dismissed out of hand – Raghavan’s judgments of their interpretations are measured. As noted earlier, the book is not hagiographical about Nehru. Among the things we learn is that Nehru was far more conditioned by and respectful of public opinion – even if this was not always the best course – than is generally acknowledged. In addition, while he was primus inter pares, he neither sought to nor could override opposition in the cabinet or in parliament. Sheikh Abdullah does not come off particularly well in terms of his changing, mercurial stance on Kashmir’s status. Nor does the Indian military. For a former officer of the Indian Army to show that its record is open to criticism, in respect of the quality of military advice, strategic assessments, as well as performance in the field of battle, requires some courage. Raghavan does not mince words, particularly in the case of 1962, and to my mind shows that, contrary to the current orthodoxy, the disaster was perhaps more the fault of the military than Krishna Menon and Nehru.
Srinath Raghavan has set the standard for future work. In addition to being a meticulous work of contemporary history, and dare I say, strategic studies, it is beautifully written (for which no doubt some credit must go to Lawrence Freedman and to Rukun Advani at Permanent Black). Anyone who thinks that Indian Army officers cannot put pen to paper will have to reconsider after reading this impressive book. A landmark book will be a landmark if it inspires. I have no doubt that it will inspire. A parallel book that might be attempted – and who better than Raghavan? – would be to reconstruct the various foreign policy crises in the Nehruvian period (the application of an evolving nonalignment to various developments – the Berlin blockade, the status of Japan, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Anglo-French misadventure in Suez, the Korean war, the Cuban missile crisis, nuclear proliferation, and so on). Then there are the events after Nehru including the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan and the crises of the 1980s and 1990s involving that country.
A star has been born in the field of Indian contemporary history and international relations! I, for one, eagerly await Srinath Raghavan’s next work (apparently on the 1971 war) and the publication of an exciting array of scholarship on India’s external relations.
Kanti Bajpai
INDIA’S NUCLEAR DEBATE: Exceptionalism and the Bomb by Priyanjali Malik. Routledge, New Delhi, 2010.
THE subject of ‘India’s nuclear weapons’ has carved a niche of its own in the literature of international relations. Yet after several decades of theoretical musings, polemical narratives or biographical sketches, the subject still remains a fertile field for serious research. Priyanjali Malik’s India’s Nuclear Debate introduces much needed sophistication into the existing body of work by addressing the question of just what it is that nuclear weapons symbolize.
The book looks at how nuclear policy, which has not traditionally featured in Indian public debates, has traversed a long way to become a part of public discourse in India. She convincingly argues that India’s nuclear arsenal defends an idea of ‘modern, independent and sovereign state occupying a position of global influence on the international stage.’ India’s Nuclear Debate seeks to provide a sharper explanation of ‘what nuclear weapons signify for attentive India and what this might mean for the future of New Delhi’s foreign and defence policies.’ With her lucid arguments, Priyanjali Malik elucidates why nuclear debates, now part of established political life in India, relegate the military aspect of India’s nuclear deterrent to the margins. This, she contends, is because it does not sit comfortably with India’s self-image – that of an independent sovereign state concerned about positively meeting future challenges than aggressively treading the dangerous path of nuclear superpowers.
In tracing the history of the debate over nuclear policy in the 1990s, Priyanjali Malik concentrates on discussions amongst elite Indians who were ‘attentive’ to the foreign and security policy of the country. While consciously distancing from the traditional research which looks at the influence of public opinion on foreign policy, India’s Nuclear Debate is more about how the attentive public shifted its opinion from nuclear disarmament, Indian exceptionalism and nuclear abstinence towards accepting a more muscular nuclear policy. Malik argues that the uniqueness of the Indian case lies in how the attentive elite Indians, despite diverse opinions, recognized infringement on the country’s sovereignty and coherently voiced the need for independence of action that in turn led to a culture of nuclear sovereignty being part of established political life in India. Such a punctuated debate was neither sudden nor flamboyant.
In the opening chapter, Malik describes how ‘attentive India acquiesced in the officially encouraged reticence over nuclear matters’, largely because of the Nehruvian legacy of Indian exceptionalism, his insistence on security through development and the inherent secrecy attached to foreign and defence policies of India. Despite voices over Chinese nuclear tests, Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, and Peaceful Nuclear Explosion of 1974, attentive India was settled into ‘somnolence’ – without raising any issues related to strategic components of nuclear response – because of an inability to shed the Nehruvian legacy accompanied with stark internal development problems.
In the next two chapters, Malik further explains how the nuclear debate struggled due to lack of coherent official nuclear weapons policy, and merely remained a simple dichotomous debate on whether or not India should test a nuclear device. She provocatively yet convincingly contends that ‘India might well have continued to coast with the obfuscations of the "option" had not developments beyond the country’s borders (e.g. 1995 NPT RevCon) forced a change in internal attitudes towards the nuclear question.’ In this context, external developments led India to decide for itself what its strategic interests should be – establishing the sovereignty attribute of the nuclear debate. Between 1990 and 1996, the turbulence of domestic Indian economy and a growing recognition of nuclear weapons in India’s neighbourhood underscored the need to prove that New Delhi would not be vulnerable to international pressures on nuclear matters.
The subsequent two important chapters deal with the central theme of the book: the idea of India symbolized in nuclear sovereignty. According to Malik, the nuclear debate took a qualitatively different route during the final negotiations of the CTBT – it moved from the security-development framework towards an identity-based framework. This shift not only forced attentive Indians to confront India’s nuclear posture but also consciously break from the Nehruvian idea of Indian exceptionalism. Building on the argument that India did not reject the CTBT for want of nuclear weapons but to forestall its coercion into international negotiations, Malik asserts that as government entered the CTBT debate expressing its displeasure, attentive Indians conscientiously linked nuclear policy to New Delhi’s freedom of action. Thus, while official India rejected the CTBT on substantive and procedural counts, Malik argues that for the first time a nuanced debate – confronting political, economic and strategic consequences of practising nuclear deterrence – emerged after Pokharan II. She convincingly shows that this impassioned debate moved from the realm of security into the arena of politics because the intelligentsia had not yet clarified its stand on the strategic implications of a ‘nuclear India’: ‘The politicisation of the debate with the CTBT negotiations had democratised nuclear policy… The CTBT had brought to light all the confusion and obfuscation muddying India’s nuclear and disarmament diplomacy.’ It is at this point that the political nature of nuclear weapons became a vision for nuclear India.
In this context, while assessing what nuclear India meant to the country’s attentive public, Priyanjali Malik’s work shows how the Kargil crisis was seen as a mere conventional engagement. For attentive Indian elites, nuclear weapons were more political than military instruments of power. This new Indian exceptionalism, she suggests, is neither Nehruvian nor a continuation of Gandhian legacy, but rather a fresh way to carve a global space for nuclear India.
India’s Nuclear Debate has not only prepared the ground for further research but also set the tone for more sophisticated research on India’s nuclear debates. Whilst its arguments are convincingly laid out, in an anarchic unpredictable world, a change in Indian attitude from political to the military aspects of nuclear weapons cannot be discounted. When future researchers attempt to explain this phenomenon, Priyanjali Malik’s book would definitely be the first pick.
Shanmugasundaram Sasikumar
DANGEROUS DETERRENT by S. Paul Kapur. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2009.
S. Paul Kapur’s crisp work evaluates the strategic implications of nuclear weapons on the subcontinent. It is not uniquely insightful in that other scholars too have drawn similar conclusions about the effects of nuclear proliferation on strategic stability in the subcontinent. Where Kapur’s work stands apart is that it is a systematic and in-depth assessment of how proliferation has led to increased military instability in South Asia. Conceptually, Kapur probes whether there is a disconnect between the way the stability/instability paradox is in operation in the subcontinent as opposed to the way it played out in Europe during the Cold War. The stability/instability paradox states that even as stability holds at the strategic level, it fosters violence at the sub-nuclear level but reduces the possibilities of a nuclear war. This is what prevailed during the Cold War, particularly in Europe, where American nuclear deployments for tactical and strategic use served as a deterrent against Soviet conventional aggression. In the subcontinent the situation is reversed whereby a high level of strategic instability has facilitated conventional violence in that the latter has increased the possibilities of nuclear conflict. The differential in conventional military power between India and Pakistan and the latter’s territorial claims introduce great volatility in a nuclear South Asia.
Kapur revisits the proliferation optimist and pessimist debate. The balance between these two schools of thought revolves around the stabilizing and destabilizing effects of proliferation. The optimist argues that while general stability holds, violence at the sub-nuclear level will persist but deterrence will hold at the nuclear level. The pessimists, however, argue that organizational pathologies, idiosyncratic state structures and cognitive dissonance can result in lower levels of violence escalating to the nuclear level. Pakistan, Kapur says, is more risk prone; India is risk averse. New Delhi is satisfied with the territorial status quo, while Pakistan is deeply dissatisfied with existing territorial demarcations. The 1971 war between India and Pakistan was a watershed event, because it played a pivotal role in impelling the Pakistanis to frenetically pursue the acquisition of a nuclear capability. Starting from the baseline year of 1972, Kapur argues that there is a high or positive correlation between India and Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear capabilities and military instability in the region.
To buttress his point he divides the shifting trends in India-Pakistan strategic relations across three phases – the non-nuclear phase when the frequency of militarized interstate disputes (MID) were the least, the de facto phase when the MIDs increased in frequency and the overt nuclear phase when MIDs were at their highest. Kapur is making a correlative and not a causal argument. In sum, capabilities have served as temptations for Pakistan giving Islamabad an additional incentive to press its revisionist territorial claims, insulating it from conventional Indian retaliation and also helping it secure third party intercession. The reverse is true of India; New Delhi’s progressive acquisition of a nuclear capability has not witnessed a commensurate propensity for risky behaviour. This only begs the question: why has India not behaved with China in the same way Pakistan has with India. This is completely absent from his analysis. Why has nuclear India not sought to undo the territorial losses to China following the 1962 war? Using the India-Pakistan strategic dyad as a test case, Kapur probes whether the Sino-Soviet military clash over the Ussuri river in the Russian Far East was the outcome of emboldening effects of nuclear weapons.
Yet the cases he cites suffer from a selection bias and are employed more to fit his hypothesis. Kapur quite conveniently forgets that Mao’s China with nuclear capabilities not only confronted the Soviet Union over the Ussuri river, but also confronted nuclear armed American forces at the Yalu when China did not wield a nuclear capability during the Korean war. Maoist China’s revolutionary fervour and Mao’s dismissal of nuclear weapons as ‘paper tigers’ had as much to do with Chinese aggressiveness. Kapur’s argument is least plausible when it comes to China and India and ignores what Raymond Aron once noted, ‘No one understands the …strategy of a state if he does not understand its regime, if he has not studied the philosophy of those who govern it.’ However, Kapur’s argument regarding the emboldening effects of nuclear weapons on weak revisionist states and how it insulates them from conventional retaliation is important and he is most convincing in his analysis on the destabilizing mix of nuclear weapons on the India-Pakistan strategic dyad. He is also reasonably persuasive, if not out rightly convincing about how Pakistan’s actions vis-à-vis India could serve as a potential model of replication for North Korea and Iran.
Nevertheless, in regards to his principal case, there are structural variables centred on communitarian identity that are even more attributable to Pakistani aggressiveness. Kapur is suggesting that in the absence of capabilities there would be less instability. Sure, but there is intuitively a stronger reverse correlation between Pakistan’s territorial claims centred on identity and progressive proliferation generating continued instability in South Asia. The Pakistani state’s ideological idiosyncrasies, dysfunctional civil-military relations and praetorian pathologies dispose it to countervail India through its nuclear capabilities. If anything the pathologies of the Pakistani state underlie progressive proliferation and instability in the subcontinent, confirming the verisimilitude of the proliferation pessimist perspective. That said, Kapur’s effort represents an important contribution to the extant literature about a rather understudied region.
Kartik Bommakanti
THE STATE, DEMOCRACY AND ANTI-TERROR LAWS IN INDIA by Ujjwal Kumar Singh. Sage Publications, Delhi, 2007.
AT a time when the country is convulsed with a bewildering range of protest activities, not just insurgent movements in J&K, different states in the North East, or what is termed as the armed Maoist challenge in the Central Indian tribal heartland, but also non-violent struggles against land acquisition, displacement due to ‘development projects’ and the like, influential sections in the public sphere are demanding the promulgation of tougher laws to deal with consequent ‘law and order’ problems. Evidently, many of them prefer to tar all mass protests with the same brush; being anti-development projects is equated with being anti-national. The fact that we have simultaneously witnessed a substantial escalation in ‘terrorist’ activities only adds grist to the mill. Developments post 9/11 in the global environment, which saw even durable democracies enact fresh national security legislation placing substantial curbs on, if not displacing, normal provisions of the criminal justice system, claiming that restriction of individual rights is needed in the larger public/national interest, has further served to erode the liberal regime of rights. To stretch a point, we now seem to be living in an Orwellian world of 1984.
To the common citizen, making sense of the plethora of legislations with acronyms like POTA – Prevention of Terrorism Act; UAPA – Unlawful Activities Prevention (Amendment) Act; the now lapsed MISA – Maintenance of Indian Security Act or TADA – Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act; or the regionally applicable AFSPA – Armed Forces Special Powers Act, MCOCA – Maharashtra Control of Organized Crimes Act, or the still to be approved GUJCOC – Gujarat Control of Organized Crime Bill – just to list a few, is not easy. Nor do those who are not lawyers, human rights activists, or defendants easily appreciate the ramifications of proposed changes in bail provisions, preventive detention, rules and procedures governing permissible evidence, the admissibility of confessional statements, and so on. What, however, is surprising is that despite the low degree of public trust and confidence in the competence and integrity of the police and criminal justice system, the demand for tougher and speedier laws against presumed offenders has only grown stronger.
Do extraordinary laws designed for extraordinary circumstances help? And if so, in what ways? This remarkable book by Ujjwal Singh should be essential reading for anyone interested in making sense of the complex debate. Detailed and meticulously argued, Ujjwal lays out a case that each of these laws, from the colonial prevention detention acts to the UAPA, have strongly negative implications for people’s lives, political institutions and democratic functioning. Equally, his analysis shows, contrary to claims made by those demanding tougher laws, that the rate of conviction of those actually brought to trial under laws like TADA or POTA does not improve. Instead, what we have experienced in practice is that a large number of people are detained on mere suspicion, many of whom never face trial. Even more disturbing are the accounts and details of who is detained. It should be a matter of concern that a disproportionate share of the detainees are drawn from religious minorities, the poor, and opposition activists – a reflection of dominant configurations of political power and ideology. It is a matter of record that the largest number of detainees are in Gujarat – Muslim citizens picked up after the Godhara incidents. Finally, his discussion of how key provisions of extraordinary laws creep into ‘normal’ criminal law and acquire a place of permanence in state practices, should make all of us interested in institutionalizing a rule of law regime pause.
Readers should, in particular, carefully scrutinize Singh’s discussion of the Parliament attack case and how both the investigation agencies and the special POTA court colluded in awarding a death sentence to S.A.R. Geelani. Fortunately, both the High Court and subsequently the Supreme Court set aside this judgement and exonerated Geelani. Nevertheless, we came close to behaving like a banana republic. Similarly, the discussion on the AFSPA, in particular why it has become so difficult to scrap/modify the law despite repeated recommendations to do so, all because the armed forces demand complete immunity, should force all those who are now recommending an involvement of the armed forces in anti-Maoist operations to reconsider their position.
It is not possible in a brief review to discuss the many details presented in the book – about the framing of laws, the ways in which they are used, the different and contradictory positions of each of our political parties who oppose laws and measures when in opposition and then introduce the same when in power. Equally gripping and disturbing is the discussion of the judicial process, both the courts and even the Law Commission and how, in the main, our judiciary is not only becoming increasingly complicit in an escalating restriction of individual rights and freedoms, but in also placing a judicial imprimatur on social prejudices, particularly when it comes to banning organizations associated with religious and ethnic minorities.
Despite broad agreement with Ujjwal Singh about much of what he presents, some questions remain, and these have more to do with what he does not discuss than what he does. Take the issue of terrorism and the functioning of terror groups. If we accept that terror today is an organized, global activity, with immense ability to cause major damage, then surely we need to imagine new institutional responses to deal with the situation. Some of this may well imply granting additional discretion to executive power. What we need to debate are the new norms of accountability which do not hamper preventive action. For instance, while continuing to insist on a ‘no-tolerance’ regime on the use of coercive means to extract information, we may need to re-imagine the gathering of intelligence, sometimes in ways that violate privacy and without having to wait for prior judicial permission. Simultaneously, while appreciating the need of secrecy for certain operations, why is it difficult to institutionalize systems of post-hoc review involving members of the opposition.
Unfortunately, given both the polarized nature of the discussions on these issues, as also our experience about the misuse of power and privileges vested in the executive, democratic opinion in the country has so far refused to engage in a meaningful and constructive discourse. Little do we realize that in firmly holding onto a contrarian position, we are only pushing the middle ground towards demanding a further constriction of our already eroded democratic space. In insisting on painting the state in demonic terms, we may well be contributing to our worst fears coming true. Possibly, if Ujjwal Singh had also talked to those charged with safeguarding security and maintaining law and order, he may have helped steer the discussion towards measures that we might usefully explore without undermining our fragile democracy.
Harsh Sethi
