Securing India: Strategic Thought and Practice

Indian strategic thought shapes how the nation interprets threats, guides policy, and foresees its future global role.

This volume brings together George K. Tanham's much-quoted RAND essay, Indian Strategic Thought', his sequel essay, Indian Strategy in Flux?' and specially commissioned commentaries by five Indian scholars. Most of our understanding about strategy is coloured by information from the West and the former Soviet Union. While this may have been acceptable during the Cold War, it is no longer so. In the coming three decades a range of powers, including India, will come to matter greatly. Hence the need to give a critical look to Indian strategy, a much-neglected subject, as also to undertake a comparative study of strategy. Indian Strategic Thought' argues that various influences have combined to make India more concerned with internal than external security; to prefer defence to offence; to be a land rather than a sea power; to seek outright independence and great power status over any form of dependence and middle power status; to rely principally on hard' (military) not soft' (economic, cultural) power as well as to produce a strategic culture of ad hocism. Tanham's new essay, Indian Strategy in Flux?' charts Indian policies since 1991. A variety of domestic and external developments, Tanham suggests, combined to shock the system in that year into at least two major strategic changes; dramatic economic reforms and a wide-ranging partnership with the United States and the market economies of East and South-East Asia. Indians continue, nonetheless, to be relatively neglectful of security issues and to have no institutionalised method of appraising threats and fashioning strategic responses. The five commentaries on Tanham's essays deal, amongst other things, with the influences on Indian strategic thought, threats and opportunities in Indian security assessments, the absence of a tradition of Indian strategic thought and naval and nuclear strategy. There is both agreement and disagreement between the essayists, which augurs well for Indian strategic thought and practice. If India moves ahead economically in the decades to come, it will be a major global force. These writings and comments will play a part in determining how Indians come to think about their country and its engagement with the world.