India’s Strategic Culture

The Making of National Security Policy

Shrikant Paranjpe

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000052473
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a comprehensive understanding of the evolution of India's strategic culture in the era of globalization. It examines dominant themes that have governed India's foreign and security policy and events which have shaped India's role in global politics.

The author

• Examines the traditional and new approaches to diplomacy and the state's response to internal and external conflicts;
• Delineates policy pillars which are required to protect the state's strategic interests and forge new relationships in the current geopolitical climate;
• Compares the domestic and international security policies followed during the tenures of Narsimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh; and
• Analyzes how the Narendra Modi era has brought on changes in India's security strategy and the use of soft power and diplomacy.

With extensive additions, drawing on recent developments, this edition of the book will be a key text for scholars, teachers and students of defence and strategic studies, international relations, history, political science and South Asian studies.

1
STRATEGIC CULTURE

The concept of strategic culture draws directly from the concept of political culture, for it is the political culture of a country that would determine the approaches to peace and security that the nation seeks to present. It was, perhaps the French Revolution that laid the foundation of the modern concept of political culture. The shift of focus from the Sovereign to the People – from Louis XIV’s claim of absolute authority in the declaration, ‘I am the State’, to the devolution of power as is indicated by the People’s declaration, ‘We are the People’ – in the aftermath of the revolution, indicated that the locus of legitimacy lay in the people. Later works reflect this change. – Max Weber sought legitimacy for political power in the state from the people and not the elite, and Rousseau introduced the concept of the General Will of the Collectivity.

During the Cold War era the work on the concept of political culture gained momentum. The works of Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Gabriel Almond, Sidney Verba and Talcot Parsons are noteworthy in this context. Anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were proponents of ‘culture personality’. They argued that members of different societies develop different personalities which in turn explain the development of different political programmes and institutions. Parsons defined ‘Culture’ as a social order constituted by institutions that included individuals with coherent sets of norms, values and attitudes.¹ Almond and Verba looked at political culture as a subset of beliefs and values of a society that relate to its political system.² Political culture, according to them, included views about morality and utility of force, rights of individuals or groups, commitment to values like democratic principles and to democratic institutions and attitudes towards the role a country can play in the global politics. The linkage of political culture with strategic culture had been acknowledged in ancient writings of Thucydides on the Peloponnesian war, Sun Tzu and Kautilya. They all had linked strategy to the understanding of the society and culture. In modern times this linkage came to be acknowledged at a time when the concept of strategic culture came to be recognized as an important factor in understanding of the question: ‘why do nations behave as they do?’.

It is mainly in the seventies and in the context of attempts to understand the Soviet approaches to Cold War that attention began to be paid to the concept of strategic culture in the search for answers to the question of ‘why nations behave as they do’. Jack Snyder, in his RAND Report on the Soviet Strategic Culture, defined the concept as ‘a sum total of ideas, conditioned emotional responses, and patterns of habitual behaviour that members of a national strategic community have acquired through instruction or imitation’.³ Ken Booth defines strategic culture as one that ‘refers to a nation’s traditions, values, attitudes, patterns of behaviour, habits, symbols, achievements and particular ways of adapting to the environment and solving problems with respect to the threat or use of force’. He focusses on a nation’s behaviour on issues of war and peace and locates its roots in its history, geography, and political culture. He also highlights the aggregate of attitudes and patterns of behaviour of the political and military elites.⁴ Johnston defines the contours of strategic culture through the lens of political culture. He looks at strategic culture as an integrated

system of symbols (for example, argumentation structures, languages, analogies, metaphors) which acts to establish pervasive and long standing strategic preferences by formulation of concepts of the role and efficacy of military force in interstate political affairs, and by clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the strategic preferences seem uniquely realistic and efficacious.⁵

Traditional strategic theory was dominated by realism or neo-realism. It posited the anarchic nature of international relations, was state-centric and also assumed rationality in decision making. It argued that international politics was based on calculation and objectivity and was a positive science. Joseph Nye and Sean Lynn-Jones argued that strategic studies were characterized by American ethnocentrism and neglected national styles of strategy.⁶ Johnston states that the proponents of the cultural factor argue that different states have different strategic preferences that are rooted in their philosophical, political, cultural and cognitive characteristics. They regard ahistorical and objective variables as secondary. The position taken by them was not a total rejection of the notion of rationality but an assertion that the cultural factor remains significant in the strategic approach of nations.

One can then identify the following sources of strategic culture:⁷

1. historical and civilizational perspectives of a country;
2. geography and natural resources of a country;
3. political structure of the country along with its political institutions;
4. myths and symbols that have gone into nation-building and developing the identity of the country;
5. impact of technological changes;
6. transnational norms and conventions.

Alastair Johnston has classified the literature on strategic culture in terms of three generational categories of scholars:⁸

1. the first generation that came onto the area of strategic studies in the early 1980s and focussed on explaining American and Soviet strategies of the Cold War from a cultural standpoint;
2. the second generation that came in the mid-1980s that looked at strategic culture as a tool of political hegemony in the realm of strategic decision making;
3. the third generation of the 1990s that looks at organizational culture as an intervening variable.

Jack Snyder, David Jones, Colin Gray and Ken Booth represent the first-generation theorists. Snyder had argued that Soviet strategic thought and behaviour originated from a distinct Soviet strategic culture.⁹ Booth, in Strategy and Ethnocentrism, argued that strategic thinkers need to see the world through the eyes of different national and ethnic groups. He argued in favour of ‘cultural relativism’ to avoid the problems associated with ethnocentrism.¹⁰ Gray, while discussing the differences between American and Soviet perspectives on nuclear issues, talked of dominant national beliefs held by the US with respect to strategic choices.¹¹ Jones identified three levels of inputs into a state’s strategic culture: a macro-environmental level that included geography, ethno-cultural characteristics and history; a societal level that included social, economic and political structures; and a micro-level consisting of military institutions and aspects of civil–military relations. This strategic culture pervaded all levels of choices from grand strategy to tactics.¹²

Is there a difference between what the political leaders say and the motives behind how they act? Is the use of strategic culture a means of ensuring political hegemony? – these are the questions that the second generation of scholars sought to address. Bradley Klein, for example, admits that in the case of American nuclear policy, the operational strategy stressed on warfighting in defence of American hegemonic interests.¹³

Both the approaches by the first- and second-generation scholars have some drawbacks. Strategic culture as a concept is too broad and encompassing to be a good tool for analysis. In fact, one cannot not argue in favour of homogeneity of strategic culture in any society. Further, each nation-state evolves its own myths as part of its nation-building activity which may sometimes influence its external behaviour. It would be difficult to distinguish between myths and realities in terms of delineating the sources of decision making by the elite.

The third generation of scholars led by Johnston have sought to rectify some of these drawbacks. These scholars tend to be more rigorous and eclectic in their conceptualization of ideational independent variables. Some use military culture, some use politico-military culture and others use organizational cultures as independent variables, but all use the realist frame of reference.¹⁴ Strategic culture then consists of two main parts: one relates to the worldview of a nation, the other, the operational aspect of dealing with the world at large in terms of national self-interest. The first would consist of a series of assumptions about the strategic environment (for example, state of anarchy in international relations or a society of nations), while the second would deal with the question as to how strategic culture in all its manifestations would impact the eventual policy formulation.

Strategic culture: India

In order to understand Indian strategic culture it would be necessary to go into the sources that have contributed to the evolution of India’s strategic culture. This study argues that Indian strategic thinking is a product of its historical, cultural, geopolitical, socio-economic compulsions and considerations. It is a perspective that has grown from a mindset that can best be described as ‘civilizational’. It traces its roots in the understanding and the interpretation of India as a civilization-state that has a continuous history going back three to five thousand years. This perspective predates the modern Westphalian nation-state system. Until the advent of British colonial rule the Indian state system was not a unified state system. Political power was decentralized, i.e., divided amongst satraps who owed allegiance to the monarch at the centre but were relatively autonomous within their territory. It was only during the British rule that the concept of a unified state took roots in India, bringing in its wake the associated strategic doctrines.

South Asian society is a product of a series of historic events that have left their impression on the modern era.¹⁵ The first relates to the decline of the Indus civilizations by the mid–second millennium BCE, the economic and administrative systems slowly disintegrating and the entry of the Indo–Aryan speakers in this region. These Indo–Aryan speakers migrated from Indo–Iranian borderlands and modern day Afghanistan into northern India where they introduced their language. The impetus for migration was a search for better pastures, for arable land and trade. The Aryans brought with them a religion that later became foundational to today’s Hinduism and a new social order based on a hierarchal stratification of society. The Vedas mention four varnas: Brahmans, Kshatriya, vaishya and the shudra; the first three were those having an occupational function while the fourth, the shudra, meant those who laboured for others.¹⁶ Today, about 80 percent of Indians are Hindus, but they remain divided along caste lines. The second event was the rise of three major protestant religions. The sixth century bc witnessed the rise of Buddhism and Jainism as a protest against the then Brahmanical orthodoxy and sacrificial ritualism. In the fifteenth century, Sikhism grew as an alternate worldview that rejected idolatry, the caste system, ritualism, and asceticism. Jainism got entrapped into casteism of the Hindu social order. Buddhism too split into the Hinayana and the Mahayana traditions, with the latter coming closer to the Hindu way of life by practising rituals and idol worship. Today the Sikhs constitute only about 2 percent¹⁷ of the Indian population and are concentrated mainly in the region of Punjab. The Sikh agitation of the 1980s on the demand for a separate state of Khalistan revolved around the separatist politics of religio–linguistic identity

The third event was the immigration of the ‘world religions’ to India. St. Thomas, one of the apostles of Jesus Christ, came to Kerala in the first century AD. Muslim traders landed along the Malabar Coast in the seventh century, and then came the Jews, Zoroastrians and the Bahais. While the Christian and Muslim influence predates colonialism ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• List of tables
• List of maps
• List of abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Strategic culture
• 2 India since independence
• 3 India: the application (1947–1991)
• 4 India: the application (post-1991)
• 5 Internal security and role of the state
• 6 Beyond strategic autonomy: the Modi era
• 7 India: strategic culture and national security policy
• Bibliography
• Index