Facets of India's Security

Essays for C. Uday Bhaskar

P.R. Kumaraswamy

• Editorial: Routledge India
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000429671
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Política

This volume brings together established and emerging scholars from academia and think tanks to reflect on important, conceptual, strategic and developmental issues in India's national security. It provides a comprehensive understanding of national security through a more open approach, covering both traditional and non-traditional concerns that have a bearing on the survival and well-being of humanity. It discusses key themes such as perceptions about China, civil-military relations, gender and military, nuclear safety, arms trade and cybersecurity, human security, food and water security, soft power and the media's role in covering security issues. As a festschrift for Commodore C. Uday Bhaskar, it highlights and adds to his scholarly contributions to the national security debate in the country for the past three decades.

A unique contribution, this volume will be indispensable for students and researchers of politics and international relations, national security, human security, geopolitics, non-traditional security, military and strategic studies, and South Asian studies.

Developmental Issues

11 Human security discourse in India

Contest, convergence and practice

Jayati Srivastava

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200291-11

Introduction

The discourse on national security in world politics has acquired increasing gravitas with the introduction of the concept of human security in the 1990s.¹ The departure from orthodox national security discourse that was defined primarily in statist and military terms shifted the focus from the states to individuals and to a multidimensional approach to include people’s security, economic security, human development, food security, employment security and environmental security (UNDP 1993, 2). It posited that the security of the people would augment the security of the state by strengthening it internally and, hence, thrust should be placed on an individual’s freedom from fear, freedom from want and freedom to live with dignity (UN 2005). It deals with external violence as well as structural violence emanating from within, such as state repression and ethnic strife. Human security, therefore, arguably ‘complements state security, enhances human rights and strengthens human development’ (Commission on Human Security (CHS) 2003, 2) and exists in a positive feedback loop with national security, rather than supplanting it. What is underlined here is the mutual complementarity between different aspects of security.

It is in this context that the chapter delineates the discourse on human security in India and the points of convergence and divergence in the first section. It analyses the state of human security in India to arrive at an assessment of the progress made in achieving security for its people. This assessment is based on using some central indices as proxies for different aspects of human security. The focus is anchored around the first matrix of non-traditional threats to human security identified by the report of the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change in 2004.² These are enumerated as economic and social threats, including poverty, infectious diseases and environmental degradation.

The human security discourse in India, however, tends to gravitate away from the language of threat and looks at addressing the underlying conditions which can ameliorate these problems. So, poverty is discussed alongside development that promises to offer a roadmap for mitigating poverty. Similarly, environmental degradation is captured through the lens of the environment (in a broader sense, not just degradation) and sustainable development. The focus on infectious diseases has been expanded to look at the larger questions of health and infectious diseases for a comprehensive understanding.

The chapter also discusses the interlinkages between non-traditional threats inter se and with the orthodox notions of national security and the missing threads in the discourse in the second section. The state of discourse in terms of measuring human security and in(security) is also delineated, along with a discussion of India’s performance across such indices in the third section. The chapter makes concluding arguments in the fourth section about the state of human security discourse and practice in India, its pitfalls and promises and its implications for national security and people/humans.

Human security discourse in India: The long shadow of national security

Theoretically speaking,

human security and state security are mutually reinforcing and dependent on each other. Without human security, state security cannot be attained and vice versa. Human Security requires strong and stable institutions. Whereas state security is focused, human security is broad. (CHS 2003, 6)

Such interlinking of the notions of state security and the vociferous argumentation about its dependence on non-traditional issues in security has been the Indian state’s position since independence. It is supplemented by a robust defence of the sovereignty principle along with an equally aggressive stance on the importance of non-interference in the domestic jurisdiction or internal matters. At the UN General Assembly informal debate on human security, India’s representative, Hardeep Singh Puri, underlined the need to:

ensure that ‘human security’ was clearly situated within the bedrock of international relations and domestic governance: non-aggression; non-interference in the domestic affairs of States; the right to national self-defence; and State sovereignty. The human security framework also needed to recognize the primary role of States and Governments for realizing human security, which can have no place for interventionism. (UNGA 2010)

Therefore, in practical terms, the national security and statist paradigm often come to cast their long shadow on the human security discourse by privileging national interests and external threats and, in the process, losing sight of internal threats and vulnerability, including of its own people. The Joint Military Doctrine of 2017 likewise outlines national interests as the core of India’s national security, which ‘implies the protection, preservation and promotion of our National Interests against internal and external threats and challenges’. The Doctrine makes it explicit that the ‘maintenance of our National Security is critical as it provides us the necessary freedom and removes all fear and hindrance in our pursuit of prosperity and happiness’ (GoI 2017, 2). In such an understanding, it is unexceptionable that prosperity and happiness (despite being critical aspects of human security) must flow from national security defined in purely statist terms, not as a coordinated outcome of human security.

Even while acknowledging non-traditional threats, the focus remains on their ramifications for conflict. For instance, the Joint Doctrine of the Indian Armed Forces of 2017 underlined the crucial connection between environment and conflict and enumerated climate change, natural disasters, security of energy/resources and competition over natural resources as important variables for national security (GoI 2017, 9), but its focus remains largely on the security of states where the outcome is defined in the language of conflict and not cooperation. It says:

Changes in the environment can result in the extinction of certain States. On the other hand, soil erosion, forest cover depletion and loss of agricultural land are dominant factors for human migrations across national and international borders. Such events heighten security risks and lead to responses from States in the military dimension. Environmental security has always been dealt with by the State and eco-system disruption, energy issues, population issues, food-related problems, economic issues of unsustainable modes of production and civil strife related to the environment. The fallout at times requires security responses from the State. (GoI 2017, 11)

The state remains the main referent object that needs protection from external threats. As a result of this dominant discourse on national security, defined in military terms, India consistently remains one of the top military spenders. In 2018, it allocated 2.4 per cent of its GDP on military expenditure that works out to be US$ 49.1 per capita and is constantly rising over the years (SIPRI n.d.). In 2018, it was the second largest arms importer and was fourth among the countries with largest military expenditure after the US, China and Saudi Arabia at US$ 66.5 billion, as per the figures available (SIPRI 2019, 7–8).

Considering that India has 21.2 per cent of people living below an average income of US$ 1.90 per day (UNDP-OPHI 2019, 18), if some of the resources currently allocated to military purchases could be used for human security considerations, it would have a huge significance in removing poverty and also improving environment and health.

This further correlates with peace, satisfaction with life and enjoyment of basic freedoms that are some of the main concerns of the human security paradigm. India ranks 141 out of 163 countries in the Global Peace Index (GPI). Within South Asia, it is behind even Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh (IEP 2019, 18). On the economic cost of violence³ sub-index of Global Peace Index, the ranking of India is 108 with an estimated loss of 5 per cent of its GDP and a loss of US$ 366.6 per capita on account of violence and an aggregate cost of US$ 496,355.4 million at PPP. At the same time, the economic impact of violence stands at US$ 852,594.9 million in PPP in the year 2019 (IEP 2019, 33, 48–49, 100).

There is a missing link between India’s national security and the well-being of its people, a substantial proportion of whom remain poor and hungry, thus making human security a compromised discourse both in theory and practice.

Indexing human security in India

This section deploys some of the latest available data from important indices as proxies for assessing different aspects of human security in India. The focus is anchored around the first matrix of security threats identified by the Commission on Human Security in 2004, which are also known as non-­traditional threats. These come under the broad rubric of economic and social threats including poverty, infectious diseases and environmental degradation. Even in this formulation, the statist mainframe continues to inform this discourse as it reiterates that ‘[a]ny event or process that leads to large-scale death or lessening of life chances and undermines States as the basic unit of the international system is a threat to international security’ (UNGA 2004, 25, emphasis added). The concept of security, therefore, is narrowly defined as a threat from external aggression that must be responded to by mobilisation of military capabilities of the country.

For a holistic assessment, therefore, and mindful of debate in India, these are slightly modified in the chapter to read as: (a) Poverty and Development,⁴ the assessment of which is being made by deploying the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (GMPI), 2019, and Global Hunger Index (GHI), 2019; (b) Environment and Sustainable Development rely on Environment Performance Index (EPI), 2018; Sustainable Development Index (SDI), 2019; SDG India Index: Baseline Report, 2018; (c) Health and Infectious Diseases marshals Health Security Index (HSI), 2019, and National Health Profile of India, 2018, 2019. The ordering of these issue...

Índice

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Conceptual Issues
• Hard Security Issues
• Developmental Issues
• C. Uday Bhaskar: More than a Family Man
• Index