The participation of the Indian navy in anti-piracy operations off the Somali coast is perceived by many as a manifestation of India's apparent willingness to take on a larger role on the global stage. This article explores the possibility for India to play a more important role in solving the Somali piracy crisis.
The debate around strategic autonomy offers a conceptual framework to understand how India, as an emerging power, tries to negotiate autonomy in its security and military relationship with the United States. In the context of Indo-US rapprochement, the dynamics of power relations are not commensurate with India's will to keep an acceptable degree of autonomy.
How effective was the Indian government in sending clear, coercive signals and orchestrating them into coherent messages during 'Operation Parakram' in 2001-02? This study finds that compellence was hampered by three factors: (1) the government kept changing its demands; (2) the lack of adequate civil-military coordination; and (3) the government engaged in a dual-track policy of direct coercion of Pakistan, while simultaneously engaging the United States to put pressure on Pakistan. Ultimately, these two policy strands worked at cross-purposes to each other.
The Treaty of Peace and Friendship signed between India and Nepal in 1950 has been a subject of debate within Nepal. The issue has been regularly featured in left parties' election manifestos in Nepal and become an agenda item in bilateral talks. India has agreed to review, adjust and update the treaty while giving due recognition to the special features of the bilateral relationship. Nepal's reservations to the treaty are based on the argument that the treaty compromises Nepal's ability to pursue an independent defence and foreign policy.
This article argues that in contradiction to the conventional wisdom that the Sino-Indian rivalry is one-sided (with only India viewing China as a rival); China has always factored India in its strategic calculus. The Sino-Indian relationship is asymmetric only to the extent that while India regards China as its 'principal rival', China considers India as only one of its (many) 'strategic rivals' as opposed to the principal one. This article also analyses articles related to India published in English-language Chinese journals in recent years.
Today, the situation in Afghanistan is mired with the geopolitics of regional and extra-regional players. Bringing stability to the country is a major challenge for the international community. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) has the potential to play an important role, provided it is able to make some adjustments in its policy. Given its strengths and weaknesses, it is likely to focus more on economic, trade and security related issues within the Eurasian region rather than in Afghanistan.
The robustness of India's nuclear doctrine would face a severe challenge in the case of conventional military offensives into Pakistan in a future Indo-Pak conflict. Such offensives are possible in case Pakistan's nuclear threshold is taken as high and its doctrine one of 'last resort'. However, Pakistani nuclear use options may include lower order nuclear use. In light of this, it recommends that India take a serious look at the Limited War concept as well as revise its nuclear doctrine to 'flexible nuclear retaliation'.
Bharat Wariavwalla's ‘Name of the Game is Interdependence’ is a thoughtful and elegantly written essay that has insights for both the theoretically inclined academic as well as the policy wonk. The essay can almost neatly be divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the constraints that are imposed on contemporary great power relations (especially between China and the United States) because of multiple levels of interdependence.
As I have understood Bharat Wariavwalla's thoughtful article, and from the current discourse on geostrategic global balance, three central issues can be raised. First, we live in an interdependent world that is the outcome of a globalised economy. Therefore, no country can expect to wield unconstrained power or strategic hegemony, which allows it to disregard either universally accepted behavioural norms or even national sovereignty. Therefore, it is irrelevant to talk of a unipolar world.
According to Bharat Wariavwalla, the Manmohan Singh-led government ‘believes that the US rules supreme and that the closer we stay with it the better we serve our interests. America will fight terror, secure us in the South Asian region and make us a world power’. In order to battle such a predilection, his article seeks to show the constraints on US power, mostly vis-à-vis the emerging superpower, China, which he implicitly sees as an emerging threat to India.
Has the power and influence of the United States declined in recent years? Does the current global recession, the outcome of the US invasion of Iraq and the resilience of the Taliban in Afghanistan provide adequate rationale to profess waning of US influence? Has China's power and influence grown to an extent that can effortlessly put it on the top of the global hierarchy of power? Is the US–China interdependence equitable enough to work as a deterrent against unbolted conflict?
Lawrence Summers, United States President Barack Obama's chief economic advisor and formerly secretary of treasury in the second term of the Clinton administration, once said that there was a ‘balance of financial terror’ between the US and its financial creditors, primarily China and Japan. Today, China, holding some $800 billion in US treasury bonds and some $2 trillion worth of currency reserves wields financial terror against the US.
Left Wing Extremism (LWE) presents a serious internal security challenge to India that needs careful and coordinated policy response from both the security front and the development front. For the CPI (Maoists) (Communist Party of India), the main outfit propagating LWE, the plan and execution of this style of people's war against the state is like the Churchillian ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. At one level, the LWE can be described as a ‘Democratic revolution through tactical offensive with tactical speed in the protracted people's war of strategic defensive’.
The drivers for sustaining the decades-long growth of the Chinese economy are the subject of enduring conjecture, controversy and even wonder. From a US$1 trillion economy in the 1980s, China's GDP has crossed the US$4 trillion mark and is vying with Japan for the status of the number two economy in the world. China has now set itself the task of becoming a major research and development (R&D) power in the medium-term, signalling its ‘arrival’ as a major power.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's visit to India on March 11–12, 2010 signifies the beginning of a new phase in Indo-Russian friendship. In fact, this visit needs to be viewed in the context of the changing geopolitical and geo-economic realities in the international system.
The peace process between India and Pakistan came to an abrupt halt with the Mumbai attacks on November 26, 2008 (26/11). Ironically, the attacks were carried out by Pakistani terrorists minutes after the foreign ministers of both countries met in New Delhi and pledged to take the composite dialogue process forward. Ever since, Pakistan's unwillingness to bring the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks to justice has come in the way of resumption of the composite dialogue. There have been many false starts, but the process continues to be in a state of suspended animation.
Like in the 1950s, the word ‘riparian’ is back again in the India–Pakistan lexicon, becoming this time intensely political, emotional and divisive. This development is both instructive and unsettling. It is instructive to note how the current water realties of the two countries, which have changed significantly since the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) in 1960, will now determine the treaty's future. With growing populations, inadequate water management techniques and the impact of global warming, water resources are under pressure.
China has throughout its history played a significant role in Southern Asia. China is a large and very populous country. However, China's role throughout its history has been more related to its civilisation and ideas than to its size. There have been wars and invasions, peace and tributes, but the overriding impression that one has of China's role in Southern Asia is that of ideas institutions. When China's century-old revolution culminated in the establishment of a Communist government in China, its role acquired a very crucial dimension.
