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Book Review: Shrikant Paranjpe, India’s Strategic Culture: The Making of National Security Policy

in nature, which the author claims to be the ‘core of Indian strategic policy in practice’. According to the author, this preference for ‘deliberate ambiguity’ has a realistic utility. One may perhaps have contentions with all of the above mentioned characteristics of an Indian strategic culture, which Paranjpe terms ‘civilisational’. However, it is the last of his assertions on India’s strategic culture that is deeply problematic. In fact, turning Tanham’s arguments on his head, the author claims to see an ad hoc and reactionary foreign policy as a strategy. Such a reading of India’s ambiguous foreign policy decision-making suffers from a number of problems. First, it ascribes logic by hindsight. As historians would argue, hindsight may help in imputing order to often chaotic decision-making processes. For example, was India’s nuclear ambiguity after the 1974 weapons tests a well thought out strategy or the result of an incoherent national security policy? One can never know unless there is strong archival evidence to support such claims. Hindsight also helps in distorting the cause and effect relationship between decisions and their results. The effects of policy may not have any relation with its primary intentions. Given that nuclear ambiguity served India’s foreign and security policy well (at least for 15 years since 1974), it cannot be seen as validating Indira Gandhi’s decisions not to have declared India a nuclear weapon state. The problems for the author are compounded by the lack of historical data, especially archival evidence, in his work. A cursory look at the acknowledgement section of his book may reveal the fact that it is not based on archival material. The libraries which he claims to have visited are not very well-known for archival research in India. However, the assertions made in the book are deeply historical. It is more problematic because the author claims to have followed the third generation of ‘strategic culture’ theorists like Alastair Johnston in establishing a cause and effect relationship between ‘strategic culture’ and the making of national security policy. And, the third generation of ‘strategic culture’ theorists is extremely careful regarding historical evidence to support their work. There is also a bigger methodological problem. The author has not been able to clearly define and operationalize the primary independent variable: ‘civilization-state’. Given that he assimilates India’s history, geography, culture, society and economics into the making of a ‘civilisational-sate’, the independent variable takes the form of a meta-narrative, which aims to and, in the author’s view, does explain India’s national security policy in total. If only the author had limited the scope of the study, this book would have been a real contribution to the debate on India’s strategic culture. Given the fact that he is covering a large swathe of India’s history (almost 65 years of independent