Does India have a Coherent Strategic Culture?
On the jacket cover of their 2012 book, Chinese and Indian Strategic Behaviour: Growing Power and Alarm, George Gilboy and Eric Heginbotham feature two photographs. The top panel above the title shows fierce-looking, colorfully fit mustachioed Indian troops atop equally ostentatiously adorned camels, assault rifles in hand. Juxtaposed in the bottom panel, a line of Chinese sailors march in smart naval whites and red national flags.[1] The impression created from the authors’ contrast appears to be of India’s somewhat more exotic and antique military aside a professional appearing Chinese Navy; perhaps subliminally, the message was that ‘pomp and spectacle are no match for pragmatic proficiency’. In fact, India’s military is one of the world’s most hardened and experienced, and the picture taken is of the Border Security Force, whose members are not so fashionably clothed while out on patrol. Conceivably more apt, however, is the implied differential between the state’s appreciation and use of their hard power capabilities. For many in the Indian academic world, military power must come with some vision of how to use it—a subject it would seem India is strategically bereft of.[2] Indeed, the issue of India’s strategic culture has birthed an explosion of scholarship in the past three decades, as academics attempt to pinpoint India’s strategic doctrine and grand strategy.[3]
India is a country with a long-lasting and deeply complex history which provides wide scope for such debates to continue as they have. Despite any implications that might be drawn from Gilboy and Heginbotham’s book cover, it is apparent that India’s position in the world as an emergent power is growing.[4] Although there has been an absence of European-style white papers or declaratory statements of explicit security objective intentions, this does not belie the presence of a strategic culture that underlies many Indian responses in the international system.[5] It will be proven that India does indeed have a strategic culture, although this does not necessitate that they have a specific ‘grand strategy’. Though to many authors India may seem strategically nascent or deficient, their strategic culture is based in their classic Hindu texts and the works of modern thinkers, their geographic positioning, and their self-perception as a natural world power. Indian strategic culture is not necessarily monolithic, but these strands are core traits that have persisted over time. Using a constructivist lens to analyse this claim, India’s strategic aims are proven to be admittedly ambiguous—but this is as their strategic culture demands. Broadly speaking, it can be defined as non-alignment and nonviolence, autonomy and defense of their natural geographic positioning, and a demand for respect and status. What will follow is firstly a discussion of strategic culture: its definition(s) and its debates. Next will be an explanation of the historiographical debate around India’s strategic culture. Finally, India’s strategic culture and specific aims will be explained through a constructivist lens.
Strategic Culture
From Sun Tzu to Jomini and Machievelli to Clausewitz, modern strategy has found its roots among theorists and military experts across a wide spectrum of time and space. Yet, none of these traditional thinkers whom scholars lean ever touched upon cultural attributes: culture was only considered a complementary factor—one that could account for epiphenomena that could not be fully justified by rational security-maximizing explanations.[6] It was only until more recently that the focus of much attention in strategic studies turned to the interplay between strategy and culture, and the concept of strategic culture. Despite its contemporary popularity, however, no single definition has found prominence and, as such, a great deal of confusion remains regarding what strategic culture is. Indeed, the task of defining the analytical category of strategic culture has been labelled by David Haglund—who was referring to Oscar Wilde’s bon mot on fox hunting— as "the unintelligible in pursuit of the incomprehensible”[7] At its base level strategic culture is primarily used to explain the distinctive strategic behaviours of states through reference to their unique strategic properties.[8]
Strategic culture owes its beginnings to Jack Snyder, an American who wrote on Russian strategic culture for the RAND Corporation. In 1977, Snyder defined strategic culture as “a set of general beliefs, attitudes and behavior patterns with regard to nuclear strategy [that] has achieved a state of semipermanence that places them on the level of “culture” rather than mere ‘policy’”.[9] The piece was seminal—it asked strategic theorists to approach Soviet attitudes to war in light of not only Communist tendencies, but also their Tsarist legacy and geopolitical position. It turned academia’s Cold-War preponderance for game theory and political science to its disciplinary roots in history and geography. It explains why strategy does not change, not why it does, containing strategy in a familiar framework that assumes strategic culture restricts choice and inhibits adjustment in priorities—even though both are essential to the construction of strategy.[10] While Snyder has since moderated his position, other notable scholars—like Colin Gray—have adopted it with increasing vehemence.[11]
What followed Snyder’s work were two successive generations of strategic culture, each with their own distinct conceptual and methodological approaches. In summarizing these approaches, Johnston also then establishes a reconceptualization of strategic culture as “an integrated system of symbols that acts to establish pervasive and long-lasting preference”.[12] While much of the debate between the three generations concerns determinism and how to conceptualise strategic culture as an ideational variable, several contemporary scholars also question its utility in predicting state behaviour—especially when concerning India. As Nicolas Blarel notes, at the theoretical level, the strategic culture approach suggests that “no single strategic factor is sufficient to state behaviour”—culture is simply a filter to specify how certain leaders react to certain developments.[13] At the methodological level, moreover, strategic culture has been criticized for being tautological, since every state’s decision is both a component and product of strategic culture in a cyclic-like nature. Consequently, it is often difficult to find a formation point of strategic culture or behaviour in a policy outcome. In reaction to this, there has instead been a focus on ‘security practice’ and emphasis on ‘self and other’ paradigms.[14] Regardless, strategic culture and its analytical uses has survived despite its many regenerations, and it continues to prove an especially potent analytical subject in the context of India.
The Indian Debate
Despite early discussions of an Indian approach to foreign affairs, the literature on Indian strategic culture is of a fairly recent vintage. Much of this scholarship began in direct response to George Tanham’s seminal but controversial essay on Indian strategic thought, published in 1992 for the RAND Corporation. Tanham argued that Indian elites had shown “little evidence of having thought coherently and systematically about national strategy.”[15] Building on his assessment of a lack of clear and systematic treatises, he argued that this deficiency in long-term planning was based in India’s historical and cultural development patterns. This led India to mainly react defensively to international events and pressures since its Independence. Hindu views of life being largely unknowable, outside of man’s control, and of time being eternal, also discouraged planning.[16]’[17]
Such claims of the nonexistence of sound strategic culture have been partly confirmed by the absence of any declaratory documents explicitly expressing India’s security objectives. This dearth of a coherent world view has also caused politicians like India’s former Minister of External Affairs, Jaswant Singh, to lament that political elites had not seriously thought about foreign policy and defence issues strategically.[18] The idea had become a much used topos that even an Economist article stated that “India’s lack of a strategic culture hobbles its ambition to be a force in the world.”[19] It is rather ironic that during Singh’s term, however, he managed little to change the strategic deficiency he decried.[20] Moreover, it is apparent that such commentaries have often confused the lack of any evident strategic planning in India’s security decision-making apparatus with the absence of strategic culture and thinking.[21]
Notwithstanding the methodological and theoretical shortcomings for which authors criticized Tanham, his essay led to lively policy and scholarly debate over the origins and the evolution of India’s strategic culture. Within this debate, the responses of myriad scholars have rightly contended that a strategic culture does not have to be clearly articulated to be present. Instead, it can be deduced from India’s history of military, economic and diplomatic behaviour. Yet, even here, there is no agreement in the scholarship on the causal mechanisms linking India’s strategic ideas and policies.[22]
Hence, in the post-Tanham literature two main camps emerged. One group of scholars emphasises a strong foreign policy continuity across Indian history, with an attachment to set core strategic beliefs. While they argue there is a relatively stable set of overarching goals, the means to fulfill these objectives have changed and varied across different periods. Continuity is marked by a reluctance to engage in alliances, autonomy, preserving territorial and political integrity, and a quest for international recognition.[23] Another group, however, identifies a set of distinct strategic worldviews that have competed to define India’s foreign policy approach since Independence. Depending on the time and nature of the policy debate, these separate strategic subcultures became either more or less salient in influencing choices and decisions. This second strand (labelled ‘ideational strategic pluralism’ by Bernard Berini) has argued against the first’s attempt to present a monolithic and static account of India’s strategic culture, which it deems too simple for the complexity of the strategic issue. Since its inception, there have been identified multiple, overlapping schools of thought: neo-liberals, hyperrealists, Hindu Nationalists, moralists, strategists, leftists and Great-Power advocates.[24]’[25]
This essay does not attempt to further explicate these multiple schools of thought but attempts instead to find the select strands of continuity in Indian strategic culture that still inform it and are integral today.
Ancient and Modern Texts
It is perhaps important here, to discuss the crossover between strategic culture and constructivism. Both began as upstarts to the neo-realist Cold-War paradigm, and both seek to explore the idealistic nature of states, rather than simply applying a ‘black box’ to states.[26]’[27] In constructivist thought, the focus is on values, identities and norms in world politics. Norms are produced through social practice, as intersubjective dogmas about the social and natural world promulgates and delineates the identity of the players, their roles, and the prospects of their actions. Thus, actors, and the appropriatness of their actions, are formed by these norms based on their social roles and environs.[28]
Since strategic culture is often regarded as a product of distinctive lessons that are adopted and internalized by successive generations of decision-makers, its hybrid nature allows for multitude sources entailing myths, narratives and symbols which inform a collective memory. As Johnston notes, this occurs primarily through education and socialization of classic texts that personify a literary tradition focused on politics and military concepts.[29] In the Indian case, the intellectual resources of several ancient and classical Hindu texts inform India’s history, intellectual inheritance and strategic culture. They represent a range of view, not only about social life, but the best ways to approach strategic policymaking and practice, and the justifications behind certain strategic decisions.[30]
These Hindu sources have accumulated since the Vedic period (around 1500-500 BC). Such texts are prescriptions of religious practices, including the ‘Vedas’; philosophical meditations like the Upanishads; epics and stories explicating moral lessons, such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana; and a collection of knowledge divided into sutras (aphorisms) and shastras (systemic treatises).[31] India’s philosophical traditions are eclectic, but the diversity is a source of civilization strength. Moreover, the sheer complexity and breadth of these sources thus provides Indian analysts with a wide range of authorities to draw from in strategic cultural analysis, yet creates complexity in describing a single strand of strategic thought.[32] Rather, three philosophical dispositions have emerged: moralism, fatalism, and activism.[33]
Kautilya’s Arthashastra (or ‘science of polity’) is regarded as the single most important ancient Indian text on strategy by scholars, and some argue it is still an inspiration to modern Indian strategic thought.[34] Written sometime in the 4th century BC, this ancient text on statecraft is neither moralistic, nor fatalistic, but assumes that events can be manipulated to the advantage of those who act in accordance with philosophical maxims and the distinction “between good and bad use of force.”[35] According to Bosche’s interpretation, moreover, power in Arthashastra is the object of interstate relations; “dissension and force” compose the natural state of the international order.[36] To this end, Kautilya appears to engender realist assumptions, and his mandala concept appears to be used by Nehru concerning territorial consolidation.[37] Other texts, like the great epics like Mahabharata, and especially the Bhagavad-Gita, resemble Indian culture’s fatalism (one should accept one’s lot in life) and moralism (one should do one’s duty in accordance with one’s lot).[38]
Much like the West knows war from the writings of Machievelli, so too are dimensions of classic strategic thought present in Indian culture, informing ideas of autonomy and power. Yet modern texts inform a collective memory and strategic culture too. Increasingly relevant are the works of Vivekanada, Mohatma Ghandi, and Jawaharlal Nehru. These figures relied not only on classic Hindu texts, but Jainist and Buddhist, and were moralists and activists, but not fatalists. They gave to India a conviction for essential unity in the context of British rule, a wariness for dependence on other states, a restraint in the use of force, and a belief that the greatness of the Indian civilization must, and eventually will be, recognized.[39]
Increasingly, it can be argued that the recent discourse around Indian strategic culture has influenced current strategic culture. Attention drawn to the classical texts has reinvigorated their use, and employment of Western IR theoretical terms has engendered cross-cultural access. Hence, Indian strategic thought has borrowed from several layers of influential political and cultural phenomena, forming a collective memory of a nation and traditions that have clearly distinguished idiosyncrasies.[40]
It is important here to consider scholarly criticism and caution on the method just used. As Ogden notes, “we must, however, be cautious when inferring too many links between ancient texts and current policy, particularly in light of ever-evolving domestic and structural constraints.”[41] Along the same line, Gilboy and Heginbotham, Bajpai and Blarel have called for restraint. Yet as Gilboy and Heginbotham admit: “This is the basic difficulty in employing a strategic culture approach in crafting any particular policy response to either China or India.”[42]
Yet, in order to understand Indian strategic culture, one must admit the context on which there has been a continuity in strategic thought—the same has been done for the West’s strategic thinkers. If we do not discuss them, we may lose any sense of the distinctive lessons they have imparted on previous and current actors in the policy and decision-making realm.
Geography
One point of rare agreement among analysts and policymakers alike is that the particular geography of the subcontinent—bounded by mountains to the north and the Indian Ocean to the south—has encouraged successive pan-Indian polities to strive for regional hegemony and achieve complete control over these natural borders, in order to ensure security. In a similar vein, the history of successive invasions from extra-regional actors can account for India’s defensive strategic behaviour regarding the involvement of external actors and states in the immediate vicinity.[43]
At a constructivist level, Jones provides a worthy account on the significance of the mythological and metaphysical significance of the subcontinent as a ‘territorial expression’. India’s philosophical foundations are based in conceptions that ‘sacred permeates identity’. Rivers connect mortals to gods and provide life-giving and cleansing properties in the material world. The mountains of the Himalayas provide a natural and spiritual frontier, connecting the rivers to another natural border: the ocean. “Modern concepts of security would protect this way of life and the territorial domain in which it exists.” These truths are timeless and pervasive, providing a commonality among Indians of their geographic expression and understanding of security.[44]
Independent India is the de facto inheritor of Britain’s strategic policy in the region. Britain considered Tibet and Afghanistan as buffer zones; the Indian Ocean a private lake. It influenced the formulation of Indian policy directly—right from the days of independence it has sought to maintain the ocean as a Zone of Peace, and has sought to maintain security on its border with China.[45] The last acts of British power and the creation of Pakistan, however, truncated India as a holistic expression and constricted the full assertion of its strategic culture. This not only affected India’s influence on the Middle East (now that Pakistan sat squarely between them) and complicated its reach and military preparedness to the east (evidenced by the traumatic Chinese incursion of 1962), but it also ‘hobbled’ India to Kashmir, which led to limited wars with Pakistan and eventually steered India down the path to nuclear arms. India’s possessiveness to Kashmir is a result of its natural expression and the territorial premises of its strategic culture. Eastern Kashmir, as part of the Himalayan chain, is linked to its historical empires and to holy, ancient places of Hindu pilgrimage. The timelessness of these historical geographic expressions means that part of India’s strategic culture is bound to mitigating Pakistan and other countries like China on which they border.[46] Here, apparent is the role geopolitical framing takes in Indian strategic thought.
Natural Inheritance
Along with their natural and spiritual borders, India’s elite is convinced that the modern state of India is the inheritor of a great and enduring civilization, which should be accorded respect and status, regardless of modern India’s economic or military power. This widely held premise is engrained in the collective consciousness of India’s ageless civilization—all the way back, most notably, to the Mughal empire.[47] Indians have a natural claim to greatness, stemming from the idea that India was “a world in itself, a culture and a civilization which gave shape to all things . . . [in which] foreign influences poured in, often influenced that culture and were absorbed.”[48] This perception of eternal existence, combined with past historical significance in foreign affairs and centrality in Asia, means that India’s aspiration for great power is valid and self-evident.[49]
According to Jones, these understandings appear to be reinforced by traditional norms of status, ‘based on ascriptive criteria’ like upbringing, family and caste. For example, the caste system still ascribes status, and those with a natural affinity for knowledge have been disproportionately fruitful in rising to positions of public enterprise and government, from which they then inform the modern content of India’s strategic culture. Moreover, the outlook that holds their importance as self-evident is reflected in India’s relations to the global world: status is an “objective reality, a matter for other state to recognize and act in accordance with, not a favor for other states to confer.”[50]
Assertions that this history demands recognition, responsibilities and rights by post-independence leaders supports the constructivist view that foreign policy is culturally constructed and not pre-ordained. Indeed, the legacy of India’s British inheritance informs among leaders a suspicion towards the global system and power politics, defining an anti-Western approach which favours defense over expansion. India’s aims, birthed from this self-perception in ancient and Raj history, as well as from ancient and modern texts and geographic expressions, are therefore based in non-alignment and non-violence whenever possible.[51]
Conclusion
Explicated in this essay is the proof of an existent Indian strategic culture. From the classical and modern texts, Indian strategic thought is shown to emphasize autonomy, yet also requests restraint in the use of force. It’s geographic positioning engenders a cultural and territorial expression that is timeless and bound to defensive measures while paradoxically challenging control of areas perceived as eternally and spiritually Indian. Finally, the Indian understanding of prestige and natural claim to greatness informs a desire for status. However much this is expounded in official documentation on ‘grand strategy’ is not inherently necessary to understanding that these strands of strategic thought have been consistent and continuous. While India’s strategic aim has been to re-assert its historical importance as a great power across the extent of its modern existence, this end has not been met with designated means. Rather, the means have been ad hoc, non-cohesive and, to an extent, ‘lacking in maturity’ when compared with other states.[52] Even under Prime Minister Modi, a conscious change to foreign policy has been patchy at best.[53] The strategic culture factors that inform these aims, are not, however, the only factors that define it, for it is varied in both its complex history and scholarship. For reasons of clarity, these three have been chosen, not to meet a traditional monolithic view of strategic culture, but simply because they are integral. This essay, however, has admittedly been limited, not accounting for other pertinent factors in depth: ideational strategic pluralism, the nuclear armament of India, climate change, distinct civil-military relations, etc.
While this essay has spelt out certain ideational variables that contribute to India’s aims, it has not made any comment on the causal mechanisms this strategic culture has had. The problem with such an abstract account is that it overlooks the actual deliberations occurring between actors and institutions that decide foreign policy. This is also an issue of the scholarship on the subject, wherein a clear gap in the literature exists. While Staniland and Narang have loosened the jar in analysing small groups of elites and how their decisions are embedded in enduring ideas and norms, this is only one foray into the subject.[54] It is important for future studies on Indian strategic culture to build on such scholarship, concentrating on the roles played by policy entrepreneurs in framing and legitimating strategies.
Bibliography
Bajpai, Kanti. “India: Modified Structuralism.” Asian Security Practice, 1998, pp. 157–197., https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804765121-007.
Bajpai, Kanti P., et al. India's Grand Strategy: History, Thoery, Cases. Routledge, 2014.
Beitelmair-Berini, Bernhard. India's Grand Strategy and Foreign Policy: Strategic Pluralism and Subcultures. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2022.
Boesche, Roger, “Kautilya’s Arthasastra on War and Diplomacy in Ancient India,” The Journal of Military History, 67:1 (January 2003): 9–37.
Echevarria II, Antulio J. and Hoffman, Frank (2017) "Review Essay - Strategic Culture And Ways Of War, Elusive Fiction Or Essential Concept?," Naval War College Review: Vol. 70 : No. 2 , Article 7. Available at: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol70/iss2/7
Ganguly, Sumit, et al. The Oxford Handbook of India's National Security. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Gilboy, George J., and Eric Heginbotham. Chinese and Indian Strategic Behavior: Growing Power and Alarm. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Gray, Colin S. “Strategic Culture as Context: The First Generation of Theory Strikes Back.” Review of International Studies 25, no. 1 (1999): 49–69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20097575.
Haglund, David G. “What Good Is Strategic Culture?: A Modest Defence of an Immodest Concept.” International Journal 59, no. 3 (September 2004): 479–502. https://doi.org/10.1177/002070200405900302
Hall, Ian. Modi and the Reinvention of Indian Foreign Policy. Policy Press, 2019.
Hopf, Ted. “The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory.” International Security 23, no. 1 (1998): 171–200. https://doi.org/10.2307/2539267.
Johnston, Alastair Iain. “Thinking about Strategic Culture.” International Security 19, no. 4 (1995): 32–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/2539119.
Jones, R.W., “India’s Strategic Culture,” SAIC, (2006): 1-31. https:/fas.org retrieved February 27, 2022.
Karnad, Bharat. Why India Is Not a Great Power (Yet). Oxford University Press, 2015.
Lock, Edward. "Strategic Culture Theory: What, Why, and How." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. 26 Sep. 2017; Accessed 25 Feb. 2022.
Narang, Vipin, and Paul Staniland. “Institutions and Worldviews in Indian Foreign Security Policy.” India Review, vol. 11, no. 2, (2012): 76–94., https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2012.674818.
Ogden, Chris. China and India: Asia's Emergent Great Powers. Polity, 2017.
Ollypally, Deepa and Rajesh Rajagopalan, “India: Foreign Policy Perspectives of an Ambiguous Power.” In Nau, Henry et al. Worldviews of Aspiring Powers: Domestic Foreign Policy Debates in China, India, Iran, Japan and Russia, Oxford University Press, New York, 2012.
Pethiyagoda, Kadira. Indian Foreign Policy and Cultural Values. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
Pillai, Mohanan Bhaskaran, “Indian Strategic Culture: The Debates in Perspective,” Social Science Research Network, (2020): 1-11. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3555343 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3555343
Scott, David. Handbook of India's International Relations. Routledge, 2015.
Sidhu, Waheguru Pal. “Book Review: Shrikant Paranjpe, India’s Strategic Culture: The Making of National Security Policy and Chris Ogden, Hindu Nationalism and the Evolution of Contemporary Indian Security: Portents of Power.” Studies in Indian Politics, vol. 2, no. 2, 2014, pp. 251–253., https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023014551882.
Snyder, Jack L., The Soviet Strategic Culture : Implications for Limited Nuclear Operations, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1977. https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R2154.html.
Strachan, Hew. “The Limitations of Strategic Culture:the Case of the British Way in Warfare.” Chapter. In The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective, 136–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. doi:10.1017/CBO9781107256514.008.
Tanham, George K., Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1992. https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R4207.html. Also available in print form.
Tellis, Ashley J., et al. “The Persistence of Nehruvianism in India’s Strategic Culture.” Understanding Strategic Cultures in the Asia-Pacific, The National Bureau of Asian Research, Seattle, 2016, pp. 141–167.
Zaman, Rashed Uz, “Kautilya: The Indian Strategic Thinker and Indian Strategic Culture,” Comparative Strategy, 25:3, (2006): 231-247, DOI: 10.1080/01495930600956260
Footnotes
[1] George Gilboy and Eric Heginbotham. Chinese and Indian Strategic Behavior: Growing Power and Alarm. Cambridge University Press, 2012, Cover page.
[2] Bharat Karnad, Why India Is Not a Great Power (Yet). Oxford University Press, 2015: 239-40.
[3] Mohanan Pillai, “Indian Strategic Culture: The Debates in Perspective,” Social Science Research Network, (2020): 2-3.
[4] Chris Ogden, China and India: Asia's Emergent Great Powers. Polity, 2017: 144.
[5] Nicolas Blarel, “India’s Strategic Culture(s),” Chapter in Ganguly, Sumit, et al. The Oxford Handbook of India's National Security. Oxford University Press, 2018: 425.
[6] Ibid., 419-20.
[7] David Haglund, “What Good Is Strategic Culture?: A Modest Defence of an Immodest Concept.” International Journal 59, no. 3 (2004): 479.
[8] Edward Lock, "Strategic Culture Theory: What, Why, and How." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. (2017): 1.
[9] Jack Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Operations, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1977, v.
[10] Hew Strachan, “The Limitations of Strategic Culture: The Case of the British Way in Warfare.” Chapter. In The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective, 136–50. Cambridge University Press, 2013, 136.
[11] Colin Gray, “Strategic Culture as Context: The First Generation of Theory Strikes Back.” Review of International Studies 25, no. 1 (1999): 49–69.
[12] Alastair Johnston, “Thinking about Strategic Culture.” International Security 19, no. 4 (1995): 46.
[13] Blarel, “India’s Strategic Culture(s),” 418.
[14] Ogden, China and India, 42.
[15] George Tanham, Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1992: 5.
[16] David Pant, “Indian Strategic Culture: The Debate and its Consequences,” Chapter in Scott, David. Handbook of India's International Relations. Routledge, 2015: 15.
[17] Blarel, 424.
[18] Ian Hall, “The Persistence of Nehruvianism in India’s Strategic Culture,” Chapter in Tellis, Ashley J., et al., Understanding Strategic Cultures in the Asia-Pacific, The National Bureau of Asian Research, Seattle, 2016: 142.
[19] Bernhard Beitelmair-Berini, India's Grand Strategy and Foreign Policy: Strategic Pluralism and Subcultures. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2022: 60.
[20] Pant, “Indian Strategic Culture,” 15.
[21] Blarel, 425.
[22] Ibid., 425.
[23] Vipin Narang and Paul Staniland. “Institutions and Worldviews in Indian Foreign Security Policy.” India Review, vol. 11, no. 2, (2012): 76–94
[24] Kanti Bajpai, “Indian Grand Strategy: Six Schools of Thought,” In India's Grand Strategy: History, Thoery, Cases. Routledge, 2014.
[25] Deepa Ollypally and Rajesh Rajagopalan, “India: Foreign Policy Perspectives of an Ambiguous Power.” In Nau, Henry et al. Worldviews of Aspiring Powers: Domestic Foreign Policy Debates in China, India, Iran, Japan and Russia, Oxford University Press, New York, 2012.
[26] Ted Hopf, “The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory.” International Security 23, no. 1 (1998): 171.
[27] Kadira Pethiyagoda, Indian Foreign Policy and Cultural Values. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, 6.
[28] Hopf, 173.
[29] Johnston, “Thinking about Strategic Culture.” 48.
[30] Hall, 147-49.
[31] Ibid., 149.
[32] Gilboy and Heginbotham. Chinese and Indian Strategic, 29.
[33] Hall, “The Persistence of Nehruvianism in India’s Strategic Culture,” 150.
[34] Rashed Uz Zuman, “Kautilya: The Indian Strategic Thinker and Indian Strategic Culture,” Comparative Strategy, 25:3, (2006): 236-8.
[35] Hall, 151.
[36] Roger Boesche, “Kautilya’s Arthasastra on War and Diplomacy in Ancient India,” The Journal of Military History, 67:1 (January 2003): 9–37.
[37] Ogden, China and India: Asia's Emergent Great Powers, 41.
[38] Tanham, Indian Strategic Thought, 15.
[39] Hall, 152-155.
[40] Beitelmair-Berini, India's Grand Strategy and Foreign Policy, 52-54.
[41] Ogden, China and India, 41.
[42] Gilboy and Heginbotham. Chinese and Indian Strategic Behavior, 36.
[43] Blarel, 422.
[44] Roger Jones, “India’s Strategic Culture,” SAIC, (2006): 5-6.
[45] Pillai, “Indian Strategic Culture,” 6.
[46] Jones, 9-10.
[47] Ibid., 7.
[48] Nehru quoted in Ogden, China and India, 45.
[49] Jones, 10.
[50] Ibid., 10.
[51] Ogden, 46.
[52] Ibid., 52.
[53] Ian Hall, Modi and the Reinvention of Indian Foreign Policy. Policy Press, 2019: 147.
[54] Narang and Staniland, “Institutions and Worldviews in Indian Foreign Security Policy.” 80.
