India’s security imagination of the Bay of Bengal: aspiration, sub-optimality, and history

ABSTRACT

India has consistently demarcated the Bay of Bengal as a security space in standard realist terms which in turn leads to its conversion as a zone of security. The article probes two questions in this context. First, what drives India's insecurity and its imperative to control the Bay of Bengal? Apart from the traditional defence imperative, India pursues an aspirational model of security that is linked to its regional prominence and growing maritime footprint. Second, what are India's security responses in the Bay of Bengal? While realist security theories are often helpful in explaining India's security behaviour, there are several episodes when India's responses are also suboptimal on a realist scale where it does not completely resort to either defensive or offensive realism to attain security. Beyond defending threats and accumulating power, India's security engagements are additionally motivated by the concerns of autonomy, leadership and pre-eminence in this maritime space.

KEYWORDS:

• India
• Bay of Bengal
• maritime
• realism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For an overview of realist conceptions of security, see Walt, Stephen M (2017).

2 This is not to refute realist and institutional explanations for India’s security engagements in the Bay of Bengal region. It is argued that, in several cases, these approaches need to be supplemented with a historical assessment to account for India’s security engagements in the region.

3 The term is borrowed from Booth, Ken (2007). Booth’s reference can be broadly used to understand the categories of defensive and aspirational security dimensions from the Indian perspective. The defensive approach is about survival, and the aspirational model is ‘survival-plus’, whereas ‘plus’ refers to the ‘choice that comes from (relative) freedom from existential threats’ (Booth, 2007, p. 106). In other words, India’s freedom from existential security threats allows it to pursue an aspiration of pre-eminence in the region.

4 For a discussion on soft balancing, see Paul, TV (2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Udayan Das

Udayan Das is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, St. Xavier's College (Autonomous), Kolkata. He is Doctoral Candidate, Department of International Relations, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.