Approaching India's Military and Security Policy, with a Detour through Disaster Studies

Abstract

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank his wife, Roberta, for incisive comments on an early draft, and his many students for their indirect contribution over the last 40 years.

Notes

1. See, for example, John J. Johnson, ed., The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962); S. E. Finer, The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962). For an excellent review of that literature, and much that has been written on the role of the military since, see Paul Staniland, “Explaining Civil–Military Relations in Complex Political Environments: India and Pakistan in Comparative Perspective,” Security Studies Vol. 17, No. 2 (April 2008), pp. 322–62.

2. Morris Janowitz, Military Institutions and Coercion in the Developing Nations, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), and Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil–Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).

3. This is not the place to dwell on the visa problem, except to note that it was very difficult personally, and made worse by the attitude of many Indian officials. The Indian government did not say “no” – it just never said “yes” – but I gained some insights into how Indian bureaucracies operated.

4. For an overview of American historiography of India, see Benjamin B. Cohen, “The Study of Indian History in the US Academy,” India Review, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2006), pp. 144–172. Fortunately, one of my Wisconsin history professors, Robert Frykenberg, had been trained as a political scientist and, along with my major advisor, Henry C. Hart, understood what I was up to.

5. Mason had earlier written several novels about India and the definitive history of the Indian Civil Service. For the army book see Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, its Officers and Men (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974).

6. During my first and second extended trips to India (1963–65 and 1968–69) it seemed as if it was obligatory for Americans to lecture Indians on the importance of birth control. This changed and by the 1970s we were giving lectures on economic reform, only to be followed, in the 1980s, by preaching about India's need to abandon any nuclear ambitions.

7. My Hindi became pretty good at that time. It had to be, because the purpose of the course was to teach students (in my case, a Jew), how to give sermons about Christ in Hindi to North Indian Hindus.

8. Sisir Gupta, Kashmir: A Study in India–Pakistan Relations (New Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1966).

9. Michael Brecher, India and World Politics: Krishna Menon's View of the World (London: Oxford University Press, 1968).

10. Lorne J. Kavic, India's Quest for Security (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).

11. Selig S. Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960). A few years later a book by another journalist, Welles Hangen, speculated on a military takeover in India, among other outcomes after Nehru's passing, raising suspicions that the Americans were encouraging a coup. See Welles Hangen, After Nehru, Who? (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963).

12. Seminarist, “The Bomb: Strategic Considerations,” Seminar (New Delhi), January 1965.

13. Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism: Civilian and Military (New York: Free Press, 1967); Hans Speier, Social Order and the Risks of War (New York: Stewart, 1952); Stanislav Andreski, Military Organization and Society (London: Routledge & Paul, 1954). Andreski is especially useful in dissecting the term “militarism”: it can mean the political dominance of the military, a foreign policy that favors the use of force, the worship of military values by civilians, and a society that reflects military culture.

14. In British and Indian military terminology, the term “class” referred to the different ethnic groups, castes, and linguistic and regional background of soldiers; thus, Punjabi Sikhs were one class, Punjabi scheduled castes another. See Stephen P. Cohen, The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

15. Two collections provide a sampling, see Daniel P. Marston and Chandar S. Sundaram, ed., A Military History of India and South Asia: From the East India Company to the Nuclear Era (Westport: Praeger Security International, 2007), and Kaushik Roy, ed., War and Society in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006).

16. DeWitt C. Ellinwood, Jr., Between Two Worlds: A Rajput Officer in the Indian Army, 1905–21 (Lanham: Hamilton Books, 2005). In the pre-internet era Ellinwood and I began, but were unable to sustain, a network of scholars working on the social and cultural side of India's armed forces, the War and Society in South Asia Group (WASSAG). This group should be revived. I know there are potential members in Singapore, Japan, India, Pakistan, the United States, Great Britain and elsewhere. The popular website, Bharat Rakshak (www.bharat-rakshak.com) does some of this, but is often marred by polemic and nationalism.

17. It was around this time that the Indian government hired Lyndon LaRouche, the faux-politician (and subsequently, convicted felon), to do a study of American scholars working in India. My name figures in that book in a way that stops just short of libelous. I am in fine company, however, as the list of American scholars who have somehow set out to undercut India is long and distinguished. Executive Intelligence Review, Derivative Assassination: Who Killed Indira Gandhi? (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1985), p. 35.

18. Edward Luttwak, Coup d' Etat: A Practical Handbook (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1968).

19. Stephen Philip Cohen, “Indo-Pak Track II Diplomacy: Building Peace or Wasting Time,” in P. R. Kumaraswamy, ed., Security Beyond Survival: Essays for K. Subrahmanyam (New Delhi: Sage, 2004).

20. The article has been reprinted in a collection of IDSA publications. See Stephen P. Cohen, “The Indian Military and Social Change,” in N. S. Sisodia and Sujit Datta, eds., India and the World: Selected Articles from IDSA Journals, Vol. I. Strategic Thought: The Formative Years (Delhi: IDSA/Promilla & Co., 2005).

21. A. Martin Wainwright, Inheritance of Empire: Britain, India, and the Balance of Power in Asia, 1938–1955 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994).

22. There were some exceptional people in this group, and I was to learn much from the work of Americans who specialized in other South Asian states, most notably W. Howard Wriggins, whose work on Ceylon/Sri Lanka was unparalleled, and Wayne Wilcox, probably the most brilliant of all of the younger foreign policy experts, who died a tragic death in an air crash in Europe. W. Howard Wriggins, Ceylon: Dilemmas of a New Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960); Wayne Ayres Wilcox, Pakistan: The Consolidation of a Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963).

23. Gene D. Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller, Communism in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959).

24. In the 1980s Leo Rose and I organized what was to be the first joint US–Soviet study of security issues in South Asia, which morphed into the first joint US–Russian study of the region. It was useful to compare notes with our Soviet/Russian counterparts about what we had each been told by Indians and Pakistanis.

25. Mohammed Ayoob, The Third World Security Predicament: State Making, Regional Conflict and the International System (Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner, 1995).

26. Kanti P. Bajpai and Harish C. Shukul, Interpreting World Politics (New Delhi: Sage, 1995).

27. I supported, but warned against the consequences of India's 1971 intervention. It was not cost free, and the use of force always has unanticipated consequences. While Indians concluded that they had established dominance over Pakistan and that India–Pakistan relations could normalize, this was not the view of the Pakistan army, and the 1971 defeat ensured that Pakistan would seek an equalizer: an atomic bomb. It also ensured that when the opportunity came (in Punjab and Kashmir), Pakistan would intervene in what was seen by the army, and most Pakistani civilians, as just retribution for India's actions.

28. It is hard to summon up much enthusiasm for AIIS, an organization which is devoted to benefiting Americans, and not Indians. Contrast this with the Fulbright program, or the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, which supports a two-way flow of scholars. I think the AIPS and Fulbright models are more appropriate, and AIIS should either be folded into Fulbright or required to strengthen Indian scholarship.

29. Rajni Kothari, “The Tasks Within”, Seminar, December 1968. See also Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

30. There is also interest in Bose in Singapore, where I spent four months in 2008 as a visiting professor. The INA erected a monument to itself when Singapore was under Japanese occupation. This was blown up by the British when they recaptured the island. However, a small marker identifies the place where the original INA monument was erected, and the Singapore government remains characteristically non-committal towards a movement that was pro-Japanese yet mostly Indian in nature.

31. The term used to describe Kissinger's insistence that foreign service officers not be too focused on one region, but acquire a range of regional and other expertise.

32. Stephen P. Cohen and C.V. Raghavulu, The Andhra Cyclone of 1977: Individual and Institutional Responses to Mass Death (New Delhi: Vikas, 1979). As a follow-up, Raghavulu created a disaster management training center in Andhra Pradesh. The book was used as a text in a course on manmade and natural disasters taught at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (Singapore) in 2008. Much has changed in the disaster field, notably the availability of the World Wide Web as a clearing house for best practices.

33. See James Manor, Power, Poverty and Poison: Disaster and Response in an Indian City (New Delhi: Sage, 1993).

34. See, for example, Brahma Chellaney and Nitin Pai, “Climate Change and International Security,” Pragati – The Indian National Interest Review, No. 3 (June 2007), 7–8. www.scribd.com

35. Stephen Philip Cohen, The Pakistan Army (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) and editions in India and China. The book was roundly condemned in the Far Eastern Economic Review: the reviewer was a serving Pakistan official who had been responsible for the ban. The Review never apologized.

36. Dick Park's ties to India began during World War II when he was stationed in Calcutta, as were a number of other Americans who eventually went on to form the core of America's academic specialists on India (and, weirdly, Lyndon LaRouche). They joined a generation of Americans whose early contacts with India were derived from the missionary experience. At Wisconsin, for example, Henry Hart, Joseph Elder, and Robert Frykenberg were all missionary children who had lived in India. These three were on my dissertation committee, and 30 years later two were on that of my son Benjamin Cohen.

37. Stephen P. Cohen and Richard L. Park, India: Emergent Power? (New York: Crane, Russak and Co., 1978).

38. George Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

39. Stephen Philip Cohen, ed., Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia: The Prospects for Arms Control (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991, and New Delhi: Lancer International, 1991). The book was a product of the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security (ACDIS), which housed the only American center for the study of Indian foreign and security policy and the training of South Asians in arms control and security matters.

40. See www.rcss.org/workshops.html.

41. Stephen P. Cohen, India: Emerging Power (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2001).

42. See, for example, Ashley Tellis, India's Emerging Nuclear Posture: Between Recessed Deterrent and Ready Arsenal (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001); Sumit Ganguly, The Origins of War in South Asia: The Indo-Pakistani Conflicts since 1947, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994).