Sitakanta Mishra | Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University, Gandhinagar (original) (raw)

Papers by Sitakanta Mishra

Springer eBooks, 2022

Secrecy as a security strategy in India's nuclear safety security architecture

Indian Foreign Affairs Journal, Jul 1, 2013

Shrikant Paranjpe, India's Strategic Culture: The Making of National Security Policy (New Del... more Shrikant Paranjpe, India's Strategic Culture: The Making of National Security Policy (New Delhi: Routledge, 2013), Pages: xv+184, Price: Rs. 695.00.Cogent and conflicting expressions on India's "strategic culture" are often heard from scholars. While George K. Tanham found little evidence of the Indian elite "having thought coherently and systematically about national strategy", Rodney W. Jones found Indian strategic culture more distinct and "is mosaic-like, coherent than that of most contemporary nation-states". The plethora of writings available today on the subject revolves round this binary narration. Distinctively, Professor Paranjpe, in the book under review, by juxtaposing Indian strategic culture in its entirety with "India as a civilization- state" has attempted to locate the answer "whether 'deliberate ambiguity' can be a strategic doctrine for India in terms of its utility for addressing problems of national security" (pp. xiii-xv).Though the analyses in the volume is confined to strategic thinking of India in the post-Soviet world order, the author has strived to locate the roots of its strategic culture in its historical, cultural, geopolitical, socio-economic compulsions that goes back to several thousand years. The author begins with the argument that independence, internal security and territorial integrity have always been overriding priorities in India's strategic perspectives. However, the uniqueness of India's strategic perspective, as the book distinctively opines, is its non-focus on the issue of "survival of nation-state", even though it always accepted the state-centric formulation of approaches to the security policy by taking a global/international perspective of security (p. xiv). In that context, the Indian strategic perspective predates the modern Westphalian nation- state system (p. 15).Normally, the peaceful approach, diversity and the assimilative culture during the ancient and medieval period, and the influx of successive streams of people and culture all merging in mainstream India have been described as the major components of the Indian strategic perspective. However, the author questions if one can generalise these traits as "all India" phenomena (p. 27). Moreover, the author brings to notice the lopsided projection in the writings on the nationalist phase of Indian history. Deliberate or otherwise, the expansionist phase of Indian history -- the expansion of the Chola Empire of the South into Ceylon or the colonisation of South-east Asia, has been overlooked.While addressing the question--why do countries make specific strategic choices in terms of their national security in general, and the ambiguous nature of Indian thinking in particular, the author has referred to relevant literature available. While K. Subrahmanyam admits the absence of strategic tradition in India that resulted in adhocism, Rodney Jones highlights the "Hindu mindset" to contextualise Indian strategic thinking. However, Professor Pranjape has brought to the fore quite succinctly, the rationality and utility of "deliberate ambiguity", which has been the core of Indian strategic thinking since 1947.Subsequently, the author studies the British-India phase that marks a clear shift of India from a "civilizational" entity to a "nation state" and how the freedom struggle has infused certain ideological currents into India's post- independence worldview. In Chapter II, III and IV, the author analyses the application in the post-Independence period, of strategic perspectives, which India has accumulated over many centuries. The three factors as offshoot of the geopolitical setting in which India found itself, seem to have shaped its strategic decision-making. The author points out that in response to the "regional threat perception", and limited choice to preserve its hard-won independence in a bi-polar world order, and ethnic nationalism (secessionist and autonomy seeking ethnic groups) at home, the Indian security policy culminated in two predominant trends (pp. …

IndraStra Global, Oct 14, 2016

Routledge eBooks, Mar 9, 2023

India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs, Oct 1, 2008

Brill | Nijhoff eBooks, Jun 10, 2020

International journal of nuclear security, 2018

Indian Foreign Affairs Journal, 2012

Stephen P. Cohen and Others, The Future of Pakistan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), P... more Stephen P. Cohen and Others, The Future of Pakistan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), Pages: xv+311, Price: Rs 695.00.Much of the contemporary literature on Pakistan has "tended to be sombre", highlighting it as a failed or failing state - a "toxic jelly state" - yet Pakistan has managed to survive. The book under review concludes that though "Pakistan is a deeply troubled state" and "enfeebled" (p. xiv), it "will remain important for the indefinite future" (p. xii), and "extreme cases could be ruled out for the next few years" (p. xiii). The contributors emphasize that though Pakistan is "now immersed in identity and governance crises", its "society remains vigorous as ever". Therefore, the most likely future of Pakistan would be "muddling through". Stephen Cohen in the first chapter points out that "the problem is not that most Pakistanis are Muslims and adhere to deep religious beliefs; it is that those beliefs have been exploited by state bureaucracy - notably the army ... It is not Islam or religion that is the problem; it is how religion has been exploited by the state" (p. 25).However, Cohen's assertion that Pakistan's capabilities are inadequate because "its ambitions are too great" can be contested. Every nation has great ambitions. What matters most is how sound the foundation on which the idea of the nation evolves. In that respect, "Pakistan has remained a conceptual orphan", as Jaswant Singh says in Jinnah (Rupa & Co, 2009), "the result of a somewhat barren attainment; 'barren' because Pakistan itself, as both the progenitor and as the first born of the idea, has demonstrated that this notion of 'Muslims being a separate nation does not work'" (p. 524). Pakistan carries this enormous burden of the past. The idea of Pakistan, as noted by M.J. Akbar, remains weaker than the Pakistanis.However, a transformation of Pakistan's political system sooner or later "cannot be entirely ruled out" (p. 27). It depends more on how smoothly but radically the monolithic bureaucratic organization, especially the army "which neither runs Pakistan effectively nor allows any other organisation to do so", is reformed. The Islamic rationale of Pakistan's nationhood and the role of Islam in the state- and nation-building process, which has implanted "the germ of theocracy in Pakistan's genes", need to be revisited by Pakistanis themselves. Cohen's suggestion for building good relations with India as a necessary condition for Pakistan to build itself into a modern society and state (p. 44) is realistic, but his assertion that India "has generally pursued a tough line toward Pakistan" (p. 28) and is ambivalent over normalization of relations with Pakistan (p. 62) seems biased, considering that India has always extended a hand of friendship despite Pakistan's repeated misadventures. His understanding that "nuclear weapons have not brought about a genuine peace [!] between India and Pakistan" (p. 46) repeats the Western fallacy on the role of nuclear weapons outside the West.In the second chapter, Kanti Bajpai sees Pakistan muddling along with six possible scenarios. The first set of radical futures could be a Somalia-like state collapse; balkanization along regional lines; or an Islamic revolution of the Iranian or Taliban kind. The second set with moderate futures that Pakistan may experience is: a deepening "liberal" democracy; a complete military takeover; or the continuation of the present muddling along. His central argument is that in the next ten years Pakistan will maintain its status quo. Present-day Pakistan, in his view, is an "uneasy mix" of five tendencies: state failure, regional balkanization, Islamic fundamentalism, military domination, and liberal democracy. But there is no group or organization that can overwhelm the military, the civil service, the political parties, the media, and the dominance of Punjab to the point of outright collapse. …

Sitakanta Mishra, Parmanu Politics: Indian Political Parties and Nuclear Weapons, (New Delhi: Kal... more Sitakanta Mishra, Parmanu Politics: Indian Political Parties and Nuclear Weapons, (New Delhi: Kalpaz Publications, 2015), Pages: 326, Price: INR 950.00.Why do states build nuclear weapons? Explaining this age-old proliferation puzzle has been an important scholarly endeavour for nuclear policy analysts since the end of the Cold War. The renewed proliferation threats in the post- Cold War years marked by a change in global distribution of power has necessitated that the proliferation problem must be addressed with new nonproliferation policies. The quest for understanding the proliferation dynamics thus has yielded a substantive body of scholarship, with diverse theoretical approaches, such as classical realism, neo-realism, organisational culture and domestic politics models, and psychological and sociological approaches. Although the realist approach dominates much of the scholarship on proliferation behaviour, the insights into the proliferation dynamics as revealed by approaches like domestic politics have been found to be particularly useful for predicting proliferation behaviour and formulating new non-proliferation strategies.This book makes an important contribution to this strand of literature by tracing the historical evolution of the perspectives of three mainstream political parties in India namely, the Indian National Congress (INC), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Communist Party of India- Marxist (CPI-M) on nuclear weapons issues. It brings out the untold story of the internal churning within these parties on nuclear weapons issues and its impact on shaping the country's nuclear decision-making in different historical periods. Political parties are one of the indispensable institutional actors through which power is exercised in a democracy. The constitutional autonomy that the political parties in India are bestowed with enables them not only to shape the political agenda but also mobilise public opinion on crucial issues, such as nuclear weapons' policy. Their ideas, beliefs and interests, thus, have become useful analytical variables in understanding the political behaviour and policy outcomes in a democracy. By dwelling on these important domestic actors, this book fills a void in extant scholarship on India's nuclear policy, which remains heavily skewed towards the role of structural conditions in shaping the country's nuclear behaviour.At the outset, the author lays down a coherent conceptual framework by identifying four distinct characteristics of political parties for evaluating their impact on India's nuclear policymaking. The author then delineates the political nuclear interface by identifying relevant domestic political actors who have exerted considerable influence on nuclear weapons related decision-making. The novelty of this book, however, lies in the adoption of a unique methodological approach that relies on hitherto unexplored archival sources, such as various party proceedings, resolutions, and pronouncements for capturing the domestic impulses.The author brings out the sharp contrast in the ways the mainstream political parties perceive various regional and international security challenges. Through comparative analysis, he highlights how the three political parties differed in their judgement of the utility of nuclear weapons in addressing security challenges facing the country. This is essential for understanding the "status-quoist" and "revisionist" tendencies that the three national political parties have come to demonstrate on nuclear weapons issues over a long historical period. …

Indian Foreign Affairs Journal, 2018

Indian Foreign Affairs Journal, Jul 1, 2014

This book scrutinises the realm of safety-security involving ‘nuclear power’ within the context o... more This book scrutinises the realm of safety-security involving ‘nuclear power’ within the context of India’s tryst with nuclear energy. Relying on open source information, it examines the efficacy of the safety-security arrangement in and around India’s nuclear installations, keeping in mind the international best practices. As India has embarked on a civil nuclear expansion programme, the public concern for safety and security of nuclear facilities and material is obvious, especially in the backdrop of terrorist incidents and the Fukushima disaster. This poses a serious challenge to garnering greater domestic support for new nuclear projects with international collaborations. Here an attempt is made to examine the issues involving social acceptance of nuclear energy, safe disposal of nuclear waste, regulatory practices, and likely challenges ahead for India, to propose a new nuclear safety-security paradigm by looking beyond the usual ‘defence by design’ or ‘defence in-depth’ practice.

Springer eBooks, 2022

Secrecy as a security strategy in India's nuclear safety security architecture

Indian Foreign Affairs Journal, Jul 1, 2013

IndraStra Global, Oct 14, 2016

Routledge eBooks, Mar 9, 2023

India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs, Oct 1, 2008

Brill | Nijhoff eBooks, Jun 10, 2020

International journal of nuclear security, 2018

Indian Foreign Affairs Journal, 2012

Indian Foreign Affairs Journal, 2018

Indian Foreign Affairs Journal, Jul 1, 2014

Mongraph, 2020

Will the world see ushering of new world order and arrival of a new global leader post COVID-19 p... more Will the world see ushering of new world order and arrival of a new global leader post COVID-19 pandemic? Such a systemic alteration to occur, some fracture in the ruling cohort is a pre-requisite. Has any irreparable fracture among the current global ruling elites emerged? Will the wrangling centered round the pandemic will prompt any fresh alignment and counter-alignment process culminating in a new polarity? Where does India fit in? Can India, while prioritizing domestic requirements, assume some global responsibility in an unfolding new world order to ensure a seat in the high table for itself? By connecting the socio-economic-strategic spats and crisis time power play in the wake of the pandemic this paper demarcates the broad pointers of the postCOVID-19 world order which may not be fully visible for next one year or two. If the US and European powers remain absent in shaping a global unity as usual, China and India may take the crisis as opportunity to start setting new rules and initiate actions according to their global governance visions.

The author suggests that a new world order is in the offing and with the strong leadership and global vision of Narendra Modi, India must look beyond the America-led world order, and both competing and cooperating with China, to usher the post-pandemic world order to its advantage.

Parmanu Politics, 2015

This book, focusing on the nuclear-politics interface, examines which political party should be g... more This book, focusing on the nuclear-politics interface, examines which political party should be given credit, and how much in shaping India's nuclear weapons policy. Taking into account the views of the Congress, BJP and CPI {M), the study concludes that there is no single mother of India's nuclear bomb. In the process, it approves the assumption t hat national political leadership, not the political parties, is paramount in India's nuclear weapons decision making. Furthermore, nuclear policy does not change with the change of government, and changes despite the same party forms the government again. The study highlights how the issue of nuclear weapon has an awesome appearance on the Indian political scene during the last six-decade. Thematically, the book attempts to identify the trends in the policies of the three parties, especially on the role of nuclear weapons in national security, domestic politics, and non-proliferation regime to speculate on the contours of India's future nuclear weapons policy.

Book, 2015

The book, focusing on the nuclear-politics interface, examines which political party should be gi... more The book, focusing on the nuclear-politics interface, examines which political party should be given credit, and how much in shaping India's nuclear weapons policy. Taking into account the views of the Congress, BJP and CPI {M), the study concludes that there is no single mother of India's nuclear bomb. In the process, it approves the assumption t hat national political leadership, not the political parties, is paramount in India's nuclear weapons decision making. Furthermore, nuclear policy does not change with the change of government, and changes despite the same party forms the government again. The study highlights how the issue of nuclear weapon has an awesome appearance on the Indian political scene during the last six-decade. Thematically, the book attempts to identify the trends in the policies of the three parties, especially on the role of nuclear weapons in national security, domestic politics, and non-proliferation regime to speculate on the contours of India's future nuclear weapons policy.