Bernhard Beitelmair-Berini - Indias Grand Strategy and Foreign Policy: Strategic Pluralism and Subcultures

Indias Grand Strategy and Foreign Policy

The book explores the competing grand strategic worldviews shaping Indias foreign and security policies by analyzing the interaction between normative modern international relations theories and vernacular concepts of statecraft and strategy.

To assess the diverse competing ideas which characterize Indias debates on grand strategy and foreign policy, the author presents the subculture-cleavage model of grand strategic thought. This innovative analytical framework reveals the complexities of Indias strategic pluralism and offers the building blocks for a systematic analysis of grand strategy formation. The book demonstrates that the strategic paradigms, or strategic subcultures, are marked by contending ideas of Indian statehood and civilization, held by policymakers and the informed public, and are a result of ideology-driven perceptions of the countrys strategic environment. The author argues that the apparent hybridization and stretching of modern and traditional concepts of international relations in India has become a widespread feature of Indian foreign policy to meet the needs of state formation and nation-building.

A unique approach to organizing and understanding the debates and discourse in Indian strategic thinking, the book will be of interest to specialists and students in the field of International Relations, political theory, South Asian Studies, and Indias foreign and security policy.

Bernhard Beitelmair-Berini is an associate member of the South Asia Institute (SAI) at Heidelberg University, Germany.

Routledge Advances in South Asian Studies

Edited by Subrata K. Mitra, Heidelberg University, Germany and Rani Mullen College of William and Mary, USA

South Asia, with its burgeoning, ethnically diverse population, soaring economies, and nuclear weapons, is an increasingly important region in the global context. The series, which builds on this complex, dynamic, and volatile area, features innovative and original research on the region as a whole or on the countries. Its scope extends to scholarly works drawing on history, politics, development studies, sociology, and economics of individual countries from the region as well as those that take an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to the area as a whole or to a comparison of two or more countries from this region. In terms of theory and method, rather than basing itself on any one orthodoxy, the series draws broadly on the insights germane to area studies, as well as the toolkit of the social sciences in general, emphasizing comparison, the analysis of the structure and processes, and the application of qualitative and quantitative methods. The series welcomes submissions from established authors in the field as well as from young authors who have recently completed their doctoral dissertations.
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42. Indias Grand Strategy and Foreign Policy
Strategic Pluralism and Subcultures
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For a full list of titles, please see: https://www.routledge.com/asianstudies/series/RASAS

Indias Grand Strategy and Foreign Policy

Strategic Pluralism and Subcultures

Bernhard Beitelmair-Berini

First published 2022
by Routledge
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2022 Bernhard Beitelmair-Berini

The right of Bernhard Beitelmair-Berini to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Beitelmair-Berini, Bernhard, author.
Title: India's grand strategy and foreign policy : strategic pluralism and subcultures / Bernhard Beitelmair-Berini.
Description: First Ediition. | New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series:
Routledge Advances in South Asian Studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021004391 | ISBN 9780367553449 (Hardback) | ISBN 9780367557973 (Paperback) | ISBN 9781003095194 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Political anthropology--India. | Strategic culture--India. | Pluralism--Political aspects. | Subculture. | India--Foreign relations.
Classification: LCC GN492 .B45 2021 | DDC 306.20954--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004391

ISBN: 978-0-367-55344-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-55797-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-09519-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To Marlene

and my family

Contents

This book is the result of a longstanding engagement with Indias grand strategy, which started during an internship in the Austrian ministry of defense (Direktion fr Sicherheitspolitik) in Vienna in 2005 and 2006 and received a boost at the IISS-Global Strategic Review in 2010 in Geneva, which led to the decision to pursue a PhD in Heidelberg. Such an endeavour would not have been possible without the active support and encouragement of many individuals.

First among them I have, therefore, to thank my Doktorvater Professor Subrata K. Mitra, for his guidance and unwavering confidence in my project. I have to express my heartiest gratitude to Professor Mitra as I would have not proceeded so far without his readily available and warm-hearted supervision and the opportunities of learning his department provided in the field of South Asian politics and in particular Indias foreign and security policy. I would also like to express my great thanks and gratitude to Professor Yale H. Ferguson, as my second supervisor, who has accompanied me since my magister with unfailing support for my forays into the field of global politics. In addition, a special thank you goes to Professor Rahul Mukherji, who has since his arrival in Heidelberg in May 2016 solidly supported my research. He enhanced my professionalism in academic life by further integrating me into the department and made me feel at home in Heidelberg even more.

Besides these three professorial father figures, I have to extend my gratitude and appreciation to my dear friends and colleagues at the South Asia Institute (SAI), Heidelberg University, who have become a second family to me. Im especially indebted to Dr Seyed Hossein Zarhani, Dr Jivanta Schttli, Dr Markus Pauli, and Dr Michael Liebig, who have influenced my project through the fruitful intellectual exchange and critical feedback they shared with me on many occasions. Through the far-reaching academic network of the South Asia Institute I had the pleasure to engage in inspiring conversations on Indias strategic culture with scholars like Professor Sumit Ganguly, Professor Dietmar Rothermund, Professor Partha S. Ghosh, Swapan Dasgupta, Professor Frank Pfetsch, Dr Suba Chandran, Dr Mischa Hansel, Dr Deep Datta-Ray, and Sqn. leader Rana Chhina. Finally, thank you also to my dear colleague Patrycja Jastrzbska, who helped me in formatting the bibliography.