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Securing India: Strategic Thought and Practice Kanti P. Bajpai and Amitabh Mattoo (eds) New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1996 ISBN 81-7304-147-9
The broad cultural determinants of state behaviour are a topic presently in vogue with international relations scholars. Possessed with the ambition and some of the necessary accoutrements for an important role in global affairs, India is nonetheless widely regarded as being congenitally incapable of fashioning a cogent approach to attaining fundamental security policy objectives. Indeed, the country is an anomaly among the world's nuclear powers. Two decades after the Pokhran explosion, India's nuclear weapons programme is marked more by indecision than purposive direction: the only issue on which New Delhi appears resolute is on what it is not prepared to do with the programme (relinquish it unconditionally).
India thus represents a significant puzzle for scholars of strategic culture, and this book aims to shed light on the historical and cultural factors that shape the external behaviour of the modern Indian state. The book's core consists of two essays by George K. Tanham, a Vice President at the RAND Corporation in the United States. Originally published elsewhere, these essays have been reprinted here in order, as the editors write in their preface, to stimulate a wider debate on India's strategic options. The first essay, `Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay', elaborates the provocative thesis that independent India has rarely thought coherently and systematically...