“India is often said to have a rich strategic culture.” Discuss. (2018, 10 Marks)
Strategic culture, a term Jack L. Snyder coined in a 1977 RAND study of Soviet nuclear thinking, is the set of inherited beliefs, memories and preferences that shape how a state thinks about force. Whether India’s is rich is contested: its tradition is deep, but its planning has been thin.
The case for richness
- Classical texts: Kautilya’s Arthashastra sets out the Saptanga state, the mandala of rivals and allies, the six-fold policy (shadgunya) and the four upayas (sama, dana, bheda, danda). Henry Kissinger (World Order, 2014) placed it among the great realist works. The Manusmriti treats danda (coercive authority) as the core of kingship.
- Epics and Vedic literature: the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Puranas describe alliance, embassy, espionage and war; the Rig Veda records tribal warfare and assemblies. S. Jaishankar (The India Way, 2020) reads the Mahabharata as statecraft balancing ethics and power.
- The national movement: Congress positions on Indian troops in imperial wars, the Manchurian crisis (1931) and Japan’s attack on China (1937, with a medical mission). Dadabhai Naoroji, Sri Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru built an outlook centred on autonomy.
- Recognisable patterns: restraint, no-first-use, aversion to alliances and strategic autonomy, carried by Indira Gandhi (1971) and Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1998).
- Kanti Bajpai identifies three competing schools: Nehruvian, neoliberal and hyperrealist. Rival schools signal an active strategic culture, not its absence.
The case against
- George K. Tanham (Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay, 1992) found little formal, systematic strategic planning, blaming cultural diversity, the colonial legacy and non-alignment.
- Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta (Arming without Aiming, 2010) saw strategic restraint producing modernisation without a clear political purpose.
- India still has no published national security strategy; Chief of Defence Staff Anil Chauhan has argued that an unwritten one exists. Responses to 1962 and Kargil were reactive.
Weighing the debate
Tanham’s yardstick was Western: it privileged military doctrine and discounted diplomatic and non-violent strategy, though India won freedom by just such a strategy. Institutions have matured: a nuclear doctrine (2003), the NSC, the Chief of Defence Staff (2020) and, after Operation Sindoor (May 2025), a declared readiness to answer terror militarily.
Conclusion
India has a rich strategic tradition and a distinct culture of restraint and autonomy. What it has lacked is the machinery to turn tradition into systematic planning. That gap has narrowed since 1998, but without a written strategy it has not closed.