Organizer: William Vanderbok, California Lutheran University
Chair: Richard Sisson, Ohio State University
Discussant: Leo E. Rose, University of California, Berkeley
It certainly has been a busy time in South Asia since early May. The U.S. ambassador to New Delhi recently asserted that India and Pakistan are closer to a nuclear exchange than the U.S. and USSR were at any time during the Cold War. India is in the process of buying a Russian aircraft carrier and will soon lay the keel for a nuclear submarine. Over 25,000 have died in fighting along the LoC since 1991.
The last time I organized an AAS panel was for the 1987 meeting in Boston. At that time, the topic was Indian electoral behavior. With papers by myself, Paul Brass, Paul Wallace and one of Ramashray Roy’s graduate students—Amita Shastri if memory serves me. Thus far papers at various meetings have been dominated by people in general strategic studies. What is needed, however, is a panel focusing on South Asian strategic affairs with South Asian focus and South Asian expertise. Most panels with a political science base look at recent events and try to explain them by reference to the past. This panel will look at recent events and look towards the future and lay out a series of high probability scenarios. It consists of four papers.
(1) A review of the Kashmir problem is, of course, obligatory since this issue has framed events for the past half-century. Hopefully, this will also include scenarios for resolving it ranging from the most unlikely, a sudden infusion of sanity and goodwill, all the way to ethnic cleansing and beyond.
(2) State stability, communal conflict and irredentism movements, primarily in India but also in Pakistan. Since so much of the Indian police and army are absorbed by everything from capturing Veerappan to containing Kashmiri nationalists, the core idea is to revisit Selig Harrison’s India: The Most Dangerous Decades in a nuclear environment.
(3) India’s vision of the world and its strategic role, now and twenty years from now. What are its military and diplomatic capabilities? What will it take to meet its projected future? After all, India is buying a Russian aircraft carrier, planning to launch nuclear submarines and conducting IRBM tests. Meanwhile, half of its Bofors howitzers are inoperative for lack of spare parts. How realistic is all of this?
(4) What will the likely reaction of India’s neighbors be over time to her enhanced aspirations and growing economic and military power? Pakistan and China are key, but responses by the U.S., Europe, Indonesia, and Iran are also important.