Counterinsurgency Democracy And The Politics Of Identity In India

The rhetoric of armed social welfare has become prominent in military and counterinsurgency circuits with profound consequences for the meanings of democracy, citizenship, and humanitarianism in conflict zones. By focusing on the border district of Kargil, the site of India and Pakistan’s fourth war in 1999, this book analyses how humanitarian policies of healing and heart warfare infused the logic of democracy and militarism in the post-war period. Compassion became a strategy to contain political dissension, regulate citizenship, and normalize the extensive militarization of Kargil’s social and political order. The book uses the power of ethnography to foreground people’s complex subjectivities and the violence of compassion, healing, and sacrifice in India’s disputed frontier state. Based on extensive research in several sites across the region, from border villages in Kargil to military bases and state offices in Ladakh and Kashmir, this engaging book presents new material on military-civil relations, the securitization of democracy and development, and the extensive militarization of everyday life and politics. It is of interest to scholars working in diverse fields including political anthropology, development, and Asian Studies.

The rhetoric of armed social welfare has become prominent in military and counterinsurgency circuits with profound consequences for the meanings of democracy, citizenship, and humanitarianism in conflict zones. By focusing on the border district of Kargil, the site of India and Pakistan’s fourth war in 1999, this book analyses how humanitarian policies of healing and heart warfare infused the logic of democracy and militarism in the post-war period. Compassion became a strategy to contain political dissension, regulate citizenship, and normalize the extensive militarization of Kargil’s social and political order. The book uses the power of ethnography to foreground people’s complex subjectivities and the violence of compassion, healing, and sacrifice in India’s disputed frontier state. Based on extensive research in several sites across the region, from border villages in Kargil to military bases and state offices in Ladakh and Kashmir, this engaging book presents new material on military-civil relations, the securitization of democracy and development, and the extensive militarization of everyday life and politics. It is of interest to scholars working in diverse fields including political anthropology, development, and Asian Studies.

A simple linear model for India has been developed to demonstrate how the degree of inaccessibility of an area, the strength of separate social identity of its population, and the amount of external influence on the area determine the propensity of that area for insurgency. Implications of the Indian model for various aspects of counterinsurgency strategy for the Third World, including economic development, the role of democracy, social and political autonomy, and counterinsurgency operations are discussed. Recommendations for effective counterinsurgency strategy and for long-term stability in these countries are included. India is very complex and provides an ideal window for understanding Asian society.

A simple linear model for India has been developed to demonstrate how the degree of inaccessibility of an area, the strength of separate social identity of its population, and the amount of external influence on the area determine the propensity of that area for insurgency. Implications of the Indian model for various aspects of counterinsurgency strategy for the Third World, including economic development, the role of democracy, social and political autonomy, and counterinsurgency operations are discussed. Recommendations for effective counterinsurgency strategy and for long-term stability in these countries are included. India is very complex and provides an ideal window for understanding Asian society.

A simple linear model for India has been developed to demonstrate how the degree of inaccessibility of an area, the strength of separate social identity of its population, and the amount of external influence on the area determine the propensity of that area for insurgency. Implications of the Indian model for various aspects of counterinsurgency strategy for the Third World, including economic development, the role of democracy, social and political autonomy, and counterinsurgency operations are discussed. Recommendations for effective counterinsurgency strategy and for long-term stability in these countries are included. India is very complex and provides an ideal window for understanding Asian society.

This edited volume focuses on India's experiences waging counterinsurgency campaigns since its independence in 1947. Filling a clear gap in the literature, the book traces and assess the origins, evolution and current state of India's counterinsurgency strategies and capabilities, focusing on key counterinsurgency campaigns waged by India within and outside its territory. It also analyzes the development of Indian doctrine on counterinsurgency, and locates this within the overall ebb and flow of India's defense and security policies. The central argument is that counterinsurgency has been an integral part of India's overall security policy and can thereby impart much to political and military leaders in other states. Since its emergence from British colonialism, India's defence policies have not merely sought to protect and preserve India's inherited colonial borders from threats by rival states, but have also sought to prevent and suppress secessionist movements. In countering insurgencies, the Indian state has fashioned strategies that seek to repress militarily any secessionist movement, while simultaneously forging a range of civilian administrative and institutional arrangements that attempt to address the grievances of disaffected populations. The book highlights key strategic and tactical innovations that the Indian Army and security forces made to deal with a range of insurgent movements. Simultaneously, it also examines how the civilian-military nexus enabled India's policy makers to utilize existing, and formulate novel, institutional means to address extant political grievances. India has been most successful where it has managed to use calibrated force, obtained the trust of much of the aggrieved population and made persuasive commitments to political and institutional reform. Examination of these elements of India's counterinsurgency performance can be compared to counterinsurgency doctrine developed by other countries, including the United States, and thus yield comparative policy prescriptions and recommendations that can be applied to other counterinsurgency contexts. This book will be of great interest to students of counterinsurgency and irregular warfare, Indian politics, Asian Security Studies and Strategic Studies in general.

In recent years there has been a significant reorientation in India's policy towards its Northeast region. Yet, Indian policy thinking has been insulated from the virtual intellectual revolution in the last one decade to study armed civil conflicts and ways to manage, resolve, and transform them. This volume lays emphasis on the term 'rethinking' and offers new ways of understanding the conflicts, and of ways to resolve them. The chapters discuss wide-ranging issues which include the multilayered nature of the conflict in the Northeast, and how democratic politics and the world of armed rebellions intersect in complex ways in this region. An analysis of the Naga war and its nation-building project is discussed. How the Northeast figures in postcolonial India's national imagination, how Assamese society engages with the term 'terrorist', and how state-society conflicts are muted in Mizoram have been argued. The role of ideas in conflict transformation, and an alternative vision of development in Mizoram have been argued. The role of ideas in conflict transformation, and an alternative vision of development in Arunachal Pradesh have also been discussed.

More than seventy years after its founding, with Narendra Modi's authoritarian Hindu nationalists in government, is the dream of Indian democracy still alive and well? India's pluralism has always posed a formidable challenge to its democracy, with many believing that a clash of identities based on region, language, caste, religion, ethnicity, and tribe would bring about its demise. With the meteoric rise to power of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the nation's solidity is once again called into question: is Modi's Hindu majoritarianism an anti-democratic attempt to transform India into a monolithic Hindu nation from which minorities and dissidents are forcibly excluded? With examinations of the way that class and caste power shaped the making of India's postcolonial democracy, the role of feminism, the media, and the public sphere in sustaining and challenging democracy, this book interrogates the contradictions at the heart of the Indian democratic project, examining its origins, trajectories, and contestations.

This book provides a micro-historical analysis of the emergence and contemporary dynamics of recent ethnic sub-nationalist insurgencies in South Asia. Using comparative case studies, it discusses the causes of each insurgency, analyses the trajectory and dynamics of each including attempts at resolution, and highlights the wider theories of ethno-nationalist insurgency and mobilization. Bringing together an international group of contributors, the book covers insurgencies in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh. It questions why ethnic sub-nationalist insurgencies occurred at particular points in time and not at others, and explores the comparative trajectories of these movements. The book goes on to discern reappearing patterns of conflict escalation/de-escalation through the method of comparative process-tracing. It argues that while identity is a necessary factor for insurgency, it is not a sufficient one. Instead, ethnic mobilization and insurgency only emerge when it is activated by tension emerging from political competition between ethnic and central state elites. These elite-led dynamics, when combined with favourable socio-economic and political conditions, make the ethnic masses primed to accept the often symbolically-rich appeals from their leaders to mobilize against the central state. Providing an important study on ethno-nationalist insurgencies in South Asia, the book will be of interest to those working in the fields of South Asian Politics, Security Studies and Ethnic Conflict.