Essence of Indecision: Understanding Indian Security Policy Choices

Abstract

Essence of Indecision:Understanding Indian Security Policy Choices Frank O'Donnell (bio) As India's decisions become more consequential to global politics, understanding the influences behind them is increasingly crucial for scholars, policy experts, and world political leaders. Rajesh Basrur's new book, Subcontinental Drift: Domestic Politics and India's Foreign Policy, deftly explains the interplay of India's internal politics, external environment, and policymaker preference hierarchies to offer a persuasive theory of Indian decision-making on foreign and defense policy. Importantly, the book includes case selections that encompass security policy decisions made not only during the current government led by Narendra Modi, which began in 2014, but also during the previous several decades. As such, this book is highly recommended for both scholars and relative newcomers to the topics of South Asia studies, rising powers, and international security. As befits one of the most thoughtful scholars of India's security policies, Basrur eloquently engages with existing theoretical schools of international relations and their explanations of Indian external conduct. He develops the neoclassical realist paradigm as a theory more permissive of domestic political explanations than the external systemic focus of structural realism. The author modifies this paradigm to introduce an analytic tool of evaluating whether policymakers make the necessary decisions within their power to protect citizens. This test inherently draws upon realist thought, dating back to Kautilya and Machiavelli, that the primary—and moral—obligation of leaders is to protect their subjects. As Basrur powerfully argues, locating responsibility for state failures in this regard is crucial not just for better policymaking but for theoretical development in bridging the "materialist/normative divide in academia," as "in important respects, the moral is the empirical when accountability is neglected in making policy" (p. xii). Democratic leaders cannot control all elements of their domestic political context and have even less influence over often fast-moving developments in regional and international politics. Reflecting this reality, [End Page 129] Basrur conceptualizes the distinct categories of involuntary and voluntary drift (pp. 9–10) to explain why "uncertainty and indecisiveness have periodically afflicted India's foreign policy in areas of critical importance to its national security" (pp. 1–2). Involuntary drift occurs when leaders cannot implement effective policy due to players with domestic veto power. In the two cases of involuntary drift exemplified in negotiating the U.S.-India civil nuclear agreement (2005–8) and Indian policy toward the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009), these veto players were Indian political parties opposed to the prime minister's preferred course of action. The parliamentary fragility of coalition governments meant that these parties were able to variably block, water down, or delay the execution of policy responses. Importantly, Basrur notes that the initial preferred policies of decision-makers were "system-driven," and would be recognized by structural realists as judicious initiatives to improve or stabilize India's international power position. The U.S.-India civil nuclear deal has been extensively covered in extant literature on contemporary Indian foreign policy, which has also established that the parliamentary opposition of both the opportunistic Bharatiya Janata Party and the anti-American Communist Party of India (Marxist) was the major cause of delays to India's approval of the deal. However, the Sri Lankan case study offers a rare cogent yet nuanced account of Indian policy toward each phase of the civil war, and how shifting domestic political forces in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu complicated India's response. The book demonstrates how India's hesitant and halting support for the Sri Lankan government, especially in the latter stages of the war, created room for China to fill this space and establish a strategic foothold in Colombo, which it continues to enjoy today. Ineffective Indian policies have therefore led to negative systemic consequences for New Delhi in its broader geopolitical competition with Beijing. The second part of the book examines cases of voluntary drift, where decision-makers face little or no meaningful domestic political constraints on their ability to devise and implement their preferred policies. Policy drift here occurs when leaders still "choose options that avoid difficult and costly action, in part because the political cost of inadequate action is not severe...