Editorial

The search for the persistence of ideas and frames of reference is nowhere more evident than in foreign policy debates. In a situation where change is the only constant we know, reaching out to old certainties and acknowledged principles, and the repeated affirmation of accepted ways of knowing our worlds, continue to map our research and policy trajectories. The challenge is to reinvent much of this to deal with new situations, and the continuation of often older issues in a different world from the one in which they first emerged. Many of the articles in this issue of the India Quarterly take on this task.

Our first article indicates both a lingering attachment to the idea of non-alignment in Indian foreign policy and also its reinterpretation to explain the shift in India’s national interest from global player to global power. The article argues that this shift is well served by the idea of an independent policy, a notion central to the idea of non-alignment. For a more aspirational India seeking to make headway on the multilateral stage some things have changed such as balancing a south–south dialogue with an increasing north–south one, but strategic autonomy, an aversion to alliances and the importance of the United Nations as a global institution remain constants. If non-alignment was a policy choice for dealing with other states, it was also one way of projecting India’s soft power to the rest of the world as the second article points out. The article cites the attractive elements in India’s soft power outreach: ideas, history, diaspora, lifestyle and its inherent pluralism. Yet India is not in the top 30 countries in the world which wield varying but effective degrees of soft power. The article argues that the challenge to India’s soft power lies in the absence of appropriate hard power capacities to balance soft power approaches, the geopolitical situation in its neighbourhood, significant internal divisions that undermine the notion of a pluralistic India and a foreign policy institutional structure unable to cope with rapidly increasing foreign policy agendas.

Two other articles look at why some social groups in South Asia took to militancy, in the one instance Sikhs in Punjab and in the other jihadists in Bangladesh. Both articles are in many ways instructive for a broader discussion on policy and research on terrorism and insurgencies in the region. In a discussion of Sikh militancy in the Punjab in the 1980s, the author points to evidence that there is little correlation between poverty and terrorism but there is one between terrorism and loss of status as well as terrorism and the aspiration for greater status. The Sikh population in the Punjab, and in India in general, was relatively well off but feared a challenge to their economic, social and political position. Much of these conclusions also apply to the case of Bangladesh where fundamentalist ideas from Islamic states in the global south were welcomed by groups that saw their displacement in South Asian and global society. Significantly, when radical ideologies persist in changed situations, as recent evidence from Khalistani groups indicates, it may be time to ask if the community is still ‘framing’ its risk perceptions in the old way and what the likely implications of this ‘status quo’ thinking could be for policy makers. The last article looks at India’s relations with Canada, important once again for New Delhi’s development and nuclear energy plans. In many ways, the trajectory of this relationship maps the distance between India’s earlier peripheral position and current centrality to the world’s economies. In many ways, as well, as the India–Canada story tells us, it has been a long, hard and often lonely journey founded on strategic autonomy and national interest.

A last word on our book review section in this issue. Four of the books reviewed relate to South Asia (Afghanistan, Myanmar, Pakistan and Sri Lanka)—all current areas of conflict and change, and each one of them struggling to deal with their own political and strategic dilemmas. One book deals with India’s defence production policy. If anything, they are indicative of the need to re-fashion domestic institutions and securitised discourses in all South Asian states, to redirect policy from domestic conflict to livelihood issues and to create the capacities for deterring conflict from across borders and within states.