Abstract
The ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences and humanities is fundamentally changing the way we understand and think of space, opening up the conceptual bandwidth to step out of the ‘territorial trap’ and move through liminal space, empirically as well as epistemologically. Itinerant enquiries are now stepping onto the road less taken, taking as their point of departure the holy grail of the modern state, the linear boundary line that divides and separates. A growing body of literature on border studies is bringing a whole new lexicon of approaching these spaces as dynamic and socially constructed. It is this rich and growing body of scholarship that Shibashis Chatterjee’s book joins in raising fundamental questions about India’s spatial imagination of South Asia.
The author goes onto argue how, in the elite imagination, South Asia remains ‘a space defined in terms of power and sovereign territoriality’ (p. xv). This imaginary, he asserts, has remained ‘remarkably constant’ and ends up crowding out other alternative conceptions of the region as spaces of commerce and of community. Chatterjee reaches this firm and definitive conclusion very early in the book in response to the three key questions that he sets out for himself, namely what conception of space guides India’s vision of its neighbourhood, who articulates it and what are its consequences. It is a compelling argument and one that he painstakingly substantiates with a fine-grained engagement with the literature. He notes the chronic fear of the alternative that has come to grip South Asia’s policymakers and which may ‘throw their nationalist and territorial projects haywire’ (p. 73). Many of these are reminiscent of colonial state-building experiences and the manner in which the colonial state used mobility as a state tool to order and reorder frontier spaces. An illustrative example of the ‘frontier fetish’ was the construction of a complex and elaborate system of inner and outer rings that spanned from Afghanistan, Xinjiang, Tibet, Baluchistan the northwest frontier provinces, Gilgit, Leh, Sikkim to Bhutan and Nepal (Mehra, 2007). How the Indian state has approached this historical legacy and the strong elements of economic, cultural and intellectual continuities help uncover many of these cognitive echoes, imparting an invisible subtext to India’s subjective consciousness.
The author rues the fact that India’s experience of subregional cooperation remains captive to the ‘familiar geopolitical dynamics unleashed by territoriality’ (p. xx) and explains why India has ‘favoured a power reading of its immediate neighbourhood’ (p. 39). This is a valid critique, and it is indeed the case that the subregional moment in Indian International Relations (IR) has been a bittersweet one— caught between colliding dualisms that have today resulted in a conflicted and confused narrative. While it speaks of a liberal vision of globalism, it has at the same time been curiously resistant to step away from the reductionist logic of borders as barriers. These centralising impulses go a long way in explaining why India’s neighbourhood policy remains unambiguously top-down and continues to be firmly led and steered by New Delhi. For instance, incongruously it is New Delhi, which has regularly hosted the Bay of Bengal Multi-Sectoral Initiative for Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) Working Groups on regional governance issues such as disaster management, customs cooperation and regulation of passenger and cargo vehicular traffic. A comparison with the working of China’s subregional discourse is both revealing as well as sobering. It is China’s border province of Yunnan, which regularly hosts the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) Working Groups on a range of regional governance issues such as environment, tourism and agriculture.
Chatterjee skilfully weaves through the contradictions and challenges that confront disciplinary IR and why it fails to problematise the notions of space, epistemology and agency. He is right that ‘mainstream IR does not generally ask questions on borders’ (p. 12). Clearly, what makes India’s emerging discourse of rethinking territoriality problematic is that it runs parallel to and often as a direct counter to a highly extant and entrenched securitised narrative on borders. This tension at the heart of the discourse on rethinking borders has been a virtual conceptual chokepoint, holding it back empirically as well as epistemologically. As long as the statist discourse refrains from foregrounding this central tension, it will lack the incentive to depart from a prepared geopolitical script. This fundamental dichotomy will be critical in order to understand the construction of borders in Indian IR and the manner in which it has today become a prisoner of binaries, unwittingly caught between feel-good geo-economic hopes and crippling geopolitical fears. Consequently, India’s intellectual engagement with borders at multiple levels—cognitive, territorial and disciplinary—has remained cosmetic and unimaginative.
The book then looks at possible ways to transcend territoriality, arguably its most interesting and challenging section. He rightly notes the need for ‘alternative spatial imaginations’ (p. 196). He also notes that he finds ‘no evidence of such an alternative vision having guided India’s policies’ (p. 196) What one misses in the book at this point is a forceful and critical engagement with statist discourses that precisely claim to be transcending territoriality. One wishes, for instance, that Chatterjee had interrogated under what conditions the spatial turn in Indian IR could mark a shift from fixed notions of territorial space towards more dynamic notions. To be fair, he does admit that he has ‘not extended a normative case of whether the spatial basis of India’s imagination of its neighbourhood has been constraining or liberating; static or dynamic, progressive or regressive, located in a paradigm of control or communication’ (p. vii).
Be that as it may, if one were to take the baton forward, one possible way to look for alternative spatial imaginaries would be to invert the mainstream research and policy gaze. Lowering the research and policy gaze can throw up interesting instances of a growing bottom-up engagement by India’s border states with its neighbourhood and by extending alternative spatial imaginations. A practice-based template has the potential to incorporate a rich and hitherto untapped corpus of domain and field knowledge that national level policymakers have no means of acquiring on their own. It is also one that mainstream Indian IR has no intellectual capacity to engage with due to the self-serving red lines that scholars have drawn for themselves. Going forward, a lot will depend on if and how Indian IR re-engages with the notion of the international itself (Kurian 2019). When one talks of alternative scenarios for foreign policy, one must also talk of what Thomas Jackson refers to as ‘alternative diplomacies’ (Jackson, 2017, p. 2).
A fundamental reason why India’s dominant spatial imagination is problematic is that it remains at the end of the day a highly capital-centric conception of space. The idea of the ‘extended neighbourhood’, a recurrent theme in the Act East Policy, is a classic illustration of this: one that ignores the reality that for the border region, the neighbourhood is an immediate and not an extended one. This also can explain as to why, as Chatterjee notes, ‘the confidence required for imagining alternative spatial imaginations is lacking in India’ (p. 42). Privileging the formal, state-led, inter-governmental processes has meant that Indian diplomacy has completely ended up overlooking a range of practices at the border regions that are fundamentally reshaping India’s engagement with its neighbourhood. These constitute subterranean (sub)regionalisms, a form of integration that mainstream research and policy has so far chosen to ignore. A far more complex and dynamic picture emerges once we disaggregate the state and look beyond the national to take into account different and potentially contradictory definitions of space. As international engagement by Indian border states increases, understanding the incentives and preferences of local political elites and understanding how these elite bargains are struck will become critical to understand the intersections between space and scale in Indian foreign policy. These multiscalar competitive bargaining processes alert us to the fact that elite consensus can neither be taken for granted nor is it monolithic.
If it wants to get out of the analytical cul-de-sac it has boxed itself into, Indian IR needs to look beyond (and below) the systemic, to the subterranean. At the very least, mainstream research needs to systematise the diversity of this growing regional engagement by border regions in terms of its nature (formal or informal); activities (social, economic, cultural, political); duration (sustained or episodic) and actors (public or private). If it is willing to do so, the subregional turn in India’s foreign policy can introduce a new lexicon for theorising space and scale and in the process, rescale Indian foreign policy towards interesting, hitherto uncharted, intellectual and policy trajectories. It is clear that Indian IR needs to make a fresh set of choices. Debating many of the questions that the book raises could well herald an intellectual journey that is fiercely contested but also one that richly abounds in possibilities. Possibilities to question received categories of thinking could fundamentally change the way we understand and think of space in Indian IR. If it does so, India’s borderlands need not remain ‘the black hole of sovereign territoriality’ (p. 182) that Chatterjee fears and can instead morph to become laboratories to problematise the Westphalian idea in fundamental ways.