Diplomacy Beyond History: Analytic-Violence,Producer-Centred Research,India

Introduction

The history of how Indian nuclear diplomacy eschewed the global practice of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), its insatiable offensiveness and accumulation of tens of thousands of nuclear bombs has been recited many a time. In contrast, India set a novel precedent by adopting a posture of perpetual defence against its foes by foregoing the right to match, let alone surpass, their bombs. Explanations of why India chose to sacrifice, that is, knowingly imperil itself in terms of MAD include, on the one hand, a feeble economy unable to pay for a weapons programme, and on the other, an inability to appreciate MAD for keeping the peace or militarising society. Of interest is not the limiting of diplomacy to the material, or the regarding of Indians as infantile for having to learn how to do diplomacy from Europe. Such explanations cannot account for such awkward details as China, Pakistan and North Korea nuclearising from a far weaker economic position, and India developing the bomb only to constrain it as no one else, within No First Use (NFU) and Credible Minimum Deterrence (CMD) (Datta-Ray, 2015, ft. nt. 80–83, p. 325). ¹

History’s partiality is attended to in the first section. It finds history’s concept of diplomacy presumes the West invented it and that the purpose is assimilation. Additionally, the presumption of non-Westerners lacking knowledge discloses a moral judgement: Indians are incapable of originality, must mimic, and so are infantile. The irrationality of this is what makes it racist, and it organises ‘analytic-violence’. This is the offence of imposing a Western conceptualisation of diplomacy, in turn, offensive. Analytic-violence also overcomes ontological differences between historical schools, such as Realists and Postcolonials, with an ethic which unifies them into berating India for not being Westernised enough or so much that the West’s errors are repeated. Sustaining imposition and rectification is analytic-violence extending to the practice of history to delete, dismiss, and denigrate, Indian diplomacy. It therefore is not explained in its entirety or in terms of its producers at the granular level of engaging sources who are in any case, branded inferior by the concept orchestrating history.

Another way of viewing analytic-violence is that it irretrievably corrupts history regardless of whether it is deductive or inductive. Hence the second section presents ‘Producer-Centred Research’ (PCR) which is a new method for being abductive, and so initiated by a problem, in this case racism, so to not replicate it when engaging India. The engagement is at the level of ‘rationality’ because of its, and the problem’s, significance. PCR converts history’s single racist rationality into ‘rationalities’. The plurality ensures rationality is maintained but that it is also rendered one of many rationalities, thereby safeguarding against aphasia—or forgetting the racism underpinning history. PCR therefore notes rationality but can also search for rationalities as robust practices and interpret them in producer terms. This is because rationalities permit treating Indians as ‘authoritative sources’, equal to the West. Enabled then is the reading of Indian diplomacy in its entirety and in terms of its producers, which is so different from historical-analysis that it is termed exegesis.

Exegesis’ value lies in uncovering what is really going on as well as possibilities and risks, blindsided by history’s analytic-violence. The final section is an exegesis of India’s nuclear diplomacy and the 2019 strike against Balakot to reveal that it is not offence but defence that organises New Delhi’s diplomacy. Relative to offence, defence improves the quality of security, stems sovereignty’s fragmentation, and retains control over the future. This is because offence finds security in exceeding opponent’s offensiveness which intensifies competition and so degrades overall security. Sovereignty is fragmented by security being dependent on the opponent, for choosing to exceed, or not, one’s own offensiveness. Control is handed over to opponents because it is their actions that actors must counter, for security lies in exceeding everyone else’s offensiveness. New Delhi avoided all three by choosing defence for its nuclear diplomacy, but it meant living in the shadow of nuclear annihilation and this sacrifice called for an uncommon courage. Its discarding is disclosed by PCR to be at the centre of the Balakot strike. Its exegesis identifies meaning, where history finds none, as a shift from defence to offence in the long-standing rivalry with Pakistan over Kashmir. Accounting for the shift is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leadership’s unwillingness to expend the courage demanded by sacrifice in the face of the offence that is terrorism. Indubitably, offence in directing violence out is courageous, but it is immeasurably intensified in sacrifice for it directs violence into oneself. The intensity of the BJP leadership’s intent to discard courage can be calculated in the price they paid to secure relief. It began with equating India with Pakistan to calculate the offence at Balakot, and fragmenting India’s sovereignty for security became dependent on how Pakistan responded. Moreover, control was handed to Islamabad because it could now legitimately escalate to safeguard itself from an offensive neighbour. The novelty of this is obvious in what occurred prior to Balakot. Then, New Delhi did muster the courage to sacrifice itself, overwhelmingly in the borderlands, so to deaden terrorist offensiveness and deny meaning to Islamabad’s provocations. All this had to be given up so that the BJP’s leaders could renounce courage, and to do so they risked nuclear war and so imperilled humanity.

Analytic-Violence

History’s inability to narrate Indian diplomacy in its entirety or in terms of its producers arises from a conceit which inaugurates analytic-violence (Datta-Ray, 2015, pp. 231–258) which is the presumption Europe invented and internationalised diplomacy (Teschke, 2002), and that it is offensive (Datta-Ray, 2015, pp. 1–26). European diplomacy is supposed to have become everyone’s which is why the concept requires unpacking to determine how it orders history. Offence is coded into diplomacy by the presumptions of ‘anarchy’ or the lack of any unity and ‘binarism’. Unity’s lack obligates diplomacy to pursue an end diametrically opposite: utopian unity. This is binarism. Diplomacy then becomes the mediation of alienation, because it is lodged deep in Western Christianity. It pre-sets alienation as origin in the Old Testament with the fall of man, that is, estrangement from God. This is universalised as the ‘brotherhood of man’ in the New Testament, the semantic shift making one man’s origin everyone’s. Hence, we are all dependent on God’s mediator: Christ. He legitimises the Papacy, uniquely imbuing it with the power to unify us with God. This is progress and indeed its entwinement in Christianity is such that the word derives from the Christian profectus: perfecting the soul by unifying with God (Koselleck, 2002, p. 235). The Papacy progresses enough to establish spiritual unity in Europe, because people believe. Its demise is the Reformation undermining the Papacy as man begins to directly negotiate unification with God. This new-found belief in man’s ability to unify fragments Christian society into sects and states which usurp the Church’s role in delivering unity. It is this splintering which necessitates the diplomatic system, and it is sealed by the Treaty of Westphalia’s appropriation and reproduction of spiritual unity as an intellectual contract (Datta-Ray, 2015, pp. 11–26).

Embarrassingly, this heralds a new technology to realise unity, diplomacy, because it obliterates unity by regularising a religiously and politically fragmented Europe. Europe displaces God, but not his logic: a pre-set origin and end remain. This means that though spirituality is abandoned because it failed to deliver unity as oneness with God, the idea of unity continues as an intellectual and diplomatic project. Its success makes for the ‘culture of “modernity”’ and it is, given its history, the ‘culture of the dominant Western powers’. Moreover, modern culture is ‘rationality in the sense of action that is internally consistent with given goals {and} the modern diplomatic tradition embodies an attempt to sustain behaviour on this model.’ Modern diplomacy then is a rationality. Its legatees are an ‘elite culture, comprising the common intellectual culture of modernity’. They are an exclusive club, a ‘corpus Christianorum bound by the laws of Christ.’ His laws remain the ‘essence of diplomacy … unchanged [because diplomacy is] always … promoting and justifying states’ interests’ (as cited in Datta-Ray, 2018, pp. 141–143).

Hereby diplomacy is converted into a practice that is no less than the violence of assimilating all into the corpus Christianorum, that is, Westphalia. Though anarchy is the origin for only Europe, its logic demands an end predicated on incorporating all: unity, the internationalisation of history as a particular logic. If the ‘mutual estrangement of states from Western Christendom gives rise to an international diplomatic system’ then ‘the Third World’s revolt against Western “Lordship” precipitates the transformation of diplomacy into a truly global system’. Hence, the seminal authors of diplomacy are, from Machiavelli to Kissinger, all from Christian societies. They must be, because ‘the modern world system … came into being in the Italian peninsula and reached its full expression in Europe’. As for diplomatic theory, it ‘appeared at the same time as diplomacy began to assume its distinctively modern form in the late fifteenth century’ (as cited in Datta-Ray, 2015, pp. 15–16). In short, diplomacy is a double violence: first intellectual, and then physical, assimilation. The peculiarly Christian understanding of diplomacy as conversion is what makes it intent on converting all others to this way of thinking which is analytic-violence, but that is not enough, for the logic of conversion continues into the temporal. After all, the reasoning that unity is desirable, is sanctioned by Europe’s Christian past. This is violence, and it is deemed to have been successful, at least intellectually.

Or so we are led to believe, for belying history’s concept, this violent understanding of diplomacy, is the West’s rear-guard invention of ‘cultural diversity’ or the problem of non-Western remnants confounding the story of progress, that is, Westernisation (Luhmann, 1997, p. 151). Nevertheless, analytic-violence orders the very understanding of diplomacy, and so governs the history of Indian diplomacy (Datta-Ray, 2013). The extent of analytic-violence’s hold is manifest in its overcoming ontological difference, no less, between schools, professing to be antithetical to each other. It is difficult to imagine any greater divide than the one between Realism and Postcolonialism. At issue between them is how to perceive the material because it makes for power. Its production is for Realism unchanging across time and space, yet this has long been contested (Reus-Smit, 2004). The challenge is polysemy, that is, the Postcolonial contention of the material having contending meaning. It is not that Postcolonials ignore the material, they argue, but only that they render its meaning ambivalent so as to not impose analyst’s meanings upon actors but to interrogate how actors, rather than analysts, understand the real-world (Datta-Ray, 2015, pp. 231–258).

Nonetheless, it is analytic-violence that unifies both schools for they both partake of the prejudice that Indians cannot be original. The very fact that this is unsubstantiated and is also extended along race is what makes for racism. It gears the historical story that Realists (Perkovich, 2001, p. 505) and Postcolonials (Datta-Ray, 2015, pp. 232–236) rely upon. This shared story consistently belittles Indians for denying them originality by infantilising them. India is presented as having begun, as all children are supposed to, with childish innocence and so was idealist. However, the trials and tribulations of international diplomacy forced India into confusion and then change, much like the original model of puberty is presumed to be a confusing time for adolescents and makes for change. Hence India underwent a period of ad hocism when the old was being renegotiated to make way for new learning (Datta-Ray, 2015, ft. nt. 2, p. 322). That was finally confirmed when India matured by ostensibly accepting nuclear weapons and deterrence and so the offensiveness of MAD. For both schools, the 123 Agreement with the United States, is taken as the culmination of the education. In keeping with their denial of polysemy, Realists understand this education as India finally having grown-up by learning to speak the language of violence. Furthermore, for Realists, the replication of their analytics is progress (Datta-Ray, 2015, ft. nt. 63, 65, pp. 322, 324).

Analytic-violence’s unifying of schools is how it makes for history’s ethic and that is to berate India, for not being Western enough, or being too Western, because of ‘cultural diversity’ being viewed either positively or negatively. Regardless, ‘cultural diversity’ in India is not a trace but dominant for being the state’s unique policies: NFU and CMD. At a minimum then, India’s education in the West’s ways is incomplete but it is just as likely that it has been altogether repudiated. That further energises Realist chastisement of India for not being mature enough to properly accept the logic of offence inherent to deterrence. Meanwhile Postcolonials argue meaning cannot be fixed: the atom is either for development or security. The process that led to maturity for Realists becomes regress for Postcolonials, for it presents India as childishly incompetent in containing the atom’s inherent violence (Datta-Ray, 2015, ft. nt. 6, 8, p. 322). Not only is New Delhi unable to control itself because it succumbed to the atom’s violence by weaponising, but it is also trivial for trying to reign in this violence with NFU and CMD. Noteworthy is that the mirror images of diplomacy presented by these historical schools are themselves reflections of the underlying racism of denying Indians originality and so, also the inability to learn.

These are sustained by analytic-violence at the granular level of historical practice which is defined by deletion, dismissal, and denigration. Deletion is when histories leave out entire divisions of the diplomatic apparatus, such as the Ministry of External Affairs’ (MEA) DISA (Disarmament and International Security division) (Datta-Ray, 2015, ft. nt. 20, p. 322). Dismissal is when diplomatic overtures involving the highest levels of the leadership, and the mortgaging of personal reputations to secure responses from leading powers, are cast aside as meaningless (Datta-Ray, 2015, ft. nt. 18, p. 322). Most significant however is denigration which is to brand Indians as incompetent or beyond belief. So, there is the old canard that India’s first Prime Minister (PM) Jawaharlal Nehru was unable to manage the nuclear complex (Datta-Ray, ft. nt. 5, p. 322). There is also the charge that Indians engage in nonsensical practices or lie. Commonplace is branding PM Indira Gandhi as either incapable of making up her mind and so engaging in the nonsense of passing off India’s nuclear test as ‘peaceful’ or that she was simply a liar (Talbott, 2004, pp. 14–15). Compounding these techniques of analytic-violence is that they are reliant on other techniques of analytic-violence. There is the creep of prejudice, which remarkably goes unremarked by feminists who still do not note that the accusations levelled against Mrs. Gandhi are by men who perpetuate the multi-cultural stereotype of women as incapable and in need of male guidance or the Christian stereotype of women as wily—for instance Delilah (Book of Judges, 16).

The proliferation of analytic-violence from the core concept of diplomacy that history relies upon results in error laden incoherence, or the very opposite of what history ought to be. Rather than reveal and cohere practice to mitigate violence, analytic-violence creates a vanishing-subject for the more India is studied the more it is occluded. Moreover, analytic-violence is uncontainable. In trying to contain India, analytic-violence is directed into the West because its historical methods and theories are mutilated. On the former, history is undermined by Indian historian’s works being riddled with error, presumably because they are acculturating into the West, and easily identified by Indian diplomats who have generational exposure to the West (Srinivasan, 2014). As for theoretical incoherence, there is the combining of the ontologically incompatible Western categories of Realism and Liberalism to try and account for Nehru (Datta-Ray, 2015, pp. 208–209). There is also the Realist claim Indians and Pakistanis are different at the level of rationality but then explaining both via Realism. Is there then, any difference if both can be accounted by one theory? (Datta-Ray, 2015, p. 18) The incoherence of Postcolonialism is somewhat different, but it makes insidious Realism’s racism. Postcolonialism professes to take seriously the subject by allowing it to speak, but just like Realism, there is not a single instance of allowing practitioner’s their voice so as to explain what they do (Datta-Ray, 2015, pp. 230–234; Datta-Ray, 2018). In other words, the multifarious renditions of Indian nuclear diplomacy are united in arising from a history whose core concept ensures Indians only mimic. In short, history is nothing more than the ventriloquism of Indians by an offensive concept.

Producer-Centred Research

So tainted then is the induction and deduction underscoring Indian diplomacy’s history, that it is dysfunctional. Induction claims to examine Indians and then sift the results for implications to develop an inference that something unforeseen in terms of rationality is operative, but all observation is informed by varying degrees of analytic-violence. It organises deduction or the proceeding through India to arrive at a result which demonstrates it or falsifies it, but falsification never arises since analytic-violence is enhanced to enforce conformity. To be unencumbered by induction and deduction, a new method is proposed which initiates instead with abduction or consequences and then constructs reason, and it is Producer-Centred Research (PCR). For instance:

The surprising fact that history does not account or explain, is observed.

But if India exceeds history, then its inability to account or explain becomes a matter of course.

Hence, there is reason to suspect that India exceeds history. (Peirce, 1934, p. 117)

Thus, PCR initiates with the perception of surprise. At issue is not theorising the surprise, but which hypothesis to follow? This is indicated by the relationship between observations, which in history’s engagement with India points to the former’s conceptual subversion and that this is despite general awareness of it and how it renders history incoherent. Hence, the hypothesis is that history is compromised. This is what endows PCR with utility, for it transgresses inductive and deductive reason for being sparked by ‘an act of insight, although of extremely fallible insight’ (Peirce, 1934, p. 181).

That fallibility is why PCR must be elaborated precisely. PCR’s initiator is surprise, which is related to other observations, in this case about history’s approach and how it engages India. Surprise takes two forms, novelty, and anomaly. For this discussion, it is the latter, since history’s professed purpose, at a minimum, of explaining and accounting, is not being realised. The depth, extent, and tenacity of this failure is why it is not viewed in the terrain of theory or practice but rationality and because embedded in it is ‘culture’ and ‘diplomacy’. Since it is pregnant with meaning, rationality is refined to ‘loose and implicit practical-cum-theoretical pattern networks of knowledge, based on the experience of physical instances,’ a phenomenon to be accounted for, and which accounts (Bloch, 1998, p. 6; Datta-Ray, 2015, pp. 109–110). The use of rationality—and other concepts such as diplomacy—gives pause for they are patently Western, if only for being in English. Their recycling does not run the risk of reintroducing the racism inherent to them in some other guise for rationality and diplomacy are not internal to the West, but external. Rationality in the singular is rejected for rationalities in the plural, hence the racism underling diplomacy and so what it spawns as the history of Indian diplomacy is not also rationality but just one of its forms. Yet, given the very embeddedness of racist rationality, it may be forgotten. This is aphasia and it necessitates a further elaboration to make for movement between rationalities without imposing racism across rationalities. In other words, inoculation against confirmation bias, which is to consistently remind oneself it is rationalities rather than rationality.

Constantly self-conscious, the final inoculation appears in the accounting for the anomaly. This starts with examining the engagement with India itself, to understand how racism is generated and propagated to make for history. Also involved is realising that the frequency with which analytic-violence must be deployed against the subject is meaningful for suggesting that at work in India is another rationality. This raises the issue of how to determine if it is rationality or rationalities in the absence of induction and deduction? The answer is that rationality as singular or plural is expressed in real life micro-sociological situations composed of practices (Durkheim et al., 1971, pp. 810–812). The implication is to be aware of one’s own rationality and simultaneously explore for another via practices. On the former, knowledge, but not the privileging, of, rationality’s theories is recommended in contrast to deduction’s emphasising one and induction’s claiming to eschew all. A plurality of theories assists, at a minimum, in fostering self-consciousness about rationality. For instance, only a deep familiarity of Liberalism, Marxism, and Global History, engenders awareness of their underlying racism, that is, their paternalistic sentimentalism. Similarly, only awareness of Postcolonialism and Postmodernism uncovers their egocentric fantasias’ foundation in a profoundly racist narrative of unending violence. Rationality then, is all too familiar to PCR’s practitioners, but they cannot allow rationality to taint the engagement with sociological practices.

These are safeguarded against aphasia by ensuring Indians are placed as equals to the West, that is, as capable to their own rationality. While academia cannot contemplate Indians as capable of being original, PCR can by treating them as ‘authoritative sources’ or capable of generating practice and rationalising it (Halliburton, 2004). That this step arises from engaging rationality, reiterates that it should inform empirical work which should also be in consonance with it – only not as deduction or induction. They negate the self-awareness of grounded disciplines such as Sociology and Anthropology and restore racism in their method. For instance, Anthropologists collect data, but interpret via Western personalities, rather than, say, Mahatma Gandhi or Chairman Mao Zedong, or local texts that have for thousands of years been part and parcel of Asian societies.

PCR therefore accounts for an anomaly arising from interaction and so proceeds to investigate in terms of rationality, historical practice, and the practices of Indians. What reinsulates the latter is that practices are not just collected to verify if they accrue into the patterns that make for rationality but rather to determine if practices are robust enough to indicate another rationality and to then verify this. The history of Indian diplomacy then, is made sense of in terms of the practitioners and history as we know it, that is, practitioner’s practices are interpreted by them alongside the referring to rationality. The result is the creation of knowledge, possibly on another register, grounded, but not in induction or deduction, and conclusive because hypotheses arising from the interaction between history and India, are explained by the latter’s data being explained by itself. In short, expunged is the analytic-violence underpinning history for actions are untainted by rationality and not subject to deletion, dismissal, or denigration. In combination, these differences accumulate into a method so different to history, that it is termed exegesis (Datta-Ray, In Press).

Exegesis

To deploy PCR then is to present Indian diplomacy in its entirety and interpret it in actor’s terms. To avoid analytic-violence as concept, ethic, and historical practice, quickly reveals PCR’s utility for it unearths a hidden possibility with a revolutionary potential to increase overall security. This is New Delhi’s diplomacy of defence. In finding security in defensiveness, always depressed are offensive capacities. That improves the quality of security in a manner unavailable to offence because it finds security in offensive superiority and so exacerbates offensiveness. More bombs and their attendant risks do not make for security but only insecurity—the ever-increasing threat of error or attack. That is what fragments sovereignty between states for in offence, security is always about responding to others, matching their offensiveness. Defence however integrates sovereignty for security is delivered by the actor itself, since it decides to never provoke opponents into offence. This retains control of the future because defence limits the opponent, for they have no reason to be offensive against the defensive. This never arises in offence, for it begets offence and so actors are always scrambling to a tune set by their opponent’s offensiveness. Despite these differences, underpinning both offence and defence is courage, but it is incalculably intensified by the sacrifice inherent in defence.

Indian nuclear diplomacy’s defensiveness is evident in the material facts, if presented without analytic-violence. Diplomacy began with Nehru limiting the atom to research with the 1948 Atomic Energy Act. Moreover, to curtail misuse India proposed in 1954 a Standstill Agreement to suspend nuclear testing. War with China, which had announced its bomb programme and tested in 1964, could not divert India’s nuclear research. There is no indication that Nehru’s sovereignty was ever eroded, but fear of China did erode parliament’s sovereignty and so it responded by calling for weaponisation (Lok Sabha Secretariat, 1963, col. 5780–5783). That same fear, or lack of courage, further eroded sovereignty after Nehru’s death. The next PM, Lal Bahadur Shastri, initiated the Subterranean Nuclear Explosion Project (SNEP) in 1965 which upon completion would have put India three months to a test (Subrahmanyam, 1998, pp. 29–34). India however regained sovereignty with SNEP’s scrapping within months by PM Indira Gandhi. Moreover, while sovereignty was fragmented by SNEP, it never threatened defence for the policy in practice would have still maintained India’s posture of being less capable by design.

That defence was Mrs. Gandhi’s métier for diplomacy and so preserved sovereignty and control is evident in her charting her own course rather than responding. An instance was her unilateral call at the UN for a non-proliferation treaty five years before the Non-Proliferation Treaty (MEA, Government of India, 1988, pp. 29–34). Despite her efforts, India failed. The unbearable burden of obliteration resulted in a test in 1974 but it was not militarised because the logic of defence persisted: India remained in an indisputably weaker position vis-à-vis adversaries. That the test was prompted by China was indeed an erosion of India’s sovereignty. What is of significance is that the alternative, offence, would have made India aspire to exceeding China’s offensiveness and so diluted overall security and eradicated sovereignty altogether by making India a function of Chinese insecurities. Mrs. Gandhi however refused to militarise the atom which permitted India’s return to maintaining security on its own terms rather than as a dependent, and so, as a sovereign in control of its destiny.

Similar processes of defence minimising the erosion of sovereignty and reinstating it along with control and in a manner unavailable to offence, are apparent in weaponisation under PM Rajiv Gandhi and the revelation of capacity in 1998. That both were defence is attested to by contextual policies such as Mr. Gandhi’s Six Nation Five Continent Appeal for nuclear disarmament in 1985 which garnered little interest. Meanwhile, China expanded its nuclear weapons programme and though it adopted NFU, it was riddled with inconsistency from the 1980s. ‘Very often one finds strategists arguing abstractly in favour of first strikes in conventional and nuclear war, even while claiming that China is committed to a second strike posture,’ commented an analyst (as cited in Datta-Ray, 2015, p. 247). China also supplied a nuclear programme to Pakistan. ‘Beijing has consistently regarded a nuclear-armed Pakistan as a crucial ally and vital counterweight to India’s capabilities,’ testified the CIA’s Director in 1993 (as cited in Datta-Ray, 2002, p. 41). That was realised when Pakistan achieved weapon’s capacity eight years before New Delhi (The News, 1998; Kargil Review Committee, 2000, p. 205).

Of interest is not that India’s sovereignty came under pressure from offence, but that it had such a limited effect and that was because India practiced defence. It ensured that provocations led to not weaponisation, let alone the pursuit of, much less offence, but rather just a test which also curtailed the deterioration of security by limiting the number of bombs in circulation. Moreover, defence permitted control over opponents by retarding their offensiveness for they had no reason to accelerate their bomb-making as India always sought an inferior position. In other words, the matrix of nuclear instability, escalation, dissemination, illegality, and deception, did make for huge pressures on Indian sovereignty. Nevertheless, the policy of defence both safeguarded sovereignty and improved the quality of security as well as maintained control in a manner impossible within the logic of offence for it always countenances a response, which is, to be more offensive.

That India practiced defence and not offence, is confirmed in the next step exegesis demands, interpreting practice in the terms of its producers. That defence was Indian society’s metric is ostensible in survey results showing that even in the 1990s there was a ‘remarkable picture of restraint in the face of grave provocation,’ as nearly half the members of the strategic elite did not consider nuclear retaliation necessary even in response to a minor nuclear attack (as cited in Datta-Ray, 2015, p. 245). Given the milieu, it is unsurprising that Mr. Gandhi’s scientific advisor stated the PM ‘was genuinely against the bomb, implying he had been forced to weaponise. The sentiment arose from a sense of purpose inherited from his mother, grandfather, and his guru, Mahatma Gandhi. A Foreign Secretary who served Mr. Gandhi reminisced that he, ‘envisions a world without … confrontation … This vision of a new world order is a spiritual vision, not unlike Jawaharlal Nehru’s but closer, it seems, to Mahatma Gandhi’s’ (Rasgotra, 1991). This genealogy makes plain that the defence Rajiv, and his predecessors, practiced, was an inheritance from a politics of defence whose greatest success was India’s freedom struggle, and whose foremost practitioner was the Mahatma.

That this political inheritance had been maintained for Rajiv and in spite of the corrosiveness of offence, is hinted at in what was said about the decision to test by Mrs. Gandhi’s interlocutors, which will have to suffice in the absence of any official records. The congruency of third-party reports illustrates the erosion of security by Chinese provocations and which split sovereignty because Mrs. Gandhi had to respond. American ambassador Chester Bowles’ secret cable about a private conversation between the Canadian High Commissioner and Mrs. Gandhi, reported: ‘With China at her {Mrs. Gandhi’s} back, and Pakistan lurking on the sidelines, she foresaw no alternative but to keep open her option on the production of nuclear weapons’ (US Embassy, 1967). However, the consequent decision to not weaponise recovered both security and sovereignty by ensuring there was no provocation to any further offence by China. Moreover, this retained control because the lack of provocation meant China was delayed, if not restrained, into further impinging on India’s security. What is also striking is that at this historical juncture, once again, the logic of offence could not have delivered security, sovereignty, or control, in the way it was in the reality of international diplomacy.

That reality also discloses that the decision to test was an intensely personal one and so makes for a direct linkage to Nehru and the Mahatma which exposes defence’s foundation as sacrifice and courage. Of the decision, an Indian diplomat wrote: ‘There were no policy papers nor any discussion … in the External Affairs Ministry.’ The official had suggested drawing up background papers and Mrs. Gandhi had agreed, but on the day, she glowered and asked who had authorised their preparation. The diplomat writes:

I tried to refresh her memory, but she would have none of it. She said something about a ‘national decision’, but we were not aware of any decision or even debate in Parliament. At least three of us {the bureaucrats in charge of the Defence, Finance and Foreign, ministries} were greatly puzzled at our summary and inexplicable rebuff for carrying out what we conceived to be our assigned duty

(Dayal, 1998, pp. 588–589).

The puzzle is unravelled by the test’s decision-making arising from an inheritance from Mrs. Gandhi’s father. This was clear to another American Ambassador, Daniel Moynihan, who reported it to Washington in January 1974 (US Embassy, 1974). That it was so is unsurprising for Nehru was the first to calculate defence in the globalised international system and from prior to India’s creation. In a pre-independence lecture on ‘defence and national development,’ Nehru stated: ‘India will … not prepare for or think in terms of any aggression or dominion over any other country. Defence thus becomes purely defence against external aggression or internal disorder’ (Nehru, 1947, p. 364). Inaugurating India’s first reactor some years later, Nehru said:

No man can prophesy the future. But I should like to say on behalf of any future Government of India that whatever might happen, whatever the circumstances, we shall never use atomic energy for evil purposes. There is no condition to this assurance, because once a condition is attached, the value of an assurance does not go very far (Nehru, 1957).

Nehru’s unconditionally exposes the sacrifice implicit in defence, for to practice diplomacy defensively in the nuclear age was to court annihilation. Furthermore, to live in its shadow called for a courage only Nehru was able to muster, after all he was the first to make sacrifice the bedrock for global diplomacy. That is why he used the word ‘evil’, with its spiritual rather than political connotations, which convey that at issue was not the temporal matter of developing or using nuclear weapons but a philosophical one, of their offensiveness. It was in recognition of this that he wrote in 1964 in the margins of a note to nuclear scientist Homi Bhabha: ‘Apart from building power stations and developing electricity, there is always a built-in advantage of defence use if the need should arise’ (as cited in Datta-Ray, 2015, p. 238). Of course, diverting the programme to military purposes was an abomination for being a loss of courage. That is why Nehru said if weaponisation was not checked then ‘it may become almost impossible to control the situation’ for India would lose the courage essential to sacrifice (Nehru, 1961, p. 235).

What that meant in practice is not weaponisation per se but opening the door to use, and so possibly offence itself. This possibility was fast approaching because of the multiplying of nuclear programmes across the globe. That Nehru met it with defence is explicit in his explanations for policy. Moreover, palpable in them is a determination which once again denotes courage. That courage, which converted his convictions into diplomacy persisted to the end of his days: ‘We are determined not to use weapons for war purposes. We do not make atom bombs. I do not think we will’ (as cited in Datta-Ray, 2015, p. 239). What this also declares is a concern with the quality of security not as chimera, but as fewer bombs. That could only arise from sacrificing oneself steadfastly to reduce the number of bombs in circulation which was contingent on courage. Compounding its necessity was that it maintained the sovereignty Nehru himself fought for in the struggle against colonialism. His lived experience meant that India could not be allowed to become a function of some new power. That, in turn, meant retaining control by not allowing opponents to dictate security by forcing New Delhi to match or exceed opponent arsenals. In other words, while defence was the ontology of Indian diplomacy, its practice called for courage, which is obvious because analytic-violence is not the fulcrum for the exegesis that is PCR.

Reiterating PCR’s utility is its ability to surface meaning across diverse situations. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the BJP’s strike against Balakot. The contradiction of nuclear capable Mirage–2000 military jets screeching across the international border in a surprise attack on Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) terrorist camps inside Pakistan on 26 February 2019 being labelled ‘non-military’ is only resolved by exegesis (Foreign Secretary, 2019). That is because history’s engagement with India only offers dismissal, just as ‘peaceful’ was dismissed as a lie, after the Pokhran test. Furthermore, the lack of analytical comment suggests the strike has been deleted by silence. PCR however must necessarily engage the action in its entirety and in its producer’s terms. Meaning begins to appear in that for India this was a diplomatic, rather than military, act, because it was designated so, unveiled by the top diplomat, and there were no other official pronouncements about the strike. Adding to this was the top diplomat who announced the strike mentioned a change underway in New Delhi so obvious that even the Chinese ‘clearly see, strategic culture is changing under the current government. India is willing to take risks. Use of force, is no longer ruled out’ (Maharashtra Education Society, 2020). In short, exegesis indicates that the labelling of the strike is a shift from defence to offence.

Reinforcing this is what was said by the airstrike’s architect, National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval. Attesting to his significance was his role of coordinator for all security matters being buttressed post-strike by elevation to Cabinet rank (Balachandran, 2019). The only time his explanation of his strategic approach, which provides the means to read the strike, was recorded for general consumption was a lecture instructive precisely because, despite notes, it is littered with irregularities and spliced with disfluencies and fillers. That is why the content is not regurgitation of received knowledge, but a strategy garnered from lived experience, including career. The NSA said the talk’s title – India’s strategic response to terrorism – equates terrorism to other strategic threats including nuclear war, and so requires a strategic response, behaviour applicable to all situations in the long term. The NSA asseverated that whatever is done must ensure India’s ‘civilizational values and culture remain intact’ and explained ‘we engage the enemy in three modes.’ They are ‘defensive mode … if somebody comes here we will prevent him, we will defend this … defensive-offence, to defend ourselves we will go to the place from where the offence is coming from … third is the offensive mode where you go outright.’ In this context, what was also of consequence was his saying the ‘nuclear threshold is a difficulty in the offensive mode but not in the defensive-offence’ because ‘you may do one Mumbai, you’ll lose Balochistan … there’s no nuclear war involved in that … there’s no engagement of troops … if you know the tricks, we know the tricks better than you’ (Doval, 2014).

That the inheritance from the Mahatma organising his disciples’ diplomacy, from Nehru to Rajiv, continues to do so across party-political lines, is apparent in Doval elaborating that defence was a civilisational and personal term for calculation. However, and additionally, Balakot was also an offence for being a retaliation intending to kill many times more than the lives claimed by JEM’s acts of cross-border terrorism (Mapping Militant Organisations, 2018; NDTV, 2019a; Das, 2019). The accounting for the historical shift cannot resort to analytic-violence, moreover exegesis is aware that defence rides on sacrifice and courage. The clear and present benefit of shifting to offence then was to be relieved of sacrifice and what it is contingent upon, courage. Undoubtedly both offence and defence demand courage. However, the courage of offence dwindles to meaninglessness in comparison to the courage of sacrifice because offence directs violence outwards, but defence and so sacrifice knowingly directs violence into oneself.

Just how unbearable the intensity of courage demanded by sacrifice was to the BJP’s leadership is measurable in the price it paid. It began with the BJP equating, for the first time, India with Pakistan, which had to be done to calculate a more offensive response to Pakistani offensiveness. The very fact that the BJP chose to respond offensively was to also surrender India’s sovereignty to Pakistan because it dictated what India did. India’s offence also meant that the future was now up to Islamabad. That Pakistan chose not to escalate despite no longer being denied the opportunity to do so by India’s defence, for India was no longer defensive, testifies to Islamabad’s ability to control itself in a manner impossible for the BJP. What makes compelling the BJP’s wanting to be shorn of courage, is that the party was willing to risk nuclear war. Indeed, Doval had already acknowledged in his talk that his tit-for-tat diplomacy risks nuclear exchange. His caveat that so long as offence avoids state-to-state conflict there is no chance for nuclear war, was embarrassingly undone by his policy in practice. Balakot led to the Air Forces of both countries clashing and so, in Doval’s terms, opened the door to Armageddon.

Why this had not already occurred is because it had been impossible till February 2019. Till then India had never granted equality to Pakistan. Indeed, equality was impossible because India unconditionally sacrificed itself and so maintained life whereas Pakistan’s offence destroyed life. India managed offence by deadening it with sacrifice. There was therefore no equating of Pakistan’s offence by India and so no proportionate or disproportionate response. This was so when Pakistanis occupied the heights of Kargil and even for the 2001 terror attack on India’s parliament. Kargil was contained because India simply sacrificed itself to take back what it regarded as its own. Noteworthy about 2001 is that courage of a till then uncalled for intensity was required, and found over several months, to manage a provocation symbolically unprecedented, and so prevent escalation. India’s capacity for courage ensured that there could be no escalation, much less, to nuclear war, and this was a service to humanity. In other words, the courage to routinely sacrifice a few lives at the border, and even the homeland proper, meant India always retained control of what happened next. Indeed, so intent was India in sacrificing itself to retain control that the will to do so was driven home to Pakistan every-so-often with cross-border raids (Hindustan Times, 2019b; Indian Army Officer, 2017).

What exegesis of nuclear diplomacy and the rivalry in Kashmir prior to and after 2019 then uncovers is a risk for nuclear war beyond history’s endless recitations of offence. The threat of annihilation was the shift from defence to offence, which was done to unburden the BJP of the demands of sacrifice: courage. Moreover, what exegesis also unveils is the novelty and gravity of an altogether new type of risk. After all, to renounce courage the BJP did what no one including the superpowers could even contemplate, even during the Cuban Missile Crisis—a nuclear power striking another nuclear power’s homeland.