Sandy Gordon

Performance and Prospects

India’s performance in defence production has been strong in certain areas such as space, missile production, some aspects of electronics and some areas of warship building. But overall it cannot be said to have lived up to the very large investment placed in it or the promise held out for it.

India ‘ looks East’

India’s interest in Asian nations lying to its east has never been as strong as it has in those regions to its west. In part this attitude is cultural and historical: the great invasions of India all came from the west. India’s introduction to modern technology was through the colonisation process, and it has until recently shared alove-hate’ relationship with western technology. The conquests of Islam led to the development of a significant cultural affinity between north India and southwest Asia, one that involves language (Hindi and Urdu are significantly Persianised), art through Moghul miniature painting and other mediums, architecture, and food. The fact that political and cultural power tends to be located in the populous north, where the cultural connection with Southwest Asia is strongest, rather than in the south, through which the cultural links with Southeast Asia were originally extended, also gives rise to the perception of stronger linkages with nations to the west than to the east.

An Australian Perspective on the Indo-US Nuclear Deal

Following its election in 2007, the Labour government imposed a moratorium on export of Australian uranium to India. This article argues that with the Indo-US deal and concomitant agreements now in place, Australia should agree to export uranium to India. It does so on the grounds that the agreements will adequately protect Australian uranium from misuse, will not unduly test the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime, could open out opportunities to meet important safety concerns, could help stabilise potentially dangerous vertical and horizontal proliferation and could also mitigate the regions burgeoning production of greenhouse gases. In supporting the agreements through nuclear trade with India, however, Australia should use any influence it is able to garner thereby to ensure that the Indo-US agreement itself is not seen as part of an attempt on the part of the United States (US), or any other power, to harness India as a means of containing China, and thus exacerbating what could become a destabilising tendency in the region.

Nationbuilding, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia

arguments in the book. The complex and interdependent nature of food security concerns is presented, and a call is made for a more sophisticated understanding of the links between individual/household-level malnutrition and the structural-level causes of poverty, lack of infrastructure provision and inadequate health-care expenditures. Sustainability emerges as a key goal for future food provision. McDonald is critical of the current piecemeal solutions to food-related ‘crises’ such as the regularly reported cases of malnutrition and starvation. He calls for more holistic approaches to understanding, and addressing, those issues, and considers that local-level attempts to empower people and to create sustainable rural livelihoods will be important for future success. This fits with calls from the United Nations Development Programme and organisations such as the Commission on Human Security for the creation of stable political systems to allow progress to be made on humanitarian, population-health and environmental fronts. There is a tacit acceptance, here, that global entities such as the World Trade Organization and World Bank, and global regulatory bodies, will provide the structural framework for progress. Yet, recent critical writings of academics and activists point to the current activities of global regulators and the neo-liberal settings they endorse as having failed to prevent economic polarisation, for having encouraged speculation in food, and for ignoring calls for greater food sovereignty as a means of providing local-level food sufficiency. This more critical literature is touched upon at various times, but the overall impression is that the author is content with policy and structural settings that ‘tame’ globalisation rather than directly confront its excesses and its contradictions. With its comprehensive coverage of the causes and consequences of contemporary food insecurity, the book will be of value to undergraduate students in areas such as food and environmental studies, development studies, human geography and population health. It will also usefully inform the general public of the difficult options that global humanity faces in pursuing food security over future decades.

Nation, Neighbourhood and Region: India’s Emergence as an Asia Power

Analysis of rising powers needs to be conducted not just in terms of their overall capabilities but also of their geopolitical circumstances—where they are placed in respect of domestic polity, their neighbourhoods, their regions and the globe. As a rising power, India is particularly closely embedded in its South Asian neighbourhood by tightly enmeshed domestic and neighbourhood dissonances. These are in turn deeply affected by global conditions, especially the rise of China and globalisation of a militant version of Islam. This article analyses India’s ‘strategies’ in dealing with its circumstances and concludes that, at least for the present, India has delayed the process of ardent military modernisation in favour of balanced development in an attempt to achieve greater domestic harmony and reduce vulnerability to destabilising cross-border influences. Strategies in South Asia are, however, less well developed and require greater attention.

Consequences of Instability

The need to involve the security forces more closely in the maintenance of civil order and to raise additional police and paramilitary forces to counter militants has inevitably eroded the quality of democratic life throughout South Asia.

South Asia and the End of the Cold War

The gridlock imposed by the Cold. War over South Asian relationships meant that an unprecedented number of lethal weapons were introduced into the region in the 1970s and 1980s.1 The Cold War also contributed directly to the introduction of technology associated with nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. The most obvious example was the case of Pakistan. Because the United States needed Pakistan as a front-line state in its efforts to dislodge the Soviet Union from Mghanistan, Washington turned a blind-eye to Pakistan’s nuclear activities and continued to supply it with sophisticated conventional weapons throughout the 1980s.2 Similarly, the close relationship that developed between China and Pakistan under the structure of the Cold War assisted the transfer of ballistic missiles, ballistic missile technology and possibly also nuclear weapons technology between the two.3

Politics, Instability and the South Asian Setting

The failure of the nations of South Asia to come to grips with the related problems of high population growth rates, poverty and political instability, and the displacement of populations to which this failure has given rise, is in turn closely related to the failure of the region to develop a viable pattern of regional relationships. All too often domestic political problems become projected onto the regional stage. This process of projection occurs at a number of levels.

India and South Asia

South Asia has been aptly called a‘loveless hothouse where member states feed on each other’s fears’.1 While the Cold War was certainly a factor in creating such an atmosphere, as we noted in Part II, local factors, particularly religious and ethnic differences and the way that they are reinforced by resource issues, have been more important. We now turn to the substance of the different sets of relationships between South Asian nations and to an examination of the prospects for more harmonious regional structures to evolve now that the Cold War is over.

India as an Indian Ocean Power

India’s naval build-up provoked considerable speculation both within the nation and in the wider region. Some non-Indian commentators believed that India was seeking a power projection capability rather than establishing a defensive posture. This interpretation also gained currency in the context of the diminution of the superpower presence in the Indian Ocean region, a phenomenon that left the role of large regional navies such as India’s more exposed to view. It is claimed that continued superpower withdrawal would, ‘in extremis, [lead to] a Southeast Asia dominated militarily by China to the East and India to the west’.1