The arms race between India and Pakistan has always remained a gravitational point of South Asian regional politics. The decades-long multileveled hostility between New Delhi and Islamabad have always attracted the attention of the international community towards the strategic competition of South Asian nuclear powers, India and Pakistan. The two governments have developed uncompromising positions on regional and extra-regional politics aided no doubt by the support of their nuclear weapons capabilities. It is more appropriate to say that the arrival of nuclear weapons in the South Asian subcontinent has triggered an unending arms race between India and Pakistan which started to leave negative impact on strategic stability in the region. In response to the persistently degrading regional strategic matrix in South Asian, the leading international circles of intellectual communities started to analyse the different dimensions of the India-Pakistan strategic competition and its impact on the regional security environment in the post-1998 scenario. Apart from viewpoints of academic circles of diverse backgrounds on South Asian nuclear politics, the work of Indian-Pakistani authors has also been an important dimension of literature concerning the politics of nuclearized subcontinent. Analogous to many other studies, the book under review is an intellectual contribution of two eminent Pakistani scholars with expertise in South Asian nuclear politics. Their intellectual contributions exclusively emphasize the many attributes of the New Delhi-Islamabad strategic competition. The book critically examines various arguments regarding India’s force posturing, which is directly linked to neighbouring China and Pakistan. The formal documents of New Delhi’s defence planning have dubbed Beijing and Islamabad as the prime threats to Indian regional geostrategic interests. Both authors, Zulfqar Khan and Zafar Khan are renowned figures in the Pakistan-based strategic community, and the rationality of their intellectual insight has granted them exceptional position among their peers. The book India’s Evolving Deterrent Force Posturing in South Asia is a glimpse of their intellectual reach, which revolves around the nature and evolution of the India-Pakistan strategic competition.
The main debate of the book is divided into ten brief chapters, where every chapter covers a different aspect of the core theme of the book, which entirely focuses on New Delhi’s evolving strategic capabilities and their impacts on the Indian force posturing. The first chapter starts the debate with a formal introduction of the core argument of the book, whereas the last chapter concludes the whole debate in five different scenarios. These five scenarios summarized the analysis of eight chapters and tried to answer five different questions regarding the future of the South Asian arms race under the shadow of India’s persistently increasing strategic capabilities. After the formal introduction in the first chapter, the second chapter provides the theoretical explanation of the nuclear revolution and its relevance to the South Asian nuclear politics between the two adjoining nuclear weapon states having a decades-long rivalry. This chapter contains an interesting account of literature maintained by different authors regarding the conceptual understanding of the nuclear revolution and its evolution in the politics of nuclear weapon states. The third chapter explains the nature of the South Asian regional geostrategic environment and its complex features consisting of India-Pakistan, India-China, and China-US strategic relationships in which defence planners of each state are busy safeguarding their core values of national interests (p. 48).The discussion on New Delhi’s quest for influencing the oceanic politics of its surrounding waters comes in the fourth chapter. This chapter attempted to underline the bilateral and multilateral alliances of India with various other states having developed naval forces. The fifth chapter elucidates the doctrinal traits of official Indian defence planners and their objective for formulating a robust counterforce strategic posture against perceived potential neighbouring rivals. The sixth chapter concentrated on the evolving Indian strategy for the Ballistic Missile Development program. Apart from covering various aspects of the India-Pakistan conflict under the contesting strategic behaviours of two South Asian nuclear powers in the seventh chapter, the eighth chapter examined the post-Pulwama situation where Indian leadership appeared determined to wage limited strikes/war against Pakistan (p. 254). The second last chapter of the book unfolds the challenges and opportunities for ensuring the values of peace and stability in the South Asian region under the nuclear shadow.
Based on the descriptions mentioned above, it can easily be maintained that this book by two Pakistani authors could broadly be considered a comprehensive account of various arguments related to the Indian counterforce strategy and its different attributes. In other words, the work of both Pakistani authors investigated the responsible factors undermining the scope of strategic stability in the South Asian nuclearized subcontinent. This book could be considered an appropriate volume for understanding the latest developments of the New Delhi-Islamabad strategic competition and its negative impact on the regional security environment. Moreover, this book could also be treated as an appreciable contribution to the literature on South Asian strategic politics and its unprecedented growth under the influences of international great power politics. Students of Politics, International Relations, and Strategic and Security Studies can find this book an interesting read to comprehend the latest developments in nuclear politics between rivals India and Pakistan.
