The debate on the intense South Asian regional security environment cannot be separated from the subcontinent’s history under British colonial rule. The British colonial retreat started another era of intra-regional conflict in the South Asian region and laid the foundations of a perpetual rivalry between India and Pakistan. The regional political trends of South Asia in the post-colonial era started various hostile developments in India-Pakistan relations, cemented in their multiple points of disagreement on different issues. The evolving conflicted interaction between India and Pakistan passed through various phases, in which the nuclearization of 1998 was a significant breakthrough and initiated a new era of the New Delhi-Islamabad strategic competition. The testing of nuclear devices by Indian and Pakistani governments altered the conventional foundations of the South Asian regional security environment and placed regional politics under the nuclear shadows in 1998. The arrival of nuclear weapons in the South Asian regional political order drew the attention of the international academic communities toward the India-Pakistan rivalry and provided a new direction to them concerning the changing attributes of the New Delhi-Islamabad strategic competition. The mainstream literature produced on the post-1998 era of South Asian politics mainly focused on the influences of nuclear weapons on the decades-long hostility between two neighbouring states. Analogous to various other studies done by different authors on the evolution of India-Pakistan hostility in the post-nuclearization era, the book under review is written by an Indian author. It is an academic attempt to provide an Indian version of the strategic competition between New Delhi and Islamabad.
The author Sanjeev Kumar H.M. has attempted to provide a picture of post-colonial political developments of the subcontinent’s politics by developing an exclusive emphasis on the post-nuclearized period of the India-Pakistan competition. Kumar is a New Delhi-based university professor who has served in various Indian academic institutions while specializing in South Asian domestic politics. He has expressed his intellectual thoughts on various dimensions of South Asian social and political attributes. The book The India-Pakistan Sub-Conventional War is his latest contribution to the literature concerning the strategic features of South Asian nuclear politics, and it mainly revolves around regional India-Pakistan power politics. Apart from a brief introduction, the main debate of the book is divided into five short chapters, where every chapter covers a different dimension of India-Pakistan domestic politics and its unprecedented growth under the shadows of nuclear weapons. In addition the final chapter consists of a concluding analysis of the whole debate regarding the interconnection of the domestic politics of India-Pakistan with conflicting multifaceted patterns of their bilateral ties, the four chapters developed various arguments with the support of a theoretical lens. All the chapters try to provide the logic of the contemporary conflicted interaction between two nuclear powers, formally democratic states. The study of an enduring rivalry between two neighbouring nuclear powers in all chapters largely emphasizes the association of Pakistan’s domestic politics with the India-Pakistan strategic competition.
The first chapter initiates the debate from the theoretical explanation of the author’s core argument and identifies the structural obstacles of Pakistan’s domestic political infrastructure, which evolved after the partition of the subcontinent. The evolution of the democratic systems of India-Pakistan and their ineffective roles in minimizing the conflicted strategic interaction between both nuclear powers covers the debate in the first chapter. The second chapter focuses on the dysfunctional democratic features of the internal politics of South Asian nuclear powers while highlighting the theoretical foundations of the conception of democracy and its various kinds (p. 68). The third chapter raises various questions on the growth of nuclear nationalism in South Asia, whereas the fourth chapter examines the association of sub-conventional war with the regional political order of a nuclearized subcontinent. The author has fundamentally attempted to criticize the positions of democratic peace and deterrence theories in the India-Pakistan conflict because both states are democratic and equipped with nuclear weapon capabilities, and at the same time, reluctant to accept the values of peace and stability. The combination of both theories proved inefficient in averting the threats of war in South Asia, according to the author (p. 174).
The focus of the author on the democratic developments of Pakistan’s internal politics traces the genesis of a political crisis in the post-partitioned subcontinent, parallel to having an exclusive emphasis on the role of religion and civil-military relations in Pakistan. The author’s analysis provides an outstanding theoretical survey of the contemporary strategic environment of South Asia without adopting an impartial analysis framework. The author’s approach, deficient of impartial standards, remained reluctant in discussing the anti-Pakistani obsession of Indian society. The growth of New Delhi’s historical antipathy toward Pakistan and its political manifestation in Indian foreign relations remained of lesser important for the author. Thus, there are a few areas for improvement in the mainstream construction of the argument, which could be measured by adopting a balanced approach for both contestants of South Asia. The sub-conventional war in the nuclearized regional security environment is principally attached to the changing attributes of the Indian and Pakistani strategic postures. Moreover, the prevalence of ideologically fanatical ideas in the post-partitioned subcontinent produced parallel socio-political developments in India and Pakistan. However, the book’s analysis only highlighted the inseparable connections of religious politics with the domestic politics of Pakistan. The examination of the democratic peace theory and its contemporary advancement in the environment of sub-conventional war between India and Pakistan further remained inappropriate in the book in studying the politics of the post-partitioned subcontinent under the Cold War influences. The role of Cold War politics proved to be an important factor in shaping the internal politics and regional standings of both India and Pakistan, parallel to determining the contesting attributes of New Delhi and Islamabad in the bipolar division of world politics.
In this way, it is more appropriate to maintain that this book is an updated reflection of the India-Pakistan strategic competition and its strategic growth, aligned with the conception of sub-conventional war. The title of the book reflects the notion of a sub-conventional war between India and Pakistan, but the debate on the sub-conventional war comes in the second last chapter of the book. Thus, this book is basically an evaluation of India-Pakistan domestic democratic politics and the presence of persistently evolving multifaceted features of the perpetual hostility between India and Pakistan. Thus, this book is an appropriate study to understand an updated picture of the New Delhi-Islamabad rivalry based on the Indian perspective. The inclusion of the theoretical debate to support the author’s arguments is the only factor that enhances the legitimacy of the author’s analysis in the book; the book is a must read for scholars and academicians interested in knowing the subtleties of democracy and war in South Asia.
