E-Paper
Grand Tamasha: Decoding India’s policies, their impact in near East
India’s Near East: A New History is the latest book by the scholar Avinash Paliwal, who is a reader in international relations at SOAS University of London, where he specialises in South Asian strategic affairs.
A new book by a highly-respected international relations scholar traces the history of how New Delhi has grappled with the twin challenges of forging productive ties with its eastern neighbours — namely, Bangladesh and Myanmar— while building a robust administrative state in India’s Northeastern states. India’s Near East: A New History is the latest book by the scholar Avinash Paliwal, who is a reader in international relations at SOAS University of London, where he specialises in South Asian strategic affairs. Paliwal’s first book was a well-received history of India’s engagement in Afghanistan.
Paliwal spoke about his new book on last week’s episode of “Grand Tamasha”, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The book narrates the story of the Indian state’s struggle to overcome war, displacement and interventionism, and simultaneously exposes the limits of independent India’s influence both inside and outside its borders.
“The founding driver for this inquiry… was to understand how India went about building a nation in areas and in demographies where the idea of the Indian nation post-1947 was contested and this huge country in the subcontinent went about projecting power” in areas closer to its own territorial boundaries, said Paliwal. “I think this twin concern of nation-building and projecting power really is what drove this project in an intellectual sense.”
Paliwal admitted to a sense of frustration when reviewing the extant literature on India’s eastern neighbourhood and its eastern states, whether it was work about the political economy of development, the politics of Bangladesh, or the India-China relationship. “These were literatures which were not speaking to each other,” said the author. “They were, in some sense, epistemic partitions quite replicating the very real partitions and separations that this particular geography and people have witnessed in the 20th century.”
Paliwal’s book exhaustively recounts India’s state-building experience in the northeast, the fate of the “Look East” and “Act East” policies, and India’s often contentious relations with both Burma and Bangladesh. It also highlights how two factors — China and Hindutva — are remaking India’s approach to the near East.
According to Paliwal, one of the key lessons of the book is “that no government in India, whether it’s led by Congress, the BJP, or anyone else, can expect strategic, geopolitical or geo-economic unity in a region which is so stratified as India’s near East by fostering social division.” He said his book is, in some sense, a warning to policymakers that “you cannot expect to play partisan politics for electoral reasons in such sensitive demographies and hope that you bring these areas together in some form of connectivity”.
Paliwal cited the ongoing conflict in Manipur, the civil war in Myanmar, and the situation in Bangladesh leading to Sheikh Hasina’s downfall as illustrative examples. “There is a certain logic to the idea of constitutionalism as a ‘cordon sanitaire’ (or protected zone)… it’s an idea that is important not just for the sanctity and well-being of India itself but also for its relationship with very sensitive neighbours such as Bangladesh and Myanmar.”
