Q. “India is often said to have a rich strategic culture.” Discuss.
(10 Marks)
Answer
Jack Snyder defined strategic culture as enduring beliefs, historical experiences, and normative values shaping how a country responds to security threats. India's strategic culture draws from multiple civilizational and philosophical strands, making it distinctively layered.
The Kautilyan Realist Strand
The oldest layer is rooted in Kautilya's Arthashastra, a treatise on statecraft, power balancing, and alliance management predating Machiavelli by two millennia. This tradition emphasises state survival and pragmatic use of force, visible in India's credible minimum deterrence doctrine and calibrated responses from Pokhran-II to Operation Sindoor (2025).
The Pacifist Strand
Running alongside is the Buddhist-Gandhian tradition of ahimsa, dialogue, and moral restraint, explaining India's preference for multilateral engagement, its No First Use policy, and refusal to intervene militarily beyond its neighbourhood even under pressure, as in the 2003 Iraq War.
The Adaptive Synthesis
Pant and Goswami describe India's strategic culture as adaptive, combining realism and restraint depending on context. Operation Sindoor exemplifies this: restraint in confining strikes to terror infrastructure coexisted with coercive resolve through suspending the Indus Waters Treaty. Raja Mohan and Raghavan reject Tanham's claim that India lacks strategic coherence, pointing to the Cholas' maritime power and Maratha warfare as historical evidence.
India's strategic culture is rich precisely because it is not monolithic. The layered coexistence of Kautilyan pragmatism and Gandhian restraint gives Indian statecraft a distinctive flexibility that purely realist or purely pacifist traditions cannot claim.
Neelam Bhatia, PSIR Faculty – UPSCPrep.com
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