Strategic Culture

• Intro:
• RAND corporation VP, George tanham in his 1992 paper, ‘Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretative Essay’  argued that the Indian elite had not systematically or coherently thought about national security and india is intellectually empty as far as political ideas are concerned.

• Counters by:

1. Prof Morris Jones says it shows ethnocentric attitude of Western scholars. Says ignoring indian values would lead to impoverishment of west.
   
2. 
1. in his book “India and Asian geopolitics”- Saying that India has no strategic culture is only to say that it is different from the strategic cultures one is used to
3. Rodney W jones- india’s strategic culture is not monolithic, rather it is mosaic like.
4. Max muller- India: what it can teach us-says nowhere in the world, human mind has dealt the issues of different spheres of life with such depth as india.
   
5. 
   
   
   
   
   “If all the books on war and peace were to suddenly disappear form the world, and only the Mahabharta remained, it would be good enough to capture all the possible debates on order,justice,force and moral dilemmas within the realm of IR.” - Arvind Sharma in Essays on the mahabharata.
6. India has a rich repository of IR policies- from Ashoka’s post Kalinga idealism to the more predicitve hard headed realism of Kautilya
7. The arthashastra talks about grand strategy that includes states military and non-military, material and ideational resources and using these power factors for the realisation of its foreign policy goals
8. For s jaishankar in his book TIW, Mahabharata is the most vivid distillation of Indian thoughts on statecraft. 
9. Shinzo Abe mentioned that his “confluence of the two seas” speech about Indo pacific was inspired from Dara Shikhoh’s book written in 1655
10. 
    Bhikhu Parekh has rightly said that arthshastra represents realist tradtion of India
11. 
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• Conclusion:
• Edward said:  gave concept of orientalism which led to post colonial thought. Said the Study of orient (east) was not an objective understanding of East but a project to justify West civilising mission on the east.