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Friday | 10:00 AM | The Evolution of Indian Defence Policies: Prof. Sumit Ganguly, Indiana University (Bloomington/USA), Department of Political Science What are the sources of India’s defence policy and how has it evolved? This lecture will argue that it can be traced to four distinct factors: ideas, institutions, resources and threat perceptions. These four factors, obviously, have waxed and waned over the course of seventy years of India’s independence. To that end, it will be demonstrated that the evolution of the country’s defence policies can be divided into three and possibly four discrete phases. In the initial phase, ideas dominated the making of Indian defence policy. The exogenous shock of the 1962 Sino-Indian border war led to the diminution of the role of ideas and threat perceptions came to the fore. However, resource constraints and institutional pathologies hobbled the conduct of Indian defence policy. The next phase came about in the wake of the Cold War’s end and the Soviet collapse. The final phase, where ideas again seem to be ascendant and where resource constraints seem to have been loosened might have begun following the emergence of the Bharatiya Janata Party regime in 2014. Address Südasien-Institut Heinrich Zimmer Lesesaal Im Neuenheimer Feld 330 69120 Heidelberg Organizer Abteilung Politische Wissenschaft Homepage Organizer http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/sai/pol/index.html Contact |