War and Peace in Contemporary India examines the importance of institutions and the role played by international actors in crucial episodes of India’s strategic history. The contributions trace India’s tryst with war and peace from immediately before the foundation of the contemporary Indian state, to the last military conflict between India and Pakistan in 1999.
The focus of the chapters included in this edited volume is as much on India as it is on Pakistan and China, its opponents in war. The chapters offer a fresh take on the creation of India as a regional military power, and her approach to War and Peace in the post-independence period. Importantly, it advances the broader work on Indian strategic history during the Cold War and after, an otherwise under-studied intellectual landscape. The book offers fresh insights based on archival work, as well as a closer conceptual reading of Indian, British and American decision making at times of war and peace in contemporary India.
This book will be of great interest to scholars, researchers and students interested in strategic studies, diplomatic and military history, international diplomacy, as well as Indian history and politics.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Strategic Studies.
Introduction: War and peace in contemporary India
Rudra Chaudhuri
1. Building the sinews of power: India in the Second World War
Srinath Raghavan
2. The ‘Indian’ staff college: Politics and practices of military institution-building in Twentieth century India
Vipul Dutta
3. The long shadow of colonial cartography: Britain and the Sino-Indian war of 1962
Paul M. McGarr
4. ‘Just another border incident’: The Rann of Kutch and the 1965 India–Pakistan War
Rudra Chaudhuri
5. Tilting at windmills: The flawed U.S. policy toward the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war
Christopher Clary
6. Provocation, war and restraint under the nuclear shadow: The Kargil conflict 1999
John H. Gill
Biography
Rudra Chaudhuri is the Director of Carnegie India and Senior Lecturer at King’s College London. He is also Visiting Professor at Ashoka University. Rudra works on contemporary security issues and increasingly on the future of technology diplomacy. Rudra is the author of Forged in Crisis: India and the United States since 1947 (2014). He is currently writing a book on the Global History of the Indian Emergency, 1975-1977.
