An indictment and a challenge
ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN
|
The challenge is to create an Indian discipline of international relations which does not evade philosophic questions
|
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN INDIA — Bringing Theory Back Home: Rs. 395; Theorising the Region and Nation, Rs. 325: Kanti Bajpai and Siddharth Mallavarapu — Editors; Orient Longman Pvt. Ltd., 1/24, Asaf Ali Road, New Delhi-110002.
These two volumes simultaneously indict and challenge the discipline of international relations (IR) in India. The indictment is that despite the presence in India of several highly capable and accomplished IR scholars, the discipline languishes for lack of funding, lack of interest, and poor scholarship, which reveals an avoidance of theory and the conflation of area studies with IR. The challenge is to create a theoretically and historically well-informed Indian discipline of international relations which does not evade philosophic questions.
IR perspectives
The collection contains many excellent papers. B. S. Chimni cites WTO rulings to show how international law, which presumes equality between states, in operation favours the powerful on most issues. Rajen Harshe gives a very clear account of the main IR perspectives — a model for students — and his citations of Gramsci come from an authoritative English translation.
There are, of course, difficulties. A clear analysis of the types of rights — civil, political, and economic — examined in IR scholarship neither notes the incoherence of the distinctions nor queries the tenability of the idea of rights. Both the distinction and the idea of rights have been fiercely attacked by several contemporary political philosophers, but their arguments are apparently unknown in mainstream IR.
Other positions in IR theory also go unexamined. For example, realism implies that the state is driven by machtlust; the further implications could have been articulated here to great effect. Equally, a serious adherence to Kant — read in his own right, not paraphrased nth hand from yet another commentary — requires us never to treat any human being in any manner that is in the slightest way instrumental, but the implications thereof for institutions and officials, and for citizens, are apparently not sensed here.
The colonial legacy
As to Hobbes, the condition most commonly described as Hobbesian, the bellum omnium contra omnes, is not the condition Hobbes advocated but the one he most feared. At worst, IR theorising looks akin to selecting brand X or brand Y in a supermarket. Those difficulties are only partly due to the fact that — as several contributors note — the overwhelming bulk of IR theory originates in northern European culture and that of the dominant racial and social groups in the United States. Another, perhaps equally significant, reason lies in the nature and status of theory itself, and in questions of generalisation and predictability.
The second volume makes some attempt to address those issues, and notes that aspects of geopolitical discourse have been examined in the light of Foucault, though the question of the soundness of applying a philosopher's work to an issue is not examined.
Nevertheless the work is very valuable. Sanjay Chaturvedi, noting that Kautilya's state was a concept rather than any particular state (was Kautilya a conceptual precursor of Hegel?), outlines the contradiction between the modern Indian state's inheritance of the colonial state apparatus and the ethos of a nationalist movement which had gained great strength by rejecting the colonial terms and categories.
The consequences have been very destructive. Colonial accounts of India excluded class — one of the dominant terms in British domestic social and political discourse of the period — and characterised Indian life almost solely in terms of religion. That has been one cause of contemporary
India's cartographic anxiety (Chaturvedi mentions the forced integration of many of the princely states with the Indian Union); another has been the unexamined inheritance of colonial concepts of the state as a territorial entity.
Promising directions
Chaturvedi cites Sankaran Krishna: "If India remains somewhere between the former colony and the not-yet-nation, is there anything `post' about the postcolonial condition?"
As Samir Kumar Das's fieldwork shows, the problems have resurfaced, with ethnically-defined territoriality and sub-territoriality replicating and subverting state territoriality. It is a pity, though, that Hannah Arendt's terrifying analysis of the collapse of the nation-state in the 1920s is not cited here.
Needless to say, developing another discourse of international relations, one which draws upon previous epistemologies, even metaphysics, and is yet distinctively South Asian, will not be easy.
Ashis Nandy's analysis of several hijackings of Indian aircraft reveals much that the official bodies and the mainstream English-language media have ignored, distorted, and even suppressed.
In particular, the situations aboard the aircraft never collapsed into amorality; with the state in de facto abeyance on board, vernacular understandings of human association asserted themselves in ways that have not been evident in hijackings elsewhere in the world, and much slaughter was thereby prevented.
In all, these two volumes indicate untapped resources and promising directions for Indian scholars of international relations; if they have their intended impact, they will have achieved much.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Book Review
