Ethnicity, Security, and Separatism in India

A hallmark of Indian politics, ethnic tension have escalated dramatically since the 1980s, endangering India's unity as a sovereign democracy. Although a succession of governments has attempted to resolve them, these conflicts have weakened India's role as the dominant power in the region. This work examines the connections between internal and external policy and explores the ways in which domestic tensions, particularly arising from ethnic and sectarian heterogenity, shape India's role in the region. The book studies movements in Punjab, Kashmir and Tamil Nadu, which escalated throughout the 1980s and influenced India's relations with Pakistan and Sri Lanka. It argues that India does not seek hegemony in South Asia; instead it acts to protect its nation-building efforts from similar problems faced by neighbouring countries. Paradoxically, this goal requires India to intervene in neighbouring countries ethnic conflicts.

The absence of regional integration in South Asia has resulted in political, economic, and societal issues due to the interference of other powerful countries in international politics. As the regional power in South Asia, India has tremendous potential to promote regional integration. However, India's hegemonic power has caused controversial issues among South Asian neighbours, and regional integration has been further challenged. This research paper examines the challenges and opportunities for regional integration in South Asia, focusing on India's role in promoting regionalism. The study also conceptualizes the potential for regional integration in South Asia, identifying the key challenges and obstacles hindering its progress, such as political rivalries, security concerns, and economic disparities. This study is primarily based on secondary qualitative data derived from research papers, books, Journal articles, websites, meeting minutes and other web based publications. The collected data was analyzed by descriptive content analysis to address the central question of the study. The findings have emphasized that India plays a critical role in the success of regional integration in South Asia, given its size, economic potential, and geopolitical significance. However, India's domestic political and bilateral tensions, asymmetric economy, and constitutional challenges have been identified as the major drawbacks to regional integration under India's supremacy. Furthermore, economic cooperation, connectivity initiatives, and leadership at the SAARC have been identified as India's pervasive potential to promote and establish regional cooperation. The paper concludes by offering policy recommendations for promoting regional integration in South Asia, focusing on India's leadership role.

Ethnic tensions in any part of South Asia have always been viewed with concern by India. Almost all the states of South Asia were once integral parts of a single sociocultural system of which India was the center. Religion, language, ethnicity, and, of course, a common colonial experience are the major forces that transcend the territorial boundaries of South Asian nations and strongly influence intraregional relations. As an Indo-centric region, serious ethnic or racial upheavals in any country that is a part of South Asia are bound to have a spillover effect in India. Thus the Tamil people of India, who sympathize with the Tamils of Sri Lanka, reacted emotionally when the island was rocked by violent Sinhalese-Tamil ethnic riots in July 1983. Historically and culturally the Tamils of India and the Tamils of Sri Lanka have felt close to each other, and the Tamils of the Indian state of Tamilnadu become agitated over any event in Sri Lanka that affects the interests of their cousins across the Palk Straits. Sri Lanka's geopolitical location is another important factor that compels India's anxiety over any destabilizing development in the island. Often described as the fulcrum of the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka is barely thirty miles from the southern tip of India. The 4000-mile maritime border of the Indian Peninsula is largely fringed by the Indian Ocean, and ensuring peace and stability within the Indian Ocean region has been a major objective of India's foreign policy. Geopolitics and the sociocultural composition of the region, therefore, compel India to conceive of itself as the security manager of South Asia. India's role in Sri Lanka's fouryear old ethnic conflict needs to be understood in this perspective.

This paper examines the gains for South Asian economies from integrating with East Asia and India’s role in this process. Evidence of increased pan-Asian integration exists but the process is uneven. Bilateral trade has grown. As have bilateral foreign direct investment flows and free trade agreements (FTAs), albeit at a slower pace than trade. The integration process has been led by India and Pakistan with limited participation of smaller South Asian economies. Tackling key impediments in cross-border infrastructure, FTAs, trade barriers and business regulations, and barriers to services will foster further integration. Computable general equilibrium (CGE) simulations suggest that a South Asia–East Asia FTA offers the most gains for South Asia and that India has an incentive to include its neighbors in such an arrangement rather than going it alone with East Asia. The rest of South Asia will gain by deepening South Asian integration and fostering ties with East Asia.

The Russian Federation developed very different ideologies on the concept of democracy. In 2006, Vladislav Surkov, the First Deputy of the Chief of the Russian Presidential Administration, coined the term “sovereign democracy”. This gave a name to the Russian form of “managed” democracy and introduced a Russian alternative to Western liberal democracy: Sovereign Democracy. It asserts that Russia is a democracy and this fact must never be questioned by any state or such action will be viewed by the Kremlin as unwanted intervention in its domestic affairs. The Kremlin reacted to the recent Color Revolutions in the former Soviet Bloc by defining the concept of sovereign democracy. Russian democratic ideology, depicted within sovereign democracy, states both sovereignty and democracy are socially and culturally determined. The Kremlin argues Western interference, such as supporting the Color Revolutions, imposed Western conceptions of democracy on Russian civilians, and this interference is an attempt to influence Russia’s political philosophies and institutions. Putin and his administration emphasized the demarcation between Russian sovereign democracy and Western liberal democracy. Sovereign democracy allows the Kremlin to validate their increasingly undemocratic domestic and international policies. In particular, it led to the creation of the domestic agency, Russian Federal Public Chamber, in 2006 and heavily influenced the Kremlin’s decision to assist Belarusian President Alexsandr Lukashenko after the presidential elections in 2006. When the Kremlin proclaimed sovereign democracy as the uniquely Russian form of democracy, it crafted itself a defense against international criticism; because, to question sovereign democracy, and the policies it led too, would be tantamount to criticizing Russian social and cultural history.

Purpose Macroeconomic policy shocks have consistently provoked debate across global economies, given their significant effect on economic growth, particularly by affecting markets and employment through changes in consumer behavior. Policymakers need proper abatement measures for both internal and external uncertainties. Design/methodology/approach The present study aims to analyze the impacts of internal and external policy uncertainty on consumption in 22 countries with their trading shares with each other from 2010q1 to 2021q4. In this regard, for external policy shocks the study constructed an index for each country based on their bilateral trade shares a weighted average of internal policy uncertainty. Findings By applying the panel ARDL, a U-shaped relationship between consumption and policy shocks is observed. Further, for the county wise assessment of internal and external policy uncertainty on domestic consumption is assessed and it has shown to be negative in most of countries. Gross effects are also revealed where internal policy shocks have more influence than external policy shocks as countries can diversify external risks from their trade portfolio. Other determinates of consumption like income and exchange rate have positive effects, while interest rate and inflation have negative influences. Originality/value The outcomes provide internal and external policy insights for consumption stabilization.

This article employs a historical framework to examine the development of a free trade zone in the Asia-Pacific region and its broader implications for the geopolitical and economic trajectories of Southeast and South Asia. The historical underpinnings of this process are inherently geopolitical, closely intertwined with U.S. efforts to maintain strategic influence over a rapidly emerging center of economic growth within the evolving “post-American” world order. Regional economic integration initiatives reflect both the intrinsic inclination of states in these regions to foster deeper horizontal cooperation and the strategic maneuvering of a fiscally constrained United States to uphold its dominance in a geopolitical environment increasingly oriented toward autonomous national interests - interests that are progressively diverging from the official policy agenda of Washington. Within the context of ongoing global transformations, India's role in both regional and international politics is undergoing a profound recalibration. Against the backdrop of these systemic shifts, this article seeks to evaluate the prospects for strengthening Russian-Indian relations within the framework of a rapidly evolving global order.

The article shows the main trends of modern historiography of a pre-war history of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The main topics of research are: formation and early years of the Baltic states in 1918–1920.; policy of the Baltic regimes towards the White movement; the reasons, contents and after-effects of the pro-fascist coups of the 1930s.; the Baltic states entry into the Soviet Union; repression of 1940–1941. According to the dominated in the Western historiography point of view, the Baltic States are considered as objects of a foreign policy of the USSR. Soviet political ambitions immolated the independence of the three sovereign republics. Serious attention is paid to the aggressive foreign policy of the USSR and Germany, but there are a small number of studies where Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are described as agents of historical processes, trying to build their own internal and external policies. It should be noted that studies of many Baltic and Western historians are preconceived. They are juggling the facts; explore the causes and consequences of historical processes occurred in the Baltic republics from one side.

Reviewed by: The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784: A grand strategic interpretation by G.J. Bryant Joshua Ehrlich The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784: A grand strategic interpretation By G.J. Bryant. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2013. The Emergency of British Power in India addresses a classic historical question: how the British East India Company evolved in the eighteenth century from a trading corporation into the dominant political power in South Asia. Looking at the “roles, opinions and contributions” of the Company’s leadership, it seeks to explain the transformation on military-political grounds (x). “The grand strategic history of British engagement in India,” it argues, “morphed from a reactive-defensive phase (1746 to 1761), primarily externalised against the French menace, to a proactive… phase (1757 to 1784), internalised to problematic relations with the Indian states” (29). Part One examines the first phase, in which successive wars between Britain and France militarized the contest between their respective India companies for control of European trade with the subcontinent. Chapter One examines the onset of hostilities during the War of Austrian Succession, the largest consequence of which for the British Company was the traumatic, albeit temporary, loss of Madras in 1746. This disaster, coupled with French interference in dynastic struggles in the Deccan and Carnatic, stirred the Company from complacency, prompting it to make local alliances and engage its counterpart in a proxy war—the subject of Chapter Two. Chapters Three and Four treat the climax of the Anglo-French rivalry, in the Carnatic and Bengal respectively, during the Seven Years’ War. In the author’s analysis, the British Company’s forces were hampered by a comparative lack of coordination, both with the London directorate and between the far-flung governments of the three presidencies. Yet the manpower and revenues of the Compagnie des Indes proved less stable, and the low priority Versailles accorded the eastern theater made it loath to allocate resources there. The British Company won a decisive victory in 1761. Even at this point, however, the author attributes to its leadership an overriding concern with securing trade and profits rather than building an empire. Part Two traces the evolution of the Company’s “reactive” posture into a “proactive” one through its military and political entanglements from 1762–84. Chronologically overlapping chapters on Bengal (Five and Seven), Madras (Six and Nine), and Bombay (Eight) treat the Company’s efforts to manage perceived threats from Indian “country” powers and prevent the French from regaining their former position. These chapters witness increasing coordination between the Company’s presidencies and the extension of its military and political thinking into the heartland and into the future. According to Bryant, officials were coming to understand Indian politics in terms of a balance of power among states, which the interests of peace and stability demanded they maintain. Differences persisted as to the means appropriate to this end. The directors reiterated their longstanding aversion to territorial conquest, but leaders in India—notably Warren Hastings—were prone to “realpolitik,” wielding the sword or the olive branch as necessary (224). In any case, there was now “no denying that the Company was itself on the way to becoming a highly active ‘country’ power” (151). While finding that the Company engaged increasingly in “‘imperialist’ behaviour,” Bryant concludes that it did not, in the period before 1784, “evolve a conscious imperial ambition to dominate India” (325). He argues instead for something like path dependency: despite the lack of a “collective perception of where it might lead in the long run,” “a generally coherent pattern of responses to specific threats did begin to emerge” (325, 327). Drawn repeatedly into conflict by its pecuniary interests, pursuing only limited and intermittent territorial conquests, insensible to any greater destiny, the Company nonetheless emerged as the dominant power in Indian politics. There is nothing particularly novel about this interpretation: commentators and historians have advanced versions of it since at least the turn of the nineteenth century. The author dismisses recent accounts, which have traced the Company’s imperial ambitions as far back as the 1600s, on the basis of a rigid distinction between the concerns of a government (“the security...

The European Union (EU) has carved out a specific approach to the issues of religion and belief in its legislative framework and policies, which is largely aligned with the standards built through the interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights. Litigation on the issue of freedom of religion and belief is on the rise before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), while in parallel the EU seems to be stepping up its efforts to tackle the given issue in its internal and external actions. The EU approach to the issue of freedom of religion or belief, remains somewhat fragmented, while its internal and external policies are not always mutually aligned. The paper provides an overview of EU’s regulatory and monitoring framework related to the freedom of religion and belief in EU’s internal and external policies, and outlines the developments in the CJEU caselaw concerning the prohibition of discrimination in the area of employment and in the context of the refugee status. The paper points out the limitations of the current EU approach.

One could question the relevance of a contribution concerning Pakistan’s self-perception, understanding of history and thought about the nature of its state in a collection of articles dealing with the security constellation in South Asia. Notwithstanding the complexity of the matter under discussion, the answer is not difficult. A specific self-image and enemy image in Pakistan ab ovo led to a distinctly ideological raison d’état. The influence these images have exercised through the education system and on internal and external policies have led to striking pre-formations of collective political behaviour that have had serious consequences for foreign and security policy. Pakistan’s external policies have therefore, for a long time, been a major factor in the security constellation in South Asia, which has been chronically tense since 1947. A further aspect with security relevance is that since the 1960s, Pakistan’s self-perception has been used by Hindu-nationalist forces in India as a justification for their own political and ideological ends. Before the BJP era, history-based revisionism was neither an element of India’s raison d’état nor of its policy vis-à-vis Pakistan. It is an irony of history that the Hindu nationalism now ruling India marches under the same banners that India’s liberal political classes criticised so strongly in Pakistan’s policy from 1947 to 1998.KeywordsSecurity PolicyNational IdentityIslamic StateHistory TextbookNorth West Frontier ProvinceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

(1989). Response and responsibility: The government of India's role in the Bengal famine, 1943. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 49-65.

This article focuses on the regional requirements for a pacification of Afghanistan. For this purpose, Afghanistan is analytically "reframed" as part of South Asia. The hypothesis is that India is the only regional actor that might possess both the incentives and the capabilities to deal with the negative security externalities emanating from Afghanistan.In South Asia, material characteristics such as the delineation of the region and its power polarity are unclear. India's role within the region is even more controversial. By examining India's role within its security environment, this paper will suggest how this lack of clarity could be remedied. In light of the disputes between India and Pakistan and between Pakistan and Afghanistan, India's involvement in the Afghan conflict is probably the most critical test case for India's leadership potential. The following section elaborates a theoretical framework based on Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT) and the concept of regional hegemony as one form of regional order.

This paper examines India's role in services outsourcing within Asia. It provides a brief overview of the global as well as Indian services outsourcing industry. The core section examines India's relationship with other Asian countries such as China, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia in service outsourcing. It examines the extent to which these countries pose a competitive challenge to India and concludes that at this time, India is far ahead although it is likely to face growing competition as its costs rise. The paper highlights the need to move beyond this comparative paradigm and to examine the complementary and collaborative opportunities that exist between India and other Asian countries in services outsourcing. It concludes that there is considerable scope for such synergies and that India and other Asian countries can form different parts of a larger regional or global delivery model. Regional and bilateral agreements within Asia can also facilitate this process.

Intensifying rice-fallow systems in Southeast and South Asia with grain legumes and/or dry season crops: analysis using field experiment and simulation