Abstract
One of the pioneering works on India’s strategic culture is by George K. Tanham (1992) titled India’s Strategic Thought: An interpretive essay, in which he argues that virtually there is no evidence to prove that Indian elites have consistently thought about a national strategy. According to him this lack of a coherent strategic thought can be explained by analyzing four principal factors that have conditioned the thought process of the Indian strategic community viz., geography, history, culture and the British raj(pp.1-19). These factors have contributed mostly to the absence of strategic thinking (pp.50-67). From among the Indian strategic community, a few have partly, and another section wholeheartedly agreed with the arguments of Tanham. Rejecting Tanham’s argument Siv Shankar Menon, former Foreign Secretary and National Security Advisor, has made a powerful intervention in the debate by stating that India possesses a strategic culture and the same gets applied in bilateral and multilateral diplomacy (Menon, 2013). The present paper reviews the positions of both Tanham and Shiv Shankar Menon. The paper sums up that India does have a strategic culture rooted in its civilization and its modern manifestation is the concept of strategic autonomy which got distilled from the ancient text Arthasastra of Kautilya.
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