The rivalry revisited

Abstract

THE SOURCES OF DISCORD What animates the Indo-Pakistani conflict? The question is far from trivial. This rivalry, which originated almost immediately after British colonial withdrawal from and the partition of the British Indian Empire in 1947, has proven to be remarkably durable. It has resulted in four wars (1947–48, 1965, 1971 and 1999) and multiple crises. The structural origins of this conflict have been explored at length elsewhere. This book, focused on Indo-Pakistani relations between 1999 and 2009, will attempt to answer a critical question: does the security dilemma (the spiral model ) or the deterrence model best describe this relationship? This attempt to squarely place the rivalry in the context of central propositions from the security studies literature is a fundamentally novel endeavor. The novelty of this approach is twofold. First, despite the persistence of this rivalry over six decades, the literature on the subject is scant. What little does exists is either descriptive or historical in orientation and there have been few attempts to examine the rivalry through theoretical foci. Second, this lack of scholarly attention to the sources of discord is puzzling, as the two states have been incipient nuclear-armed rivals for well over two decades and became overt nuclear weapons states in 1998. Furthermore, one of the two rivals, India, has long had aspirations to emerge as a great power. Indeed, according to some scholars, it has already achieved great power status. Some recent literature, mostly focused on Pakistan, while not explicitly alluding to the concept of the security dilemma , has nevertheless suggested that the sheer structural differences between the two states at the time of their emergence from the detritus of the British colonial empire in South Asia, led the weaker state, Pakistan, to fear its behemoth neighbor. To varying degrees, these works suggest that misgivings about India precipitated Pakistan's anxieties and set the stage for the rivalry. Before turning to a discussion of the security dilemma and deterrence models and their applicability to the Indo-Pakistani conflict it appears necessary to provide a brief account of the evolution of the rivalry. The rivalry, from the outset, became structured within the territorial dispute over the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Briefly stated, the problem of the Kashmir dispute can be traced to the process of British colonial disengagement from the subcontinent.