Form of words:
IThere is a basic, general idea that in strategy and much more, you must put yourself in the place of others if you want to deal with them. This is an important thing I tell students when I teach foreign policy and national security courses.
Harvard political scientist Stephen Walt recently made the same point in a Article In the American magazine on “Empathy” in International Affairs, foreign policy. Constantino Xavier of the Indian think-tank Center for Social and Economic Progress (CESP) supported Vault Scene Emphasizing that it is “impossible to understand India’s regional policies in South Asia without seeing Delhi” from the point of view of its neighbours.
India’s diplomats are paid to do many things for our country, including lying, but they are also paid to tell us the truth about how others see us, especially in our neighbourhood. I am not aware of what he writes and says, but he could have done so with the help of academics and think-tank analysts. While our diplomats and intelligence officers switch roles and responsibilities every few years, researchers can spend their entire career on one topic and bring much needed depth of knowledge.
As I tweeted in response to Xavier, it is an absurdity that given India’s population of 1.3 billion people, we cannot even hire 20 well trained China and Pakistan experts. The emphasis in the previous sentence is on the word “well trained”. Glad things are getting a little better With respect to Chinese experts. But this is not the case in Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
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Missing South Asian Studies Center
Part of the problem is that there are very few South Asian study centers in India. The discipline is a vast field, but my reference here is to South Asian studies in the context of political science and international relations, with a focus on the internal and external policies of regional countries.
When I googled “South Asian studies in India”, I found a few dozen American and other western research centers studying this area. However, I found only four campuses in India that offered South Asian studies: Jawaharlal Nehru University, Pondicherry University, Madras University, and South Asian University. Search Pakistan study in India and you will get a complete blank. In 2010, Panjab University in Chandigarh was considering such a center, but after searching three Google pages I was unable to find it.
Dibrugarh University has a Bangladesh and Myanmar Studies Center, and Delhi University should have a Bangladesh chair, but you can open several pages of Google searches and the only dedicated Bangladeshi studies “hits” you’ll find. Fortunately, India does better at understanding Bangladesh, mainly because of West Bengal’s cultural similarities and linkages with its neighbour. Yet, India has not invested in the study of Bangladesh in any systematic way.
Beyond the South Asian Studies Centers, there are certainly individual South Asian experts in the Departments of Political Science or International Relations in India. I mean no offense to those who study contemporary South Asia, but has there been any aftermath? SD Muni JNU’s who has written a book of some depth and who has a real name identity?
In 2020, an Indian Association of South Asian Studies was launched. The president is a historian, and not surprisingly, the “distinguished speakers” advertised at the first conference were historians of modern South Asia. Remarkably, there was only one historian in India who was one of those speakers, and that was Shahid Amin of Delhi University. If we had a conference of political scientists from South Asia, we could end up with a similar advertisement, which mainly featured distinguished speakers from outside India.
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educational rabbit hole
What is the plan? Given the pathetic condition of Indian public universities, there is little hope of promoting South Asian studies in older campuses, at least in the near future. In fact, all indications are that standards of higher education are about to decline further, essentially because university administration is so dysfunctional and the government’s contempt for anything other than STEM studies is so deep that the social sciences cannot flourish. The only real hope in India is from private universities and think tanks. Their biggest problem is the funding and the scale of operations they can mount.
Significantly, the Indian government itself has stifled South Asian studies. Indian scholars who want to understand our neighbours, must be careful, otherwise they run the risk of being called liberal (is there a dirty word in India today?), appeasement, or worse, anti-national. If the government is hostile to open investigation and debate, there is little hope of promoting high-quality South Asian studies.
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Neighborhood first?
India talks about being a “leading power” and having a “neighbourhood-first” approach in its foreign policy, but it rarely does. This is quite evident in terms of how much it invests in knowing the world outside its borders, including its immediate neighbourhood. Given our relationships in the region, we should be NS Global Center for South Asian Studies. Unfortunately, we are nowhere near that position.
If India wants to better manage its territory, it must first confront the ignorance of its neighbours. We cannot leave the understanding of South Asia to our generalists and hardened diplomats, and even our intelligence officers, who rush from topic to topic.
Kanteo Bajpai is the author and Wilmer Professor of Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. Thoughts are personal.
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