Book Review: Shrikant Paranjpe, India’s Strategic Culture: The Making of National Security Policy and Chris Ogden, Hindu Nationalism and the Evolution of Contemporary Indian Security: Portents of Power
| Author | Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu |
| DOI | 10.1177/2321023014551882 |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
sovereign Pakistan’ is taken as a comparative critique of the organizational failure of the Muslim
League to prepare itself ‘to assume the governance of a sovereign country’, (p. 157), when in fact it
could be equally taken as evidence of ongoing uncertainty, even as late as 1946, about the very meaning
of the Pakistan demand. To probe the contingencies of Pakistan’s creation would require a far deeper
engagement with the meanings of ‘nationhood’ (and of its relationship to religion) than Tudor is willing
to engage in. In spite of its many important insights, Tudor’s book thus effectively illustrates, in the
end, how the use of history to develop comparative theory can, if one is not careful, force history into
a straitjacket.
David Gilmartin
North Carolina State University
E-mail: david_gilmartin@ncsu.edu
Shrikant Paranjpe, India’s Strategic Culture: The Making of National Security Policy. New Delhi: Routledge.
2013. 184 pages. ` 695.
and
Chris Ogden, Hindu Nationalism and the Evolution of Contemporary Indian Security: Portents of Power.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2014. 257 pages. ` 795.
DOI: 10.1177/2321023014551882
Strategic culture—broadly defined—is a state’s belief system and behaviour, which in turn shapes the
ways and means a state uses for achieving its national security objectives. The study of strategic
culture seeks to provide a framework to better understand why states pursue certain policy options
over others and to try to explain continuity and change in the national security policies of states. Among
the questions that strategic culture scholars grapple with are: What are the drivers—internal and
external—that lead states to make the choices with regard to national security that they do? Is there
a consistency over a period of time of the choices made or do these choices change over time? Can
strategic culture explain this consistency and change? Clearly, strategic culture is a crucial element to
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