Indian Army Most Influential in Asia Pacific Region

What’s with the hard sell?

Am I being overly suspicious again about something relatively innocuous (just answering a question)?

Sucks to have every word parsed but the foreign and diaspora press do this all the time. Might as well get used to it.

Is this for domestic or foreign consumption?

If it’s for domestic consumption, is this about providing options within the Asian Rebalance framework (or about not getting left behind)? Mil-mil training provides a nice option because policy makers like options but I am always suspicious about how these relationships are supposed to work in reality.

If it’s for foreign consumption, is this some Cold War AEI nostalgia, hoping for anti-China “blocs” when we should strive for good relationships with all nations in the region, including China? It’s a multi-polar world and the US doesn’t have an existential enemy in the sense of the Soviet Union. The “bloc” thinking of that era seems ill-suited to today.

Or is this just good old-fashioned American eagerness and I’m reading too much into it (once again, get used to it).

In a study that interviewed many US and Indian officials, one US military officer said, “Indians can be accused of having many cockeyed views,” but “they always have a substantive knowledge of the historical interactions, which makes it difficult to counter their arguments. They always raise the history of events during meetings.” This view was echoed by many others., that while the United States had an arrogance of power, the Indians had an intellectual arrogance. The study concluded,

“The Indian elites are quintessential intellectuals. They thrive on fine-tuned arguments and logic. But US military officers and businessmen are not interested in intellectual arguments—they are interested in practical issues. Consequently, they find India’s intellectual arrogance off-putting and counter-productive.”
As one US official framed it, it was American Calvinist arrogance versus Indian Brahminical arrogance, and as Thucydides reminds us, men’s indignation is more excited by a legal or intellectual wrong than by a violent wrong; the first looks like being cheated by an equal, the second like being compelled by a superior.

Unfortunately, many Indian scholars have imbibed their diplomats’ prickliness. India has failed to produce sufficient numbers of qualified foreign policy analysts on its own, and the government’s paranoia regarding declassification of state records has forced scholars to work from foreign sources and cultivate privileged access, not all of which is kosher. Usually due to widely varying sources (for example, the British Archives versus an interview with a former Indian bureaucrat), Indian foreign policy wonks have reacted harshly to “outsiders” like William Dalrymple, Bruce Riedel, Francine Frankel, and George Perkovich, oftentimes unfairly or for perceived intentions rather than their scholarly output. This attitude does not further understanding of Delhi’s thinking and only creates polarised minefields where there ought to be research.

http://jaideepprabhu.org/2013/07/09/the-prickly-indian/

Remind you all of a “prickly” regular commenter around here, although an American?

Doctrinal arguments fine, cracking open the books better….

You watch yourselves out there. Remember the last time we had grand plans of using regional South Asian armies as a part of a bunch of soft-focused, dreamy and theoretical strategic plans?

🙂

PS: I tried correcting a bunch of errors but I don’t know why I bother, I always miss something in my hurry to post something when I don’t have time to do so….