The State of Security Studies in India: Limitations and Potential

Teaching and research in the security studies discipline remains one of the most neglected critical component in ensuring India’s rise as a major twenty-first century power. However, in spite of India’s well-recognized heritage as also potential to contribute to the emerging global discourses, its security studies remain devoid of direction, vision and resources. Sporadic initiatives, both at individual and institutional level, have not allowed India to move beyond producing merely a mass of consumers of teaching and research done in select universities in Europe and North America that continue to guide the tone and tenor of India’s security studies. Indian universities, which sustain large degree-awarding infrastructure in security studies, have continued in this path-dependency and celebrate works done in the West. Information revolution led globalization was expected to create a level-playing field for India’s experts. But it has only reinforced conventional path-dependency by providing free and rather easy access to Western analysis and information. India’s security studies have remained bound within the original mode of Imperial education that was aimed at producing clerks and court jesters. No doubt, few think tanks have tried to present Indian perspectives of few contemporary issues yet they remain focused on topical themes and confined to policy research. Even here, it is India’s universities that provide both the cadres as also consumers for these think tanks’ analysis and comments. Thus responsibility lies primarily with Indian universities to engage in deeper academic research through long-term cultivation of Indian scholarly traditions. Indeed, as India emerges as a major power to reckon with, evolving original Indian schools of thought in security studies teaching and research becomes a prerequisite for ensuring India its place in the evolving global order.