Ethnicity, Security, and Separatism in India.

• Author: Rao, Arati
• Position: Review

Ethnicity, Security, and Separatism in India Maya Chadda (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 286 pp.

South Asia provides scholars with one of the most challenging examples of the supranational state's efforts to manage a population of overlapping nationalities whose demands frequently spill across national boundaries. Maya Chadda's book examines three security flashpoints for the Indian state--Kashmir, Punjab and Tamil concerns--to argue that domestic conflicts have a crucial impact on the making of foreign policy. In her "ethnonationalistic perspective" on security, Chadda gives priority to the tensions generated in India's multi-ethnic society by the coexisting demands of allegiance to the Indian state as well as to the ethnic group.

When these tensions lead to violence, interference from neighboring states turns a domestic concern into a regional conflict. Through detailed analysis of the historical antecedents of these flashpoints, Chadda convinces her readers of the dynamic relationship between domestic and international politics and highlights the challenges and many difficulties of maintaining the supranational state at the cost of suppressing sub-nationalisms.

Chadda is one of a growing number of scholars who attack the traditional approach to foreign policymaking that separates internal and foreign affairs, conceptualizes the state as a homogenous territorial area with stable frontiers and defines power in terms of quantifiable advantages such as size, industrial strength and armed forces.

In the case of India, this approach divides foreign policy into three periods--ranging from the internationalism of Nehru, through the retreat to regionalism in the 1960s, to the current phase of hegemonic expansion and regional meddling--without any reference to the serious political and economic considerations influencing government leaders at all times, and the difficulty in post-colonial states of ever separating domestic and foreign policies, especially in light of aid dependence and increasing globalization. (Indeed, globalization makes these new states and their internal situations freshly important to the industrialized states.)

In contrast to these traditional readings, Chadda makes the persuasive case that, Indian foreign policy actually is explained in large part by "the lack of congruence between the boundaries of the supranational Indian state and its ethnic nations." Even the violence of partition and the creation of Pakistan in i947, and the bloody civil war which led to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, did not separate as much as rearrange pre-existing ethnic communities. The political manipulation of this transnational overlapping of linguistic, religious and cultural affinities, particularly in the Indian states of Punjab, Tamilnadu and West Bengal, frequently encourages foreign intervention at various levels. Even where military action has not yet occurred, the opinions and actions of foreign governments frequently prompt the Indian government to rethink its handling of the domestic crisis and contain the spillover to foreign soil with force, if necessary.

The author argues that the constant attention given to regional power balances by the local superpower, India, is neither hegemonic nor defensive. Chadda's treatment of power as something transactional and constantly renegotiated is more effective than traditional, static notions of state power in highlighting the nexus of domestic concerns and foreign policymaking. Here, Chadda's thesis relies on the concept of "relational control" developed by Baumgartner, Buckley and Burns.(1) By definition, relational control is maintained when a country secures comparative dominance over others while acknowledging a multiplicity of participants and reciprocal influence and leverage regarding outcomes. Building on Baumgartner, et al., Chadda extends the definition of power to include the...