The Geostrategic Implications of the Indo-American Strategic Partnership
by Stephen Blank

The recent Indo-American nuclear agreement has generated much controversy over its provisions for nuclear technology exchange and its impact on the non-proliferation treaty and its regime. However, it is entirely possible that the geostrategic importance of America’s acknowledgement or India as an autonomous great power in Asia outweighs or is at least equal to the importance of that agreement. This article examines he geostrategic implications of this deal beyond the purely nuclear provisions in it and the significance of this deal for India’s geostrategic standing and capabilities in Asia

 

Public Rites and Patriotic Funerals: the Heroes and the Martyrs of the 1999 Indo-Pakistan Kargil War
by Max-Jean Zins

The state funeral organized by India on the occasion of the Kargil War with Pakistan in 1999 have engendered new funeral rites. For the first time in its history, India systematically and officially repatriated the corpses of its soldiers killed on the battlefield. The public mourning surrounding Kargil seems to indicate that a new individualistic view of death is emerging in the country. This development is closely related to the context of the Kargil War, which gave rise to a specific semantic usage of the terms heroes and martyrs. The political competition that developed between the three main actors of the public funerals – the Hindu nationalist government, the opposition, and the army – around the fourth one - the corpses of the dead soldiers - is at the root of the phenomenon.

Review Essay: Understanding the Problem of Northeast India
by Sudhir Chandra

It is difficult to make sense of the festering Northeast. There obtain standard prejudices about the ‘backwardness’ of the region, its peoples and their cultures. The generally unsatisfactory level of scholarship on it, as also want of reliable introductory studies, have done little to soften those ossified prejudices. Fortunately, the publication of an excellent collection of essays by Sanjib Baruah, Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India, will surely create a degree of informed awareness. It is the product of a sophisticated scholarship that is at the same time critical and engaged, empathic and detached. Its clarity of perspective and “utopian” readiness to consider cross-border formations in the region free the work from the fallacy of realism, which often warps official and popular perceptions as well as academic thinking on such fraught and emotive public issues.