Why is South Asia strategic studies declining in US? All alignment, no depth

Dialogue between American India watchers and Indian strategic community is broken. It is marked by ‘hot takes’ rather than a sustained conversation that bridges understanding gaps.

Representational image | Photo: PTI

Is South Asia studies in the United States in a state of decline? This question was posed to me recently by an Indian scholar while reflecting on the perceived lack of insightful or thought-provoking commentary from American scholars of South Asia.

“The discipline is undergoing decline since the days of Stephen Cohen, which is unfortunate because such a voice is most needed now,” he said. Despite a hint of intellectual nostalgia, this characterisation is plausible. But it may also be part of a larger story, and a somewhat complicated one at that. And the real story is this: South Asia studies (with special emphasis on India studies for this argument) is suffering from the narrow confines of the pursuit of ‘strategic convergence’.

Let me explain.

The present state of dialogue between American India watchers and the Indian strategic community appears somewhat broken. It is marked by ‘hot takes’ and ‘I told you so-isms’, rather than a sustained strategic conversation that bridges understanding gaps over time. The democratic abilities of X have certainly vitiated the atmosphere.

The emotional overhang of “You just don’t understand” hovers strongly over most conversations. Operation Sindoor has been only the latest ‘episode’ to bring this element to the surface. And within a month of the ceasefire, Ashley Tellis—the most notable India hand in the US academic and strategic community—fired yet another shot. In his piece, ‘India’s Great-Power Delusions’ for Foreign Affairs, he placed ‘multipolarity’ as India’s main foreign policy driver and source of divergence from Washington.

Finding India a lot more ‘inscrutable’ since the last few years, the prevailing sense in Washington is that “We got India wrong. Where do we go from here?” And it has only been strengthening.

A tightrope walk

Reflecting on the state of South Asia studies in the US at present as well as the strategic conversation between Indians and Americans, a former diplomat demurred to me: “Why is there nothing interesting or original coming out of South Asia studies regarding the latest India-Pakistan conflict?” While I was content to simply nod while trying to think at the time, the question did follow me around for a few days.

There was indeed something to the statement. A review of a wide array of articles published by South Asian scholars revealed that they were mostly well-curated backgrounders and historically sensitive summaries of the four-day crisis. In many ways, both good and bad, the recent conflict upends many strategic assumptions that we have all held for many years.

Has Pakistan been able to establish some form of parity? Does the crisis alter India’s strategy toward China? Was the near-war conflict foreseeable? What were Pakistan’s likely motivations going into the conflict? What does the crisis say about civil-military relations in India and the state of civilian morale? What did the military exchange reveal about the broader conventional military balance in the region? Most tellingly, the impact of the crisis on the nature and scope of India-US strategic ties has been largely absent.

These broader questions were left broadly unengaged. However, this could be explained by the phenomenon of ‘market demand’ and the value in providing a ‘just good enough’ explainer to a Western audience already befuddled by a season of crises all over the world. The drivers could be structural rather than individual.

Similarly, American analysts’ long-form reports and articles on the India-China-US triangular relationship have acquired a certain pattern over the last few years. Earlier (2005-2019), the commentary was marked by optimism about the prospect of a strategic partnership between India and the US. Then, the literature moved toward greater and in-depth enumeration of India’s political hesitancy in balancing China in cooperation with the US. It also discussed India’s continuing military, bureaucratic, and economic weaknesses that strongly inhibit the advancement of the above strategic trajectory.

The analysis is now characterised by a tightrope walk between maintaining forward momentum in India-US ties and conveying to Washington that India is, in many senses, still not ready. A recent thoughtful essay navigates this seeming incongruity by explaining three roadblocks to ‘deterrence coproduction’. It still ends on a much-needed optimistic note, suggesting that all three roadblocks are ‘surmountable’—but not quite convincingly so.

Stephen Cohen’s time

Known as the doyen of South Asia studies, Stephen Cohen was the mentor of many leading scholars in the US as well as the subcontinent. It is hard to fully understand the US-India relationship without factoring in his influence on ideas, frameworks, and policies. (The relationship has been strongly shaped by ideation, after all.) Cohen’s influence continues through his peers, students, and proteges, including Dinshaw Mistry, Sumit Ganguly, Christine Fair, Dhruva Jaishankar, Tanvi Madan, Anit Mukherjee, and Trump’s recent pick for Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs, S Paul Kapur.

Cohen had two great advantages that contemporary South Asia scholars don’t. First, he had the first-mover advantage. In the 1970s, India’s geopolitical importance with regard to the Cold War was on the wane, and most governments did not consider New Delhi ‘important’ enough. This allowed Cohen to study India ‘as it is’, unencumbered by the imperative of urgent analysis and aligning research interests with immediate policy needs. He could move slowly and patiently, cultivating friendships, building networks, mentoring future scholars, and bringing together distinct worlds such as strategic analysis and journalism. Most remarkably, he did all this when the Indian state and society were strongly hostile toward the US as well as its scholars and researchers. At the very least, it required a great deal of patience.

Second, Cohen had the privilege and opportunity of deciding what approach to take in studying the country and the region. He undertook a broad and rich approach that drew upon reflections related to Indian society, strategic culture, religion, caste, postcolonial identity, the nature of bureaucracy, and the Indian military as an institution. Even as his core output was related to Indian strategic culture and foreign policy choices, his starting point of analysis was always wide and context-focused.

Given that India was once famously described as a place where every true statement is immediately met with an opposite statement that is equally true, perhaps Cohen stumbled upon a useful approach. His ability to ‘interpret’ India using a broad canvas allowed him to occupy the position of an intellectual mediator, translating Indian intent and motivations to American policymakers and vice versa.

His ability to understand both India and Pakistan ‘as they are’, and then as adversaries to each other, allowed him to guide a relatively ill-informed Washington in its South Asia policy and helped constitute the crisis playbook that various administrations would employ—from Kargil to Pulwama. The present Trump administration’s side-stepping of this playbook during the latest crisis only points to the dangers that necessarily follow a more ad hoc and ‘play it by the ear’ approach.

Cohen inhabited a time in American academia that was still closer to classical approaches toward the humanities and liberal arts. This approach emphasised the ‘human element’ in the social sciences, acknowledging that the centre of inquiry is human behaviour in all its complexity, rather than the discovery of social ‘laws’ and ‘regularities’. The former emphasised the interplay of human motivation and action in a context and with all its vagaries, while the latter sought to emulate mechanical laws that could then help to organise and generalise ‘knowledge’ and ‘expectations’.

This sounds like esoteric, ivory tower-speak, but it is important. For one, it meant that Cohen never sought to explain India-US estrangement as simply a function of the Cold War—an analysis that has strong policy implications. It is also notable that this distinction was emphasised at some length by former NSA Shivshankar Menon when describing Cohen’s legacy in December 2019.

Understanding India and its future choices is, after all, more than the sum of factoring in its patterns of GDP growth, defence spending, and bureaucratic adaptations.

Cohen’s prescience

Cohen’s privileged opportunities and academic style led him to prioritise research outputs aimed at long shelf lives, which would remain relevant for decades. On this score, he succeeded. He wrote books that would become standard references for policymakers and students alike. His analysis had lacked the strict rigour of his modern counterparts due to its subjectivist and interpretive nature. But the same approach, married with decades of patient listening and reflection, allowed him to achieve a high strike rate in terms of prescience as well as discovering many ‘unthought of’ thoughts that remain highly relevant. Consider the following instances.

In describing India’s defence planning apparatus:

“Strategically, the United States should regard India not as another Asian state comparable to Pakistan or Indonesia, but as a player in the larger Asian sphere, one of the five most important states in the world, whether from a strategic, political, or ideological perspective. India may not be China, but neither is it an insignificant ‘third world’ state”.

On the US’ naive expectations from India:

“Largely unfamiliar with Indian history and culture, many officials underestimated the core Indian concern with technology and autarky, and the still-powerful sentiment from colonial times that India should not be beholden to any outside power, especially one that provided military technology.”

On the US’ teleological view of the India-US strategic partnership:

“We regard as naïve the view that somehow the cold war was a barrier to good ties between the two countries … It should not be assumed that India’s stunning economic rise automatically implies a US-India strategic alliance.”

Even on Pakistan, Cohen was deeply insightful and prescient. Writing in 2004, he anticipated that Pakistan’s ‘youth bulge’ would threaten social unrest by around 2025 if it was not managed by proper urbanisation, education, and employment. This, he expected, would lead to the emergence of new political parties. The adulation of Imran Khan by the lower and middle class youth fits right into this analysis, one could argue.

Cohen was not always right, and he would be the first to list his assessment errors in later editions of his work. But his long-term views have proved abidingly useful. He acknowledged the bases of India’s rise while seeking to temper US expectations. He was famously pessimistic about India-Pakistan relations despite his personal idealism. And he recommended a policy of ‘do no harm, but do something’ to the US, thereby framing US involvement in the India-Pakistan rivalry as a necessary but not sufficient condition for normalisation. Cohen also anticipated China’s stronger interest in the future in preventing an India-Pakistan reconciliation.

By courting India so persistently (as well as gently) over the decades—and despite New Delhi’s best efforts to be rid of him—Cohen set the template for the US’s own approach of long-term strategic engagement of India. So it is not surprising that he happened to brief Bill Clinton before the American president embarked on his path-defining visit to India. On balance, Cohen was an optimist on India’s rise as well as India-US relations. But it was an optimism built on patience and contextual understanding.

Cohen chose to pursue broader questions with a long view. It will not be unfair to say that more recent American research and scholarship have not adopted a similar proclivity. To be fair, this is largely due to structural factors and needs to be understood within its own context.

New paradigm of India studies in Washington

The India-US conversation has changed in many ways since the early 2000s. Cohen’s areas of interest were particular to his time: India’s democratic experiment, the Kashmir question, the Indian military as an institution, and the prospect of strategic normalisation between India and Pakistan in the context of Afghanistan and greater nuclearisation in the region.

The paradigm of inquiry saw a sea of change after India’s nuclear test in 1998. Thereafter, it has been shaped by three main variables: the hype and expectations related to strategic partnership, the urgency and imperative of responding to China’s rise, and a research paradigm closely wedded to policy planning.

India-US strategic hype

The relationship started to peak in the first two decades of the 21st century. This had generated a popular story. It went something like this: India and the US are democratic liberal natural allies with similar societies that had been separated by the tragedy of Cold War geopolitics. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the two mighty democracies are destined to come closer and eventually cooperate economically, politically, strategically, and militarily in order to jointly shape the conditions underlying China’s rise in Asia.

This paradigm had a defining intellectual consequence. It created and strengthened the idea that the two societies are sufficiently familiar to each other, and what is needed is greater research to help shape the policies that advance greater strategic cooperation. So the focus shifted from peoples, history, and society to policymaking and identifying areas of convergence and divergence—as well as constraints. What it gained in meticulousness toward policy planning, it lost in depth, and by design.

Urgency of responding to China’s rise

Cohen had the luxury of ‘tackling’ an India that had just come out of colonialism. The present generation ‘faces’ an India that is seen as a West-oriented strategic actor, and increasingly so. Moreover, the imperative to counterbalance China during what Jonathan Ward calls ‘the decisive decade’ has been urgent, especially since 2017. So scholarly attention has been compelled to stay close to policy aims, churn frequent publications to reinforce policy initiatives, and concern themselves with a narrow set of interests pertaining to strategic initiatives. Such a framework, while indispensable in helping policymakers gain immediate context and assistance, forsakes the world of deep and long-term insights and broader reflections. The long-term approach offers perspective and allows us to place the transient, dramatic, and episodic within a longer-term and less-changing framework—an essential aid in managing expectations.

 It is somewhat telling that Cohen had famously described India as incomparable and unique in itself, while the present policy paradigm places India’s central value as a key votary and beneficiary of China ‘plus one’. By viewing India as a ‘solution’ to China’s rise, the post-2000 paradigm elevates India’s strategic position in world affairs, but it has also come with epistemic costs. Its impact on India’s own policy choices has been enormous, but that is a separate story.

Indian analysts would like to assert that the Indian role in counterbalancing China should not be seen as a fixed given—it was somewhat flawed in the first place. However, such assertions entail an inherent depletion of India’s geopolitical profile, which requires consideration, and perhaps, acceptance.

Blame game

China’s consequential rise occurred much ahead of ‘schedule’. Its actions at the LAC in April 2020 were a strategic surprise, and the seeming success of its grey-zone operations in the South China Sea has left the US scrambling. US disappointment with India’s ability to ‘get its act together’, after all, often masks the US’ own shortcomings vis-a-vis China’s rise. Instead of mutual empathy and solidarity, this factor has ironically encouraged a greater ‘blame game’.

At the same time, the India-US strategic partnership is perceived as having under-delivered, compared to earlier expectations. This is in relation to India’s four-year-long stand-off with China, as well as the US’ expectations from India vis-a-vis Russia and China. By 7-8 May, the US expressed its indifference toward India during the escalatory conflict with Pakistan in a ‘none of our business’ approach, only to then reverse course and serve a backchannel role. In its aftermath, the ‘partners’ are left in a bitter rhetorical dispute about how the ceasefire came about, while the Pakistan-China ‘transactional’ ties appear to be on the upswing.

Needless to say, this raises questions about the US’ role during the next crisis—a sobering development.

Mutual exhaustion

It is in this deteriorating context that the strategic conversation appears so broken and tired. American India watchers appear exhausted by New Delhi’s continued inability to read the strategic writing on the wall. At the same time, Indian analysts appear more adept at rhetoric against its strategic partner than against China. Within a short span, many Indian analysts have gone from ‘India-US ties strongest ever due to India’s strategic value’ to ‘The US is apprehensive of India’s rise, wants to keep India down’.

With every passing year, there is yet another ‘last-ditch’ effort to revive the partnership (in both policy and analysis), armed with fresh insights, lessons, learnings or adjustments. The iCET initiative, as well as PM Modi’s visit to the US in June 2023, represented the same trend at the policy level, armed with unhindered ambition based on tech transfer and strategic alignment through greater military-tech interdependence.

Given that the paradigm of India studies in the US had put almost all its eggs in the ‘strategic partnership’ thesis, there is an understandable dilemma. The thesis is undergoing difficult days, and it is likely to only get worse before it gets better. India watchers are keen to retain the interest of policy-makers toward India, but they are also wary of generating over-expectations while facing an Indian strategic community that increasingly sees the US as a perfidious element in world politics. Ties have become only denser and multi-varied with time, but such thickets of linkages are no substitute for strategic mutual understanding and consensus.

This trajectory from peak optimism to the current scepticism has encompassed prior administrations (Manmohan Singh and AB Vajpayee) as well as the subsequent Modi administrations. The former represented the appreciation of unbound potential during a time when the central proposition of ‘convergence and consensus’ was yet to be strongly tested. The latter period, especially since 2022, has represented greater volatility because of rapid geopolitical shifts and the need to produce strategic deliverables. Meanwhile, even as Trump has seemingly abandoned the long-term playbook, it is less than certain that there will be a return to the period of optimism (similar to 2001 or 2021-22) in future US administrations.

Back to Cohenism?

Given that the India-US strategic partnership is in a state of indecision amid many global and national shifts, there is an opportunity to rethink the future of India studies in the US. If anything, the current trends and realities would suggest a qualified return to the Cohen approach. Insufficient advancement toward strategic alignment mandates a re-inquiry and re-testing of assumptions.

Perhaps it was not just the Cold War that kept India and the US apart, a view that was always too simplistic. Perhaps India’s under-balancing of China has as much to do with sociology and history than it does with contemporary institutional muddle and resource constraints. Perhaps India has a fundamentally different view of deterrence toward China, sensitive to the toll such a frontal posture would take on India’s social and political order. The imperative of ‘deterrence coproduction’ would have to grapple with the same, if true.

If India appears ‘inscrutable’ again, it might have something to do with India itself being in a state of lasting indecision, given its own scale and the pace of geopolitical shifts in recent years. Hence, the catchphrase ‘multipolarity’ may be more low-cost low-risk rhetorical safehouse than a top-down strategy. India, after all, wants more US counterbalancing of China (the most salient challenger to unipolarity)—not less.

These deeper lines of inquiry were always present under the radar, and South Asia scholars have always been aware of them. They were simply overlooked in the time-bound pursuit of the ‘strategic partnership’ thesis. It is indeed time to return to Cohen’s interpretive approach.

The wily institution-builder and mentor has, after all, ensured that his concrete, timeless body of knowledge continues well beyond his lifetime. Policy-relevant backgrounders, reports, and commentaries will still be indispensable. But it could be matched with broader approaches that seek to understand India ‘as it is’ all over again. Despite its immediate value to the balance of power, India still needs more time, in more senses than one.

Sidharth Raimedhi is a Fellow at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research (CSDR), a New Delhi-based think tank. He tweets @SidharthRaimed1. Views are personal.

(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)