Jason A. Kirk

ABSTRACT Since declaring their nuclear weapons capabilities in 1998, India and Pakistan have engaged in three major crises that each threatened to escalate into war. In each crisis, the USA engaged in active diplomacy to dissuade the South Asian rivals from taking escalatory actions. Previous literature on the crises has described the American role, but has not theorized third-party involvement in a nuclearized regional rivalry. We apply Timothy Crawford’s pivotal deterrence theory to the nuclearized India–Pakistan conflict, and extend the original theory to cover the novel condition of a non-superpower nuclear dyad, in the context of a single-superpower international system. We find that America’s pivotal deterrence generally enhanced stability in the India–Pakistan crises, and unlike in pre-nuclear South Asia, other great powers supported American diplomacy. However, we suggest that future regional crises between nuclear rivals, in South Asia or elsewhere, may present greater challenges for pivotal deterrence.

The International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank's facility for low-income countries, has granted India an unprecedented exception to its usual “graduation” policy—extending transitional support to its largest borrower, even though it has crossed the normal eligibility cutoff for IDA’s soft loans (based on per capita income). Before 2012, some Indian officials had called for a “graceful graduation,” believing that India did not need concessionary development assistance any longer. But with IDA graduation imminent in 2013 and facing a limit on borrowing from the Bank’s other window for middle-income countries, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, India successfully appealed for continued IDA access. This article draws on official interviews and documents to show how India secured post-graduation transitional support from IDA—suggesting that while India’s leaders seek to present their country as a rising power with influence in multilateral institutions, they can also be pragmatic in their status demands and quietly persuasive in their economic diplomacy.

S umit Ganguly may be the most prolific political scientist working on India today. In just the past five years, his name has appeared on no fewer than a dozen books covering topics in India’s foreign policy, international relations, and security. In India Since 1980 Ganguly teams up with Rahul Mukherji, a leading scholar in his own right who specializes in India’s political economy, to produce a concise but comprehensive introduction to the world’s largest democracy. The book offer readers a rigorous account of India as a rising power. Its equally wide-ranging yet compact discussion of internal state-and-society dynamics is especially impressive, and perhaps because I was relatively less familiar with their perspectives in these areas, I found these discussions to be the book’s most engaging. However, the chapters on each of the “four revolutions” underway since 1980—in foreign policy, economic development, democratic mobilization, and secularism—are all skillfully executed. Below, I will briefly comment on the authors’ treatment of each. But first, the book’s periodization deserves particular consideration. As a publisher’s note explains, this book is part of the Cambridge University Press series “The World Since 1980,” which includes titles on other important countries and regions. In any case, 1980 works well as a meaningful (if approximate) marker for several crucial turning points in India’s politics and international relations. As a teacher at a liberal arts institution, I tried both to read this book as my students might read it and to think about what distinguishes this volume from other generalist works that might be used in an advanced undergraduate course. I can almost envision using India Since 1980 as a stand-alone text, which is nothing short of remarkable given its mere 200 pages. And although I might supplement it with other material on the earlier decades or on specific topics, this does not mean that the book’s historical demarcation is a shortcoming. On the contrary, as post-independence India arrives at the ripe young age of 65, it makes perfect sense to approach its political history in roughly two halves. The first period—a backstory that the authors recount judiciously when necessary—begins with independence in 1947 and runs to the late 1970s or early 1980s. This period encompasses the Nehruvian era of state-building, central planning for economic development, and pursuit of a nonaligned foreign policy.

... 17. National Sample Survey data, cited in CP Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh, “The Continuing Possibilities of Land Reform,” http://www.macroscan.com/the/food/nov04/fod231104Land_Reform. htm. ... 44. Subhomoy Bhattacharjee, “World Bank May Cut Off State.

But 2007 also marked a half-decade since the horrifying pogroms against Muslims in India's Gujarat state, following the notorious episode at the Godhra railway station in which 58 Hindu train passengers burned to death following a communal confrontation. Thus, the year also ...