ABSTRACT
Do Indians think strategically, and does India have a grand strategy or even aspire to a grand strategy? While it would seem to be a truism that every country must have some conception of how it deploys military, diplomatic, political, economic, and cultural resources for the purposes of security, in the case of India there is a tradition of scepticism. George K. Tanham, the author of a wellknown monograph on Indian strategic thought written in the 1990s, and K. Subrahmanyam, India’s most famous strategic analyst, hold the view that India lacks systematic thinking about strategic matters and that part of the reason for this is the country’s aversion to power.1 Notwithstanding the scepticism, this essay suggests that Indians do indeed think about grand strategy, even if they don’t use the term ‘grand strategy’ to describe what they are doing, and that at any given time India does have a set of policies that in aggregate amounts to a grand strategy.
