Colloquium Series: Power, commerce and community: India’s Spatial Imagination/S of South Asia. Shibashis Chatterjee

Professor Chatterjee argument is that India’s policy towards South Asia has evolved in according to its conception of space as power. This conception is primarily the result of its postcolonial status and its heritage of imperial geopolitics. While India did not espouse the expansionist idioms of imperial geopolitics, it had sought to prevent its neighborhood against external interference and tried to achieve a Geo-political unity of the space. Alternative imaginations of the neighborhood were possible. India could have defined its neighborhood as a space of commerce and shared prosperity or as a community that did not care about political borders. However, its postcolonial identity has leveraged the geopolitical reading of the continent by absolutizing the salience of sovereign territoriality. The territorial imagination has naturally favored a power reading of its immediate neighborhood, which is fundamentally a defensive security centric imagination based on its claims of difference. To understand this sense of difference, one needs to look closely at the contestations of India’s self-identity as a nation-state and the one selected by the dominant official elite to condition the state’s foreign policy preferences in the neighborhood. Identity is thus critical as to why Indian elites hold particular interests as vital and renders alternative definition/s invalid; draws attention to the justificatory discourses that are invariably deployed to achieve legitimacy, and shows the rejection of alternative spatial imaginations in the process. Despite the qualitative shifts in Indian foreign policy over the years, its (in) securities in South Asia have thus remained remarkably consistent, despite its unquestioned advantages in virtually all aspects of material power.