Linking economic and security strategies

India's economic strategy vis-à-vis to Punjab (& perhaps in other ways for other border states with minority populations) has reduced national security while being directly suboptimal

- NIRVIKAR SINGH

ECONOMIC STRATEGIES AND security strategies are inevitably linked to each other. Residents of the earliest large towns built walls to protect themselves from marauders, and used some of their economic surplus to finance those walls as well as military capabilities such as training defence forces and providing them with weapons.

The post-World War II security order allowed countries like Japan, South Korea, and Germany to grow economically under security umbrellas fashioned and led by the United States, reducing their need to spend on their own national security.

India chose a different path, and its own distinct security strategy, which in some ways was more successful than its economic strategy. The world in which these choices took place began to change with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of China, and those changes are now accelerating dramatically.

India began to shift its economic strategy in the late 1980s, with gradual acceleration of those shifts over time, including the moderately "big-bang" reforms of 1991. More recently, its security strategy has also shifted, including its membership in the Quad, along with the US, Japan, and Australia. The reason and the focus for such shifts is, of course, China, which has quickly followed its economic success with political assertion. Countries in China's geographic neighbourhood (and the US, which is omnipresent since the last World War) see China's moves as a threat. Taiwan has good reason to be worried, but in other cases China's leaders may well justify their actions as protecting their own national security.