Danielle Rajendram is a Lowy Institute research associate. Her work focuses on Indian foreign and domestic policy, India-China relations and Asian security.
- The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has launched a special project focusing on India’s general elections in 2014. It features a piece from Milan Vaishnav on five trends shaping India’s voting landscape, and an excellent infographic on the ins and outs of India’s parliamentary system.
- Is the transformative impact of social media in India being overestimated?
- A new project is shedding light on competing versions of history in India and Pakistan.
- An editorial in The Hindu asks whether Miss America pageant winner Nina Davuluri could have won in India.
- Can India afford to modernise all three defence services at once?
- Why the outcome of the Delhi gang-rape trial is only the beginning for India’s women.
- India’s new Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan weighs in on the state of the economy.
- Zachary Keck and Dhruva Jaishankar debate India’s nuclear weapons. In the most recent instalment, Keck argues:
While nuclear weapons are the strongest deterrent ever invented for strategic and existential threats, China only posed a limited threat to India, primarily along their shared border. Nuclear weapons are ill-suited to deterring low-level threats, and they have unsurprisingly not stopped China from continuing to challenge India in the border region. On the other hand, India’s nuclear acquisition prompted Pakistan to pursue its own arsenal, negating Delhi’s massive conventional superiority over Islamabad. Consequently, India has found it difficult to respond to Pakistan’s support of proxy terrorist attacks against Delhi. In the final estimation then, India’s nuclear arsenal has done little to address the China threat, while it has weakened its position vis-à-vis Pakistan.