 Hello, and welcome to Think Tech Hawaii Global Connections. I'm Dr. Alison Goff. I'm the Dean of the Honours Program at Hawaii Pacific University. And today it's my distinct pleasure to swap roles with your usual host and my colleague, Dr. Patrick Bratton, also a professor at Hawaii Pacific University, associate professor of political science. Welcome, Patrick. Thank you, Alison. And we're going to kind of switch gears from the last conversation we had, which was a fun conversation about various film noir in the pre- and post-war period. Not that this conversation won't be fun, but we're going to talk a little bit today about your research interests. Because I'm very intrigued by this, because you are particularly focused on India. And I'm really interested to know how you've got to that topic given your background. OK, it's kind of a funny story. The joke I give often with my students is oftentimes when you meet people who specialize in India or South Asia, and there's often some sort of personal sort of spiritual journey where they went to an ashram and found themselves with a yoga or something like that. And that's not my case at all. I didn't actually have a formative training in sort of India or South Asia. But there was always kind of an interest. So when I was taking classes as an undergrad, I always was interested in the region, interested in the history about it. And then kind of coincidentally, a couple of things came together when I was a graduate school. My graduate research was on sort of course of diplomacy, coercion, these types of things. And one of the things that was interesting was that I found that at the same time I was working on this topic, which actually, funnily, wasn't very a la mode in American academia at the time when I was working. But I started, as I did my literature search, as we all do, doing our dissertation, I found there were all these Indians writing about the topic, and they were really interested. And I thought, well, it's kind of interesting that they're interested in the same kind of intellectual debates, policy debates that I'm in. And so it got me kind of wondering why they were interested in this, and got me interested in reading what Indians and other South Asians were writing about security and foreign policy. At the same time that was going on, my wife actually, as a lawyer, was working at a South Asian law firm in DC. And she was mostly doing immigration cases. And so a lot of the immigration cases she was doing was sort of asylum issues for people who were suffering persecution in various countries in South Asia, particularly for Christian minority groups who were persecuted for various reasons. And so when she was writing up these asylum briefs, because I was a graduate student in international politics, she'd asked me for background about Nepal or Pakistan or these Bangladesh, and it got me interesting about reading about these topics to kind of give her background materials and things to help her. And those two things came at the same time, and I got really interested in the region and how people were looking. And also too generally, one of the things we've talked about on the show, and I've talked with some other guests, oftentimes people in universities, we tend to have internal debates within our own country. So American historians talk to other American historians, but they might not talk to British historians. And so it got me interested in how Americans or Western scholars were covering topics differently, say, than Indian scholars and so on. So that's where it comes from. So did you find yourself working on this in isolation? Because I know when I did my PhD, I was, well, when I did my undergraduate, I was interested in American history. And at the time, you know, not a lot of universities were doing that. And so if you were doing American history, you were working with a very small kind of culture, you're a scholar. So did you have much support for the American end? You know, yes and no, like the dissertation advisor I had, that was one of his topics, so he was really great. But, you know, I'd go to conferences and there'd be kind of a token amount of us. Yeah. And in a sense, it wasn't a big topic. And it's funny because in the past five or 10 years, this subject has come back. Now that I'm not working on that subject as much, it's, I'm like, wow, is that the wrong place? You know, trying to bring back bill bottoms at the wrong time or something, right? Oh, I missed it by five years, right? But at the time, I agreed. I mean, it was something where, I mean, there were some people working on it. At the time, this is to kind of take our way back time machine. This was sort of in the mid-Aughts, I guess, early to mid-Aughts. And so sort of in a post-911 world, you know, there was a lot of interest in sort of terrorism, political Islam, these types of things with the Iraq war and all this stuff. There was a policy debate going on about coercion, but it hadn't filtered to the academic debate as much. Yeah, and this is a period design to standard where India is changing its foreign policy as well, right? You talk a little bit about coercive diplomacy in the context of India, because obviously that's an initial area of interest. I understand your interest have kind of shifted since. Well, one of the things I'll put on my pointy academic hat for a second, does it ever come off? I don't know. I think that the interest that India had in it is that traditionally, if we look at sort of Indo-Pakistani security relations, there's a familiar dynamic that happened throughout the Cold War in that some event would happen. Normally, because Pakistan's the smaller, weaker state, it tends to have a slightly more, one could say sort of forward-leaning or more aggressive posture in a sense that it feels that it has to act quickly in order to act against a much larger India. So India would always be reactive to some crisis with Pakistan for the most part, and then it would always have this fallback card that it was bigger. And so if Pakistan, we get in a fight, eventually we'll mobilize our big military and we'll go smush the Pakistani military. And that was always sort of the default mechanism. Now, one of the two things that happens very interesting at the end of the 80s into the 1990s is you have a simultaneous twin development in South Asia where both the Pakistanis start having some relationship with sort of violent non-state actors who commit, say, may terrorist acts inside of India, particularly in Kashmir or other places, at the same time that both India and Pakistan become overtly nuclear. And so this twin developments call this traditional Indian policy of mobilizing the military to threaten Pakistan into question. And so what the Indians were very interested in sort of the end of the 90s, in the beginning of the aughts, the time period that I was working in my PhD, they were interested in how can we utilize the strength that we have, the military strength, we have the diplomatic strength we have in a way short of war to get back what the Indians called the sort of a search for strategic space against Pakistan. And that's where their interest and course of diplomacy came. And in many ways that dovetails the interest in the US got in course of diplomacy. Again, once the US and the Soviet Union could basically annihilate each other in the 1960s, was there some way to still think about force or the threat of force in some way short of war that would still be useful for the United States? So it's a similar sort of a scenario that developed into the sort of academic policy research. Oh, I see. So this was your initial area of research. So where have you taken your research at more recently? One thing that got me was the, I mean, India's, this sounds almost like cliche, but it's very interesting in the sense that it's a very complicated society and a very complicated history and political system. And so the more that I was looking at India and saying, oh, well, I think the diplomats work like this and the government works like this and the military works like this, I'd come back a year later, do more research. Okay, I'm wrong. So I would constantly find that it was much more complicated than I thought it was. And so I got very intrigued in, and this kind of dovetails to some of my other intellectual interests about the different ways countries organize sort of their national security and foreign policy infrastructure. So what is the relationship that the US has with its military, its diplomats? How was that similar to Britain or to France or to Japan or in this case, India? And I got very interested in how civil military relations works in India or one could say doesn't work at times and how India is also, as you alluded to earlier, changing its role in the international sphere as it sort of is a rising power. So what do you think is the driving force between civil military relations in India? And how does that compare? It seems that a lot of your work is comparative. So this is what is interesting about this. And India obviously is an understudied, at least area in terms of international relations in the West, so. Right. It's interesting. India is an interesting paradox, in a sense, for civil mill. Because if you look at the developing world writ large, and particularly South Asia and Southeast Asia, civil military relations has a problem with praetorianism, with military institutions that take over and throw coups and take over the government or behind the scenes influence civilian leadership and things. So whether it's Thailand, Pakistan, Bangladesh, any of these countries, there's this problem with sort of praetorianism in the military. And India's never had this problem. And so from the start of Indian democracy, arguably with independence of 47, although there's democracy in a form earlier, you don't have a problem with praetorianism in the military. So on the one hand, there's this great shining success story of civilian controlled military, the way that people in the West would want to see in the US or Britain or wherever. On the flip side, there's this kind of weird separation between policy makers in the military where they don't really talk or coordinate that well in the system. And so one of the struggles has been, as India becomes a rising power, can this relationship where they don't talk to each other, in a sense, and have a kind of antagonistic relationship, can, is that still the best model, in a sense? So you say that India doesn't have this history of praetorianism like most of Southeast Asia. So is that a legacy of its imperial past, or where does that come from? That's an interesting question. There, arguably, there's this longer tradition culturally in India about the relationship the military has with rulers and things. And there are some debates on that, that this goes back thousands of years. But if we go back to the more recent time, sort of 19th, 20th century, a lot of this has its origins actually in sort of the British Raj and sort of the reaction against British imperialism. In many instances, because Britain had a very large Indian army, right? So you have this army that's mostly soldiered and by the 20th century increasingly officered by Indians themselves in the service of the British crown. The military, in a sense, seemed to be one of these sort of shiny examples of British colonial power. And so unlike a lot of other countries, the elites who were pushing for independence in India were not military men. Like in a lot of other countries in the 30s, 40s, 50s, we've got revolutionary fighters, whether it's in Myanmar or Indochina, people who were gonna take power back for the people by the power of the gun. The Indian elites who were pushing for independence were by and large almost completely non-military men and they did it without arms. And so there's not really this history in India of the sort of militant revolutionary the way you would have an Algeria or something. And also there's this lingering suspicion at the time and I would argue still that the political classes have that the Indian military is this kind of last bastion of the Raj in India. Some of this is kind of apparent if you watch like Indian military parades on Republic Day in January. I mean the Indian military in some ways remains culturally very British with bagpipes and swagger sticks and sort of things. I mean I have a bunch of both serving and retired Indian military officers as friends and it's sometimes with some of them and I don't mean this in a mocking way. It's interesting to me because I grew up with a lot of these World War II movies where my mom likes espionage movies. And there are just times I could imagine a lot of these particularly like the Air Force pilots with a white scarf and shot down two missusmiths watch watch and had a brandy. You know a sort of thing and it's and so for a lot of the political classes there's still this these guys seem very in a sense trapped in another time and maybe not imbued with the spirits of democracy. I don't actually I actually think that these views are relatively problematic but that's sort of the viewpoint in a sense that the military is the sort of bastion of leftover British colonialism. Well we'll be exploring some more of your research because I know you have things to talk about about the Navy I think you've got an interest in that after we go to a couple of messages. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii meeting people we may not otherwise have met helping us understand and appreciate the good things about Hawaii. Great content for Hawaii from Think Tech. Aloha my name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Law Across the Sea. Please join me every other Monday to hear lawyers from Hawaii discussing ways to reach across the sea and help people and bring people together. Aloha. Aloha I'm Kirsten Baumgart Turner host of Sustainable Hawaii. Thanks for watching Think Tech this summer. We have a lot of terrific shows of great importance and I hope you'll watch my show too every Tuesday at noon as we address sustainability issues for Hawaii. They're really pertinent as the World Conservation Congress approaches in September and the World Youth Congress that's focusing on sustainability next year as well. Have a great summer and tune in at noon every Tuesday. Welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii. This is Global Connections. I'm Dr. Alison Goff and I'm here talking to my colleague Dr. Patrick Bratton about his intellectual adventures in India and we'll get to his actual physical adventures in India in a minute but before the break we were talking about you know coercive diplomacy and your other research interests and I know recently you've become more interested in naval policy in India and in the region. Can you talk a little bit about how that came about and what particularly you're looking at in that area? It's an interesting question. I mean one of the things that has often been sort of missing in India since independence has been a focus on maritime issues in the Indian Ocean and part of that is kind of explains there's several reasons for that and one of the reasons is that India sort of is a land power with sort of disputed borders with Pakistan and China naturally had sort of more territorial security preferences but there's other parts of it that are missing that I think people miss out on when they're looking at it and that in many ways countries that build up strong navies or strong maritime power and normally this will sound kind of tautological have maritime interests and India at independence was trying to pursue a sort of autarkic sort of state led development without trade and so if you don't trade you don't really need a navy in a sense and so because of the particular development path that India was on throughout most of the Cold War it didn't need a navy in a sense. Now that India is sort of opening up to the global economy it's sort of wanting to have a larger say sort of in its own region and also to protect the trade that goes on and so there's been this interest in it and it's been an interesting shift if you will so there's been an investment in the navy there's looking now with the new government investment in the shipbuilding industry, ship repair industry and so on to try and lay in pieces to be more of a maritime state but it's a long path in a sense. I mean the Royal Navy did not come. Right, they're coming from behind. So yeah, yeah, yeah and is this causing issues with the economy and the budget? I mean there are factions that are pushing hard for this right now obviously competing factions on this. So definitely I mean the traditional sort of, in terms of military usage, the army and so on they say hey we've got the police forces we've got terrorism, we've got border issues we should have more of a slice of the pie. There's also the traditional infrastructure development all of these other things that are a great pull on the economy as well. But there has been I think particularly in recent years of view in the government that India needs to have a larger trade role and that maritime issues writ large are kind of a vital part of that. So has this done anything to worsen or better civil military relations? Because one would think given India's propensity to trade with the world then they might have civilian support given that one needs this maritime fleet to protect world trade. I think so and I think one of the things that's interesting the Indian Navy has a much better relationship with some of the civilian industries in terms of having the Indian shipbuilding industry provide ships for the Navy. That relationship is sort of the success story we're often like the army and the Air Force have had sort of terrible relationships with civilian or government suppliers. And also there's a kind of a natural cosmopolitanism with navies in a sense that they're sort of not to say that there are non military militaries but they tend to have an ability to sort of interact with civilians in the civilian world in a better way than say I think a more traditional sort of particularly like the army that tends to be much more I guess military in a sense. Well we kind of talk about your intellectual journey to India and we've been showing some photographs behind us that there's little man himself at the Institute of Foreign Policy Studies. So let's talk a little bit about the physical journey to India because obviously you have to go there to do a lot of archival research and interviews I presume with that. What are we looking at here? This is the Ambien Mall in Gurgaon I believe. And this is interesting because this is one of these huge mega malls. It's one of the largest malls in the world that's built out in these suburbs in India. And so you see kind of an example of sort of the India, the shining India that the government would like to portray to the world that this is not the India of Mother Teresa and so on. Calcutta which is honestly is the image that a lot of people have of India who have not been there. Yeah definitely. And so this is one of these malls where they're showing where the upper middle class can go and buy the same goods that we buy in Waikiki, well I don't buy them in Waikiki, but it was other people to risk and buy Prada and so on. And so it's kind of an interesting contrast when you, I mean that's I think the interesting thing in India is that you have some areas in some places where the infrastructure, the development, I mean you could be in, you could be in Seoul, you could be in any Tokyo or wherever. And then you still have other areas of India where you go where there is poverty, infrastructure is crumbling and these things and you'll often see them sort of juxtapose with each other. So what are we looking at here? This is India gate. This is sort of the India's Arc de Triomphe. And it was built by the British in memory of war did and the Indian, the independent India's kept that tradition and that's they've got a flame for the unknown soldier and that's sort of a centerpiece of Newton's deli, the new deli that the neoclassical sort of Art Deco deli that was built in the 1930s. Yeah, a lot of that monumental architecture really is still very British-like in some ways. And this one. This is interesting, I went to Mumbai, early this year, my first time going to Mumbai and we've kind of talked, I have a weakness for Art Deco and Mumbai has some of the best, well, most well-preserved areas of Art Deco in the whole world. And so this was this really interesting sort of Assyrian-themed. That's my first thought when I was looking at that. It looks like these monumental horsemen from the ancient Assyria, yeah. And it was this elaborate building that was very Assyrian or Babylonian sort of themed. And more examples of this here, yeah. It's a fascinating contrast to go and see these beautiful buildings and then, and it's interesting because a lot of the architects and the builders of these buildings were Indian. And so you see this interesting sort of fusion of Western and Asian motifs in this Art Deco. I mean, similar to some of the Art Deco fusion we have here in Hawaii which has a mixture of Western and Asian sort of influences. So which areas have you traveled to most with? Where's a lot of your research kind of? Mostly Delhi. I mean, Delhi because it's the capital city and the foreign policy security is sort of concentrated there. So I'm almost always passing through Delhi, spending a lot of time there. But the one of the traps though with India is that it is so big, it's so diverse. And if you do foreign policy stuff, you naturally have to spend time in Delhi. And so there's this kind of, you can get trapped in Delhi in a sense. Oh, this is me, this is one of my finest moments maybe. I was interviewing, or not interviewing, was at a conference with Mr. Jay Shankar. And at that time he was the Indian ambassador to the US and he's now the Indian foreign secretary under Modi. And he's unbelievably interesting, very intelligent, very urbane gentleman. And he comes from a very influential family. His father was sort of the Indian Henry Kissinger for lack of a better term, sort of the doyan of their strategic community. And him and his brother is a very well-known Indian historian. And so this was actually over at the East-West Center. Oh, he was, so this was here. Okay, so you brought him in or he was? No, he happened to be on a tour when he was ambassador and he came to East-West Center. And so got to ask him some questions about the bureaucracy and he seemed to have fun actually answering questions. About the bureaucracy. Which is kind of rare for me. This is over at JNU, which is the main university in Delhi, right next to the statue of Nehru there. And that's sort of the main, particularly for sort of foreign policy history, economics, that's one of the main universities in India. And here I am in front of the School of International Studies, the campus is interesting because JNU is sort of a bastion of sort of Cold War sort of traditional Indian sort of leftism and things. And so the campus has these wonderful, you know, like murals and for me, I mean, I have to say it's kind of like, it's like going back to like the 70s and it's like, smash imperialism brothers, rise, you know, this kind of stuff. And it's really interesting. So I tried to take some photos. So is that the dominant theme in international studies in India or? Traditionally, there's a strong, in the university system there's this strong sort of third world sort of leftism that you saw in many aspects. I mean, both in the West, but also in a lot of the, in a lot of the developing world for the Cold War. So that's the traditional sort of model, sort of disarmament, you know, anti-colonialism, this sort of thing. Having said that, now as we've seen with Indian politics, you know, there's a rise of sort of a Hindu revivalism, which is interesting because it's, in some ways, it has parallels with a lot of, I mean, you know, a lot of the sort of conservative parties you have in the West, in the sense that it's merging religion, you know, sort of free market economics, you know, these types of things. And so that's also, you see an increase in that as well. And this is people that want a more sort of nationalist free market sort of approach. But it's also part with the religious aspect as well. And so as in other countries that what they're studying really reflects, you know, kind of presentist concerns and cultural, you know, heritage at the same time. I think you can say that about any IS or poli-sci or history in any country, the trends follow kind of social developments and political developments at the time to a certain extent. And, oh, okay, looking very regal, yeah, yes. That's in front of Saftar Jung tomb. This is one of the Mughal tombs for these emperors, actually not for Saftar Jung, but they built a lot of these tombs in the same sort of architectural style that eventually goes to the Taj Mahal. And one thing with the Mughals is, I mean, they knew how to build. And I mean, the buildings that they did, I mean, spectacular. This is South Block. So this is actually the ministry buildings that the British built in the 30s around the president's house, which then was the vice-president's house. And they're, again, an interesting architectural mix of sort of Mughal, Art Deco, British Imperial. Yeah, you can see the fusion right just in that shot, yes, of these two cultures kind of coming together, yeah, and a lot of other, yeah. Now, this I wanted to ask you about, because I know the guy who lived here was a particular kind of hero of yours, and he was a man-eaten tiger hunter, turned conservationist. So would you like to talk a little bit about his Jim Corbett, right? Right, yeah, very nice, yeah. Nicely done, Alison. Yeah, Jim Corbett was this interesting guy. He was a Brit who was born in India, and his father, I believe, was a post office, a railroad worker, and he grew up in the northern areas around Nainital and Nisuri up in, I'm forgetting the name of the Indian state, that's okay. He grew up around this area in these cities. And Jim Corbett started off, you know, like most sort of British gentlemen sort of out in the hills. He started out as a hunter, and one of the things that was interesting is he was often frequently called upon to hunt down man-eaters, so they would have these issues with man-eating tigers, man-eating leopards, and he went out to go shoot them. And the thing that was interesting with Corbett, kind of like Teddy Roosevelt in a sense, he became this great conservationist, because as he saw over time, he saw the disappearance of habitat, a lot of the animals who would never be replaced, in a sense, in an area, and so he's the one who sort of founded the first sort of national park and tiger reserve, eventually, in India, the Corbett Reserve, which is over in that area, and that was a picture of one of his houses. He had a house for the winter and a house for the summer, and I believe that was the summer house, Grinney house. And it's interesting, I had a funny, it was about two years ago I visited, I had interesting experience, because it's actually a private house, it's not a museum, and there's a family that lives there, so you have to kind of knock on the gate and say, hey, you know, and they'll let you come in. I thought you were coming, that's good. And it was a really interesting family that I met there, and I visit them from time to time coming back when I visit India now. A woman and her husband, believe it's from her husband's family, she's a very well-known Indian journalist and things, so it was funny, I went there purely to see Jim Corbett's house, and next thing I know, I'm sitting there having tea with them, and she's asking me really tough questions about criticisms of Obama's foreign policy and how we should resuscitate Indo-U.S. relations. Was not, you know, I was just there to take some photos, but not to have, but it was a really great conversation, a lot of fun, unexpected kind of thing, so. Yeah, well, I think you find the unexpected in India. That's right. I think that's the place to go for that, certainly. So, and oh, we missed that one, but you were looking very dapper in your cap there. Oh, I think that was Nani Ta Lake. Oh, yeah, so that's the same area there. And so that's this very famous lake that's supposed to be one of the eyes of an Indian goddess during one of the, one of the name of the actual tail escapes me at this moment, that landed there and was supposedly then formed the lake was her eye. And so it's this very beautiful hill station, as you know, from reading E.M. Forrester and all. I wasn't going to bring that up. All of these folks. One tradition that's kind of interesting that the British introduced was, again, being from England where it was colder, coming down to India where it was very hot in the summer, they started this tradition the 19th century of these hill stations where basically they would move all of the government apparatus up to these high elevation heights where the weather was cooler. And then once the British left, the middle class in India discovered that this was a really nice way to build vacation. So when it's really hot in Delhi, a whole bunch of middle class people from India from Delhi go up to these stations in a sense the same fashion of way that the British did 100 years ago. And so Nani Tal is one of these areas up in the hills and the weather is quite pleasant in the summertime. Okay, well, Dr. Bratton, it was a pleasure speaking to you. And this is your last program very sadly and wish you every luck and whatever you're gonna do and come back and speak to us when you return with more information about more of your adventures wherever they're gonna take you. Okay, so thank you for being with us and we'll see you next week at Think Tech Hawaii Global Connections, goodbye.