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under the benign patronage of Sultans and emperors. They were also places where the discontent of aspiring social groups clashed with the unyielding control exercised by the ruling class(es). Both works by renowned historians of medieval India, while treading familiar grounds, open our vision to complex q uestions regarding the evolution of medieval society in India. The diligent perusal of a vast array of sources by Siddiqui creates a vivid picture of cities teeming with nobles, traders, saints, as well as winemakers, brewers, tailors, weavers, papermakers, binders, cooks, barbers, sweepers, gardeners, clothiers, pyro-technicians,

among others. For him the urban centres of the Delhi Sultanate were places where indigenous and immigrating cultural t raditions interacted to create a syncretic tradition that encouraged social mobility and change. His work provides a captivating glimpse into these towns and cities and helps us understand the processes through which complex urban social identities emerged in medieval north India. Satish Chandras work examines more issues than can be fully addressed here. Exploring factors like state, society, urban and rural economy, trading practices and socio-religious movements, Chandra pre sents a picture that is far more complex

and persuades us to look for the roots of discontent in medieval social processes. Through his thorough analysis he is able to point out that the hierarchical s tructures of medieval society were not merely based on religious differentiation, but rather ones that evolved through complex interactions between various social classes.
Tanuja Kothiyal (tanuja.kothiyal@gmail.com) teaches history at Government Girls P G College, Jhalawar, Rajasthan.

Note
1 I H Siddiqui, Social Mobility in Delhi Sultanate in Irfan Habib (ed.), Medieval India I (Delhi: OUP), 1992, 2006.

Dissecting the Kargil Conflict

Srinath Raghavan

n early May 1999, a patrol of the Indian army came under fire near the town of Kargil close to the Line of Control (LoC) with Pakistan. The ambush was more than a tactical surprise. For the patrol had been fired upon from a position on the Indian side of the LoC. Some weeks passed before the Indian authorities understood that they were dealing not with infiltration by militants but with a large-scale incursion by the Northern Light Infantry of Pakistan. This belated reali sation prompted a vigorous diplomatic and military campaign to oust the Pakistani forces. Two months of bloody combat in unforgiving terrain ensued, resulting in hundreds of losses on both sides. The international community watched on with mounting unease as the two recently nuclearised countries slugged it out on the heights of Kargil. Eventually, Pakistans weakening military position coupled with its growing international isolation convinced the leadership to pull back its forces. No sooner had the fighting stopped than the first accounts of the conflict began to appear. Scores more have been published in the following decade. In particular, the Kargil crisis became grist to the mill of n uclear strategists. This community (composed in about equal measure of political scientists and policy-wonks)

Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict edited by Peter Lavoy (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press), 2009; pp xvi + 406, Rs 895.

had been r elegated to the margins of security studies following the end of the cold war. The n uclear strategists eagerly lit upon the Kargil crisis as it seemed to provide an excellent laboratory to test the ageing ideas of nuclear deterrence. The nuclear optimists averred that the crisis upheld the notion that nuclear weapons were a force for stability not to say for good. Had not India refrained from bringing to bear its military superiority by launching a full-scale war? How could this restraint be explained if not by nuclear weapons? The nuclear pessimists were not so sure. They argued that the crisis could have e scalated to a nuclear exchange owing to the rudimentary command and control systems possessed by the two sides. More sophisticated variants of these arguments have been advanced in recent years. But the debate rages on.1

Delayed Publication
This volume of essays edited by Peter Lavoy is the outcome of a research project on the Kargil crisis undertaken by the Center for Contemporary Conflict at the Naval

Postgraduate School in the United States. The project brought together a team of American, Pakistani and Indian scholars and participants in the conflict. Most of the essays benefit from extensive interviews conducted in all three countries. But the publication of the volume has been much delayed. In consequence, a lot of the material has already appeared elsewhere and in other forms. The essays have been updated to take into account the new material that has appeared in the years since they were originally composed. Yet the volume does not substantially change our traditional understanding of the conflict. Taken together the essays offer an analysis of the causes, conduct, and consequences of the conflict. Inevitably, some of them are more interesting and instructive than the others. And there are some gaps that still need to be filled. But it is to the editors credit that he has avoided imposing an overarching interpretation of the conflict though his own differences with some contributions do come out clearly. As such, the volume offers much to s tudents of international politics and to f uture historians of this short, sharp and strange conflict. The causes, particularly Pakistans m oti vation for undertaking this misadventure, are dealt with in two essays. There is considerable overlap between them. But they do shed some interesting light. The authors identify a range of causes: the protracted conflict with India over Kashmir; the desire to redeem the armys honour besmirched by Indias occupation of the

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Siachen Glacier; the need to interdict Indian communications along National Highway 1A (connecting Srinagar to Kargil) as a response to Indian interdiction of Pakistani communication in the Neelum Valley; the wish to give a fillip to the flagging insurgency in Kashmir; and the hope that a short crisis would draw i nter national attention towards the need to resolve the Kashmir dispute. Such a profusion of causes and motivations is analyti cally problematic. For one thing, it would appear that the Pakistani incursion in Kargil was severely overdetermined if not inevitable. For another, it is unclear which of these were reasons for Pakistans behaviour and which are rationalisations. The heavy reliance on interviews with, and writings by, participants is unavoid able. But the treatment could have been more discriminating.

mixed. Lavoy writes that India would have opened up other military fronts, if the offensives in the Drass sector had failed. That the Indian army was prepared to launch a conventional offensive in the plains and deserts is well-established. But it is difficult to take at face value the I ndians claim that they were not at all bothered about the nuclear dimension. They had every incentive to deny this both for projecting their resolve and strengthening their position in a future crisis. Then again, the need to avoid crossing the LoC and to preserve its sanctity was probably more important in Indias decision calculus. After all, Indias diplomatic offensive was geared towards convincing the world that Pakistan had violated the Simla Agreement. (Never mind its own transgression in Siachen.)

Indias Closed Eyes

The flip side of the issue of origins is, of course, why India failed to foresee and prevent the Pakistani intrusion. This is all the more interesting because the Indian intelligence agencies did provide inputs that seem tantalising in retrospect. The Kargil Review Committee (KRC), which included a former chairman of the Joint I ntelligence Committee, pinned it to a systemic failure. The KRCs report suggested that systematic war-games by the Indian officialdom might have anticipated an intrusion on this scale and at these l ocations. The essay by James Wirtz and Surinder Rana offers a more nuanced view of Indian intelligence failure. Indian intelli gence analysts, they observe, were a ttuned to the prospect of a large-scale conventional operation in the Kargil r egion. Hence, the inputs that suggested activity that fell short of preparations for such an operation were not given adequate importance. Jervis adds that the Indian assessment was reasonable because States r arely expect their adversaries to behave foolishly. But the problem was rather more deepseated and difficult to fix. First, assessments of future behaviour of the Pakistanis rested on extrapolations from patterns of past behaviour. This form of inductive reasoning is the most prevalent mode of making predictions about the way the world works. The problem with inductive

Role of Nuclear Factor

Interestingly, the authors of these chapters and the editor more generally are at pains to rebut the argument that the possession of nuclear weapons had anything to do with the origins of the crisis. The thrust of their narrative is to uphold the optimistic view of nuclear weapons. But the essays by Timothy Hoyt and Robert Jervis serve as useful correctives. Hoyt rightly argues that nuclear weapons emboldened Pakistani military leaders to take assertive military action. They believed that the fear of escalation would inhibit India from responding forcefully to any Pakistani move. Jervis adds another dimension to this analysis. As the weaker party seeking to change the status quo in Kashmir, Pakistan had to rely on its ability and willingness to create a crisis. Nuclear weapons were central to Pakistani cal culus. For without them Pakistan would lack the ability to trigger a crisis that could menace India. Indeed, none of the factors listed in the previous paragraph can account for why the Pakistani incursion took place when it did barely months after the competitive nuclear tests by both countries. The argument that nuclear weapons have a stabilising impact on a conflictual situation simply does not wash. Yet did nuclear weapons prevent the crisis from escalating? The evidence seems

reasoning is that it licences a bias towards assuming continuity rather than deviance. And wars represent extremely aberrant behaviour, displaying sharp discontinuities from the normal form of handling international disputes. The alternative to inductive reasoning is to adopt a deductive approach. We start with a hypothesis and examine how well the available data fits with it. The trouble here is that the information collected by the agencies might fit well with more than one hypothesis. The problem, therefore, is that we do not have a methodology for divining such abrupt shifts in behaviour. It could be argued that the best response would be to proceed on the worstcase a ssumption. Best to expect the adversary to behave foolishly and recklessly. Such a response, however, is bound to pose high costs costs that might come to be seen as unnecessary. For instance, if the Indian army had tried to plug the gaps along the line of control in the winter of 1998-99, it would certainly have resulted in casualties owing to weather. Further, it is quite likely that the Pakistanis might have put off the operation because of Indian moves. This, in turn, might have led the Indians to reconsider the wisdom of incurring such costs when the anticipated development did not occur. Even if propounded in principle, worst-case thinking will be corroded in practice. The paradox here is of a self-negating prophecy. Further, the Indian political leaderships assumptions about the state of IndiaPakistan relations (especially, after the trip to Lahore by Vajpayee) led them to disregard the possibility of any such intrusion. Much of the information provided by the agencies was assimilated in a manner that fit with their preconceptions. This results from the physiology of our cognitive processes. Once we start thinking about an issue in a certain way, the same mental channels get reinforced when we return to the issue. This is essential for retrieving information, but also creates mental ruts that make it difficult to view the information in a different pattern. The more ambiguous the information, stronger the role of preconceptions. In short, the panaceas advanced by the KRC and others are u nlikely to address these problems of intelligence analysis. Indeed, the absence of

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a chapter looking at the KRC and the q uality of its report is a significant omission in the volume. Other essays in the volume analyse the course of military operations and diplomatic manoeuvring that accompanied them. These are competent, if familiar, a ccounts. The essay by Bruce Reidel on the meeting between Bill Clinton and Nawaz Sharif has attracted much attention a lready. And Reidel has little new to offer in the light of other revelations. There is no analysis of the critical role played by C hina during the crisis. Consequently, and not surprisingly, the international dimension is reduced to the American role.

Impact on Domestic Politics

Among the more interesting chapters in the book are the ones on the impact of the conflict on Indian and Pakistani politics and society. Praveen Swami notes the wave of nationalism (shading at times into jingoism)

that washed Indian society. Yet he points out that the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) actually failed to reap any electoral advantage from the Kargil conflict. In fact, its vote-share in the next elections dropped by two percentage points. But Swami is unable to advance any con v incing explanation for this. He does not undertake a systematic survey of the impact of Kargil on popular opinion. Swami is content to suggest that the continuing i nsurgency in Kashmir might have dampened the BJPs claims about being robust on national security. However, he does perform a service by highlighting (however briefly) the Indian governments attempts to mislead the public about the nature of the intrusion. And Saeed Shafqats essay on the impact on Pakistan treads on more familiar ground, but is interesting nevertheless. Three subsequent chapters deal with the lessons learnt from the crisis by India, Pakistan and the US. These allude

to the impact of Kargil on the next crisis of 2 001-02, but do not make a causal argument. Future historians though are likely to see these as part of a single arc of crises. All in all, this is a substantial volume. But we still do not have a good overall account of the crisis. Such an account would combine the military, strategic and diplomatic a spects of the conflict in one analytical narrative, focusing on its domestic, regional and international dimensions. As we await an authoritative study along these lines, this collection of essays presents a serviceable alternative.
Srinath Raghavan (srinath.raghavan@gmail.com) is with the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Note
1 For a recent, succinct statement of the two positions see Sumit Ganguly and S Paul Kapur, India, Pakistan, and the Bomb: Debating Nuclear Stability in South Asia (New Delhi: Penguin), 2010.

On the Development of Underdevelopment

Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury

avi Ahujas book, Pathways of E mpire: Circulation, Public Works, and Social Space in Colonial Orissa (C 1780-1914), is a welcome addition to the history of transport in the Indian subcontinent and in particular, the larger Orissa region. Through a detailed analysis starting from the 18th century and stretching to the first world war, A huja shows how colonial rule created op portunities while sometimes maintaining and further a ggravating regional transport and socio-economic imbalances. In the 18th century the larger Orissa region was already suffering, like Bengal, from a proliferation of tolls and customs duty on its roads and waterways that proved restrictive for long distance trade and larger regional circulation. This situation of chaos worsened u nder the Maratha rule. The East India Company, after assuming direct control in 1803 established a uniform but possibly harsh rate of taxation until it

Pathways of Empire: Circulation, Public Works, and Social Space in Colonial Orissa (C 1780-1914) by Ravi Ahuja (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan), 2009; pp xiv + 362 + maps and illustrations including index and bibliography, Rs 695.

was finally abolished in 1836 (pp 162-63, 165, passim). Ahuja demonstrates the complex patterns of circulation of goods and men locally and regionally, even transregionally, and the nature of their seasonal and religious practices related fluctuations. As mentioned earlier this delicate system was a lready suffering from shortsighted rapaciousness, which increased as the Mughal central control declined.

The Imperial Projects

This book shows how British policy whimsically continued experimenting with what Ahuja calls the ancien rgime of circulation of the area. Following Jean Deloche (Transport and Communication in India Prior to Steam Locomotion), (in his schema of

axes or major directions of flows in modes of circulation of the larger Orissa region, Ahuja demonstrates how British policy neglected the region and contributed signi ficantly to its relative decline over time (p 302). While Deloche forwarded an argument for the subcontinent; Ahuja restricts his model to a porous region. He shows how British policy chose to adopt a process whereby the regions waterways would be promoted and a system of navigable canals would contribute to the development and trade of the region. This was a policy decision that never received the budgetary allocation from the government necessary to achieve it, while roads and railways continued to be neglected, or invested in s poradically: what the author describes as a development of under development ( pp 222-23). Again, the diversion from central India towards Calcutta is another significant feature of the colonial age. This book is a significant contribution to ongoing researches in various fields into the imperial project and more specifically imperialisms much valorised public works. While investigations of this nature continue, there are two very clear traps into which many arguments seem to fall: public works was all a sham

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