IPCS BAGS ML SONDHI AWARD FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE

As India rises she faces an extremely complex international environment. In negotiating her way through it the country needs the best available integration of intellectual insight and policy expertise. In awarding this year’s ML Sondhi Prize for International Politics to the IPCS we are honouring its pioneering role as a modern Indian thank-tank which has been enormously successful in precisely such an exercise.

The IPCS was founded in 1996, by Professor PR Chari and Major-General Dipankar Banerjee. Retired Major General Dipankar Banerjee is the Director of the Institute. After a distinguished military career during which he also taught at the Indian Military Academy, the College of Combat and the Defence Services Staff College, he began a new academic career as a defence, strategic and foreign policy expert. He joined the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis and rose to become its Deputy Director. He was International Advisor to the International Committee of the Red Cross and Consultant to the United Nations on the Conventional Arms Register. For three years he also served as Director of the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies in Colombo. He has numerous publications dealing with security issues relating to China, to Asia Pacific Security, to Confidence Building Measures and so on.

Professor PR Chari is currently Research Professor at the Institute, earlier he was its Director, and along with General Banerjee is one of the co-founders of this Institute. Professor Chari started with a long innings as a civil servant – he served as an IAS officer for 32 years 7 of which were spent in the Ministry of Defence. His last position there was Additional Secretary. He retired as Vice-Chairman (Chief Executive) of the Narmada Valley Development Authority. After taking early retirement Professor Chari has held several positions –as Director, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi (1975-80); International Fellow, Centre for International Affairs, Harvard University (1983-84); Research Professor, Centre for Policy Research (1992-96); Visiting Fellow, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (1998); Co-Director and Director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi (1996-2003).

He also has a prolific output, having published over 1600 op-ed articles and over 150 monographs and major papers in learned journals and in books in India and abroad; authored, co-authored edited and co-edited upward of two dozen books, and more are in the offing. Most relevant to today’s talk, Professor Chari has worked on nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation and Indian security issues.

It has two able and very productive Deputy Directors – Dr. Mallika Joseph and Dr. Suba Chandran who write and publish prolifically, as do also the Institute’s Research Fellows and Research Officers. It is in fact thanks to the combined energy and output of all the staff and office bearers that the IPCS is able to maintain its comprehensive scale and exacting standards. The IPCS also stands out for being an unusual Delhi think-tank in that it has been able to generate its own funds – an indication of the high credibility it enjoys.

With its numerous and highly creditable achievements, starting with its research focus on disarmament, WMDs, security dynamics and sector reforms, Asian regional studies and terrorism, its most dramatic achievements is in the field of information and data analysis –the IPCS runs one of the best websites in India, a very popular security issues related site, with which many of you may be familiar. It is very well maintained and user friendly and receives nearly 2 million hits a month. On it one can read analytical articles, very well produced special reports, and policy briefs. It is absolutely contemporary, up to date and sports the most meticulous coverage. The research programmes, whose subjects are legion, employ, apart from conventional academic methodologies like conferencing, projects, seminars etc, also exercises in War Game Simulation, Scenario Building and Track-Two Dialogues, especially with China and Pakistan. In other words, and perhaps this is its most distinguishing feature, the IPCS conducts policy relevant research, offers policy recommendations and is also available for putting ideas into practice.

Because of its high credibility the IPCS attracts foreign scholars as interns who are then connected to Indian specialists – academic or professional, in their chosen areas of research. Indeed the IPCS is connected with an incredible number of the world’s best Institutes and universities– be they in the USA, UK, Europe or Asia. Happily and that is the most exciting part, the Institute declares that its aim is to foster ‘alternative thinking’ – not simply data accumulation and analysis.

Professor Sondhi’s life was also marked by a consistent quest for a sustainable peace in the subcontinent and for a more benign world order, from the tensions of the Cold War to the present day. He understood the strategic significance of nuclear weaponry and argued simultaneously in terms of national security and regional peace and world peace, seeing all as intimately interconnected in a unified world vision of the present and coming future.

It was in 1965, after he had resigned from the Foreign Service and joined the Indian School of International Studies that he found himself at a CIBA Foundation symposium on Conflict in Society in London. CIBA is a well-known drug manufacturing company but it has a less well-known and fascinating non-medical research side. The academic study of Peace & Conflict was relatively new in those days – at the end of World War II International Relations itself was just emerging from within political science as a subject in its own right. And something in the area of peace was beginning to happen in Norway, in the US and UK. This is not to say that philosophers and political scientists had not thought about peace since at least the time of Immanuel Kant in the 18th century, but it had always been part of philosophy or politics – never a discipline on its own.

By the early sixties, a Conflict Research Society had been established in Britain, but it was only at this London conference in 1965 that the threads were gathered together, so to speak, and in time it came to be described as the foundational event for the development of Peace & Conflict Studies - and it was here that ML Sondhi found himself. Professor Sondhi had been sent by Dr. Appadorai, the Director ISIS probably because of his diplomatic experience – diplomacy being the well-trodden path of conflict-avoidance till date. But now there were academics and practitioners from various disciplines who were soon to become recognised stars in the field: Kenneth Boulding from economics,; John W. Burton, from International Relations; Karl Deustch, Political Science; Herbert Marcuse, philosophy; Ruth Glass, Urban Studies; Harold Lasswell, Law & Political Science; Justice Bert Roling, Law – (famous for his membership of the post-war International Military Tribunal for the Far East and Tokyo); Anatol Rapaport, Mental Health Research; SL Washburn, anthropology; and Johann Galtung, already Director of a Peace Research Institute in Oslo - to name just a few from amongst the almost 25 distinguished participants. ML Sondhi’s interventions are part of the record, and the participants asked him to give the parting after-dinner speech on their behalf. More importantly the whole exercise made a huge and lasting impression on him, affecting forever his academic and public life. Back in India, where no one had heard of peace as an academic subject - he made several fruitless attempts to introduce Peace Studies into JNU. For many years he had to be content with giving his own course on peace and conflict in the Department of International Relations, though finally in 1997 he managed to institute a Conflict Management Programme whose declared purpose was to set up workshops to deal with disputes academically, co-operatively and creatively. It was also designed to build models of conflicts and train students in the field. Later in 1999 with help from Sonia Gandhi, he succeeded in getting an annual Visiting Professorship installed at JNU known as the Rajiv Gandhi Professor of Peace & Disarmament Studies.

Personally of course Professor Sondhi continued to write and lecture on the subject inside and outside the university; he strove to connect real problems on the ground like the militancy in Punjab, religious intolerance at home, the unrest in East Pakistan, ethnic problems in the northeast or Sri Lanka to workable irenic solutions, always involving persons from all disciplines and walks of life. One of his favourite philosophical concepts was praxiology – the essential connectedness of theory and practice.

Despite often adopting confrontationist attitudes in the policy and public sphere in his strong voice which created a multiplier effect, his own proposals were always of an irenic nature. For example he shocked Foreign Minister Chagla in the Lok Sabha in 1968 by accusing him of being a war-monger when he advocated that India support Egypt’s proposal to withdraw the UNEF from the Sinai. The phrase he used might have been somewhat colourful but in fact the withdrawal directly resulted in the Six Day War.

Altogether he responded positively to developments, from conflict-avoidance, conflict management to post-conflict reconciliation. Certainly he was not a simple pacifist or non-violent fundamentalist: while he recognised the importance of peace processes and diplomacy, he was also well aware that the dynamics of conflict once set in motion had their own life and momentum and had to be dealt with in a multiplicity of ways - whether through diplomacy, deterrence or defence. In general he was interested in cultivating a position of strength but avoiding the use of strong measures: he agreed for example with Raymond Aron who had said that ‘nations must learn the art of using thermonuclear weapons on the diplomatic level in such a way that they will never have “to use them at the military level.”

So I think this particular occasion which brings together the IPCS, the lecture on Nuclear Energy and Proliferation by Prof Chari and the Professor ML Sondhi Trust and the ML Sondhi Institute for Asia Pacific Security could not be more appropriate, and I have no doubt the IPCS will continue to scale new heights as it pursues its agenda of ‘developing an alternative framework for peace and security in the region.’

Thank you.
New Delhi
18 August 2010

The Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS) is the premier South Asian think tank which conducts independent research on and provides an in depth analysis of conventional and non-conventional issues related to national and South Asian security including nuclear issues, disarmament, non-proliferation, weapons of mass destruction, the war on terrorism, counter terrorism , strategies security sector reforms, and armed conflict and peace processes in the region.

For those in South Asia and elsewhere, the IPCS website provides a comprehensive analysis of the happenings within India with a special focus on Jammu and Kashmir and Naxalite Violence. Our research promotes greater understanding of India's foreign policy especially India-China relations, India's relations with SAARC countries and South East Asia.

Through close interaction with leading strategic thinkers, former members of the Indian Administrative Service, the Foreign Service and the three wings of the Armed Forces - the Indian Army, Indian Navy, and Indian Air Force, - the academic community as well as the media, the IPCS has contributed considerably to the strategic discourse in India.