India in Space: Between Utility and Geopolitics by Marco Aliberti

Author:Marco Aliberti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

5.4 India’s Evolving Space Doctrine: An Assessment

As described throughout Chaps. 4 and 5, the Indian space programme is an increasingly complex and multilayered endeavour that, over the years, has come to entail a wide range of dimensions at the nexus of societal utility, commerce and geopolitics. India’s use of space technologies is now driven by a combination of factors that simultaneously span from societal development and economic growth to military security and diplomatic goals. In the process, India has succeeded in joining the club of major spacefaring nations and has established itself as fully fledged space power with key independent technological capabilities.

Notably, despite a 40-yearlong involvement in space activities, the Indian government has not yet issued an overarching and integrated policy document that “provides the raison-d’etre of national space activities and explicates the philosophy behind the development and use of space assets” (Sachdeva 2016). Admittedly, there has been a debate on its adoption for more than a decade now. But thus far, the outcome seems to be that the pressing need to get a national space policy is not equally shared among decision-makers. Whether this seems to be related more to India’s resolve to maintain strategic flexibility than to the lack of grand political vision,16 either way the result has been a certain degree of ambiguity, at least from the perspective of foreign observers.

India’s space officials have certainly missed no occasion to stress that the overall objective of India’s involvement in space is to assist the all-round development of the nation and that there is no ambiguity of purpose. But concerns have been often raised over the “alleged contradiction between the development goals that Indian governments historically used to justify the programme, and the obvious military rationale that lies behind the country’s development of both launchers and satellite technology” (Sheehan 2007; Thomas 1986). As a widespread line of argument has gone since the latter part of the Cold War “whether originally intended or not […] space programmes serve dual purposes” (Thomas 1986), and a developing country like India has been investing in such programmes despite their huge cost exactly because of their military applications. Similarly, many have pointed to India’s clash between its declared interest in developing international norms regulating behaviour in space and its underlying suspicion of a more stringent regime that might limit its freedom of action in the field of military space.

However, this line of reasoning proves particularly limiting, if not misleading. For one, the historical evolution of the Indian space programme makes it clear how, for a long time, the military dimension has been strictly firewalled because of political considerations. In addition, India’s current uses of space prove to have been brought in line with the rationales typical of all other spacefaring nations, the difference being that the military dimension of the programme has arisen well after the societal one. Hence, it would be more appropriate to look at the progressive expansion of the Indian space programme and in particular its forays into the realm of military space as a “normalisation” rather than a “militarisation”.

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