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177 Introduction India’s involvement in United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations is one of its most visible contributions to the multilateral system. More than 100,000 Indian military and police personnel have served in forty of the UN’s sixtyfive peacekeeping missions, dating back to their inception in the 1950s. As of April 2013, India had 6,851 troops and 1,038 police officers under UN command , representing just less than 10 percent of all uniformed personnel in blue-helmet operations. These overall figures arguably underrepresent the importance of India in peacekeeping, as it offers the UN a range of specialized military assets—such as combat helicopters and field hospitals—that peacekeeping missions urgently need. Yet despite these contributions, there is a curious ambivalence around India’s participation in UN peace operations. For many Western commentators observing India’s rise, its leading role in blue-helmet missions is an obvious opportunity to brand itself as a responsible power.1 China has effectively publicized its involvement in UN operations as a sign of its growing capabilities and commitment to multilateralism, although in numerical terms it still lags behind Ghana and Uruguay as a troop contributor. Brazil has also invested heavily in UN operations, providing the military backbone for the high-profile mission in Haiti and more recently sending units to trouble spots such as Lebanon. But while India still has more personnel serving with the UN than Brazil and China combined, it has not received a comparable quantity of political capital out of its role. It has received good publicity for some of its individual deployments, such as the dispatch of an all-female police unit (the first of its type in a UN mission) to 10 India and UN Peacekeeping: The Weight of History and a Lack of Strategy richard gowan and sushant k. singh 178 richard gowan and sushant k. singh Liberia in 2007. But it has had to fend off recurrent reports of corruption among Indian units, especially in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Meanwhile, advocates of UN operations complain that Indian policymakers have not made major conceptual contributions to discussions about peacekeeping strategies. India used its temporary membership in the Security Council in 2011–12 to convene a debate on peacekeeping, but as we note below, this generated no new insights or ideas. There has been a growth in studies of non-Western powers and peace operations in recent years, but researchers have often been frustrated by India’s relatively cautious approach.“Although India is developing a well-articulated discourse on peacekeeping issues and is critical of the Security Council’s working methods,” Thierry Tardy argues, “it has not acquired political influence commensurate with its massive field presence, nor has it given any indication that it intends to do so.”2 Some commentators have concluded that this passive posture presages a gradual disengagement from UN operations.3 There is an ongoing debate within India about whether continued engagement in peacekeeping is in line with its national security priorities and status as an aspiring first-class power.But,as this chapter argues,this debate has only had a marginal effect on actual policymaking to date. India has linked its continuing participation in UN missions to receiving more command positions. But significant constituencies in India remain broadly satisfied with the status quo. A recent study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute concludes that the Indian military still perceives “a strong intrinsic value in deploying troops to showcase India’s growing force-projection capabilities.”4 India has also adopted an equivocal approach to the principles and norms that guide peace operations. In diplomatic debates about peacekeeping at UN headquarters, Indian officials are stout defenders of long-standing mantras such as the primacy of state sovereignty and need to limit the use of force by UN troops. Yet in the field, Indian contingents have participated in robust operations, some of which have blurred the boundary between peacekeeping and peace enforcement.As Varun Vira has observed, Indian soldiers“fall into the very narrow bracket of troop contributing countries willing and able to act kinetically” and have been praised for “operating with unprecedented force” in the eastern DRC.5 Tardy concludes that “pragmatism often prevails over ideology” for Indian officers operating in tough places.6 This mixture of pragmatism and principle complicates efforts to define India a“rule maker”or“rule taker”in the field of peace operations.In some contexts, such as diplomatic debates at the UN, Indian officials...

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