Priyanjali Malik awarded BISA thesis prize in International Relations

Priyanjali Malik has been awarded the BISA thesis prize in International Relations for her thesis ‘Debating `The Option`: India`s Nuclear Policy in the 1990s`.

Priyanjali Malik was a Dhil candidate in International Relations. Her thesis was jointly supervised by Professor Henry Shue and Professor Judith Brown.

‘Debating the Option` examines debate in the 1990s on India`s nuclear policy amongst the country`s ‘attentive public` - the small but influential group of upper middle and middle-class Indians - to explain why the tests of 1998 were so popular. Until 1998, India had espoused a policy of peaceful uses for itself and championed nuclear disarmament abroad. Yet nuclear policy (undifferentiated, but understood to pivot on the undisclosed weapons programme) had come to be viewed since 1948 as an ingredient of nationalism and a symbol of the country`s independence.

For ‘attentive India`, nuclear policy sat at the intersection of two competing ideas of the nation: one which pitted security against development and another which placed the India of Gandhi and Nehru in opposition to the state governed by realpolitik. International attempts in the 1990s to bring India into the non-proliferation fold by pressing New Delhi to sign first the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and then the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty represented not just a threat to India`s security by eliminating the nuclear weapons option in responding to the challenges posed by China and Pakistan, but also an infringement of India`s sovereign right to set its own developmental and security policies. These anxieties received official encouragement, while also being used by government to claim domestic compulsions in not acceding to these treaties. As the thesis argues, in these circumstances, the devices tested in May 1998 came to be seen as political weapons that safeguarded India`s sovereignty.

Priyanjali received her MPhil from Oxford in 2001. Her MPhil thesis had examined the making of India`s nuclear identity from 1948 to 1998.