VIPIN NARANG
▶ FIELDWORK LOCATION: INDIA
“Would you like some tea?” asked the retired three-star Indian Army general.
“Thank you sir, that would be wonderful,” I replied.
Although I am not usually a tea drinker, and neither wanted nor needed tea given the Delhi summer heat—where the morning temperature was already over one hundred degrees—this was the first senior Army general with whom I had scored an interview during my doctoral research. I did not want to be rude, and knowing that refusing tea and biscuits is potentially insulting to a host, I readily accepted.
After beginning the interview on Indian conventional military strategy and its evolving nuclear weapons program, the general’s aide brought the tea and biscuits. I politely took a sip and immediately knew I would be in trouble. It was barely lukewarm. As a lifelong visitor to India, even I still abided by three rules, especially in the summer: no unboiled water, no ice, no raw vegetables. I was quite sure the water for the tea had never reached a boiling temperature, which is critical to make the water drinkable. What to do? Leave the rest of the tea and risk insulting the host, or continue drinking it and risk an infamous bout of Delhi Belly (at which I was a seasoned pro)? I already had taken in a decent amount (sunk cost fallacy!), so how much more damage could I do? I decided to drink the rest of the tea.
A couple of hours later, I paid the price. I was in the car, stuck in Delhi traffic, heading to another meeting when I started getting the shakes and my body started aching. I immediately knew the culprit and thought, this isn’t going to be good. I powered through my next meeting, which was my last of the day, and headed straight back to the house where I was staying. Things were deteriorating fast, and I couldn’t hold anything down, or in. This was going to be bad. My usual strategy of filling myself with Imodium was going to be insufficient, so I made the decision to nuke the bacteria with antibiotics, hoping I could keep them down long enough to start being effective. Due to the overprescription of antibiotics in India, many antibiotics—such as Cipro—that used to be prescribed for such situations are no longer effective. I had to take my chances on Azithromycin, which I had carried with me from my U.S. doctor for precisely this scenario. Long story short, I was out of commission for about three days.
Was it worth it? Absolutely. As a fourth-year nobody graduate student just getting off the ground, it required a lot of effort to get contact information for someone who knew anything about Indian conventional military and nuclear strategy. The Indian military and government are very opaque about these matters. They tend not to keep written archives that one can consult, nor do they publish regular “posture reviews” as is done in the United States. The only way to get credible information about Indian security thinking is to go to the field and meet as many people in the system as possible to try to triangulate developments—and then sift through the misinformation, misdirection, accusations of being a CIA spy, and so forth. This is complicated by the adage that “those who know don’t speak, and those who don’t know speak too much.” This is all too true in South Asia.
Through a random series of events and circuitous contacts, my first substantive interview was with the retired Army three-star general, someone who had just left the military and had experience with India’s experiment with the so-called Cold Start conventional strategy to redesign India’s military strategy. This had deep implications for India’s nuclear strategy and its attempt to escape the paralysis of Pakistan’s nuclear threat, which was critical and also germane to my dissertation. I suffered through the tea (and what I still think was a mild bout of dysentery) to discover that India’s purported Cold Start strategy was frozen and would never materialize—and that the Army was frustrated at its isolation from civilian leaders regarding integration of its conventional and nuclear strategies. The general also gave me a set of invaluable introductions and contacts for officers who had recently left India’s Strategic Forces Command—a set of contacts that were impenetrable without his introduction. If it took a bout of dysentery for the general to vouch for me as someone worth meeting—and not a CIA spy as is usually the suspicion for those trying to get details on India’s or Pakistan’s most sensitive secrets—so be it. To be fair, I was young, healthy, and probably a little too cavalier about it. I certainly paid a heavy price for this information. It is obviously not worth risking life, limb, or stomach, but illnesses can happen when doing fieldwork. I learned a valuable lesson for the future: “pretend” to drink the tea. (Make the slurping noises, but don’t consume any! There is a good chance the host won’t notice.)
The snowball interviews proved to be invaluable for my dissertation—which later became my first book. I believe I had collected the most detailed and novel data on India’s evolving nuclear posture to that point in time. None of the details had been written down anywhere previously. Although the officers sometimes spoke elliptically, I was able to piece together crucial procedures and facts that painted the picture of a nuclear force increasingly different—more responsive, more ready, more mature—than anyone had previously thought. I had to go to Delhi—and maybe get dysentery—to get these details.
Nor were health issues the only risks I faced while conducting field research. At some point, I even made the mistake of flying to Simla (rather than going by train and road, a combination which is statistically more dangerous in India, for what that’s worth) to interview an officer at India’s doctrine development command. It was only after my trip that I learned that Simla is one of the world’s ten most dangerous airports to fly into; it has one of the shortest certifiable runways allowed for civilian aircraft and sits on top of a mountain, with cavernous valleys on either side. I held on for dear life as we dipped into one of those valleys after takeoff, trying to gain speed and altitude. Never in my life had I been so happy to safely land back in Delhi.
Between the increasing pollution; water and food issues, especially in the summer; and the chaotic traffic during the day and the dangerous speeds at night, I try to be off the road before midnight. One certainly has to be careful in Delhi, as in any large developing city. Lest you think fieldwork in Delhi is only hazardous to one’s health, I also fall in love with India all over again when I arrive. The sights, the sounds, and the food are nothing like you’ve ever experienced before. If you think you’ve had Indian food at your neighborhood curry house, you haven’t had anything until you’ve tried HaveMore on Pandara Road, Karim’s in Old Delhi, or the classic Moti Mahal. I literally have dreams about a fresh butter naan out of a tandoor, done right. Or the food shacks in Goa en route to the Naval War College, or a detour to Kerala where the food is so different and spiced so purely that it could be from a different country than what we are used to in North India.
Delhi is an assault on the senses, one’s patience, and occasionally one’s stomach. There is nothing more frustrating than being stuck in two hours of traffic in the monsoon rain just to go two kilometers because of the combination of impassable roads and the congestion of cars, rickshaws, and goats; or braving that chaos to show up at the appointed time for a meeting only to be stood up because the person forgot, or something better came up. Everyone operates on Indian Standard Time, where 7 p.m. dinner means 10 p.m., and where “would you like some tea?” really means “drink this tea”—or at least pretend to—come hell or high water (or dysentery!). One summer, many years after my first research trip, protestors had literally destroyed the lone canal that feeds Delhi its water. We had our young son with us, so I was terrified. No water? What the heck does that even mean? But everyone else was nonchalant, including my Punjabi mother-in-law, for whom it didn’t even register because, as she said, she was a daughter of Partition—they had lived through far worse. What I viewed as existential crises were not even minor nuisances for Delhi residents. And sure enough, through some creative jugaad (the Hindi word for creative “hacking”), they managed to divert water and repair the canal to avoid a disruption.
Somehow, through all the chaos, India works. Once I experienced Delhi like this—one can never fully understand or learn it—I had a much better appreciation for India’s lumbering, seemingly sclerotic, and dysfunctional security strategy. India faces social, economic, and political challenges far worse than foreigners can imagine, all while operating on Indian Standard Time; but somehow, through it all, it gets the job done. Without countless trips to Delhi, lukewarm tea in the summer that occasionally comes with a side of dysentery, I would never have understood that.
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Vipin Narang is associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
PUBLICATION TO WHICH THIS FIELDWORK CONTRIBUTED:
• Narang, Vipin. Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014.