India, Nov. 12 -- When India faced its defining strategic crisis in the early 1960s, it was compelled to rethink what security truly meant. The 1962 War with China exposed not only military shortfalls but also an absence of intellectual preparedness. The young republic, still discovering the grammar of power, realised that ideas could be as critical to defence as armies or arsenals. From that period of national introspection emerged an institution that would shape India's strategic imagination - the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, now the Manohar Parrikar IDSA. Its establishment in 1965 marked India's decision to think systematically about power in a turbulent world.
The Institute's origins lie in a series of encounters abroad....