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The advent of Narendra Modi to the Indian premiership aroused considerable expectations about India's place in world politics. In the closing years of the last millennium, the spurt in India's economic growth and its 1998 nuclear tests appeared to signal that the country was poised to become a major player in Asian and eventually global politics. The India-US nuclear agreement of 2005, which allowed India to bypass the tightening rules of nuclear commerce despite its refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), seemed to symbolize the restructuring of the global balance of power, bringing Washington and New Delhi together to counter the rise of China. Yet, barely a decade later, the Manmohan Singh government (2004-2014) appeared to be irresolute and reluctant to press on with the task of consolidating India's position. Modi's election in May 2014 was widely viewed as signifying a more decisive phase in the country's foreign policy, especially after he launched his tenure as prime minister with a flurry of overseas visits to large and small powers alike. There were three reasons for the high expectations of change. First, Modi's personal style is starkly different from that of his predecessor. Singh was a low-key leader, inclined to position himself as primus inter pares and collegial in decisionmaking, while Modi is charismatic and authoritative. Singh was media-shy and bland in his public style, whereas Modi quickly displayed his media skills through orchestrated media events and the effective use of mass media such as Facebook and Twitter. 1 The 2014 election manifesto of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) clearly carried his personal stamp, proclaiming a determination to 'fundamentally reboot and reorient the foreign policy goals, content and process, in a manner that locates India's global strategic engagement in a new paradigm'. 2 Second, Singh was hampered by serious political constraints. He rose to power through the bureaucracy, was never elected to the Lok Sabha (the popularly elected lower house of parliament), and had little control of his party, the Indian National Congress, which was (and is) dominated by the Nehru-Gandhi family. In contrast, Modi rose up through the maelstrom of state politics-he was chief minister of Gujarat 1 Nalin Mehta, 'Modi and the art of political performance', Times of India, 28 Sept. 2015, http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/academic-interest/modi-and-the-art-of-political-performance/. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 11 Oct. 2016.)

The persistence of restraint, stability and minimalism in India's nuclear policy is best explained with reference to its strategic culture. This constitutes an intermediate structure between the power-acquisition imperative of the structure of the international system and domestic choices on how power is actually constituted. Disaggregation of strategic culture into three analytically distinct components - the level of assumptions and beliefs, the operational level and the structural frame - facilitates identification of the precise areas of continuity and change in a dynamic structure. The disjunctures observed, whether at one level or between levels, can then be subjected to social action in the pursuit of peace and stability. An examination of Indian strategic culture with respect to nuclear weapons on the basis of official and non-official preference structures reveals (a) high levels of continuity in the form of restrained responses to external and domestic pressures for change, and in a positive disposition toward arms control; and (b) a significant shift from high to low tolerance of ambiguity resulting from the steady growth of an operational, as opposed to a political, conception of nuclear weapons. The last creates space for nuclear instability. The anomaly can be corrected by exposing the deficiencies in the operational conception of deterrence, thereby reinforcing strategic stability.