What's India's Grand Strategy?

What's India's Grand Strategy?

A nation has security, Walter Lippman notes, when it does not have to
sacrifice its legitimate interests to avoid war, and is able, if
challenged, to maintain them by war. India does not meet these
criteria.

K.P.S. GILL

A nation has security, Walter Lippman notes, when it does not have to
sacrifice its legitimate interests to avoid war, and is able, if
challenged, to maintain them by war. It must be clear to any objective
observer of the trajectory of developments in this country that India
does not meet these criteria, and that its leadership has not even
begun to imagine the task of building them into a national vision.

Indeed, for decades, India has even failed to neutralise the challenge
arising out of the malevolence of a single hostile neighbour one-eight
its size.

The disaster of the confrontation with China in 1962 has simply been
pushed out of our strategic perspectives, and the political and
military leadership in the country appears to have convinced itself
that shared economic interests, China's "good intentions", and our
"friendly relations" with Western and other powers are sufficient
guarantee against any future threat from that direction. And given
China's overwhelming size and rising power, in any event, what can
India do?

But why doesn't Pakistan think in this way of India? The truth is,
though there is much talk of India's emerging "great power status",
the strategic vision and the awareness of both the collaborative and
competitive imperatives that this would involve is still to develop
within leaders and leadership institutions in this country. It is
significant that, while we pit ourselves repeatedly, exclusively and
with very limited success against a manifestly inferior adversary,
preparing for an engagement with a superior enemy has been integral to
Chinese military and national philosophy since the very creation of
the "New China" under Mao Zedong's inspired, though ruthless,
leadership. China clearly sees itself as being engaged in sustained
and protracted competition with other major powers, while India sees
itself substantially as little more than a hopeful supplicant before,
and occasionally as an inferior partner with, these.

It is useful to recall that China has confronted and defeated the
United States in two wars--directly in the Korean war and indirectly
in the war in Vietnam--at a time when the new nation was only just
beginning to stabilise after two decades of civil war and a seven year
conflict with Japan. At that time the Chinese economy was shattered,
there was mass distress among the people and the nation's industries
had virtually collapsed. On the other hand, the US was already well
established as the number one power of the world.

Indeed, the earlier victories of the People's Liberation Army in both
the civil war and the war against Japan were also secured against
adversaries who were far better equipped and, at least at some point,
far more numerous. In June 1950, when General Douglas MacArthur made a
daring push towards the Yalu river--the boundary between China and
North Korea--he was confident that China would not dare to intervene
because of America's air superiority and nuclear power status. But
China pushed in more than 200,000 "volunteers", who attacked and
overran the US 8th Army 50 miles south of the Yalu River.

History--even recent history--is replete with instances where
"inferior" powers have prevailed in the battlefield over "superior"
powers, and, at least once, China has been the victim of this process.
In 1979, China attacked Vietnam to "punish" Hanoi for toppling the
Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, but had to withdraw in haste after it
was given a bloody nose by fierce Vietnamese resistance.

In Iraq, today, rag tag bands of insurgents and terrorists are tying
down the Armies of the world's "sole superpower" and it is far from
clear who will emerge the eventual victor.

It is clear that established military doctrines in countries like
India, Russia, even America, have failed to grasp the transformations
in the fundamental nature of warfare that have occurred.America's
overwhelming firepower can devastate the infrastructure of any country
in the world, but it cannot impose the necessary conditions of an
unambiguous victory. There is, indeed, both among great powers and
among "aspiring great powers", a failure to evolve the necessary
concepts of war and of "soft power projection" that can help guarantee
their interests in the new world order.

If India is to rank among the world's first nations--indeed, given its
particularly hostile neighbourhood, if India is to survive over the
long term--its leadership will have to evolve a grand strategy that
will guide the nation into the future. If the political,
administrative and intellectual leadership of this country remains
completely mired, as it presently is, in the chaotic exigencies of
daily political survival and the pressures of the most immediate
challenges at hand, the future of the country is in serious jeopardy.

Within this context, a military doctrine that seeks to prepare the
country only for a "short, intense war--the only kind of ar that we
are, in fact, currently prepared to fight is worse than absurd, it is
a preparation for defeat. India does not appear to have any strategic
minds at least not in the nodes of power--and has manifestly lacked
these for a very long time. The fact is, war has been systematically
and substantially factored out of the Indian political world view in
its unrealistic--often delusional--pursuit of peace. To desire and to
work for peace is, of course, admirable. To fail to prepare for the
wars of the future is suicidal.

The country's leadership appears to have put its entire faith in the
capacity of our limited economic successes (these are a fact of life
only for a microscopic minority in a fraction of the country's
geographical area) to catapult India to great power status. The fact,
unfortunately, is that this success is itself permanent hostage to the
multiplicity of internal and external security challenges confronting
us today.

It is now time to evolve and articulate India's grand strategy, and to
tailor specific policies in every area--the economy, governance,
administration, defence, foreign policy, human security,
development--to the realisation of this strategy. Within this context,
a radical restructuring is needed to create an integrated system of
military and commercial production that would not only directly
benefit both these sectors, but would create the sinews for the wider
task of nation-building.

Defence science has, historically, led national (commercial and
industrial) science in the advanced nations. In India, defence science
lags far behind the commercial sector, despite the billions of rupees
that have been poured into the defence scientific establishment. The
gap between our indigenous defence technology capabilities and the
cutting edge technologies of the modern world is several generations
wide. This is not the case in at least a selection of our best private
and non-military technological enterprises.

We have the scientific capabilities; we are simply failing to apply
these where they are needed because our present security perspectives
and doctrines are flawed. Our technological efforts and institutional
structures need to be redefined by clear thinking on the projected
demands of future operations and conflicts, and not just of current
threats. The development of technologies in line with a comprehensive
and realistic security doctrine could radically alter our entire
strategic and tactical vision, not only on the conventional and
sub-conventional battlefield, but in every aspect of the national
enterprise.

K.P.S. Gill is Publisher, SAIR; President, Institute for Conflict
Management. This article was first published in The Pioneer.