Ashok K Mehta
At a time when the Government is fumbling over its defence and security policy, a re-visit of India at Risk: Mistakes, Misconceptions and Misadventures of Security Policy, the last book written by one of its own – though now disowned and sadly comatose Jaswant Singh will be instructive. It will explain the straitjacket successive Governments have been in, partly due to the inherited legacy of British rule though mainly due to faults of ‘sectionalised understanding of national security’ and, therefore, the limited importance attached to it even 70 years after independence. Singh calls national security the cellular core of governance which has got circumscribed by the concept of state power being emasculated by a number of genes in our DNA – Hindus being accommodating and forgiving; Gandhi’s pacifism; lack of strategic culture; absence of a sense of history; an incomplete sense of geography and territory (and frontiers) and its protection and failure to maintain a surplus of military power. In short, a neglect of defence of the realm.
The Nehruvian vision of Asian solidarity and his misplaced importance of China-India friendship was jolted by the Himalayan blunder of 1962 when Jawaharlal Nehru’s response to a Press query about the People’s Liberation Arm deployment on Thagla Ridge was simply: “Throw them out”. Ironically it was India that promoted China’s membership of the UN Security Council even after the latter had annexed Tibet, one of India’s biggest strategic omissions. Singh adds the root of our problem began with the challenge of Partition, the eruption of the Hindu-Muslim identity, and the creation of India-Pakistan, which fractured the unity and solidarity of the Indian subcontinent, leading to the second partition and birth of Bangladesh. But before that was our failure to act in preventing the occupation of Tibet by the Chinese PLA.
Gen Francis Tuker’s paper included in the book called The Mongol Frontier describes the Tibetan plateau as the vital area which would be the base for any military offensive into eastern India. The paper warned that once British power waned and withdrew from India, Tibet would lean more towards China and recommended: “rather than see a Chinese occupation of Tibet, India should be prepared to occupy the plateau herself for the invasion of India by various routes would be quite practicable”. 1962 made this forecast a reality. The settlement of the disputed border is linked with Tibet, to Dalai Lama and not the Line of Actual Control really.
The biggest impediment, Singh says, to foreign and security policy is their being trapped between four lines: Durand Line, McMahon Line, Line of Control, and the LAC. This strategic confinement has diluted autonomy and restricted manoeuvre space. As long as India is thus constricted, “it will remain immobilised in thought and action, its response physically impaired and our quest for lasting national security chained, hence unattained and of course economically greatly hampered”.
This confined strategic space is only partly inherited: It is largely self-actualised through mistakes in allowing military infrastructure and operational capability slip in China’s favour. One other negative consequence of being confined between artificial lines is that it has bequeathed the longest unsettled borders in the world and a two-front situation compounded by cross border terrorism from across one and frequent border bravado from across the other.
Instead of being entrapped by the confines of space and chained to the lines, efforts were never made to disrupt them to regain greater autonomy by placing on a much higher priority, defence capability and operational readiness. The creation of a military surplus was never attempted to subdue or deter adversaries. Singh says “the defence budget is the price we pay for our foreign policy (and autonomy)”.
There were howls of protest by the opposition parties over infringement of autonomy when US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter said this month that the US wanted to help India to become a great power. This will enable India to close the military-technology gap with China without being aligned or allied to the US and converse with Beijing on more equal terms.
Anticipating war with Pakistan, India signed the peace, friendship and cooperation treaty with USSR in 1971 which had a clause: “Consultation in the event of the security of either party being threatened”. Paradoxically, on Indira Gandhi’s insistence, Moscow endorsed India’s non-aligned status in the treaty. Why over-stretch the virtues of non alignment or autonomy in a globalised world?
