New Delhi: In his Independence Day speech from the ramparts of Red Fort this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that Bharat was the land of Buddha and “war was not our path.” He said that India does not pose a threat to the world and that Bharat never dragged the world to wars.
While PM Modi said that India was also ready to confront challenges in the same speech, he has in the past said that Bharat has never even coveted an inch of foreign territory or had any imperial designs.
Ironically, none of this has stopped Indian adversaries like Pakistan and its handlers in the west, and China from creating fresh hurdles in the path of Bharat’s rise. While Pakistan has waged four wars to capture the Kashmir Valley since Independence, China foisted the 1962 war on India to teach Jawahar Lal Nehru a lesson for his immature ‘Forward Policy’. It has been nibbling Indian territory since that day and launched major transgressions over the LAC in East Ladakh in May 2020, designed to change the status quo on ground. Cross-border terrorism still continues in Jammu and Kashmir from Pakistan and Islamabad backers in the west are trying to stoke political fires in India to destabilize the Modi government.
In this context, the larger question that arises is do India’s national security planners and politicians suffer from strategic confusion ? Has the pacifist doctrine of Buddha really helped India ?
This strategic ambiguity that fogs the minds of Indian planners has made Bharat vulnerable in the eyes of its adversaries. It is perhaps still perceived as a country that still does not have a clear cut global objective or does not know it’s right place on the global high table.
India today is a major military power with a functioning nuclear triad and a high survival second strike capability. It will be a four trillion US dollar economic power next year and possibly a third biggest economic power by 2029 if not early. It will soon have military theatre commands with a powerful sub-surface nuclear deterrent. The question is does India have the military doctrine or tactics for the heavy ticket platforms it has. After all, maritime diplomacy cannot be the doctrine for the Indian Navy and its two aircraft carriers and ballistic missile submarines.
While PM Modi has talked about decolonization of the Indian mind, the Indian national security planners are still to craft military tactics that cater to the topography and geography of Bharat. Instead, what we see is both the planners, diplomats, armed forces and intelligence in India regurgitating western think tank language and concepts. Indian planners have lost the way when it comes to new military tactics or strategic vision.
One has to go through Jadunath Sarkar’s seminal work ‘Military History of India’ to understand that Bharat has lost wars to technology and unified strategic vision of the conquerors over the past centuries. Even today neither the Indian private sector nor the public sector has been able to come up with path breaking technology with the armed forces more than happy to purchase off the shelf western technology.
If India aspires to be ‘Jagat Guru’, then it has to create a military-industrial complex that challenges the world in dual use technology and has to craft military doctrines to suit it’s strategic interests. It cannot do so by ordering a caste census and causing a Hindu societal implosion for political power or throwing merit out of the window for the same. If craven politics was a sport in Olympics, India would definitely win a gold medal as national parties now want restoration of Article 370 as part of a regressive political mindset sweeping the country. Such is the political power grab that the two major national parties can not come to a strategic agreement on issues that are critical to Bharat survival.
The ‘chalta hai’ concept that PM Modi talks about must be dumped and so should be this so-called pacifist mindset as it is causing confusion among the youngsters. India’s neighborhood is a cause of serious concern with Bangladesh virtually in the hands of Islamists and a weak western prop like Ashraf Ghani as a ruler, Sri Lanka is yet to stabilize and Maldives staring at an economic abyss. Pakistan’s policy towards India remains the same notwithstanding who is in power and the Modi government should be talking about Occupied Kashmir as the bottom line for dialogue if and when it happens with Islamabad. It is now more than four years since the Indian Army deployed against 100,000 Chinese troops in East Ladakh with no signs of any de-escalation from either side. Chinese naval activity has increased in the Indian Ocean. What to talk about in the Pacific Ocean. Unless ‘Pacifist mindset’ is just a posture, one should remember that history has no time for losers.
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