We Need A New Militarism To Stiffen Our Spines

We need a new militarism to stiffen our spines

India reasonable is India laughably soft. We are now reduced to a global pushover thanks to our unblinking appetite for humiliation self-justified with amazing verbosity. Many people look at a sub-continental country of 1.21 billion people quite unable to hold its own, with amusement. Not even against Mauritius, and Nepal.  

But we can rationalise any insult with exquisite wordiness, and convince ourselves we have done very well for ourselves. Italy challenges our courts and strains our ability to rectify the hurt, and China tells us what to do in our own territory. We can protect neither our distressed citizens abroad nor our tortured and mutilated soldiers on our borders.  All we can produce is clumsy diplomacy and ponderous self- regard.

Why we won’t militarise sharply defies logic. Of course, our policy implementation is so poor and slow that a lot of our unreadiness is due to this. Our military back-datedness  obtains by default rather than design perhaps.

Our armed force may be ill-equipped, but it is well trained nevertheless, and enables us to acquit ourselves well in any theatre of conflict or war. Of course, we lose more good men like this, because bravery and the spirit of patriotic sacrifice has to make up for our criminal neglect of the  equipment needs of the fighting man.  Nevertheless, the Indian armed forces are respected globally for being able to punch much harder than its weight.

Of late, most of our prowess has been demonstrated ably, either in UN Peace Keeping Missions, or in joint exercise with other militaries. We have, in these joint exercises, always impressed our counterparts with our ability and professionalism which stands out all the more starkly due to our inadequate and obsolete weapons and delivery systems.

We also manage to keep going, without adequate ammunition and spare parts, by cannibalising, localised ingenuity and substitution. We have had no howitzers enter the Army since the Bofors scandal broke in the eighties for example! The Defence Ministry is now looking into the matter after 30 odd years. Who knows, it might take another several years to come to fruition.

Our defence sector is also riddled with corruption at various levels up and down. The graft and commission farming encompasses even some serving men in uniform and retired officers. The recent Agusta Westland helicopter procurement scandal is a case in point.

We manage, despite the incompetence of our defence preparedness, to compete most creditably with much superior technology available to others, the Americans and Chinese for example.

The roots of our battle readiness, regimental spirit and izzat, may well hark back to the days of British India. But we have more than held our own over the 65 years of independence, and almost all the credit for this goes to the Armed Forces themselves, rather than their civilian masters.

Domestically speaking, it is our Army, Navy and Air Force, along with the CRPF, the BSF, the ITPB etc.  that we routinely involve to quell both insurgency and manage disasters. And the men in uniform invariably do a heroic and competent job. The guts and glory seems to slip up with more public contact and interaction, as in the Police. While there is much to be proud of in the upper echelons of the IPS, the lower ranks are often riddled with petty corruption, mirroring perhaps the citizens they are mandated to protect.

It is an irony therefore that such a corrupt and venal people produce and maintain such an honourable and admirable armed force! This is given teeth by the fact that we are an overt nuclear power. Even though Pakistan is attempting to raise the ante by working to develop tactical nuclear weapons in addition to having numerical superiority in warheads.  Having said all this, we, like the famed Polish Cavalry, could be wiped out in any conventional war with China, and be badly mauled even in one with Pakistan.

We are being constantly menaced and bullied by China with little by way of counteraction available to us. Diplomacy may settle the border issues with China but any negotiation will see India represented from a position of weakness. How then can our voice be taken seriously by a belligerent and militarily regenerated China? Pakistan,  which is China’s cat’s paw to harass India is complicit at all times, to compound the issue and potentially subject India to pincer movements.

It will take a decade or more for us to develop sufficient strategic deterrence vis a vis China. The worry is, what can we do to protect ourselves from the Chinese dragon in the meantime? And this presupposes that we intend to catch up, or at least checkmate Chinese designs to dominate India ,if not with overt military action, then with constant menace.  

In the event we do nothing to help ourselves, let us understand that this time there is no JFK and America’s overwhelming military superiority to come to our rescue as happened in 1962.

Today America’s economy and domestic appetite for foreign adventures is severely curtailed. It has made a mess in Iraq and Afghanistan. It does not quite know what to do about Iran or Syria. Europe also is too economically afflicted to come to anyone’s rescue.

The situation abroad, combined with India’s extraordinary political weakness is perilous. We have a government much diminished by deserting coalition partners at the fag- end of its tenure. It is also wounded by an aggressive Opposition.

China could well seek to exploit our domestic weakness at this juncture, but may hold off if it wrests enough economic manna from an India being driven to its knees.

It is sad that we have had no real recognition of what a multipolar world means. It is even sadder that we aspire to not even one of those poles for ourselves. India has no strategic vision and all its diplomacy seems to be ad hoc fire-fighting.

We are experts at selling ourselves short. Whether a country like this can lead in South Asia, let alone in the global scheme of things, depends most sorely on a rebooted political vision. The UPA may be too tired to enunciate it.  But if it loses the next general election, the winners will have to address the looming challenges of national security.

In the meantime, vulnerable as we are, let us hope China has a greater desire to consolidate its domestic scenario under the new leadership of Xi and Li, instead of letting the PLA set the agenda.

(1,080 words)

May 14^th, 2013

Gautam Mukherjee