The myth of ‘strategic restraint’
http://www.kashmirtimes.in/newsdet.aspx?q=58756
In mid-2013, a group, referring
to itself as ‘members of India’s strategic community’, brought out a press
statement at their haunt, the Vivekananda International Foundation that read: ‘It
is time that policies are devised that will impose a cost on Pakistan for its
export of terror to India, and thus change the cost-benefit calculus of these
policies and actions. A proactive approach by India towards Pakistan must be
the order of the day, as it will yield us much better results than those
garnered by policies of appeasement which have regrettably been pursued by us
for years.’[1]
The group amongst which was Mr.
Doval, current day national security adviser, has since captured the national
security policy making establishment. The results are self-evident, with
India’s Pakistan policy taking a final policy turn – after several
‘pirouettes’, in one apt phrasing. Today, if prime time strategists are to be
believed, India is following a doctrine of strategic proactivism, jettisoning
the strategic restraint of the preceding NDA and UPA periods.
The jury is still out on whether
the shift is indeed as marked as its votaries shout about. After all, a set of
‘surgical strikes’ in wake of the Uri attack, are not qualitatively different
from those India has reportedly engaged in over the years, dating back to
Sharad Pawar’s stint at the defence ministry’s helm. Only, now India is
acknowledging outright what it has been at all along, and, while doing so,
noticeably couching its language so as to align its action with international
law and with the tenets of limitation in the nuclear age.
There are two divergent
inferences from this lack of shift: one that the strategic doctrine does indeed
continue to be one of strategic restraint; and, two, that what passed for
strategic restraint earlier was instead - unacknowledged and misinterpreted -
strategic proactivism. Agreeing with the proactive strategy votaries, here a
case is made that the second inference is more in accord with reality.
Contrary to the conventional thinking, the argument here is that strategic
restraint is a myth and that India instead has a healthier record of strategic
proactivism, though kept well under wraps till Mr. Modi stepped up to unwrap it
in the run up to a consequential round of elections in UP and Punjab soon.
Those spearheading strategic
restraint rummage the cupboard of history to make their case that India has
been a power always imposed on by nefarious neighbours, particularly Muslims to
its north west. This explains their reject of the last thousand year strategic
history of the subcontinent as not quite ‘Indian’ since India’s strategic
trajectory was not dictated by natives as much as foreigners, with Muslims
settled in India for over half a millennium continuing to be regarded as
foreigners, including the likes of southerner Tipu Sultan.
A reading of the introductory
chapter to the book India’s Wars,[2]
by a member of the – by all accounts - apolitical and secular military brass
and on the faculty of an august institution that turns out its future higher
commanders, informs as much. He writes that he is ‘inclined to look at the
Mughals as foreigners who ravaged India.’ He finds the Haidar-Tipu sojourn in
the Deccan as relatively short and therefore not worth including alongside the
martial exploits of the contemporaneous Marathas and Sikhs to his dating of the
origin of the modern Indian army. He chooses to miss out on an opportunity to
rehearse the secular imagery - Ranjit Singh, a Sikh; the Peshwas, Hindus; and
Tipu, a Muslim – keeping colonialism at bay. His wards at the National Defence
College cannot exit its portals unscathed by such history telling. Since this
mythology shall get wider as the Modi era firms in, it is best exposed sooner
than later.
The more popular discourse within
strategic circles – reproduced in the book – is that India – ever the ‘good
guy’ - has since Independence been on the receiving end of its neighbours. That
it did go on to retake PoK in 1949, has left regaining it as the ‘unfinished
business of Partition’ – a newly minted interpretation of the phrase used
hitherto by its adversary. In 1962, instead of throwing in the towel, Nehru
should have chased the Chinese back, and used air power to do so, since they would
have been caught on the wrong side of the Himalayas in the fast approaching
winter then.
In 1965, India should have
proceeded with the war beyond its three weeks since Pakistan was exhausted. In
this line of thinking, giving back Haji Pir later at Tashkent is the
quintessential example of India’s softness. In 1971, India should have used the
PoWs as pawns in getting Pakistan to give up its Kashmir obsession. In the various
crises unleashed by mega terror incidents, India should have ‘taught Pakistan a
(military) lesson’. That it has apparently finally followed their advice
explains the loud cheers following the Uri riposte.
All this papers over India’s
proactivism. In 1947, it was first off the military-blocks by refraining from
signing the Standstill Agreement even as it interestedly watched the Maharaja
borrow its proxies, the Patiala State forces, for operations in Kashmir. Later,
the timely arrival of its regular army led to chasing the tribal invaders back
to Uri. In 1962, its ‘forward policy’ prompted in some measure the Chinese
invasion. In 1965, it pulled the rug from under Pakistan by stretching the war
zone to include the Lahore front from Pakistan’s plan to keep it confined to
Kashmir. It returned Haji Pir in order to incentivize the firming in the
ceasefire line as a mutually acceptable finality. It vivisected Pakistan in a
well thought through intelligence, diplomatic and military operation over the
better part of 1971. It is foolish to sell the notion that it could have
ignored its compulsions under the Geneva Conventions to keep Pakistani troops
hostage to Pakistan signing on the dotted line giving away Kashmir. It was
assertive all through the eighties, be it in Sri Lanka or internally in Punjab.
By the nineties, it rightly
understood that it was in the nuclear age. Internally, it deployed its army to
quell the insurgency in Kashmir and Assam. The claim that IK Gujral shut down
the R&AW’s external operations itself suggests that these were well in hand;
and it also needs noting that the Gujral doctrine of unilateral concessions to
neighbors had one notable exception, Pakistan.
In wake of terror attacks, the
consistent call in the Delhi-centric strategic community has been to militarily
take down Pakistan a peg or two. The army came up with a doctrine to enable
India to do so, Cold Start. India’s devotion of a proportion of its
liberalization-expanded national cake to gain the wherewithal to do so,
indicates strategic proactivism not of the immediate kind but a future oriented
one. This does not in any way make it less ‘proactive’, at least not where it
matters, in General HQ, Rawalpindi. Alongside, the several attacks on Indian
consulates across the Durand Line, suggests that it checkmated Pakistan’s
redoubtable ISI in its own backyard, Afghanistan. The insertion of the
reference to Baluchistan by Pakistan to the meeting’s outcome as far back as in
the Sharm es Shaikh meeting in 2009 indicates that Indian interests in
Baluchistan are not particularly recent. Diplomatically, India not only de-hyphenated
itself from Pakistan and got up close to the US, but has managed to distance
the US from its ‘most allied ally’ Pakistan.
It is apparent that India’s
strategic postures and actions cannot easily be taken as strategic restraint.
Instead, strategic restraint was not so much a misnomer, but appears to have
been conjured to dull attention to India’s strategic moves. It helped justify
the moves as resulting from neighbours ganging up to pose it a ‘two front’
problem. It obscured the security dilemma of its principal neighbour stemming
from India’s low-profile strategic proactivism, including of the long-term
kind.
Strategic restraint did involve keeping
the military sheathed for good reasons, but being militarily restrained does
not fully equate with strategic restraint, since strategy has several
instruments at its command – intelligence, diplomacy, economic - all of which
more than compensated for any military restraint. At tripling of the defence
budget over this century cannot by any stretch qualify as military restraint
either.
In effect, India has been
strategically proactive for long, only now its people are being let in on the state
secret. Acknowledging this is the first step back from the nuclear brink. Newly
minted strategic proactivism entails not only going too far but also to be seen
to be doing to. Against a Muslim red rag held by equally charged religious
extremists, this is a sure recipe for nuclear disaster. Averting this requires,
as the second step, adopting strategic restraint for real.
