MODI'S CHINA VISIT

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China policy: Will economics trump the military stance?

Surprisingly, the biannual jamboree of high brass was held as usual in New Delhi this spring. Surprising not because of any reason but that at its October edition last year, Narendra Modi, perhaps taking cue from venues of party conclaves, had suggested in his address that it be held elsewhere in the country. Sensibly, the brass did not bend over backwards to act on the suggestion since the intellectual repository to service the commanders’ conference is only at Headquarters.

As usual, the conference yielded interesting insights, the most significant one this time around being a dilution of the preparedness on the China front. Media reported that the defence minister had expressed scepticism over the steep requirements, both manpower and financial, stemming from the army’s creation of the mountain strike corps.

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Strategic shifts

The two mountain divisions that were raised late last decade had enabled a shift from dissuasive defence to defensive deterrence. Defensive defence, implying an ability to fight back defensively, had been India’s posture on the China front since the sixties till the late eighties. India upped this posture to dissuasive defence, in which a robust defence was intended to dissuade an attacker, during the Sundarji period with Exercise Chequer Board.

This posture was yet again hiked around the end of the last decade to active defence with the two mountain divisions sucked into a defensive role in Arunachal Pradesh. Active defence is akin to defensive deterrence in which China is to be deterred with the knowledge of an active fight back by India.

The army in a doctrinal revision exercise over the turn of the decade, that was conveniently leaked to the press, alighted on the formulation of the ‘two front’ war. The ‘two front’ threat dates back to the early sixties when Pakistan and China began to see common strategic cause. However, economic factors did not permit India to do anything more than strengthen its fence with China. The steady economic growth of the century’s first decade enabled the army to think more ambitiously.

The army had already made a shift from defensive to offensive thinking on the Pakistan front. Prompted by the Kargil War and Operation Parakram, it had moved from basing its doctrine on a counter-offensive capability to a more proactive and offensive one, termed in the media as ‘cold start’. With increased defence outlays that have witnessed a near four-fold increase from $11 billion in 2001 to $40 billion today, it was possible for the army to transfer the offensive mindset to the eastern front.

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UPA II was reluctant to concede this since it was presiding in a period during which India’s growth rate slowed down from its high of eight percent to about six percent. Over the period, the army fought a guerilla action through the media, hyping up the China threat to thirty divisions rolling down to the Ganga-Brahmaputra plains, along with a Pakistani hyena act along the upper reaches of the Indus.

Modi’s government, in keeping with its self-image as being strong on defence, has expectedly been more forthcoming. Arun Jaitley, when he wore the double hats as finance minister and defence minister, had taken an appraisal of the new corps in one of his first moves. The national security adviser too, in a speech late last year, borrowed the army terminology on two-front. And yet, the current minister Manohar Parrikar is shown in media dragging his feet on the advisability of the corps, blaming the UPA for approving the 90000-strong increase in troops and its budget demand of Rs 64000 crore. This raises the question: Why?

Can India sustain the grand strategy?

There could be three explanations. The first relates to the infirmity in the Indian national security establishment in which the doctrinal sphere is mistakenly assumed to be the military’s domain exclusively. It appears that South Block thought up the ‘two front’ doctrine and its requirements without recourse to a ‘whole-of-government approach’ in which North Block could have its say. While a lame duck Antony let it pass, Parrikar has been checkmated by Jaitley.

The second, following from the first, is that the new government is operating to a grand strategy. The national security adviser spelt it out in the same speech in which he mentioned the ‘two front’ threat. ‘Economic development is the best way to ensure security and a 9 percent growth will make us totally secure,’ he said.

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Indeed, in terms of such a grand strategy, the UPA was also similarly engaged, but was not able to pull it off, since it had to constantly look over its shoulders at what the right wing opposition would say. Can results be any different this time around?

The fact that Modi has a new man in the foreign ministry in the form of China hand – S Jaishankar, who has inherited a fine strategic mind – gives this line credence. The problem is if this turns out to be only tactical, a pre-visit bit of signalling. When done, it would be back to the business of India, the new kid in the great power race, catching up with China. That would potentially upset Doval’s grand strategic apple cart, revealing it as product of an enlightened speech writer but out of sync with the hyper-nationalist national security policy of the right wing government.

While time will tell, the potential for tripping up is there. When Xi visited, there was an ongoing intrusion in Depsang.  Before Modi’s visit, Xi has scheduled his own trip to Pakistan, heightening India’s ‘two front’ paranoia with his promise of investing $45 billion in an economic corridor through Indian- claimed territory in Gilgit-Baltistan and the sale of nine submarines. The submarines, in particular, enable a diesel electric submarine-based nuclear second strike capability for Pakistan.

While its strong-on-defence image can enable the Modi government to contradict the commentary that it has blinked first with China, whether it can do so under the prevailing political circumstances – an opposition rejuvenated by its electoral control of Delhi and the escalating situation over the land bill – is the question. While ‘acche din’ theoretically follows the grand strategy, the absence of ‘acche din’ in the interim can lead the government to lean once again on defence. In other words, the prime minister can end up a victim of his own self-image.

India as security provider?

What will it mean to have India as a ‘security provider’?

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Prime Minister Modi’s trip this month to the Indian Ocean islands has been touted as part of India’s assumption of some of the burden of being a ‘security provider’ in the Indian Ocean Region. But the littoral of the ocean that bears its name is not the only region in which India entertains such ambitions, albeit covertly. The subcontinent is its own backyard and its self-image as a regional power necessarily entails the role of a ‘security provider’. The question, however, is can India pull off such a role?

India has projected itself as a benign power. To argue this, it not only points to its strategic posture but also to its strategic culture.

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These arguments are to embellish India’s credentials as a regional security provider. Since it has been a benign power, others need feel no apprehensions if its military exercises presence in their vicinity. India is now an emerging power with extra-territorial military capability. It is no longer an adversarial power, forever at odds with the West due to its non-aligned policy. It is instead a strategic partner of the US, and since it has a policy of multi-alignment, it is not averse to China either.

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However, a security provider means much more, and that this remains unstated implies that there is a case for wariness.

Firstly, counter narratives on India’s strategic behaviour exist. As can be expected, these are routinely trotted out by Pakistan, more to hide its own chicanery. However, these cannot be dismissed entirely on that count. This record, starting from Junagadh to reactivation of the Line of Control last year, is at variance with the popular narrative of a reticence in using force based on a strategic culture privileging restraint.

Instead, it suggests a realism-inspired strategic doctrine, which means that India is just as most other states are: not averse to using force to further its ends. Even the ‘defensive and reactive’ posture that India presents as proof of its benign strategic culture has a realist rationale. As the status-quoist power and the powerful one in the India-Pakistan dyad, it is a rational posture that has thus far been suited to its ends.  Strategic culture, therefore, can be read not so much as the inspirational bedrock of strategy but an afterthought, obfuscating its realist strategic doctrine.

Therefore, both the strategic culture and strategic doctrine argument underpinning India’s projection of itself as a security provider are rather thin. The role of security provider needs to be measured against a truer representation of India, as evident in its hardnosed strategic behaviour rather than its sugar-coated professions.

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This has placed India at the crossroads now. While the US may see India as its handmaiden, the latter for its part could well be taking the ride for its own purposes, not different from those of any growing power wanting to shape its neighbourhood. The second possibility is in India being unable to escape the US embrace and both unconsciously and wilfully internalising its role as a subordinate power out to do the US bidding in the division of global strategic labour.

The spin being put out in strategic circles is that India is riding on US coat tails, quite like China did in the seventies to the nineties. This would be a sign of continuity. The recent appreciative word from the former National Security Adviser, Shivshankar Menon, on India’s strategic moves in the Modi era suggests this may be the way to go.

The danger is from the discontinuities making India go down the wrong road. The change to the Modi era appears to be under-appreciated in the strategic community. The belief is that India will do what it has been traditionally doing, but only better and perhaps without hypocrisy.

However, ensuring continuity in India’s foreign policy and defence posture requires appreciating that it will not be easy in the light of the manifest change from a centrist polity to a rightist one. The likely change in the US post Obama towards the right and the continuance of its out-of-the-closet partner Israel under the right wing could place expectations, or even demands, on India that its right wing dispensation will only be too willing to oblige.

The influence of India’s US-based diaspora, the military-technological ballast from the US and Israel, and its Hindutva-rooted internal political compulsions and complexion, suggest that the definition of security provider could expand. The regime believes that India has been imposed upon historically, particularly by Muslim invaders, and that it needs to be more assertive, such as against Pakistan’s continuing provocations; that India has arrived with Modi’s ‘Barack’ moment, and finally that in Narendra Modi, India has the ‘man for the job’.

Currently, India is rightly staying out of this quagmire, with the home minister echoing the prime minister in arguing that its Muslims stand unaffected. This is encouraging in that the security provider logic is useful cover for the $40-billion military budget and force projection capability underway.  The chickens will come home to roost only if this changes. Given an increasing military capacity, a worsening situation that threatens to come right up to the Indus, subtle pressure from strategic partners and an amenable regime, this cannot be ruled out. Therein lies the threat of the ‘security provider’ argument. 

On India Opines: Mr Modi, pebbles ahead!

Mr. Modi, pebbles ahead!

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Mr. Modi is so comfortably in power that he can ride out the storm ineffectually put up by the opposition and intellectual class over the deplorable remarks of one of his ministers. His comfort levels derive from the three legs to his stool. The first is the one from which springs the minister in question, the Sangh. The second is corporate India and the third is the ‘international community’. Even so, Mr. Modi can be upset, and given the prohibitive prospective cost of this, requires timely warning against.

Over the short term, the corporate India and its middle class is the more critical leg of Mr. Modi’s stool. Mr. Modi is its hatchet man and has played his part thus far admirably. He has rolled back environmental legislation, gone global with his ‘make in India’ campaign, marginalised autarchists, firmed up his fences and in doing so given a boost to the defence sector.

Corporate India awaits Mr. Modi’s bolder roll out of second generation economic reforms that are perhaps wisely pended by him to the next budget. This gives him time enough to firm-in in saddle so that he can then proceed with confidence. This will enable the corporate to get back the investment they have made in him over the past decade, culminating in the rupee imparted ballast to his election campaign. Mr. Modi needs to deliver on their demands in order to be able to fulfill his ideological inclinations.

Arguably, over the longer term it is the ideological agenda of the right wing that carries greater significance for Mr. Modi. For the present, rightist oddballs that embarrass have to be managed. They lent their legs to his campaign as well as generated the polarisation to make of the Hindu vote a bankable vote bank for Mr. Modi. They will have their pound of flesh and therefore the politician in Mr. Modi is unlikely to mess with them. This explains his reticence in the case of the eminently sackable minister in question.

It is the cultural nationalist agenda to which Mr. Modi will turn once his economic agenda is on course. This will not merely keep the Sangh placated but will help keep Mr. Modi in power well into his dotage; besides ensuring his place in history as the one who rolled back a ‘millennium of humiliation’. And well in time for the birth centenary of the RSS that conveniently for his project coincides with 500 years of Babur’s invasion and a 1000 years of Ghazni’s ravaging of Somnath.

Mr. Modi’s stability is enhanced by India being the cynosure of the international community due to its strategic and economic significance. His economic agenda will be supported by global capital and India’s diaspora that has helped him to power for precisely this purpose. The strategic scene is also Modi friendly.

Obama is enroute to India since India is important for the containment and balancing of a rising China. It is also useful to cover the US’ flank as it moves out of the region. Obama would not like another Iraq style return to square one when he pulls out of Afghanistan. 

Whereas India would have been significant, with or without Mr. Modi, Mr. Modi’s attributes are useful, particularly for the US. Mr. Modi’s Pakistan policy suggests as much. He has put Pakistan on notice and that helps the US cover its tracks as it bails out of Afghanistan. Mr. Modi’s attributes are useful for the US. It is not unhappy in the temporary turn to majoritarian politics in India and its corollary of incipient authoritarian rule. History repeatedly reminds that being a friend of the US is a worse than being its enemy. For China and Russia, India assumes importance owing to his importance to the US. Both want to keep India out of the US firmament.

Since Mr. Modi strides the internal domain unchecked, the seeds of possible upsetting of Mr. Modi’s applecart are in the external domain. His aggressive regional policy has potential to cause unravelling of his two-step strategy: economy followed by socio-cultural engineering. Developments on the Pakistan front are somewhat unsettling, with Pakistan’s national security adviser pronouncing that normalisation is ruled out so long as Mr. Modi is in the chair. 

On the China front, India’s proximity to the US is such that it may get the message that India has been unresponsive to its premier’s visit. China could prop up Pakistan, as it has all along, to keep India tied down, just as the US is propping up India to keep China tied down. Given military preparations, including nuclear developments, and a strategic scene set to get ‘interesting’ in the Chinese sense of the word in AfPak and India’s increasing footprint in Afghanistan, there is scope for instability.

The favoured scenario of a mega terror attack being followed up by an Indian Cold Start attack, leading to tactical nuclear use by Pakistan is by now trite. However, India’s aggressive posture, perhaps intended for deterrence, under Mr. Modi, may lead up to its inevitable unfolding in case terrorists wanting to set India back try him. In effect, India’s aggressiveness makes this more likely, even if India’s posture is intended to achieve the opposite.

While Mr. Modi can be expected to outlast this decade on the chair, he needs being warned against relying overly on Pakistan’s good sense, for most part of that state’s life marked by absence.

Modi's national security strategy

SECURITY STRATEGY

Can PM Modi pull it off?

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The new government is only following on the footsteps of its predecessor, but with a difference. While Manmohan’s Singh’s government built national defence sinews, it apparently went about it with a longer time-span in its mind. In the interim, it reckoned it needed to keep the neighbours on both fronts placated through talks or the promise of talks. However, the new government, in speeding up the activities around national security, may be putting too much on its plate all at once. Will it be able to pull it off? 

More consequential is the broadcasting of intent to its potential adversaries, Pakistan and China. By cancelling talks, the government has put Pakistan on a clear notice. By wielding a sword in addition to a shield, as the defence minister put it, Pakistan has been conveyed a message of deterrence.

On the China front, the national security adviser at the Munich Security Conference in New Delhi ruled out a compromise solution on the border involving territorial concessions. India’s position in China’s ‘containment’ has come to acquire considerable heft in India’s exchanges with the US, Japan and Vietnam. This, alongside having a mountain strike corps out of its infancy, gives India the confidence to ‘stand up’ to China, if not tell it off.

The upshot of these moves has been evident in the response. From Pakistan it is as expected. Not only has its national security adviser rejected any Indian attempt at ‘hegemony’, but its maverick former dictator, Musharraf, has gone on to say that Pakistan would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons if push comes to shove. China has also been equally clear, telling India not to build border roads, but also keeping its forces in eyeball to eyeball confrontation at Chumar even while its president was in Ahmedabad and Delhi. 

The messaging between the states can be taken as one of deterrence. A new government in power is drawing the line and adversaries are reciprocating in kind. Thereafter, if it is back to business, then it would indeed be Doval, and at one remove, Modi, ‘pulling it off’. The metrics for this would be resumption of the interrupted dialogue with Pakistan and tying down China with investment in India’s infrastructure.

Commentators, fearful of India overheating, have rightly advised caution. Strategic rationality may indeed dictate thinking in Sardar Patel Bhawan, site of the National Security Council Secretariat. However, what miss the strategic eye are internal political compulsions. The earlier government had right wing BJP looking over its shoulder. This time round, minus an effective opposition, the government has a more far-right flank to worry about. How does this impact strategic calculations and how can it render them awry?

Firstly, the government has dug itself into a commitment trap by creating a certain image of itself, based on electoral calculations. It would, by default, require being violently responsive in case it is tested by a mega-terror attack. This has the potential to throw a spanner into its grand strategy of economic development, quite as desired by those who may manipulate such a terror strike.

The Israel model of ‘mowing grass’ in Gaza or in Hezbollah dominated areas in Lebanon would not hold good in India’s attempted taming of Pakistan. On a wider regional level, the competition can expand territorially, moving from playing out in Afghanistan currently to engulf the expanding arc of instability till the Mediterranean; in fact, there was a suggestion during Modi’s US trip that India was somehow needed in that area. 

Secondly, since the government has nothing to offer Pakistan through talks and has lost in Sharif an interlocutor to proceed with these in any case, it cannot but continue having a tough line on Pakistan. This situation has the potential to yield internal political dividends in keeping India’s largest minority on the defensive through working of the contrived linkage between India’s internal ‘Other’ and its external ‘Other’.

This will enable space for the regime, with its supportive quasi-cultural organisations, to go for more than merely an economic reset of India over the next ten years. Modi has declared an intention to stay in power. In case of another outbreak of the ‘troubles’ in Kashmir, India may well revert to the period depicted in the film, Haider.

Thirdly, in the self-confessed nationalist government’s prioritisation of national security lies incipient militarism. Militarism and nationalism are a heady mix. While the ‘Modi wave’ has put him in the saddle, those who contributed to his victory have their own impressions of the victory and their role in it and their own agendas. He has either to give them their share of flesh or else get diverted to taming them.

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Finally, the picture above of strategic rationality being upset by political extremism may overshadow another likely source that the threat could spring from. It could instead come from within the strategic fraternity. Ideology driven strategy tends to be insensitive to the limits of power. Having been kept dormant by a liberal-realist combine at the helm for so long, the strategic subculture comprising hawks who have been closet cultural nationalists all along may come to the fore. They are liable to take jargon such as ‘massive’ nuclear retaliation and ‘decisive’ conventional victory at face value.

Intent on turning back time by a millennium, this section shall push to take India across the Hindu Kush, if not to Mount Kailash. These shall be the Trojan horses of Hindutva who can upset Doval’s applecart, assuming he is different.

If the Prime Minister is indeed to pull off the foreign and security policy he has put in place as first step, he needs to get firm with the far right as his next. It would be a case of the leopard changing its spots. With the majority he has, he can. But the question is, will he?

Firdaus Ahmed
31 October 2014

place the region first

22 September 2014 -

Sunburn warning for India’s day in the sun

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Recent commentary on the succession of visitors to New Delhi and of New Delhi’s own foreign visits, both by the high profile prime minister and the minister of external affairs, makes this juncture the high noon for foreign policy analysts. The commentary mostly luxuriates at New Delhi’s recently found status as a capital worth courting.

Strident commentators such as Brahma Chellaney, taking cue from the prime minister’s visit to Japan and the impending one to the US, are pushing for strategic partnerships, more than just titular ones, with both. More sober analyses, such as that of Rajesh Rajagopalan, warn that being the cynosure is not easy. While India need not be a bashful bride, it would nevertheless need to watch the suitors carefully.

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Commentators have rightly warned that treading between all those courting it will not be easy. However, they do so in the light of foreign policy. Finding a way between being non-aligned and being aligned to the democratic bloc is the challenge. However, the threats are not all necessarily in the strategic and external domain. These can also be from within.

Setting our house in order

Blindness to these is unremarkable in foreign policy analysis since it is mistakenly seen as distinct from the internal sphere. This is a fallout of the early split between international relations and political science scholarship in the west, one that India has imported into its universities. Consequently, the two look different ways, the former inside and the latter externally. This leads to foreign policy analyses overlooking otherwise consequential internal factors.

The first overlaps both internal and external domains: Muslims in India. While the prime minister has finally got around to complimenting Muslims for the first time publicly in his acknowledgment, saying they are ready to die for their country, it appears tactical coming as it does on the eve of his visit to the US. The wider political position of his party over the past three decades and its supporting formations over the past century suggests that India’s minority question is significant.

The ‘othering’ of the minority has two aims: one to consolidate the majority into a bloc, a strategy that has recently yielded political dividends at long last; and secondly, to retain upper caste dominance by enabling vertical integration within Hinduism. Dominance, to repay the minority for a millennium long humiliation, is a project underway, the most recent manifestation of which is the ‘love jihad’ insinuation. All this could have remained exclusively internal factors, but for Pakistan as neighbour.

Pakistan’s very presence and actions such as proxy war makes it more than merely an external factor. Just as the recent contretemps surrounding the cancellation of talks with Pakistan indicates that Kashmir is not quite an internal issue alone. Pakistan’s shadow also looms large over periodic allegations of penetration of Islamist forces into India. The prime minister’s belated dispelling of the notion is too little, too late inasmuch as the manufacturing of public perception by his party and its supporters goes. Pakistan is therefore the ‘other’ outside, one that needs domination.

This internal-external linkage, contrived by the ruling party for getting to power, sets the stage for the chickens coming home to roost. India is exerting itself to overawe Pakistan by its economy-backed military strides. This can form India’s Achilles heel in case it comes to blows, a not unlikely eventuality in the light of past precedence and the heating up of the regional strategic scene in the likely departure of the US from Afghanistan. In one fell swoop, India will cease to be a strategic player at the Asian level, falling back into its regional box as a regional power.

Even in the game on the Asian geopolitical chessboard, India can be tripped up easier. China will have a readily available lever if it finds India as a part of a ‘ring of democracies’ bent on containing it. India has sought to deter China on this front. While Xi Jinping was in India, President Mukherjee landed back from a visit to Vietnam, India’s forces were staring down the Chinese in Chumar, its military was set to exercise with US troops in the Kumaon Himalayas, and Mr. Modi was packing for his US trip.

While necessary, all this may not be enough. India has, therefore, to do something more if it is to perform at a higher strategic level, numbering with the US, China and Japan. It has to first set right its place in the region. One way is the manner it is currently set about: overawing Pakistan.

Cancellation of talks and the manner in which it was done are India’s suggestion to Pakistan to read the strategic tea leaves and drop its insistence on hyphenation with India. The impetus behind this policy, being a piece of the position of the Sangh Pariwar, owes much to internal politics.

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The problem is that in India’s case this is not about to change. The strategy can only be upgraded, for instance with Mr. Modi decisively weaning the US away from Pakistan. Therefore, the thorn in India’s side can only remain, and so will the possibility of India’s tripping up even as it reaches for the stars.

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The upshot is that navigating India’s path between China and Russia on one side and the US and Japan on the other is not going to be easy. India has in its regional security choice made this even more difficult for itself. With so many balls in the air all at once, time might just send this particular one crashing down.

India-Pak talks cancellation

Indo-Pak talks: Getting past the eyewash

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21 August 2014 

India summarily cancelled the late-August foreign secretary level talks with Pakistan, which were scheduled consequent to Sharif’s visit to Delhi for Modi’s swearing-in ceremony. This has come as a surprise. Since the ostensible reason given is that the Pakistani envoy in Delhi met separatist elements of the Kashmiri leadership against the counsel of the Foreign Secretary, the reason given only adds to the surprise, since such meetings are usually unremarkable.

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Power play

The foreign ministry can hardly be expected to be behind the move since it stood to gain by getting into the driver’s seat of the India-Pakistan process with resumption of talks. The resumption of talks earlier had also been led by the foreign secretaries. They had met in Thimpu in February 2011 after Manmohan Singh and Zardari had agreed to resume talks in a meeting on the sidelines of the SAARC summit in Thimpu in 2010.

That round of talks had been aborted in 2013 after the UPA government’s stupor in its second term was such that the political investment necessary to revive the process was rendered impossible in face of the border clash in January that year, in which an Indian soldier had been beheaded. This aborted precedent suggests the first explanation for the cancellation, namely, struggle between the two sides - those wanting talks and those against it.

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Strategic shifts

There are two further explanations. One is based on strategic logic. India’s deterrence in place against Pakistan is not of the order as to preclude proxy war. Its conventional rearmament is not complete as yet. For instance, avid military watcher, Rahul Bedi informs that its artillery arm is woefully short even to enable the ‘manoeuvers by fire’ as part of ‘cold start’ doctrine.

Further, Pakistan in late 2013 tested the tactical nuclear missile system, Nasr. These embolden Pakistan to up the ante in Kashmir. This long-anticipated juncture is now at hand since the US is readying to pull up stakes from the region soon. Therefore, it is not the right time for India to turn to talks since Pakistan would get the impression that this is from a position of weakness.

India has under the new government launched into a new programme of military upgrading. 

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These measures indicate that the pace of armament has increased. This is not only because the government is demonstrating more energy to distinguish itself from its predecessor, but also because it is shifting its strategic doctrine.

While Modi in his visit to Leh described India’s strategic doctrine as one of deterrence, India already has the ability to deter since in the same speech he also mentioned Pakistan’s movement to proxy war because of its inability to take Kashmir militarily. What India’s continued armament suggests is that India, unable to stop Pakistan’s proxy war, is determined to roll it back.

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However, even in such a grand strategic scheme, talks now would have bought India time to complete its rearmament since they would not have proceeded meaningfully in any case. For instance, even though India’s deterrence against China is falling into place slowly, with road building ongoing alongside raising of the mountain strike corps, India is engaging diplomatically with China. Its president is visiting New Delhi next month. Talks could have been a supplement on the Pakistan front too. The calling off of talks therefore does not have a strategic rationale.

The real reason: Man above the moment?

That brings one to the last possibility. It is in the person of the prime minister. Modi has been personalising governance. He was the face of Gujarat while he was at its helm. He is replicating that model of leadership in Delhi.

Not appointing a full time defence minister, Modi is himself keeping a keen eye on defence. He has already commissioned two naval ships, been to J&K twice over and visited BARC. He is to visit Siachen soon. His government has set aside money for the ‘one rank one pension’ scheme, which was approved but not implemented by the last government. He has given the go-ahead for the war memorial on India Gate lawns.

In this scheme of personalisation, there is no question of talks on Kashmir. India has already indicated it is an internal matter. Modi is looking at a culmination of his electoral victory in which the BJP gets within sight of Srinagar’s assembly in the coming polls.

It is a fallacy that foreign policy is based on external coordinates and strategic factors. It is, like most else, driven by internal politics, which in India’s case is currently entirely focused on the personality of the prime minister. Therefore, Pakistan’s attempt to foreground Kashmir in the talks needed to be repelled outright.

Modi through his war-leader act is relying on the army’s continued management of the status-quo in Kashmir. Hopefully, Pakistan’s inevitable challenge will not come as a surprise.