Grand strategy: back to basics

By C. Raja Mohan

AFTER CONDUCTING five nuclear tests in May 1998, the BJP-led Government is beginning to lose its way, unable to either overcome the political consequences of Pokhran-II or articulate a coherent national strategy for a newly-nuclear India. It has drifted from crisis to crisis, failing to find innovative answers to national security challenges it had inherited. Nor has the Government come up with a strategic vision for the future.

Three months after returning to power, neither the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, nor his key colleagues, the Home Minister, Mr. L. K. Advani, the External Affairs Minister, Mr. Jaswant Singh, and the Defence Minister, Mr. George Fernandes, have found the time to publicly reflect on the policy challenges facing the Government or to communicate a sense of purpose and priorities. Meanwhile, the so-called national security community is paralysed by the inertia of the impractical slogans from a world that has long passed and a spasmodic search for enemies in every possible direction.

The strategic debate in the public domain has been marked by an aggressive, and often abusive rhetoric, that has no connection with the ground realities of the nation, the region or the world. Rhetoric is cheap and can easily avoid the hard questions on reconciling ends with means and choosing between often unpleasant options. But the Government cannot skirt its own responsibility to come up with hard decisions on the national security front.

The failures at Kargil and Kandahar demand that India shed many of the grand illusions that have gripped it since Pokhran-II and come back to the basics that must guide national strategy. The greatest recent illusion has been the notion that nuclear weapons are a short-cut to great power status. India will never get there, however many nuclear weapons it might choose to build. India can gain the much-vaunted influence on the world stage only when it can effect a rapid economic advancement of its people. To sustain the great power status, India needs to complement its economic modernisation with a serious reform of its political and social institutions.

On the national security front, the Lahore, Kargil and Kandahar episodes have brutally exposed India's vulnerabilities. If India does not quickly overhaul its national security structures to make them modern and efficient, nuclear weapons will become a burden rather than an asset. It is necessary for India to understand at once the limited role of nuclear weapons in the country's grand strategy and the severe limitations they impose on its immediate security policy.

The BJP has talked about the modernisation of the national security apparatus and better coordination between intelligence, defence and diplomacy - in the election campaigns over the last three years. But it has done precious little to get the Government thinking about reforming the core arms of governance since it came to power in early 1998. Having misjudged the Lahore summit with the then Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mr. Nawaz Sharif, and having been taken for a ride in Kargil and Kandahar, will the Government now begin to move on security sector reforms?

Second, instead of focussing on the new challenges that the acquisition of nuclear weapons had begun to pose for India's security, both the Government and the public debate have been obssessed with international arms control treaties such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Wringing hands furiously for three and a half decades without a decision on an appropriate nuclear posture, India had made it a national pastime to attack international arms control treaties and whip itself into a frenzy over the minutiae of the NPT and the CTBT.

Having exercised its nuclear option in May 1998, there was a hope that India would move away from its excessive past focus on the abracadabra of the CTBT and adopt a pragmatic approach towards international arms control. In its early statements on May 11, 13 and 27, 1998, in the wake of the Pokhran tests, India did signal a readiness to engage the world on the basis of a new pragmatism based less on ideological slogans and more on strategic requirements.

But even as that engagement seemed to succeed and the time came to clinch a modus vivendi with the international community on nuclear issues, India seems to find it difficult to come to a closure. Making heavy weather of the CTBT, the Government has put itself on the defensive without making a clear case for signing the CTBT but insisting that the Opposition parties first come out and support the move. In the process, the country is drifting back into a metaphysical nuclear debate of the pre-Pokhran kind. Until 1998, the country persisted with such formulations as India will not give up its nuclear option but will not exercise it either. Now many in India take the position that India should not conduct any more tests, but it should not also sign the CTBT. The essence of this argument is that India will observe the CTBT but will not join it!

As the strange debate on the CTBT continues, the fundamental nuclear challenge facing India has gone unaddressed. The nuclear equivalence between India and Pakistan has given a free hand to Islamabad to step up its provocations across the border, either in the form of direct military aggression or by intensifying its support for cross-border terrorism.

Although this situation has been inherent in our security dilemmas since the turn of the 1990s, when Pakistan acquired nuclear weapons, the formalisation of nuclear parity between India and Pakistan in 1998 has certainly exacerbated the problem.

Pakistan is now in a position to provoke India at any time of its choosing, to generate international concerns about a ``nuclear flashpoint'' in the Subcontinent and demand great power intervention to resolve the disputes between New Delhi and Islamabad. Kargil, Kandahar and the expanded terrorist operations in Jammu and Kashmir are part of the offensive by Pakistan to exploit the new situation.

Third, many in India saw the May 1998 tests as a way of liberating the nation to play a much larger role in the international arena. It had become fashionable to dismiss Pakistan as inconsequential, invent new threats from China and the West, and demand that India take on the world on every single issue. Mindless strategic militancy and puerile postures of global defiance that have dominated Indian strategic thinking since Pokhran-II have prevented India from focussing on the clear and present danger from Pakistan. The pretence that India is now in the big league after the nuclear tests, is not going to make the Pakistan problem disappear. By referring all the time to the so-called ``real threat from China'', India cannot wish away the challenge from Pakistan.

Grand strategy is not about larger-than-life geopolitical ambitions. It is about a realistic assessment of security threats and an ability to correctly identify priorities and devote resources to meet the most pressing ones. In the wake of Kargil and Kandahar, there is no question on where those threats come from. They emanate from Pakistan which must now be dealt with squarely. But India can no longer address this challenge from Pakistan by merely stating that it will not engage Islamabad until all cross-border terrorism stops. Successfully coping with Pakistan's conventional and sub-conventional threats in a nuclear environment demands a sophisticated strategy and not just empty rhetoric.

Such an Indian strategy should demands serious efforts to regain the political initiative in Jammu and Kashmir, revamp the organisation of the security structures in the State, find a way to induce positive change within Pakistan, and mobilise international support in the war against cross-border terrorism. While the internal efforts are primary, India cannot fight the extended war of nerves against Pakistan with policy of needless confrontation with the international community. If India wants to defeat the forces of destabilisation radiating out of Pakistan, it needs a conscious strategy of engagement and coalition- building and not nuclear isolationism.

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