National security: Little talk, no action

Feb 05, 2014

Inder Malhotra

Isn’t it a disgrace that nearly seven decades after Independence, India has to import 70% of all the military hardware it needs? For this both the armed forces and the DRDO are to blame.

Let me start with a candid confession — I am no admirer of Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate and Gujarat’s chief minister.

But that is no reason to deny him credit for being the only participant in the slugfest that goes by the name “2014 election campaign” to have spared a thought for national security, a subject that is of little concern to the political class, barring a few exceptions that can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

At a rally in Mumbai the other day he made three pertinent points on national defence that policy makers and Parliament should have attended to years ago but haven’t. He said that India’s defences must always be strong but aren’t. Secondly, Mr Modi deplored that India was too dependent on imports of weapons and equipment from foreign lands and produced very little itself. His third point may seem relatively trivial but is, in fact, vital. He moaned that ours is the only country in the world that does not have a war museum. He is right on all three counts.

Anyone with an even rudimentary knowledge of matters military is painfully aware of the great and growing gap between China’s military power and ours, and realises how worrisome the situation is. To make matters worse, some of the measures to bridge this gap that the government had announced belatedly are in danger of being impeded for want of funds. A case in point is the Cabinet’s recent sanction for raising a Strike Corps in the Northeast to strengthen our defences against the northern neighbour. But hardly was this welcome decision made when the capital budget of the ministry of defence (MoD) was cut by `7,800 crore and this amount transferred to the ministry’s revenue budget to meet the soaring costs of petroleum, oil and lubricants, aggravated, ironically, by the declining external value of the rupee. The number of the combat squadrons of the Air Force has declined dangerously. Yet the much-hyped project to import 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft from France that was close to being clinched has been put on hold. Those competent to speak on the subject are also complaining that India is not paying adequate attention to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the fastest growing in the world.

Moreover, isn’t it a disgrace that nearly seven decades after Independence, India has to import 70 per cent of all the military hardware it needs? For this both the armed forces and the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) are to blame. The services prefer foreign weaponry — the possibility of kickbacks may be a spur. For its part the DRDO makes claims that cannot bear too close a scrutiny. At Republic Day parade it was heartening to see Tejas, the indigenous light combat aircraft that has taken three-and-a-half decades to be built and tested. It will soon be fully operational. But the story of the main battle tank is dismal. It was built a very long time ago. But till today the Army is not willing to accept it and prefers to rely on the Russian T-90 tank even though it is of an old vintage.

As for the absence of a war museum that is a must for every country that wishes to record the history of its wars and applaud the gallantry of the defenders of its freedom and frontiers the less said the better. Rajiv Gandhi solemnly promised to build one. Twelve years later then Prime Minister I.K. Gujral was assuring the service chiefs that the construction of the war museum would begin soon. Sixteen years have passed without a single stone being turned.

What turns the knife in the wound is that the powers that be are not unaware of what the root cause of the problem is, but nobody seems to want to do anything about it. The higher management of Indian defence is hugely faulty because, unlike in other democracies such as United States and Britain, there is incomprehensible resistance to the basic need to integrate the service headquarters with the MoD. Considered the ministry’s “attached offices”, the three services are virtually subservient not to the political leadership but to the civilian bureaucracy of the MoD, consisting of generalist IAS officers without any special knowledge of intricate ramifications of security, external and internal.

In a speech to the Combined Conference of Commanders in November last Prime Minister Manmohan Singh advocated, among other things, that there should be a “greater balance” between the civilians and the military in decision-making on defence. But there hasn’t been the slightest change in the grave imbalance that exists.

As it happened, in a memorial lecture in honour of this country’s strategy Guru, K. Subrahmanyam, last month Admiral Arun Prakash, a former Navy Chief as well as chairman of Chiefs of Staff Committee, threw a flood of light on the festering problem of the civil-military relationship. Incidentally, he was also a member of the Naresh Chandra Task Force on Security Reforms whose major recommendations have been put in cold storage.

After narrating the development of the civil-military relationship over the years, since the present structure of higher security management was set up at the recommendation of Lord Ismay, Chief of Staff to Lord Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy, he pointed out that “civil-military dissonance” had become the “primary fault-line” of the Indian security system. “In India’s unique democracy, a layer of civilian bureaucracy has inserted itself between the political leadership and the isolated military establishment. This three-cornered relationship has evolved itself into a triangle of discord, tension and differences, whose most damaging impact has been a statis in national security affairs.”

Admiral Prakash also quoted the man he was honouring: “Politicians enjoy power without responsibility, bureaucrats wield power without accountability and the military assumes responsibility without direction.” This says it all.