SOCIALISM COMES IN THE WAY

Tuesday, 18 February 2014 | Abhijit Iyer-Mitra |

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The Defence Minister alone cannot rectify the situation. Joint efforts of the Union Ministries of Human Resource Development, Industry and Finance are required to fix the problems in defence procurement. Also, the root of the problem lies beyond procurement procedure

Mr Pravin Sawhney makes an interesting case with regard to Union Minister for Defence AK Antony’s several undeniable lapses in his column, “He saw nothing, he did nothing”, on February 13, in The Pioneer. The issue, however, is deeper than Mr Antony’s personal incompetence and rather is the product of 67 years of disastrous socialism, and a historical Indian myopia on issues of security.

Perhaps the single most obvious tell-tale sign in this is the whole narrative in India today on defence technology, be it the transfer or absorption or modification. The issue is such that it is not the Defence Minister who can rectify the situation, rather it is the joint efforts of the Union Ministries of Human Resource Development, Industry, Finance and Infrastructure that are required to fix. No matter how much India modifies it Defence Procurement Procedure, no matter how excellent a document we produce and no matter how good a Defence Minister we have, the root of the problem lies elsewhere.

This mentality however of seeking silver bullet solutions, failing, and then muckraking the French, Americans and Russians claiming that they we’re duplicitous has a long historical tradition in India dating back to a few thousand years.

In his 1945 book, India and the Indian Ocean: An essay on the influence of sea power on Indian history, KM Panikkar delves in depth into the story of the Arab horse and India’s obsession with it. We are informed that the Arab peninsula would only sell Indian traders stallions or colts — male horses, and the sale of a mare — the female to an Indian carried severe penalties. Similarly, specialised horse doctors were barred from travelling to India on pain of a particularly excruciating death, the same penalty applying to the captain of any ship willing to transport said doctor to Indian shores.

Yet, Indian kingdoms and sultanates expended huge resources importing these pointless status symbols, (and presumably cursing the Arabs along the way) even when cavalry had demonstrably lost its edge on the battlefield. Instead of finding alternative ways of fighting or indeed of leveraging the inherent strengths of native breeds like the Marwari and Kathiawari, India continued to invest heavily in unsustainable imports. Evidently the peace time attrition of these imports was enormous with no doctors available to treat their unique conditions or teach Indian veterinarians. Repeated attempts at training Indian veterinarians or breeding these Arab stallions with native mares also failed, and evidently no maharaja or sultan had the bright idea of sending a raiding party to Arabian shores to capture some mares, or for that matter set up breeding grounds there. At the same time, however, Rajendra Chola 1 had no compunctions sending his fleet a few thousand kilometres away to grab gold from the Srivijaya kingdom in modern day Malaysia-Indonesia.

In many ways, this is the exact mentality that plagues our defence industry today — pompousness and penchant for status symbols, the lack of an ecosystem to absorb purchases, the lack of ground conditions to organically create these at home. As a simple example one only needs to look at how the import of HDW submarine technology from Germany has not been able to help us build our own submarines. Similarly the import of Mig-21, Mig-27, Su-30 and Jaguar technology has not brought the Tejas any closer to being an operational aircraft.

Technology is not an end result or a goal that is coveted. Rather it is the natural manifestation of a complex ecosystem. When one marvels at a Rafale fighter, it is not a product, rather it is a story — one that talks of the producers education system, its industrial policies and its business climate. The Rafale is an organic product of the synergy of these various subsets as they exist in France today. No matter how good or intense the transfer of technology from France, importing the Rafale under the Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft programme (or for that matter any other plane from any other country) will not will magically create an educational, industrial, business environment in India. Similarly the PAK-FA, a twin-engine jet-fighter developed by Sukhoi, is demonstrative of the Russian environment — a brilliant Soviet inherited education system, combined with an environment where free enquiry is stunted and bad business and industrial practices.

What is brilliant about the PAK-FA is that it takes rudimentary Russian technology to its absolute peak. However, bad industrial and financial policies meant that the Russians (and Soviets) were never able to break the serious value addition barriers that can only be driven by market forces. Consequently, despite the undeniable brilliance of Russian engineers, their systems were and will in the foreseeable future remain inferior to their Western counterparts. Given the geometric nature of technological leaps, Western technology will only pull ahead.

But this leads us to our second big problem — the one we have with our Armed Forces’ leadership and their philosophy. In an age where Armies are downsizing, India has the only Army that is growing. This diversion of capital resources to manpower expenditure that Mr Sawhney decries is happening precisely because the Army has fought hard for an under-equipped, badly planned mountain division. Moreover, the fact that we enjoy an air advantage over China and are at a significant ground disadvantage means that this mountain division is throwing precious resources away on a white elephant, seems to have registered with neither the Defence Minister nor the Army Chief. The question here is: Who is more guilty? A politician whose name has been a byword for incompetence or successive Army Chiefs who should have known better? Or perhaps it is successive Air Force Chiefs who failed to fight their bureaucratic battles or make the Defence Minister aware of the inherent dangers of the Army’s plans?

Much like the Rafale is a symptom of all that France has got right — Mr Antony’s defence ministership is a namoona, to use the Hindi word, of everything that has gone wrong — with our defence, industrial, financial and educational policies over the last 67 years. Is he a disaster? Unequivocally yes, but he ultimately is a reflection of what we have become. In our case, evidently the term, ‘socialism kills’, is about to come true in a very nasty way.

http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/oped/socialism-comes-in-the-way.html