https://aliahd66.substack.com/p/the-doval-score-card-at-its-fag-end?sd=pf
The Doval Scorecard at its fag end
Five years back, toting up National Security Adviser Ajit Doval’s score card as custodian of national security, I said that his principal contribution has been to shore up the electoral chances of Narendra Modi. I had no inkling that as the situation became grimmer in an economy unable to revive after Modi’s midnight brainwave, demonetization, Ajit Doval’s mastery of his craft would help pull Hindutva’s chestnuts out of the fire.
Pulwama happened timely, giving Modi a shy at Balakot. That the Air Force missed the target didn’t really matter. A military history tome now records a Mig shooting down an F16, to the chagrin of Americans music to the Russians.
Elections are coming up sometime early next year, unless, as Arundhati Roy reckons, these are preponed Modi made wary of his prospects by the back-to-back successes of the Bharat Jodo Yatra and Pathaan and the coincident triple-blow by the proverbial ‘foreign hand’: Straw, Hindenberg and Soros.
Taking cue, the pandits (as defined by Mohan Bhagwat) are out ratcheting up Ajit Doval’s national security score card. One strategic hand has it that he has institutionalized national security. Wonder if firming in the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) spells national security coming to bail Modi out yet again?
Prior to the 2014 elections, communal polarization was initiated in Muzaffarnagar so as to wrest the western Gangetic belt for Hindutva. Whereas Hindutva has the vile resources to commit such crimes unbidden, the atmosphere of impunity it enjoyed owed to the preceding decade-long vilification of Muslims prior.
The hand of India’s Deep State is visible through that decade. As to Doval’s location in relation to the Deep State, contemporary history writing will no doubt throw more light on someday. However, that the Deep State’s instruments – its foot soldiers as Pragya, Purohit, Aseemanand, Vanzara and Kodnani - were let off in Modi’s first term holds a clue.
Come the 2019 elections, Modi rode the coat tails of the military, inflated by the information campaign accompanying the Balakot episode. How some 80 kg of explosive ended up with the Pulwama bomber has yet to be revealed.
So what does the upcoming year hold?
Now that the NSCS has the reins – or so we are told by its spin masters – to what extent it participates in furnishing Modi with an election hattrick - or forestalls it with institutionally mandated action - will be the ultimate test of whether Doval marches to a national security drumbeat or otherwise.
A direct participation by the national security apparatus in shoring up Modi’s chances in 2024 – as in 2019 - is not on the cards.
Whereas Pakistan is on the ropes, having China hold its back, it cannot serve as a punching bag. Alluding to the power asymmetry, Foreign Minister Jaishankar has made clear that it’s common sense not to rile China. No wonder India only very gingerly got on to Kailash Range and very sprightly vacated it at the first opportunity.
Instead, to ensure national security deficits do not trip-up Modi, India has gone out on a limb projecting its disinterestedness in the military, for instance, by disemboweling it with the Agnipath scheme.
Indeed, there is nary a mention of India’s nuclear capability in the assiduously covered alleged institutionalisation of national security structures that answer to Doval. This bespeaks of India’s ditching of deterrence in favour of appeasement.
The national security implications of this are debatable. While it buys India time for getting its missiles, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines in place, it is questionable if those are the instruments India should at all use against China.
What’s clear is the dividend for Hindutva’s next shot at the hustings. The idea is that national interest – by the government’s own admission China continues to sit on two parcels of Indian land - must take a back seat at least up until Hindutva’s Champion is back for the third term.
Modi’s lame duck year provides Doval an alibi. With India stewarding the G20 and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation this year, it can do without national security clutter. It is a separate matter that a routine rotation of presidency is being made much of, to project India’s arrival as Vishwaguru. India privileges multilateralism making Modi look a global statesman in election year, in the bargain fetching Jaishankar brownie points (though his regime-pleasing one liners on Youtube show him coming into his own).
Even so, Doval needs cautioning that even any indirect participation in influencing voter choice through acts of omission and commission would be laid at his door. Should Hindutva adopt other gambits – such as, say, a Muzaffarnagar elsewhere – he would be responsible.
Portents today from places as diverse as Nuh, Ajnala and from eviction sites in Assam are indicative. The supposed institutionalization of the NSCS should rightly result in nipping such excesses in the bud or tamping down on overzealous chief ministers.
The recent observance of the third anniversary of the North East Delhi pogrom threw up the lesson-learnt that the law-and-order machinery, including additional forces, not only turned up late, but were partisan when they did. While Nellie could be covered up forty years ago, that history cannot easily be rewritten these days is evident from Modi’s use of emergency powers to clamp down on an offending documentary on Gujarat.
Over the past nine years, Doval has acquiesced with Modi’s de-institutionalisation of the Republic, though knowing of national security implications of this. The intention of Hindutva progenitors is opening up India to a Constitutional reset. The under-fire Basic Structure doctrine should have had the national security apparatus tacitly shoring its defences. Doval’s inaction has made Constitutional rejig within reach.
Another mandate for Modi will be willfully read as a majoritarian blank cheque. The last time in the run up to elections, Doval had publicly pitched for Modi. Another iteration of such unwarranted advocacy must be taken as unconscionable.
Doval’s score card is being written-up, presumably because his age and limitations might not allow him to continue into the next Modi administration. With Jaishankar already breathing down his neck, Doval might be set to pasture. Therefore, interrogating his nine years at the national security helm is warranted.
On the touted institutionalization, the dismantling of India’s military strength is stark. Not only was the appointment of the second Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) held in abeyance for long, but the Military Adviser’s (MA) chair, left vacant with its last incumbent moving post-retirement as CDS, continues to be empty. This despite there being no shortage of brass hats shamelessly auditioning for it through their tweets and regime-endorsing writings.
The CDS – the MA at NSCS and current MA to the defence minister – has his predecessor MA at the NSCS having the ear of the defence minister as principal adviser to the defence minister. Ever wonder where that places the defence secretary’s advisory role, which in any case stands now extended past his time to hit the pasture?
As for institutionalization in the defence sector, the major signifier could have been jointness and theaterisation. That is not on the horizon owes to it being left to the military. The military - through its veterans - has long pushed back, pointing to the absence of a guiding national security doctrine. The doctrine has not been signed off on, though Doval heads the Defence Planning Committee mandated to churn out one.
Absent doctrinal advance at the national and joint levels, did the Air Force just preempt regime-favourite late General Rawat envisaged theaterisation with a unilateral decadal update to its own doctrine? Can an army bogged down with whether horse drawn buggies are a discard-worthy colonial legacy be really taken as seriously professional?
The only ‘happening’ sector is defence diplomacy and atmanirbharta. Both broadcast a postponing of any resort to military means for strategic ends. The up-front message is that strategic partnerships are being forged and military wherewithal being acquired in the interim before a reckoning with Chinese power and ambition.
Military diplomacy can alternatively be read as another information war track, since the Ukraine War shows no other military will step up at the crunch. As a strategic observer put it: When India won’t act in Ladakh, why would it over South China Sea or Taiwan?
As for military self-sufficiency, it’s yet another conduit for crony capitalism to play out, making Indian Chaebols out of Gujarati companies. However, remember Reliance Jr that sequestered offsets on Rafale and promptly went bankrupt. As for the Adani juggernaut - that per an opposition politician bid for two strategic projects - will yet be steadied by the Indian state, testifying to the depth of the Modi-Adani connect.
What of the traditional security preoccupations: Kashmir, Pakistan and China?
In Kashmir, Doval can be credited with selecting General Rawat to do the dirty job of wrapping up the youth who were the backbone of the insurgency. This set the stage for the vacation of Article 370 of meaning under an unprecedented dragnet. Though Jaishankar rightly credited fewer deaths to this strategy, its continuing application means the problem has been kicked down the road.
The anticipated explosion in the pent-up alienation of people on their unceasing humiliation by Hindutva - fearlessly tallied in Anuradha Bhasin's new book - will likely be faced by Doval’s successor. That’s the time Doval’s report card needs to be wrapped up, not now when the indices of violence are low enough to have the spin masters plant the idea that Kashmir can do without army deployment and Rashtriya Rifles can be mothballed.
As for Pakistan, advocacy is extant on Modi bailing it out of its dire circumstance, thereby, in some wishful illusions, preponing Akhanda Bharat. As to the extent some of Pakistan’s troubles are an intelligence handiwork is unknown, but the factor cannot be dismissed given Doval’s reputation as intelligence czar.
A new book by Doval a senior in the trade, AS Dulat, laments the hardline policy towards Pakistan, though he informs that Doval once also fancied himself as being able to usher in peace too if he so wanted. The hardline has bought some respite in Kashmir, such as a manageable Line of Control, allowing India leeway in Kashmir. Yet, neither the problem of and in Kashmir has gone away, which doesn’t say much for an old Pakistan and Kashmir hand, Doval.
The cost has been insertion of a third party into the conflict, the Gulf acting as handmaiden of the United States. Instead of a strategy, it appears yet another anti-Muslim Partition predating Hindutva approach. Doval created conditions for a strategic initiative to have meaningfully addressed Kashmir, but has instead lent his expertise to Hindutva. When concessions and promises made in the back channel are called in by the third parties and Pakistan-back-from-the-ashes is when Doval’s report needs to be in the ‘In’ tray.
India perhaps counts on its indispensability to the management of the challenge posed by China. That it has counted itself out is clear from trade booming amidst working level diplomatic and military talks grinding on. That Modi wishes to have Xi over to Delhi twice-over in the run-up year to elections is priority. The ostensible reason is that India will not be distracted by war talk as it transits Amrit Kaal to developed state by 2047.
That inaction is intended to give Hindutva the run of the place, even as it posits a strong on defence image, is left unsaid. Legitimate as strategy, only its compromised by its impulse and the regime not owning up to it. This perhaps explains the lack of a national security doctrine/strategy, since this elevation of Hindutva to being the national interest cannot legitimately be put into words till the Constitution is overturned. Doval’s strategic stupefaction allows speculation such as this to bite.
It is possible to be more sympathetic to Doval. He might have bitten off more than he could chew.
It is uncertain if he, as part of India’s Deep State of a hidden elite comprising corporate bigwigs, intelligence honchos and Hindutva gadflies, chose Narendra Modi as mascot, or whether it was the other way round: Hindutva picking Doval for its purposes. Even if the latter, Doval cannot be absolved, since he advertised his availability from his think tank perch in Chanakyapuri.
In either case, he has proved unable to tame the instincts of Hindutva working through, for instance, Amit Shah, whose only training in institutional control of the police, central armed police and paramilitary is in phone calls to DIG Vanzara when the latter busied disposing off mortal remains of Sohrabuddin and wife.
This presupposes any interest in playing to the straight and narrow, a delusional proposition, given what is known of the heightened budget of the NSCS and surmised workings of Pegasus, including its role in cornering a Chief Justice to hand Modi the card to clinch the elections: a glittering temple in Ayodhya just as India goes to polls.
Doval will be judged on what he has done for Hindutva: readied India for Hindutva by dismantling its institutional defences from within. Luckily for Doval and sadly for Accountability, whether that is a good thing or bad might not be known in his lifetime.
