From the archives, 30 Jan 2003

THE STRATEGIC ‘COMMUNITY’

Published in Pinnacle

The term Strategic ‘Community’, though a misnomer, has wide currency. It is the collective of strategic policy enthusiasts who variously reflect on, analyze, critique, pontificate, editorialize and offer prescriptions on security related policies. The policy spectrum over which this ‘tribe’ ranges includes fertility rates impacting on future demography to the clear and present dangers such as the Indo-Pak standoff of last year. Its members, self-styled for most part, are a diverse lot with qualifications ranging from internal and international politics, economics and technology to no particular qualification. They include retired bureaucrats and the brass, academics, media persons specializing in the security affairs and avid military watchers. This band has expanded of late with the sprouting of think tanks catering to increasing public interest in matters military over the past decade and more. Increased visibility has resulted from greater airtime on the numerous competing channels. Its influence on public opinion is far more than its impact on South and North Blocks. Their singular achievement has been in placing security issues in the forefront of the consciousness of the politically heavy middle classes in a liberalizing India.

 

The decade of the Eighties can be taken as the turning point in the way India views itself. Although it established itself as a regional power through its victory in the 1971 war and its nuclear explosion of 1974, it was only in the early Eighties that it began to act its weight. The missile program, implementation of the Indira Doctrine in Sri Lanka, coercive diplomacy in Exercise Brasstacks, expansion of the Navy, reaching the culminating point in post-independence defense budgets and being the second biggest arms importer of the decade after Saudi Arabia is evidence of India’s attempt at maneuvering itself in the Great Power game. The forex crisis of the early Nineties was only superficially a setback, for it laid the economic foundations for present day Indian effort at transcending the region. Lately, its stance on the CTBT, its gate crashing into the select nuclear club, its exposition of an expansive nuclear doctrine and gaining the physical and institutional teeth for its implementation have been acknowledged as evidence of India’s Great Power potential. India’s handling of the Kargil affair and the post Dec 13 mobilization and its flirtation with the current day hegemonic power, the USA, have underlined India’s security management capabilities.

 

These developments in the security field have attracted attention of the expanding middle classes empowered by the continuing economic liberalization. The incidence of the communication revolution and a rightward tendency in politics has ensured primacy for security issues. The widespread availability of information on security affairs can also largely be attributed to the spread of the Internet. Another more visible factor has been Pakistan’s relative insecurity in face of emergence of Indian power. Pakistani efforts to redress the power imbalance through proxy war have only served to keep security issues on the front page. Terrorism emanating from Pakistan has not only struck closer home but has also been beamed into drawing rooms, thus giving such a prominence to security issues that political parties are today basing election strategies on their commitment to security. Manifestation of globalization in terms of permeation of concepts of human rights and good governance has also seen increased interest on how the state tackles these security problems in civil society. Therefore there has not only been an erosion in the ‘holy cow’ image of security agencies, but also an increased felt need within them to involve the larger public in affairs of national security. Thus, we see a three-way interaction wherein the security agencies principally the armed forces, the state and society comprising the Clausewitzian Trinity have had a democracy friendly engagement over the past decade. Crucial to this interaction has been the role of the strategic community.

 

The strategic community has grown in step with Indian power and ambition. With respect to serving society, it has served to interpret the security conundrums, specifically defense versus development and democratic freedoms versus peace. Its self-acquired specialization enables it to act as a watchdog and adviser to the security managers. It has brought to bear on the regional and Indian situation the insights developed in the discipline of security studies elsewhere. They have served not only to inform the Indian public but also as interpreters of the Indian position in Track Two engagements with both China and Pakistan. The strategic community’s articulation and advocacy of a variety of positions ranging from radical to conservative has been of particular benefit in public understanding of Indian security compulsions. The public now has access to reasoned pros and cons. This has been particularly useful in gaining a near national consensus on the aspect of nuclearisation. The otherwise abstruse aspects of nuclear theology have entered public discourse intelligibly. This is not only in terms of arguments buttressing nuclearisation but also its critique, thus ensuring democratic health of Indian polity. Likewise, calls for increasing accountability of the state in the security sphere have resulted in the state acquiring greater depth through high profile and highly respected institutional innovations as the NHRC and the NSC. While public awareness and informed formulation of opinion is the ideal, some may interpret public participation in national security as evidence of an increase in democracy diluting militarisation and militancy in society. The fact remains that the intellectual space for both Karnad and Bidwai exists in the strategic community and this has the requisite democratic dividend.

 

The strategic community is largely anchored in think tanks, both establishment and anti-establishment. These have thankfully acquired a regional spread thereby breaking the stranglehold of Delhi based strategists on the field. This has been the result of vibrant communities of ex-servicemen settling down in places as Chandigarh, Pune and Hyderabad. The academic faculties at JNU, Jadhavpur, Allahabad, Jaipur, Pune and Madras have made notable interdisciplinary contributions ranging from international relations to sociology. Acquiring qualifications in security related fields by media personnel and academics in foreign universities, for example Shekhar Gupta and Kanti Bajpai respectively, largely through scholarships encouraging such study, has set high standards of participation in the discourse. Increased interaction between the intellectuals and security agency training institutions and liberalized sabbatical rules in an era of security glasnost has encouraged cross-fertilization. Memorial lectures organized for example by the IAF and the USI are indicative of the growing public interest. Serving service officers attached with think tanks such as the IDSA, the USI and not least the RAND Corporation temporarily form part of the strategic community. While intellectuals are no longer confined to ivory towers, the security forces are no longer islands.

 

Indigenous wellsprings to this tide in security affairs have origin also in retirees choosing to upturn the tradition of reticence. Most notable among these from the uniformed background are Generals Sundarji and Raghavan; from the Foreign Service are Dubey and Dixit; from the steel frame are Vohra and Mander and from the IPS are RK Raghavan and KPS Gill. Those who have helped navigate the ship of state through crucial waters as Gen Krishna Rao and Lt Gen Sinha have voiced their experience in print, thus bringing ground reality back in. Diverse backgrounds help flesh out the field; for example a scientist heads the quasi-autonomous IDSA while an economist headed the last NSAB. Most importantly, practicing politicians and parliamentarians are taking strategic thinking seriously. No finer examples exists than in the involvement of Shri IK Gujral, Shri Jaswant Singh and Shri Arun Singh in matters of ‘high politics’. Special mention must be made of the doyen of the strategic community, Mr. K Subrahmanyam, who can be said to have singularly kept alive strategic thinking in the years when studio hopping by would be strategists was not a cottage industry.

 

Foreign funding and academic interest of foreign intellectuals have injected energy into the discourse. For instance an American scholar’s thesis on the lack of strategic culture in Indians created a stir in the Nineties. The strategic community owes a debt for the insights of Cohen, the nuclear revelations of Perkovich and the interpretations of India’s nuclear strategy by Tellis. Speaking engagements in India by giants as Kissinger and Chomsky representing opposite poles of the policy spectrum have enlivened the debate. Contributions from the burgeoning Indian diaspora, such as from Sidhu and Ganguli, have helped deepen and expand perspectives. Certain South Asian faculties and think tanks in the US, such as ACDIS, Stimson Center and Brookings Instititutions have avid India watchers, run excellent websites on India and train young Indians aspiring to join the ranks of the strategic community. The advantage that foreigners have in regarding India is of objectivity, while the disadvantage is of possible motivations anchored in respective national interest. Their greatest contribution has been in placing India and the South Asian region in the consciousness of the Oval Office, the State Department and the Pentagon. This has helped forge the ‘natural’ alliance between the two largest democracies.

 

The three National Security Advisory Boards that have been convened thus far is evidence of the importance the government attaches to input of the strategic community. The Draft Nuclear Doctrine released by the first Advisory Board in 1999 has served to publicize Indian nuclear thinking. This healthy practice has acquired the form of a tradition with the last Advisory Board that criticizing the No First Use pillar of the nuclear doctrine, as also cautioned on the post-Godhra/Gujarat imperative of preserving communal harmony. Denizens from the strategic community based on expertise are chosen for various committees set up by the government, such as the Kargil Review Committee and the four committees formed in its aftermath on its recommendation. Non-formal influence of the strategic community is through informal brain storming and indirect channels as pressure of public opinion or from other political parties.

 

The growth of the strategic community has been an important highlight of developments in the security field over the last decade. It is reflective of the widely accepted understanding that matters of security cannot now be left to the brass and politicians alone. While theirs is the domain of security policy and decision making, public association with these, through enlightened mediation by the strategic community, helps keep these democratic, rational and objective. Clearly, the critique that India lacks a strategic culture has now been confined to the baggage of last century by the voluble contention between India’s homegrown hawks and doves.