Resurrecting strategic rationality in Modi's Bharat

Compilation of my writings from mid 2023 to late 2025

Oct 30, 2025

https://www.academia.edu/144703250/Resurrecting_strategic_rationality

Foreword

This is the twenty-first compilation of my writings. The twentieth – Thoughts While Lying Flat - was put out ahead of the last national elections with an intention of informing the voting public that national security stands endangered in the hands of its right-wing minders. In the event, voters brought Modi’s electoral juggernaut to a pause. However, national security matters continue being appropriated for majoritarian ends, and with greater energy and impunity.

This is the theme in this book covering the past two years. In the period, not only were inter-community relations unhinged in Manipur, but Kashmir continues to be delicately poised, as witnessed at a meadow at Baisaran. Whereas on the China front, India appears to have made concessions, the regime is compensating with being tough on the western front with the launch of Bharat’s very-own ‘forever operation’, Op Sindoor. This, even as the military’s professionalism stands eroded through the military’s cooptation, legitimized by its senior-most officer holding that ideological affinity – fusionism – is the way to get to Viksit Bharat.

The dust having settled on Op Sindoor and Op Bunyan al Marsoos seems an appropriate juncture to put out this volume. While the operation is taken as a grand success, that it was at all resorted to indicates a failure of national security strategy. Not only did deterrence collapse, despite the much-vaunted preceding surgical strikes, but internally, it’s evident that Kashmir remains unsettled despite over ten years of ministrations of the regime’s much-touted hatchet-men. Future Op Sindoor iterations only imply a reinforcing of failure. Next time the exchange will start at the terminating fusillade of Op Sindoor, affixed as the ‘new normal.’ Anticipating higher violence levels is less to further deterrence, than an opportunity for those mouthing the strategic shift to sign up as loyalists.

The uptick in deterrence rhetoric builds space for the regime and its ideological project, Hindutva, to consolidate. Not only does its champion’s strongman image get a boost from the atmanirbharta whirly-jig, but it builds the crony economy that girds up the regime. It sets up a jugalbandi between the three forward castes: the social, economic and martial elite. The dichotomy between regime and national interest is obfuscated by the contrived conflation between the two. This volume breaks the silence on this aspect of the society-security dynamic. It tries to reassert the logic of national security as above and beyond sectoral, sectarian and personage interest. To the extent the national interest articulation is an inclusive exercise in amalgamating stakeholder interests – whether of ethnic, class, caste, gender, community or sector - departures must raise hackles.

The play here within the Clausewitzian Trinity (crudely: people (passion), government (rationality) and the military (chance)) has the political master selling ethnic supremacism for nationalism. That’s how we have more of the Op Sindoor lilt, like how we crushed ‘misguided youth who once carried 303 rifles’: “It’s been a remarkable effort and one day, volumes will be written about how this form of internal guerrilla warfare was handled. The world will study how Bharat’s brave forces destroyed Maoist terrorism through their valour and strategy. We, as Indians, are proud of this that such heroism has taken root in our very soil.” All this is precursor ultimately for a nuclear cul-de-sac. The volume provides an alert on this score; whereby its title, Resurrecting Strategic Rationality.

Strategic rationality entails progress towards meaningful conflict resolution through dialogue and not either perpetuity on a conflict management treadmill or seeking wars of annihilation. The strategic community’s traditional gaze on technological upgrades, interminable structural inanities as theaterisation and gargantuan monies apportioned periodically serves only to divert. The period covered here witnessed end of the phase of disruption and institutional vandalism. Now a stable regime rests on a complicit support base, that includes the strategic community, finding a home within the ruling caste triumvirate.

In the pages that follow, I hold a mirror to the strategic community, the national security establishment and former colleagues. I owe an especial word for the latter, since they navigate the military through uncharted waters. The magnitude of their lot is not merely the changing ‘character’ of war, but the changing ‘nature’ of the Republic. While it is presumptuous to expect this book to make even a dent, it shouldn’t be - to paraphrase – for want of an idea the Republic was lost.

Acknowledgements

I have divided this book into two parts, with commentaries arranged chronologically: one part has my published pieces and the other commentaries on my Substack pages, Ali’s Version. I thank the editors at The Wire India, The Citizen, Deccan Herald, Kashmir Times and the USI Journal for carrying the pieces in the first part. I thank members of the strategic community –mentors, colleagues and well-wisher subscribers to Ali’s Version – for their encouragement. The unpublished pieces of the second part are the result. May our tribe increase before time runs out on South Asia!

Contents

Published

Viksit Bharat needs a potion from India’s ‘Intellectual Architects’
The army’s bombshell into the domestic sphere
Awards: The final nail in the military’s ‘apolitical’ coffin?
India-Pakistan: Off to riot with nukes
Why Naya Bharat needs a Jameel Mehmood
Pahalgam: To War or Not to War is the Question
Kashmir Terror Attack | A conflict resolution strategy goes awry
A curious absence in the statistics from Central India
Nanavatty: Of a different mould: Of radical professionalism
What’s really colonising the military mind
A Republic Day revisit to the Army’s leadership Credo
Much ado over the Chief’s office annexe
India is past the Early Warning phase
Martyrdom in the Sauni Cauldron
Cost of neglecting conflict resolution in favour of conflict management is rather steep
The Army’s Leader-Manager Binary
The questions the prolonged encounter at Anantnag raises
Tide is in favour in Kashmir. Will the Centre act on time?
Strategic importance of Rajnath Singh’s Nigeria visit
The key take away from the G20 fixture in Srinagar
Ghulam Nabi Azad’s tryst with two peace processes in J&K
Preserving United Nations Peacekeeping for a Multilateral world
Preventing an Afghanistan redux in Somaliac
From Substack – Ali’s Version (unpublished elsewhere)
Deterrence messaging, desi-ishtyle
In the hype around New War, Old War is back
Military leadership: Shape of the line-up ahead
Op Sindoor: The myth of a ‘free hand’
Military Leadership in Radical Professionalism: Was the Chinar Corps Commander right at Kokarnag?
Op Sindoor: Interrogating its professed aims
Op Sindoor: Rummaging for lessons in a fog of mis-/dis-information
Pahalgam as Ajit Doval’s cross to bear
Resurrecting R2P in a fresh avatar: But the only way to stop the Israelis is a non-starter
Did we just hear the Mother of all conspiracy theories?
Theaterisation: Not in the Year of Reform
MMS and India’s swing to the Right
Rewiring the India-Pakistan peace process
Buckle up for the ride to Viksit Bharat
Disengagement to De-escalation: Military lessons-learnt alone won’t do
Expanding India’s Peacekeeping Footprint
Reminding the Chiefs of Fidelity
The Big Fat Fib on the utility of force in Manipur
Manipur as Hindutva laboratory: Hindutva-Minority
Indian democracy: What to do about a global good
Is Chief of Defence Staff as Supremo safe for Democracy?
Zadoora: Missing the Strategic Corporal
Has the renaming bug hit the military?
Manipur: Smoking out the majoritarian agenda
Manipur: Smoking out the majoritarian agenda
Does the brass still shine?
Nukes and Thermo-Nukes in a Two Front Conflict
Has the military anything to do in forestalling an end to India’s Democracy?
Is kicking the Kashmir problem upstairs a solution?
Pulwama: India pussy-foots around the conspiracy theory
Reviews
In his new book, General Chauhan spills the beans
Joshi is great; that said, there’s more
Inadvertent revelations on how Kashmir messed up the Army: Review of KGAKGG
1965: A view from the Other Side of the Hill - Review of ‘Memoirs of Lt. Gen. Gul Hassan Khan’
A UN Force Commander’s saga: The travails of UNAMSIL
Anuradha Bhasin, A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir after Article 370
Geeta Mohan (ed.), Nothing is Impossible: Eight Inspiring Profiles; Naveen Menon (ed.), Abhootpurv Prerak Vyaktitva
Film - Oppenheimer: For a South Asian ‘Cry-baby’
Film - ‘Warfare’: How warfare is but oughtn’t to be