Eschewing and (Not) Manipulating
Escalation
India’s unwillingness
to tactically manipulate escalation makes its responses predictable
and has led to
strategic inertia most evident in the handling of the situation at the Line
of
Actual Control in
Ladakh. The responsibility for this inertia primarily lies with the political
leadership, but the
military top brass also shares this responsibility.
On 7 November, at the
60th anniversary observance webinar of the National Defence
College (NDC), New
Delhi, Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat expressed worries
on the possibilities
of escalation along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), saying, “border
confrontations,
transgressions and unprovoked tactical military actions spiraling into a
larger
conflict cannot be
ruled out” (Pandit 2020). He had averred to similar dangers a year ago
but in relation to the
Line of Control (LoC), when he said, “The situation along
the LoC can
escalate any time. We
have to be prepared for the spiraling of the escalatory matrix”
(Times of India 2019).
Rawat’s fears were expressed in the context of Pakistani border
action teams actively
supporting last-minute infiltration attempts prior to the usual winter
respite in Kashmir. A
year on, the LoC witnessed a significant spike in firing over the
Diwali
period this year.
Escalation dangers can
be seen in Pakistan’s strike back after the Indian surgical strike
at Balakot, launched
in response to the Pulwama terror attack in February 2019. Apparently,
Pakistan’s aerial
counter was so provocative that India had prepared to retaliate. Recent
internal political
salvos between the government and opposition in Pakistan reveal that the
Indian preparations
caused the Pakistani army chief and its foreign minister considerable
apprehension (Economic
Times 2020). In the event, Pakistan pre-empted the missile strike by
returning the Indian fighter pilot downed in the aerial dogfight over
the LoC, short circuiting what Prime Minister Narendra Modi later
colourfully depicted as could well have been a qatl ki raat (night
of killing) from missile strikes (Asian Age 2019). That it would
not have been a one-sided qatl (killing) is evident from
Pakistan reportedly readying three times the number of missiles in a
counterstrike (Miglani and Jorgic 2019).
As for China, its
Ladakh intrusions suggest that it has a measure of India’s sensitivity to
escalation. Its incremental intrusions began with cutting off Indian patrolling
in Depsang sector in April, before intruding along the northern bank of the
Pangong Tso in May. India, fearing escalation if it took the more robust action
of either evicting the Chinese or taking equivalent territory in real time
elsewhere, settled for mirror deployment, leading by the onset of winter to
some 30,000 troops being deployed in Ladakh. Its occupation of Kailash range,
south of Pangong Tso in end August, though depicted as a vigorous response, was
limited to securing unoccupied heights on its own side of the LAC. The
much-touted tactical action, which is certainly a remarkable martial feat, was
at an operational cost. India lost both an opportunity and an avenue of
approach to offset Chinese intrusions elsewhere.
Unwilling to Escalate
Escalation thus
appears to loom large in India’s thinking, resulting in both adversaries taking
advantage of India’s sensitivity. Pakistan, a relatively weaker opponent, has
exploited Indian escalatory concern by restricting India’s options to
lower-order, sub-conventional-level surgical strikes. At this level, there is a
degree of equivalence where it seeks to give as good as it receives. Up the
proverbial escalation matrix, it has matched the Indian doctrinal movement. Even
as India firmed up its Cold Start doctrine of swift, conventional punishment
for terror incidents, Pakistan has adopted a new doctrine, namely “new concept
of war fighting.” For good measure, it brought to the fore the nuclear card in
its operationalisation of full spectrum deterrence, with the tactical nuclear
weapons at the vanguard and keeping a step ahead of India in nuclear warhead
numbers.
China, for its part,
has thrown the onus of escalation on to India. In its turn, India, convincing
itself that the escalation advantage was with China, owing to its comprehensive
national power, allowed China to get away with territorial gains. When
challenged by the intrusions, India instead settled in favour of prudence over
risk-taking. Even while experts argued that it is not the cumulative power that
matters as much as the power that can be brought to bear at the point of
contact at the end of a long line of communication in Ladakh (Menon 2020),
India took the counsel of its fears and decided on talks as the route for an
expansive, if unrealistic, aim of a return to status quo ante. The rounds of
talks—that at last count included eight at military level, three at the level
of the diplomats in the working group, three ministerial level talks, including
a telephonic conversation between the two special representatives—have neither
brought down troops to more hospitable altitude levels nor lessened their
numbers in Ladakh.
Escalation concerns
dominate Indian considerations on the use of force. Its military power is hobbled
by self-deterrence brought on by an interpretation of escalation as inevitable
and uncontrollable. Contrast this to the Pakistani and Chinese approach to
escalation concerns. Pakistan has deliberately exploited the possibility of
escalation. Not only did the landward surgical strikes not prevent the major
terror incident at Pulwama, but the aerial surgical strikes, already
debilitated by their inability to hit the target, resulted in a setback to
India in the dogfight they provoked. An outcome has been Pakistani
psychological ascendance, which the subsequent information war has not quite
obscured.
Against China, over
the years, India settled rather tamely in the initial stages itself, for
deterrence by denial, where deterrence by punishment might have been warranted.
India’s doctrinal shift in the decade prior was from deterrence by denial to
deterrence by punishment with precisely such intrusion scenarios impelling the
shift. The mountain strike corps was to be the vehicle. Since the financing of
the strike corps progressively stalled, the army shifted last year to
innovating, with integrated battle groups for a reconfigured, if truncated,
corps. It innovatively flexed its muscles in Exercise Him Vijay,
held in Arunachal Pradesh, even as Chinese premier Xi Jinping landed for the
Chennai Connect dialogue at Mamallapuram (Peri 2019). Even so, when push came
to shove in Ladakh, India was either unprepared or unwilling to shift to its
newly minted and practised doctrine. This is reminiscent of India’s Cold Start
doctrine lacking teeth in the wake of the Mumbai 26/11 terror attack.
Prime Minister Modi,
in his Diwali address to troops at Longewala, explaining India’s strategic
reticence, had this to say: “Today the strategy of India is clear. Today’s
India believes in the policy of understanding and making others understand. But
if attempts are made to test us, the reply they receive is intense” (Free
Press Journal 2020). While it is true that India has been “tested” by
both adversaries, it is difficult to see from recent strategic developments
that India’s reply has been “intense” against either of them. India’s
unwillingness to chance or inability to manipulate the escalatory threat led it
to rely excessively on dialogue as substitute, even where force is manifestly
warranted as and when territorial integrity is at stake.
Self-deterrence
Escalation is
intrinsic to the use of force, prompted not only by the usual play of chance
and the fog of war, called inadvertent escalation. This impelled the
Clausewitzian concept of Absolute War or war’s tendency to spiral (Walzer 1977:
23–24), if untrammelled by political control and the constraint of friction.
Consequently, it is reasonable to be wary of escalation and especially so in a
nuclear dyad such as India respectively finds itself in with its two
adversaries. The very first dictum put out early in the nuclear age by Bernard
Brodie (1946: 76) remains applicable: “Thus far the chief purpose of our
military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must
be to avert them.” However, the danger is in over-learning, for it opens up a
state to the fear of escalation, eroding its will to use force. Thomas
Schelling (1967: 142–43) conceptualised the manipulation of the dangers as
follows:
It is in wars that we have come to call
“limited wars” that the bargaining appears most vividly and is conducted most
consciously. The critical targets in such a war are the mind of the enemy … the
threat of violence in reserve is more important than the commitment of force in
the field.
Escalation is thus
Janus-faced, a threat that also provides a strategic opportunity.
India’s strategic problem therefore is not to allow self-deterrence to a degree
that the use of force where warranted is negated substantially. Further, the
collusive “two-front” threat, while in the realm of possibility, is not in that
of probability. Nevertheless, it has been repeated so often that India has
begun to believe it, further constraining willingness to resort to force.
The reticence to use force
stemming from self-deterrence requires explaining, particularly for a
government that projects a muscular strategic approach. A case for ‘‘strategic
patience’’ is currently being argued. Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar
(2020), in his new book, lays out the narrative thus
We need to cultivate the strategic patience …
Use of force must always be the considered option, never the first one …. Major
nations have multiple weapons in their armoury and blunt instruments are
usually the least productive. But efficacy aside, the imagery is no less
significant. Those who casually advocate application of force abroad do damage.
Such actions, as the instructive epic (Mahabharat) tells us, are an
option reserved for imminent danger or serial offenders.
While this is
explicable for the ‘‘application of force abroad,” its utility is
somewhat diminished when a state faces loss of territory, a core
characteristic, that elevate such threats to constituting an “imminent danger.”
China’s record of salami-slicing over the past decade makes it count amongst
‘‘serial offenders.” Also, as the ‘‘imagery is no less significant,” Indian
reluctance to use force nevertheless is at a reputational cost. To overplay its
securing of the Kailash range to compensate may have had internal political
utility, such as in the fig leaf it afforded the government from questioning by
the opposition in the recent Bihar election campaign, but the limited
significance of the operational level manoeuvre just ahead of the defence and
foreign minister level talks is evident from its inability to compel China to
blink.
The narrative that
India stared down China by preventing it from chewing off more than what it
already has is being played up. This year’s Vijayadashami address by the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) supremo, Mohan Bhagwat, said that,
“Bharatiya defence forces, government and the people remained unfazed and
responded sharply to this attack. This example of a strong resolution,
exercising self-respect and bravery has stunned China” (Bhagwat
2020). Such self-congratulations undergrid his Jaishankar-reminiscent
prescription: “Rising above China economically, strategically, in securing
cooperative ties with our neighbours and at international relations” as
“the only way to neutralise those demonic aspirations”
(emphasis added; Bhagwat 2020).
Strategic Inertia
At the political
level, the policy of dialogue has been exposed at its critical test against
China. Not only was the “Wuhan spirit” vacuous, but the talks have been
infructuous. The strategy of patience—to hold one’s horses till comparative
comprehensive national power enables an Indian military response—ends up but as
an alibi for doing nothing. The intensity of the information war that sees
India manufacturing favourable military history is testimony to the fact that
it knows it has something to hide.
Since the political
level supersedes the strategic, a top-down cadence is visible in Bipin Rawat’s
usual media interventions. His hyping up of escalation possibilities, including
a collusive two-front threat, seemingly allow India to weigh in on the side of
pragmatism and prudence. In the midst of an economic downturn and a pandemic,
it would not be sensible to be off to war reflexively. But then, it is
ostrich-like to determinedly avoid a war when warranted, especially since
models of war are available that eschew escalation, even while manipulating it.
Rawat, familiar with
the spectrum of war, knows that war is not necessarily Total War, else the
Limited War concept would not obtain in strategic theory. Clausewitz (2008: 7)
wrote that,
War can be of two kinds, in the sense that
either the objective is to over throw the enemy … or merely to occupy some of
his frontier-districts so that we can annex them or use them for bargaining at
the peace negotiations.
In a nuclear dyad,
only the latter, limited form of war, is possible. Indian military thinking has
an exaggerated impression on the inevitability of the latter turning into the
former, apparently bought into by the political level.
The past year revealed
that either the Indian military lacks expertise in the art of strategy in terms
of manipulating escalation to one’s advantage or it did not press the political
level enough to allow it to prove its credentials. If in the case of the latter
it was denied the opportunity, there has been no resignation from its upper
ranks to prove that it pressed fulsomely to exercise its professional expertise
in the national interest. Consequently, the onus for strategic inertia in
Ladakh does not rest at the political level alone, but also with the brass in
its compromising on its advisory and representational role.
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