https://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/en/NewsDetail/index/4/18172/The-Crisis-in-the-Indian-Deep-State
http://kashmirtimes.com/newsdet.aspx?q=98483 20 Jan 2020

Unedited version

The crisis in the Indian deep state

The deep state is familiar to Indians as being associated with the Pakistan army and its intelligence agencies running of the state there. Recently, President Trump’s fulminations against an American deep state alerted Indians to the phenomenon that it is not one confined to military dictatorships next door but sister liberal democracies also suffer likewise.

To the usual suspects from the marginalized, alternative strategic community, this is not news. However, most Indians were surprised when the opposition Congress party tacitly averred to an Indian deep state in its press conference on the arrest of Jammu and Kashmir police officer Davinder Singh.

In real time, the heavy artillery was deployed for damage control with the lapdog media and long-known intelligence name droppers, like Praveen Swami, being put to what they are best at – obfuscate and putting out a sanitized narrative.

In this official narrative, Davinder Singh succumbed to the usual blight of the police, the inducement of pelf, by taking to ferrying militants – terrorists if you will. He was apprehended by the Kashmir police red handed. Regime apologists quickly had it that there was little to it than a cop gone rogue.

The alternative narrative had it that their suspicion of an Indian deep state existing, if not thriving, stood vindicated. The alternative narrative is worth reprise in order that Indians take a measure if national security is at all well served by the deep state.

In the instant case, the alternative narrative it that there is much more to the parliament attack than met the eye of the courts. Davinder Singh’s role was one such. Afzal Guru in a parting statement in writing had indicated that Singh had put him to aid one of those killed in the parliament terror attack. That this lead had not been investigated thereafter only hardened suspicion. The Kashmir police’s seeming ignorance of the accusation in its press conference on Singh’s arrest only serves to reinforce.

Both cops of Delhi’s special cell who were the face of the parliament attack investigation died separately under suspicious circumstances. Rajbir Singh who had a reputation as an encounter specialist - short hand for custodial killer - died while engaged in a corrupt deal. The other, Mohan Chand Sharma, likely stopped friendly fire at another badly-executed alleged custodial killing in the infamous fake encounter at Batla House. 

The sense that there is something to hide is furthered by the National Investigative Agency (NIA) readying to take over Singh’s case. The agency has acquired the reputation so far that it only helps cover up tracks of majoritarian terrorists.

This brings one to the second piece of evidence in this narrative of the deep state. The NIA has let off Naba Kumar Sarkar, aka Swami Aseemanand, for his self-confessed participation in acts of majoritarian terror in the Mecca Masjid, Ajmer Dargah and Samjhauta Express blast cases. It’s looking the other way in the Malegaon blast case has helped one well-known terrorist to be elevated to parliament by the ruling party.

A sister agency, that sports the moniker ‘caged parrot’, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), has not pursued the case that Justice Loya was engaged in at his CBI court when he died in suspicious circumstances. It dropped the charges that allowed Home Minister Amit Shah to walk free in the Sohrabuddin fake encounter killing. The cops involved under DG Vanzara include a rapist-murderer, testifying to justice being ill-served for Sohrabuddin’s wife killed alongside.

The alternative narrative has it that Sohrabuddin’s killing had to do with covering up any links to the political murder of a former home minister of Gujarat, Haren Pandya. Pandya was said to have spilled the beans to human rights organizations on the right wing conspiracy behind the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat. The rest, as they say, is history with the then chief minister rising to becoming a two-time prime minister today.

In the alternative narrative, this political journey from the province to Lutyen’s Delhi is the clinching evidence. The start of the journey was littered with Muslim bodies, including that of a nineteen year old girl supposedly killed in encounter with terrorists out to gun down the provincial chief minister allegedly presided over the pogrom.

Modi’s tough-on-security image took form then. A poor security situation in several terror attacks in the mid 2000s helped. The adverse security situation itself was one conjured up with magnification of terror attacks, not only by several perpetrated by majoritarian terrorists, but by the media ceding its investigative faculties.

Even the terror attack of singularly horrifying proportions, Mumbai 26/11, has an underreported underside. That the Hemant Karkare-led heroes of the anti-majoritarian terror investigation were suspiciously shot dead in the attack is a pointer. Outspoken testimony of a retired inspector general of the Mumbai police with several leads to the contrary has not made a dent in the popular narrative that solely has Pakistan at its cross hairs.

Clearly, the conjuring up of the image based on a misleadingly poor security situation could not have been without help from within the security establishment. In those years, a Congress-led government was in power.

This points to a deep state, furthering an agenda outside that of the state, yet from within its confines: in this case manufacturing of a security situation to help midwife its chosen champion to power.

The choice of Modi for the role was made easier by the corporate sector falling in line by the end 2000s.

In the popular narrative, the security situation was vitiated by Pakistani complicity and an internal hand, whether of Kashmiris in that benighted state or of Muslim sleeper cells in the Indian hinterland. This keyed into the Hindutva narrative of Muslims having external loyalties and helped consolidate a vote bank from among majority Hindus behind Modi as the Hindu Hriday Samrat.

It is probable that the twinning of the Pakistan and Muslim minority security predicaments of the Indian state gave rise to the deep state. The eighties and nineties saw their aversion to Pakistan’s interference in India’s internal security. They were less than enamoured by India’s hapless reaching out to Pakistan through the nineties. They finally got their act together as a right wing government took the helm at the turn of the century. It gave them the space necessary for putting together a hard-line counter to Pakistan, with their professional expertise in intelligence operations to the fore – of which the parliament attack is epitome.

With the reins passing on to the UPA in the subsequent decade, these denizens – comprising at various junctures busy bodies from groups within the national security complex with extensions into their respective retired fraternities – went dissident. The term deep state was apt for the period.

However, in the Modi years, with the doyen of the dissidents in the UPA years, Ajit Doval, being rewarded with the national security adviser chair, the deep state has gone mainstream. This is their victory of sorts, but also one of their antagonists, the Pakistani deep state counterparts, who are counter-intuitively perhaps happy that India has now come to resemble them all the more.

The apprehension of Davinder Singh suggests that there is now an alternative deep state, wary of the workings of the erstwhile deep state now ensconced in power.

Singh’s apprehension is likely their preemption of yet another plot in the Pulwama mould, this time to spring the Modi government out of a tight spot it has got into with the counter citizenship amendment act protests in time for it to retrieve from precarity faced with the Delhi and West Bengal elections.

http://www.milligazette.com/news/16633-will-pakistan-be-happy-if-modi-returns-to-power

Will Pakistan be happy if Modi returns to power?

In a campaign speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi thundered that Pakistan would be happy in case he is removed by an electoral verdict from power. As is his wont, he was implying that those who vote against his party are doing the handiwork of Pakistan, an enemy state. They are Pakistani agents, who naturally deserve to ‘go to Pakistan’ for their ‘anti-national’ act of voting against his return to power.

His logic is that since he is strong on defence, Pakistan would not like to see him re-elected, preferring instead traditional pusillanimity in the Indian leadership. A strong man at the helm would deal them the required blows from time to time as Mr. Modi has done with his claim of three surgical strikes – on land, through the air and in space in the form of a deterring anti-satellite (A-Sat) test.

Displacing Modi would be music to Pakistani ears and that of its ‘deep state’ constituting the army and the intelligence agency, supported by jihadist formations. To Modi, those who vote against him would please the Pakistani establishment. The subtext is that doing the Pakistani bidding, even if unwarily, would amount to treason – dissent and sedition being synonyms these days – now that Modi has revealed Pakistani expectations.

Is Modi right? Would Pakistani minders be pleased with an election outcome that sees him banished from 7, Lok Kalyan Marg?

Absent a ‘wave’ as in 2014 - observed by the political leader from the Deccan, Asaduddin Owaisi - there are jitters in the ruling party, best evidenced by the two ‘surgical strikes’ – Balakot and the A-Sat test. It also is reason for the polarising rhetoric orchestrated by no less than the occupant of the high prime ministerial office, Narendra Modi. Therefore, it is quite unnecessary to dissect his invective while on the campaign trail, even if the campaign has nothing to do with it since he is a genuine believer in himself, the first bhakt so to speak.

Nevertheless, to fact check Modi is useful, first, to ascertain if his claim to being strong on defence is valid, and, second, if that makes Pakistan quake in its boots.

Modi’s claim to three surgical strikes serves as a starting point. The first one – conducted across the Line of Control in the wake of Uri - was based on two preceding trans-border raids in the north east into Myanmar in 2015 and the following year. The 2015 raid was hyped up and the commanding general was later elevated as army chief. A similar operation the following year was downplayed by the then commander in the east, who was summarily overlooked for the post of chief for his temerity to deny the ruling party an opportunity for grandstanding on security.

Of the operation post-Uri terror strike, it was unnecessary to begin with, since the number of casualties were not a direct result of terrorist action but inflated by a dozen unfortunate soldiers perishing in a resulting fire in their tent. As for the outcome in terms of deterrence for further such terror attacks, the subsequent terror attacks south of the Pir Panjal on military installations and the car bombing at Pulwama in February this year, are testimony of failure of deterrence, the advertised aim of the ‘surgical strikes’.

As for Balakot, whatever the actual result on ground, an Indian general, Ata Hasnain, has admitted in a speech at a London think tank that the Pakistani information warfare got the better of the Indians. Pakistan in any case virtually evened the score immediately thereafter with its aerial strike at Rajouri-Naushera, downing of an Indian plane and capture of its pilot. It also gained an upper hand in the optics by releasing the pilot soon thereafter. The deterrent effect of the Balakot strike will be known in the coming summer and whether India is able to hold the assembly elections in Kashmir without embarrassment on its democratic credentials from the numbers turning out to vote.

As for the third surgical strike, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency has criticized the A-Sat test for the creation of space debris that could impact the international space station. This implies that the A-Sat capability is not usable, in that it has a collateral damage potential that cannot be risked politically. India would end up losing potential supporters in war in case it damages their satellites by taking the war to space. As for usability, China being ahead of India by a dozen years can easily be expected to deter Indian resort to A-Sat warfare. Against Pakistan, it would be useful but Pakistan has no known prowess in space that India needs to take out in war. In any case, today’s technology does not rely on kinetic-kill for such action but on cyber war.

The list could go on and include the down-turn in Kashmir, the hold-up in India-Pakistan relations, the subservience to the Chinese on display in Wuhan, the stench of scandal in defence procurements from the Rafale scam, the status quo on the Nagaland ceasefire, subversion of institutions, the inability to integrate defence acquisitions revealed in the friendly-fire incident in which an Isreali weapon system allegedly brought down a Russian-made helicopter due to incompatible identification friend or foe systems, doing a hit-wicket on India’s position on terror by releasing Hindutva terrorists in many terror cases, and the inability to institutionalise the national security system owing to an over-focus on the personality of its head, Ajit Doval. The list is ended here for want of space.

This survey of the defence side does not indicate any particular merit in the Modi-Doval stewardship of security. This prima facie means that there is no reason for Pakistan to fear a return of Modi to power.

That said, the reverse is more likely truer. Though the diplomat I accosted at the book release function was too professional to let on the Pakistani mind on the issue, it can be hazarded here that the Pakistani deep state would like to see Modi back in saddle. Firstly, as seen, they are not over-impressed by the Indian showing on defence, as to be losing any sleep. Secondly, they are aware of the mess in national security, which even Modi’s famed troll army has been unable to sweep under the carpet.

Finally, and more importantly, another term of Modi at the helm would result in a backlash to the Hindutva project that he seeks to entrench. His resort to all manner of jumlas, surgical strikes, outright lies (that there are no Hindu terrorists (if so, as Siddharth Varadarajan wondered, who, pray, was Nathuram Godse?)) is under-gird by the logic that ends justify the means, the ends being the greater glory of Hinduism as defined by its Hindutva proponents.

Any backlash would not necessarily be from Muslims, who are largely socially ghettoized, politically marginalized and cowed down by micro-terrorism. The Indian liberals are the first line of defence of the Constitution. Then there are leftists, currently down but could reemerge as the corporate-politics nexus under Modi runs aground in rural neglect and farmers’ strife. The entrenching of Hindutva would not result in an imagined homogenous nation in a Vedic-brahmanical frame, but a ‘million mutinies’, to borrow Naipaul’s phrase. The ongoing one is in Kashmir and in the pipeline could well be what might result from the populating of the register of citizens exercise in Assam and sought by the ruling party to be started also in West Bengal. There is, of course, the temple at Ayodhya to be built and ever higher statues that could at best divert attention. The military may be put out by the politicizing attentions of the far-right and their work being put to domestic political utility by the Modi-Shah combine. India’s closer strategic embrace of the United States and Israel would likely end in the same internal effects on polity as witnessed in other states that have been subject to such attention, significantly Pakistan as a US-frontline state. The fallout of this relationship would be in increased pressure from China. A cumulative backlash and a Modi-Doval authoritarian counter would push India back.

This survey of national security as it stands at the end of Modi’s five years and the possibilities ahead in a possible second term suggests that Pakistan would be quite happy to see Modi return to power. It would turn India into a Hindu-Pakistan and a poor imitation at that, a prospect not unwelcome to India’s antagonists. This would also be at a time when Pakistan for its part imagines it is slowly coming out of the tunnel of obscurantism that it had entered three decades back. For India to rush into the tunnel voluntarily would – counter intuitively – place Pakistan a step ahead, courtesy Modi.

The Perils of a Grand Strategy that is Intelligence-led

http://thewire.in/2016/05/10/the-perils-of-a-grand-strategy-that-is-intelligence-led-35095/

Unedited version

With the National Security Adviser (NSA) being an old intelligence hand, it was only to be expected that the intelligence arm of strategy would gain prominence in India’s grand strategic repertoire. However, since national security runs a risk when strategy gets intelligence-led, it is only a corollary that the risk is compounded when the by-far-more-consequential grand strategy gets to be intelligence-led. India is no stranger to intelligence dictating strategy. Given that the consequences have been far from benign, with the intelligence community usurping grand strategy there can only be trouble ahead.

Even the great intelligence manufactured victory in the 1971 War has not been without its aftershocks. Pakistan first furthered disaffection in Punjab and then concentrated on Kashmir. An intelligence-led strategy in Kashmir, described languidly by an intelligence practitioner with leadership experience in both IB and R&AW recently, has not brought India any closer to closure. Instead, the situation in Kashmir continues to embarrass India.

At the other end, the failure of an intelligence led strategy in Sri Lanka was more obvious, even if the intelligence chiefs in their writings in retirement never tire to put the failure at the army’s door. India’s intelligence-led interference prolonged the internal conflict there by at least a decade. R&AW’s weapons largesse, as academics such as Muthiah Alagappa inform, at the fag-end of the expedition there led in favour of the Tamil National Army, led to prolonging of the war there for another decade since it was obvious that  these arms would fall to the LTTE once the IPKF set sail.

Today, a master of the ‘trade’ is NSA. In his pre-accession phase immediately prior to elections, he laid out his world view in Sastra University, now famous as the ‘Baluchistan ultimatum’ to Pakistan. He opined that since the nuclear threshold had made war rather costly, intelligence operations were the answer to India’s Pakistan problem. Since terrorists were merely mercenaries, India with a growing economy behind it could afford to out-bid Pakistan. If Pakistanis are to be believed the results are already apparent. 

Munir Akram, one time Pakistani diplomat in the UN, has in two successive articles in Dawn pointed to ‘reported support’ by India of some terrorists groups there. Even if we are to discount atrocities such as at the Peshawar school and Lahore’s park as having Indian provenance, as typical Pakistani obfuscation, terrorists targeting Pakistan’s maritime reconnaissance assets at Karachi airfield should lend us pause. The alleged surfacing of an alleged Indian spy, former navy officer Jadhav, in Baluchistan in ISI custody shows to Pakistani at any rate that India might have found a theater for its intelligence operations. With guns silent on the Line of Control and diplomacy in abeyance, it can plausibly be inferred that the intelligence arm is compensating in some measure.

A plausible aim of an intelligence-led strategy is easy to divine. It could be to bring Pakistan to realize that those who live in glass houses should not be throwing stones at others. With Pakistan’s military dominated national security establishment suitably conditioned by Indian intelligence operations to its underside, it would perhaps ease up on its policy of administering death to India by a thousand cuts. Seeing that its military and ISI has been bested by India at its own game, Pakistani political class and the business lobby can turn the tables in internal Pakistan politics to begin a pro-India regime there.

Since this is perhaps all to happen in the long term, the strategy can be expected to have some set-backs. Perhaps, this accounts for the current day hiccups - if not hold up - in the India-Pakistan dialogue, despite a promising leg up it received in Mr. Modi’s Lahore stop over.

Indeed, India’s diplomacy has seen not only its Pakistan domain hijacked by the intelligence lobby, but its multi-vector outreach has been reduced – counter-intuitively in cerebral Jaishankar Subrahmanyam’s tenure - to a single track: terrorism. At the nuclear security summit, India raised terrorism. On Mr. Modi’s return via Saudi Arabia from the nuclear security summit, it was terrorism yet again; this time with the Lashkar in the sights. Its China policy is in danger of being over-shadowed by terrorism since the Chinese refrained from enabling sanctioning of Jaish, a point that figured in the visits of the defence minister and the NSA to that country. With Modi visits to the US, Israel and Iran lined up, it can only be more of the same thing.

The external part of an intelligence-led strategy is only the tip of the iceberg. India’s Pakistan policy is reduced to a psy war. Grand strategy comprises an internal dimension too. On Kashmir, the age old policy of a military template continues, absent conflict resolution. The state government remains in place even as the police and intelligence keep it afloat, the latest intelligence foot work being release of the video of the Handwara girl presumably with the larger purpose of saving lives that would  have otherwise been lost in a high on energy but  low on purpose agitation.

More pertinent for internal security is the home front. A proportion of terrorism Indian hinterland has witnessed is of Hindutva origin. Yet, as closet Hindutva hands in the strategic community have been reminding since the UPA II years, such an acknowledgment weakens India’s hand versus Pakistan. India’s claim of a Pakistani link can best be sold in case Hindu fingerprints on terror bombs are obscured. This explains the volte face of the National Intelligence Agency on Malegaon; the triumphant return of Vanzara to Gujarat; the bail for Samjhauta bombing suspects; Major Purohit poised on being let off; the second assassination of a dead young Muslim woman Ishrat Jahan; the dropping of cases against BJP stalwart Amit Shah; the go-slow in the case being kept alive by Zakia Jafri and the over-hyping of India’s vulnerability in its huge Muslim population to ISIS overtures.

The contradiction in India’s position on terror in the non-recourse to hate speech laws against Hindutva proponents, even while asking for incarceration by Pakistan of their Pakistani counter parts, and letting of suspected Hindutva terrorists while calling for Pakistan to account in its softness on India’s wanted list, cannot be missed in chanceries on Shanti Path. The subtext appears to be that if Pakistan can be soft on its terrorists, so can India go slow on its own terrorists, thus putting paid to ‘zero tolerance’ for ‘enemies of humanity’.

What is up for discussion is whether the hijack of grand strategy by the intelligence community owes to the takeover by majoritarian forces in politics or reliance on the intelligence arm to furnish high politics and grand strategy. Is it top down or bottom up? One interpretation can be that the intelligence instrument is only doing its professional bidding since the policy has been put in majoritiarian forces. By the second yardstick it is playing hand maiden. The intelligence subculture, fathomed through strategic literature, anecdotal evidence and writings by practitioners, suggests there is reason to fear Hindutva contamination of its professionalism. With intelligence agencies so predisposed calling the shots at long last, there is a case for a general alert over the strategic underside; principally that while the external may fascinate, the internal sphere is where the action is. So the jury is out on this one. Either  way, India needs to retrieve balance in grand strategy by ensuring all institutions and agencies contribute to it rather  than have any one run away with it. 

Dangerous strategy

http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/dangerous-strategy/216492.html

In his inaugural statement at a seminar on nuclear security at a think tank in Islamabad, the Nuclear Development Adviser to Pakistan’s National Command Authority, retired general Khalid Kidwai, made sure to get the deterrence message across to India.

He warned that ‘Cold Start or no Cold Start’, Pakistan’s adoption of ‘full spectrum deterrence’ had brought  about ‘retention of strategic equilibrium in South Asia’ by seriously neutralising any propensity in India for the ‘use of the military as an instrument of policy’.

For their contribution to ‘peace and stability in the region’, he was inclined to echo the title of a book on India’s nuclear weapons by Raj Chengappa, calling Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, ‘weapons of peace’.

Is Khalid Kidwai right?

On return from Islamabad where Sushma Swaraj had gone for the ministerial meeting of the Heart of Asia conference on Afghanistan, Swaraj in briefing parliament acknowledged as much, saying: “war is not an option”. Whereas she did not specify why this was so, the nuclear factor also figures among other reasons to avoid war, such as the economic one.

Since both states are close to embarking on a ‘bilateral comprehensive dialogue’ brokered by Swaraj during her Pakistan visit last December, it would appear that Khalid Kidwai is at least partially right. However, since the promised dialogue has not taken off three months on since its announcement indicates the pitfalls.

The terror attack on Pathankot airfield early in the year resulted in the foreign secretary talks scheduled for mid January being postponed. Even if talks finally take off in wake of the visit of the joint investigation team from Pakistan to the site of the terror attack in Pathankot, the hiatus indicates a continuing fragility that cannot be wished away.

This is compounded by India’s Pakistan strategy, likened by a former Indian ambassador to that  country as ‘manic pirouetting’. Since the strategy is controlled by National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval, his views are worth probing.

Immediately prior to parliamentary elections in which Doval had a major hand in generating the Modi wave, Doval laid  out his strategic world view at a talk in Sastra University. He called for a shift from a defensive strategy to one of ‘defensive offence’. Since this was not an offensive  strategy, the nuclear threshold was not of consequence. He preferred ‘intelligence led’, ‘covert’, operations to military action against Pakistan’s ‘vulnerable’ areas, such as its ‘internal security’.

Deeming ‘strategy without tactics is noise before defeat’, it can be expected that Doval as NSA is practising what he preached. Pakistan’s recent nabbing of an alleged Indian spy, former naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav, is perhaps evidence of this.

Alongside, in another preview of his Pakistan strategy, Doval as head of the Vivekananda International Foundation had instigated a press statement by 41 members of the strategic community. The statement had effectively tied down UPA II from contemplating a resumption of talks with Pakistan. It called for terrorism as being the sole agenda of talks.

Today the promised ‘comprehensive bilateral dialogue’ continues in abeyance, held hostage to terrorism. This explains Sushma Swaraj’s briefing to parliament: “We have decided that through talks we will resolve the issue of terrorism as talks is the way forward so that the shadow of terror is removed.”

The upshot is that India’s Pakistan strategy appears to have two prongs. One is to condition Pakistan to its underside by exposing it to Indian intelligence operations, while engaging in a dialogue restricted to terrorism.

The strategy is not without its dangers.

Firstly, while Indian interests are sought if not quite met this way, over time Pakistan’s national security estabishment’s interest in the dialogue  would lag. It is currently not averse to Sharif’s outreach to India that relies on personal equations reinforced with Indian Prime Minister Mr. Modi’s brief stop over at Sharif’s Raiwind residence. However, a status quo in India’s favour could prompt counter action by the Pakistan army to once again use its tried and trusted instrument, the ISI.

Secondly, the Pathankot terror attack and Pakistani NSA’s tip off to his Indian counterpart of infiltration of ten terrorists on Mahashivratri eve into India suggests that terrorist forces can act autonomously. They can trigger off another crisis by a mega terror attack.

During his Sastra University address, Doval had weighed in favour of an intelligence driven response to 26/11. In effect, the intelligence game would now heat up, increasing propensity for either side eventually going military. It is then that the nuclear threshold, so cavalierly dismissed by both Doval and Khalid Kidwai, would kick in.  

Given such escalatory possibilities, the contrasting policies of the two states appear delusional. Whereas Pakistan loses no opportunity to  foreground nuclear dangers to reinforce deterrence, as done most recently by Kidwai, India for its part has taken care to omit any mention of nuclear weapons in relation to military exercises since 2013.

Foregrounding nuclear dangers thus continues to be important, if only to compel the two states to remain at the table. 

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Another India-Pakistan Upswing In The Offing?

Saturday, March 19,2016

http://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/NewsDetail/index/5/7183/Another-India-Pakistan-Upswing-In-The-Offing

The meeting on 17 March in Pokhara between Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj and foreign policy advisor 

to Pakistan’s prime minister, Sartaj Aziz, filling in as Pakistan’s foreign minister, heralds yet another prospective 

upswing in the relations between the two states. Swaraj accepted the Aziz conveyed invite for Mr. Modi to visit

 Islamabad for the SAARC summit in the later part of this year. The two prime ministers could meet even earlier,

 at the Nuclear Security summit in Washington D.C. The joint investigation team into the Pathankot airfield terror

 attack is set to begin work by month end.

Relations appear to be back on track after being derailed by the terror attack in Pathankot. However, in light of 

the earlier flip-flops in India’s Pakistan policy - characterized by one perceptive observer as ‘manic pirouetting’ -

 Mr. Modi’s trip to Islamabad is not a done deal yet.

As at previous junctures, this one too shall attract speculation as to whether this is a sustainable upswing or 

yet another mirage. Influence of internal politics with elections looming in Assam and Bengal is a candidate

 line of inquiry.  Deeper still is whether Hindutva philosophy contaminating strategy today can at all countenance

 equable ties with Pakistan. However, a robust answer will likely prove elusive.

For a better understanding of India’s Pakistan policy, there is one almost forgotten vantage point: the

 9 August ‘Press Statement on India-Pakistan Relations by Members of India’s Strategic Community’. 

Forty one denizens of Delhi’s seminar rooms signed up to a statement brokered by the Vivekananda 

International Foundation, headed then by current day National Security Advisor, Ajit Doval.

The statement had put paid to Manmohan Singh’s dream nurtured since his UPA I stint of making a 

path-breaking trip to Pakistan. UPA II, already in doldrums by then, preferred not to chance the forthcoming

 elections on the altar of India-Pakistan relations.

The statement if not quite Mr. Doval’s brain child, had him signing off on it. As India’s national security minder 

and old Pakistan hand, India’s current Pakistan policy therefore can be credited to him. What he endorsed then

 therefore affords being dusted up for review to see if it might have clues as to his mind. His policy advice 

then was:

India should show no anxiety to hold a dialogue with Pakistan, keep a steady focus on the issue of 
Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in any conversation that takes place, abjure language that equates our
 problems with terrorism with those of Pakistan, and take Siachen out of the basket of issues …

The logic given was that Pakistan’s military held the reins, even if there was a new placatory civilian government

 in place headed by Nawaz Sharif. India consequently was better advised to – in the words of the signatories 

– ‘impose a cost on Pakistan for its export of terror to India, and thus change the cost-benefit calculus of these 

policies and actions.’ Towards this end, a ‘proactive approach’ was thought as able to ‘yield us much better 

results than those garnered by policies of appeasement which have regrettably been pursued by us for years.’

This amounts to a blue print for the still-young Modi era. India has indeed been ‘proactive’. Diplomatically, it has 

reached out to Nawaz Sharif, best exemplified by the invite to Mr. Modi’s swearing in and Mr. Modi’s dropping in

 at Sharif’s Lahore farm house last December. The National Security Advisers have met twice over. Pakistan has

 been kept off balance with foreign secretaries meetings also having been either cancelled or postponed twice

over too. The sole agenda in the stillborn dialogue is terrorism, as anticipated in the statement.   

Militarily, India upped the temperature on the Line of Control since October year before last. With the message

 hitting home, it has wound down the pressure lately, though the heads of military operations have yet to meet as 
thought up in the Ufa meeting between the two prime ministers. On the intelligence front, the ‘game’ is clearly on, 
with India – if Pakistanis are to be believed - giving as good as it receives both in Pakistan and in Afghanistan.  

The idea appears to be to soften up Pakistan’s military, expose it to its own underside and the age old dictum:

 those who live in glass houses must not throw stones at others. Alongside, the line of strategy directed towards 

Nawaz Sharif is at best to incentivize Pakistan and at worst to divide its national security elite.

Since this dual pronged strategy is in play with the hard and soft lines alternating, it is confounding to Indian

 observers, predicating their analysis on the values of predictability and consistency. For its part, Pakistan’s 

decision making elite at the receiving end appears unfazed. It is making gains in its counter terror operations.

 Its proxies the Taliban have reemerged in Afghanistan. It is able to launch pin prick terror attacks against India 

at will. Its nuclear trump card is well into three digits in terms of warheads. It is heartened by India’s foreign

 minister - sensibly - ruling out war as an option. The military is not averse to using Sharif as foil.

It is unlikely that India’s hyper-nationalism inspired strategic community would find these comfort levels of 

Pakistan at all enthusing. It spells that Pakistan’s military has not been sufficiently battened down nor a 

division created within Pakistan into pro- and anti-India camps. Consequently, Mr. Modi’s pirouetting can 

be expected to continue under direction of Chanakya II, Mr. Doval himself.

The problem – nay, danger – with the strategy is that it has not thought through what it considers sufficient

 punishment of Pakistan. Hindutva infected, it would unlikely settle only for appeasement by Pakistan, when 

only Pakistan’s capitulation or going under will do. Clearly, the strategic ‘community’ needs to once again get

 together to draft a fresh statement to help bail Mr. Doval out. 

Security demands strategy before action

http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/security-demands-strategy-before-action/185506.html

Accounts of the National Security Adviser (NSA), Ajit Doval, as a man of action have only been reinforced by his response to the terrorist attack at the Pathankot airfield early this month. While a laudable quality in an operational-level commander, however, when this trait (to take action) is present in abundance in a person required to function at the strategic level, it may be problematic. 

 

Perhaps, the most onerous responsibility of the NSA is his duty as Secretary to the Political Council of India's Nuclear Command Authority (NCA) and as Chair of its executive council. The appointment requires a cool, reflective, person to tenant it. The Pathankot episode throws up the question: Whether Doval is the best man for this sensitive job.

 

On this score, the criticism attending the response to the Pathankot terror attack should not be spin-doctored into oblivion. The Prime Minister on a visit to the site, and the Army Chief in his Army Day press conference, have tried to restore confidence in the system. Acknowledging a few home truths would better serve the system. 

 

A key point was brought forth by the previous NSA, Shivshankar Menon. He observed the cancellation of the NSA’s trip to China for strategic-level talks, implying this was an instance of misplaced priorities. Second, an NSA getting involved in essentially a tactical-level operation is liable to miss the wood for the trees. Third, the NSA's bypassing of institutions such as the Home and Defence Ministries and the military serves to sap traditional chains of command and constitutionally ordained authority. 

 

Since the NSA is at the fulcrum of India's nuclear command and control, these observations have implications for India's nuclear command and control. 

 

India's NCA already has glaring lacunae. As revealed in the commentary in the aftermath of the Pathankot episode, India's National Security Council (NSC) system has been created through an executive order in 1998. It has not been institutionalised and sanctified by an Act of Parliament ever since. As a result, the NSA is an oddity in the parliamentary system, only owing accountability to his appointing authority, the Prime Minister. This further empowers the Prime Minister's Office, detracting from India's parliamentary democracy by making it resemble a presidential system. 

 

The NSA serves as link between the Political Council of the NCA that comprises the Prime Minister and principal ministers, and the Executive Council, comprising of the significant officials, military chiefs and scientific heads. Even this responsibility of the NSA has no legislative authority underwriting it. The press release of January 3, 2003, from the Cabinet Committee on Security that met to operationalise India's nuclear deterrence policy at best serves to inform. It cannot be taken as sanctioning this role of the NSA. The responsibility needs being invested with legal content. 

 

The insertion of the NSA in the nuclear command loop is such as to act as a buffer between the political head and the military chiefs. To fulfil this function, the NSA has the support of the NSC Secretariat (NSCS), which is under the Deputy NSA and part of the PMO. The strategy programme staff that informs decision-making and implements nuclear deterrence and employment strategy is, however, not under him directly, but is in the NSCS.

 

The Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee (COSC) commands the Strategic Forces Command (SFC) that is in charge of India's crown jewels, its nuclear arsenal. The staff support of the Chairman COSC is the Headquarters Integrated Defence Staff. Further, the Chairman COSC receives his marching orders not from the Prime Minister or Defence Minister, but the NSA. Since the Chairman COSC is himself double-hatted, also serving as head of his service, the NSA’s role assumes a greater significance. In effect, the general commanding the SFC is willy-nilly reporting to two heads: the bona fide military chain of command and the more significant, but civilian, NSA. 

 

This reveals a structural problem in India's nuclear command and control in which accountability is with the military, but the authority is with the NSA. Governments in this century, including the current one, have promised to create the appointment of a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) or permanent Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. A CDS, with executive teeth in the nuclear realm, would ensure convergence of accountability and authority. That the reconstitution of the dysfunctional National Security Advisory Board has been held up for close to a year now does not lend confidence on this score. 

 

The deficiencies of this system are such as to preclude buffeting from the angularities of personalities. As demonstrated on other occasions such as the Special Forces operation in Myanmar in the middle of last year, the NSA has a tendency to join the action. Conflict will serve up temptations aplenty for him to roll up his sleeves. The NSA would be better advised to exercise considerable self-restraint and allow the national security institutions to work their mandate, to enable him to take a wide-angled view of crises and conflict. Servicing the NSC in a sober manner would enable him to give relevant inputs as the fulcrum of the NCA.

A cautionary word for the NSA

Kashmir Times, 11 September 2015

http://www.kashmirtimes.com/newsdet.aspx?q=44865

India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval in a public lecture averred that India’s propensity to punch below its weight needed correction. India’s diplomatic and security shuffles ever since Mr. Modi’s election can be credited to India’s national security reset under Mr. Doval.

The latest example of Indian operational footwork is the creation of conditions under which Pakistan’s NSA was forced to cancel his trip to New Delhi. The trip itself had a promising beginning going back to the very first ‘surprise’ by the government in the invite to SAARC leaders, including Pakistan’s Nawaz Sharif, for Prime Minister Modi’s swearing-in.

India roughed up the sheen with its very next move by calling off foreign secretary talks with Pakistan last August. Even so, it yet again created space for a potential opening in the joint statement of the two foreign secretaries at Ufa when the two prime ministers met on the sidelines of the SCO meet in July.

Perplexing move are in other areas as well.

When in Paris, the prime minister made a step-back from ‘Make in India’ to short-circuit the long drawn defence acquisition process in buying 36 Rafale aircraft off-the-shelf. The sudden signing of a framework agreement with Naga interlocutors is another example.

Whereas these actions suggest decisiveness, could they also have an underside in a shortcutting of the decision making process?

That the NSA is in the driver’s seat is unmistakable. He has figured prominently in what would otherwise be matters to be handled by the relevant institutions rather than by intervention of the NSA.

Media let on that the NSA was off, along with the then IB head, to Iraq on a rescue mission for Indians numbering in the double digits reportedly taken hostage by the ISIS. Could not this mission have been left to IB’s Asif Ibrahim who has since taken over as Special Envoy for West Asia and AfPak region?

Doval skipped the prime minister’s Bangladesh trip in order to organize the somewhat belated ‘hot pursuit’ operation in Myanmar after Naga hostiles killed 18 army men in an ambush in Manipur in early June. Apparently, the Indian army chief was also in tow, overseeing a tactical level action that could well have been left to the reputed corps commander there.

Where ordinarily the foreign ministry, in charge of Modi’s ‘Act East’ strategy, could have stepped in, instead Doval went over to assuage Myanmar’s hurt over possible sovereignty violations after the raid.

Another controversy over ‘turf’ has been in his getting on the phone for berating the Pakistani high commissioner in New Delhi and instructing India’s high commissioner in Islamabad to tell Pakistan to lay off firing on the Line of Control.

In what could be seen as undermining state governments, including in the BJP’s, he was spotted in Mumbai to supervise control over any backlash in the aftermath of the hanging of Yakub Memon. He queried Delhi Police on the Uber cab rape case. Though the NIA was already seized of the case, he visited Burdwan over the accidental blast there killed two alleged Bangladeshi bomb makers. In Kashmir, a new strategy to keep Kashmiri youth from radicalism was attributed to him after his visit there.

Clearly, Doval is indeed a man of action, as the numerous hagiographical profiles had it when he took over as one of Modi’s first appointees. However, Doval’s numerous interventions bring under cloud his remonstrations of teamwork, reinforcing criticism of Modi running an over-centralised ship.

Institutional good health depends on due processes and cohesion. The NSA can at best play a coordinating and facilitating role, and needs being self-effacing when about it in order that a national security culture based on institutions rather than individuals develops.

Concentration of power and authority in the person leads to an avoidable premium on personality factors, with an underside. Observers point to a Pakistan obsession resulting from the NSA’s long stint under cover there that can potentially render India’s Pakistan strategy awry.

More significantly, ideology potentially contaminates strategic rationality. The web-pages on culture and history of the foundation Doval headed for close to a decade, Vivekananda International Foundation, and that of his son, the India Foundation, reflect the Hindutva narrative. Ideology leads to a colouring of perceptions of national interest, with corresponding knock-on impact on national security.

Finally, expertise necessarily implies narrowness. A forte for intelligence does not necessarily imply operational dexterity or strategic finesse. Indian cultural constraints and bureaucratic deference, compounded by Doval’s omnipresence from the tactical to strategic level policy making and implementation, can result in a dearth of practitioners willingness to ‘speak the truth to power’.

While it is too early to write his report card or write-off Doval, a cautionary word can prove timely. Policy entrepreneurship and individual hyper-activism are recipes for personal and, worse, institutional failure with prohibitive national security consequences.

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