https://thewire.in/security/why-rajnath-singh-talks-defence-strategy-and-religion-together

Strategic culture: Rajnath Singh tests the waters on next steps

https://aliahd66.substack.com/p/strategic-culture-rajnath-singh-tests

Speaking as the ‘yajman’ (‘chief patron of religious rituals’) at the second anniversary of the Ayodhya temple consecration, India’s defence minister, Rajnath Singh, said, “Ram is humble. Ram is virtuous. Ram is compassionate. But where necessity arises... Ramji takes on the role of vanquishing the wicked there as well. During Operation Sindoor, we worked under that same inspiration of Lord Ram.” For him and his colleagues in the Cabinet Committee on Security to draw on their shared cultural wellsprings during Op Sindoor is unsurprising.

At the event, Singh was present in his personage as Raksha mantri. He prayed, “May this flag of Sanatana Dharma continue to fly as long as the sun and the moon endure. May Lord Ram guide us all on the path of duty.” This is a natural corollary to cultural nationalism subscribed to by Singh. Rajnath Singh legitimates such subscription, thus:

No social movement is born suddenly from zero. It emerges from the consciousness of society, grows within society and takes shape while changing itself according to the changes in society. And when the movement progresses, it determines the direction of society. The temple construction movement has also been such a movement which not only shook history, but also gave direction to the present and laid the foundation for the future.

There are three higher-order problems with such formulation. One is the proximity it betrays of state and religion; the second is the partisan role of the state in the contested space of religion in a diverse society; and the third is implications for rationality and modernity that an anachronistic uptick in religion implies. Instead, here Singh is met at his own level.

When humility, virtuousness and compassion are notable in their absence from the regime’s repertoire, its claims to being inspired by a deity cannot be taken at face value. It shows instead the appropriation by political Hinduism – cultural nationalism - for legitimation of a bellicose turn to strategic doctrine. The changed visual depiction of the Lord - itself a step succeeding the makeover of widely loved Lord Hanuman – presaged this. As for the ‘movement,’ it stands forever tainted with the demolition of a mosque and a judicial sleight of hand that handed it the proceeds of its handiwork. Whether such a shady start can or should secure the future direction of society is debatable.

This is of a piece with Rajnath Singh’s belief system, which holds that, “Lord Ram is not merely an embodiment in stone, wood or soil, he is the centre of our culture and faith.” To him, “Lord Ram is our identity as well as that of our country.” The primacy of religion as identity carries significance for the ongoing (re)shaping of Indian strategic culture. Given the stranglehold the regime has acquired over all institutions, not least over those in the domain of national security - including lately the military - the regime cannot but be expected to pitch for strategic culture’s evolution in a certain direction. Hardly organic, the illegitimacy of this impulse must not be missed.

Strategic theory visualises three hierarchical platters in strategic discourse. The upper platter is somewhat amorphous, comprising the national ethic or ideology informing strategic doctrine or approach to the use of force. The second platter consists of guidance, the somewhat diffuse defence policy and military doctrines. The lowest platter has the tangible products: grand strategy and strategy. A hierarchical layering ensures pathways and guardrails are provided by the higher, prolix layer for the next lower, progressively more concise layer. Together and over time, these ideational tracts - along with implementation outcomes - shape strategic culture.

Strategic culture defined loosely is the historically-informed attitudes to power and behaviour of a nation in regard to the use of force. The location of the national ethic at the apex of the process makes it a consequential piece. Miscuing it potentially renders askew the whole strategic edifice. The debate in India over absence of strategic products – as the national security strategy - owes to the contestation over the national ethic. The Constitution - that drew on the ideals of the freedom movement - has mostly served for convergence in thinking on national security. However, witnessed in the Modi era is an attempt to lend an authoritative stamp on the national ethic, riding on the back of religion.

This owes to the unacknowledged political project furthered by the regime. There is a duality at play. While the Constitution is bowed to at one side, it is surreptitiously shredded at the other. The security domain - relied on by the regime for legitimation and sustenance - cannot escape such a game-plan. The harnessing of strategic culture to the regime’s purpose is yet another measure towards such an end.

Strategic culture is being constructed afresh through official diktat in the regime’s image. With a self-regard of being strong-on-defence it is eking out vignettes and aphorisms from ancient texts on India’s martial grandeur, seen by it as having been eclipsed for the past 1200 years. The regime is seeking Kautilyan thinking as revetment for its security policies. Barring exceptions, Bollywood has also largely been sequestered in its manufacture.

This is unexceptionable in itself, since the regime can well pitch for an assertive strategic doctrine and condition public sentiment accordingly. Afterall, its detractors back the robust counterpoise that has historically rivalled Chanakyan thinking, the Ashokan security perspective that prevailed through vast tracts of Indian history and geography. In this debate between ‘shanti and shakti,’ the problem is when gods are invoked to lend ballast to the regime’s preferred strategic doctrinal choice.

Referencing religion – as Rajnath Singh attempts - implies that the regime wishes not merely to steal a march over its opposition, but to outpoint them in perpetuity. Since the majoritarian game-plan does not necessarily have in mind the shaping of the external security environment as much as the domestic, this is fraught. Therefore, the parallel political project cannot be lost sight of in appraising the strategic field in India. Scholars are liable to arrive at anodyne appraisals of strategic culture if the duality is not sufficiently appreciated.

Singh makes evident the regime’s favouring of an ideology-driven national ethic. While cultural nationalism can and will influence the national ethic, it cannot supplant the Constitution. Only a Hindu Rashtra could anchor a national ethic in Sanatan Dharma. For now, doing so will elide the necessary consensus. The electoral verdict clipping the regime’s wings was on the basis of its gunning for the Constitution in the event of an ‘abki baar, char sau paar.’ The distancing by the seers from the spectacles at Ayodhya signifies the illegitimacy of the regime’s political project. Simply put, the ‘movement’ is not quite the place to rummage about for the national ethic.

As befits an democratically obedient military, the military has rightly addressed itself to constructing a strategic culture in line with an assertive strategic doctrine. Notwithstanding civil-military fusion, the mentioned upper platters of the strategic process are largely civilian mandated and must be politically-led. Rajnath Singh’s trial balloon – there was no ministry press release on the remarks – shows up potential next steps in reconstructing strategic culture. The military would be wise in not mistaking reiterations as marching orders. As the military drafts its vision document – part 1 is due out soon – it is hopefully wary of the regime seeking to fire from its shoulders

http://www.kashmirtimes.com/newsdet.aspx?q=112843#

General Rawat’s legacy in civil-military relations

General Bipin Rawat has etched a place in military history, not so much by way of martial feats as much for his contribution to civil-military relations of New India. He was first recipient of governmental favour in its resort to ‘deep selection’ as a policy for selection to higher rank. His showing in the successive appointments – army chief and chief of defence staff – places the policy under a pall, showing it up as a ploy for the regime’s attempt at institutional capture of the military, quite in the same vein as it has truncated other national institutions.

Deep selection

Rawat came into limelight as corps commander when two cross-border raids into Myanmar were undertaken simultaneously. These caught the eye of the national security adviser (NSA), who was curiously on hand to oversee a tactical level action, with the army chief in tow. It is not known how many hangers-on and camp-followers - and therefore in the reckoning of international humanitarian law, noncombatants – were among the 60 killed in the camps struck.

It cannot be said with any certainty which of the two influences on NSA Ajit Doval – Rawat’s operational skills or his being an ethnic kin - resulted in Rawat’s elevation for field army command in Pune, outpointing one of his seniors, PM Hariz heading the training command at Shimla. Hariz was doubly-handicapped, being a mechanised warfare expert, but - more pertinently - a Muslim, anathema in New India then emerging.

Later, called to Delhi as vice chief, he outflanked yet another senior, his earlier boss in the North East, General Praveen Bakshi. A journalist recounted how Rawat, as vice chief, was heard hailing the surgical strikes launched by the government after the terror attack on Uri garrison. Did Rawat anticipate a shift to ‘deep selection’ to substitute for the seniority principle in selection of the apex military leaders or was he tipped off by his new found mentor within the new regime?

Such questioning is pertinent when contrasted with General Bakshi, for his part, by underplaying another surgical strike into Myanmar, did precisely the opposite. As it turned out in the run up to change over of army chief, men in shadows whispered against the front runner, General Praveen Bakshi. The deep selection policy had a positive start in the precedence set by the two officers superseded soldiering on.

Whether Rawat played with a straight bat at this juncture comes into question. He did not live up to the precedence in which two officers offered the chair of the army chief stepped aside for their senior being superseded: Generals Nathu Singh and Rajendrasinhji in favour of the senior most Indian officer, General Cariappa.

Operational showing

It soon became evident Rawat was selected for implementing the regime’s soon-to-unfold policy in Kashmir. Operation All Out was just that: a take-no-prisoners approach between 2016 and 2019. Rawat as its principal agent brought about a cultural makeover in the military’s approach, best exemplified by infamous ‘human shield’ episode.

The operations set the stage for the voiding of Article 370 by preemptively de-fanging any potential armed backlash. It is lost to history what Rawat’s input on this was, since the action has resulted not only in present-day aggravation of the situation but also in a long term threat lingering in Kashmir.

To keep Pakistan on a tight leash, Rawat touted surgical strikes. The second surgical strike did not involve the army directly, but the riposte of the Pakistani air force almost got its northern army commander, then visiting the forward defended localities, leaving the army rather red-faced.

But the more significant military event on Rawat’s watch was the Ladakh intrusion. Whereas early in Rawat’s tenure, the army had mobilized and held its own at Doklam, the outcome turned out vacuous. The Chinese reckoning that a similar outcome was possible in Ladakh, launched a massive intrusion in early 2020.

Rawat, by then chief of defence staff (CDS), did not exhibit any dexterity in a timely, equivalent grab action elsewhere. The army always has such contingency plans up its sleeve and its operational formations have intrinsic capability. It had exercised this capability only the previous autumn. Covid outbreak is not a plausible excuse for settling for ‘mirror deployment’, on over the last two winters, only redesignated as ‘proactive localized deployment’. This year, the army even stepped back from the Kailash range, which it had taken over amidst some auto-backslapping last year.

Apparently, CDS Rawat was persuaded that Chinese comprehensive national power was improbably of the order that a regional power, India, could not indulge itself in a perfectly legitimate and militarily plausible, localized, border war. Arguably, Rawat can be faulted for taking the counsel of his fears in his advice as the principal military adviser to the defence minister.

For its part, the government got the advice it bargained for, having chosen a counter-insurgency expert as top military adviser. So enamoured was Rawat with ‘grey zone’ war theory - on which the army doctrine put out under his tutelage is based – that the military appears to have concluded conventional war is passé. Since this emphasizes the ‘half front’ of the ‘two and half front war’ formulation put out by Rawat, it inserts the army into an essentially civilian domain, leading up to the logic articulated by the NSA that civil society is the new threat to national security. 

Elusive Jointness

Rawat’s approach to war-fighting played out in his controversial public face-off with the Air Force. To universal surprise, he admitted to a view that the air force was but an extension of the artillery. This appears a hangover of 1962, when the air was kept out of the conflict. The air force, with a self-belief as a service with a strategic purpose, was quick to publicly contradict Rawat.

A similar run in was with the Navy. While the silent service wishes for sea control capabilities, based on carriers, Rawat instead plugged for a sea-denial capability built on submarines. The argument reached such proportions that Rawat skipped the last Navy Day ceremonies, instead scheduling a lecture at Ajay Singh Bisht’s pocket borough, Gorakhpur.

With turf wars as this, Rawat’s legacy, being associated with the inception of the joint theatre command concept, is dead at birth. Rawat over-interpreted the press note on the appointment of the CDS. The mandate given therein does not state require front-specific joint theatre commands, pressed for by Rawat.

Rawat was unable to see through the politician’s ploy of shooting from his shoulders by not providing him with political direction. Rather than calling out this bit of political abdication on the part of his political masters, he instead went for a bottom-up solution, ordering the services to come up with studies on theatre commands. Though Rawat ran out of time wrapping up jointness, his successor must convince political masters that their investing political capital is necessary.

Inroads of ideology

It is for historians to unravel if Rawat’s forays into the headlines from time to time – the latest being his defence of lynchings – were because he sat on a difficult chair in the worst of times or because he was a regime acolyte. In favour of Rawat, it can be argued that seeing institutions fall like nine-pins around him, perhaps his foremost worry was to preserve the military from a similar fate. A choice to sway with the political ill-wind in such a case could arguably be taken as a pragmatic one. Unfortunately, in Rawat’s case there is no evidence yet that he ever had it mind to defer to the right wing political line only for pragmatic reasons: to ward off worse to come if he were to embark on confrontation. Clearly, the lessons of Admiral Bhagwat’s sacking reverberate through the decades, as perhaps they were meant to.  

However, the foot-in-mouth syndrome that persisted all through his tenure prevents unambiguously ruling out that he was not purveyor of an ideological line, impardonable in a uniformed office holder. Till biographers tell us otherwise, Rawat will have to be held partially accountable for the departures from traditional civil-military relations in his time at the helm.