What to make of Modi’s ‘war is history’ thesis?

ali

Sep 18

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In his bilateral meeting on the sidelines the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit with President Putin of Russia, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, “I know that today's era is not of war and we have spoken to you many times on the phone that democracy, diplomacy and dialogue are such things that touch the world.” Modi was referring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, expressing his dismay at Russia seeking to further its national interest through the instrumentality of war.

That Modi was speaking in the context of an ongoing the Ukraine-Russia war into its sixth month, in wake of outbreak of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border hostilities and Kyrgyz-Tajik border skirmishes next door to Samarkand, where he was at the time, his regarding war as outdated, intrigues.

No room for war

The idea that war is passé has been around now for some time. Modi’s national security adviser in an address to cadets passing out of the Hyderabad-based Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy had spelt out the idea, saying, “(T)he new frontiers of war — what we call the fourth-generation warfare — is the civil society. War itself has ceased to become an effective instrument for achieving your political or military objectives. They are too expensive and unaffordable.”

Doval borrowed the idea from then Chief of Defence Staff, Bipin Rawat. A recurring feature in Rawat’s speeches in various forums had been on hybrid war. Though he takes hybrid war as an instrument of Pakistan in its proxy war in Kashmir, he considered only two options in response: ‘offensive (hybrid war waging) option’ and ‘proactive defense’ against hybrid war. He settled for proactive defence, with limited proactive offensive hybrid operations conducted in support of the latter. This was in line with Doval, in his famous Balochistan reference, averring to the offensive option, but only in response to higher order provocations as the one at Mumbai.

Understandably then, Rawat’s concept called for all kinds of proactive defensive responses ranging from governance to empowerment of central police organizations and narrative warfare. Evidently, his known proximity with NSA, Ajit Doval, allowed him to indoctrinate Doval with the same reticence on war as an option. In turn, Doval having the ear of Modi on national security matters, Narendra Modi’s ‘war is in the dust bin of history’ thesis lies in such thinking.

Interestingly, in Rawat’s laying out of the concept, there is no mention of war as a counter to hybrid war. Considering he was a military man, his leaving out war as an option is strange and perhaps holds the key to understanding Indian distancing from conventional war.

The role of conventional deterrence was limited to deterring proxy war, restricting it to levels of intensity at which proactive defence could contend with hybrid war and wrap it up. Where the intensity was upped, India resorted to surgical strikes, broadcasting through ‘a shot across the bow’ its irritation as much as resolve to go the distance. In the event, India refrained from raining down missiles on Pakistan – allowing the United States to pick its chestnuts from the fire for it after the aerial surgical strike flopped.

Room only for hybrid war

Doval went on to hold that civil society was the hybrid war battlefield. The war on civil society today has this understanding that with war obsolete, civil society is game. To him, the adversary’s tentacles reach into civil society. Since the offensive option of giving the foe back in the same coin cannot overtly be admitted to, he appointed police officers as civil society defenders in case of hybrid war on India.

This is theoretically problematic in that some of the pressures civil society is subject to emanate from the State, which the State perpetrator cannot - or will not - itself regulate. The problem then arises is human rights defenders pointing this out end up as the hybrid war enemy. Contrived linkages are then painted of their external inspiration or funding, allowing for an offensive option – that is otherwise to be incident on the adversary - to play out internally.  

Doval’s adaptation of the concept has thus led to a war being waged on Indians. In Kashmir, site of proxy war, there is a plausible case for proactive defence. But in circumstance where there is no proxy war, as elsewhere in the country, the offensive option is very much in evidence. At a stretch, the proxy war justification can be contrived in relation to Maoist ambition to upturn India’s neoliberal applecart, Maoism being taken as an import from China.

To Rawat, proactive defence in Kashmir involved a political resolution. Instead, the political ‘solution’ that is currently in the works - comprising as it does the gerrymandering of the forthcoming elections to the Union Territory to engineer a win for the ruling party - is quite the opposite. It is the offensive option, a hybrid war on one’s own people. That the Supreme Court is laying-off on the constitutionality of the deflation of Article 370 indicates it too is implicate in the legally dubious maneuver, putting India’s preferred political ‘solution’ in the pail of offensive option.

Whereas proactive defence against proxy war is justifiable, it cannot be put beyond a Doval-run national security apparatus to deliberately misconstrue proactive defence for an offensive option. Take the case of the Bhima Koregaon human rights defenders, social activists and advocates of alternative economic approaches. Not only have they been jailed on trumped up charges, but in jail they are also denied medical care, though one of them died from health causes. On the contrary, the right wing goons and their masters who provoked violence at Bhima Koregaon are free. The irrefutable case of this as the offensive option is that the ‘evidence’ of a conspiracy to assassinate Modi was inserted into laptops. Though tampering has been outed, the fact has been neglected by Courts.

Troubling is the Judiciary’s joining the Executive on the hybrid war frontline. The case of Teesta Setalvad’s incarceration is illustration. First, the Supreme Court passed egregious comments on her pursuit of accountability for the Gujarat pogrom. Then her bail hearing for release from custody of an overzealous Gujarat police was kicked down the road by the Gujarat High Court.

The continuing of Siddique Kappan in jail is another. Kappan continues in jail despite bail is not only because he is held under a second case, but the judiciary took care to spike the grant of bail by requiring two locals to stand surety. A Keralite is unlikely to have such contacts in the Gangetic belt and the intimidation of civil society has been such by Chief Minister Ajay Bisht that it would be foolhardy for locals to stand surety.  

In short, while hybrid war is taken as the face of present-day war, in India’s case, it’s not in a two-sided contest with adversaries, China or Pakistan. Instead, hybrid war is being waged by the Indian State on its people. Worse, it’s not proactive defence that is in evidence as much as much as the offensive option. Therefore, when Modi says it’s not a time for war he – true to form - is economical with the truth, excluding hybrid war from definition of war.

Is war done with?  

Clearly, war is around as evident from close vicinity of where Modi made these sage remarks, Samarkand. The Ukraine-Russia face-off over the preceding eight years has seen hybrid war waged by both sides. Russia’s hybrid war is fairly self-evident in its usurpation of Crimea and propping-up dissidence in the Russian-dominant enclave of Donbas. Ukraine for its part has been carrying out offensive hybrid war of its own on its people of Russian origin by deploying nationalist forces in the Donbas, aggravating - and arguably legitimising - irridentism. The conventional war of late summarily puts paid to the notion that war - normally conceived - is no longer an option.

Western capitals - that self-interestedly lauded Modi’s remarks - best know that war remains an instrument of State, if not a preferred one. They’ve been busy fueling the war over the past few months, when they realized that the knock-out blow Putin had attempted in the opening phase of the war had fizzled. They have banded closer together, upped respective defence spending, used the opportunity to corner Russia and hope to set it back in a manner as to make it a liability for its supporter, China. Thus, for them its two birds with one stone: undercut the Russia-China challenge to a West-articulated world order. Over on the other side of the Eurasian landmass, they have created conditions for another war in forcing China to respond to their needling over Taiwan.

Modi may have been prompted by the Ukrainian counter offensive wresting back territory and giving depth to its second largest city, Kharkhiv. Ukraine carried out a feint towards Kherson in the south, while they built up for this offensive. Surprised, the Russians preferred to vacate the territory, falling back to a defensible river line.

Even so, core Russian interests in their special military operations are not threatened: consolidation of their control over the Donbas. Russians intend to hold the now-postponed referendum as prelude to either their incorporation of these territories into Russia - as was the case with Crimea - or to create Russian supported statelets, as witnessed earlier in Georgia. The action by Western powers in Kosovo is coming back to haunt them.

Since Russian gains in vicinity of Kharkhiv were diversionary and to provide depth to Donbas, while they stabilized their hold, the Ukrainian attack merely retook territory that Russians would have in any case traded on the negotiation table. Arguably, the gains allow Ukrainians a face-saver, setting up conditions for a negotiated end to the conflict as General Winter intervenes.

Conventional War has not indubitably proved unviable for either side. To be sure, usually there are better ways to go about achieving war aims. Risking war that has its own logic and grammar is not always readily justifiable. Even so, war is an option that States use and shall continue to use. Their risk acceptance ability genuflects to the capriciousness of the God of War.

To Russians, the war has helped give themselves an exaggerated image of their place in the world. It helps them walk the talk in their recently-released foreign policy doctrine, Russian World. To Ukrainians, who otherwise could have used the excuse of asymmetry with Russia for dignified capitulation, the war has enabled assertion of Statehood and nationhood. As for India, it has bought time for its troubled economy by buying up oil cheap from Russia, all the while keeping mum at the horse shoe table on implications for the United Nations’ Charter of Russian actions. Couched in terms as multi-alignment, it has allowed itself to also be wooed by the West.

‘Give war a chance’

Therefore, it is too early to write war’s obituary. Modi’s attempt need not detain us overly. After all, in the same breath, he also used the terms, ‘democracy, diplomacy and dialogue’. It’s no secret India is now an ‘illiberal democracy’, an ‘electoral autocracy’. Diplomacy has been marked by its absence in relation to both neighbours with which it has been at odds over the past few years. As for dialogue, he ducked the Summit dinner where he might have had a brush-by with leader of either neighbour.

However, Modi’s ‘war is history’ is of a piece with his regime’s strategic doctrine. Though confronted with intrusions in Ladakh, it preferred prevarication when a border war was called for. The Fire and Fury Corps had a frontage to defend and presumably has the resources to take on well-practiced contingencies. Its mandate is preserving of national territorial integrity. When challenged, there is no looking back for a corps configured for precisely such a challenge.

That it looked back and was not reprimanded shows up the national security system in place. Instead, recall in the 2013 episode of Chinese incursion into Depsang, a counter was posed it in Chumar. It is in the Modi era that Indians have started waiting out the Chinese, once each in Ladakh and Doklam. At Doklam, the Chinese were back in strength the following winter, though India had declared a victory at the end of that crisis. In Ladakh, it took Amit Shah’s vain posturing in parliament over Aksai Chin that brought the Chinese into Ladakh. Covid had not quite set in by early April. That the spirit was willing is evident from the showing of Santosh Babu’s band of merry men.

Instead, Modi lied. India dithered. Was it was under-confident in its general staff being able to pull off a localized border war? Isn’t escalation control part of operational art teaching at its war colleges? Was it was over-impressed by the asymmetry in comprehensive national power with China? Was there an internal bureaucratic fight in which the military was left to its own devices, having burnt its fingers at Galwan; and the intelligence fraternity and diplomats running for cover for letting their side down with no strategic warning? What exactly passed between Modi and Xi that Xi thought he could judge his Indian interlocutor so accurately that India would not respond militarily?

When India faces itself in the mirror, it might come up with the right answers. For now we are served up the logic that a nation off to developed nation status cannot afford to be distracted by war, imposed on by a neighbour wanting a competitor out of the race. We need to get up to speed militarily before taking on China. However, such self-exculpation can be shot down arguing that the much-touted economy might have held up to the test of a border war; the West would have stepped up; a border war is a limited war, fought with what one has (to recall General Ved Malik’s imperishable phrase); that comprehensive national power is a bogey, since all that matters is what can be harnessed at the spear tip etc.. War is not always Total War, as Russia’s measured actions in Ukraine show. Arguing thus is obviously as infructuous as pearls before swine.

Alternately, it would only be fair to speculate that the reasons for not going to war over a legitimate and legal reason to do so – a challenge to its territorial integrity and thereby to its national sovereignty – can be only if the reason for not doing so is graver. It can only be such if national interest is taken as regime interest in its self-perpetuation in the higher purpose of consolidation of Hindutva, the regime’s defining philosophy. The regime could not chance a war, the outcome of which could be as catastrophic for it as it proved for Nehru personally. Having gained the reins of the State after a century on the political margin, it could not have a foreign policy setback deflate the image of its Champion, on whose back it rode to power.

This explains Modi’s advocacy of non-war. It is a legitimization of India’s approach to war: wage offensive hybrid war on its own people in the name of proxy war in Kashmir and against liberal-leftists in anticipation of recoil from the under-classes, further deprived by the corporate orgy unleashed by Neoliberalism 2.0. Its easier. For ideological reasons, it prefers hybrid war on its own people to warring without. Holding war is not an option, legitimizes its shadow boxing in Ladakh. It puts the regime off the hook for its adoption of strategic patience to see off the Chinese, even at the cost of trading Indian spaces.

It has appropriated the typical do-gooder, sweet-talking veneer that was used to good foreign policy effect by its bête noire, the long deceased, Nehru. It remains to be seen if down the line it meets the same strategic outcome that proved fatal for Nehru.

The Book Review https://thebookreviewindia.org/
July edition

TP Sreenivasan, Modiplomacy: Through a Shakespearean Prism, New Delhi: Konark Publishers, 2020; pp. 242; Rs. 800; ISBN 978-8193555446.

The book’s title intrigues. The author early on in the book explains it, thus, “I began to see the pattern of a Shakespearean play, consisting of early successes, some complications, a climax, the emergence of a major event or character which changes the course of events, leaving the hero to disentangle the situation and emerge victorious as in this case , or fall victim to forces at work (p. xviii).” At the end of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first term, the author – an English postgraduate – neatly organized his foreign policy into five acts of a play, on which is based the layout of book.

The book enjoyed a good reception, with diplomats of the author’s generation cheering it not only in advance praise of the book carried on its dust jacket but also in reviews elsewhere. They noted that while the author is appreciative of the prime minister’s foreign policy pitch, it is not over enthusiastic – as have been many similar works that the cottage industry of publications on the net and in print brought out by the self-confessed troll brigade and closet Hindutva keyboard warriors.

As with most Indians and voters, the author believes that Modi is in “the mould of a Shakespearean hero, who overcomes his problems by sheer dint of his wisdom and courage and emerges victorious in the end (p. xviii).” Since the book closes at the start of Modi 2.0, it is not an unreasonable conclusion in light of Modi’s election victory. Even so, the author notices ‘tragic flaws’ (p. xviii) in the first term that potentially bring suspense into how the rest of Modi’s tenure at the foreign policy helm turns out. The book does not explicate what Modi’s Achilles heel is, but inadvertently the author does provide a clue.

To the author, Modi’s air dashing around the globe in his initial years “had the flavour of the ‘Aswasmedha Yagna’ of yore (p. xvii).” While the author credits Modi with “being his own playwright, choreographer, scriptwriter, director and actor (p. 3),” instead, this is indeed how the choreographers of the prime minister’s projections on the national media might have visualized it. The information management exercise that accompanies the prime minister’s activity is by now self-evident. The extensive perception manipulation surrounding Modi, amounting to an intelligence-led information warfare operation, obscures both reality and intention. In effect, be it foreign or security policy, the reins are with the quintessential intelligence man, Ajit Doval, in his capacity as national security adviser, overseeing the domains of foreign, external and internal national security policies. That Doval does not figure in the book at all is the fatal drawback of the book.

The backseat foreign policy has taken in the Hindu nationalist defined national security agenda is the principle facet of the Modi government and has not been captured by the author in his book. The author prefers to skim the surface rather than diving deep into the wellsprings of Modi’s foreign policy. The book therefore covers the usual ground, without breaking the crust for the core. A diplomat of 37 years standing, he expectedly dwells on moves on the foreign policy front. It covers the visits and the about turns, characterized elsewhere more forthrightly by a fellow traveler on the diplomatic circuit as foreign policy ‘pirouettes’ by the Modi regime. The author is rather careful in his analysis, drawing back from calling a spade a spade. This is unexceptionable since there has been a noticeable degree of self-censorship in India’s intellectual circles in the Modi era.

The author fails to record the body blow dealt by the centralizing tendencies in the Modi government to institutional health. The tenure of late Sushma Swaraj during Modi’s first term, who was sick for most part through it, was eminently forgettable. As with the rest of the cabinet system, a one-time prime ministerial contender against Modi, she was reduced to acting in response to tweets by Indians stranded across the globe. The foreign secretary, who presumably had the prime minister’s ear then, is now foreign minister. Usurpation of foreign policy by the prime minister’s office, a significant feature of Modiplomacy, does not figure in the book. An old foreign policy hand could have been expected to throw light on this and lament it, but the author passes up the opportunity in favour of merely an insubstantial recording the happenings in the years.  

The book has been put together in part from opinion pieces of the author at various places in print and on the web. It is a catalogue of the times, with little depth. It carries summaries prepared by an intern from the publishing house of analytical pieces published in the mainstream media in the period by several intellectual lights, who also appear to have been too careful to spill the beans on the manner foreign policy was being stewarded. It appears that the book is yet another one to hit the stands in anticipation last elections, in this instance at the publisher’s behest who the author informs was putting out a four-book series on the Modi’s showing in his first term. This is another clue of the manipulation of the discourse, obscuring what should otherwise stare the strategic community in the face.

The author restricts himself to the theatrics onstage, rather than digging for the roots of Modiplomacy. Take for instance Modi’s blitz across some fifty capitals in his initial years. It was to make the new turn to India, of authoritarian majoritarianism, acceptable. With India’s market serving as incentive to buy the silence of other nations, Modi could launch India down a new path. The driver of India’s foreign policy is therefore not out there in the constellation of external factors reviewed by the author but is internal. The myth in international politics is that there is such a thing as international politics. All politics is internally driven. India’s case it is the creation of a Hindu India. Foreign policy in Modi’s first term has been to shroud this in a curtain. He has eminently succeeded in this, with pundits unable and unwilling to call it out.

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.

https://www.epw.in/journal/2018/34/strategic-affairs/modi-helm.html

Modi at the Helm

Whither Nuclear Decision-making?

Vol. 53, Issue No. 34, 25 Aug, 2018

Nuclear decision-making, when examined at the institutional and individual levels, suggests that India’s case is fraught with shortcomings. This adds to the complications for regional security, already present on account of Pakistan’s nuclear decision-making being military dominated. The aggravated institutional infirmities of India’s nuclear decision-making structures and the authoritarian tendencies in India’s primary nuclear decision-maker, the Prime Minister, heighten nuclear dangers in future crises and conflicts.

he Rafale deal reworked by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a visit to Paris early in his tenure has come under scrutiny recently. Critics have it that the jettison of the original deal—in which India was to get 18 aircrafts and assemble 108 separately—in favour of getting only 36 aircrafts in a fly away condition, albeit with India-­specific enhancements, has been to India’s disadvantage (Sinha et al 2018). The decision figures alongside the sudden demonetisation as another landmark decision by Modi. Critics have it that both cases lacked due diligence in processing. While then Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar was seemingly out of the loop on the shift in the Rafale deal (Dutta 2017), it remains unclear which officials were consulted on demonetisation (Indian Express 2017). What do such major decisions bespeak of India’s ability to handle arguably the most fraught decision, that on nuclear weapons use?

The last four years have provided adequate insight into the workings of the Modi government. The Rafale deal, demon­etisation, and the roll-out of the goods and services tax are taken as the leitmotif on its decisiveness (Hindu 2018). These provide enough grounds to suspect that decision-making on nuclear weapon employment could well be problematic. This is troubling, particularly as the government is about to approach the voters once again for another five years at the helm.

Owing to its nuclear weapons overhang, South Asia has on occasion attrac­ted attention as the “most dangerous place on earth” (Hiro 2016). The contribution of the pathologies of Pakistan’s nuclear decision-making are rather better known (Narang 2014: 75). Pakistan’s military has deployed nuclear weapons as a cover to pursue a proxy war in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) (Joshi and O’Donnell 2018: 63, 79). While in the Pakistani decision-making structure, the Prime Minister has pride of place in the Employment Control Committee of the National Command Authority, in practice, the military controls nuclear decision-making (Narang 2014: 84). It can be inferred that the institutional interest of the military, which colours its vision of the national interest, can potentially render nuclear decision-making awry.

If this was not bad enough for regional crisis stability and escalatory pressures in conflict, the situation in South Asia is compounded by lesser remarked on deficiencies in Indian nuclear decision-making. This article examines the drawbacks in India’s nuclear decision-making, cautioning that these heighten dangers in regional crises and conflicts. Possible sites of shortcomings in nuclear decision-making are discernible in two ways. One is at the institutional level, with the peculiarities of the Modi government taken into account; and the second is in the character of the primary decision-maker, Prime Minister Modi. If the recourse to the process of decision-making is taken insufficiently, a matured decision is unlikely.

So far the perception has been that organisational position holders among India’s policymaking elite have had a “passive stance on nuclear issues” (Frey 2010: 198). The emphasis on nuclear decision-making discussions in strategic literature has consequently been on the necessity to demonstrate resolve and commitment by the leadership to order a massive or punitive retaliatory strike (Kanwal 2017: 190). The underside of decisiveness in nuclear decision-making reveals two issues: the decision-maker may be held to an image of dynamism and decisiveness, impelling a decision on nuclear use; and this may undercut the taking of recourse to deliberation in high-tempo and high-tension nuclear decision-making.

Institutional Level

The infirmities at the institutional level are owing to the overweening salience of Prime Minister Modi in the government. He rode to power in 2014, forming the first majority government in three decades. The campaign itself was seen as a presidential one, magnifying Modi’s profile and personality. Initial hiccups in cabinet formation were indicative of the problems ahead. For want of a suitably high-profile defence minister, the ministership was given temporarily to the finance minister. There have since been two ministers in the chair, with the finance minister coming back in the interim between the two for a second time. The current defence minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, did not have a traditional heavyweight profile (Hindustan Times 2017). This playing of musical chairs with a significant cabinet position undermines the decision-making table at which the defence minister sits alongside the finance, external affairs, and home ministers, namely, the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), the National Security Council (NSC), andpossibly—since its composition is not known—the political council of the Nuclear Command Authority (NCA).

Of the other three ministries, the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s office is not only a busy one in itself, but he has faced health issues and grappled with party issues. A low profile has been thrust on External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, with Modi taking over 50 foreign trips, testifying to the centre of gravity of foreign policymaking having shifted from her ministry to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). The home ministry’s disaster management role has been diluted with the National Disaster Management Autho­rity (NDMA), chaired ex officio by the Prime Minister, currently lacking a vice chairperson (News18.com 2015; NDMA nd). A low, technocratic profile of the NDMA furthers the centralisation at the PMO.

Centralisation implies a higher profile for the National Security Adviser (NSA). NSA Ajit Doval reputedly enjoys a close relationship with Prime Minister Modi. As secretary of the political council, his input is, thus, liable to become magnified. The upshot, first, is in an increase of bureaucratic weight, and lessening of ministerial weight in policy- and decision-making. The strategic-level perspective represented by the NSA as head of the executive council of the NCA needs to be superseded by political-level considerations provided by ministerial members of the political council. Dilution and asymmetry in salience between the two levels—political and strategic—tends to have an adverse impact on the political weight and considerations in nuclear decision-making (Ahmed 2010: 5). If the ministers around the table are restricted in terms of their power differential, the Prime Minister–NSA alignment can deflect decisions in directions other than what might have emerged from collegiate and deliberative political-level decision-making.

Second, personalisation, by making the Prime Minister more than the first among equals, results in going against the grain of the Westminster-style parliamentary democracy system adopted by India. An illustration of this is in the joint doctrine of the military, according the Prime Minister the decision-making authority within the political council (Rej and Joshi 2017: 21), which is at variance with the official nuclear doctrine of 2003 that states: “The Political Council … is the sole body which can authorise the use of nuclear weapons” (MEA 2003).

As for the executive council’s input, its advice collectively arrived at is to be conveyed by the NSA. The interrelationship between the NSA and the institutional heads in the executive council—who largely also sit in the Strategic Policy Group of the NSC system—corresponds to that of the Prime Minister and his political colleagues, one of power asymmetry. The other pillar of the NSC system, the National Security Advisory Board, which is expected to be a repository of national security expertise, has been run aground with its membership comprising four members, including the chair (Economic Times 2018), as against 22 members in the first advisory board headed by the doyen of the strategic community, K Subrahmanyam.

Individual Decision-maker

This brings up shortcomings in nuclear decision-making discernible in the character of the individual decision-maker. At this level, the character of the Prime Minister as decision-maker is consequential. Modi’s significance in his government—best illustrated by the information ministry employing some 200 media watchers to regulate the coverage of the Prime Minister by the media (Bajpai 2018)—magnifies the implications of him being the decision-maker.

Critiques of Modi popularly have it that his is an authoritarian personality. Such appraisals usually compare him with Indira Gandhi, infamous for the Emergency days. Sociologist and clinical psychologist Ashis Nandy (2002) has stated that Modi exhibits a

mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, massive use of the ego defence of projection, denial and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of violence—all set within the matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits.

Nandy (2002) writes that on emerging from the interview in which he formulated this impression of Modi, he felt he “had met a textbook case of a fascist and a prospective killer, perhaps even a future mass murderer.”

Modi’s electoral majorities over three successive elections in his home state, Gujarat, have reinforced his image of having authoritarian traits. He was able to fend off then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s possible move to oust him from chief ministership after the Gujarat carnage (Ullekh 2017). He withstood the scrutiny of the Supreme Court through its Special Investigation Team on his role in the carnage (Dasgupta 2012). Facing these challenges contributed to the rise in his political profile. The habits formed in Gujarat have come to define Modi and have carried over to governmental functioning at the centre.

As can be expected, the nuclear field has been affected (Ahmed 2017). The initial promise from a nuclear doctrinal review having found mention in the manifesto of the Bharatiya Janata Party was dashed with Modi silencing any talk of change, claiming nuclear weapons were a “cultural inheritance” (Reuters 2014). As a result, over the past four years, there have only been hints of possible change, such as in his defence minister making a personal observation in public on whether the no first use (NFU) policy tied down India’s hands (Kanwal 2017: 33–35). Consequently, the official doctrine, predicated on NFU and “massive” retaliation (MEA 2003), remains unchanged. The remainder of this article examines the implications of an unchanged doctrine when viewed through the organisational theory lens at the individual level.

Determinants of Decision-making

Four factors are likely to influence decision-making regarding nuclear use. First, is the Prime Minister’s image of decisiveness. This could tend to push for a quicker decision from the political council, overshadowing the abundant caution that needs to attend such decision-making. Second, is the strong-man image of the Prime Minister and the NSA, who respectively chair the two councils of the NCA. Apprehending a heightened reputational risk from a decision that does not conform to a tough line may lead to an unnecessarily harsh decision on the nature of Pakistan’s punishment for the temerity of going nuclear, albeit at a lower-order level of introduction of nuclear weapons into an ongoing conflict. Third, is the perceived reservations the Prime Minister and the NSA have of Pakistan, evident from the prevalent hard line towards Pakistan. Last, but not least, and compounding this issue, is the attitude that Prime Minister Modi has towards Muslims in general (Malhotra 2017).

The upshot of deliberations on nuclear retaliation is less likely to be in favour of restraint. India may go ahead with its doctrinal follow-through of “massive” retaliation, or a watered-down version: “unacceptable” damage. In a recent iteration of this by a former head of the Strategic Forces Command, Pakistan stands to lose 8,00,000 people as primary casualties and another 12,00,000 as secondary casualties to such retaliation (Shankar 2018).

Lest the walkthrough appears speculative, a look at nuclear developments might strengthen the case on nuclear dangers. Commentary on the Rafale controversy has it that the change was possibly necessitated by India needing a nuclear weapons air-delivery system. The India-specific enhancements that have apparently shot up its cost and necessitating secrecy may have been to the nuclear avionics of the Rafale (Mitra-Iyer 2018). Alongside, India is set to purchase the S-400 Triumf air-defence weapons system from Russia at a steep cost of ₹40,000 crore (Hindu 2018). This system is expected to deploy a
protective screen alongside the Defence Research and Development Organisation’s endogenous and exogenous missile defence system around the national capital region. Expec­tation of protection against Pakistani retaliatory strikes will embolden aggression in nuclear decision-making. It provides a rationale for jettisoning self-deterrence from perceived vulnerabilities that constitute mutual deterrence.

India’s nuclear policy and decision-making structure is designed for democratic decision-making. But, the propensities in India’s higher governmental leadership today appear to be the opposite. Thus, the structure is unlikely to function as envisioned. The hollowing out of India’s institutions can, thus, exact a rather steep price. The very traits in the primary nuclear decision-maker that so enamoured the middle classes and voters at the last hustings show up now as liabilities. An extension for the ruling party at the helm in 2019 increases the likelihood that the unthinkable is at our doorstep.

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