https://aliahd66.substack.com/p/expectations-of-the-tour-of-duty?s=w

Expectations of the Tour of Duty initiative

From Sardar Patel Bhawan to Nagpur

Writing on the Tour of Duty (TOD) initiative, a former military adviser in the National Security Council Secretariat cautions against the baby of military effectiveness being thrown out with the bathwater. He hints at the less remarked reasons for the move, stating, “The other payoffs cited are of strengthening the connection between society and the military, instilling nationalism among the youth, reducing age profile, and providing an opportunity for the youth to fulfil their aspiration of serving in the Armed Forces.”

This post argues that these are not quite ‘other payoffs’. A rationale on financial grounds is but rationalization to sugarcoat TOD to make it palatable for the army to swallow. Commentary from former army men expresses apprehension about the move.

Theory has it that primary group bonding takes time. Horizontal group integration is furthered when the primary group faces and bests challenges, collectively. Personnel turbulence is the enemy of cohesion. Absent cohesion at the primary group level, the army’s operational showing is iffy.

The army’s deployment in operational areas is largely in high altitude and in counter insurgency. Both settings require cohesion in primary groups. This is usually pre-existing, brought about by training together. It can also be generated when faced with adversity and operational tasks.

But this presupposes a degree of personnel stability. In case there is a revolving door system then the time and stability required for horizontal bonding will not be available. This may make cohesion wither.

It is possible to generate cohesion in face of operational dangers – such as in war or crises – and military leaders have the capability to infuse respective outfits with it. However, it’s the organisation’s lookout that cohesion is pre-existing so that the premium on leadership to also cater for it is reduced.

That this aspect stands neglected in the initiative suggests that the organization expects that cohesion will not be required. Hints on this have been abroad for some time. There is an expectation that the future wars will be different in kind.

The assumption is that high intensity wars are passé. The nuclear umbrella precludes these. Advantage can be taken of a peace dividend from nuclear weapons’ possession to see if the army can be re-jigged a bit. Wars if any will be of short duration, subsumed under Limited War. Hybrid wars - with mostly non-contact operations as hallmark - will be the wars of the future. They require composition and skills of a different kind.

These are persuasive arguments. Nevertheless, the initiative begs the question: Why? Why has the government not followed a different route to the same end: rationalizing the defence expenditure?

Elected twice over as a majority government, it is indeed a government with a difference. It is best placed to address both India’s external and internal security issues with long term solutions.

Other governments with less political capital have come close but have fallen short, since they did not command majorities and had to answer to right wing carping for being soft-on-defence. They did not have the certitude of not selling out on the national interest that the right wing has.

The right wing has appropriated ‘nationalist’ credentials and claims to have a better handle on the ‘national’, as against parochial party, dynasty or caste, interest. The right wing also has the social capital having the infrastructure in place to sell its decisions in both polity and society.

Therefore, there was nothing stopping this government from settling India’s security issues with neighbours over the past eight years, as prelude to realigning the army to the changed security circumstance.

With the border problem behind the nation – when Lines of various designations redefined as demarcated borders – and mutually agreed, negotiated solutions to territorial disputes on the cards, the army could have easily been both downsized and upgraded. It would have been spared the calisthenics that the TOD entails. 

The TOD initiative implies that the government believes that it has both sets of problems reasonably fixed. The subtext of the initiative rollout is that wars of last century – the Russian invasion of Ukraine notwithstanding – are not replicable. We don’t need conventionally-oriented militaries, reliant on cohesion to deliver on their operational responsibility. 

This is inexplicable in strategic terms. A country beset with what is popularly called a two-front challenge, attenuated by collusion between two hostile neighbours, cannot be complacent. Let’s take a counter factual. It can be argued that had Covid not interfered, it is well nigh possible that in spring 2020 India might have been subject to joint coercion by its two adversaries, put off by its initiative the previous year rescinding the political map of Jammu and Kashmir.

To drive home the point a hypothetical situation is not required. Even in the context of Ladakh, had Covid not interfered, India may have had to evict the Chinese intrusions. This would have required - along with other measures as standoff missiles and airpower, cyber attacks, information war etc - a Kargil replay. Galwan provides a glimpse. It is arguable that a system sans cohesion cannot deliver at the crunch.

Even if we are to take the internal security situation, from the hiatus in Kashmir and rolling back of Armed Forces Special Powers Act in the North East, it cannot be taken that the central police forces can keep the lid on matters. A spiral in externally-abated insurgency can be expected in case of outbreak of hostilities with normal interdiction of the communication zone by the adversary using proxies.

Insurgency will not go away until politically addressed, which the government has resolutely refrained from doing. Not only did it set the political clock back by its Article 370 convolutions in Kashmir, but also shot itself in the foot in Nagaland while it was doing so. As the army’s experience of the nineties with the evolution under fire of the Rashtriya Rifles suggests that without subunit cohesion, only repression, hardly conducive to conflict termination, will be on call.

Are we to believe that the government expects to succeed in conflict avoidance always and every time? Since strategy is a two-player game, that is rather presumptuous. The government’s main task in war is not to mistake it for anything that it is not. War is pretty only between a hyper-power at the peak of its unipolar moment and a ragtag army, and that too only in its first, opening phase.

Surely, the government is aware of this, since it has a military adviser, albeit one that sings its tune. So to embark on destabilizing the army through the TOD must be with some very good reasons. These are not reckonable in the strategic ken, but have impulse elsewhere.

Strategists make a mistake in analyzing this regime’s actions in conventional terms. Most analysis is in the realist paradigm, unsuited for grasping the regime’s intent and actions. The cultural lens is the best prism to get a fix on it. As Elizabeth Kier had it, militaries are configured in a manner that their internal power is rendered inert by governments more bothered by the internal power equations.

The shift in political culture has been towards firming in of Hindutva. The regime’s aim is its propagation, which at the current juncture entails consolidation. It therefore cannot afford instability and definitely not the uncertainty of conflict. Consequently, war avoidance is its strategy, not so much through deterrence, but through tacit appeasement.

This explains the prime minister going out on a limb to claim there was no intrusion and the subsequent vacuous rounds of interminable military-level talks. Even Operation Snow Leopard was just us dancing solo.

It explains the preceding years of defence budget draw-down, broadcasting to the other adversary, Pakistan, that it need not worry since India is not accentuating the asymmetry with it. The regime pulled its punches even in the surgical strikes, allowing Pakistan to brush these off with contempt.   

Consequently, the strategy is janus-faced: signaling to an external audience a relatively flaccid India, while the internal audience is made to see a fiery India. 

External stability enables the regime to countenance instability within the military. It has already leveled all other institutions. Even the military is considerably degraded in institutional strength. The TOD is thus a preemptive measure to neuter the military by removing any cohesion that it can muster to challenge the regime, a coup proofing of sorts.

It is cover for right wing penetration into the military, through induction of right wing oriented youth. An aim plus is militarization that will remove in one generation the right wing’s belief that Hindu effeteness brought about their slavery for over-a-1000 years. Preparing recruits for the corporate world is hogwash.

The measure also has the plausible purpose - as left-wing critique has it on social media - that the foot-soldiers of the right wing can get trained in military mores officially rather than informally in shakhas. After the Ram Navmi incidents across the country, what they will then be put to then need not be belaboured here.

The outlandish TOD can only have a very useful purpose. Balancing of long term budgetary proportions is the reasoning bureaucrats have added to the pie. The TOD pie has instead been cooked up in Nagpur, with icing done at Sardar Patel Bhawan.   

 https://aliahd66.substack.com/p/an-alternative-strategic-reading?r=i1fws&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=direct

An alternative strategic reading of Modi’s India

A retrospective on Modi’s crises

“Counterfactually, had Modi not become the prime minister, it is difficult to imagine India responding as robustly and tactfully to China and Pakistan as it has done since 2014 (Sreeram Chaulia, Crunch Time, New Delhi: Rupa, 2022, p. 162).” Chaulia’s book makes the case of a robust and tactful Indian response in the four Narendra Modi-led crises – Uri, Doklam, Balakot and Ladakh. Instead, the proposition could be more accurately phrased to read, “Counterfactually, any prime minister post 2014 could have resorted to the options exercised, but may not have had to exercise these.” Though prompted by the book, this post is not a review of it, but an alternative reading of strategic developments dwelt on in the book.

Let’s begin with the attack on the Uri garrison. It was arguably not quite a ‘terror attack’, not being one targeting civilians in order to overawe a political system. A legitimate military target was taken on by the attackers in the context of hostilities on the Line of Control (LC) and the post-Burhan Wani suppressive template in the Valley. Pakistan had post-26/11 mostly switched to targeting security forces, precisely to escape being called out as a terrorist state – it’s lesson-learnt from that episode. The Uri garrison, though taken by surprise, did a plausible job in wresting back the initiative and taking out the 4 attackers at the cost of some 6 of their own, the others unfortunately perishing in an accidental fire. This helps place the reaction in perspective. Surgical strikes by land that could have triggered off a border war can well be taken as over-reaction.

As for the surgical strikes themselves, had any other dispensation been in power it would have had the option too. Recall, surgical strikes at a smaller scale had taken place earlier. That a military operations head who denied having any records of earlier surgical strikes is now the military adviser in the National Security Council Secretariat should tell its own story. His post retirement sinecure owes to his enhancing the myth that the innovation awaited Modi’s arrival to operationalise. The army commander then - who quoted the military operations head in refuting his retired predecessor admitting to the earlier surgical strikes, only conducted discreetly and discretely, is also ensconced in a sinecure, heading the army’s land warfare think tank.

The surgical strikes at the scale they were mounted could not have been launched had there be no preceding instances. Not only was the enabling doctrinal movement in the preceding government’s period, but the tightening up of the execution was itself done. This is best known to the Modi government since it has the then army chief in its council of ministers. General VK Singh is on record admitting to the army’s felicity with contingency operations that enabled it to furnish a set of options not amounting to war when faced with Pakistani provocation.

This was a natural progression to the Cold Start doctrine, an outcome of lessons-learnt from the coercive diplomacy, Operation Parakram, indulged in reaction to the terror attack on the Indian parliament. The doctrine having been fine-tuned by decade-end, the army moved to more usable military options, referred to by General VK Singh. Cold Start did not have the answers that presumably were asked post 26/11 during considerations on how to get back at Pakistan without triggering a nuclear conflict. It was a conventional doctrine, which though mindful of nuclear thresholds, had built-in escalatory tendencies. Missing were subconventional options which would put additional buffers.

In any case, such options did not require a doctrinal nod. These had been in evidence even prior to doctrine catching up. Stories abound of head-hunting expeditions by both sides on the LC, necessitated by retaining or regaining ‘moral ascendancy’ – a term central to a military’s self-regard in a competitive setting. These took a leaf out the First World War book, when raids were launched across frozen trench lines lest Christmas Truce-like situations erupt across it. An Army Chief in the context of the beheading of a soldier on the LC said that he encourages aggression tactical level commanders, implying that the chain of command had been given full play to get even. In short, landward surgical strikes were not an innovation, but a pre-existing practice, which by the time Modi came to power had doctrinal imprimatur. The subconventional doctrine, dubbing these border skirmishes, steers clear of discussing them for reasons of confidentiality.

What of the effects of the surgical strikes? In the tradition of the Gurdaspur and Pathankot attacks that were prior to surgical strikes, Nagrota, Lethpora, Sanjuwan and finally, Pulwama yet happened. Landward surgical strikes failed to deter. That aerial surgical strikes followed shows landward surgical strikes exhausted their utility in a single iteration. Faced with Pulwama, and having lost surprise with the earlier surgical strikes, a step-up the ladder with the aerial option was next, though that should not really have been the only punitive response option left.

It is true that putting a new idea into an Army’s head is made difficult by the old idea occupying it. The Cold Start concept was based on integrated battle groups (IBGs), but these were not self-consciously operationalised. Strike corps continued their sway well into the nuclear age, due in part to internal turf dynamics of the Army occasioned by its Kashmir commitment. The infantry-artillery lobby reigned at the cost of the mechanized one, making the latter loath to let up on its raison d'être – the strike corps and its potentiality for the mythical Blitzkrieg.

It was only with General Rawat taking over as Army Chief that he turned to IBGs. Incidentally, Pulwama happened just a week after the Army announced, 15 years after the idea was mooted, IBG test-bed exercises. If these were available prior, then a landward strike could also have been countenanced to substitute for Balakot. Also, since Cold Start remained the conventional option, its hypothetical unfurling in wake of a Pakistani landward riposte - instead of Swift Retort - could have pushed the crisis into conflict in short order.

This reinforces the case of an unnecessary risk being run, especially since Pulwama was not a terror attack, targeting as it did a military target in the context of heightened counter insurgency operations that had accounted for over 700 Kashmiri youth. As for Pulwama being a black operation, that a book has come out refuting the idea shows up the info war; only to deepen suspicions on what’s being hidden.  

Balakot has been on the cards with the Air Force advocating subconventional use of air power well prior. This may have had institutional interest at heart, in that the nuclear age making an unmistakable advent in the subcontinent in 1998, feasibility of conventional war receded. The Air Force grabbed at straws; making itself more relevant to India’s ongoing national security concern in Kashmir being one such avenue. Writing in the 2004 edition of Trishul, a group captain makes the case that air power is relevant across the three stages of insurgency: strategic defensive, stalemate and offensive. It is also useful to coerce the sponsor. Thus, with the concept crystallized and finding mention in the joint doctrine on subconvetional operations, the Air Force had some 15 years of head-start on preparation, constantly figuring among the options when contemplating response to both 26/11 and Uri. That it was unleashed at Balakot and did not deliver quite as planned is another matter. That its showing in the Pakistani riposte - Swift Retort - was also arguably below par is also a matter that need not detain us here.

The choice of target - made much of for being in mainland Pakistan - was a novelty. Even so, the bravado lost its shine somewhat with the Indian statement emphasizing that it as a ‘non-military preemptive’ strike, presumably anchored on the choice of target being non-military - rather than the mode of delivery of the ordnance - and the intent, pre-emptive. Pre-emption is a fraught term borrowed from the Americans. Prevention is the more saleable international security jargon. Sloppy drafting is the least of concerns.

It bears reflection as to what might have been the case had India actually taken out the 300 seminary students it claims. Recall, since Pakistan had taken to privileging the American end-game in Afghanistan, it had already started pulling its punches in its proxy war in Kashmir. India would have ended up willy-nilly bestirring it against its better judgment, since jihadi energy to the Pakistan Army is better directed at India than within Pakistan.

Even so, the escalatory prospects intrinsic in crises were in full play. Narendra Modi avers to an aborted ‘qatl ki raat’, tacit reference to readying for a missile exchange. This was over a relative triviality, supposedly to prompt release of a downed pilot, in any case subject to protections of the Geneva Conventions. Instead, the potential over-reaction was to divert attention from the lost aerial skirmish of that morning, which, incidentally, coincided with India also accidentally shooting down its own helicopter. The possible result of the missile exchange - if it had come about - might well have focused minds enough to have the Security Council take a view on what to do about the bone of contention, Kashmir, that remains on its agenda, albeit latently, and with good reason. It is unlikely that the world will sit by an Iraq-Iran War of Cities replay between nuclear powers. India got away lightly in the misfired missile episode recently only because the Ukraine War was on.

Next, the two crises with China merit attention.

The outcome of the one at Doklam, where India stood its ground for over 70 days, has it that the Chinese are very much back on the plateau and have completed what they set out to. This prompts the question: what was all the hulla-gulla about? Did India concede what it had wished to prevent when it launched into the Doklam crisis to wind up its deployment? That the Chinese activity on the plateau was in full-swing as early as autumn suggests as much.

India’s showing in Doklam evidently did not deter China from its Ladakh intrusion later. Neither did the two informal Modi-Xi summits that followed. Could it be that the Chinese had a measure of Indian resolve through both Doklam and from the two summits, which instead of deterring them, prompted the intrusion? Therefore, unlike in the advertisement that attends Modi’s resolve and international showing as a statesman, is the credibility of Modi’s India not quite as vaunted?

India had completed the doctrinal movement, on over the preceding decade in relation to China. Having a reckonable answer to Pakistani provocations in the mentioned contingency operations backed by Cold Start duly-refined, India had shifted - lock-step with the pivot to Asia of the Americans - to countenancing a two-front scenario. The two-front scenario owed to Pakistan not having gone away, even as India – as the next great power – wished to punch above its weight by weighing against China.

Through the decade, Indian Army valiantly tried to convince two different governments on the desirability of an offensive mountain strike corps (MSC). All it got at decade-end was a truncated corps, debilitated by lack of economic heft in Modi’s India – itself an outcome of the hubris that attended the decision on demonentisation.

Even so, by end 2019, India had practiced the IBGs intended for portions of the China front. Thus, India’s Army, fresh from its test-bed exercises was partially in a position to implement its doctrine by launch of IBGs and the MSC. When Covid did not stop the Chinese ingress, it cannot be argued that it stopped India’s readily available and recently practiced IBGs. That India pushed up 50000 troops soon enough shows that a set of these troops could well have on a short fuse also gone across. That it could occupy heights on own side of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Operation Snow Leopard shows that troops could also have occupied unheld heights across LAC. The term ‘defensive offence’ – an unlettered mouthing confusing ‘offensive defence’, the term favoured by the Land Warfare Doctrine 2018 – could have served as cover, but India chose shadow-boxing over stepping into the ring. India settled for an info war directed at its own people, rather than manipulating escalation by offensive action. That interminable talks are on shows how military heft is required for talks to be meaningful.

An alternative reading is necessary since the spin on Modi’s showing in these crises has him as the intervening variable between provocation and reaction. The reaction is hyped-up and portrayed as evidence of Modi’s potential as a war leader, while not chancing escalation is seen as maturity. Instead the reading here is that not only was the reaction insipid, but shying off escalation where warranted shows up the butterflies in the stomach. (It’s for another post to dwell on why the crises came about in first place, brought on by policies impelled by Hindutva, a narrow ideology of the Modi regime.) It is important to put a pin into this balloon lest at the next crisis, we believe the myth of our own creation and the enemy gets to pin the balloon. 

 https://aliahd66.substack.com/p/hindi-hindu-hindusthan?r=i1fws&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Hindi-Hindu-Hindu-sthan

The last nails in the coffin of the Indian First Republic

Amit Shah launched a trial balloon recently. He opined that Indians must use Hindi as their link language since inter-citizen communication “should be in the language of India". To him, Hindi is the natural alternative to English. He misses that this advantages native speakers of Hindi over those whose language it is not, which evidently happen to be the majority. Thus, there is willy-nilly a subordination of one by the other: the non-Hindi speaker disadvantaged.

Howsoever delicate a policy is thought up for its spread it will amount to an imposition or be perceived as such. Official backing of Hindi elsewhere can tantamount to language imperialism, eliciting backlash, which in extreme can take on proportions of civil war. We need look no further than our neighbours, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In both cases, the term genocide figured to describe the consequence of the language policy imposing an alien language on those whose language it wasn’t. Putting down the civil war led to credible allegations of genocide in both cases.

This shows how sensitive the issue is and therefore requires looking at through a national security lens. That the idea has itself figured owes to ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindu-sthan’ conception of national security. India has not put out a strategic doctrine, but if it were to do so, this trinity would be at its center. The national security minders believe that for unity - signified by the latter term - India needs a dose of the first two. To them Hindu-sthan is not quite Iqbal’s Hindustan (land of the Indus as originally conceived) but abode of Hindus. This conjoins the latter two terms. While this conception builds unity between adherents, it divides these from skeptics, making of those with reservations, anti-national. Therein lie national security connotations of the Hindutva trinity, Hindutva being politicized religion or political Hinduism.

This national security conceptualization has had a life co-extensive with the Hindutva movement. Just as the movement made an advent into the center of national life from the margins in the late eighties and early nineties, it not only brought along its strategic perspective but the world view took further shape as Hindutva went on from the margins to dictating political culture within three decades.

Hindutva’s origins are in Hindu revivalism of the nineteenth century in face of British colonial takeover of India. Its content is captured by the imagery, context and lyrics of Vande Mataram narrated in the book, Anand Math. Though set in the colonial period, the antagonist was not the colonizer, but the Muslim community, that had itself been divested of power by the colonial power. The next influence was fascism in the early twentieth century, with borrowings on ethnic-nationalism from Europe. The competitive interaction with the Muslim League and Muslim separatists in the run up to Partition was its next shaping influence. With Partition, the right wing assumed its place unmistakably, precipitating and participating in the carnage. Partition was as much its handiwork, with its violence potential in conjunction with the separatist Muslim capability and propensities on this score, convincing the leadership that Partition was the only alternative to civil war of uncertain outcome. Though the right wing shot itself in the foot by inspiring the assassination of the Mahatma, its humanitarian interventions in aftermath of Partition could not be wished away. Consequently, the conservative part of the Congress spectrum continued to play footsie with it, even as Nehru kept it marginalized so long as the hangover of freedom lasted. The non-Congress conservative parties were buoyed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an all-India quasi-political outfit then mindful of upper caste and class interests.

Externally, the wars with Pakistan, and the continuing friction with that state over Kashmir, enabled the right wing to espouse an alternative strategic view. In Kashmir, its attitude to integration of that state into the Indian Union, forced the government’s political missteps that in turn led to disaffection in Kashmir. These were capitalized on by the right wing for its purposes of keeping the government on the defensive, a cycle that has continued till the right wing itself in time constituted the government. The government for its part tried to defuse right wing criticism by appropriating a portion of the right wing agenda – reducing the distinctiveness of the state granted in deference to agreements on its entry into the Union - thereby stirring the pot in Kashmir. As regards Pakistan, the right wing maintained an extreme stance of countenancing Akhand Bharat, a figment of imagination that lent itself better to iconography.

Internally, the presence of the right wing, kept the Congress system – that wished to be all things to all people – from doing little more than lip service to the minority Muslim community. Instead, riots were a fixture that helped the right wing take center-stage during their course. In the Indira period, the ‘foreign hand’ turned from being a reference to the United States (US) - with whom Indira was at odds for her socialist turn - to Pakistan’s intelligence agency, then fishing in troubled waters in Punjab. The Congress reaped the nation-under-threat electoral dividend, only to soon have the fiction rudely snatched.

It’s placating the right wings of both communities – Hindu and Muslim - with the Ayodhya opening and Shah Banu episodes set the stage for the right wing to gain center stage. Needing to keep both the Congress and the right wing out, VP Singh unleashed the Other Backward Communities. The right wing, seeing a threat to its upper caste base, seized an opportunity. Riding a chariot across India, its stalwart, Advani, sought to stitch Hindus together by diverting attention to the Ayodhya temple issue, inflating a local land dispute into a national issue. The bringing down of the mosque led to Pakistani complicity in the Bombay bomb blasts, close on the heels of the one-sided violence with state police participation and complicity, against the Muslim minority. This brought forth the ‘Hindu’ aspect of the trinity, with Muslims projected as the internal ‘Other’, a fifth column out to do the bidding of Pakistan, the external ‘Other’.

The tumult in the global order in the period heightened the seeming necessity for unity in diverse polities. Not only did the Soviet Union disappear, but Yugoslavia, another proximate country through the Cold War years, dissolved in violence. The lesson for national security practitioners was that diversity is not a boon. The knitting of Hindus into a vote bank for the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), then started, seemed to provide a way out of the diversity trap. Hinduism had presence across India, but was internally divided by the caste system. The caste system was parochially exploited by political parties. The BJP, not oblivious to caste, appeared to have an answer to political divisiveness and ability to end the era of loose coalition governments of the nineties. At this point, Narendra Modi was dispatched by Vajpayee to Gujarat.

The Muslim Other acquired new dimensions with Narendra Modi, ensconced in Gujarat, taking up his Hindu Hriday Samrat mantle rather seriously. The honorific was itself from his dubious role in the Gujarat pogrom. Those in the security apparatus who were also grappling with internal security issues were looking not only to a unifying potion but a political entrepreneur who could take it forward, ending their worry over fissiparous India. It is speculated here that a nefarious bond formed between the rogue intelligence operatives and the right wing icon. A story of which more needs uncovering is that well before India’s corporate honchos alighted on Modi as the next messiah, India’s intelligence-led ‘deep state’ (to borrow Josy Joseph’s famous description) had picked its mascot.

Evidence for this is in black operations launched by the deep-state comprising rogue intelligence elements in India’s unsupervised intelligence apparatus and right wing extremists. The Gujarat office of the Intelligence Bureau held the back of rogue policemen killing Muslims in encounters supposedly of terrorists out to avenge Gujarat pogrom. That this went on even during the subsequent Congress-led coalition term in office, suggests a ‘deep state’ was active.

There were foreign policy advantages of this that provided legitimacy of sorts: to arraign Pakistan. Since then a political outreach with Pakistan was on, this served to sabotage it. This would help the right wing outbid the government by tacit suggestions that it was the consequential interlocutor and that Pakistan hold its horses till the right wing returned to power. The internal political consequence was more consequential: to return the right wing to power through manufacturing a majority by leveraging the religious identity of Hindus and have them voting qua Hindus as against hitherto along caste lines.  

After some six years in power over two stints (the first of which was truncated after about a year and the second the first full non-Congress term), the right wing had subverted a major portion of the media, itself predominantly upper caste. Since Pakistani proxy war was ascendant in Kashmir and a fresh Indo-Pakistan war had been broadcast nationally, there were enough takers on the ‘external abatement-internal threat’ as the most significant of threats, in line with Chanakya’s thesis some two millennia ago. Thus, a Muslim threat was spuriously manufactured, propagated by closet Hindutavavadis in the strategic community and a media that knew better but was either bought or was a likeminded cheerleader.

The back-draft blew away rationality in strategic discourse. One eminence went so far as to say that the policy of blaming Pakistan for internal security suffered by acknowledging the Hindu provenance of terrorist acts attributed to Muslims, and therefore investigations not be pursued. This, though 26/11 did not require any more exertion on India’s part to keep Pakistan in the dock. Part of the cover up is to valourise the likes of Pragya Thakur and denigrate Hemant Karkare. The strategic community succumbed to the Doval’s stable, anchored in the well funded think tank he led after retirement. Apparently, the conspiracy to take down the anti-corruption movement that had caught the imagination was hatched in its precincts. Military veterans, ferociously looking the part, went on air on Arnab’s show to spread the invective. A former army Chief, who later was spotted in khaki knickers, invited Narendra Modi, till then a provincial chief, to make his debut on the national campaign trail to capture the impregnable Hindu vote bank. The rest as they say is history.

The trinity is a work-in-progress. It provides the framework for the regime’s actions. Hindu-sthan inspires legislation as the Citizens’ Amendment Act, helping turn India from a secular country to one for Hindus. That both Modi and his protégé, Yogi Adityanath aka Bisht, have been voted in twice-over, each with higher percentages the second time round, is the manufacture of a majoritarian democracy from a liberal one on the backs of Hindus. The spread of Hindi by the backdoor shows up the intent. The name tabs on dangrees of naval cadets at their training academy in Kerala are in Hindi.

Change is synonym of instability, since the status quo has to first be unhinged and then retethered to an anchor. The political opposition has been decimated, with the Left missing-in-action for over a decade. The possible contenders are pale imitations of the ruling party and dare not challenge its command of the ideological high ground. Activists, who could have held up a mirror and cried ‘wolf’, have been put on notice by jailing some and intimidating the rest.

The regime believes it has the security conditions in place. It has an intelligence czar as national security adviser. The communalization of the central police forces has been on for over two decades. Its success was most recently visible in the armed police forcing Muslims to sing the national anthem instead of saving them during the Delhi riots. One of these unfortunates died from such coaxing.

The military has been neutered by appointing of regime favourites, as was General Rawat. The current delay in appointing his successor owes to higher demands on virtue signaling by brass-hats for gaining the regime’s attention. Since Hindutva is in the final stage of consolidation before the assault on the Constitution is procedurally made, there is need for a believer in the orthodoxy to be in place, lest the military uncharacteristically get wrong political ideas into its head. That an Engineer officer has been positioned to take over as Army Chief shows coup proofing of sorts. An Engineer, being out of the charmed circle of combat arms brass, cannot be sure of taking it along if he ever needs to; besides, his being at the head undercuts the combat arms lobby. The three-year ‘tour of duty’ scheme must be seen as another example of coup proofing, so that even if the brass gets its wrong, it is unable to implement any ideas  since it would not command allegiance of a limited term rank and file. If it were to do so, a situation as developed for the coup against Erdogan can be expected.

Thus, though the regime has the elements in place for the final nails in the coffin of liberal democracy, it bears warning off. The trinity, seemingly an answer to India’s challenges, may not prove the best potion. If it fails then India is endangered. The potential for failure is intrinsic in the trinity itself. Hindi may not help with unity. The assumption is that with the BJP spread across India, the state governments would be able to administer the bitter pill. As in Karnataka, they can use the Muslim scapegoat to weld Hindus, but that still does not answer if it is enough for Kannadigas to take to Hindi. Tamil Nadu is an entirely different kettle-of-fish altogether. The Sri Lankan experience, including that of India’s vaunted military, must not be forgotten.

Being Hindu, as basis for first-class citizenship, may not build the solidarity to paper over the widening economic divides resulting from the corporatist bent of the regime. Muslims are being offered first-class citizenship, in case they ‘return’. Their choice is being conditioned by a foretaste of what second-class citizenship feels like, being administered from Karnataka to Delhi and Assam. Micro-terror in lynchings is supplement.

As for Hindu-sthan, it suffers the limitation of restricting India’s ambition to the Hindu demographic spread. India, at the center of the subcontinent, would be at odds with its periphery. It would end the strategic unity of South Asia, reforging of which is arguably the sole way for South Asia to transcend Partition and reclaim its pride of place lost with colonization, defined not as Hindutva has it, with arrival of Muslims but the advent of British.

The jury is out on the Hindutva project. It is not certain the electorate voted for it, but it is certain that most of the voters did not. Even so, since it’s the closest Hindutva has got to clinching the project, it will be taken to fruition. A benign outcome can be prayed for of course, but in case it goes awry, the use of the central police will add fuel to the fire. Layering by the Army may worsen matters since it will be the emerging, new Army of the second Republic, New India.