https://aliahd66.substack.com/p/amrit-kaal-scenarios-out-to-2047

The Modi era has found a name: Amrit kaal. Conjured up last year in wake of the dreadful Covid Wave II, it is now official, finding mention – according to statisticians with nothing better to do – in the prime minister’s Red Fort ramparts speech, all of 14 times. Narendra Modi’s contradicting of Himanta Biswa Sarma the other day on the next prime minister (PM) has put at rest the question that plagued Nehru starting about a similar juncture in his tenure: ‘After Nehru, who?”

It’s going to be Modi for some time. He needs outdo Indira’s 13 years, plain-sailing after an inevitable hat-trick (pun intended) in 2024. His photos from the Garden of Five Senses at his Lok Kalyan Marg residence testifying to his pracharak-edifying physical fitness, he will saunter past Nehru’s, 17. His sanskars - judging from those of the Brahmins let-off for rapes and murders in the Gujarat pogrom - are celestial. Besides, lessons learnt from the security breach on the flyover in the vicinity of Bhagat Singh’s shrine at Hussainiwala and from the chip-laden man gate-crashing National Security Adviser (NSA), Ajit Doval’s residence (that saw the first instance of accountability of any kind in the Modi tenure in the sacking of three of the NSA’s personal security minders), should see him through to Mugabian longevity.

The very plausible excuse will be that his party needs him. After all, its twice-won parliamentary majority owes to the ‘Modi wave’ in each case. In the first instance, it was manufactured on the back of the black operations comprising an India-wide terror bombing campaign that created a Muslim ‘Other’ to carve out a Hindu vote-bank. It then appropriated the national sentiment against corruption by subverting the movement from within by sending in stooges as General VK Singh, ‘Crane’ Bedi and ‘Baba’ Ramdev, all of who were rewarded subsequently. The second time round, the promise of acche din having being dashed on the rocks of demonetization and a botched ‘Gabbar Singh Tax’ rollout, required another resort to black operations: this time at Pulwama.

At Pulwama, a militant in and out of custody some six times reduced a bus in which 40 security men were travelling to ashes. Apparently, there is a book out that tells of where the 80 kgs of explosives came from, but, to cognoscenti, that the explosive found its way – as did the 26/11 attackers into Mumbai and the terrorists targeting the Pathankot airfield – tells its own story. Reportedly, another book tells of the accuracy with which Balakot was targeted. Balakot was the military-feat-that-wasn’t but provided enough space on its back for Narendra Modi to ride into power a second time round. (This author suffering from ‘confirmation bias’ - as trolls inform him on his twitter handle - has no intention of reading either book.)  

As Modi ages, the excuse to continue milking his persona will be that there are alternatives, but fratricide might result if he were to depart the scene or settle into Rashtrapati Bhawan for life. A prime minister-in-waiting might not make it past Covid Wave VI. One who could make a credible alternative has been sidelined from the party’s parliamentary board. Pretenders to the throne are aplenty and all in the age bracket and ambitious enough to see them respectively bid for the new prime ministerial residence at Central Vista. There is an ascetic being mentored for the role, testified to in photos of the prime minister - who changes his shawl at every turn of their stroll together during the tutoring session; a minister with a foreign degree and whose daughter does not own a bar; a chief minister leading a civilisational war between the rest and the Muslim one-third of his state; and, not to forget the South, a brash young man last seen in Srinagar stirring up passions over the tricolor on Lal Chowk, though taking care to stand right behind a gun-toting Sikh cop. The ‘After Modi, who?’ conundrum will be flogged to keep the patriarch going even as he chugs past Biden’s current and Trump’s by then-second term landmarks.

Under continuing Modi leadership, Amrit kaal is at hand. By the centenary of Independent India, New India is to be a ‘developed nation’, two aspirations advisedly twinned. Both journeys began with the end finally of the British Raj in 2014 - as the Bollywood ‘Queen’ reminded us. The nation building part of it has been on for about a century, with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) at it since its inception. Over the past eight years, the Republic is no longer Mahatma Gandhi’s and Nehru’s, but ‘Veer’ Savarkar’s. The nation includes only those subscribing to the latter’s punya bhoomi thesis, though the thesis shuts out spiritual winds – that can only but be universal - from elsewhere. Strangely, while ancient India can be vishwa guru in the spiritual sense (and all other senses including technological), other lands and their peoples cannot.

The development promise is held out yet again to keep the corporate and commercial elite alongside. They fund the project in exchange for second generation neoliberal economic reforms that Modi promised to unleash untying the animal instincts, energies and appetites of capitalism. The middle classes who seek to profit from this marriage of convenience - signified by Hum Do Hamare Do - are doubly advantaged: not only getting an identity-kick from the ‘nation’ but also corral the benefits of development, its underside be paid for by other sucker communities on India’s social and geographic periphery. Luckily for Modi, Covid intervened timely to provide him with an alibi of mahamari to show for a derailed economy – his election a second time round obscuring that his actions had brought this on well prior to Covid onset.

Modi, ably assisted by NSA Doval, fostered ‘politico-military collusion’ – in the words of a leading military watcher - whereby he set the external security coordinates in a manner as to not interfere with or trip up the internal political project, Hindutva. It is two birds with one stone. The two neighbours – Pakistan and China – have been kept mollified, even as the appeasement that has brought this quietude on the borders is projected internally as a work of deterrence. Internally directed information war has it that the two neighbours have been suitably impressed by the bared fangs of the Modi-inaugurated Simha atop the new parliament building. This suffices for voters, willfully and self-interestedly beguiled by the lapdog media with the lies earlier on Balakot and later, on Ladakh.

While on the borders, both sides have been kept engaged by the typically-Indian approach to talks: interminable and meaningless. These have been secret with Pakistan and been between the two militaries with China. Since there is no known expertise in negotiations with the intelligence hands undertaking the secret talks (other than hostage taking negotiations) or with the military, these can get nowhere. Arriving at resolution through talks was never macho enough, even with Manmohan Singh’s (MMS) India, even though the receptive Yin was not absent in MMS, which Anupam Kher purposely over-acted out in his rendering of the Singh character in The Accidental Prime Minister.

The quietude on both lines of control – ceasefire on one and status quo (though not status quo ante) on the other – allow for the political space for consolidation of Hindutva. All institutions – including the judiciary having been brought over and bought out – once there was only the military left. This is being hollowed out by the Agnipath scheme. It is kept without the jointness that a Chief of Defence Staff might have instilled. Thus, the dominance of Hindutva over the political paradigm and political culture going official in an impending make-over of the Constitution by a switch to Hindu Rashtra, there would be no institutional rearguard for the First Republic.

This setting provides for three possible trajectories of the future: the officially-conceived Amrit kaal; a contested Amrit kaal; and, last, an alternative Amrit kaal.

The official Amrit kaal

New India, duly impressed by the success of Har Ghar Tiranga, puts aside its diversity. From a salad bowl it gets to being a melting pot. Hindi-Hindu-Hindusthan resonates, including in the South, where Hindutva made inroads beginning with the Telangana elections. Hyderabad’s Owaisi fled to Dubai, taking his millions, while his pocket borough lined up for ghar wapsi. The Pasmandas, serenaded by Modi, pleaded for the reservation dividend, but there were no sarkari jobs as the government bailed out from its enterprises, including the corporatized and then sold-off Railways. New India swept past the $5 trillion mark and lined up within sight of $30 trillion by when it got to a Grand Old Party-mukt centenary.

The Agniveers thwarted the Army’s last-ditch institutional-interest driven backlash, siding with the deep-selected CDS to thwart the ex-National Defence Academy, combat arms cabal of generals. The generals pleaded that they had mistakenly taken the NDA prayer seriously, that has it: ‘Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.’ Judicial infrastructure was improved, especially judges residences, as was personal security. The judiciary tamped down challenges to the Constitutional make-over to Hindu Rashtra, arguing that the democratic verdict in 2024 indicated that it was the collective will – harking to the ‘collective conscience’ that did Afzal Guru to death.

To provide space for Hindutva to grow roots and sprout, Akhand Bharat was suspended till after Amrit kaal played out. Pakistan was offered ghar wapsi into an India-led South Asian federation. Diminishing marginal utility of the ‘Bangladeshi’ illegal immigrants issue catching up, after its use as another tool to beat Indian Muslims with the compilation of the National Population Register, they were given labour documents and their Aadhar, voter and ration cards taken away.

China, having displaced the United States (US) as the hegemon after the US civil war over Trump’s second loss in the Presidential polls – this time to a coloured woman - dissipated its status, could no longer be messed with.  Taiwan, with US having fallen off the radar, fell in line, putting paid to the hope of realist strategists that China would implode, leaving India as the new kid on the block. Dr. S Jaishankar was put to pasture and pension.

After Modi attained nirvan for his upholding the raj dharma ever since his 2002 ‘action-reaction’ days in Gujarat and Ram Rajya that made Amrit kaal possible, the British war-commemorating India Gate was displaced from its location and a temple dedicated to Modi was constructed. The humble tea seller in him had decreed from his death bed that its glory should not match that of the Ayodhya temple that he had conferred on the people.      

A truncated Amrit kaal

In retrospect, it appeared that the ‘developed nation’ strategy required sequencing. Being double-engined, there was more likelihood of a wreck. Both engines, trying to get ahead, tripped each other up. Getting to ‘nation’ required Hindus to give up their identity, anchored historically in caste. Depressed classes were offered cosmetic hand-me-downs, but then instances, as of the upper caste teacher thrashing a lower caste student for partaking of water from his pail, set back the idea. Muslims, already nonentities politically and marginalized socially, did not take up the ghar wapsi bait since it meant getting reinstated at the bottom of the pyramid whence an ancestor had fled. All indicators pointed that they were already there.

As for ‘development’, New India continued plunder of forests, extracted coal, sold it off to China and used the strategic roads - constructed to keep out China - for bringing in China-made goods in return. Corporates into export of armaments drew a blank as Ecuador took India to trade arbiters over imported Dhruv helicopters falling out of its skies. The Agnipath scheme could not absorb all the surplus would-be Agniveers. Most millionaires, not needing cue from the Lalit Modi and Vijay Mallya, decamped for Canada and the Caribbean, in footsteps of 31000 who’ve left since business-friendly Modi’s ascent. Unicorns turned out myths. The right wing control of Hyderabad and Bangalore, led up to restive social relations, frightening off the investments in the two Information Technology hubs. Tamil Nadu’s finance minister challenged the federal arrangement as keeping his people back. Tamils drifted back to its skepticism of the Center that it had given up during the 1962 War.

The Gandhi siblings - physically fit and relative young - took their street fighter avatar that fortuitously emerged from their faceoff with the Enforcement Directorate further. They were joined by the farmers, displaced tribals, Muslims threatened with disenfranchisement, the unemployed, assorted denizens of the Khan Market gang and Lutyens’ Delhi, climate change victims and laid-off Agniveers. Even though China rebuffed them – not needing to lend a hand to have India keel over since India was doing a fine enough job on its very own - the Maoists emerged from their forested hold-outs. Though the Bhima Koregaon detainees numbered into three digits, even though many succumbed to malaria in custody, their apologists in the academia helped forge linkages within the underclass. RSS shakhas were disrupted in the mohallas and rural unrest widened. Climate change heat waves pushed many into poverty, making the country side resemble India of the sixties.

Pakistan, espying opportunity, diverted some Punjabi jihadi energy to Kashmir. There was enough hardware from the $7 billion left over by the Americans in Afghanistan to equip them with. The army reverted from the Ladakh border. The Chinese 1959 claim line was conceded and de-facto Chinese occupation accepted with Ladakh demilitarized. This didn’t help in the western front since Pakistan was now a frontline state again, but being a Chinese proxy enjoyed impunity. It turned out, happily, that India’s nuclear weapons were indeed – unlike what Modi said – meant for Diwali.

In a succession battle, Modi was kicked upstairs as Rashtrapati and had the PM Cares fund to retire with. His saffron-robed successor won a Moghul era-resembling succession battle. Churchill, in his grave, was reportedly pleased to note India reverting to his description of it as a ‘geographical expression’.

A wishful Amrit kaal

The stench from the regime’s electoral pursuit was too much even for bhakts. People could see that though a Muslim, Bilkis Banu was a woman. An agitation equaling the one for Nirbhaya, forced her rapists – even though Brahmin - back into jail. This turned out the second peoples’ victory after the farmer’s agitation. As prices went up, people asked for acche din in return for their vote. Noticing that these were placed some 25 years away by the Amrit kaal rhetoric, they emulated counterparts in Sri Lanka. The once-failed Agniveer agitation - that went violent and lost peoples’ support - was revived. The Sarkar was prevented from disinvesting (euphemism of allowing a national asset to go to seed so as to have an excuse to hand over at a pittance to a capitalist crony). Godi media anchors started getting heckled, its reporters pushed around and its outdoor broadcast equipment mysteriously catching flames.

In 2024, Modi was voted out of power. His ghost-written memoirs only rivalled Mein Kampf sales in Gujarat. Critiques panned it as a Bunch of Lies, recalling RSS’ Guruji’s title, Bunch of Thoughts. His foray into speech-making, à la his good friend Barack Obama, flopped because the teleprompter cat was long out of the bag.

A peoples’ agitation, reminiscent of non-violent Quit India protests, got going in Kashmir. Its leadership invited the Kashmiri Pandits back, guaranteeing their safety and dignity. Pakistan, with a new dispensation in Islamabad - and the military duly chastened from their support and its aftermath for Imran Khan - was more politically able. India was in a position to restart where talks left off in 2008 and had sputtered to a halt with Sushma Swaraj’s Islamabad visit. India had secretly conceded more ground than Modi or Doval would care to admit, so the start point was mutually agreeable to both. Kashmir reverted to statehood and fair elections held.

China, deprived of a proxy partner to tie India down to South Asia, was more amenable to talks. Talks were upgraded to diplomatic level and mandated to deliver a border settlement in a time-bound manner. India was willing to countenance tradeoffs, and went public with the options. This transparency helped mould public opinion, allowing the two sides flexibility on the table. China, for its part, was sanguine that India not a rentier state for the US. Within India, Amit Shah’s ‘chronology’ abandoned, India could reach out to neighbours, together creating a South Asia at ease with itself. 

India made environmental laws stringent. Development was no longer at the cost of future generations or its adivasis. Climate change effects and extreme weather events were not denied any more in policy making circles. Cooperative federalism was more in evidence. Economic devolution to states was its spirit. The judiciary suddenly found its mojo and reopened the case of death of Justice Loya and the case he was engaged with when he died. The accused could not this time round circumvent court appearances.

The right wing party was purged off its extremist leadership that had taken over in a party coup by placing the party’s elders into a marg darshak mandal, and reverted to being a normal conservative party. The Left parties made a comeback with their critique of the economic path hitting home. Thus, India ended up with a four cornered contest: conservatives, middle roaders that included the Congress and identity-based ones, the Left and regional parties. Hinduism was wrested back from those perverting it. Reportedly, a shocked Churchill slipped and fell into purgatory.

Of the three scenarios, it’s easy to see where India is headed. A cataclysm lies ahead. A timeline that has Nadir Shah’s sacking of Delhi, the Mutiny and Partition well spaced out implies that another could be in the offing. The relations with neighbours and an internal situation that is delicate, strategic structural infirmities and doctrinal ambiguities and the leadership’s moral deficit all conspire to set up a ‘perfect storm’. The scapegoat - Muslims - is readily available, so are storm troopers and mass (mis)leaders. The RSS has inserted its tentacles into all walks of life, deflating all institutions of any moral worth. All the Chanakyan cunning of the presiding duo and the vaunted strategic acuity of Doval and his coterie will not measure up. This is known best by them, which explains India pussyfooting round Operation Swift Retort and in Ladakh. It’s far easier to badger a minority through micro-terrorism than to be confrontationist externally. Akhand Bharat is without any cost, being but tall talk. Internally, it is far easier to coast along than to chance reforms of the police and corrections system and insist on application of the rule of law. The fixation on the Dynasty shows up a fear, since the Dynasty can serve to focus and articulate the hopes of the people. If a mere tweet can have the trolls scurrying to the aid of the Emperor, other modes of political action are both plausible and potent. This shows some relief in the gloom. Even as the regime contemplates what to substitute the words, ‘We, the people…’, with ‘We, the Hindus/Sanatanis/Brahmins/Bhatkts….?, ‘the people’ themselves have merely two years to ponder who they are and who they want to be.

 https://t.co/fX6ZMA6ira

How Partition Shaped One Family 

The state of Hyderabad, situated in the Deccan, was not impacted by Partition as much as it was by what was termed “Police Action.” Even so, Brigadier Ali Ahmed of the Hyderabad State Forces was determined to keep his family together and in India. During Police Action, he commanded the southwestern sector against the invasion of Indian forces. As member of the Hyderabad delegation in the Standstill talks with India, he had advised against the confrontation, relying on military knowledge from his days as the first State Forces officer to undergo training at the Quetta Staff College. 

Though he chose not to take up the Indian Army’s offer to join, he sent his son who had been escorted back from the Royal Indian Military College during Partition, along with other Muslim cadets, to rejoin the school. Two younger sons soon followed their brother into the military. Their three sisters married officers of the security forces. From the next generation, three joined the Services. By the early nineties, their immediate family had members serving at every rank, from second lieutenant to lieutenant general. Today, while the rest have retired, a Major General commands a formation on the China front. Thus, Brigadier Ali Ahmed ended up patriarch of the Indian Muslims largest Services family. 

 https://aliahd66.substack.com/p/tupolevs-and-the-place-of-nukes-in

Tupolevs and the place of nukes in India’s grand strategy

Note: The news is unconfirmed, with one informant saying that the former Air Chief was misquoted. Even so, the analysis stands.

In its typical style, India’s regime pulled a rabbit from its nuclear hat. It’s reportedly going in for six Tupolev strategic bombers. The unveiling was in a curious manner, a former Air Chief going public with the news at a conference. But as is its habit, there was no preceding discussion on the move. Even India’s leading nuclear hawk, Bharat Karnad, who has long advocated such moves, was also pleasantly surprised at the conference.

It seems India’s Strategic Planning Staff of (SPS) is in full gear. But the SPS can only propose and presumably does so with a strategic rationale. Acceptance of an SPS proposal at the political level can only genuflect to strategy. It is informed by political parameters that, in India’s case, do not all necessarily have external, geopolitical stimuli. The impulse behind the decision therefore cannot be sought in looking at power equations and how the next war might play out, as is the wont of strategists. Instead, in India’s case, it must be seen against the principle political project of the regime: the consolidation of Hindutva.

India’s grand strategy

India’s grand strategy has so far eluded strategists. Their excuse is that it has not been written down. To critics, this is because it does not exist. This helps the strategic community to pussy-foot round the elephant in the room for some 100 years now: Hindutva. Strategic vocabulary, largely a product of rationalist-modern conception of state as a social contract centered on the Constitution, cannot easily accommodate an identity-based idea of the Indian nation. The National Security Adviser (NSA)-led Defence Planning Committee – mandated to write up the national security strategy - cannot admit to this as impulse, since identity is seen as infra-dig in a rational-modern undertaking. Personal politics keeps NSA Ajit Doval from taking cue from Foreign Minister Jaishankar’s helpful rumination on ancient well springs of Indian strategic philosophy. So, India’s grand strategy eight years into the Narendra Modi era, notwithstanding the regime’s boasts of being strong-on-defence, is still under wraps.

For our purposes here, even as the charade continues, the grand strategy can arguably be inferred from the strategic actions of the regime. In its first term, the regime went about consolidating itself in power, in order that it could propagate Hindutva, its ideological fount. It sought to set the external environment in a manner as to not upset its internal aim. Its second tenure sees Hindutva as the dominant political philosophy in political culture. External stability is prerequisite to ensure longevity of and deepening of hold of this political philosophy over Indian minds.   

Having set the internal house in order with the political (and partially social) dominance of Hindutva in the run up to and winning of the 2014 elections, the regime in its first term shifted to strategic proactivism. Its excuse for strategic assertiveness was that its reaching out to Pakistan not having met with due regard, left it with no recourse. Recall Modi’s visit to Sharif’s home was spurned in the terror attack on Pathankot airfield.  

Soon enough it was disabused of its illusions over strategic assertion by both neighbours. Not only did Pakistan strike back within 48 hours of Indian aerial surgical strikes, but drew blood in aerial combat as it did so. Modi was reduced to rhetoric, referring to nuclear weapons as not meant for ‘diwali’. As for the China front, he publicly dissimulated on intrusions in Ladakh, hoping his sway over the discourse would carry the day. In the event, talks have traded Indian operational space for the Modi dispensation claim of staring down the Chinese. Its deterrence bid having drawn a blank at Doklam, there is a turn to strategy: to one of appeasement.

As things stand, there is quietude on the Pakistan front. With Pakistan preoccupied internally, recently revealed secret talks have not been taken to their logical conclusion. Pakistan is holding out to see developments in Kashmir, namely, elections and reversion to the India-promised statehood. India developed cold feet in Kashmir – after the Gupkar signatories upturned its Kashmir strategy in local level elections. Unsure that electoral chicanery – by manipulation of the assembly constituencies by a demarcation commission – will gain the regime a puppet in Srinagar, India is held up on elections.

Against China, an interminable round of military talks continues, supplemented with working level diplomatic talks designed to go nowhere. The Special Representative – who is the NSA – and the defence and foreign ministers have studiously kept from taking the talks forward. The regime, despite its parliamentary majority, is unwilling to invest politically in border talks. Their scope is now to retain the post-intrusion status quo, while dressing it up internally as a partial - for now - return to status quo ante. China is reportedly building infrastructure on talks’ process-conceded Indian land, but official prevarication continues.

Almost as if messaging both neighbours, India has shelved its strategic proactivism of the first term. Not only has the Chief of Defence Staff appointment been kept unfilled for unconscionably long, but a newly launched scheme – Agnipath – has been thought up to scupper the military. The military is kept introspective with reforms (integrated theatre commands) and an offensive turn (integrated battle groups (IBG)) taking their leisurely pace. Only one offensive IBG has been conjured up on the Pakistan front since the concept was envisaged twenty years ago as part of Cold Start doctrinal thinking. Its forces are kept operationally deployed in a supposedly deterrent posture on the China front, though doing so interminably will lead to a tiring out in the middle term. It’s going in for reducing the Army’s numbers, can only attenuate this problem. 

What we see is a dilution in strategic posture on both fronts. This is of a piece with a policy of appeasement. Appeasement having a bad press, it is obfuscated over by initiatives as the currently ongoing exercise with troops of the United States (US) and, in a first, talks with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Appeasement is projected as temporary, to tide over India catching up with China’s head-start of some 10 years and to end the ‘two front’ problem by having the failing state, Pakistan, fall off the equation. The interim is to be used to build up muscle power – (Rafale, air craft carrier, S-400, nuclear powered and armed submarines etc) and its projection capability through, for instance, road building and jointness. By end decade, a self-confident India could then credibly fend off China. Evidently the Ukraine example of taking down a formidable foe happened rather too late for India to emulate. ‘By not losing, Ukraine wins’ is a concept of victory subscribed to by underdogs. India – a civilisation at par with China – cannot see itself as underdog.  

The external prong of strategy allows for breathing space to consolidate Hindutva internally. Having seen what a mere intrusion could do – be it in Kargil or Ladakh - Hindutva cannot countenance instability resulting from issues with neighbours getting out of hand. Modi would prefer to forego an Indira moment (1971) rather than chance a Nehru moment (1962). Military resort being intrinsically of uncertain result cannot be hazarded. Therefore, war avoidance is best.

Deterrence and appeasement are two strategic options that furnish such an aim. Deterrence having failed, appeasement is the default option. It buys time for Hindutva – through gimmicks as Agnipath – to militarise Indians, enabling internal balancing. Alongside, external balancing is by taking on Pakistan’s hitherto role as rentier state, offering India’s strategic location for the US for use in its faceoff against challenger China. Deft diplomatic footwork is expected to keep the strategic pot from boiling over.

Locating nukes

This rather long introduction is to help situate nuclear weapons in India’s strategy. The current storm in the tea cup is the reported intention to acquire the Tupolev 160 for the role of a strategic bomber. An ability to threaten China’s eastern seaboard would stay Beijing’s nuclear hand. Having both the nuclear and conventional advantages, China has escalation dominance.

A serving Indian colonel, writing for the website of the Army’s think tank, bids for counter value targeting by India for deterring China. He advocates that India, “(A)dopt a ‘Conditional First Use’, nuclear policy which would permit India to launch its counter value nuclear strikes if the casus-belli of Indian Redlines are crossed.” Intriguingly, his very next point rides on the back of a Herman Kahn quote: “holding the enemy’s population centres as intact Hostages can guarantee survival of own population centers.” With this, he contradicts himself, in that if India is to go counter value at first blush, then how are cities held hostage? Cities can be held hostage if India does not go in for counter value targeting on its invoking the ‘conditional First Use’ when China trips up a trip wire. The author predicates First Use with ‘conditional’ as he appears shy of calling for ‘first use’ right off. No First Use (NFU) has been India’s virtue signaling for close to a half-century. Jettisoning it is not easy for the colonel. All first use is ‘conditional’, even a ‘bolt from the blue’ first strike – conditional on, say, a closing window of opportunity. In any case, India’s NFU has been undercut by at least two defence ministers, who sit in its Nuclear Command Authority.

What’s intriguing is advocacy for first use to be massive (counter value or the going after cities, and, if Karnad is persuasive, dams). It would expose India to counter strike of more grievous proportion. This blindsides India’s vulnerabilities. It is implausible that the incomplete-as-yet acquisition of the S-400 and nuclear defences, that rest on the defence research organization’s tall claims and tunneling in environmentally vulnerable mountain zones, can assuage these concerns.

Nuclear thinker, Ashley Tellis, in his latest opus for the Carnegie think tank, writes that despite nuclear developments across the board in Southern Asia, India largely maintains its nuclear doctrine of deterrence by punishment, predicated on NFU and punitive retaliation. However, both have come under cloud. As per the preceding NSA, India contemplated the launch-on-warning option, that, to a couple of strategic hands has first strike proportions. Tellis informs there is not only doctrinal flexibility but also operational capability for proportionate retaliation. Even so, he flogs his quarter-century old thesis of the Indian deterrent being more of a force-in-being.

However, there is a sound perspective that the deterrent is more readily usable and in a war fighting mode informed by deterrence by denial. Pakistan has broadcast its deterrence by denial philosophy, which when matched with India’s deterrence by punishment promises escalation. Since India has more to lose and Pakistan – having little - has little to lose, escalation dominance is not necessarily in India’s favour. Against China, it would be fool hardy to provoke higher order exchanges from a position of disadvantage. India too has much to lose, therefore cannot replicate Pakistan’s gung-ho attitude to wrest escalation dominance from China.

Escalation dominance is not about equations alone, it’s also judgments on moral strength. What stays the hand of a decision maker is the assessed degree of hurt received, even if what makes a finger itchy is the degree of harm that can be inflicted. The hurt-harm calculus is central to escalation dominance, more a moral than a material factor. In India’s case it must be seen against the Hindutva project, central to the regime’s grand strategy.  

Returning to the Tupolev

Tellis’ thesis on Indian nuclear conservatism – sticking with a doctrine beyond its sell-by date - better explains the acquisition of the capability to inflict punitive retaliation that is conferred by the Tupolev. The regime is tacitly revealing a capability to hit mainland China. The capability is questionable since a nuclear package would require half of India’s Air Force to see it through to target. The force package for the Balakot strike and the response to Pakistan’s Operation Swift Retort indicate as much. Losing the Tupolev enroute – the defence-offence game always being of indefinite outcome – would be equivalent to losing the HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales. Therefore, its fit with the regime’s grand strategy is a better way to figure out what it really means.

There is little threat of the two sides coming to meaningful blows. Post-spring 2020, China is satiated, having never claimed Ladakh beyond its 1959 claim line. It has kept up a notional claim to ‘South Tibet’, but having vacated it in 1962 has left the difficulties of its  defence to tie India down. Evidently, Tibetan territorial interests only instrumentally drive the Chinese. In any case, Indian deterrence, regurgitated with two divisions, has held up. India is not about to precipitate matters in light of its switch to appeasement. Its plurilateralism allows cover for engaging China, with trade hitting record highs as is the adverse trade balance. Even Chinese provocation of the levels that obtained in Ladakh could not budge India from strategic restraint, a term associated with the preceding, Congress-led government. This suggests that with hostilities remote, it is possible for India to remain in the game by projecting a capability to take on China. At upper rungs of a nuclear ladder this will only remain untested, a bluff not about to be called.

Apologists might have it that India was unable to respond with gusto in Ladakh on account of force asymmetry. It was hobbled by escalation dominance in Chinese favour. Were India was to have forcefully pushed the Chinese out, conventional escalation – horizontal and vertical – might have ensued. If India was to compensate by asymmetric escalation, it would still have been shy of escalation dominance at the nuclear level. Self-deterrence would keep it from going nuclear at its lowest rung – tactical or operational level nuclear first use. The ability of China to withstand escalation pressures had to be whittled by acquiring an ability to render China’s urban heartland insecure. Geography has given India a poorer hand, with its Gangetic heartland being within sight of the Tibet plateau, site of Chinese missiles. In contrast, India’s ballistic missile submarine force is taking time to gain potency. It’s doubly short: of boats on patrol and ballistic missile range. Its land based ballistic missiles need complementing with an air delivery vector.

This is where the Tupolev comes in. A fledgling strategic triad duly reinforced in one medium – in this case air – helps ward-off self-deterrence, enabling reaching for nukes are lower rungs of the escalation ladder, commensurate with the trip wire crossed. A deficit in escalation dominance at the conventional level, that apparently prevented India from responding adequately to the Ladakh provocation, seemingly stands addressed by enabling India to countenance asymmetric escalation and deterrence by denial. At lower nuclear rungs, the match is relatively equal since any exchange would not involve several iterations, either being discontinued on better sense prevailing or escalating to consequential exchanges prior to either of the two expending their respective nuclear armoury designated for that level. Thus, India can checkmate China.

Politically, when the bluff is not going to be called – appeasement having made it more remote - it’s easier to trade on it. An internal political dividend is the offing. The regime can tacitly present itself as weighing-in in the Chinese weight category, matching it at the higher end of the nuclear ladder. The timing of the annoucement suggests a need to dispel the critique that India might fall military to China within a mere ten days. At the organizational level, since this puts the Air Force closer to pole position in the strategic triad stakes, prosaic reasons can also be at play. It gives the Air Force some reason for bluster, as sweetner to fall in line with the theaterisation concept it is reluctant to sign up to.

Factoring in grand strategy

For Tupolev like acquisitions have a strategic rationale, this is not what carries the day. Just as in the US system, the predilections of the military industrial complex and inter-service bureaucratic politics cannot be wished away, in India, strategic calculations provide rationalizations while the impulse behind strategic moves must be sought elsewhere. In India, this is in viewing the move in relation to the regime’s pet project: Hindutva. Moves that further the project have political backing. Therefore, strategic rationale must be complemented by a political level perspective to understand India’s strategic moves. Here the case study was of the Tupolev. The approach of factoring in grand strategy can serve as a model to holistically view other and future strategic moves of the regime.