No first-use options

For five years, our politics has starved our military. Now we're suffering the consequences.

Indian Army | Representational image | Vipin Kumar/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

Shortly after conducting the Pokharan II tests, the NDA government made two significant announcements. One was a voluntary moratorium on further nuclear testing, and the other, an unequivocal commitment to no-first-use of nuclear weapons. It is the second that is becoming increasingly relevant as the post-November 26 strategic picture develops. A nuclear weapons power makes a no-first-use commitment only because it is so sure of its conventional deterrence that it believes it won’t need the nukes except in retaliation. India’s larger strategic thinking is, therefore, predicated on two beliefs: that our conventional strength is sufficient to ward off any future, conventional threat from China, and is adequate to deter Pakistan with a threat of punishment. To that extent, nuclear weapons become the weaker, or the losing side’s, option in the subcontinent. India’s deterrent, therefore, remains a decisive conventional superiority. Unless you have it, you cannot talk of no-first-use.

Over the past five years, we have allowed the gap between our conventional strength and Pakistan’s to narrow so dangerously that that deterrent has weakened. That is why Pakistan was bold enough to create war hysteria pro-actively after November 26. The establishment there believes India no longer has the capability of imposing quick and effective retribution and, if a spiral of retaliation escalates, it would be at most a war of attrition, and soon enough the global community would stop it. Or they could raise the nuclear alarm. You can read this cockiness in every post-November 26 move and statement of the Pakistani establishment. Their response was substantively different from what it was even in 2001-’02 after the Parliament attack.

There are clear conclusions to be drawn from it. One, the Pakistanis believe there is far too much Western strategic capital invested with them for the US and allies to allow India to retaliate. But second, and more important, that the gap between India’s conventional forces and theirs is no longer what it used to be. So any Indian talk of retaliation is just talk. That India only threatens retaliation to catch the attention of the world, and that is a game they can play more brazenly, and gainfully.

It is most likely that if the Pakistanis pushed this belief too far, they may live to regret it, because India is now sitting precariously on its patience threshold, beyond which such calculations will not matter. But their basic assessment is sound. India, over the past five years, has frittered away the military advantage created in the preceding five. And the history of our troubled relationship with Pakistan shows that any time our political leadership lapses into such complacence, the generals on the other side get adventurous. Their move into Kargil in 1999 was also mostly based on a similar belief. India, post-1989, had been ignoring its armed forces. Kargil laid bare India’s inadequacies that were underlined, so tellingly, by that one statement from the then army chief, General V.P. Malik: We will fight with whatever we have got. He spoke from pent-up frustration at our system’s inability to procure or produce what the armed forces needed. And he wasn’t wrong. The forces had not inducted a significant new system then for more than a decade. He brilliantly used massed Bofors artillery to back his infantry’s assaults against dug-in intruders on the heights, but it involved such a large percentage of his long-range guns that if the war had escalated, he would have felt the pinch across the battlefront.

The shock of Kargil did make our establishment act. The next couple of years saw some quick spending and acquisitions, so strong was the sense of urgency that even the Tehelka interruption did not slow that momentum. Some new weapon systems and force multipliers did get inducted, and the basic gear and equipment of the average jawan improved. But that phase was short-lived. The Congress’s return to power brought back the Bofors blood feud. The Congress now wanted evidence to pay George Fernandes (and the BJP) back for what they had done to it on Bofors, and the NDA was not willing to bury the hatchet either. Quattrocchi returned to the headlines at that crucial moment as well.

One significant fallout was that the defence establishment now became entirely scared of closing any acquisition deals. In any case, most deals initiated by the NDA were under investigation now, so who was going to push for them? And, similarly, who wanted to risk exploring new ones, just in case the government changed again in these times of anti-incumbency? Waffling over the upgrade and strengthening of high-calibre artillery is a very good example of this politicisation of military acquisitions. Of the three guns that qualified for trials, one is Bofors by another name (BAE-SWS), so who would touch it? The second is from South Africa’s Denel which was black-listed post-Tehelka, and the third, of exotic Singaporean ancestry, is not convincing enough. As a result, our artillery strength is pretty much at a level that was attained in 1989 and considered grossly inadequate by 1999.

You can write an entire book listing such disasters. But the larger picture cannot be missed, by our strategic establishment or that across the border. In areas that give a country decisive conventional superiority – long-range artillery, armour, multi-role aircraft, even submarines – we have allowed our strength to get run down to levels where we have lost our conventional deterrence. And this, as charts accompanying this article show, is borne out by hard figures. In every budget the finance minister draws warm applause when he states that should defence need more money, he will be willing to provide it. The fact, however, is that year after year our defence forces do not manage to spend a large amount of the money allocated to them even in the original budget and so their revised estimates are always lower. And even out of that, they return a dangerously large part of the money provided for new acquisitions unspent. It is also no surprise then that money provided for acquisition, as a percentage of the capital budget, has been declining over the years. As is our own defence spending, as a percentage of GDP.

This is not the way an aspiring global power hopes to survive in such a hostile neighbourhood and preserve the security of its people and their self-respect. And certainly, this is not the way to back a nuclear doctrine that promises no-first-use. Because this allows the nukes to become just one side’s deterrence, and underwrites its adventurist defiance. After the welcome new focus on internal security, therefore, the government would need to look at military preparedness with the same sense of alarm.

Squeezing the sword arm

Every year we budget less for our defence; then we revise that downwards. Even of that, more and more is returned unspent. And this when in two decades, our defence spending has more than halved as a percentage of GDP. This is no way for an aspiring global power to manage its defence, particularly when it lives in such a hostile environment and follows a no-first-use nuclear doctrine.