Military & Aerospace

India: Strategic Challenges and Responses
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Issue Net Edition | Date : 04 Apr , 2013


At the outset let me clarify that I will discuss the subject primarily from the foreign policy and security point of view.

Many believe that strategic challenges should now include those relating to energy, environment, population, food, health, climate change and the like.

India is a country most challenged by terrorism because, unlike any other country, a powerful, nuclear armed state is using it as a form of asymmetric warfare against us.

With the end of the Cold War and the perception that all-out conflict between the principal powers is now out of the question as everyone has too much to lose, attention has shifted to non-military challenges.

The phenomenon of globalisation has contributed to this changed perspective. Countries have got tied together increasingly through global economic integration and therefore their prosperity has become intertwined. Nothing is to be gained by capturing territory and acquiring resources through the use of force. It is better to capture markets and acquire control over resources through investment.

Economic prowess and technological innovation enable countries and corporations to exercise global power without the burden of governing foreign lands and peoples. That is why so much importance is being given to innovation for survival in what is becoming a highly competitive world

Some of this may be true, but this is looking at the world from the perspective of the West. The collapse of the Soviet Union ended the military challenge to the US, leaving it as the only global power. It also ended a military threat to West Europe.

With the incorporation of East Europe into the European Union and the dismembering of Yugoslavia, Europe has secured peace within its frontiers. Consequently, the West stresses non-military threats or threats by non-state actors as the real strategic challenges to its security, prosperity and traditional dominance of international affairs.

India’s Perspective

India’s perspective has to be different. We are still vulnerable to traditional threats, quite apart from those emanating from non-state actors.

The structures of the international system are biased against countries like India. Changing them to reflect the realities of today is a strategic challenge for us. This is exactly the opposite of the challenge that the West faces.

Nothing is to be gained by capturing territory and acquiring resources through the use of force. It is better to capture markets and acquire control over resources through investment.

We are a country still ravaged by poverty, and, consequently, our challenge is to bring modest levels of prosperity to all sections of the population. It is not to protect high levels of prosperity already reached from being threatened by the shifts in global economic power.

Of course, all the other challenges pertaining to energy, environment, population, food, health, climate change etc face us too, and this makes the totality of our burden bigger and more complex.

Worse, we have to confront these broader, non-security challenges in a position of disadvantage, as the terms of debate on these issues is largely set by the West, again with a view to preserving its privileged positions and channeling decisions by the developing countries in directions that suit western interests the most.

India’s Unique Strategic Challenges

India’s strategic challenges are in many ways quite unique.

We are among the biggest countries demographically and geographically; we are endowed with considerable natural and human resources; our industrial and technological base is sizable; we are a nuclear weapon state with impressive space capabilities; we are an old civilisation.

A country with these attributes cannot but play an important role, not only regionally, but also globally.

Even if we seem to lack a thirst for power and do not pursue it with determination and a clear sense of purpose, we will not be able to survive without being one of the world’s foremost powers.

India has been partitioned by Islam geographically and fractured by it internally. Our secularism and democracy have succeeded in managing these fractures, though not in eliminating them completely.

Only growing political, economic and military strength can enable us to confront the challenges we face, as otherwise we will be overwhelmed by them in the years ahead.

Pakistan

Historically, India has been exposed to military threats and conquest from the north-west. With the creation of Pakistan that military threat persists, even if the danger is no longer of conquest.

Pakistan claims Indian territory even now; it has not shed the animosity of over 66 years. It has used various means to pursue its feud with India, whether direct military aggression, infiltration, supporting insurgencies, stoking communal tensions or use of terrorism as an instrument of state policy.

We have a tendency at times to play down the threat to us from Pakistan, claiming that we are much bigger and stronger than our neighbour and can meet any challenge that it poses. Such a view misses out many dimensions of that challenge.

The Islamic Challenge

The first is the challenge of our complex relations with Islam.

India has been partitioned by Islam geographically and fractured by it internally. Our secularism and democracy have succeeded in managing these fractures, though not in eliminating them completely.

Nevertheless, India’s worthy example of accommodating Islam internally at the political, religious and cultural levels, more particularly because of the huge size of our Muslim population, has not induced change of thinking on managing diversity, building a tolerant political system and society and respecting different religions either in Pakistan or beyond in the Islamic world in general.

On the contrary, fundamentalism and religious extremism have grown in our region. India has not seen any Shia-Sunni clashes, whereas not only in Pakistan, but in the larger Islamic world, a Shia-Sunni confrontation is looming larger and larger.

Pakistan represents, in a sense, the unwillingness of Islamic lobbies to make definitive peace with India.  Kashmir, in turn, symbolises the clash between India and these Islamic lobbies that has not ended despite our internal accommodation of Islam as part of our composite heritage with which most Indians relate easily and oneself-consciously.

So long as Pakistan uses the argument of Islam against us, we are hindered in our relations with the Islamic world which dominates the geography from our western borders across to North Africa and to southern Russia.

…the presence of a huge number of Indians in the Gulf and the links created at the human level, Arab visibility in India in political terms is muted; high level visits are few; there is limited Arab investment in India…

The fact that we have energy, manpower and financial ties with the Gulf Arab states and have had strong political ties with countries like Egypt in the past within the nonaligned movement does not negate the proposition that the Islamic world is unable to relate to India uninfluenced by the Pakistan factor, which for it is not geopolitical, as in the case of the West, but religious.

Even if the Islamic countries bilaterally do not make Kashmir a point of contention, the desire by some of them to be “helpful” in resolving the issue surfaces discreetly.

The Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), of course, regularly slams us on this issue in an unacceptably partisan manner.

Many in India have felt that despite India’s record of unstinted political support for the Palestinian cause, the Arab world hasn’t reciprocated with less partisanship on the Kashmir issue.

In spite of the presence of a huge number of Indians in the Gulf and the links created at the human level, Arab visibility in India in political terms is muted; high level visits are few; there is limited Arab investment in India despite the size of our market and prospects of expansion that all analysts are agreed upon; culturally the Arab world is inactive in India. Defence cooperation is token.

In all this the Pakistani factor plays a part to a lesser of higher degree- less in the economic domain but more in the political and security domains. Even President Morsi was obliged to visit Pakistan before he came to India last month.

The Challenge of Terrorism

The second dimension is that of terrorism. India is a country most challenged by terrorism because, unlike any other country, a powerful, nuclear armed state is using it as a form of asymmetric warfare against us.

Our situation is unique.

If the US is targeted by terrorism it is because of the perception that it controls Arab resources, has protected dictatorial Arab regimes, protects Israel unconditionally, is engaged in military operations against Islamic countries and has military bases in the Arab world.

Instability in Pakistan is bound to spill over into India; increased radicalization of Pakistan is a threat to communal harmony in India as the threat of ISI and other elements fomenting trouble in India through proxy groups here could worsen.

Some European countries are targeted because of their colonial past and continued interference in Arab affairs driven by past colonial impulses.

If Israel is targeted by terrorism, it is because it is seen as a country parachuted on Arab lands that continues to occupy the West Bank and the Golan heights, apart from the emotive issue of settlements. Israel also has a robust policy of retaliation which leads to a spiral of action and reaction.

Iraq and even Pakistan are being ravaged by terrorist attacks, but these represent a settling of scores internally between politically driven religious groups, with no external involvement.

India is not engaged in military operations against Pakistan or any other Islamic country; it is not occupying Pakistani territory- even Pakistan acknowledges that Kashmir is “disputed” – or that of any other country; it has no military bases as symbols of domination in any Islamic country; it is neither interfering in Pakistan’s internal affairs, nor abetting terrorism by local groups there; it has also eschewed a policy of reprisals against Pakistan despite intense provocations like the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008.

Pakistan’s involvement in terrorism in India is a huge problem as Pakistan is not being sanctioned for its conduct either by India or the international community. On the contrary, it remains a non-NATO ally of the US, has a strategic partnership with it and receives US economic and military aid.

Pakistan is truly the epicenter of terrorism in the region, with its involvement also in such activities in Afghanistan. It was also involved in attacks against our Embassy and other establishments housing Indians there.

The proliferation of extremist religious groups in Pakistan, the inability and unwillingness of the government to deal with them, the nurturing of jihadi groups by the ISI, the fact that jihad figures in the motto of the Pakistani army, the legitimization of jihad in school text-books and the explosion in the number of madrassas, have raised questions about Pakistan’s future as a viable state.

Instability in Pakistan is bound to spill over into India; increased radicalization of Pakistan is a threat to communal harmony in India as the threat of ISI and other elements fomenting trouble in India through proxy groups here could worsen.

Instability in Pakistan and its unwillingness to bury its differences with India means that Afghanistan will continue to be seen as a space for rivalry with India.

This also means that Pakistan will continue to support the Taliban, will look for “strategic depth” against India there not in military terms- except for using Afghan territory for training terrorists for operations in India and using Afghan irregulars in J&K- but enlarging the space for Islamic ideologies around us and preventing us from having any strong foothold in Afghanistan.  This, in their calculation, will strengthen the combined Islamic challenge of Pakistan and Afghanistan to us.

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The views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions or policies of the Indian Defence Review.

About the Author

Kanwal Sibal

is the former Indian Foreign Secretary. He was India’s Ambassador to Turkey, Egypt, France and Russia.

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