A Grand Strategy for A Resurgent India

Now that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the US, India must signal that territorial defence, internal order, and economic prosperity are core national security interests, threats which the country would fight rather than compromise on.

 The American political scientist Robert Osgood pointed out that the national interest is “a state of affairs valued solely for its benefit to the nation.” It involved, at a basic level, “survival or self-preservation, for upon national survival depends the achievement of all other self-interested ends.” Most countries treat national security as their highest priority. Barack Obama declared soon after assuming the US presidency: “[M]y single most important responsibility as President is to keep the American people safe. That is the first thing that I think about when I wake up in the morning. It is the last thing that I think about when I go to sleep at night.”

India has faced several threats to its physical security from both internal and external forces. Unlike other countries, historically India has been unwilling to bear the cost of defense against these threats. India’s poor record in safeguarding its national security is sometimes blamed on the absence of an Indian grand strategy. Ashley Tellis, the leading American scholar of Indian security, however, counters that India under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had indeed developed a grand strategy that comprised sustaining a democratic polity, economic self-reliance through centrally planned industrialization, and non-alignment.

The Indian grand strategy described by Tellis, assuming he is right about its existence, suffers from one serious limitation: insufficient weight given to defending national security from external threats, which India faced right from 1947. Non-alignment was meant to firewall India from the threats arising from Cold War inter-bloc competition—from getting sucked into the rivalries of great powers and being reduced to a pawn in their games. It could not contribute in any way to India’s defence against direct threats. In fact, non-alignment prevented India from seeking allies when faced with a stronger adversary—China.

Secondly, the economy should have generated resources for a defence buildup. Instead, India’s economy under Nehru consumed the national resources, leaving little for defence. Until 1962, Nehru refused to spend adequately on the armed forces, leading to critical gaps in military capabilities. Minus military strength, diplomacy could not work in a territorial dispute with a more powerful adversary. Nehru’s grand strategy, which foreclosed the use of diplomacy as a tool of his government’s national security strategy and neglected defence, led to the humiliating defeat in the 1962 war with China.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi discarded her father’s approach. She was willing to spend handsomely on defence and was elastic in her interpretation of non-alignment. However, by continuing to follow the same failed economic policies of her father, she ensured that the Indian economy would not embark on a high-growth path and generate the surplus required for acquiring the defence capabilities India badly needed, and the need for which she, unlike her father, saw quite clearly. When the economy deteriorated in the late 1980s, defence funding fell, halting military modernization dead in its tracks.

The first NDA government discarded non-alignment and continued with the liberal economic policies introduced earlier in the 1990s. It made a major departure by conducting nuclear tests and overtly declaring India’s nuclear weapons capability. But plagued by defence-related controversies and confronted by multiple national security crises early in its tenure, it failed to do enough on conventional defence.

The Nehruvian liberal approach and the accompanying grand strategy, centered on subordinating spending on defence to economic growth and a strategic autonomy that India was unwilling to use for national advantage, made a comeback in the form of the UPA government’s  “Manmohan Singh Doctrine.” The crux of this doctrine was the proposition that India could leverage its burgeoning economy and liberal-democratic polity to shape the international environment in its favor. The Manmohan Singh doctrine did not even pay lip service to India’s defence requirements. Airy-fairy ideas about the weight India would pull in global affairs thanks to its new-found economic clout did not provide a strategy that addressed India’s security concerns, during a decade punctuated by national security crises.

In an address to the Combined Commanders’ Conference in 2005, apparently written in consultation with the late K. Subrahmanyam, Singh laid out what sounded more like a grand strategy:

First, to strengthen ourselves economically and technologically; Second, to acquire adequate defence capability to counter and rebut threats to our security, and third, to seek partnerships both on the strategic front and on the economic and technological front to widen our policy and developmental options.

Note that Manmohan covered both enhancing defence capabilities and using diplomacy to seek allies—a dramatic departure from past policies of Congress-led governments. Singh did not speak much on defence itself but he addressed the question of resources for defence: “If our economy grows at 8 per cent per annum it will not be difficult for us to allocate about 3 per cent of our GDP for our national defence…Hence, our priority is to pursue policies to generate faster economic growth and mobilize more resources.”

What Singh laid out in this address was easily the best enunciation of a grand strategy for India ever by anyone in power, although it was the Manmohan Doctrine, which had taken no notice of India’s defence imperatives, which was trumpeted by his acolytes. Unfortunately, the Singh government did not act on it. In reality, the share of defence expenditure steadily declined as a percentage of the country’s GDP during the UPA’s tenure, irrespective of the GDP growth rate. Even when the GDP grew at higher than 8 per cent, the total defence budget increased only marginally. When the GDP growth rate precipitously declined, the share of the defence budget in the GDP further declined—to levels not seen after 1962—creating deficiencies that have made the Indian military a hollow force.

Manmohan Singh reiterated his emphasis on economic development as the goal of India’s national security policy in multiple statements. In a 2011 lecture, then National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon also stressed the centrality of the economy in India’s national security strategy:

Our primary task now and for the foreseeable future is to transform and improve the life of the unacceptably large number of our compatriots who live in poverty, with disease, hunger and illiteracy as their companions in life. This is our overriding priority, and must be the goal of our internal and external security policies (emphasis added).

The Manmohan Singh Doctrine and Menon’s line go to the heart of the flaw in the approach of almost all of India’s governments to national security. The economic transformation of India is no doubt the overriding national objective and certainly the objective of the country’s economic policy. But it is foolish to consider it the overriding national security goal when the country faces enormous national security challenges. India’s economic interests do not face the kinds of “threats” that the instruments of national security—armed forces and diplomacy—can defend. Threats to the Indian economy have come mainly from the government itself, in the form of misguided policies and inefficient implementation of even the few correct policies.

The new NDA government is in a position to make a paradigm shift in India’s approach to national security. It should recognise that India does not exist in a vacuum. It is but one unit of the international system. As Western political thinkers have long theorised, this international system is anarchic, lacking a higher authority to impose order. Kenneth Waltz had argued that states are socialised into a behaviour pattern of security seeking and competition through copying other successful states. States are left mainly with self-help to advance their security interests. If states would not help themselves, however highfalutin their “values” might be, their interests would suffer. Indian leaders, officials, and elites are fond of saying that India is in a “tough neighbourhood.” Survival in this neighborhood demands playing by the rules of the neighbourhood. By treading a different path, India has not prospered.

Ending poverty and making India a developed nation is also the objective of the NDA government.  Fulfilling this goal would necessitate transforming every aspect of the country, the government machinery and the educational system above all. This transformation requires an atmosphere free of security threats. Faster economic growth would be the bedrock of any Indian grand strategy but by itself does not constitute one. In order to secure vital national interests, India needs to translate economic power into hard power. Creating this hard power must be a critical pillar of India’s grand strategy. Manmohan Singh’s 2005 address to the Combined Commanders’ Conference contains the core of the grand strategy the NDA government would do well to embrace.

The government need not issue a statement or document enshrining its grand strategy, although a strategic review would help. Actions speak louder than words. The government must signal that territorial defence, internal order, and economic prosperity are core national security interests, threats to which the country would fight rather than compromise on.

Nothing would convey this determination more than allocating a significantly higher portion of the national wealth for defence, reforming the higher defence management structures, ridding procurement of corruption and other bottlenecks, building up domestic defence industries, and improving strategic planning. Diplomacy must become an instrument of national security strategy: not for preserving the country’s mythical strategic autonomy but for using its real strategic autonomy to take decisions for enhancing national security.