Chanakya's New Manifesto: To Resolve the Crisis Within India (25 page)

As a nation we cannot afford to devalue or marginalize the issue of security. Unfortunately, that continues to be the case. Some months before the scandal of the army chief ’s letter to the prime minister, a CAG report presented to Parliament evoked little response, despite it stating that the army was using artillery of World War II vintage. Another report by the CAG during the monsoon session of Parliament in 2011 on the state of the navy’s preparedness was equally damning, but again created little stir. On the contrary—and this too is a major weakness—our defence minister sought to project a picture of complete normalcy. On 11 April 2012, a day after General V. K. Singh told the Standing Committee of Parliament on Defence that wartime stocks for certain critical anti-tank ammunition were down to just four days, and some months after the Eleventh Plan (2007-12) review of the army prepared by his own ministry had emphasized that ammunition and equipment stocks were ‘still critical’ (for instance, the stock of anti-tank guided missiles [ATGMs] was just half of the authorized holding of 80,000), the defence minister proclaimed to the media that there was no cause for alarm and that the country was ‘fully prepared’.

Our lack of offensive and defensive weaponry becomes even more glaring when compared with that of our potential enemies. For instance, China has sixty-six intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launchers, which have a range beyond 5,500 kilometres; we have none. The Agni V missile, which has a range of 5,000 kilometres (a rare triumph for the indigenous defence industry) cannot by itself compensate for the radical asymmetry in the overall defence preparedness of India and China. For instance, China has 2,800 battle tanks against our 568; it has sixty submarines against our fifteen; its fourth generation tactical aircraft number 747 against our 280; its fighter attack aircraft add up to 1,669 against our 784; and its armoured infantry fighting vehicles number 2,390 against our 1,105.
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China can move thirty divisions (half-a-million troops) to the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with India within a month, outnumbering Indian soldiers in that area of operation 3:1. It has built up its infrastructure on the Tibetan border—3,000 kilometres of new highways, 1,956 kilometres of railroad, the 1,080-kilometre-long Golmud-Lhasa pipeline, and several airfields. Our border infrastructure does not even begin to compare. The Kargil Committee Report had strongly recommended that India needed to upgrade its surveillance capabilities, particularly through satellite imagery. It had emphasized the need for the acquisition of high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles, and for their imagery to be quickly disseminated to the concerned agencies, as also a major upgrade in interceptor communications technology that could eavesdrop on conversations in enemy nations. None of these recommendations have been adequately followed up. Even the army’s proposal to create a China-focused mountain strike corps consisting of a military brigade for Uttarakhand and two armoured brigades for Ladakh and Sikkim, which was cleared by the prime minister in April 2011, is yet to receive funding from our ministry of finance. There are innumerable such examples of yawning holes in the country’s defences when it comes to China and Pakistan.

Opponents of adequate investment in armaments argue that a country with such a huge population of the poor and underprivileged should be spending more on development than on defence. It is the old guns versus butter argument. The obvious riposte to this is that India needs to pursue both development and defence efficiently, and it cannot be one or the other. A country’s security is imperiled if its economy is sub-optimal and the legitimate discontent and deprivation of its abjectly poor is not attended to. Equally, development cannot exclude security imperatives, because we are in one of the most hostile nuclear weapons regions of the world. We have 4,057 kilometres of a disputed LAC with China; a 778-kilometre-long disputed Line of Control (LOC) with Pakistan; a total of 15, 106 kilometres of international borders with seven countries, and a 7,516-kilometre-long vulnerable coastline. It would be suicidal for any nation to ignore security concerns in such a situation.

The fact of the matter is that we neither pursue development nor security efficiently. China spends more than twice what India does on its military (India: 37.3 billion; China: 89.8 billion according to 2010-11 figures). Yet its defence expenditure, as a percentage of its GDP, is lower than that of India (1.3 against 1.89). The Chinese economy has grown at a faster pace, and its defence budget, although larger, is more efficiently used. Arms imports have come down dramatically. Russia and Ukraine are the only outside suppliers of China’s weaponry, most of which is now produced at lesser cost at home. If India had pursued its indigenous arms production effectively, we could have had by now one of the world’s largest military-industrial complexes, and could be exporting arms and using that income for development.

India stands out among a host of newly-independent countries for the exemplary manner in which its armed forces have always been under civilian control. However, security imperatives dictate that the vital area of civil-defence relations is re-examined and revamped in order to involve our top military leadership in the framing and execution of our defence policy to a greater extent than is presently the case. The Kargil Committee Report is categorical in this matter: ‘India is perhaps the only major democracy where the Armed Force Headquarters are outside the apex governmental structure. The chiefs of staff have assumed the role of operational commanders of their respective forces rather than chiefs of staff to the PM and defence minister. They simultaneously discharge the roles of operational commanders and national security planners/managers. Most of their time is, however, devoted to the operational role, as is bound to happen. This has led to a number of negative results. Future-oriented long-term planning suffers. . . The PM and defence minister do not have the benefit of the views and expertise of the army commanders and their equivalents in the Navy and Air Force. . ..’
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The result is poor defence planning, quite apart from growing resentment in the armed forces, which no security-conscious country can allow.

In recent times, inept civilian leadership at the political level has accentuated the rift in civil-military relations. The most dramatic evidence of this was played out before an appalled nation with regard to the age controversy of former army chief, General V. K. Singh. The whole affair could have been handled by the political leadership better. A public spat between government and the head of the army is not only a security threat but could potentially unravel the carefully built dynamics of civil-military interaction.

There may be conflicting evidence with regard to Singh’s age. However, an alert political leadership, anticipating the consequences of leaving this issue unresolved, including the politicization of the chain of succession within the army, should have decided firmly on the matter before Singh was appointed. After all if, as claimed, Singh was asked to accept his date of birth of 1950 before he was appointed as army commander, why couldn’t a similar acceptance in writing have been taken from him before he was appointed the chief? Even if this was not done, and the issue cropped up during his tenure as chief, the RM, instead of allowing his bureaucrats to prevaricate, should have called Singh in and settled the matter decisively and expeditiously before it blew up into an unseemly and damaging controversy.

The RM could have explored two options. First, he could have expressed faith in the man the government had chosen to lead one of the largest standing armies in the world, and decided the matter in his favour. In any case, Singh’s claim was not entirely without merit. When you appoint a chief you must trust him. Or, he could have told Singh that while the government believed his version of when he was born, in the face of even the slightest ambivalence in the matter, it was expected of the chief, in keeping with the highest traditions of the army itself, to put an end to the controversy and accept the earlier retirement age. The reiteration by the government of faith in the chief, and his version of his age, should have been made public. By so doing, General Singh’s notion of honour would have been salvaged; he would have won public approval for his disciplined fidelity to the higher interests of the institution even at the cost of a few more months of service. Besides, the nation would have been saved the embarrassment of a public spat between the authorities and a belligerent general who felt he had been deliberately slighted by being accused of lying about his age, and perhaps went a trifle overboard in expressing his angst.

Focused political leadership is crucial to safeguard a country’s security interests. The unseemly controversy about General Singh’s age showed that this was not the case.

The lack of optimum civil-defence strategic collaboration is also dangerously visible in the management of our nuclear weapons. A recent book
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which has studied the issue states that ‘India is saddled with a nuclear force management system that is seriously inadequate for the work it needs to do’. The marginalization of the three service chiefs from policy decisions on nuclear force management shows clearly our government’s inability to adapt to changing needs. Besides, our nuclear doctrine itself needs to move beyond the mere acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Delivering the P. C. Lal Memorial Lecture at the Air Force Association on 2 April 2012, Shiv Shankar Menon, the national security advisor (NSA), said: ‘Some of our instruments of internal security are in disrepair’. It was an honest statement but hugely understated. All our instruments of internal security are in serious disrepair. Terrorism, both externally sponsored and homegrown, has become one of the biggest threats to the security of the Indian state and the safety of innocent citizens. However, the legal framework to tackle it remains inexcusably weak. The Terrorism and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) was enacted in 1985, but under misguided pressure from human rights organizations, it was scrapped in 1995; the Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act (POTA) was adopted in 2002, but for similar reasons, annulled in 2004; we now have a toothless law in the form of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).

The Intelligence Bureau (IB) is hamstrung by inadequate manpower and equipment. The intelligence support it is provided by the National Technical Research Organization (NTRO) has been acknowledged by experts to be inadequate. The National Investigative Agency (NIA) lacks muscle, and receives little cooperation from state police forces which resent its intrusion. The efficiency of state intelligence units is close to nil, with personnel deployed more for routine law and order and VIP security duties than the job that they are actually expected to do; besides, it is no secret that the underworld, which often has very close links to terrorist groups, has deeply infiltrated state police structures. All proposals for police reform, including precise directives from the Supreme Court, remain unimplemented. The Natgrid, the nationwide intelligence data collection centre, is running behind schedule. The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), as the Kargil Report bluntly said, stands ‘devalued’ with its role and place in the national intelligence framework needing thorough re-evaluation. The Kargil Report further states that the role of the Defence Intelligence Agency is circumscribed by any lack of clarity in areas in which its role overlaps with that of the RAW or the Cabinet Secretariat, whose inputs have been far below par in any case. The National Security Council, comprising all the members of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) and the NSA, rarely meets. Nobody really knows anymore what the NSA does. Is s/he a glorified foreign secretary, or does s/he oversee internal security? Who reports to them? What is their interface with external intelligence? Does s/he oversee the nodal agency to synthesize all intelligence inputs, or is s/he just a high sounding dignitary to blindly implement the PM’s routine external engagements—no one really has the answers. The Multi-Agency Centre (MAC) has been subsumed by the proposed National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) which, even in its unsustainably diluted form, is embroiled in an irrelevant debate on the sanctity of federalism. Besides all the other problems that bedevil the functioning of these agencies, there are unseemly turf wars leading to sub-optimal coordination and information sharing.

This situation is appalling, because where internal security is concerned few nations have had a more rough passage of it. Our Parliament has been attacked, our planes have been hijacked and terrorist attacks in our major cities seem to take place at will. Between 2010 and 2011 alone, there were as many as five major terrorist attacks in Pune, New Delhi, Bangalore, Varanasi and Mumbai leaving forty-five dead and hundreds injured. New Delhi, the capital of the nation experienced, in the course of just one decade, eight major terrorist attacks that killed scores and injured hundreds. The simultaneous bomb explosions of 29 October 2005 at the busy shopping areas of Sarojini Nagar and Paharganj in the capital, killed 62 and injured over 150. On 26 November 2008, heavily armed terrorists travelled from Pakistan by sea and held Mumbai to ransom, killing dozens and injuring hundreds; it was the most brazen show of strength by terrorists sponsored by Pakistan. There is incontrovertible proof that home-grown terrorist cells, supported by Pakistan, are proliferating. In the face of this threat what has our response been? In the mid-1990s, Prime Minister I. K. Gujral presided over the winding down of our covert operations in Pakistan. We have thus emasculated our powers to infiltrate the terrorist organizations in Pakistan that plan murder and mayhem in India, deprived ourselves of vital intelligence information that could be used for preemptive attacks, and discarded the option of striking within the enemy camp to take out terrorists wanted in India.

The local police unit is the basic source of intelligence, but former Home Minister P. C. Chidambaran admitted at a chief minister’s conference on 26 April 2012 that ‘there were only 100 civil police officers for a population of 100,000. The vacancies in all ranks (as of 1 January 2011) were 501,069 or about 25 per cent of the sanctioned strength.’ Chidambaran told me separately that at the current rate these vacancies will take seven years to fill, plus two more years of training before those recruited can become operational. Further, police stations lack basic equipment such as motorcycles, modern weapons and night vision devices. And, police reform, including the creation of a National Police Commission, has been shelved.