The Routledge Handbook of Indian Defence Policy

Themes, Structures and Doctrines

Harsh V. Pant, Harsh V. Pant

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000074352
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Routledge Handbook of Indian Defence Policy brings together the most eminent scholarship in South Asia on India's defence policy and contemporary military history. It maps India's political and military profile in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region, and analyses its emergence as a global player.

This edition of the handbook:

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• Canvasses over 60 years of Indian defence policy, its relation to India's rising global economic profile, as well as foreign policy shifts;

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• Discusses several key debates that have shaped defence strategies through the years: military doctrine and policy, internal and external security challenges, terrorism and insurgencies;

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• Explores the origins of the modern armed forces in India; evolution of the army, navy and air forces; investments in professional military education, intelligence and net-centric warfare, reforms in paramilitary forces and the Indian police;

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• Comments on India's contemporary strategic interests, focusing on the rise of China, nuclearisation of India and Pakistan's security establishments, and developments in space security and missile defence.

Taking stock of India's defence planning architecture over the past decade, this accessibly written handbook will be an indispensable resource for scholars and researchers of security and defence studies, international relations and political science, as well as for government thinktanks and policymakers.

1
Introduction

Harsh V. Pant

Indian defence policy has been attracting global attention since the coming to office of the Narendra Modi government in May 2014, which was re-elected in May 2019 with an even greater majority in the Parliament. It has tried to make a break from the past in various policy areas, including defence. At its highest echelons it has underlined the urgent need to reform India’s defence procurement policy. There is a growing recognition that, unlike the previous two decades, India will have limited resources to spend on defence in the coming years. India’s challenging security environment means Indian armed forces need to upgrade themselves rapidly and prepare for modern-day threats. But successive Indian governments have now been signalling that resources for defence will be at a premium. India’s other socio-economic needs will be priori-tised, and Indian armed forces will have to become smarter in how they manage their dwindling resources. It is one of the main reasons why every year there is an expectation that capital allocation would see a significant hike, only to face disappointment. India’s defence budget in recent years has been falling, but more significantly, an increasing component of the funds are being allocated towards salaries, pensions and other operating expenses. And given the demographic trends, the nation’s pension bill is becoming larger, even surpassing the salary bill. It is therefore not surprising that India’s top political leadership has been calling for reforms. Rationalising manpower in the armed forces should be a priority, and some steps have been taken for that.

It has been widely known that Indian armed forces have, for some time, been facing critical shortages. The Indian Army urgently needs new field artillery. The Indian Air Force has repeatedly expressed concerns about the obsolescence of its ground-based air defence systems. The Indian Navy’s depleting submarine fleet poses its own set of challenges with just 13 conventional diesel-electric submarines, 11 of which are 20–27 years old. The Indian Army chief is reported to have told Prime Minister Modi about the ‘critical hollowness’ afflicting the Indian Army after a decade of missed deadlines for procurement and wherewithal to face war (Thapar 2014). It will indeed be a delicate task to manage an Indian defence modernisation program, a priority of the Modi government, during a period of relatively slow economic growth.

With the world’s fourth largest military and one of the biggest defence budgets, India has been in the midst of an ambitious plan to modernise its largely Soviet-era arms since the late 1990s – one that has seen billions of dollars spent on the latest high-tech military technology – as it started asserting its political and military profile in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region. In line with India’s broadening strategic horizons, its military acquisitions have also seen a marked shift from conventional land-based systems to means of power projection such as airborne refuelling systems and long-range missiles. India has been busy setting up military facilities abroad, patrolling the Indian Ocean to counter piracy, protecting the crucial sea-lanes of communication and demonstrating a military assertiveness hitherto not associated with it.

Drivers of India’s arms build-up

India’s drive towards arms acquisition in recent years can be attributed to several factors. The process was ignited in the 1990s by a combination of the end of the Cold War and the growing threats from Pakistan and China. India’s close ties with the erstwhile Soviet Union during the Cold War made the Soviets India’s primary supplier of defence equipment to India. The West could make only small inroads into India’s defence market during the Cold War. When the Cold War ended and the USSR broke apart, India and Russia maintained their relationship. Gradually the government found itself with old and outdated weapons technology. Russia was and still is a huge seller of defence equipment to India, but the government’s newly re-established relations with the US and Europe allowed for a diversification of the defence market.

The rapidly evolving security environment facing India continues to pose challenges to Indian defence planners. A combination of internal and external as well as state- and non-state-based threats have emerged that have made the Indian security scenario precarious in recent years (Bajpai and Pant 2013). Internally, Indian security is challenged by a plethora of insurgencies which are a product of factors ranging from a desire for greater autonomy to left-wing radicalism to prevailing socio-economic inequities. The authority of the Indian State has seen a progressive weakening over the last few years as a result. Externally, India’s immediate neighbourhood continues to pose challenges to India statecraft. India is witnessing rising turmoil all around its borders. The instability in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Myanmar is a major factor that inhibits India from realising its dream of becoming a major global player. India is surrounded by several weak states that view New Delhi’s hegemonic status in the region with suspicion. A policy of ‘splendid isolation’ is not an option, and Indian strategic elites recognise that India’s desire to emerge as a major global player will remain just that, a desire, unless it engages its immediate neighbourhood more meaningfully and becomes a net provider of regional security.

The biggest challenge to Indian strategic interests comes from the rise of China in the region and beyond. India and China are two major powers in Asia with global aspirations and some significant conflicting interests. As a result, some amount of friction in their bilateral relationship is inevitable. The geopolitical reality of Asia makes sure that it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Hindi-Chini to be bhai-bhai (brothers) in the foreseeable future. If India and China continue to rise in the next few years, a security competition between the two regional giants is highly likely. If India is serious about its desire to emerge as a major global power, then it will have to tackle the challenge of China’s rise (Pant 2011). China’s defence modernisation and the ambiguity surrounding China’s arms build-up is generating apprehensions in New Delhi and has forced India to pursue its own defence modernisation program.

The nuclearisation of India and Pakistan has forever changed the context in which wars will be fought in the region. It is part of the reason that elements within the Pakistani security establishment have become more adventurous. Realising that India would be reluctant to escalate the conflict because of the threat of it reaching the nuclear level, sections of the Pakistani military and intelligence have pushed the envelope on the sub-conventional front, using various terror groups to launch assaults on India (Kapur 2008, 73–87). For India, this presents a structural conundrum: nuclear weapons have made a major conventional conflict with Pakistan unrealistic, yet it needs to find a way to launch limited military action against Pakistan without crossing the nuclear threshold. Nuclear weapons have allowed Pakistan to shield itself from full-scale Indian retaliation as well as to attract international attention on the disputes in the sub-continent. To overcome this constraint, India needs to preserve its conventional superiority vis-à-vis Pakistan, and this implies increasing acquisition of conventional weaponry, especially after Pakistan’s use of more than $10 billion worth of US military aid to arm against India.

India’s rising global economic profile has made the world take India more seriously as a major power and has made Indian elites more ambitious in defining their global role and aspirations. There is clearly an appreciation in the Indian policy-making circles of India’s rising capabilities. It is reflected in a gradual expansion of Indian foreign policy activity in recent years, in India’s attempt to reshape its defence forces, in India’s desire to seek greater global influence. Yet lack of any credible military option against Pakistan has brought into sharp relief the fundamental weaknesses of Indian defence policy over the last several years. The terrorist strikes in Mumbai in November 2008 exposed vast gaps in India’s security system (Gupta 2009). The three-day siege of India’s financial capital became a pivotal point in the country’s drive to beef up and modernise its armed forces and its arsenal. With extremist violence growing in Afghanistan and Pakistan, India’s ability to prevent attacks through intelligence gathering and defensive measures has become more urgent than ever (Pant 2014).

India needs a defence policy that can actually take on all these challenges simultaneously. It’s a difficult task to accomplish given the fact that the multiplicity and variety of challenges that India faces often require varied responses. Yet compared to any other time in its history, India faces an international environment that has so far allowed it to pursue a ‘multi-vector’ defence policy as its relations with all major global powers are on a stable footing.

Growing external dependence

India’s dependence on external actors in the defence sector has continued to grow and is now at an all-time high. Drastic steps will be needed as the Indian defence import bill is estimated to reach $130 billion over the next seven years even as homeland security purchases are likely to cross $110 billion (Sidhartha 2014). Though in the mid-1990s, India was assured that indigenous content of weaponry would increase from 30 to 70 percent by 2005, the nation still continues to import more than 70 percent of its defence requirements from abroad (KPMG 2010). India today imports defence equipment worth over $8 billion annually even as the story of the Indian state-run defence industry has been largely one of gross inefficiency, incompetence and failure. The performance of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the body responsible for developing technologies for the military, has been abysmal because of lack of any accountability (Menon and Sawant 2012). The Indian armed forces have not had a reliable experience in working with the DRDO-made armaments. Given its significant budgetary resources in the context of a developing nation, it seems to have failed in delivering quality output. Most of its key projects have either not been completed on time or have resulted in huge cost over-runs.

The Indian defence sector has not been successful in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) in defence sector, with a measly $4.94 million coming to India since the opening of the sector in 2001, the lowest in any sector (Pandit 2013). When the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government tried to increase the FDI limit from 26 percent to 49 percent in 2013, then Defence Minister, A.K. Antony, steadfast in his opposition, argued that this would make India dependent on foreign companies and vulnerable to policies of their countries of origin on a long-term basis (Press Trust of India 2013). This is a strange argument to make in a country that is importing most of its critical weapon systems from abroad. The real reason, perhaps, was Antony’s desire not to rock the boat which has been the hallmark of his time in the government, making him one of the worst defence ministers India has had in recent years, neither managing to bring transparency in the moribund procurement system not providing a strategic direction to defence planning.

The Indian corporate sector too has been a house divided on the issue of FDI in the defence sector (Sidhartha 2014). Initially supportive of FDI including 100 percent foreign investment, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), an association of business organisations in India, has been changing its tune, suggesting that it was unlikely that technology transfers would be guaranteed with this move. The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), a rival association which aims to create conducive environment for industrial growth in India, meanwhile, has argued that FDI over 49 percent should only be allowed in a case-to-case basis, and only with technology transfers. Despite the fact that it doesn’t have the capability, the Indian private sector has been raising the bogey of the level playing field for the domestic industry in order to scuttle the move to bring foreign companies in.

There is an urgent need to strengthen India’s weak military manufacturing industrial base by expanding the private sector participation. This can be done by raising the FDI cap in the defence sector and by encouraging joint ventures between Indian and foreign defence firms. India’s modernisation program and the desire of external actors to tap into the new market should be an impetus for reforms. India’s notoriously slow bureaucratic processes will need to change if they want to continue reaching the western markets. Changes have been slow to come by because some institutional interests are so entrenched in government policy that it is nearly impossible to change.

An external force might just propel India to change. These external forces might come in the form of a backlash from western defence industry over the slow and tedious contract process. The US and Europe have made it clear they want to sell to India, but the current structure of the procurement process will only be tolerated so much. Eventually, someone might walk away. India can certainly emerge as an attractive destination for foreign manufacturers to set up defence manufacturing facilities in India for global defence markets. This will in turn lead to high-end technology coming into India with cascading effects across multiple sectors. The Modi government wants to change India’s arms-importer tag and turn the country into not only a defence manufacturer but also a major weapons exporter, emulating China’s transformation from being the world’s leading arms importer in 2006 to one of the top global exporters of weaponry seven years later.

For this, India needs domestic political leadership. The Indian government has, over the years, failed to demonstrate the political will to tackle the defence policy paralysis that seems to be rendering all the claims of India’s rise as a military power increasingly hollow. There has been no long-term strategic review of India’s security environment, and no overall defence strategy has been articulated. The challenge for the Indian government is to delineate clearly what products they need and how to build up their own industry in the process by significantly reforming their domestic defence manufacturing sector. In the absence of a comprehensive, long-term appraisal of the country’s defence requirements, there will be little clarity about India’s real needs in defence acquisitions.

Fundamental vulnerabilities

Though Indian defence policy has become more ambitious in recent years than it has ever been in the past, some fundamental vulnerabilities continue to plague the defence policy landscape. These include the marginalisation of the military in the national security set-up, inability to think through the use of military as an instrument of policy and lack of institutional capacity to give defence policy a long-term strategic orientation. These factors have led India to a sub-optimal defence policy, the most visible manifestation of which is India’s ad hoc approach towards defence acquisitions.

Indian bureaucracy and its archaic and ineffective procurement procedures also remain a major hindrance. Decision-making remains slow, as politicians and bureaucrats are wary of approving purchases due to a series of arms procurement scandals since late 1980s. The armed forces have a dismal record in spending their capital acquisition funds, and they have been returning large sums over the last several years primarily because of delays in decision-making on procurement. The Indian armed forces keep waiting for arms and equipment while the finance ministry is left with unspent budget year after year. Most large procurement programmes get delayed, resulting in cost escalation and technological or strategic obsolescence of the budgeted items. Allowing the rollover of the unspent funds might save some of the problems by removing uncertainty over funding of the postponed program and might even encourage long-term strategic thinking in the defence policy.

It was the Kargil conflict of 1999 that exposed Indian vulnerabilities as Pakistan realised that India doesn’t have the capability to impose quick and effective retribution. The then Indian Army Chief had famously commented that the forces would fight with whatever they had, underlining the frustration in the armed forces regarding their inability to procure the arms they needed. Only because the conflict remained largely confined to the 150-km front of the Kargil sector did India manage to gain an upper hand by throwing the Pakistanis out of its side of the Line of Control (LoC) (Joshi 2009). Then came the stand-off between the Indian and Paki...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• SECTION 1 Soldier, state and society in India
• SECTION 2 Military and foreign policy
• SECTION 3 The services
• SECTION 4 Doctrines
• SECTION 5 Defence versus development
• SECTION 6 Internal security
• SECTION 7 Institutional infrastructure
• SECTION 8 Nuclear weapons and space
• Index