That the Prime Minister wants to condone bona fide mistakes is admirable. The issue is that the military, the civil defence bureaucracy and the foreign service are making mistakes that are not bona fide, and re-cycling failed dogma
The past week we have been treated to reports of how our decade of weakness and indecision is coming to an end. As the narrative goes our bureaucrats have been ‘re-energised’ as Prime Minster Narendra Modi has promised to shield them and accept bona fide mistakes. The three Service chiefs presented their wish lists and their procurement — tens of billions of dollars worth — is to be expedited. He will be visiting one such white elephant — the INS Vikramaditya — and dedicating it to the nation.
All this may bring considerable cheer to our mindless jingoistic brigade for whom nationalism equates to crude measurements like money spent on defence, fighters purchased and justifying petulant and childish positions at international fora, no matter how counter-productive, as a sign of a ‘reawakening’. The sad reality, however, is that many of these decisions will be mistakes and not ‘bona fide’ mistakes, but long-term strategic errors that run the risk of locking the new Government into a ‘more of the same old thing’ trap, where its only resort will be to spin doctoring.
The first issue at hand is defence procurements and a misguided Nehruvian belief that technology can solve all our problems. Till the 1990s when India was subjected to severe technology denials, technology made a wonderful scapegoat to blame for our many failures. Yet, even after 14 years of the steady removal of those barriers, the military is still unable to give our political leadership credible strike options. Even after 14 years, in a vastly more permissive technology environment, has the Defence Research & Development Organisation been able to produce a single world-beaterIJ The problem never was technology; it was the chronic governance deficit that has infected every other sphere of public life.
let us be clear about this: No new fighter plane and no new aircraft carrier is going to solve that problem. Far from it if the Government persists in the failed policy of giving carte blanche to the Armed Forces and buying every new shiny toy it wants, it will simply be doing what every Government before it has — burning hard-earned taxpayers’ money on moonshine.
There are two reasons for this. For far too long has the narrative of the upright General and corrupt devious babus, gone unchallenged. The reality is both are responsible for our sorry state in equal measure. The Army, for example, has used its sheer weight in numbers to crush the Air Force and the Navy. While every other major power has moved away from Army centrism, (China under Xi Jinping was perhaps the last of the major powers to downgrade the Army and shift focus to the Air Force), India not only lags behind but is also gambling its future on a thoroughly ill-advised and unaffordable expansion of the mountain divisions in an age where Air Forces and not Armies win wars.
But the Air Force is no saint here, either. They have persistently disrespected and deceived civilian authority, and the concept of ‘budgets’ seems to be a bigger enemy to them than either the PakistanI or Chinese Air Forces. The fact today is our IAF have yet to get the Su-30 working properly. It has an abysmal availability rate of less than 50 per cent. Its radar keeps failing, its expensive Israeli jamming pods have failed to integrate with the aircraft. Now instead of fixing an expensive weapon system touted as the mainstay of the IAF for the next 20 years or so, the IAF wants to go in for other expensive toys like the Rafale and the PAK-FA. Take a step back and think how exactly will the purchase of new planes fix our problems with the SukhoiIJ
Similarly, just last week, an Air Vice Marshal, no less, has drawn the blatantly erroneous conclusion from the Kargil conflict, that it is not what a plane can do, but rather how much it costs that determines its effectiveness. If this is the sorry state of a ‘thought leader’ of the Air Force, how far behind is the Air ForceIJ
But the military alone is not to blame here. As far back as 2005, the Defence Secretaries were passing on blatantly false information to Parliament. Take a look at the Parliamentary Standing Committee reports of those years. In one, the claim was made that all ‘respectable Air Forces’ have a ‘high-medium-low mix’ — a clear lie because even the US along with every other major power only have ‘high-low mixes’. In the same reports can be found deep doctrinal confusion as to what constitutes ‘low’ and what constitutes ‘medium’. First, the F-16 is light, then within the same report it becomes medium. Within 10 pages the F-18 goes from being a medium fighter to a heavy fighter in the same category as the Su-30. Now clearly the civil bureaucracy has little expertise on such matters, and such statements must have been vetted by the Air Force itself.
Yet, we are supposed to believe the same 70-year old story — if and only if technology and money are available, all the problems of the Indian military would go away. India’s problem is no longer hardware — it is software; one of failing vision and failing doctrine, one where technology is used as a scapegoat to mask the failing of the military and the bureaucracy.
The Indian Foreign Service is just as complicit, having joined this battle with its obsolete and laughable stand on the Arms Trade Treaty. It has squandered precious diplomatic capital fighting a battle against technology denial that was realistic in the time of Rajiv Gandhi and Indira Gandhi, but means nothing in the age of Messrs Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi. Their stance was that reporting requirements were onerous and required far too much work on their part. So India gets painted in bad light, because our bureaucracy doesn’t want to be accountable and spend a few extra hours in officeIJ This, of course, is not the first time they have conflated sectional interests with national interest frequently at great cost to India.
That the Prime Minister wants to condone bona fide mistakes here is admirable. The issue is that the military, the civil defence bureaucracy and the IFS are making mistakes that are not bona fide, and recycling old, tried, failed dogma in new garbs and forms.
In the season of free advice, my two cents worth would be: Before spending those billions, Mr Modi, please take a long hard introspective look at the actual causes of our failure that lie within and not some concocted phantom of technology and apartheid.