If he becomes Prime Minister, how will Narendra Modi handle the defence and security challenges that India faces from PakistanIJ Will he deliver on his current belligerence or will he calm down by the weight the new responsibility adds on himIJ
Possibly the first challenge Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi will face if and when he takes charge as Prime Minister, will be that of terrorism. It will be likely that the Pakistani military establishment will choose to test him or humiliate him, as the case may be. Their chosen vehicle for such provocations/tests will be the time-tested route of terror, against which India has thus far proven impotent.
Mr Modi has, to date, made some muscular statements on the subject — but when a large-scale attack eventuates he would basically set himself in a trap where he will either have to respond forcefully or end up looking weak on security at the very outset.
Both routes are perilous. If on the one hand, he chooses to go the military route, he will be getting advice from an Army that has not been bloodied in a full-scale war since 1971. While in public people praise the professionalism of the Army, in private the discourse is quite different. A spate of recent scandals have been compounded by extraordinarily dangerous and borderline suicidal ideas like Cold Start emanating from the Army. So, if Mr Modi chooses the military route he will be sanctioning an action over which he will lose control very rapidly and one that may escalate to a nuclear conflagration. This, of course, is what Pakistan has always warned about.
If on the other hand, he does not respond, much of his electoral promises of being a man of action, a man willing to take on and defeat enemies, evaporates. Moreover, it opens him up to attack by political opponents.
This is why Mr Modi needs to decide as soon as possible what his foreign and defence policies are going to be — Hindu nationalist or realist, and sadly never the twain shall meet. If he chooses the realist path we arrive at two inescapable conclusions: Pakistan is an economic entity of the Pakistan Army. The second is that deterring Pakistan also has a component of reassurance built in.
What this means is that, if Mr Modi is to hit Pakistan and deter it from further action, he needs first and foremost to build up reassurance mechanisms — military and economic.
The military aspect of this involves bypassing the Army altogether for air and naval-based solutions. For far too long the Army is using its overwhelming numbers to completely eclipse the role of the Navy and Air Force that are much better suited to this purpose. This is usually characteristic of a country that doesn’t understand or refuses to understand technology. Today, our access to Western technology gives us a range of options never before available to us. The issue with Army-based solutions has been that they only present linear solutions like land grabs.
The problem with this is four-fold. First, since an Army presents a physical threat to territory, it is perhaps one of the most escalatory options available. Second is that it confines the punitive aspect of retaliation to the lower levels of the Army — namely soldiers, whose death will have zero impact on the Pakistani high command. Third, it denies the Indian Government the ability to finely calibrate a retaliatory attack. last, the Government loses the the fig leaf of plausible deniability.
Why is this importantIJ Because India has historically viewed air-power as the most escalatory option, and boots on the ground as the least escalatory. This was true with World War II technology where a ground offensive restricted damage to militaries while air campaigns caused wanton civilian deaths. However, things have changed; as we have learned, boots on the ground like 26/11 and Parliament attacks are extremely provocative.
On the other hand, Pakistan has proven completely impotent at resisting US drone attacks. If Pakistan is to realise the error of its ways, punishment needs to be doled out at the highest levels of the Inter-Services Intelligence and the Army, and not at the soldier-level. If India is serious about deterring terrorism, no Pakistani General associated with terror should be able to sleep peacefully at night, and he should know that an Indian Air Force or Navy missile will kill him and his near and dear ones at a time and place of this country’s choosing.
India already has several of the technologies required to carry out such pinpoint strikes — cruise missiles like the Nirbhay and terminal attack drones like the Harpy, which duplicate many of the key features of drones. Such strikes enable the Government to completely deny that such attacks took place. Thus far, the West, valuing stability above everything else, has been loath to point fingers at Pakistan and has accepted whatever flimsy excuse the Pakistanis have given — going out of their way to separate ‘non-state’ actors from the Government and apply immense pressure on India to avoid retaliation. A full-fledged ground campaign does not give India the benefit of being able to deny ownership. Precision strikes from planes and ships on the other hand, in spite of evidence give Western powers adequate shield to accept India’s denials at face value. That way Pakistan will find that the shoe would be on the other foot.
But this is the deterrence aspect. In order for this kind of retaliation to be successful, Pakistani Generals will also have to be reassured and given an exit route, so that they cannot blindly goad their country into war.
This is where a comprehensive trade package which is aimed at Pakistan will come into play. If we accept that the Pakistani Army is in fact an economic cartel, then incentivising it through trade presents it with a choice — power or money, and the choice of any economic cartel will be clear on this score.
Additionally, this creates incentives to not attack their own interests in India. Should India choose to retaliate to provocations as and when they happen, they also act to dampen Pakistan’s willingness to publicly name (and, therefore, retaliate against) India.
This is not to claim that any of the possible solutions discussed above will be easy. Far from it, Mr Modi will have to pursue sweeping reforms of the Armed Forces and the civilian defence bureaucracy to turn it from the unusable drain on national resources that it is, to serious national asset to be feared abroad. Only time will tell, if he can do to national security what he has done for governance, if he gets to the post.