by Rahul Bedi - The Indian Express, November 28, 1996

India has a massive security gap which even the best equipped military cannot fill. This is the complete absence of a national security doctrine or institution to formulate a response to security issues.

"Since independence, the Cabinet and the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs (CCPA) have dealt casually with security leading to short-term, ad-hoc decisions," said a senior military officer.

He said India had to take hard military decisions as it was sandwiched between a belligerent Pakistan stockpiling arms and a militarist and nuclear China, the longer term threat for India looming in the background, rapidly modernising its air force and swiftly upgrading much of its naval fleet.

The hiatus on security issues will show, yet again with tedious monotony, in today's visit of Chinese President Jiang Zemin, in which issues inimical to India are unlikely to be discussed, despite foreign secretary Salman Haider's optimism. At a press conference on the eve of President Jiang's visit, Haider said: "Prior indication of our concern (for contentious Sino-Indian issues) would be premature". Loosely translated, it means that India is unlikely to raise important but uncomfortable issues with the visiting Chinese leader which affect its security.

China, with whom India fought a war in 1962 over a still unresolved border dispute, is rapidly modernising its air force, building a blue water navy and honing its nuclear weapon capabilities.

Chinese naval activity in the region has also multiplied, with the installation of signal intelligence facilities in the Great Cocos island, 30 nautical miles from the Andaman islands.

Beijing is also helping Myanmar modernise two ports and construct a naval base giving rise to fears of enhanced Chinese presence in the Indian ocean for the first time. These fears gained credence last year after a Chinese trawler, equipped with sophisticated tracking and surveillance equipment was detained by India's Coast Guard allegedly for spying, but released under diplomatic pressure from Beijing.

Though relations between the two neighbours have considerably improved since the late '80s and troop pullbacks have been effected on both sides of the Line of Actual Control (LOAC), military officials are sceptical about the future of Chinese intentions and worried that no serious attention is being paid to what could emerge as a threat after 2000. "However good Indo-Chinese relations are today, intentions can change overnight," said former Air Chief Marshal S.K. Kaul. Defence preparedness, however, takes decades of planning, he said.

Military officials complain that none of the major irritants (see chart) are even mentioned by Indian officials during innumerable diplomatic exchanges and reciprocal visits by senior political and military leaders which are part of the confidence building measures (CBM) between the two countries.

All talks with the Chinese are Beijing-driven, said a military officer and expose India's lack of any fixed security doctrine or understanding at the establishment level of future portends in the region. This, he said, was crucial given that India was beset with problems on all its borders: to the east, relations with Bangladesh have deteriorated over the old river-water dispute and the infiltration of millions of Bangladesh is across a porous border.

To the south, the fierce fighting between Tamil Tigers separatists, the LTTE and the Sri Lankan army has the potential to spread tension amongst southern India's large Tamil population.

To the north, even Nepal, long considered an Indian ally, wants to re-negotiate its old treaty with Delhi in a bid to come closer to China, which, in turn wants to increase its sphere of influence in the Himalayan region bordering Tibet.

Further afield, the bitter struggle for power in Afghanistan between the Islamic Taliban fundamentalist militia is threatening to unwind downwards into Kashmir. Latest intelligence agency estimates maintain that over 1,000 Afghan mercenaries are dominating the insurgency in Kashmir today which, slowly, is picking up momentum.

Successive parliamentary reports have lamented the absence of a security doctrine and the reality that any potentially serious military situation could throw India's defence planning into disarray. The most recent one said that the "absence of clearly defined national security objectives/military aims to led to proposals being examined on a general basis." Senior military officials said the absence of a security doctrine affected not only their operational planning but also in establishing a credible deterrence and pursuing an organised equipment policy for the military.

Ironically, India must be one of the few countries where the military has the least input into whatever little planning exists in security matters. None of the service chiefs was reportedly consulted during the protracted negotiations at the disarmament Conference at Geneva for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Neither has their opinion been invited on the mechanisms of India keeping its nuclear options open after it opted out from the CTBT.

The 1962 was with China was a classic example of India's ad hoc approach to matters military. For, when China advanced into Indian territory in the north which it still holds - a joint secretary in the defence ministry wrote a terse note to the Army chief asking him to "evict" Chinese troops from Indian territory. Adhocism persists even in internal security issues.

India has no tradition of any National Security Council (NSC) or body. After independence, a Defence Committee of the Cabinet, presided over the prime minister, which included the three service-chiefs, was replaced in the mid-60s by the CCPA with a wider, albeit diffused, role. But military officers no longer formed the core of CCPA committees and never have since.

But CCPA members admit there was never any effective coordination between the defence and foreign ministries, intelligence agencies and the scientific and economic ministries. Bureaucratic control over security issues progressively .. related the military from defence matters leaving novices to deal with delicate security measures.

In 1986, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi tried to initiate change by constituting Policy Advisory Committee which included junior ministers from the foreign defence and home ministries, the Cabinet Secretary, head of Research and Analysis wing. India's external intelligence gathering agency and director of the Institute for Strategic Studies and Analyses, New Delhi. The three service chiefs, however, were again excluded from this committee but within three years, it wound up with the failure of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in Sri Lanka as its biggest blunder.

The IPKF's Operation Pawar led to the death of 1.155 Indian soldiers, including scores of officers but failed to end the LTTE's fight for an independent homeland which is continuing. Senior military officers involved in the IPKF say it was an "unmitigated" but avoidable disaster, provided some national security planing mechanism existed.

But in 1990, Prime Minister V.P. Singh's National Front government announced the setting up of an NSC comprising the prime minister, foreign and defence ministers who were to be assisted by an advisory Strategic Core Group headed by the Cabinet Secretary along with the service chiefs, senior bureaucrats and intelligence officials. But there was to be no national security adviser nor any dedicated staff concentrating on formulating policy to deal with internal and external threats.

The Front government collapsed and the experiment remained untested till in 1993, P.V. Narashima Rao told Parliament that an NSC would soon be established. A year later, he reiterated that the NSC was still in the process of being set up but nothing has been heard of it since.

Analysts say the approach to national security matters is so casual that for the past nine years, India has had five defence secretaries and between 1992 and 1996, Narasimha Road held the defence portfolio, along with heading some 15 other ministers. "Ad hocism in defence planning had the counter-productive effect on other policies as resources were allocated without long-term considerations," says Lt. General K.K. Hazari, former vice-chief of army staff.

Military officers said India's vacillation over initiating the serial production and deployment of Prithvi, the indigenous surface-to-surface missile, reportedly at the behest of the US, was yet another example of a non-existent national security doctrine.

For months, senior Pentagon officials confidently claimed Prithvi had not crossed the threshold of serial production under Washington's "persuasion", a position corroborated by senior Indian officials including M. Malikarjun, former junior defence minister, despite opposition by military officials pointing to a belligerent Pakistan and China.