Trick or retreat: There’s a grand deception behind Indian military shortfalls, and in this column

This begins with a spoiler alert—if you promise not to read the postscript first. In this column, I play a trick on you.

After ages, India has a chief who speaks the hard truth. Air Chief Marshal A.P. Singh has persistently and firmly drawn attention to the Indian Air Force’s alarming numbers and technology gap with its rivals. He even held up the mirror to the holiest of the holy among our PSU monopolies, HAL, on cameras and microphones. This is refreshing when you’re used to hearing from a succession of chiefs self-pitying platitudes like: “We will fight with what we have.”

This all-pervasive fear makes defence purchases nearly impossible. Too little is made in India yet and even if it is, most of it is in tight joint ventures. Much as we boast about rising levels of ‘indigenisation’ (why don’t we say Indian?), ask yourself this: After making 200-plus Sukhoi 30-MKIs and god knows how many Jaguars or even MiGs, can we make one entirely by ourselves even now? We won’t reverse-engineer like cheapskate Chinese, you see.

All of this was why we had called 36 Rafales a gutsy purchase which broke a stalemate and defied the vicious lobbying, leak-versus-leak battles in New Delhi. But we also acknowledged the validity of the counter-argument: How did India paint itself into such a corner? The result was a $5-billion purchase off-the-shelf in a wartime-like haste? That tag ‘top arms importer’ is the greatest self-inflicted damage and curse on the Indian system.

Stockholm-based SIPRI, which estimates imports in terms of constant 1990 dollars, puts the value of India’s total arms imports in 10 years (2015-24) at a little over $23.7 billion, (9.8 percent of global arms imports). The average is a mere $2.3 billion per year.

Two points arise. First, that Narendra Modi’s decisions to order Rafales, Apaches, M-777 mountain howitzers, Harpoon missiles, MH-60 Romeo naval helicopter, MQ-9B drones, etc., off-the-shelf were wise and brave, like a senior doctor risking a series of immediate surgeries to save a deteriorating patient. The second is a question. How does the fourth largest military machine in the world and one with two live borders, manage to keep itself in the ICU forever, often needing emergency surgery in the middle of the night over a weekend?

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Or, to make it inconvenient for this columnist, you could reword the same questions: Mr Editor, go get your head examined, how can you accuse a country importing most armaments of suffering from a fear of acquisitions? How can it then be perpetually short of critical weaponry?

These are perfectly valid questions and reflect the multiple paradoxes of India’s defence planning, deserving a couple of tomes. My favourite is Arming Without Aiming, jointly written by the late Stephen P. Cohen, and Sunil Dasgupta (who worked with me in India Today three decades ago, learning to cover defence). The book bemoans the lack of a culture of strategic thinking and planning in India.

The Indian doctrine, they imply, is purely tactical, episodic, immediate-need-based. My own most telling insight on this sits in my rather flimsy personal archives. It’s a note scribbled with a pencil on a scrap from Jaswant Singh. He slipped it to me with a smile at a strategic affairs brainstorming at Salzburg, in the summer of 1994, as General Sundarji held forth on the weaknesses in India’s strategic doctrine. “I headed the parliamentary committee to examine India’s military-strategic doctrine,” wrote Jaswant Singh. “We concluded there was no strategy and no doctrine.”

There is zero evidence this has changed. Because if it had, we would not be buying frontline fighters off-the-shelf, as if picking groceries at a supermarket or toys at Hamleys. Or Spike anti-tank missiles a few hundred at a time, infantry rifles in batches of 60,000 or thereabouts. This has been the history of our defence purchases except, say, a remarkable 1985-89 phase under Rajiv Gandhi. But this left behind the Bofors virus.

Fear leads to fatal minimalism. How was a MiG-21 Bison shoved into a wolf pack of F-16s after Balakot? Remember the initial setbacks IAF suffered in Kargil, when two MiGs and a Mi-17 attack helicopter were lost and all crew were killed, except one taken POW? A fourth, a sturdy photo-reconnaissance Canberra (since retired), was nursed back to base by a deft crew with a crippled engine. All four were hit by shoulder-fired missiles. Once IAF woke up, bought overnight laser kits from Israel for its night-flying, high-altitude Mirages, the picture changed.

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This isn’t meant to be a litany of our ‘chalta hai’ short-termism. It is to explore a limited question, with apologies to Erica Jong: Why this fear of buying? Since 1987, one reason is the Bofors syndrome. Every defence purchase is fraught, delayed or “thrown in orbit,” the description George Fernandes preferred for sending a file into a permanent spiral of indecision. This makes New Delhi the easiest playground for arms dealers, middlemen and a newer phenomenon, the dedicated, B-to-B, arms bazaar media.

The public is confused between negotiations, shifting requirements, a constant whiff of worry that the system is owned by this evil arms trade. At the same time, we import more than any other nation. You want a paradox: A.K. Antony, our most risk-averse, most anti-American defence minister since 1991, ended up buying more from the US, through government-to-government (C-130s, C-17s, P-8Is) than in our entire independent history. Modi resumed that de-risked, emergency-buying tradition, though with more urgency.

The only way to fight phobias is to face them. It is fashionable to curse Rajiv for Bofors and more, but the truth is, 1985-89 was the only period in our history when weapons acquisitions were proactive, futuristic and redefined our largely defensive tactical doctrines. Sundarji’s Brass Tacks and Checkerboard exercises “fought” the wars in enemy territory. Even today, much of the hardware the three forces will field was bought by Rajiv, from Mirages to T-72 tanks to new-series MiGs, BMP armoured fighting vehicles and, of course, Bofors artillery. In those years, our defence budget crossed that lakshman rekha of 4 percent of GDP.

To understand how self-defeating this phobia is, check some data. Our 10 years’ defence imports are less than half of our gold imports in an average year and, more tellingly, less than 5 percent of the import bill of Reliance Industries and about 8 percent of the Indian Oil Corporation, a PSU. Our annual average military imports, at $2.3 billion, is less than one-fourth of our fertiliser imports. Why is buying for the kisan less scandal-prone or more virtuous than buying for the jawan?

Controversy dogs defence imports not because they are huge, but because they are small, piecemeal, with many vendors, and the “system” games this fear. If we don’t conquer this phobia, we will keep landing up in the ICU over a weekend, needing emergency transfusion, if not surgery, soon enough.

PostScript: Here’s the trick I played on you. I had written a National Interest on 27 April, 2015 in the wake of the Rafale controversy. This week, I have mostly written over the same text, changing the figures and updating the context. This shows the more things change—or don’t change—the more the joke is on the fourth largest military power in the world.

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