Himalayan task ahead

Historians cite American secretary of state John Foster Dulles inadvertently leaving out South Korea from the US defence perimeter in a seminal speech he delivered post-Second World War as one of the reasons for the Korean War in June 1950. This non-inclusion motivated the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung — aided and abetted

by Mao Zedong’s China — to send his armies across the 38th Parallel into South Korea to unify the Korean peninsula. It is important for a big power to define its security perimeter broadly and, geographically, to talk expansively of its national interests. India is yet to do any such thing, so no Indian “sphere of influence” or of “responsibility” has ever been delineated. China is leaving nothing to chance.
In Singapore last week, at the 10th Asia Security Summit hosted by the London-based International Institute of Security Studies, the Chinese defence minister and member of the Chinese State Council and Central Military Commission, Gen. Liang Guanglie, authoritatively put down the geostrategic stakes in terms of China’s “core interests”, incidentally, in response, to ruling Congress party spokesman Manish Tewari’s query. China’s core interests, he said, include “anything that is related to sovereignty, stability, and form of government”. Dilating on this last, sensitive, bit related to state ideology and authoritarian system Gen. Liang explained that “China is now pursuing socialism. If there is any attempt to reject the path, it will touch upon China’s core interests related to our land, sea or air. Then anything that is related to China’s national (economic and social) development also touches upon China’s core interests”. He thereby covered all the factors impacting that country’s security, including separatist movements in Tibet and Xinjiang, an independent Taiwan, disputed territories in the South China Sea and the Senkaku Island chain (contested with Japan), safety of sea trade routes, Chinese interests in African and Latin American natural resources, the Doha Round of tariff negotiations, and even climate talks (Copenhagen followed by Cancun). Gen. Liang implied that China would develop capabilities to protect and safeguard these interests.
Unlike China, India has shied away from laying down markers in the belief that what is left unsaid cannot provoke a confrontation — exactly the opposite tack to that taken by Beijing, which is that what is not pinned down can be expropriated by others. In a dog-eat-dog world of international affairs — that Indian policymakers pigheadedly refuse to acknowledge — no prizes for guessing which attitude is a liability.
Further, having staked out China’s perimeter and expansively elaborated its interests, Gen. Liang sought to lull his audience with the usual Pablum. Such assertiveness backed by China’s manifest economic power and fast-paced military modernisation programme, he claimed, are of a defensive nature and should not be perceived as threatening, and added, reassuringly, that China abhors “power politics and a Cold War mentality” and “has not been and will never be a hegemon”. Despite his considerable talents in this respect, Mr Tewari would have learned a lesson or two in dissimulation and about the art of effortlessly easing an iron fist into a silk glove. Whether he will be able to convey the right message to the Indian government, leave alone awaken it from its stupor, is less certain, considering that starting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and his national security adviser, the esteemable Shiv Shankar Menon, everybody up and down the government seems convinced that saying little about the growing differences and military tensions with China is the best way to resolve them.
A policy of playing the China threat in a low key makes sense if it is supplemented with a marked build-up of deterrent conventional military capability. But when India has no mountain divisions for offensive warfare on the Tibetan plateau worth the name and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) can marshal as many as 28-35 divisions inside of a month, courtesy the Qinghai-Lhasa railway connecting the Chinese mainland with its western periphery, then we have a problem. We need a minimum of nine offensive mountain divisions — stalwart commanders deem 13-14 such divisions as barely adequate for the mission of credibly fighting the Chinese PLA on their ground. According to the general officer commanding one of the two new Army divisions expressly raised for offensive operations in the mountains, his formation is at present reduced to “protecting newly built border roads”. What is the guarantee that these minimal additions to the extant force, or even the full complement of 9-14 mountain divisions, equipped with light howtizers, light tanks (to debouch from the Demchok Triangle), and assault helicopters whenever these are obtained, will actually be deployed for aggressive action against China, rather than as a strong backup for the defensively arrayed formations along the border, given that the Indian armed services as a whole have, over the years, grown as passive-defensive and risk-averse as the Indian government?
Reorienting the Army to take on the PLA, however, involves much larger issues than merely raising new strike divisions for the mountains. It requires transformative ability which, in turn, depends upon organisational agility — something the Army — the senior service and a habitual laggard in these matters — is simply not good at, having undergone just two major restructurings in the last 60-odd years even as the methods and nature of war, and India’s threat reality changed radically. The first transformation happened after the shock of the 1962 war with China; the second in the late-Eighties with Gen. K. Sundarji pushing to make the Army mobile warfare capable. Assuming the government cannot increase defence spending beyond 2.5 per cent of the gross domestic product level, the manpower and financial resources necessary for an offensive capability in the mountains will have to be freed up by finessing the Army’s armoured might into a consolidated strike corps plus. There’s no way to escape making hard choices. These and other issues were discussed at a June 3 seminar hosted by the HQ Central Command in Nainital with the Army Chief, Gen. V.K. Singh, present. One hopes Gen. Singh will initiate measures to make the Army relevant for tomorrow’s contingencies, otherwise a bigger military humiliation awaits the nation in the Himalayas.

bharat karnad is a professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi