Securing India’s security

First, India should act more purposefully to ensure national consolidation and long-term internal cohesion. That cohesion is necessary if it is to emerge as the most important political, military and economic power straddling the region between Central Asia, South Asia and the western parts of Southeast Asia. India should also aim at emerging as a capable military power in the South Asian land mass and an influential power in the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the waters of the Indian Ocean. It should work towards consolidating its position as a responsible nuclear power and get recognised as such. Such a consolidation would, of course, help it to emerge as a major economic player. In fact, India’s aim should be to structure and participate in a system of political, security and economic consultative arrangements which could form the basis for a stable world order.

Having stated this vision for India, it would be pertinent to list the micro-level political and security challenges achieving it would entail. Most of all, India requires to structure new equations with the important power centres of the world after the and of the Cold War because of the disappearance of leverages it once had. An important dimension of this is the creation of a stable and calibrated relationship with the United States, without losing its own ability to make autonomous decisions on foreign and security issues. Managing the prospects of Pax Americana is a major foreign policy and security exercise. Then there is South Asia, which constitutes nearly one-fifth of the world population and which also happens to be one of world’s poorest regions. Meeting developmental requirements through appropriate domestic and external policies is another challenge.

Safeguarding India’s territorial integrity and unity against overt or covert external aggression is the supreme responsibility of the government. This would require the fashioning of clear defence policies with precise consensus on the priorities to be kept in mind. Certainly, keeping the nation’s armed forces fully prepared, backed by the necessary resources, is vital. The BJP-led NDA government has failed in discharging these responsibilities. It has not undertaken the necessary reorganisation and reform in the armed forces or the defence organisations. It has not allocated sufficient funds for national defence. What is even more regrettable is that even the limited resources allocated have not been fully utilised to strengthen the armed forces. We need to remedy these shortcomings and in order to do so we would need to speedily implement the recommendations made for the restructuring of defence organisations and the armed forces, integrate the defence ministry with the headquarters of the three services, with uniformed officers being given a participatory role in the formulation of defence policies and the higher management of national defence. It is necessary to integrate the higher command of the armed forces and appoint a chief of defence staff.

Clearly, necessary financial resources need to be allocated for defence, including special allocations for the research, development and modernisation of defence technology. Similarly, it is necessary to take steps to develop human resources for national defence. These would also entail finetuning the higher command for nuclear and missile capacities. These capacities must be safeguarded and maintained at the appropriate level in the context of the changing security environment, particularly in the Asian region.

The institutional arrangements made by the BJP-led NDA government have been cosmetic. It did not ensure that national security was underpinned by systematic and structured institutional arrangements. The National Security Council, established in 1999, has not functioned with institutional cohension. Important national security decisions have been taken by the prime minister and his principal secretary in consultation with the deputy prime minister, without utilising the Cabinet Committee on Security, the Strategic Policy Group and officials of the National Security Advisory Board. A separate national security advisor should be appointed. The present arrangements of the principal secretary to the prime minister functioning as the national security advisor should be discontinued. Regular meetings of the Cabinet Committee on Security should be institutionalised.

It is imperative to ensure necessary connectivities between the intelligence agencies and the National Security Advisory Board. Restructuring should be undertaken of these agencies to improve its human resource basis with multidimensional expertise. It should be ensured that there is modernisation of functional capacities of the intelligence agencies with appropriate modern technological equipment and facilities. The recommendations made by the Experts Group to reform the intelligence agencies after the Kargil war, which have been hanging fire for the last four years, should be speedily implemented. This will ensure not only the efficiency but accountability of the intelligence agencies.

The writer is the chairman of the National Security Department of the AICC. The views expressed here are his own