Last week, speaking in Mhow cantonment, Union defence minister Rajnath Singh said that “Bharat is not a very lucky country” in terms of security. He pointed out that India’s “northern and western borders continuously face challenges” and went on to add, “We also face challenges on the internal front.”
It’s remarkable that 77 years after independence, India’s defence minister is putting India’s security scenario down to Lady Luck. It shows that our political class is ever ready to find excuses for our predicament and refuses to acknowledge their own culpability in the situation.
There is no doubt that malign forces, external and internal, have played a role at various points in time in undermining our security. But surely a balanced appraisal would suggest that errors of omission and commission on the part of the Union government, which is wholly responsible for national security, have played a significant role as well.
Take the case of China. As the historian A.S. Bhasin has noted, “Nehru did not realise that international borders are not settled unilaterally but in consultation with the other stakeholder.” Nehru unilaterally declared Indian borders and made them non-negotiable and even altered them and expected the Chinese and the international community to fall in line. The Chinese took full advantage of the situation and played India to the point where it led to a war which went badly for India and has left a border situation which Nehru’s successors have had to deal with.
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As for the western border, most of it is demarcated, the problem being Kashmir. India could have done little about it given the Pakistani obsession with it. But there was an opportunity to settle it during the talks after the 1971 war and the opportunity was missed, not because of luck, but the incompetence of Indira Gandhi’s advisers.
Both the China and Pakistan problems go back a long time. But opportunities to resolve them have come and gone without any gain. In the case of China, till 1985 Beijing was willing to give up its claim to Arunachal Pradesh, in exchange for India recognising their claim on Aksai Chin. But New Delhi rejected the offer demanding that Aksai Chin be returned to India.
In the case of Pakistan, the best opportunity was in the 2004-2007 period when a four-point formula was being negotiated, and there, it is true that luck played a role in preventing it from fructifying. A variety of developments, unconnected to the India-Pakistan situation laid our Pakistani interlocutor, President General Pervez Musharraf low.
As for internal challenges, it is true that New Delhi could have done little to check the rise of Islamism around the world, or effectively deal with Pakistan’s use of jihadi elements to stiffen the Kashmiri separatist movement short of fighting a war. But surely, it needs to be recognized that the militancy in Punjab which so roiled the situation in northern India, and took the life of a prime minister, was the outcome of political strategies that went out of control.
India has also perceived security challenges from its smaller neighbours – Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Nepal, Bangladesh and even little Maldives. Dig deeper in Sri Lanka and you will find the remains of a wayward policy that sought to undermine the Sri Lankan government by training and arming the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). As for Bangladesh, India’s great success was in its creation. But in recent decades, poor policy choices led to our unqualified support to Sheikh Hasina’s increasingly authoritarian regime whose overthrow could lead to the emergence of a new security challenge now.
We have been lucky, and we say this with some deliberation, that despite two bouts of blockades of the country on the part of India, Nepal is not hostile territory for India. There are of course situations, such as in Myanmar which we cannot influence.
Recent moves in Sri Lanka and Maldives indicate that good policy can have benign results. By backing Colombo and Male in 2022 and 2024 to overcome their respective economic crises, New Delhi has managed to alter the anti-Indian trajectory of these two island countries.
Handling the security of a large and diverse nation like India can never be an easy process, but it should not be dependent on luck. What is needed today first of all, is some introspection over the manner we have handled our security challenges in the past. This is likely to reveal the need for competence and realism and a choice of instruments that go beyond just the mantra of security.
Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.
