Trick or retreat: Bofors aside, Rajiv's term reshaped India's defence plans

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.”

  The reaction to the Air Chief breaking the silence barrier is predictable. Anybody pointing to what the armed forces are short of is instinctively accused of being import-hungry or sold out. The insinuation: An evil cabal is preventing India from developing its own capabilities and keeping it dependent on expensive, unaffordable imports. Defence has also become an “influencer” pursuit and even the chiefs are wary. Then, Donald Trump throws the F-35 fat into this fire.

  This all-pervasive fear makes defence purchases nearly impossible. Too little is made in India yet, and even when 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 over 200 Sukhoi 30-MKIs and countless Jaguars or even MiGs, can we build one entirely on our own even now? We won’t reverse-engineer like cheapskate Chinese, you see.

  All of this was why we called the purchase of 36 Rafales a gutsy move—it broke a stalemate and defied the vicious lobbying and 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 off-the-shelf purchase made in wartime-like haste. That tag—“top arms importer”—is the greatest self-inflicted wound and curse of 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 per cent 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, and MQ-9B drones, among others 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 world’s fourth-largest military, 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? 

 

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 at India Today three decades ago). 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, and infantry rifles in batches of 60,000 or thereabouts. This has been the history of our defence purchases, except for a remarkable phase between 1985 and 1989 under Rajiv Gandhi. But that 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 the IAF suffered in Kargil, when it lost two MiGs and a Mi-17 attack helicopter, with all crew killed—except for one, who was taken as a 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.

  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) deals, than in our entire independent history. Mr 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 weapon 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 would field in a war was procured under Rajiv— Mirages, T-72 tanks, new-series MiGs, BMP armoured fighting vehicles, and, of course, Bofors artillery. During those years, our defence budget crossed the Lakshman Rekha of 4 per cent of GDP.

  To understand how self-defeating this phobia is, check some data. Our defence imports over a decade amount to less than half of our annual gold imports and, more tellingly, under 5 per cent of Reliance Industries’ import bill and about 8 per cent of that of 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 finding ourselves in the ICU over a weekend, needing an emergency transfusion, if not surgery, soon enough.

  Postscript: Here’s the trick I played on you. I had written a National Interest on April 27, 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 that the more things change—or don’t—the more the joke is on the fourth-largest military power in the world. 

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