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The conspicuously modest rise in the defence budget for 2018-19 highlights the mismatch between India’s grandiose strategic ambitions and our limited ability to fund them. Defence allocations, including military pensions, will rise by a token 8.1 per cent from the current year’s revised estimates of Rs 3.74 trillion ($58.45 billion) to Rs 4.04 trillion ($63.2 billion) next year. The usual suspects have lamented that this is far short of India’s “legitimate security needs”. But they seem to be overlooking the fact that successive Indian governments over the past two decades seem in agreement on what India can afford to spend
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