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Have you ever asked yourself the question, how do I look from the outside?
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This is actually not a great question to ask.
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It can motivate us to be better people, but it can also keep us stressed out all the time.
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One of the core reasons for human unhappiness is the anxiety of what other people think
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Once we get past this, once we realize that no one thinks anything of us, that everyone
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is obsessed with themselves, that's when we can start being happy.
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However, geopolitics is different, nations aren't people.
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If you are in charge of India's defense of foreign policy, then how other countries
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think of us has real consequences.
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A resentful Pakistan may want to bleed us with a thousand cuts.
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A strong China may want to weaken us so that we can't ever be a threat to them, knowing
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that we can't really fight back.
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In our short history as an independent nation, we have had costly conflicts with both China
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And yes, all those conflicts were costly, even if we did win a war against Pakistan,
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because all conflict is a negative sum game.
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That is why the role of our armed forces is not just to win wars and secure our borders,
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but also to avoid conflict.
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Our armed forces need to be strong, even if we hope like hell that we never actually have
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But are our armed forces equipped for wars of the 21st century?
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In a nuclear world, what is the relevance of conventional force?
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What role can the military play in securing our place in the world?
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Are we up for that challenge?
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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My guest today is Sushant Singh, one of the finest defence and foreign policy analysts
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Sushant paid his dues in the trenches by serving in the army for 20 years, which included a
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He then went on to become a journalist, serving as a senior editor at the Indian Express and
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winning multiple awards.
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He has taught at Yale and is now a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in
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I have been meaning to pick Sushant's brain for a long time and we finally made it happen.
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In this episode, we discussed his time in the army, the Kashmir issue, the India-Pakistan
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conflict, the India-China conflict, the politicization of our armed forces, as well as the state
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I have done episodes on some of these subjects before with the likes of Srinath Raghavan and
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General Prakash Menon, so do go over to the show notes for those links.
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Before we get to this conversation though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
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In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog India Uncut,
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which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time.
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I loved the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
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I exercised my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things
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because I wrote about many different things.
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Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it.
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Only now I am doing it through a newsletter.
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I have started the India Uncut newsletter at IndiaUncut.substack.com where I will write
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regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
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I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
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So please do head on over to IndiaUncut.substack.com and subscribe.
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Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.
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You don't need to go anywhere.
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So subscribe now for free.
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The India Uncut newsletter at IndiaUncut.substack.com.
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So, Shant, welcome to the Seen and the Unseen.
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Thank you so much, Amit.
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It's a pleasure being on your show.
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So before we get started talking about all the areas in which you have expertise, our
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defense, our foreign policy, geopolitics, so on and so forth, I'm curious to know a
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little bit more about you because, you know, you've had what seems to me to be a really
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rich life, spent 20 years in the army, been a senior editor at the Indian Express, a much
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respected analyst who write for foreign policy as well.
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But take me to before all this, take me to your childhood, wherever you were born, what
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was your childhood like?
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Tell me a bit about that.
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So, Amit, I was actually, I belong to the state of Uttar Pradesh and my early schooling
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took place in the city of Agra, the erstwhile capital of India till the Mughal Emperor Shah
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Most people know it for the Taj Mahal.
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And after my graduation, I joined the Indian Military Academy and got commissioned in the
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Corps of Engineers in the Indian Army.
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I was a Madras Sapper, served for 20 years in the army, which included multiple stints
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in the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, including Srinagar, you know, Rajouri-Punj
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area on the line of control, Kargil-Jaz sector much later after the war, and did also did
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a stint as a United Nations military observer in Kodiwa, in Ivory Coast in West Africa.
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And there were other postings all over the country, which is usual for an army officer.
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The most notable among them would be probably my stint on the India-Pakistan border during
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Operation Parakram, which is the mobilization of the Indian Armed Forces after the terror
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attack on parliament in 2001, where Indian Army almost seemed prepared to go across.
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And a lot of activity took place at that point in time.
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After serving for 20 years in the army, I took premature retirement, voluntary retirement
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I held a corporate role for a short period of time, about a year or so before joining
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the Indian Express, where I was eventually the deputy editor, where I served for six
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years and then moved on as the as a senior fellow at Center for Policy Research with
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the Armenia here in Delhi.
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Besides doing some other things, as you said, still following, pursuing my writings and
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whether it is in foreign affairs or foreign policy or in other think tanks or other places.
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That in a nutshell is what my life has been so far about.
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That's a fabulous nutshell to compress all of that into three minutes is something that
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is not permissible and we'll unpack different parts of it as we converse.
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But take me back to before this, take me back to your childhood.
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What kind of a kid were you?
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What was it like growing up in Agra?
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Why did you want to join the army?
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What were the other things that you wanted to do?
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What were your influences?
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And also give me a sense of your pre-army life in terms of what was your day like?
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What kind of books did you read?
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What kind of music did you like?
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So you know, this is, of course, I'm talking about the pre-liberalization India, pre-1991
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India, pre-Babri demolition India.
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It was a very different India, Agra was, it was a different world, pre-internet world.
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We all, you know, I'm sure Amit, you remember that period as well, we all went to school
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on time, woke up on time, went to school, slept early, woke up early.
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I grew up reading a lot of Hindi magazines, a lot of newspapers, of course, were a big
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thing at that time, you know, essentially the Hardy Boys and all the other things.
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And because I happened to go to an English medium school, an ICSE school, I happened
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to read all the books in the syllabus, which were there starting from whether it is the
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Black Beauty, to the Treasure Island, to everything that a convent educated young boy read in
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the 1980s, going up to a lot of the flies in the 12th standard, the full play of Macbeth
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and March into Venice, and you know, 16 Tales from Shakespeare, what have you, everything
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So essentially, that is what reading was about.
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Music was primarily a lot of Hindi film music.
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My mother was a Hindi music and Hindi film lover, so we heard a lot of Hindi film music.
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The English pop music came much later when I was much older in school.
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And that was almost at that time cassettes mainly and that was what Michael Jackson and
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you know, nothing going to change my love for you.
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And all the other things which we now cringe at, which would probably make Twitter go retro
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and that kind of stuff, yeah.
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So that was what it was like.
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But Agra was a different city at that point in time.
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And I have reflected it often, my parents still stay in Agra.
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And I have reflected about it often that, you know, you could actually go and see an
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English movies would get released there.
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And I'm not talking just about 007 movies or Steven Spielberg movies.
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I'm talking even about movies like The Airport 77, The Lost Horizon.
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And very early school years, primary school years, I actually did go and see those kind
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of movies in the early 80s, including The Jungle Book.
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And I don't know if you remember, Amit, along with The Jungle Book, the India-Pakistan Cricket
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series, there was an hour long film on India-Pakistan Cricket series, which was shown along with
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The Jungle Book at that point in time, which I remember seeing at that point in time.
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So yeah, it was a nice life.
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It was a very different life.
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It was easy pace life, you went and played some sport, you studied hard, you know, usual
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My father was a doctor.
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You wanted to do well in life, the works, you know, standard things.
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The army thing came up primarily because, you know, you always are looking for a good
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And I'd be honest about it.
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And also it was a very exciting career.
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As a young kid, everybody loves the uniform, the razzmatazz and the glamour which is associated
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People always believe that you're going to be fighting 24 by 7 and it's all going to
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be all action and glamour, which is of course not true as one learns a hard way in life.
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And so essentially that is how I ended up in the army as a very young man.
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I got commissioned at the age of 21 and a half.
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And yeah, and that's how the career started.
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So I always kind of find this part of the conversation fascinating, especially when
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I'm talking to someone my own age, because it kind of makes me nostalgic because I think
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young people today who have the whole world at their fingertips don't realize what kind
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of a circumscribed world we lived in, like all the books you named and everything.
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They were part of a very small set of books you're reading.
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If you're a kid, you're reading Janet Blight and Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew.
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Then you go on to all these standard classics that you named.
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Even the kind of music you listen to in college was like extremely standard, whatever you
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actually got cassettes of.
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So all of that is sort of interesting.
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And even in terms of careers, you know, we had so few choices open to us.
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It was like, you know, you had your typical doctor and engineering and army, of course,
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is another kind of option, almost seems like a separate world.
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And people would want to do the civil services, all of that.
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I'm interested in another sort of aspect of what you kind of mentioned, which is that
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you would read a lot of Hindi magazines and newspapers.
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And one of the interesting sort of threads that I have, you know, explored in past episodes
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with people like Akshay Mukul and Rahul Verma, who you know, and you know, Gazala Wahab,
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who also grew up in Agra, is, you know, whether the fact that they were reading in these languages,
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reading Hindi, reading something different from what the sort of the English speaking
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world was giving you, whether that kind of made a difference in your outlook, you know,
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And I would imagine not so much with regard to your peers in the army, but many, many
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years down the line with maybe your peers in the media, where I'd expect that, you know,
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many of the people who write about foreign policy and defense and all that would be typical
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Latins Delhi journalists who've grown up reading and speaking and thinking in English.
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Tell me a little bit about that aspect of you that were you also then equally shaped
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by what you read in the languages while people like me were perhaps kind of stinted, although
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I did study Hindi and all that in school, but were kind of stinted because we had access
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only to one very English kind of exposure.
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Yeah, Amit, you know, I think that is to an extent through all of us are influenced by
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If somebody probably read Tamil literature or Tamil magazines, they would probably be
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So if a magazine like Dharmiyog, which was regular at my regular place, or Hindi newspapers,
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Jan Satta, Prabhas Joshi was editing it, or other magazines, Hindi magazines, Hindi articles,
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Hindi journals, Hindi books, or whether it is Jaishankar Prasad that you are reading
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or whether it is Dharmavir Bharti's Andhayog that you are reading at that young age, you
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know, you may not make full sense of a lot of stuff and a certain sensibility.
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And I would say at that time, a very socialist sensibility, which pervaded Uttar Pradesh
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at that point in time UP would definitely get through and shaped you in many ways.
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It was a period of great flux and great churning the 1980s in India, I think it's the most
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turbulent decade in so many ways in India's history.
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And to be seeing it from two different worlds, the English world, the Times of India, well,
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the Girdhal Jains of the world, and the Prabhas Joshis and Dharmavir Bharti's of the world.
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I think the ability to see through two separate prisons, the same incidents, the same issues
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without getting polarised, without getting into kind of the haranguing debate that we
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I think that does help shape in some way.
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It allows you to look at certain possibilities which others may not be open to, others may
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explore much later in life.
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More than that, a lot of it is late stage reflection, where we believe we read something,
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but we realise that we read it much later and then we transpose it to our young age
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and thought that we had read it at that point in time.
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So that's that's equally true.
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I reread Andhayog or Rashmi Rathi and then I realised that I didn't get a bit of it when
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I was much younger or even Premchand, reading Premchand at an early age when you were 17,
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18, 16, you know, you really don't get what Premchand is trying to say till the time you
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understand the socio-political context in which Premchand is writing it, which comes
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At that time, you are reading it more like a linear story, more like events happening
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one after the other, more like a good novel in that sense without realising where it is
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situated, where it is located and what effect it does have, which I think.
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So the idea that you can go back to those books again and again, or maybe you could
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draw upon some of those experiences does help in some way.
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But Amit, let me say one more thing.
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And I'm saying this with as somebody who's a Hindiwala, so to speak, even if I did not
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study in the language school, there's a slight amount of arrogance that has now come into
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a lot of people who actually studied in Hindi or who actually were growing up in Hindi speaking
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households saying that they are the only ones who understand the real India.
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And I think that arrogance is something which is not correct, which is not healthy.
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And people should not believe that they hold a copyright over what people would call Lutyens
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Delhi or people who come from different sensibilities over understanding India.
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India is too vast and too complex a country, too diverse a country, for any one of us to
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claim that we understand that country or even that district.
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Districts in India are really big, states are really big, we would not know, and especially
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because India has changed so quickly and so fast.
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It is very hard for any one of us to claim that we understand India because I grew up
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in X, Y, Z place or I read magazines and newspapers in X, Y, Z language.
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I think that's not fair on the rest of us.
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And it shows us kind of condescending attitude, which I find at times I find very repulsive.
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No, that's fascinating.
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And there's a lot to think about in what you just said.
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And one of the points that really struck me is that meta point you made about in hindsight,
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reflecting and giving greater significance to something that happened in the past.
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And we might now like, I often think that when we remember our past, when we kind of
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reconstruct our youth, are we also kind of making it up as we go along?
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I did a fascinating episode with Aanchal Malhotra, where we discussed kind of the nature of memory
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and how the brain actually works is first we remember something, but the next time we
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remember it, we are not actually remembering the original event, we are remembering the
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remembering of it and so on down the line.
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It's almost as if there is a game of Chinese whispers in our head.
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And this was like a complete TIL for me when I first kind of came across, which is why
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memory can be so unreliable.
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I'm also sort of struck by what you said about the arrogance of people who are sort of this
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almost this inverse of the snobbishness of language, while earlier the people who would
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study English would laud upon you.
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And now the people who studied Hindi are saying that no, only we know the real India.
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And it actually seems to me that people who have had a multi-lingual, a genuinely multi-lingual
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upbringing not just speaking different languages, but also reading in them and reading different
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papers would have different lenses with which to examine the same world.
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And at some level, I think there is a deepening there, which is valuable.
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Each lens can also distort what you see.
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So I wouldn't place a value judgment on it.
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I'm sure that there are these kind of trade-offs.
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But since we are speaking about that period, let me just kind of think aloud and take a
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brief digression into something wider, which is that when we look around at our discourse
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today, like we know that the discourse around us is deeply polarized, and that there is
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this move perhaps exacerbated by social media where everything is being pushed towards the
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extremes, almost the opposite of the median water theorem in a sense, where our politics
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is being pushed to these extremes and so on and so forth.
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So a couple of questions, one, is it the case that society is also as polarized as the polarization
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in our discourse would indicate, that are we much more divided than we used to be?
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And also, my sense of Indian culture has been something that while there are these kinds
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of strands in it that one may not appreciate, it is also very assimilative, very rich, very
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That cliche of a khichri with everything in it is so accurate.
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So now when you look back on, say, the Agra in which you grew up, the people around you
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in those times, the things that you read in the Hindi newspapers and or even the English
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ones, what is your sense?
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Have we really changed that much as a society or does the media today and the discourse
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today only amplify a division that always existed?
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So Amit, I would say that from the Agra that I grew up in to the Agra that exists now,
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including some of my closest friends in school with whom I studied and who are either now
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businessmen, doctors, professionals, whatever they may be, and probably not at my age, I
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do find a shift from the kind of values that we grew up with, which we all identified with
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at a certain point in time.
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Is that shift as horrible, as sharply divided as social media may like us to believe?
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May or may not be true, but there has been definitely a shift which has taken place.
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It would be unfair or incorrect for us to say that no shift has taken place.
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Whether the shift is like, you know, I can't talk to someone who supports a political ideology,
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I do not find conducive or healthy.
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People, my friends still talk to me, you know, the old boys association still meets in that
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But are they still the same people who would at that point in time feel very repulsed by
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what the Bajrang Dal was doing or what was going on, Islamophobia that was developing
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So there has been a shift.
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There has been a change.
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But has the change been to the extent to where it's a clear split, a very clear divide where
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nothing moves between the two sides?
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I don't think that's true.
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But Agra may be a particularly different case because Agra has always been, as you know,
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a very major BJP stronghold, the whole branch region.
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RSS has had very strong roots owing to Mr. Vajpayee and to other leaders.
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It saw major riots after the demolition of Babri Mosque in 1992.
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So it has a history, it has a past.
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So I know to sit on a value judgment or to give an answer based only on Agra and particularly
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my section of society, whom I knew in Agra, which is predominantly, you know, upper caste,
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affluent, well-to-do people would not be fair.
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So off the cuff, if you put a gun to my head, I would say, yes, things have deteriorated.
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But are they really split wide open, which cannot be bridged, may not be true.
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You are showing your army roots by using the expression, if I put a gun to your head, listen,
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we civilians don't do that kind of thing.
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So, okay, you can maybe, you know, whatever you put a chemical weapon or something down
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Yeah, thereby indicating that civilians also contain much evil.
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And I kind of wonder just to sort of take the same point forward that it's almost a
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cliche on my show to say that people contain multitudes.
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And this is something, however, that I've been thinking pretty seriously about recently
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because the truth is that all of your friends who would once have been repulsed by the Bajrang
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Dal, but today may support that party and so on and so forth, they are not simplistic
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It's not like they shifted from one point to another point.
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There are many conflicting impulses within them, and all that has happened is that perhaps
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one particular impulse, one particular narrative strand has drawn them out a little bit more
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But many of their other impulses would remain, including assimilative impulses and they enjoy
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Urdu guzzles and all of that, I'm quite sure.
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So my question is that what has happened in the past 20 or 30 years is that a particular
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strand of thinking about the world, about thinking almost in tribal terms, othering
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a certain kind of people, thinking about one's culture and history in a particular way, there
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was always a narrative within our society, as Akshay Mukul's excellent book on the
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Geeta Press shows, but it has gained dominance.
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And it strikes me that if it has gained dominance today, there is something about it that has
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been attractive to the people who have become attracted to it, like perhaps some of your
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friends who have gradually changed in that way.
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What do you think that is and do you think that there are countervailing narratives that
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could also appeal to, in a sense, a better angels or the different angels of their nature
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if we are not to put a value judgment on this particular narrative?
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Very tough to say what really triggered those changes.
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As you rightly said, those changes have taken place over gradually, over a period of time,
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till the time we see this dominant ideology at play.
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Obama has a great line in his new book in the memoirs, the first part, that some leaders
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come and I'm paraphrasing it, it's not the exact thing that some leaders come, they touch
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upon the dark side of the people and the dark side comes.
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Other leaders come and they touch upon the good side and he's actually referring to Trump
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I know that all the venom, all the poison that you see comes out suddenly and all the
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And as you rightly said, maybe the narrative which had gained dominance, the certain kind
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There are multiple factors at play, there's global factor of 9-11 as you probably somebody
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on your show, I'm sure must by now must have explained to you how Islamophobia and anti-Islam
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thing came up and nicely fitted in with the whole thing.
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So you know, if you see somebody of my age, you have the Bapri demolition, the whole movement
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which leads to demolition of the Bapri Mosque followed at the same time simultaneously,
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you know, mixing it with the insurgency in Kashmir, which really at one point in time
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people forget threatened to break apart.
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People really believe that Kashmir was going to break free.
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You know, most of us have forgotten what the situation in Kashmir in 91, 92, 93 was like.
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No, it's very hard for us to now imagine that situation.
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And at that point in time, I think that played into the whole narrative and eventually the
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political rise of a certain political force and the ideology which had always existed
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in the party, the decline of other political ideologies, the whole mixing of it with the
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economic reform, the rise of capitalism, crony capitalism, whatever you wish to wish to call
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it or followed by a 9-11 and the global environment around the same ideology, the rise of conservatism,
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art, so to speak, you know, in a certain way, all that at some level was mixing and matching
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till the time it really burst out in the open around the same time, Mr. President Trump
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comes to power and in India, the BJP comes to pass.
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It's a journey, but a lot of factors which were happening in the background at the same
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time, along with the dominant narrative, the rise of subaltern parties, the fact that there
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were parties which were rising, which threatened the existing status quo, whether it was the
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BSP, the SP, the Lalu Yadavs of the world, they were not really something the existing
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parties which were dominated by a certain sections of caste and class could digest.
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So there was a lot of pushback against the change, they were trying to change the status
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quo, there was a lot of pushback against the status quo.
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And because caste system is this wonderfully graded inequality, so even the middle class
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believe that there was somebody under them whom they could oppress, say that they were
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trying to target them rather than trying to really go for equality as Pratap Bhanumetta
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is wonderful, that thin essayish book, which clearly says that the idea of social justice
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in India was not about seeking equality, was actually imposing your own inequality on somebody
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So all those factors, the social churn, the economic churn, the churn globally placed
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in a context where Kashmir was happening, where massive political mobilization was happening,
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Mandal was happening, 9-11 was happening, all that came together.
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And I think we landed up where we landed up.
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I would even put Kargil as part of it, the fact that the militarization of the Indian
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society, the fact that hero worship of a certain kind of thinking which took place at the India's
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first televised war, almost like the Gulf War in the US.
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And a great comparison is how the US media covered the Vietnam War and how they covered
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Similarly, how the Indian media coverage of the military changed with Kargil is something
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which needs to be seen in the same context.
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And we see more and more of that going down the line.
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Yeah, it's fascinating.
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I mean, obviously, it's multifactorial and much of what you mentioned, it's stuff that
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I've discussed separately here, the very interesting point that I'm here that a guest has raised
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for the first time is how the Kargil war was possibly our first televised confrontation
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in a sense and could have also played a part, which is fascinating and best thinking about.
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I mean, the interesting thing is you spoke about the rise of conservatism.
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I would say it's the rise of the right wing per se, because Trump is pretty much an anti-conservative
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and even the BJP in many ways is a radical party where they are, you know, seeking to
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uproot so much that is embedded in our society, such as our tolerance and such as our assimilative
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But that to be fair, you know, and if you go back to the to the late 80s, early 90s,
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BJP is actually not a right wing party.
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It's actually a conservative party, Hindu conservative party, which has its origins
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in the Jansang, the Swatantra Party and the Congress, which were all merged in the in
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So you have the Sikandarbaks of the world, which are part of the BJP, who came from different
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So where we have landed up today, maybe hardcore right wing ideological project.
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But where we came from or the journey that we took, there were a lot of conservative
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points which allowed it to seamlessly get through because you said these guys are slightly
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They're not evil in that sense.
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They're just like slightly different.
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They believe in a certain way of life and we should go with them.
#
And I think in that sense, the quibble, I would, you know, I would take a quibble with
#
No, no, that's absolutely a fair point.
#
And I did a pretty popular episode with Vinay Sitapati on this, also tracing the BJP before
#
Modi and all of those years.
#
I mean, in fact, you know, in the 1980 when the BJP formed over the ruins of the Janta
#
Party, it was the stated aim was Gandhian socialism.
#
And it's really because Congress took a move towards a certain kind of soft Hindu tour
#
that the BJP felt compelled to go in and kind of reclaim that ground, which is very interesting.
#
And I'll link that episode from the show notes.
#
Let's get back to the narrative of your life as it were.
#
And then you joined the army.
#
What was the army like?
#
Like what attracted you about the army as opposed to all of the other sort of options?
#
I mean, one you mentioned, it's a glamour and men in uniform looking supremely fit.
#
And obviously, you know, all of that is there.
#
But once you entered it, what was army life like?
#
What did you like about it?
#
What did you not like about it?
#
In the early years, the training period or the early years, it was very enjoyable for
#
You know, it opens your eyes to the world.
#
And as you rightly said, you know, I was from a pre-internet, pre liberalization generation.
#
The army actually showed you the world in some ways, you know, it was a totally different
#
world with the kind of it still had the a lot of traditions coming down inherited from
#
the British India, which looked very glamorous at that point in time and very fascinating.
#
And you know, so much of discipline, so much of clarity, very structured, regimented way
#
of thinking, all that, you know, physically fit, you know, bloody civilians, you know,
#
Kind of, you know, if you're 21, 22 year old, it can be very, you know, intoxicating.
#
It can really get to your head.
#
You'll say, well, guys, we are superior to, you know, so the whole idea in the military
#
at that point in time, you're superior to all these bloody people.
#
These guys are lesser inferior human beings because you are disciplined, because you can
#
run, you know, whatever, 16 kilometers and this thing, you can run five kilometers with
#
so much of weight in 20 minutes because you can walk straight, talk straight, look straight
#
and you can drill smartly, you know, you guys are superior human beings.
#
And so, you know, and for any human being, especially at 20, 22, 23 year old guy, it's
#
very easy to believe that he's superior to others.
#
You know, we, in any case, all of us believe you believe it even now, I believe it in now
#
that I'm so at that point in time, it just gets to your head.
#
You are completely intoxicated and you love it and you know that you love the fact that
#
A lot of people get disillusioned as young army officers when they are posted to peace
#
stations because in peace stations, you are doing some bit of training, you're doing a
#
lot of routine administration.
#
It's a very boring, thankless kind of job.
#
It is not that challenging.
#
Fortunately, I was lucky I landed up in Kashmir.
#
I landed up in Srinagar early on for three years and Srinagar at that point of time was
#
You know, I was at a place called Hafchanar, it used to be the old Jackalai Center and
#
it was the peak of militancy and as a young Sapper officer, you would go with various
#
patrols, you would defuse IEDs, you would make bridges, you would do all the other things
#
dealing with explosives.
#
So it was a challenging time and it felt good.
#
So you were experiencing what really one doesn't realize at that point in time that one would
#
never experience again in the military actually.
#
So to straight away go there was pretty enjoyable, pretty heady in a way and almost kind of validated
#
the decision to join the army.
#
It is as you grow in service, as you do more and more peace postings, as you go through
#
routine administrative duties, as you realize that it is like any other organization, any
#
other bureaucracy, with all these internal politics, everything, etc.
#
Then you slowly realize that this is different and you also grow up, you also reflect back,
#
reflect at things, look back at things.
#
And that is how one traverses the journey.
#
But for me, the early years, at least the first five, six years of my service were really
#
wonderful, were really enjoyable and they in some sense, they are still remain a marker
#
But when you talk about the military or the military training, there is a great phrase
#
in Jaswant Singh's memoirs about military training.
#
And I actually admired it when I read it because if some and he was saying that he thought
#
about this when he was 16, he was in the National Defense Academy and if somebody could think
#
about that at 16, while he was undergoing military training after coming from Mayo,
#
that it actually breaks you down, military training breaks you down and tries to fit
#
And I tried to resist breaking down without being pointed out.
#
He said, in my head, I decided I would not break down and would not form part of this
#
And I thought if somebody could actually think that at 16 and do it, it's amazing.
#
Most people do not even realize that they are being broken down in the name of discipline,
#
in the name of motivation, and we try to fit into a pattern.
#
But Jaswant Singh to realize it, and that's why he decided to quit the army very early,
#
a failed and then again, went on to quit the army much later.
#
It's a great couple of pages in his memoirs, something called A Matter of Honor, the memoirs
#
I thought that for the very apt description, but for lesser mortals like us, very difficult
#
to ascertain at an early stage in life, it takes much longer to realize the bit of truth
#
in that it may not be the full truth, but it contains a lot of truth that statement
#
No, that is in fact a staggering bit of self-awareness, like not just for someone aged 16, but anyone.
#
I mean, that kind of self-awareness where you can look at yourself and what's happening
#
to you like that is pretty rare.
#
So you know, a smaller question and a broader question, and the smaller question is not
#
so much smaller really, but it pertains only to you therefore, but it's a large question
#
pertaining to you, which is that Jaswant Singh self-awareness, and obviously not everybody
#
can have that and all of that.
#
But what is your image of yourself developing through this entire period?
#
Like, of course, you're a young man, you get into the army, you've pointed out, you know,
#
all the seductions of it, you know, you're fit, you're fitter than everyone, you're probably,
#
you think you're smarter than everyone because you are being taught stuff within the army
#
and all of those things are there, but how is your self-image then evolving over a period
#
Like how does Sushant Singh see himself at 18 and 22 and 26 and 30 and how is that kind
#
of progressing over time?
#
It's a tough question to answer, but I think at 22, 23, the self-reflection is more about
#
that I'm doing a great job, I'm doing a wonderful job, and perhaps I'm doing national service.
#
So, you know, I'm doing something which I'm trained for and I'm enjoying myself.
#
By age 30, and I'm now just trying to calculate where I was when I was when I was age when
#
By age 30, it is, you know, as you go up the slightly up the hierarchy, you become more
#
aware of the career, you know, the advanced career advancements, the promotions, the courses,
#
the routine administrative things and other bureaucratic norms which are there, you know,
#
you also move along in your family life, you probably get married, you may or may not have
#
kids or you are on your way to having kids, etc.
#
And that brings a different dimension to the whole life, you know, people expect you to
#
be more responsible, your bosses, which is which they don't expect you to be at 22, at
#
22, you can be really brash, you know, and people will say, oh, he's a young man, so,
#
you know, God, he's got a lot of josh, as they call it in the army.
#
So all those things happen in the journey, yeah, more self awareness, more self reflection
#
And you start looking at the world, you start looking at the world outside by that time,
#
you know, when you are when you are 21, 22, you are probably among the earliest lot of
#
your friends who have settled down in life and earning a salary and you know, having
#
By the time you're 30, most of your friends have settled down, they're earning, they're
#
So you are able to, even if you don't want to almost compare with others and look at
#
others and see how they are doing by that time, they're also settling down how their
#
And then you start reflecting on what could have gone better for them, what could have
#
Yeah, that is the time when you start looking at yourself differently, you've done a couple
#
of peace postings, forces, etc.
#
You start wanting to do well in your career.
#
All those things take place at that point in time.
#
So and at this point, I'd also sort of like to ask you about like, I find it interesting
#
that you were sort of into separate bubbles at two different points in time, one of which
#
you already mentioned, it's the army bubble where, you know, people within the army will
#
look at themselves as different from the civilians and perhaps a little superior.
#
But the other interesting bubble is the bubble which you are in when you are in Kashmir.
#
Kashmiri people are, you know, one thing and you are in a bubble of your own as somebody
#
from India, from mainland India, somebody who is in the army.
#
And in a sense, there is at some level, surely some sense where the local people look upon
#
you with hostility as if you are oppressors, you are kind of an other for them.
#
What was that sort of period like, like, what if like, first of all, for a person in the
#
army in Kashmir at that point, what is your approach towards the local population?
#
What is their approach towards you?
#
And how does that thinking kind of deepen as the years go by?
#
Yeah, so the period that I'm talking about that we are discussing is early 90s.
#
And at that point in time, the situation was very tense in Kashmir and the army was really
#
trying to regain control in some way.
#
There was no civilian government in place in Kashmir and things had been very, very
#
A lot of army units, a lot of paramilitary forces had been pushed inside the valley.
#
There was, of course, a lot of hostility from the Kashmiris towards the security forces.
#
But the power equation was clear.
#
The power was with the security forces who were trying to establish some kind of order,
#
some kind of state power, leave the stamp of state power at that point in time, trying
#
to deal both with the militancy or the armed militancy that was being supported by the
#
Pakistan while also trying to find a way to deal with the civilian population.
#
This is the period in Kashmir where it is more about dealing with the armed militancy
#
and regaining some kind of control over the violence in the Kashmir valley.
#
And there was, of course, as I said, a lot of hostility which one could see and people,
#
the soldiers, the officers, a lot of them were dying, a lot of them losing their lives.
#
A lot of militants were coming in from, well trained from Pakistan.
#
Many others were coming who had fought in Afghanistan and against the Soviet Union and
#
had been freed after the war got over or were fighting with the Taliban or the forces and
#
were coming back well trained.
#
It was a very tough period.
#
Indian army was itself learning how to deal with this kind of counter-insurgency.
#
Amit, as you know, Indian army had only dealt with counter-insurgency in Nagaland before
#
that or in Sri Lanka and Sri Lanka was a totally different kind of experience against the
#
A lot of lessons which were learned from the LTT could not be actually used against these
#
militants who were trained in a totally different frame and were using completely different
#
To give you an example, the kind of IEDs or the improvised explosive devices that the
#
LTT used were more like Vietnam in that sense, bamboo stakes, all those deceptive kind of
#
But what you saw here was far more technologically advanced electronics, almost like with remote
#
control IEDs and all those other kinds of things, pressures, which were far more sophisticated
#
These were far more battle hardened people.
#
They had better weaponry in that sense.
#
And the Indian army, as you know, and the Indian armed forces since the time of 1950s
#
in Nagaland do not use air power, do not use heavy weaponry.
#
When I say heavy weaponry, they do not use mortars, they do not use artillery against
#
any of the armed militancy.
#
A very rare example is the Manipur thing in the late 1960s where air power was used.
#
So that actually makes it almost, if I may say, a battle of equals, so to speak.
#
The militant also has an AK-47, I also have an AK-47, who is better with the weapon will
#
But it is not like a duel in that sense.
#
Of course, there are more things in the numbers, the understanding of the terrain, the local
#
support, all those factors come into play.
#
So it was a very tough period.
#
The sympathy for the local population was limited at that point in time as the target
#
was militancy and suppressing the violence.
#
So that is how it was at that point in time.
#
And the whole idea was about resting back control of Kashmir and to ensure that it remains
#
a part of India and the sovereignty of the Indian state is not harmed.
#
A lot of it was directed towards that.
#
I wrote a column a few years ago, which was about sort of how the situation in Kashmir
#
And one of the things I wrote about in that was exactly what you said about counterinsurgency,
#
which you know, in fact, the Iraq war, even the Americans really hadn't figured it out.
#
David Galula wrote a famous book a few decades ago called Counterinsurgency Warfare Theory
#
And one of the early practitioners of this kind of warfare was, in fact, Mao, one of
#
Mao's generals defined counterinsurgency as, quote, 20% military action and 80% political.
#
Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom once spoke about how, quote, war upon rebellion
#
was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife, stop quote.
#
And eating soup with a knife, in fact, seems a very sort of vivid description of what it
#
And one of the points that they kind of made, and there's a great book by Fred Kaplan called,
#
I think, The Insurgents, about the insurgents within the American army, including David
#
Petraeus, who tried to sort of bring this new wisdom to the fore after the Iraq war
#
But talk about, again, go back to the 20% military, 80% political part and say that
#
what an army must do in any situation of such insurgency is what they call clear-build-hold.
#
That first you clear the ground of all the terrorists who are coming from outside and
#
then you kind of consolidate there and all of that.
#
And a lot of it involves getting the local population to your side.
#
And this seems to me to have been a spectacular failure of the Indian army in Kashmir, that
#
essentially the Indian administration there, I won't just say the army, alienated local
#
Kashmiris, and a lot of that just happened the way the incentives went down.
#
For example, David Davidas wrote a book called The Generation of Rage in Kashmir, where at
#
one point he talks about how the number of kills, the number of terrorists killed became
#
a metric for the advancement of the forces.
#
So he speaks about how court officers and units sometimes competed to notch up higher
#
He talks about how there was a bump him off culture, suspects were routinely killed and
#
He gives cases where innocent people are taken from one area to the other, killed, passed
#
off as terrorists to get rewards.
#
And this kind of continues, like Davidas, for example, there's one para from his book
#
which I had quoted in my column which struck me as striking, where he writes, quote, Waheed
#
Para experienced this in 2005 when he was in his late teens.
#
A BSF officer accused him of being a militant, dramatically holding a pistol to his head,
#
and then tortured him mentally until he broke down.
#
He was released after a minister in the state government intervened, but the swaggering
#
officer threatened while letting him go that he would discover weapons from the car and
#
then blow up that car with the boy in it.
#
The boy was studying in class 11 when he became a victim of such torture and threats.
#
That officer wanted the boy's new black indigo car, stop court.
#
And Davidas' overall point is that the situation in Kashmir was actually becoming much better.
#
You know, during the time Vajpayee had his talks with Nawaz Sharif and, you know, in
#
the middle of the auties, but it suddenly became much worse because the administration
#
just kept treating the locals in a sense the way the British treated us, if not far worse.
#
Looking back in that period with, you know, perhaps a lot of the wisdom you have in hindsight
#
as well, would you say that the Indian army made big mistakes there in the 1990s and if
#
So Amit, a very long question and very tough question to answer for a former army man.
#
But let me put it this, the insurgency and the counterinsurgency in Kashmir, at least
#
what I have understood, the way I look at it is actually divided into a few, you know,
#
One is the period between 89 and 96 and of course, there are multiple parts to it.
#
The early part is JKLF led and then the JKLF declines, the JKLF is the urban, local, you
#
know, Kashmiri Azadi kind of a group, which is replaced by a more pro-Pakistan Hezbollah
#
Majahedin, which actually, you know, suppresses the JKLF and almost finished the JKLF at that
#
Then comes the period of the suicide bombers, the suicide attackers, the Fidain who start
#
attacking and this is all happening within the 90s, but till 96 and I put 96 as a marker
#
because of the elections that took place, which were supposedly successful, both the
#
Lok Sabha as well as the assembly elections.
#
The assembly elections brought the Farooq Abdullah government to power and around that
#
same time, you have the counter insurgents, the Koka Pare and the others who were propped
#
up by the state to fight against the insurgency.
#
The whole endeavor at that point in time in this period, when you look from the angle
#
of the state, Indian state at that point in time, was somehow get control of the situation.
#
And the only thing that the metric for bringing in the control was, can I suppress the violence?
#
And I know for a fact that the idea Manoj Joshi probably has quoted in his book on Kashmir
#
about that period is very clear that the why is the local afraid of the militant and not
#
We may in hindsight look at it wrongly, but try to think of an institution, a state and
#
organization under tremendous pressure and almost an instrument of last resort, believing
#
that things were slipping away and trying to regain control.
#
That was the mindset with which that period was approached till 96.
#
So in 1996, Farooq Abdullah comes to power with a huge majority.
#
And I think there is a shift that takes place in Kashmir around that time.
#
And I'm not going to say the shift is radical in some way, but there is some semblance of
#
democracy at that point in time.
#
The army's behavior, not army only, the whole behavior of the security forces changes.
#
And I saw this with my own eyes, even in a place like Srinagar, the behavior changes.
#
People could walk up to their local MLA, et cetera, who could come if there was something
#
wrong or something which was harsh being done by the security forces and could represent.
#
Even a semblance of democracy could actually allow that to happen in Kashmir at that point
#
From 96 till almost 2003, 2003 is when the ceasefire takes place on the line of control.
#
And this is the peak of the Vashpayee Musharraf engagement.
#
This is really the high point of that engagement.
#
This is a totally different phase of insurgency where actually violence does not come down,
#
but the security forces response becomes less harsh.
#
Now, I'm not going to argue with you and say everything was fine, everything was hunky
#
dory and we were like completely following everything in the court.
#
But this is the period when the chiefs of army staff's commandments are told to everyone.
#
People are actually sent behind bars.
#
People are punished through court marshals for any excesses.
#
People are being held to account in whatever manner that they were being held to account,
#
whether through the channels of the military or through other channels of the state.
#
And this is a time when violence actually does not go down.
#
In 2001, if I'm not wrong, is the peak of militancy in Kashmir in terms of fatality.
#
Some 3000-4000 people died in Kashmir in 2001.
#
From 2003 when the ceasefire takes place and 2001 is actually when Musharraf goes on television
#
and says that we will stop all militant training, we will do everything, et cetera, et cetera,
#
And by 2003, you have the ceasefire.
#
The militancy suddenly comes down.
#
And by 2012, we have what 100-odd people did.
#
And I think 2012 is the lowest in militancy.
#
And then again, it's a secular decline, almost like 400-odds, 300-odds, 200-odds, 100-odds.
#
And 2012, if I'm not wrong, was a period when less people died in Kashmir than they died
#
before 1989 in normal robberies at whatever violence you would have on the streets.
#
And post-2012, there's a rise which really shoots through the roof post-2015 and 2016
#
So in the whole thing, how I would put it is 89 to 96, more desperate phase when you
#
try to regain some amount of control, 96 to 2003, more stable, more trying to find a balance
#
between how to use the strong arm as well as trying to win the hearts and minds, so
#
But there's a contestation that is going on.
#
It's not a perfect thing, but it's a contestation that is going on.
#
And then from 2003, the militancy is coming down.
#
Muftis forms a government, PDP forms a government with Congress.
#
And then Omar comes to power with Congress.
#
The state governments are asserting their power, they're part of this whole structure
#
which is created in Srinagar and Jammu where they head the committees which have the military
#
So from 2003 to 2014-15 is a totally different phase of militancy in Kashmir.
#
And it is around 2015-2016 that militancy and now this time more local, then supported
#
by Pakistan, really shoots through the roof.
#
So Amit, I don't know if you're aware, but this year so far, every single militant who
#
has been killed in Kashmir Valley is a local.
#
There's no foreign militant.
#
Yeah, this is stunning data.
#
I don't think in the last 30 years we have ever had a year where there was no foreign
#
So if it continues, I don't know whether it will continue or not.
#
But till a few days back, no foreign militant had been killed.
#
And that is the phase in which I think the army's response becomes more and more strong
#
armed response, which we saw in South Kashmir, which we saw in the photograph of the gentleman
#
being taken on a bonnet of a jeep and all those kinds of visual public images which
#
were not condemned by the state or people were not punished for those transgressions
#
but being justified and in some cases even being rewarded for what they were doing at
#
And I think that's the journey Kashmir has seen in some ways.
#
It's not been a happy journey for Kashmiris, it's not been a happy journey for the army.
#
I don't think any institution benefits by being in this kind of environment for a long
#
And probably there was a time when things could have been settled better if the state
#
administration had been much more stronger, much more powerful, if the army had been more
#
willing to take certain amount of risk, if Pakistan was not as perfidious as it was,
#
if probably Afghanistan was not in turmoil and the Americans were not trying to pacify
#
it with Pakistani support, all those kinds of things.
#
What ifs, there are a lot of counterfactuals, there are a lot of what ifs that can be used.
#
But unfortunately, now we are at a point in Kashmir where it looks pretty bad from the
#
perspective of the Kashmiris.
#
Any Kashmiri you speak to doesn't really have nice things to say about the Indian state
#
and that's pretty hurtful for most of us.
#
Yeah, I know that chronology dovetails exactly with what Devdas describes in his book.
#
In fact, earlier I said the watched by Nawaz Sharif talks, but spoken typo, obviously I
#
meant watched by Musharraf, so around 2003 it starts getting better.
#
But what happens, and this is probably not just an army issue, it's a BSF issue, it's
#
a police issue, like Devdas in his book writes about how the people who became senior police
#
officers in the late autees were people who grew up at the height of the insurrection,
#
so they were used to strong arm methods.
#
There was massive rent-seeking because the state was using its power.
#
There was daily humiliation, like at one point he writes quote, most men had at some point
#
been abused, slapped or kicked on their way after a soldier had looked at their ID card,
#
or they had watched a father or an uncle being slapped, or ordered to do squats while holding
#
his ears, or made to stand on his hands with his feet propped against a wall on a public
#
road while neighbours and relatives passed by.
#
Humiliation was one of the keys to control, stop quote, entirely sounding worse than the
#
And the question here is, how do we think of something like legitimacy, like you actually
#
served in Kashmir at one point in the early 90s, and like you said, this is in the first
#
phase where a lot of the militancy was coming from outside, you've said that the locals
#
trusted the army more than the militants, and in a sense they are caught between a rock
#
But this question of how legitimate you are considered to me is really important, because
#
if you're not considered legitimate, if you're looked upon as an occupier, then every arrest
#
Everyone who, every local who dies for whatever reason, it can be looked upon as a murder.
#
So what was your experience there in Kashmir, like did it evolve over a period of time,
#
and do you feel that in a sense, you know, like going back to that whole counter-insurgency
#
formula that is 20% military and 80% political, is that something you agree with, and was
#
this something that the army was not equipped to do, that you were equipped to win the military
#
How the hell do you do the rest of it, in hindsight, when we look back at that period,
#
what are the kind of failings that one can see, and would the army having learned from
#
all of those lessons be in a better place to do the job if you had to sort of in a groundhog
#
kind of, groundhog day kind of way, relive history again?
#
Two things, one is that the army actually acted against a lot of misdemeanors.
#
So I will not say that every misdemeanor was punished, but everything wrong that was reported
#
or brought into the public domain, people did get punished, you know, people went behind
#
bars, people suffered for their promotions, all those things, they were not taken lightly
#
Maybe the reason may not be human rights per se, the reason may be that the institution
#
did not want the discipline to go down.
#
Maybe the reason was that the institution did not want it to be perceived badly by the
#
public, a larger public, larger Indian public.
#
Maybe that's the narrative in the country was different, the larger political administrative
#
set up in the country thought different, maybe the courts in the country thought differently
#
So there was no reward for doing something wrong, you know, if you got caught, you know,
#
There's no doubt about that.
#
And people did get punished for it.
#
That's something which we must recognize.
#
So it's not that as if it was free for all that everything that went unpunished and went
#
or was rewarded in that place.
#
In army's defense, I must say that in the defense of the security forces or the Indian
#
Now that's debatable whether it was up to the right extent when it should have been
#
done, whether it really, really allowed us to build the trust.
#
And you know, we have the examples of the Americans in Vietnam, Americans in Afghanistan,
#
Iraq, you know, this is a whole debate, which is like, none of us have the answers to that
#
Could the army have provided the final solution or the and I'm not using the final solution
#
in the term not in quotes, unfortunate choice of words, sorry, you know, could the army
#
have provided a more lasting permanent solution to the problem in that sense on its own?
#
I don't think that was possible by the very nature of the army without the other arms
#
of the state taking their responsibility, including the political leadership and being
#
supported by the central in a big way.
#
And those opportunities were there at multiple points in time, especially when the violence
#
has subsided in the early 2010s in the earlier part of the previous decade.
#
There was a possibility that something like, you know, you remember the debate around the
#
removal of AFSPA from urban areas of Kashmir, which was supported by Mr. Pichadambaram as
#
the home minister and others.
#
But the upward was opposed by the army and the defence ministry and the then defence
#
Antony and it could not be removed.
#
There were movements which were not grasped in Kashmir very clearly.
#
And you know, these were movements which were not grasped politically more than by the military.
#
I would not want the military to go and start telling the politician how to do politics.
#
You know, that would be more like Pakistan than with India.
#
So yeah, military was doing what it was being told to do, what it thought was the right
#
thing to do within the domain of independence that it was given within the task that it
#
There were mistakes made.
#
I think everybody in the army would accept that there were mistakes made.
#
Some of them went unpunished.
#
Some of them were, of course, punished.
#
Things could have been done better.
#
Things could have been done in a much smarter way, much better way.
#
But the nature of the organisation, the nature of the institution, the certain inherent characteristics
#
through which the military looks at various roles and military is not the police for a
#
reason or not the gender armoury or the paramilitary for a reason to come into play because you
#
at the end of the day, you do not want to reduce the military to a paramilitary force
#
or to a police force because it has to deal with an external enemy and deal with an external
#
There's a psychological mindset of the organisation of the institution, which is different from
#
other security forces and which does come into play at many points in time.
#
It is also that, you know, if the paramilitary forces fail, they will call in the army.
#
If the police fails, they will call in the paramilitary forces.
#
But if the army fails, whom do you call in?
#
You know, you really cannot call in anybody.
#
So I think that pressure of having to succeed, you know, if I fail, then there's nothing
#
It's almost like the number seven or number eight batsmen in cricket, if I fail, the pressure
#
of somebody, you know, batting at that thing, I'm trivialising the matter.
#
But what I'm saying is that nothing after me, you know, and so I really need to.
#
So you know, people can make decisions under that kind of pressure, which are not the decisions
#
they would look back very fondly at a few years down the line.
#
And I think that's how I would characterise it.
#
That's how I would I would put it across.
#
Yeah, that analogy about the number seven batsmen is spoken like a true 80s kid because
#
this was true in the 80s, number seven out ho gaya toh gaya, but today we have such pleasant
#
So you know, again, to come out of the army context, just as someone who's kind of lived
#
in Kashmir and I assume you have some familiarity and affection, which goes beyond whatever
#
your army experience might have been.
#
How do you feel when you look at it today?
#
Like I thought what happened a couple of years back and of course, I had a great episode
#
on this with our mutual friend Srinath Raghavan.
#
I remember being very despondent at the time because I thought India has lost Kashmir for
#
Like I cannot and especially after what has happened since where for months and months
#
And I mean, everything that happened just felt that it was a huge turning point towards
#
What's your sense of all of that?
#
Yeah, that episode with Srinath was by the way, a great episode.
#
Srinath is a very dear friend, Srinath is a very dear friend.
#
And what more can I say actually, I mean, it's very, very sad, in fact, you know, that
#
Kashmir is the place that it is in and the Kashmiris had to undergo all that they have
#
undergone in the last couple of last couple of years, including denial of basic rights
#
like the, whether it be internet or whether it be freedom to move or to do other things.
#
And the whole characterization of Kashmiris as being something different from Indians,
#
and I'm saying Indians in inverted commas, the way the whole narrative has been framed
#
on certain news television channels, and the way it has been politically exploited leaves
#
me very, very despondent.
#
And you know, it raises the fundamental question, are we in Kashmir for the land or are we in
#
Kashmir also for the people, you know, we really have let the Kashmiris down in a big
#
And for all those of us who think that we may not speak for Kashmiris today, because
#
it doesn't really matter, they are one part of the thing.
#
And they have a different history, narrative context, may realize sooner or rather than
#
later that it can then come to other parts of the country as well.
#
One of my closest friends who's a very reputed Kashmiri journalist, and I'm not going to
#
name him here, but he says that guys don't think that what's happening in Kashmir won't
#
happen in India tomorrow.
#
A lot of this is what is being tried there is then being used in the rest of the country.
#
So I think that's something Indians, if not for out of any altruistic motives, or, you
#
know, reasons of ideology, at least for their self preservation, or for their self interest,
#
a lot of people should actually think about Kashmiris and stand in their support or not
#
allow the violation of human rights in Kashmir to the extent that has happened in the last
#
couple of years at least.
#
And I actually lament while that it might even be too late for that slide.
#
I mean, it reminds you of the Naimala poem, right, where first they came for A and I didn't
#
speak up and then they came for B and then they came for C and then they came for D and
#
then they came for me and there was no one to speak up for me broadly.
#
And you see, right, in fact, playing out in the sense that when 370 was repealed, Kejriwal
#
actually became a cheerleader for the government and put out that tweet about how he supports
#
And now they've come for him and now they've come for Delhi and what are you going to do?
#
And the larger mindset, which applies to all of us, and your friend is absolutely right
#
when he says that it holds a lesson for all of us.
#
The larger mindset is that the state looks at itself as a colonial state in the sense
#
that they are our rulers and we are the subjects.
#
And the moment you become subjects and not citizens, then everything is up for grabs.
#
And first it happened to the Kashmiris, but there's no reason that if that mindset is
#
pervasive and that mindset is even pervasive in the people, not just in the state, then
#
what are you kind of going to do about it?
#
So, Amit, the whole point is, as you rightly said, citizens not subjects.
#
And the citizens, what is the difference between a citizen and a subject?
#
That a citizen has certain inalienable rights which are bestowed upon him.
#
And it is essentially we do not see those rights being spoken of.
#
We see that trust the state, trust an individual, you know, he's giving you this, she's giving
#
you that, take it and be happy, you know, so and so, so much of amount of money is coming.
#
It's not that I have certain rights which are which are enshrined to me and which are
#
enshrined to me not only in the Indian constitution, but even without the Indian constitution as
#
Amit, many people forget that the cases for habeas corpus, which are upheld by the various
#
high courts during the emergency and this is beautifully explained in Pratina Vanil
#
and Christophe Jaffalo's new book on the emergency were not upheld because of the constitution,
#
because constitution was an abeyance, fundamental rights, they were upheld on the grounds that
#
certain rights are inalienable to a person, to a human being, with or without the constitution.
#
And habeas corpus is one of those rights.
#
In today's times, the habeas corpus is not being upheld, you know, habeas corpus petitions
#
have been lying for months, habeas corpus is the very basic fundamental right of democracy.
#
How can you have a liberal democracy if habeas corpus is not being upheld?
#
The Supreme Court with due respect, you know, and you and I may be charged for contempt
#
of court, but Supreme Court with due respect saying that, you know, you can go but not
#
You know, give him medicine, but don't do this.
#
That is not habeas corpus is present, the guy, why is he being kept behind bars or the
#
fact that Mehbooba Mufti or Farooq Abdullah or Omar Abdullah, the gates were being shut
#
down during the DDC elections and they're not being allowed to go out.
#
How do you justify that images being put out?
#
And this goes beyond the constitution, this goes to us as human beings, these are certain
#
rights which which over the years have emerged and this is how those rights were upheld during
#
the emergency as well by the various high courts and you know how it went on from there,
#
the Supreme Court came in and the new laws were brought in in the 42nd Amendment, etc.
#
But this is what we have completely forgotten when it comes to the Kashmiris and to the
#
way the Indians, all the institutions of the Indian state have dealt with the situation.
#
It's almost like a death with thousand cuts that the various institutions of the state,
#
whether it is the parliament, whether it is the whether it is the judiciary, whether it
#
is the other account of its constitutional bodies who have not really upheld their charter
#
No, that's a fantastic point and it's something that I will again underscore, do you underscore
#
it that you know that our rights are not something that are granted to us by a benevolent state
#
that we necessarily require a constitution to have.
#
We are all human beings, we have some autonomy, some dignity and all of that and I'm glad
#
you sort of share that Lockean vision as it were almost of the world.
#
Yeah, I mean, but before we sort of descend into mutual despair, I think let's take a
#
quick commercial break, think some happy thoughts and come back and talk about the army and
#
the rest of your journey and where we stand today right after that.
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Welcome back to the scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Sushant Singh about, you know, his time both in the army and later
#
as an analyst and a serious thinker on all of these issues.
#
And I'm now going to like ask you about the army per se.
#
Like what is very interesting is that we got a slice of the same army that Pakistan got
#
And this was a colonial era army, which was set up to essentially, you know, to control
#
You know, Stephen Wilkinson and his Bokami Nation writes about how, you know, the British
#
had this vision of India as, you know, they divided it neatly into races and castes and
#
So they picked from what they call the martial races, Punjabis and so on.
#
And they put them in the army to control the rest of the people.
#
And you know, there was always this fear that what is going to happen after independence?
#
And what we saw, and you know, when Ambedkar argued for a separate Pakistan, one of the
#
kind of, you know, in his 1941 book, I think, Thoughts on Pakistan, one of his points was
#
that what's going to happen with the army and how's that dynamic going to play out?
#
And we saw how it played out in Pakistan.
#
But in India, it didn't play out that way because there was a great sort of consciousness
#
of what could go wrong and what we needed to do in the nation that we were.
#
Tell me a little bit about that period, because it seems crucial.
#
We could have gone in another direction.
#
Of course, the way we didn't is because of certain decisions made in 47 certain directions
#
With regard to the army, tell me about how the army evolved in the decades after independence
#
and what really was going on there.
#
So you know, Wilkinson, Stephen Wilkinson's book is absolutely fantastic.
#
And the last chapter actually answers this question, which you have raised, you know,
#
he talks about the various coup-proofing measures that were taken, the whole idea of race and
#
how, you know, the army tried to move away from the idea of caste-based this thing and
#
try to control who became what kind of percentages of people that they had so that there could
#
be no dominant group could control the army.
#
And the third point which he makes and as well as Maya Tudor makes, Maya Tudor has a
#
fantastic book, a very thin book, black cover book name, probably I'll send you an email
#
which we can add in the notes, which India and Pakistan actually took different paths
#
and why one remained democratic and the other didn't.
#
And the fact that the Congress Party was a more institutionalized structure, which operated
#
in a manner which could deal with the diversity of the country, allowed it to deal with the
#
army as a more representative, popular institution of the country, could deal with the army in
#
It was not easy, as you know, with Karyapa and with a lot of others, there were, there
#
were periods of great tension and pushback at some point in time.
#
But because of the institutionalized nature of the Indian polity and the leadership and
#
certain steps that they took, they could handle it.
#
One point which nobody actually speaks about, Amit, and which I think needs to be understood
#
is that the Indian army did not emerge out of the independence movement.
#
It was not an army of the revolution.
#
The PLA is an army of the Communist Party of China.
#
It is not the army of the Chinese state or it is not even an army of various Latin American
#
states or Southeast Asian states who fought for the freedom of the country along with
#
the, you know, certain people, locals.
#
And then once they became free, they'd become the national army.
#
The Indian army became a national army despite being a colonial army.
#
It was a fantastic switch which it did, which it played by fundamentally seeing that we
#
are a professional force, we are a very professional army, we do our job professionally, we were
#
playing our role as a professional army earlier and we are playing our job as a professional
#
Now our rulers are different.
#
There is a democratic norms under which we are operating and we will continue to operate
#
It is only in post 71, Stephen Cohen says post 71, many of us may say post 90s, post
#
late 80s, it starts taking a more nationalistic tone where the army starts representing the
#
nation or becomes the epitome of the nation.
#
And when then it starts happening, it of course starts controlling the mind space of the people
#
far more, has far greater influence on policy making.
#
Then when it is, you know, slightly cut off from the mainstream politics in that sense.
#
And I think the fact that it was not an army which emerged out of the independence movement,
#
which slightly put it a slightly on the back foot and also allowed it to recraft, reimagine
#
its role, its position in the new setup in India post independence, which allowed Indians
#
to, along with all the other factors that Wilkinson and Tudor mentioned, allows India
#
to actually not go the Pakistan way.
#
So Pakistan actually does not have a freedom movement.
#
It's not something that they really fought for from the British in that sense, unlike
#
So it's a totally different experience that they undergo.
#
And of course then they lose Liyaka, they lose Jinnah very early, they lose Liyaka immediately
#
There is huge turbulence and then Ayub realizes that, you know, they are hailed when they
#
go and clean Karachi over four or five days, they are hailed as this great institution.
#
And then he suddenly realizes that why am I the defense minister of the amici, why can't
#
I be the governor general of the country?
#
And you know, and the whole thing completely takes a totally different turn.
#
In India, in contrast, the generals who tried to get into politics did not do well.
#
Karepa fought a couple of elections, did not do well at all.
#
It was from one of the constituencies in Bombay that he lost.
#
A lot of other people, other military officers did not do well when they tried to, you know,
#
bring out the military past.
#
People like Jaswant Singh and others, the only military officers who has really gone
#
up the chain and become the defense minister, the foreign minister, the finance minister
#
And I think he really did not tom-tom his military background to that extent.
#
So a couple of threads and I'll go through them one by one.
#
And the first of those threads is that obviously the China war happens and that kind of changes
#
the civil military dynamic where there is this sense that there wasn't enough dialogue
#
between the army and the government and the army was asked to do things which it could
#
not have done and had there been a proper process in place of dialogue between the two,
#
it would not have happened.
#
What is also happening at this time is that Nehru sensibly doesn't want what happened
#
in Pakistan or what would happen in Pakistan to happen here.
#
So there is significant civilian control over the military, but a lot of this happens in,
#
a lot of this takes the form of bureaucratic control where there is a ministry with all
#
his boffins and all of that who are now in charge of the entire armed forces.
#
And obviously this has a proximate effect of keeping the military away from politics.
#
But does it have, also have an ultimate effect or an effect down the line, a second order
#
effect of sort of ossifying processes where in the same sense that the bureaucracy all
#
over India governance has become so ossified and almost paralyzed in certain ways.
#
Does a similar thing happen in the army, especially you've written at great length about how there
#
just isn't enough money.
#
It's not a modern force, it's not being modernized and you almost see sort of the negative impact
#
What's your sense on what this dynamic case of this bureaucratic control over the army
#
and the pros and the cons and the directions is going in.
#
1962 is a complicated one, I'm sure you did the episode with Srinath and his first book.
#
I haven't done one specifically on China, but in the CAA episode we discussed it.
#
The War and Peace in Modern India, his first book actually talks about it in great detail.
#
So the whole reality and the myth of how much of it was abdication of civilian responsibility
#
and how much of it was bureaucratic control.
#
But yes, it is true to a great extent that at least the armed forces, not only the army,
#
but the armed forces believe that bureaucratic control has been detrimental to their growth
#
and to their development.
#
And that has kept them away from the political leadership, which has been a constant complaint
#
that we are not under bureaucratic, civilian control does not mean bureaucratic control.
#
It means political control or parliamentary control by the people through the parliament
#
or through the political leadership.
#
Now that's a debatable point, there are two sides to it.
#
All political executives operate through bureaucracies, bureaucracies are normal instruments, including
#
civilian bureaucracies.
#
And if you replace civilian bureaucracies with military bureaucracies, would they be
#
operating any differently?
#
Now that's a question, which is a difficult question to answer, but that's a question
#
which most people grapple with and do not have an answer to.
#
Would India have done better if there was less bureaucratic control and the armed forces
#
were given more independence?
#
It's a question which is very difficult to answer and I don't think we still have an
#
Over the years, especially in the last 20, 25 years, a lot of freedom, a lot of independence
#
has come to the armed forces and come to the military leadership.
#
You know, the 1971 war is a great example of where the political leadership and the
#
military worked closely.
#
That was a success, but the fact that even Blue Star or IPKF or Pavan, Operation Pavan,
#
there also the military leadership was very closely aligned with the political leadership
#
or brass tacks, where India and Pakistan almost came to war in 1986.
#
Those things also happened when the political, when the military leadership was very closely
#
aligned, the budgets were very high, period of highest military budgets, highest defense
#
budgets are the period of mid 80s in Rajiv's time, they crossed 4% of the GDP at that point
#
They are now down to what, 2% or something, something like that.
#
So it is that period, even in that period, that doesn't lead to great results, great
#
outcomes in that sense.
#
So it is very hard to say what the right mix is and what leads to the right answers and
#
what doesn't lead to the right answers.
#
Is there a right balance?
#
And I think that's a very dynamic balance.
#
What most people think is that there's a static balance, you know, you arrive at a solution
#
and that that's what it remains.
#
I think when a military conflict is imminent or when the army's armed forces are fighting
#
a war or they're about to fight a war, then the balance of civil-military relationships
#
would be completely different from a peacetime scenario where the political leadership would
#
probably be more hands-off allowing the military to train for itself, do things for itself.
#
The fundamental thing where I think most people fail to understand civil-military relations
#
is, if you look at it only through the prism of the relationship between the military as
#
an institution and the civilian leadership as an institution, it is actually not that.
#
It deals with the whole of the society, the military's position in the society, how military
#
It also deals with how military deals with politics.
#
How does it work with operating politics?
#
How does it look at politics?
#
And essentially the point that I'm trying to make is that it is not a two-circle thing.
#
They're just not two points which are engaging with each other.
#
There's also a larger blob of the public which is there, to which the democratically elected
#
leadership is responding, which is also being influenced by the army.
#
When the army deals with this larger blob, it indirectly can pressurize the political
#
leadership to take various decisions that it takes.
#
So it is just not that there's a bold line which goes between whatever you want to call
#
it, the civilian executive and the military leadership.
#
There is also a big dashed line which goes to this blob called the larger public opinion
#
and which can be operated through the media.
#
The media is the vehicle through which it operates and through which it allows you to
#
And there are numerous examples of this.
#
We spoke about the removal of AFSPA from the urban areas of Kashmir in the last time.
#
Another example is the withdrawal from Siachen that has been well recorded that the then
#
army chief went into the meeting and said, no, we cannot move away from Siachen at the
#
last moment, which did not allow a deal to take place with Pakistan.
#
I'm not saying whether it was right or wrong, but the fact is that the military leadership
#
did have a say in doing it after creating a narrative.
#
Or the fact that a new China strike corps was created after a lot of articles came out
#
in the Indian media between 2011 and 2014 saying that India needs a new strike corps
#
to take on the Chinese threat.
#
Of course, that strike corps has never come through because it's such a financially taxing
#
option that no government can afford to have it, so it has not been fully raised so far.
#
It remains only partially raised.
#
But the point I'm trying to make is that the political leadership and the military leadership
#
interact not only directly between the leaders, but also through the public in which media
#
starts playing an important role.
#
And through that, a lot of actions, a lot of decisions which are taken are influenced
#
or happen in that context, are situated in that context in some way.
#
So I'm just thinking aloud here that would it then mean that if there is growing nationalism
#
happening in the country and obviously the armed forces are sort of tied in with that
#
nationalism and you're proud of the soldier and how can you protest about X, Y or Z when
#
your soldiers are dying at the border, all that rhetoric is there.
#
Does it then become natural for the armed forces to be drawn towards politics?
#
Like at one point you've written about how during Vajpayee's time, general VP Malik complained
#
to him that the images of the three service chiefs were being used in BJP advertising
#
and he was like, what is this?
#
And yet just a few years later, you know, you have Bipin Rawat after Balakot playing
#
along with the macho political rhetoric of we taught them a lesson and so on and so forth
#
rather than keeping a distance.
#
And obviously there is now the precedent of, you know, former general actually joining
#
the cabinet and so on, which in terms of incentives just creates completely the wrong incentives
#
because now you can play up your time in uniform and turn it into political capital and all
#
So, and somehow over the decades, it seems to me, you know, like whatever Overture's
#
career, Kariyappa might have made towards running in politics after he retired.
#
Before he retired, he was non-political.
#
In fact, after independence, I believe he sent a letter out to his forces saying that
#
whatever happens, we shall not have anything to do with politics.
#
And it's after politics that he went in that other direction.
#
That number one, is there a fear that that wall is falling?
#
Number two, should there be a line that one draws?
#
Why is a line defined that way?
#
And what institutions and what rules of the game can keep that distance if a distance
#
So the distance between the civilian and the military is healthy because as you said, military
#
leadership comes with a certain halo and a certain order of sacrifice, which is hard
#
for any civilian leadership to match, any civilian opponent to match.
#
And that is why, you know, you can't have a former military officer in the United States
#
without a special sanction being given the post of the defense secretary in the U.S.
#
And when General Austin, Lloyd Austin, actually gets the post, he cannot use the rank general.
#
So he's Secretary Austin, not General Austin.
#
You know, this is completely different from how, because you know, you can't showcase
#
that you're a former military officer.
#
You are here as a civilian, completely only and only in your capacity as a civilian.
#
So he cannot actually use the rank.
#
When Biden unknowingly or inadvertently used his rank a couple of days back last week,
#
I think there was an article in Washington Post which clearly pointed out that Biden
#
should not have done that.
#
It's a grave error on his part to call him General Austin and not Secretary Austin.
#
I think that's the fundamental dividing line between the military and the civilian political
#
Can you draw a hard and fast rule?
#
Can you erect a Chinese wall between the two?
#
I think that's very hard to do in a democracy because you cannot say that somebody who's
#
just served in uniform cannot fight an election.
#
There's been this debate about whether people who have served in very senior posts in the
#
government, they should have a five-year cooling off period before they can enter politics.
#
I don't know how viable it is and how practical it is.
#
But this, as with most other things in a liberal democracy, it has to be about norms.
#
What are the kinds of norms that are being followed by people who are in those positions
#
of influence and power?
#
You know, everything cannot be legislated.
#
Everything cannot be, you know, tightened by rules.
#
What is the kind of values?
#
What are the kind of norms that people follow?
#
And I think that is what would determine the course of the civil relations in India and
#
where it goes, whether the military gets even more closely aligned with the political leadership.
#
And there are two parts to it, you know, without taking any names.
#
The fact that military is being paraded more and more in support of a certain political
#
ideology and a certain political leadership is, of course, worrisome.
#
But the fact that the military leadership is being chosen by overlooking seniority for
#
no very strong reason creates an incentive for a lot of senior leadership to show that
#
they are politically aligned.
#
It's a very natural thing to do.
#
If I know that anybody can be picked up and if I'm one of the five or six guys, I would
#
like to be seen in good light by the political powers that be so that I am picked up.
#
So while seniority on paper seems like a very bad idea, in practice, especially as it had
#
been practiced, unless there's a reason why it needs to be breached, a very strong reason
#
why it needs to be breached, handpicking people for various posts by overlooking seniority,
#
especially in the military, has a certain disadvantage in a politically volatile, politically
#
not stable country, society like.
#
I don't mean to say stable in that sense.
#
What I mean to say is politically not mature enough society like India where institutions
#
do not perform their role to the extent that they should perform them.
#
No, but just to respond to one of the sort of things that you said earlier, which was
#
about how there are things which you can't legislate for everything, that certain things
#
come from values which have become part of the convention and all of that.
#
And I have to admit, I'm a little skeptical of that because to me, all values ultimately
#
derive from incentives, not in a direct sense, but incentive change behavior and then behavior
#
over a period of time becomes embedded in a culture and values change accordingly.
#
So I do think that's a bit of an issue.
#
But moving on from there, like if we speak of, if we leave aside this funny question
#
of the politicization and so on, what is the state of our army today?
#
Like one hears a different analyst saying that, look, our conventional army is in really
#
If we had a conventional war with Pakistan, though of course we won't and we can go into
#
those reasons, but if we had a conventional war with Pakistan, we would probably, we might
#
And you know, you've written in the past about how there is a budgetary crisis within the
#
You wrote a 2018 piece, which I'll link from the show notes where you spoke of, you know,
#
the army vice chief talking to a group of MPs and what he said, and I'll quote from
#
your piece, quote, the army vice chief told the MPs that 68% of the army's equipment
#
is vintage and the capital budget doesn't even cater for the committed payments of 125
#
ongoing procurement deals, leave alone provide funds to replace the vintage equipment.
#
There is no budget for making emergency procurements or for providing perimeter security to army
#
camps susceptible to terrorist attacks.
#
The powers to buy ammunition and spares for critical stocking levels needed for 10 days
#
of war fighting have been delegated to the defense services, but not enough funds have
#
On top of that, the army will be saddled with an additional bill of rupees 5,000 crore due
#
to increased taxes because of GST, but no additional money has been made available for
#
Besides paying salaries, there is little else that the army will be able to do with the
#
money given by the government.
#
And as you go on to point out in your piece, it's the same with the Navy and the air force
#
So what kind of is the situation?
#
Do we have the kind of modernized army that we need is, is this sort of a precarious situation?
#
You know, I would not, I would not agree with the contention that India is going to lose
#
to Pakistan in a, in a conventional war.
#
No, I don't think that's true.
#
I don't, I, and I don't know if any analyst who has any Indian analyst who has actually
#
said that what I think people say something like this for rhetorical purposes.
#
So I, you know, I think the argument is that we do not have the kind of military superiority,
#
but that we would need to have for an outright victory over Pakistan.
#
So it's not that India would lose to Pakistan in a conventional conflict.
#
That's, that's clearly is not a possibility.
#
But the fact that India would not have the kind of conventional superiority that Pakistan
#
would sign up, you know, another kind of agreement in December, 1971 kind of a moment, you know,
#
We don't have the kind of military superiority when it comes to China.
#
Of course, it's a totally different ball game.
#
It's just not the idea of conventional superiority in terms of number of tanks or number of soldiers,
#
number of aircraft, submarines, ships, or whatever you have.
#
It's also about the new technology that the Chinese army, the PLA, has really mastered
#
and brought to the fore.
#
So the PLA actually marks itself against the U.S. Army, and it is looking at AI, it is
#
looking at robotics, it is looking at, you know, unarmed drones.
#
It's a totally different kind of warfare that they are fighting.
#
It's a new generation of warfare that they are fighting, and the Americans have been
#
The fact that the Chinese are benchmarking themselves against the U.S. in cyber, in AI,
#
in robotics, in all these other things, all these modern things that they are facing.
#
So India has a double crisis when it comes to China.
#
It does not have the kind of technological advancements that the Chinese army is pursuing.
#
It even does not have the old world conventional superiority or the conventional past, superiority
#
is the wrong word, a conventional military power that it had earlier to be able to ward
#
off or hold the Chinese.
#
Now when you combine the two together, if you have a collusive threat from China and
#
Pakistan, then the situation really, really becomes tough.
#
So I'll give you simply two things, you know, the Raksha Mantri's directive or the Defense
#
Minister's directive, the last one, to the best of my understanding, came out in 2009.
#
Ask the armed forces to be prepared to have their stocks and ammunition in stores for
#
30 days of intense war fighting and 30 days of normal war fighting.
#
So the rate of ammunition expenditure in intents is three times the rate of normal rate of
#
And these are old tables through which it has been generated.
#
So essentially you need to be prepared to fight on two fronts for 40 days of intense
#
Now the army does not have the ammunition for even 10 days of war fighting, essentially
#
for 10 days of war fighting.
#
They started building up in Mr. Parrikar's time as Defense Minister for 10 days of war
#
So if the directive is for 40 days of war fighting, with the Defense Minister of the
#
country speaking on behalf of the cabinet has signed, which has not been amended till
#
date, you want the armed forces to be prepared for that, the money has not been provided
#
It's as simple as that.
#
The fact that the Air Force is supposed to have 42 squadrons of fighter aircraft, which
#
are down to 30, which includes the MiG-21, which still includes the Tejas and the MiG-21
#
It's not that everything is a Sukhoi and everything is a Rafale.
#
And there are Mirage 2000s, there are MiG-29s, all refurbished and modernized, but still
#
older generation aircraft that are there.
#
So these are severe shortcomings which have not been made up by the government by providing
#
the kind of resources that the armed forces need.
#
The point is that the armed forces have been told that you should be prepared to deal with
#
both the fronts simultaneously.
#
So armed forces have to be prepared for it.
#
Now how do you prepare it for us?
#
You know, you prepare it by training, you prepare it for leadership, by doctrine and
#
by equipping yourself, by resourcing yourself for it.
#
The resources have not been made available to the armed forces to essentially equip themselves
#
or to prepare themselves.
#
So they can talk about all the training, they can talk about all the doctrine, they can
#
talk about dissuasion and, you know, they can talk about all the kind of language linguistics.
#
But the fact of the matter is that the wherewithal does not exist to fight on both the fronts.
#
And the whole idea is somehow it will magically happen that we will not fight on both fronts.
#
Probably the political leadership is convinced that we will not fight on both fronts or maybe
#
even not on even one front.
#
Maybe somehow diplomatically we will be able to resolve the situation with China so that
#
we don't have to go to a war with China.
#
And to presume that the Chinese do not understand it or the Pakistanis do not understand it,
#
And going into the future as the power difference between India and China increases and as Pakistan
#
becomes a subset of the Chinese problem for India, the collusive threat problem could
#
Let me explain to you in a different way, Amit, you know, let's say in the 1965 conflict,
#
The Pakistanis come into Kashmir, Lal Bahadur Shastri decides to open up the Punjab and
#
You know, he says, I'm opening up the whole of I.B., whereas the Ayub and Bhutto thought
#
that there would only be the war would be limited to Kashmir, we have already sent our,
#
you know, infiltrators, etc., and then we will do and we will take away Kashmir, etc.
#
They get surprised when Shastri decides to expand the war to the international border.
#
Now what happens in a two-front war?
#
The most likely two-front war scenario, let me paint it from Ladakh, for example.
#
The Chinese come to wherever, Ladakh or wherever they come in, the army moves in, it has to
#
move some of its resources, which are dedicated for the Pakistan border to deal with the Chinese
#
threat, including moving of your arms, ammunition, resources, etc.
#
The Pakistanis decided to take some part of Kashmir, whatever part of Kashmir they decide
#
to on military grounds.
#
And I'm not even talking about Siachen, which is a different ball game altogether based
#
That's a different story altogether.
#
They try to take on some part of Kashmir.
#
What would India have done in normal cause?
#
India would have gone, done what Shastri did, if it was a single-front war.
#
If Pakistan tried to come and occupy Kashmir, a part of Kashmir, India would go and open
#
other fronts and conventionally try to fight in Rajasthan, Punjab and threaten and put
#
Now if India is also engaged on China front at the same time, there is no possibility
#
of going down and opening Punjab or Rajasthan or going anywhere down.
#
You would only want to restrict it and somehow fight a very defensive battle in Kashmir.
#
That is the kind of military challenge, strategic challenge that is being posed to India by
#
the two-front collusive threat, which most people do not seem to realize or seem to appreciate.
#
I think the military appreciate to some extent, but the fact they are constrained by the lack
#
of resources which have been provided to them by the government, which makes the situation
#
No military leader can go and say, no army chief or HE worth his salt can go and say,
#
oh, I cannot fight a two-front war or we are not capable of fighting a two-front war.
#
The government will say, please resign and go home.
#
Why are you here if you cannot fight a two-front war?
#
So all this lip service is paid, all the rhetoric is said about, we will fight a two-front war,
#
we will find a way, there is a method, we will make a primary front, we will make a
#
But the fundamental fact is that the resources are simply not there to fight on two fronts.
#
The resources are simply not there to even fight on the Chinese front alone.
#
And if it is a two-front thing, then you are going to be under real pressure from Pakistan
#
I think that should worry most Indians whether you look at Pakistan and China as separate
#
fronts or whether you look at Pakistan as a subset of the Chinese threat or as a subset
#
of the Chinese front in that case.
#
So I will ask you about India-China, India-Pakistan in much more detail after this.
#
But before that, to kind of drill down a little bit more in this question, like what this is
#
fundamentally is that there is a problem of resources.
#
Now even if there is also a sort of an intellectual obfuscation or a denial that this is a problem
#
at all to different extents, I mean different extents of that denial within the different
#
establishments, assume that everyone was on the same page and we all agreed that this
#
is a problem and that therefore this is a problem of resources.
#
My next question is looking at the state of the economy and the way our state is set up.
#
It's a two-part question.
#
Number one, is this problem solvable in an ideal world?
#
And number two, is this problem solvable in the actual world as it is now with a political
#
economy being the way it is?
#
In an ideal world, the problem is solvable.
#
We need to grow at 20% per annum and we can solve it.
#
By ideal world, I mean everyone's will is aligned in the same direction, but your resources
#
No, if the resources are what they are, so just to give you a simple example, that the
#
total capital expenditure of the government of India and I'm talking about the government
#
of India, not the state government, but the government of India's total capital expenditure,
#
one third of it, you know, 32%, 31%, 33%, let's call it one third of it over the last
#
five years on an average, one third of it goes towards the defense capital expenditure.
#
Now there's no way you can increase that without stopping everything else.
#
You would not be making any infrastructure in this country.
#
No bridges, no roads, no highways, no expressways, no major hospitals, no major infrastructure
#
would be coming up in place.
#
You know, because you want more resources for capital procurement and the more resources
#
means that if the resources are not increasing, if the pie is not increasing, if the cake
#
is not increasing, then the share will come from other infrastructure, other capital expenditure
#
and that is just not possible.
#
So even in an ideal world, if everybody's aligned together, the simple fact that the
#
cake is not big enough for everybody to share, especially in a country like ours where development
#
is the need of the hour, it would be very, it's not just not possible to balance the
#
The two sides of the equation cannot be balanced in that manner.
#
It is just not possible to balance that equation and I think that is what fundamentally we
#
Therefore, the only answer, as everybody says, is economic growth.
#
The only answer to India's national security would be very high levels of economic growth
#
over a sustained period of time that would allow you to spend more on national security,
#
more on defense and build up those resources.
#
It cannot be done by any, by waving a magic wand at all and certainly not at the level
#
of economic growth that we have witnessed since the demonetization in 2016.
#
It has been very, very tough.
#
You quoted the 2018 army vice chief's statements to the parliamentary standing committee.
#
The funniest part is that that same gentleman very quickly joined the BJP a few months
#
That's something which really boggled my mind.
#
I was like, okay, so this is it.
#
I don't even know how to interpret this thing then or what to make of it.
#
It's like a good mutual friend, Nitin Pai often says that the best foreign policy is
#
And that's of course for multiple reasons.
#
One reason is you have a larger pie and you can spend more on your defense.
#
But another reason is you change the incentives for everyone else.
#
If you are a beginner, you know, someone like China would rather trade with us and try to
#
make random villages in Arunachal Pradesh.
#
Like what is even the point of that?
#
You know, one of the interesting things you said while you were speaking about the way
#
that politicians kind of think of the army is that you pointed out that they actually
#
think that there will be no war at all, that we have to have an army, we'll sort it out
#
And it seems to me also that there is a kind of thinking which would go that now that we
#
are a nuclear power, now that there is that nuclear deterrent in place, the actual conventional
#
army, while it needs to exist in practical terms, could be a bit of an artifact because
#
you're never having a conventional war, there is a threshold you will never cross because
#
the danger of going nuclear is simply too high.
#
In a sense, both India and Pakistan going nuclear has actually taken away our advantage.
#
Like whatever advantage we had in conventional terms is now equalized because in a game theory
#
sense you are never going to go beyond a certain threshold.
#
You will have, you know, the optics of Balakot and surgical strikes and all of that to satisfy
#
the local political constituency and we will discuss that later as well.
#
But then the question is that how is the army to think of itself, like on the one hand you
#
pointed out about how the Chinese army is modernizing with AI and robotics and all that.
#
I am guessing that there must be many aspects of the Indian armed forces which are actually
#
redundant in terms of technology.
#
How are we to think of that and how is the army to think of itself when the army needs
#
to exist to be sort of a pawn in the geopolitical games, but is never actually going to be used.
#
That seems to be a certain kind of school of thought that is out there.
#
So what's your response?
#
So there are two ways I look at it.
#
So I'll expand it to more than the army, the armed forces.
#
So the armed forces will have a role to play.
#
The Navy perhaps in the Indian Ocean region, because it's such a important region trade
#
wise if you dominate the Indian Ocean region, you control a lot of this thing and you can
#
put pressure on various countries including China.
#
You can wave the Indian flag or clearly a blue water Navy would be a great idea.
#
And that's what Navy has been advocating for itself for the last two decades, if not more,
#
at least 20, 25 years, that they've been advocating that we want to be really a blue water Navy,
#
a three carrier Navy to be able to take the Indian flag far and wide and really be controlling
#
In the sense what the inverse of what China says, China says Indian Ocean is not India's
#
When India says, I want to make Indian Ocean India's Ocean in that sense.
#
For the army, particularly, the whole idea is that how do we find a way in which we can
#
impose the nation's will on an adversary under the nuclear threshold?
#
So the whole idea, the whole strategy, the whole thing is, can I do something by moving
#
What was called the cold start later on called the proactive operations POA, whatever the
#
name you may want to give to it.
#
The whole idea is, can I move in quickly, grab a certain piece of territory or a certain
#
piece of valuable territory with or break the adversary's center of gravity, so to speak?
#
And do it rather quickly and under the nuclear threshold so that it comes to the negotiating
#
table or concedes or listens or whatever you wanted to get it done or even humiliated or
#
That's the way the armed forces have responded to the changing dynamics of having the nuclear
#
Let's also understand that nuclear weapons, at the end of the day, are political weapons.
#
The Indian armed forces do not control the nuclear weapons.
#
Nuclear weapons are controlled politically and whatever would happen would happen as
#
a decision, as a political decision, not as a military decision.
#
In Pakistan, Ghulam Ishaq Khan handed over the nuclear weapons to the military.
#
Even in Pakistan, they were not controlled by the military.
#
And now they have become military weapons, especially they have brought in these short
#
range tactical nuclear weapons and they brought in these small missiles.
#
They are almost, you know, using them at the lowest in the army to threaten India that
#
go nuclear, which is not the case in India.
#
So when the military operates or when the military plans for its operations, it really
#
does not factor in nuclear weapons in the first instance.
#
And there's a very high bar for use of nuclear weapons since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
#
You know, we saw that during the Korean War and since then, there's a very, very high
#
bar for use of nuclear weapons.
#
It would really take something for even Pakistan or India to even threaten the use of nuclear
#
weapons or to use them.
#
So even you gave the example of Balakot, the fact that Indians went and attempted an airstrike
#
or did an airstrike inside Pakistan proper.
#
The fact that Pakistan, then the Indians threatened a missile strike, Pakistanis threatened a
#
missile strike and Prime Minister Modi went and said in an election speech that Diwali
#
ke liye patakhe nahi rakhne hai, we haven't kept them for Diwali.
#
But the fact is that nuclear weapons still remain a distant thing in the India Pakistan
#
What that red line is, we really don't know.
#
I don't know what Pakistan's red line is.
#
We can all keep on assessing that red line and I always believe it's a dynamic red line.
#
What India's red line with China is, if there's a red line, what is it?
#
And that probably keeps on varying depending on time and place.
#
I think while the nuclear weapons have affected the way wars are fought, Kargil happened after
#
the nuclear weapons had come into play.
#
India mobilized in Parakram after nuclear weapons and based on after Parakram, India
#
decided to undertake a new thinking on cold start operations, proactive operations, etc.
#
And I think that's how the thinking is going on currently within the armed forces with
#
the way they are trying to operate in this environment.
#
So tell me about Parakram because you actually served there.
#
You actually, as you mentioned at the border and all of that, waiting to take the Indian
#
flag to Lahore and just kind of plant it there.
#
You know, how much of it was theater, how much of it was actually preparing for war
#
Like at that moment in time, what did you think the probabilities were?
#
What did you find more desirable?
#
And even there, of course, probabilistic thinking comes into play.
#
How far would we need to be pushed before we actually went to war, for example, which
#
is a separate question.
#
And I can ask you that with your current hat on.
#
So tell me a little bit about that and then also how the dynamic of India-Pakistan relationships
#
have been playing out since, because like you pointed out, you know, 9-11 kind of changed
#
I remember traveling through Pakistan to cover a cricket tour in 2006, but I was also writing
#
pieces for the Wall Street Journal.
#
And one economist I met there said that, listen, we don't call Al-Qaeda Al-Qaeda.
#
We call it Al-Faida because of all the money that flooded into Pakistan after that happened.
#
And obviously then they would, because Pakistan was helping them with the so-called war on
#
terror, they would, you know, the U.S. would turn a blind eye to what was happening in
#
So there's that interesting dynamic playing out.
#
How has that relationship kind of evolved over the last 20 years or so under, of course,
#
But even apart from that, just the politics of both countries.
#
So in Parakram, I was a very young officer, so I was really not really understanding the
#
larger dynamics of how probably the decisions were being taken.
#
But I can say that as a cyber officer, mines were laid by India, which is like the first
#
preparatory stage before you go to war.
#
And actual live mines were laid.
#
A lot of casualties took place while laying those mines.
#
There were accidents which are par for the cause, etc.
#
But there was serious preparation at that point in time.
#
And at one point in time, it almost seemed that India had decided to go into Pakistan
#
Clearly, there was a lot of international pressure which came from the U.S. primarily
#
and from others and which eventually stopped India.
#
And then there was a whole theory, then a lot has been written about it, whether India
#
genuinely wanted to go to war and only wanted to convey to the West that we are serious
#
and therefore took all those steps because how do you credibly convey that they are serious
#
and which brought Musharraf to make those announcements on the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the
#
Jaisal Muhammad, which he made on live television and then the Indian army pulled back from
#
There were a couple of things which happened very clearly that the mobilization timings,
#
the timing for the forces to mobilize from their permanent locations to the forward lines,
#
those timings were just not kept up by the army.
#
And there's something which came out in all these study reports after the war.
#
They took a lot of time to really reach those forward lines.
#
So if something was planned to reach in 10 days, they took 30 days, 35 days, 40 days
#
So that completely upset all the planning that had gone on till then and clearly showed
#
that some of the planning was unrealistic.
#
That is what led to the whole idea of cold start operations.
#
Can you move certain forward?
#
And because the window is very short before the Western countries, Western powers intervene,
#
can you use that window to quickly go in rather than having this massive second world war
#
kind of mobilization where it takes months for you to reach the border and then decide
#
And by that time, Western leaderships and Western diplomats have come in and put pressure
#
on you so as not to go.
#
That was the one big change which took place after Parakram.
#
But that has not been tested so far and has not been checked by or tested on the ground
#
But a lot of talk, a lot of discussion, a lot of practice, a lot of rehearsals have
#
What is the dynamics between India and Pakistan when it comes to proactive operations cold
#
Pakistan has milked the whole idea that India will launch cold start operations, will do
#
proactive operations to the maximum.
#
It has of course prepared for it under Pyani.
#
They conducted multiple exercises where they practiced and rehearsed their responses to
#
it and they claim that they are better prepared for it and they also claim that they brought
#
the tactical nuclear weapons, the HATS missiles to deal with this kind of challenge because
#
the Indian army would move in very, very quickly and occupy certain territory and the only
#
way for them to stop it was to fire certain tactical nuclear weapons, which are like low
#
output nuclear weapons.
#
So that is the kind of dynamics that has taken place because of Parakram and what happened
#
after the attack on Indian parliament.
#
Well that is kind of fascinating and you know the other part of the question that I asked
#
was that assume that you are in charge of sort of decision making.
#
What is the threshold at which you say that okay we have to move in now, we have to actually
#
go to war or is there no threshold because the nuclear option is just too expensive?
#
And if there is no threshold, if you are never actually going to war, if you are just going
#
to posture, then the other side surely knows that and can take advantage of that right.
#
So you know how does that sort of, it's almost a game theoretic situation except that it's
#
not actually chicken chicken because both sides know the other one won't be crazy enough
#
but who's going to stop first?
#
Yeah so it is clearly, game theory does apply there and that's what will decide how the
#
What is it that you want the adversary to do and if it concedes then you don't do it
#
then your threat is clearly credible.
#
How credible is your threat is the question and to have a credible threat we need to have
#
What will be the reasons for which India would go to war?
#
My sense is a very big terror attack on Indian soil which can be seen to have come from Pakistan
#
and where Pakistan is unwilling to punish those terrorist leaders or hand them over
#
to India and then that would lead to a kind of retaliation on Pakistan.
#
The other situation is that there is too much of political instability in Pakistan and a
#
bad Pakistani leader tries to capture Kashmir, regain Kashmir for whatever reason.
#
Something a military leader which is far ahead of Musharraf in that sense and tries to recapture
#
Kashmir and tries to try some funny things that would of course India would clearly open
#
up a conventional military option, conventional military war at that point.
#
I think those are the two scenarios where I think India would go in for a conventional
#
war and whether this would lead to the nuclear option being exercised or nuclear option coming
#
into play is something which every single analyst has debated and written about and
#
spoken about and I don't think anybody has an answer but I think everybody will agree
#
that there is an inherent risk involved in the escalation ladder.
#
So if you think that you are the one controlling the escalation ladder, there are two sides
#
playing the game and there are a lot of miscommunication and misapprehensions happening at the same
#
time and it can clearly lead to situations where the escalation ladder may not be controlled
#
So I think that's something which everybody worries about, that is something which nobody
#
knows how it will play out.
#
Once the first shot is fired, you know the enemy also has a vote, there are two sides
#
who have a vote in this and I think that's something which is what stops, prevents, makes
#
people think twice before committing to opening a front, opening a conventional war, going
#
for a conventional war.
#
No and it also strikes me that it is easy for us to get complacent and say that listen
#
you know no one has actually attacked anyone with a nuclear weapon since Hiroshima Nagasaki
#
so it's not going to happen and imagine that the situation will last forever.
#
And I am reminded of this beautiful book I am reading right now by a German writer called
#
Stefan Schweig who fled Nazi Germany and killed himself in 1942 but just before that he published
#
this book called The World of Yesterday where he is talking about the pre-World War I years
#
and he is essentially saying that we were under this liberal illusion that all our problems
#
are solved, that you know a liberal vision of the world has won over, there will be no
#
more terrible wars, you know all these other problems like hunger, famine etc. will gradually
#
solve and nothing will happen and little did we know and he is talking about this pre-World
#
War thing where there is almost like a Fukuyama-esque end of history kind of sense to it that we
#
have sorted everything, it's done and then suddenly everything goes nuts and when we
#
talk of nuclear weapons I also think that at some level it's kind of dangerous to think
#
that nothing will ever happen, this is all just a political tool because you know of
#
course nothing will happen until something does and you know there is no reason to kind
#
The other sort of difficult angle in this is that this is not just two states, it's
#
not just the state of India and the state of Pakistan which determines what happens
#
within India and Pakistan like you have pointed out in this recent piece you wrote on foreign
#
policy, quote, a talks can be derailed as much by a lone suicide bomber in Kashmir as
#
by the powerful deep state in Pakistan or by the stranded anti-Pakistan Hindu majoritarian
#
electoral agent of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, stop quote.
#
The idea being that there can be some lone rogue actor who can set something off and
#
then there is of course a fog of war where you don't know that what happened, is this
#
really the state of Pakistan doing this, are these rogue actors within the deep state,
#
is it a lone suicide bomber, possibly even a local guy in Kashmir who is doing all of
#
this, all of that uncertainty is also kind of built in, so that complicates the whole
#
situation so much more, doesn't it?
#
Amit, just going back to Fukuyama, you know the loveliest part of Fukuyama's story is
#
that his initial essay actually had a question mark at the end of his title.
#
Yeah, it's a misunderstood essay, he gets a lot of flak for it.
#
Yeah, so the question mark completely changes everything as you know, so that was an aside.
#
On the other statement that you made about the nuclear weapons, they will never be a
#
No, I don't think anybody should ever say that there will never be a nuclear war, that
#
The only question where I was, what I was responding to was your premise that nuclear
#
weapons have made the Indian armed forces redundant in a sense.
#
What I was saying is no, they are not redundant, they continue to exist despite the nuclear
#
You missed my question mark, it was a question more than a premise.
#
Just to clarify, people should not misunderstand it, the whole idea is that despite the nuclear
#
weapons, the conventional military, the conventional armed forces have a role to play, which they
#
have tried to reorient themselves for, train themselves, devise for themselves.
#
It doesn't mean that the nuclear weapons cannot be used or will not be used, or there is some
#
kind of that they are kept only as a showpiece, which will never be used.
#
As far as the India-Pakistan relations are concerned, there are many factors.
#
But I mean, if India-Pakistan relations are to be considered, the simple and the most
#
fundamental factor is that there's a certain narrative on both the sides, there's a narrative
#
on the Indian side and there's a narrative on the Pakistan side.
#
That narrative is embedded in history, in politics, in religion, in colonialism, in
#
every geopolitics, in every single framework that the modern political, socio-political
#
It is embedded in every single thing, in geography, in history, everything, whatever we can think
#
That narrative is the fundamental structural factor, where we believe that Kashmir belongs
#
to us and the Pakistanis have occupied a certain part of Kashmir, including a little bit of
#
Pakistan, which should come to us logically and we are going to take it at any cost.
#
Whereas the Pakistani side believes that Kashmir has been grabbed by Indians, the Muslim majority
#
state has to be part of it.
#
That fundamental dissonance, that fundamental gap has not been reached.
#
It is the structural factor.
#
Unless we fix that narrative gap, how are we going to fix the problem?
#
I don't see any kind of quick fixes where you can deal with it.
#
Eventually, as you see today, when we are recording this show, Imran has sent a letter
#
to Modi, responding to Modi's letter on 23rd March on Pakistan Day, and Imran has again
#
said that the core issue is Jammu and Kashmir, because Prime Minister Modi had said that
#
the core issue is terror, that you know, please stop terror coming from our side.
#
Fundamentally, we are operating within a structure where there are structurally, it is not possible
#
These are two parallel tracks, which will keep on going parallelly.
#
I'll keep on talking about terror, they will keep on talking about Kashmir.
#
Unless the narrative is fixed, you cannot align those two and everything else that can
#
lead to this whole process going kaput, actually flows from that, whether it is a terror attack
#
like what happened in Pulwama, you know, a 22 year old guy with a car and 20 kgs of explosive
#
in his car banging into a CRPF bus, or it is somebody else doing something similar or
#
some elements of Pakistan army who believe or deep state who believe that Pakistan is
#
conceding too much, trying to, you know, try and do some stunts on from their side, which
#
has happened earlier as well from the Pakistani side.
#
And of course, there's a danger, as you said, Mr. Modi's whole politics, majoritarian Hindu
#
politics, anti-Pakistan narrative, which he has used in various state assembly polls,
#
whether it is Gujarat, whether it is Karnataka, whether it is Uttar Pradesh, Pakistan has
#
been a constant factor, which has been invoked.
#
How does he sell peace with Pakistan when since 2002, you know, you remember the Mia
#
Musharraf campaign at that time, he has always used Pakistan as an enemy and trying to show
#
himself as somebody who's trying to, who has dealt with Pakistan very efficiently and very
#
effectively and very boldly.
#
So I do not know how this narrative, how this problem of narrative on the Indian side and
#
on the Pakistani side can be bridged, which when merged with all these other problems
#
of lone wolf, lone terrorist, with Pakistani rogue state, with Indian dominant Hindu majoritarian
#
political ideology in India.
#
I really don't know that there is.
#
So anybody who believes that this process is permanent, irreversible and will lead to
#
a solution of the problem needs to get a recheck.
#
I am not convinced that this solution is that easy and can be found so quickly.
#
The closest we came to solution is the time when you were in Pakistan, you know, covering
#
That is the time we came with the four point formula, etc.
#
And then the whole process got derailed on the Pakistani side because Musharraf got involved
#
with that whole lawyers crisis and then completely everything then stopped.
#
And then since then, we have never been able to, that's the closest we have come to this
#
I have spoken to some senior Indian diplomats who have dealt with Pakistan over the years
#
and they say that Pakistan always overreaches either out of a certain defensiveness or out
#
of certain aggressiveness, whether it is Bhutto talking to Swaran Singh after the 62 war,
#
you know, trying to be very aggressive about what Pakistan wanted or Bhutto in Shimla after
#
the 1971 war, where he is trying to say, oh, please save me, I'll be hanged if I concede
#
you too much kind of a thing, they have always overreached in a sense and that overreach
#
has not allowed any solution to come through.
#
Of course, the practical answer, as most people would tell you, sane people would tell you
#
is that why don't you make the line of control the actual border?
#
And that is something which has been discussed since Tashkent.
#
I know people who were at Tashkent have said that this was discussed at Tashkent as well
#
and this was agreed almost informally between the two sides, between Ayub and Shastri that
#
we should make the line of control the international border at some point in time.
#
But I don't think now with the kind of narrative that we have and the kind of ideology that
#
we have ruling on our side, which believes in the whole idea of an Akhand Bharat, which
#
does not believe that partition was the right thing, it would be very difficult for them,
#
for anyone to go and say, okay, that we are giving away Pakistan occupied Kashmir to Pakistan
#
or we will get Pakistan to Pakistan and still take a very strident anti-Pakistan line electorally
#
in their election campaigns here in India.
#
No, and sort of three thoughts strike me while you were talking just now.
#
And one of them is I agree that it seems and it's almost like Israel and Palestine issue
#
that it doesn't seem to be a resolution because the narratives are just so opposed.
#
Having said that, I think that the Kashmir situation is one that could have resolved
#
itself through decades if we had only taken the effort to integrate Kashmiris within our
#
In fact, around that time that I was in Pakistan, around that time that, you know, Musharraf
#
and Wajibbai were talking about chilling out, David Devdas writes about how the youth of
#
Kashmir at that time became aspirational.
#
They wanted to do MBAs, they wanted jobs, they wanted all of that.
#
But things just fell backwards from there.
#
And if things had gone in a different direction and they could have felt that there is value
#
in it for being part of this Indian Union, maybe things could have been different.
#
But that's an aside and amusing and anyway it is moot because it is too late for that,
#
The other interesting part about narratives is one, of course, there are the narratives
#
about Kashmir, but then there is also this local sort of political narrative, this nationalistic
#
narrative where Pakistan is always the enemy, where you keep telling your enemies that you
#
are anti-national, go to Pakistan.
#
You know, it's become part of the vocabulary in that sense.
#
So how do you see that danger of the narrative itself making reality go in a certain direction
#
like, you know, if the Prime Minister is in a political fix and you have no option but
#
to raise the kind of temperature like in fact what, you know, we saw with the surgical strikes
#
which, you know, luckily didn't lead to anything beyond that, but where in fact you inadvertently
#
played a part in a little number that came out of that narrative.
#
So do take an aside and tell us about that and then you can address a larger question.
#
So the first the aside.
#
So essentially it happened that the army was briefing that they announced these surgical
#
strikes across the line of control and if I remember correctly now they said five places
#
had been hit, which were these points from which terrorists were being sent across.
#
And somebody, a fellow journalist, a television journalist for a Hindi news channel actually
#
asked me, yes sir, you have served in that area.
#
How many people would be there in such a place?
#
So I said, you know, five, six, seven people could be there.
#
These are very small, old, disused bunkers kind of places from where militants or terrorists
#
are sent across and these are the last stops in that sense.
#
So I said, what, five to seven people a bunker can hold, a small bunker can hold an old bunker?
#
That's how it would be.
#
And five of them have been hit.
#
So and a moment later I realized and there are those two or three screens which play
#
on the, in that room in the army headquarters in the south block and I realized that on
#
one of these screens he's going live on mobile and he's telling that 30 to 35 people have
#
been killed because five bunkers have been, because five places have been hit and each
#
of them hold seven people so there are 35 people and suddenly you have the headline
#
It's actually, I just give a mathematical answer to a very, you know, kind of a, how
#
do I put it, a very theoretical question, a very theoretical answer and it suddenly
#
became inadvertently a kind of headline, the 35 and suddenly every other journalist in
#
that room, television journalists in the room started getting calls that, you know, this
#
channel is running 35 dead, why are we not running 35 dead?
#
And then they started running, I think the figures, whatever those figures were, which
#
eventually led to whatever the figures that they led to.
#
We still don't know how many actually died.
#
Pakistan claimed two, but I don't know whether the number was three, I think Pakistan claimed.
#
I don't know whether the number was right or not.
#
Now to the bigger question, can the narrative push India and Pakistan down a dangerous path?
#
Yes, I think that danger remains, especially because the emotion has been whipped up to
#
such an extent and where people genuinely believe that, you know, Pakistan is something
#
which needs to be either destroyed or annihilated or completely finished.
#
That it would be very difficult if something is proven or a narrative is created that something
#
is happening from Pakistan for India to say that it would not punish Pakistan.
#
So, you know, you did it after Pulwama, you did it after Uri and you know, anything similar
#
that happens, you have raised the bar to an extent where you would be forced to do something
#
And as you said, if there's a scenario which is painted in which it is happening in a certain
#
political context, where there are huge political costs to inaction or to not doing that kind
#
of action, the choice would be a very tough one for the political leadership to make.
#
And it is likely that the decision would be would err on the bolder side and not on the
#
side of not doing this.
#
If there were friendly relations, if there were the kind of environment which you had
#
in 2006, India probably got away by not doing anything after 2008 militarily except going
#
after it diplomatically and putting so much of pressure on Pakistan that it really squeezed
#
Pakistan very heavily diplomatically, but did not militarily punish Pakistan.
#
Now the military punishment to Pakistan, this is punitive strikes.
#
These are punitive in nature.
#
They are not essentially strikes which are acting as a deterrence, you know, that they
#
do not deter Pakistanis from not doing it again.
#
So you can punish them, but it doesn't change their behavior.
#
You punish them with the surgical strikes, there's still Bulwama happens.
#
You do Balakot, but the militancy does not come down in Kashmir or the line of control
#
does not become peaceful.
#
So a lot of people call it political theater meant for domestic consumption.
#
Because if you're not really altering the behavior of the adversary, then what is this
#
You know, what is its strategic importance?
#
And I think that's a question which remains unanswered.
#
And that's a question which a lot of people need to ask as to what the value of these
#
strikes is if they are not deterring Pakistan or forcing it to alter its behavior.
#
I mean, the value is obviously domestic consumption.
#
But then the point is that every time it's like a hit of a drug that even for domestic
#
consumption, you'll have to take it up one notch.
#
And while you don't actually change the adversary's behavior in a positive way, you can affect
#
it in a negative way if they then have to play to their political constituencies and
#
And I guess there's always a danger of that happening.
#
My next question is about before we get to Indochina, which is fascinating in itself
#
and will take up some time, but just to end with sort of the India Pakistan with the question
#
about recent events, which is that, in fact, like I heard that President Biden's administration
#
made a little bit of a difference in the way India approaches all of this.
#
In fact, an insider told me a couple of days ago, I don't know how true this is.
#
Maybe you'll have more information that one of the reasons that Internet was restored
#
in Kashmir was that the Biden administration made it a precondition for talking further
#
And equally, they've kind of said that, listen, you really have to chill on all this anti-Pakistan
#
rhetoric and all of that, which is why in these current elections, you don't have so
#
much anti-Pakistan talk or almost any anti-Pakistan talk coming from the BJP because they're kind
#
So how big a role is sort of the US approach to this whole situation?
#
Yeah, Amit, just coming before this question, let me just rewind to the statement you made
#
at the beginning of the question about the narrative and the political calculations that
#
can lead to Pakistani response.
#
So what has happened so far in the two instances, the surgical strikes and the Balakot strikes?
#
How the Pakistanis have dealt with it is they completely denied the surgical strikes.
#
They said nothing happened.
#
So they didn't need to respond.
#
The narrative from their side was, when it came to Balakot, they said that the Balakot
#
airstrikes did not hit the target, did not lead to any casualties.
#
So it was really an effective strike.
#
And then they came back and did whatever little bit they did on the Indian side of the line
#
So in that sense, they also found a way to address their own political constituency without
#
really climbing up the escalation ladder.
#
Now that's pretty lucky on the part of both countries.
#
It may or may not happen every single time.
#
And I think that's where the fear that you raise really comes into play.
#
This can quickly go out of hand in such a scenario.
#
Just to give a counterfactual, if the Indian fighter pilot had died in Pakistan army custody
#
after Balakot, the Indian response would have been completely different.
#
And Pakistan would have no kind of easy card in their pocket to hand over to India.
#
The fact that Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan went to Pakistani parliament and announced
#
that they were handing over led to the defuse the crisis in a big way.
#
Let's say if the Indian fighter pilot had died in Pakistani custody for whatever reason,
#
whether he was injured during the flight or whether he was beaten up by the civilians,
#
villagers when he was captured or whether he was beaten by the Pakistani military when
#
Think of the whole situation, how it would have developed.
#
Pakistanis would have had no way in which they would have defused the crisis.
#
The emotions and the tempers in India were running so high that it would not have been
#
possible for anyone to advocate that let's not go and do something more with Pakistan.
#
So it is those kinds of situations, accidentally or otherwise, which can really lead to a crisis
#
completely going out of hand, especially as you said, with two countries which are armed
#
Getting back to your other question about the Biden administration's role, very clearly
#
the Kashmir internet thing, whether it is true or not, the fact is that the State Department
#
did welcome it in a very enthusiastic manner the day it was done, which was clearly a signal
#
The fact that the US Defense Secretary, not General Mattis, not General Austin, but Secretary
#
Austin, when he came to India, the fact that he chose to go public in the press conference
#
and say that he had spoken to India about the backsliding of democracy and various democratic
#
freedoms clearly indicates that it wanted to send a message to the Indian side.
#
This democratic party, the current democratic party, as you know, has a lot of people who
#
are far left on the progressive side than historically the democratic party has been.
#
This administration particularly has been speaking tough on many issues with many other
#
If India has to stand in contrast to China, particularly on the issue of democracy and
#
liberal values, then I think there would be pressure on India, whether said or unsaid,
#
to deal with those issues.
#
It's not something India can get away lightly with because of China.
#
It's something that would come into focus, even if it's not spoken publicly or spoken
#
semi publicly as Secretary Austin did.
#
It definitely plays and will continue to play a part in the India-US relations going forward.
#
Let's talk about China now, because China suddenly kind of burst onto the consciousness
#
in the sort of adversarial framework as it were in the last few years.
#
You know, we lost the 60 to war, and that kind of happened, and then for decades it's
#
almost like there's been nothing.
#
There have been these little outstanding disputes, but there's kind of been no action.
#
It's almost as if we are too small for China to bother with, and when we start becoming
#
big, you could argue we start becoming big as a market as well, where their manufacturers
#
can sell stuff, so you know, why would they create a conflict or go for conflict and all
#
But equally, the situation is like you pointed out, that if there was a hypothetical war
#
in a thought experiment with China, we would of course not stand a chance, and they know
#
that and we know that, so beyond the point, there's really not much we can do.
#
That's my layman's understanding of it, obviously there are nuances to it, and you'll correct
#
So tell me a little bit about what's brewing here, what are China's motivations, what is
#
a predicament that India finds itself in, where for example, we can't even admit that
#
we've lost some territory for domestic political reasons, obviously, you know, and in the middle
#
of all this, like all India could do was ban poetic talk, which I love, which is like really
#
sad, but and which empowered many people in, you know, small town India and rural India
#
who didn't have any other platform that spoke to them.
#
So it's just tragic at multiple levels, I just feel horrible about that.
#
So essentially, there is a line which goes directly, the Chinese behaviour changes around
#
2012-2013 with respect to India, whether they believe that they were coming on to their
#
own, whether they believe that India was getting too closely aligned to the US, whether they
#
believe that time had come when the existing arrangements between India and China, which
#
had held good for some 20 odd years, had no longer held good.
#
The behaviour changes around that time and this is all the officials who dealt with China
#
at that point in time have now in hindsight said that this is the time when things start
#
changing with changing with China, China's behaviour becomes more assertive, more aggressive,
#
it starts pushing more, it has better infrastructure, better economy and everything else.
#
The major turning point comes in Doklam in 2017.
#
This is the India Bhutan Tibet border, China border in Doklam, as you know, the Chinese
#
were coming and making a road which we believed was in Bhutanese territory, the Chinese believe
#
it was in their territory, we went down from our post on the Indian side into what we believed
#
was Bhutanese territory and what Chinese believe was in their territory and stopped the Chinese
#
physically from making that road.
#
The standoff lasted 73 days, it was a tough standoff, but the message that China got was
#
that Indians were now aggressive enough to come down and stop us on our soil.
#
Looking at it from the Chinese perspective and if you read some of the Chinese documentation
#
around that time, Ananth Krishnan has written about it in his new book as well.
#
It's a great book, by the way, on India-China relations.
#
This is when the shift takes place in China's thinking and it starts looking at India that
#
India is trying to be too aggressive and trying to do something and a lot of Chinese thinkers
#
have spoken about it, written about it.
#
It is around the same time that the India-US ties start deepening, all these agreements
#
that India is signing, the Prime Minister Modi and President Trump, the bonhomie between
#
them and the agreements that India and the US are signing and there is an impression
#
that Beijing gets at the time that India is only acting at the behest of the US, which
#
And then the whole fracas around the revocation of Article 370, to which China objected and
#
India flew in its foreign minister to go and brief them, to brief the Chinese at a very
#
very short notice and the Chinese did not like it.
#
They kept on issuing statement after statement, whether it was in the UN or whether it was
#
by their foreign ministry.
#
There's a whole sequence of events and whole sequence of documents that are there to show
#
that the Chinese were not happy the way J&K was bifurcated and the Article 370 was revoked.
#
They believe that India was trying to, again, assert its original claim on Tibet, on Aksai
#
Chin, which they historically had.
#
That's primarily my understanding of what the Chinese were objecting to, not to what
#
was happening to Kashmiris.
#
They are doing far worse in Xinjiang.
#
So what they were primarily objecting was, India is trying to reassert its line and this
#
flows from how they had dealt in 2017 in Doklam and they were acting at the behest of the
#
All this led to the situation which erupted in Ladakh last year, where tensions had been
#
brewing up for some time, going back to at least October 2019, when on the waters of
#
the Pangongso Lake, the Indian and Chinese forces had clashed and certain Indian soldiers
#
were very badly injured, who had to be heavily lifted to the nearest military hospital.
#
They were so badly injured, it was a very serious clash and those clashes led to situations
#
where Indian patrols were being stopped by the Chinese.
#
Indians are also pushing back in certain areas and trying to be aggressive for very obvious
#
You have to be aggressive against an adversary.
#
You cannot allow an adversary to ride roughshod over you.
#
And one thing led to another, till the time, in early May, late April, early May, 2020
#
that is, the Chinese decided to replace their border guarding troops with the regular PLA.
#
And that is when the crisis really erupted, what we read about on the 5th of May, the
#
clash on Pangongso Lake, so many people got injured on the Indian side, etc, etc.
#
And then, as you saw, one thing led to another.
#
The Chinese coming in and occupying these areas, whether it was in Galwan, whether it
#
was in Hotspring, whether it was in Gogra, whether it was in Pangong, and also all those
#
actions took place, whether they moved forward in Deptsang planes to stop Indian patrols,
#
one of the strategically the most important area.
#
Then they came down in Demchok, as much to the south, close to the Himachal Ladakh border.
#
They came down in Demchok, two areas where they had not come down, they crossed the Nala,
#
something called the CNN, Sharding, Darding, Nala, I'm sorry for the, I don't know the,
#
I don't remember the full thing, but it's called the CNN, they crossed the CNN and came
#
So that is all that happened.
#
And eventually, Indians moved and occupied certain areas in late August, early September
#
on the south of Pangongso Lake in the Kailash range, the two, the Indian tanks and the Chinese
#
tanks were barely a few meters apart for all those months.
#
There were rounds fired in the air, some 100, 200, 300 rounds fired.
#
We don't know where the physical clashes took place, but troops were face to face in that
#
Tanks were face to face in that area before the disengagement took place in, some disengagement
#
took place in January and the whole buffer zone, no petrol zone was created in that area.
#
In the whole situation, I missed out on the big major clash in Galwan on 15th of June.
#
Twenty Indian soldiers lost their lives and those were the first lives that were lost
#
after 1975 on the Sino-India border.
#
There were also 10 people who were released, 10 Indian soldiers, including four officers
#
who were taken captive, who were released after three days.
#
I read a report somewhere which said that at least 50 Indian soldiers were taken captive
#
and others were released much earlier and only 10 were released after three days.
#
And it's an Indian report.
#
It's an Indian website.
#
It's on India Today, in fact, that the report was there.
#
And that was a big crisis and the Chinese later acknowledged that they had lost four
#
of their soldiers in that clash in Galwan.
#
And that really led to two tempers going through the roof on both sides, despite the Prime
#
Minister saying four days after the Galwan clash that there's no Chinese on Indian territory,
#
na koi ghuza hai, na koi aaya hua hai, but the framing to that, to that effect, almost
#
meaning that there's nobody on Indian, no Chinese on Indian soil, which was clearly
#
not the case as the satellite imagery, all these commercial satellites showed us.
#
So the situation that we have now, coming back to the present, is that there's been
#
a complete disengagement on the North Bank and South Bank of Pangongso.
#
South Bank of Pangongso is where we had moved in later and which allowed us to have an advantage
#
and that has been bargained for this creation of this no-petrol buffer zone on the North
#
The Chinese continue to remain in the areas of Hotspring and Gogra, Deptsang and Demchow.
#
In this, I have spoken to enough senior military leaders who have commanded that area.
#
They all of them say that Deptsang is the most worrisome and I'll take a couple of
#
minutes to explain why Deptsang is most worrisome.
#
Deptsang is very close to the Karakoram pass, just south of the Karakoram pass, is a flat
#
It's a flat area in which the Chinese have five roads which are coming to that area where
#
they can use their armour and it forms a kind of a wedge towards this, to Siachen.
#
So if Chinese come from this side, you know, from the east and move into Deptsang and Indians
#
only have one road through which they can maintain Deptsang, the new road which they
#
The Chinese come and occupy Deptsang plains and if they overcome one single mountain range
#
which is there, which is defended by Indians, by India, then they could actually cut down
#
the Indian supply line to the southern Siachen glacier, which would then allow the Pakistanis
#
to move in from their side and occupy the southern glacier.
#
So that is what fundamentally the issue is.
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This is the only place where China and Pakistan can physically meet territorially on the Indian
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There is no other place where they can physically meet.
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It does not mean that China will go and occupy the Siachen glacier.
#
It only means that it facilitates the Pakistani attack to capture southern Siachen glacier,
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which is something which India occupied in 84 and at a very high cost.
#
That is something which really, really worries the Indians the most and Deptsang is not really
#
defensible in that sense because of the terrain configuration there and this is what most
#
military commanders believe.
#
It is not easily defendable and the Chinese continue to block Indians, Indian patrols
#
in Deptsang even now as we speak.
#
I saw a short interview by the army chief a few hours ago where he said that the problem
#
will be resolved eventually.
#
We are still talking about these places and I think that remains the biggest worry as
#
of now for the Indian army and for the Indian political leadership that there are areas
#
where disengagement has not taken place and Deptsang is one of the foremost areas where
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that disengagement has not taken place.
#
I would in fact go out on a limb and say that Deptsang is far more important than the Pangong
#
Pangong lake may be very good for tourist reasons, for reasons of civilian democratic
#
electric leadership going there, civilians going there, a lot of tourists going there
#
but strategically is the area of Deptsang which is far more important and which remains
#
So tell me what are the implications of the growing closeness of China and Pakistan like
#
on one hand you could take the negative view that listen they are both antagonistic towards
#
India and this is a classic example of how they can kind of come together and really
#
But on the other hand I did an episode with our friend Pranay Kotasane a couple of years
#
back or maybe even three years ago where I asked him the same question and his point
#
was it can also work the other way that China has deep economic interest in Pakistan and
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therefore they want Pakistan to stay out of conflict and stay out of trouble and the economy
#
to progress because it's obviously a positive sum game and all of that.
#
So it can also work the other way.
#
So how do you see this dynamic kind of playing out and also the interesting thing is that
#
whereas as far as India is concerned you know China and Pakistan are natural allies but
#
from the US point of view you know they've kept Pakistan close to themselves you know
#
the relationship that deepened after the war on terror began so to say but at the same
#
time they want India as a counterbalance to China in the subcontinent.
#
So what is the whole dynamic of this China Pakistan relationship and how it could affect
#
You know Amit if you are aware that around a week or so back a note from the Pakistani
#
government was leaked by a Pakistani portal and a social media handle which clearly showed
#
that the Chinese had during the Ladakh crisis last year had asked the Pakistanis to mobilize
#
to put pressure on India and the Pakistanis refused and that allowed them to build certain
#
confidence with the Indians so that they could go for the kind of deal that they're going
#
on that they've gone ahead on the line of control.
#
Wow I didn't know that that's fascinating.
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Yeah so the idea that the Chinese would not want Pakistan to be involved does not seem
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Pakistan may not be a North Korea I agree with you to China that's fine but even North
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Korea doesn't listen to China always so Pakistan will not listen to China always Pakistan as
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other friends whether it is Saudis whether it is UAE may not be today but earlier or
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Turkey or US as you say US has certain interest in Afghanistan for which it needs Pakistan's
#
So Pakistan has more friends and may not listen to China always but clearly the strategic
#
picture shows that the Chinese would want Pakistan to come into play against India and
#
use it but that also as you rightly said gives India the option of dealing with Pakistan.
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So Pakistan feels confident enough to deal with India because it thinks that it has something
#
up its sleeve that allows India to go ahead and actually it's a kind of counterintuitive
#
thing but it actually allows you to do a deal the way it has happened now.
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If Pakistan wants as you said economic growth development whatever peace in any sense of
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what in whatever limited way it would then say see guys I did not go along with China
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I didn't fight so why don't we do a deal and that's something which we are almost seeing
#
So this may in a sense have come to India's advantage in a way that India can do a deal
#
with Pakistan but as we discussed earlier the whole political narrative in India and
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the structural factors how do we do a deal with Pakistan because essentially if you do
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a deal with Pakistan if you can find peace with Pakistan the two front threat actually
#
goes away because the Chinese threat is not going away.
#
Now let's be clear everybody knows globally as you saw the New York Times piece today
#
the Chinese are very clearly positioning themselves as ideologically opposed to the US led grouping
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saying clearly we stand here this is what we are we are not taking it lying down and
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you know we are going to push bring countries on our side and we are going to say that this
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is what it is and the and as a country which shares a land border with China disputed land
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border with China India cannot afford to you know walk away from the Chinese shadow.
#
The Chinese threat is going to remain and is going to increase by the day.
#
India as the as a major country in Asia will have to leave with it Pakistan need not necessarily
#
be a threat or an adversary to you if you can do a deal with Pakistan that's my sense
#
but of course there are many ifs and buts in it the least of all being the Indian political
#
scenario but there are other things within Pakistan itself there are huge fault lines
#
there are huge problems within Pakistan the whole narrative of Pakistan as to why it exists
#
why the country exists would be under threat if there is a peace with India the whole idea
#
of Kashmir what happens to Kashmir is it integral to Pakistan's existence all those questions
#
come into play so I am not really I am not sanguine but I believe that the answer actually
#
lies in India doing a deal with Pakistan to resolve one front and then try and find ways
#
to deal with the Chinese threat or try and do a deal with China to resolve the crisis.
#
I think it would be a bad for the Indian economy it would be bad for the Indian military and
#
it would be very bad for the Indian strategic calculus if the two front threat is not removed
#
because as we have seen from this current Ladakh crisis or rather the Ladakh crisis
#
which just disengagement had just taken place it is a real threat and it can and it can
#
lead to situations where India can be put under pressure which would lead to more spending
#
on the military which would further impinge on our economic growth and make us economically
#
unattractive in some ways.
#
And you know like any conflict is a negative sum game you know the India China conflict
#
also seems that way but it feels worse for India like you have pointed out you wrote
#
in a recent piece in foreign policy that you know this it might seem to be a stalemate
#
but it is actually a stalemate that China is better equipped to handle for a couple
#
of reasons number one they have far deeper pockets like you have pointed out elsewhere
#
that their defence budget is nearly four times as much as India their economy is nearly six
#
times bigger and that gap has actually widened during the pandemic because somehow they have
#
even though it started there they have kind of handled it better than we managed.
#
So that is one thing and the other thing is that all of this distracts our security forces
#
from the other front so to say that the opportunity cost for India of manning that China border
#
and being alert and all of that is far greater than it is for China because hey they have
#
got such a massive and modern force.
#
So what are your kind of thoughts on that because it seems to me that you know we come
#
off worse no matter what we do and to some extent our basket of options there is in thinking
#
of how best we can limit our losses until some point maybe through diplomacy maybe through
#
trade we can just you know get past this what is your sense of the Indian thinking on this
#
and what are the realistic options in front of us like if you were in the foreign ministry
#
now what would you be telling the Chinese what would you be trying to do?
#
So you know the argument that I make is that even the political imperative is that India
#
cannot afford to lose any territory to China and if that is the political imperative even
#
if this crisis gets resolved in some way India would have to deploy its forces closer to
#
the border ground forces closer to the border to prevent any loss of territory.
#
Now with the budgets limited and with the finances as they are as we have discussed
#
again and again this would mean that India cannot really build its Navy which needs to
#
go out in the Indian Ocean region and do what it needs to do along with other core partners
#
which is which is what would make India more attractive to the to its core partners if
#
it can go out in the in the Indian Ocean region and can do what it needs to do in the seas
#
or can take on a very fast growing Chinese Navy PLA Navy in the region that is the opportunity
#
cost essentially which comes from there.
#
Now why does that cost come?
#
That cost comes because of the political imperative of not losing any territory.
#
Now militaries do not think that way militaries are fine with losing territory because they
#
can either go back and capture that same piece of territory again so by using military force
#
and if they can't they can go and capture another valuable piece of adversaries territory
#
so that they can negotiate on the table and exchange those two pieces of land.
#
So losing territory is no big deal militarily but politically in India especially with a
#
more powerful country like China it is a very big deal and that is what forces India's hand.
#
If India could do what is called a QPQ a Qutproko you know you come and capture something in
#
Galwan I'll go and capture something in Arunachal or Tibet or wherever or Himachal wherever
#
else I'll go I'll go and capture some territory so you jolly well then you know you will we
#
will both go on to the negotiating table and and that will be vacated that's something
#
which was advocated in non-alignment 2.0 which was produced in 2013 by the current institution
#
where I am at the Center for Policy Research.
#
So that is essentially where the whole problem lies the fact that India is unwilling to do
#
a QPQ on China and the political imperative is that you cannot lose any territory.
#
So if we had a way by which we could regain lost territory we would not need to deploy
#
as we are planning to deploy or as we are trying to deploy to minimize any loss of territory
#
and I think that is a more exhausting option of trying to deploy in that manner.
#
So Amit I hope you realize that the Chinese do not deploy all across the border like we
#
deploy they actually come from 200-250 kilometers far behind and then move in because they are
#
very confident about probably as you said the power differential that they have.
#
The last major deployment they did was in Doklam close to the place where Indians stopped
#
them they've created a big military base as satellite images etc have shown since.
#
So that is where I think probably an answer could lie if the military was confident enough
#
and had the political mandate to go and do a quid pro quo they are areas where they can
#
certainly go and occupy certain piece of Chinese territory.
#
Chinese cannot defend every single piece of land they are not 60 feet tall dragon in that
#
So we need to recognize that but that would mean taking a certain political risk in terms
#
of losing certain territory initially.
#
That would provide the ideal solution a rational solution to this kind of a problem where we
#
get bogged down trying to defend every inch of our territory.
#
I think also that comes from the whole historical narrative that not even one inch of territory
#
will be lost to the enemy lost to the adversary.
#
I think that political line which is so filmy in its nature has completely made it very
#
difficult for our political leaders to go.
#
We are sensitive about territory because of historical reasons we are a land dominated
#
country the land is scarce we are you know highly populated population density is very
#
high India was not united before you know earlier so you don't want to lose any piece
#
of territory because you are worried if you start losing territory there would be other
#
areas where you would lose territory and would do nothing about it.
#
You know the whole fracas or the Bangladesh those exchange of villages went on for so
#
many years and Supreme Court and everybody got into play because you just don't want
#
to lose any territory at whatsoever for any reason which I think India is now India should
#
be politically confident after so many years after independence.
#
This is not the India of the 1950s where it needs to really defend every inch of territory
#
or claim that it is defending every inch of territory.
#
It needs to be far more confident and think in more strategic terms more military terms
#
while dealing with the territory.
#
And what is your thinking and the thinking of experts in the field about what China wants
#
because it seems to me that in all of this like let's say okay Doklam was sort of you
#
know like a provocation for them but at this moment in time listen I am sure they don't
#
want a few little piddly bits of territory on the border what difference does it make
#
What do they really want at what point if we can credibly communicate that listen we
#
will work with you we won't necessarily be USA's counterbalance in Asia let's work together
#
let's trade together you know our entire country is a market for your goods and all of that.
#
Then is there a way of getting to that kind of table and just changing the tone and you
#
know sorting this military issue through politics through diplomacy through whatever.
#
Yeah perhaps there is but as our foreign minister Mr. Jaishankar said that he himself doesn't
#
know the reason why the Chinese have done it.
#
So you know if India's foreign yeah he's on record if Indian foreign minister does not
#
know why the Chinese have done this it's hard for Amityu or me or any other analyst to actually
#
assess why the Chinese because I'm sure the Chinese would have told him in their various
#
meetings or his diplomats in various meetings why they have done what they did in Ladakh.
#
Clearly as you said it seems to be something about the counterbalancing that the Indians
#
are doing along with the US and is there a way in which India can assure the Chinese
#
without being subservient to them or without conceding its own interest.
#
I think that still remains to be seen.
#
China is really coming out in some way and it's being very very assertive in so many
#
I don't know if there is a way in which India can operate with China without conceding on
#
its sovereign interest.
#
I would be watching very carefully in the coming months when President Xi is supposed
#
to come to India for the BRICS summit etc as to what happens or if President Xi and
#
Prime Minister Modi actually undertake another informal summit and arrive at some other formulations
#
some other solutions and what kind of give and take takes place whether India wants to
#
concede something on the BRI or something else takes place.
#
I would be very carefully watching the rest of the year for science on India China.
#
I don't think we should not assume that everything is lost on India China and there is no way
#
that nothing can be regained despite the push by the Biden administration and the court
#
because at the end of the day there are parts of Biden administration which are engaging
#
John Kerry is holding a meeting on environment and climate with his Chinese counterpart.
#
So there is a post there remains a very distinct possibility than the Indian and Chinese government
#
may find a way to engage and find and do some give and take some exchange through which
#
they find certain answers to their current predicament and create structures where these
#
The old structures which are created in Narsimha Rao's time probably have outlived their utility
#
and new structures for peace building for resolving tensions could have to be formulated
#
under a new framework by the two governments.
#
These are really hopeful words you know may there be clarified butter and sugar in your
#
mouth basically aapke moon mein ghee shakkar and sort of and you know you've outlined
#
in the course of this India the security the challenge to India's national security pretty
#
well there's Pakistan there's China there's a pressure of a two front war there is our
#
fading economy you know part of which also feeds into the whole problem of our armed
#
forces not being modernized enough and not being enough revenue for that all of these
#
are sort of valid points would you add something to that and then to go further what would
#
you say if you look over say the next 10 years what would you say is a best-case scenario
#
and worst-case scenario in terms of India's national security like what could go wrong
#
or and how could we actually you know make progress on all these fronts.
#
So remember you know there are four things which are which are the national security
#
imperatives for India the unity unity of India's India's unity you know territorial integrity
#
essentially what I'm talking to sovereignty you know whether it was non-alignment whether
#
it is strategic sovereignty whatever word we may want to use can India take sovereign
#
decisions as a sovereign as a sovereign power that is the second national security imperative
#
the third national security imperative is internal security internal security so that
#
there's a rule of law and there is development growth peace business etcetera etcetera within
#
the country and the fourth thing is a global standing and India really you know reach that
#
kind of global standing so within those four parameters through which the Indian national
#
security paradigm has to be judged what could go wrong what could go right you know what
#
could obviously go wrong is you could face a resurgent crisis in Kashmir in the north
#
and in the northeast the two areas where situation has not really stabilized especially if things
#
go wrong in Bangladesh with Sheikh Hasina because clearly till the time Sheikh Hasina is there
#
she's very close to the Indian government and things are fine but if she goes away I
#
do not know what kind of situation would emerge in Bangladesh and what impact it would have
#
in northeast particularly with whatever is going on in Myanmar in Myanmar right now so
#
the situation in India's neighborhood essentially could lead to crisis in northeast could lead
#
to a crisis in Kashmir with either Pakistan and of course on top of that that you could
#
have Pakistan China threat collusively coming into play and China trying to bring all the
#
neighborhood countries whether it is Nepal whether it is Sri Lanka Maldives into its
#
orbit of influence and trying to put India under pressure that would be the worst case
#
scenario that everything going wrong we're talking about virtually everything has gone
#
wrong Kashmir has gone wrong northeast has gone wrong Nepal Sri Lanka Bangladesh Myanmar
#
China Pakistan everything has gone that's the worst case scenario that's possible probability
#
can vary you know Nepal may not go wrong Sri Lanka may not go wrong Bangladesh may not
#
go wrong but probability is low but everything can go wrong that's the thing what can go
#
right India resolves Kashmir through political means not through military means India resolves
#
the problems in Nagaland problems in the northeast whether it is Nagaland Manipur etc and finds
#
a way out India finds a way to engage with Bangladesh in a manner that once the Sheikh
#
Hassan administration is not there it does not lose its credibility and its say inside
#
Bangladesh and India is able to find a way to deal with China as you said where they
#
can both cooperate and compete at the same time without getting into adversarial positions
#
or having this enmity of such a high standard with their military confronting each other
#
or challenging each other and India can at the same time have a deal with Pakistan where
#
it is no longer a threat and in such a scenario India would rather devote more of its political
#
energies and economic resources towards development growth poverty alleviation then towards its
#
military and devoting this whole narrative national narrative around who our enemy is
#
and how we need to tackle that enemy we would rather be talking about how to lift these
#
7.5 crore people who have been pushed into poverty during the pandemic and all the other
#
challenges of inequality of illiteracy of joblessness that really India needs to tackle
#
India really doesn't India should not be for India at this point in time Pakistan or China
#
should not be the real problem the real problem is what our own country you know citizens
#
of the country are facing I think that's what the best case scenario for India would be
#
India and I think in a sense our your advice for India would also be the same as your advice
#
for any individual that if you sort out the problems within then you can sort out kind
#
of the problems without so before ending this episode I just want to kind of get back to
#
the personal because you made this interesting journey where you are a young boy growing
#
up in Agra then you have joined the army you spent some time in the army you have moved
#
on to the you know you have become a journalist and now sort of a think tanky as it were working
#
for CPR so you know so how do you look at this current path that you're on in a sense
#
it's kind of accidental because obviously if you don't join the army you don't end
#
up here either so what do you feel about your current path what are the things that make
#
you look forward to the day when you wake up in the morning is it writing is it reading
#
is it just talking to smart people you know what drives you so the current path is good
#
you know I have taught it at at Yale I taught in the political science department at Yale
#
in 2019 fall 2019 they have again invited me to go and teach there that's something
#
I look forward to again going and teaching there it's a wonderful university wonderful
#
environment lovely place to be there other than that the fact that I am able to think
#
read and write without being CPR is a great place to work by the way my boss Yamini Iyer
#
she's a wonderful person and they give a lot of freedom for people to do what they want
#
to exercise without putting them under pressure it's a kind of place which allows you to intellectually
#
engage and do things that you wish to do without really looking over your shoulder which is
#
a great opportunity at this stage of my life other than that what do I think when I wake
#
up when I wake up I actually look forward to yes reading writing and meeting interesting
#
people all three things actually reading more reading and meeting interesting people but
#
and writing less writing is less of hassle because now I do find serious writing being
#
able to produce new ideas more regularly a huge challenge I admire people who are able
#
to write a very high quality stuff very regularly it's not that something that that comes naturally
#
or or easily to me but yes reading and meeting interesting people definitely drives me every
#
day yeah and as this show and this episode is a witness to I get to meet interesting
#
people as well so Sushant thanks a lot for being a guest today on the scene and the unseen
#
I really appreciate your time and insights thank you so much I mean it was a pleasure
#
it's been a long show thanks thanks a lot if you enjoyed listening to this episode head
#
on over to the show notes for many many links enter rabbit holes my friends if you want
#
to follow Sushant on Twitter you can do that at Sushant Singh that is S-I-N so S-U-S-H-A-N-T-S-I-N
#
and you can follow me at Amit Verma A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A you can browse past episodes of the scene
#
and the unseen at scene unseen dot I-N thank you for listening
#
did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen if so would you like to support
#
the production of the show you can go over to scene unseen dot I-N slash support and
#
contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking thank you
