‘India’s Mad Defence Hike’

Former DG ISI, Lt Gen (Retd) JAVED NASIR is shocked at the massive increase of 28% in defence spending in India.

The increase in the Indian current defence budget of 28%, has taken the declared defence outlay to the staggering figure of 585.87 Billion Rupees. The increase alone is far more than the total defence budget of Pakistan. The Defence Budget of India is more than the National Budget of Pakistan even without including the outlay for defence related heads like the nuclear weapons and missile programme, the space and research programmes, the Border Road Organization, most of whose budget is spent on defence oriented roads, allocation to the shipping and within the shipping the Oil Tankers which are primarily required to sustain the Indian Navy when on the High Seas. The Border Security Forces, 90% of which are engaged in active hostilities in Kashmir, NEFA, Tripura and the Nagaland. The allocation for R&D is mainly meant for defence oriented projects. The pension are no longer reflected in the defence budget. The Indian soldiers in Kashmir, NEFA and Assam are paid internal security field allowances amounting to billions out of the Ministry of Interior’s budget. The budget for RAW which now runs into billions of rupees and many other allocations are not even tabled in the budget. If all these allocations are added up, these will, even by a conservative estimate, exceed 200 billion. Thus the declared and the undeclared/hidden allocations add up to nearly 800 Billion Rupees which converted to common currency of $ puts it at 19.00 Billion Dollars which is nearly 750% of Pakistan’s Defence Budget and 150% of Pakistan’s national budget. The capital outlay for purchase of new weapons system, command and control set-up - to the tune of 4-5 Billion US $ is additional.

Regardless of what Indians say, the Indian terrain in the North against China rules out completely the possibility of any military operations beyond the tactical level even if the Indians completely denude their borders of all troops.

This 4th largest Military System in the world that India has developed is a threat not only to the Subcontinent but also to the entire region exposing India’s hegemonistic designs - The “Blue Waters” naval fleet India is building, focuses its orientation in the east to the very sparsely populated continent of Australia where India could shift its shelterless overflowing millions or in the West to the mineral rich African countries including South Africa. In its ambitions to acquire the super power status, after building a stockpile of nuclear weapons and the delivery system - Indians are manipulating to replace the Pakistani and Muslim labour in the Gulf States by the Hindu labour. They have already acquired very effective control in Dubai. RAW has plans to take the number of Indian expatriates to 5 million in the UAE - who eventually in the years 2005 - 2010 will create internal crisis therein and on the pretext of safeguarding the lives of Indian nationals, Indian Navy and Army will take over the Oil rich states in the Gulf.

The Indian analysts know that to maintain the minimal defensive ratio - Pakistan must allocate at last 33% of the Indian defence allocation. India has been forcing a strategy of economic compression on Pakistan. By increasing their defence budget which India’s much larger GDP can absorb easily - India is forcing Pakistan to enhance its defence outlay. With Pakistan’s economy under constant threat of default, should it match even 1/3rd of India defence outlay it will be in no position to siphon any funds towards its nuclear and delivery system programme. The west is also in complete connivance with India in its strategy of economic compression as well. It is linking IMF, World Bank loans with such harsh and unjustified conditions that Pakistani economy remains under the constant threat of collapse, the loot by the political leaders of all parties notwithstanding. Frustrated by its ever rising cost and ever deepening involvement in occupied Kashmir - India has launched a full scale media offensive to somehow have Pakistan declared a terrorist state - India knows the weak spots of the Western mind. It uses terms and expressions like the rouge Army, the Islamic fundamentalists, the terrorist state against Pakistan which are music to the western ears. The recently planned high jacking by RAW was a dismal failure - RAW bungled-up the whole affair. The incident exposed major weaknesses in India’s crisis management and decisions making process. The high jacked plane remained in Indian Air Space for nearly 2 1/2 hours and on ground at Amritsar for 45 minutes where even a single woman guard could have bursted its tyres or even an uneducated driver of a tanker could have prevented it from take off. There was mental paralysis which was manifested by India’s total lack of decision making. “RAW’s” last drama of enacting Israel’s Entebbe style commando action through its “Black Cat Commandos” whose reputation has been built on killing mercilessly Sikh women and children in Indian Punjab and innocent and unarmed Kashmiri citizens in the occupied Kashmir, turned out to be a flop. The Taliban were too good and clinched the issue by surrounding the Indian relief aircraft with “Black Cat Commandos on board at Kandhar with Afghani APCs making it loud and clear that any false move will result in roasting of Black Cats.

By this highjacking India wanted to project to the West Pakistan Government’s alleged collaboration with the Talibans to dub them both as terrorist to play on the western mind. RAW had wanted the plane to be taken eventually to Afghanistan - otherwise, it could have easily got the hostages released in UAE - where Indian negotiation team showed no such desire - it went all the way just to receive some of the released hostages. In addition to intensifying anti- Pakistan media offensive, Indians have unleashed highly provocative border violation in which Indian troops after crossing the LoC, killed civilian men, women and children in Azad Kashmir - The Indians want to convince Clinton during his visit that despite Washington Declaration, Pakistan continued to violate the sanctity of LoC and that Indians are fighting back only in self-defence.

This increase in Indian Defence budget therefore should have come as a surprise only to the ignorant and self-centred Indian advocates in Pakistan and the West. RSS is the worst militant organization in the world. Every member of RSS is more cruel than Milosevic - It is the youth wing of BJP - whose Government Vajpayee heads. He is amongst its founder members and openly advocates Hindu India with Hindu supremacy - They are absolutely intolerant to non-Hindus. Even though RSS is banned in some of the states in India yet its membership is being forced on the bureaucrat and government servants - RSS and BJP are synonymous. They want India to be a super power - aspiring (even though ridiculously unrealistic) to clinch the leadership of the rest of world. They are arming themselves to teeth. Their Ministers have repeatedly declared that China is no threat to India. If it be so then who is Indian arming itself against?

The real problem with the Indian leadership is that it is very stubborn, rigid and inflexible. It has learnt no lesson from history about the consequences of tackling insurgencies militarily. De Gaulle saved France by ending the war in Algeria. Nixon saved US economy from total collapse by ending the war in Vietnam. Even Israel belatedly realized it could not go on with the war with the Arabs. Gorbachev was late by three years in his attempts to correct the blunders committed by his predecessors. It was too late - despite Soviets unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan, it could not prevent its disintegration which still continues. In Kashmir, India is trying to find a military solution against a popular freedom movement which is totally indigenous and which has the strength of legitimacy provided by the UN resolutions which remain unaccomplished despite the passage of half a century.

Popular insurgencies not only sap the national resources in ever increasing figures, its protractedness gradually builds an anti-feeling amongst the peoples, thus sowing the seeds of discontent and despondency, which eventually lead to the disintegration of the country. With its very weak economy India has been increasing the budget to meet the ever rising cost of the counter insurgency - but what it cannot barter with money is the psychological demoralization of its troops who are totally disillusioned by an unjust war. The tenure for Indian Officers and men in Indian occupied Kashmir, where India has over 700,000 troops bottled, used to be one year after every 10 years. This tenure has now reduced to one year after every one year. This has been the single most demoralizing factor. Sustaining such large force on war footing costs extra billions. The present increase clearly shows the intentions of the Indian to continue with the mad, unsuccessful policy of counter insurgency by military operations. So demoralized is the Indian high command that a very senior officer in his interview summed up the situation in Indian Occupied Kashmir as in the past we used to chase the Guspatis (Mujahideen) in the forests - they now chase us inside the cantonments”.

This is not the only place where Indians are fighting the insurgency - the situation in the NEFA, Assam and Tripura is much worse - these areas remain neglected and the freedom fighters in these regions have acquired control of bulk of the area because 75% of India’s field army is bottled up in Kashmir.

If the Kashmiris can sustain the present level of operations for the next 3 years and there is every likelihood that they will, as is reflected from their morale and the material support being provided by the Muslims all over the world; Two things will happen. Either India will suffer a major military setback caused by large scale defections and desertions leading to even a mutiny or India may opt for a political solution and unilateral withdrawal under international pressure and mounting casualties, the turn over problem and unbearable cost - In India there is a rapidly growing opinion that India must resolve the issue politically. The west is also alarmed and Kashmir has been unanimously declared as the most dangerous nuclear flashpoint. The west including USA despite latter’s recent tilt towards India have started applying pressure on India to resolve this issue.

Seen in this backdrop the Indians appear to have opted for a foolish military solution. By contracting new state of the art Aircraft, T-90 tanks and a Russian aircraft carrier with 20 VTOL Mig-29s, India wants to create such staggering differential in the conventional forces that Pakistan should consider the option of going to war as a totally futile effort, outcome of which is a foregone conclusion.

Where India defence planners have blundered is the totally changed environment in the post-May 1998 Sub-continent. Indian leadership is either ignorant or does not have the full comprehension of the extent of damage the weapons of the two countries have in their nuclear arsenal can cause. Each one of these is capable of killing 10 times more people than the crude bombs which USA had exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945. With Pakistan’s far superior technology based on centrifuge system, it is in a position to build sufficiently large stockpile of bombs to back its nuclear deterrence strategy. Notwithstanding the argument, it will introduce a fresh nuclear race, Pakistan should detonate its thermal device to send loud and clear message that the path of mutual suicide that India has forced on Pakistan, will mean not only the killing of entire population of cities like Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and other 5 million plus cities, for which there will not be even enough vultures in the whole world to clear the carions. The cities of hope for Indian future like Bangalore with its Silicon Valley will have nothing left except for stench and ashes.- same will be case with its industrial complexes, darns and power reactors. The radiation and the residual radiation will affect billions all over the world. The situation on the Pakistan side will be no different - with not even the command and control network yet on ground, either in India or Pakistan against nuclear attacks which will cost trillions which neither of the countries can spare. India and Pakistan are perhaps the only two nuclear weapon states in the world which do not have nuclear shelters in any of their cities. The west must intervene to resolve the most dangerous nuclear flashpoint of the world. What a supreme dichotomy in the west’s thinking. A few words of praise for Hitler and Nazism by Jorg Haider in Austria - created such big uproar and fuss in the whole of Europe that he had to step down from the chairmanship of his party. Yet no one is taking notice of RSS, the worst militant and terrorist organization of the world, of which Vajpayee was a founder member and is now heading the Indian Government. How can he make himself proof against war mongering suicidal policies projected by the RSS?

Even if India crosses all limits of madness and lunacy and decides to turn its conventional forces into the largest in the world. Pakistan must not match or increase its conventional forces except to improve the quality of its weapons and Emaan of its troops. On the contrary whatever Pakistan can set aside from the national budget, it should improve and enlarge its nuclear arsenal and the delivery system to the desired level of deterrence.

The west and Japan should make their economic considerations subservient to the bigger cause and not be shyed away by Indian paradigm that since it has the largest middle class numbering over 200 million, the industrialized west and Japan cannot afford to ignore such large consumer market and hence will bow to Indian rigidity and inflexibility. They must project more forcefully the other side of Indian picture of 400 million living below the poverty line and another 400 million unfortunates who were born, live and will die on footpaths. This is the gravest violation of HRs by India who instead of improving the overwhelming lot of the Indians from poverty, hunger, disease stricken 800 million, its leadership is aspiring to have the 4th largest and most modern military system and dreaming to be a super power.

The Indian and Pakistani leadership owe it to the 1300 million people of the subcontinent to employ every bit of its scarce resources on the improvement of the lot which have no protection against, rains, floods, cyclones and starvation. They should resolve as Gen. Musharraf has rightly pointed out the core issue of Kashmir. Scale down forces to meet the bare essential internal security requirements. Once Kashmir is resolved, it will open all vistas and floodgates of opportunities and can change the worst antagonists into friends. Will the Indian leadership rise to the occasion or will it follow the beaten track? We can only hope and pray that sanity will prevail and the leadership in India and Pakistan will not disappoint their people and the rest of the world.