The Black Swan event of Corona has prompted the Indian leadership to do some out-of-the-box thinking, like Atmanirbhar Bharat. Corona presents a great challenge and disruption. It also paradoxically provides great opportunities. The world has been jolted by its pathetic dependency on China to rethink its supply chains. Thousands of multinational companies want to move their plants and factories out of China and relocate them in India, Vietnam or Bangladesh. This is a decisive moment in our recent history. We need to take bold and resolute steps and jettison the tremendous bureaucratic inertia and resistance to change that has been institutionalized in India.
Panic Buying
The sudden crisis in Ladakh saw us doing panic buying of defence equipment at a scale that makes nonsense of all our national security planning processes. The 15 -year Perspective Plans and Five-Year Defence Plans are simply derailed by our bureaucrats who are callously unconcerned about our defence preparedness.
Defence minister Rajnath Singh has announced a list of 101 defence items on which a complete and progressive ban will be imposed on their import. This step sounds far more concrete in terms of giving a level playing field to our vibrant private sector. The list of 101 embargoed items ranges from some types of ammunition, sonars and radars to artillery guns, assault rifles, corvettes, transport aircraft and light combat helicopters, among others. The proposal on artillery guns sounds most welcome because it provides an opportunity to our private sector to contribute in a major way in the here and now.
It is sad that right from the outset vested commercial interests have become so deeply mired in our arms acquisition process that they have made it dysfunctional. It took us over 30 years to get a replacement for our Bofors guns and 20 years to get the Rafales. Unless we have a death wish as a nation state we now need to rescue our arms acquisition process from this bureaucratic strangle hold – we simply have to make it work or perish. Autarky in key weapons systems can no longer be left to the tender mercies of the old Bureaucrat-Neta mafia. The joke of assembling semi-knocked down (SKD) and completely knocked down (CKD) kits in the name of self-reliance produced an optical illusion of self-sufficiency that has set us back by several decades.
This issue of the IMR takes a detailed and in-depth look at our latest initiative at reducing drastically our import dependency in defence and creating a viable military industrial complex in India that can not only meet our needs but produce for export to earn foreign exchange and produce economies of scale. To get this going we need to collaborate with countries like U.S., Israel, France, Japan and South Korea in a big way.
Taming China
Japan’s defence minsiter Taro Kano made a very significant declaration recently. He said, “The consensus in the international community is that China must be made to pay a very high price for its muscular revisionism in the South and East China Seas, in the Himalayas and Hong Kong.” We endorse this wholeheartedly. There is a dangerous degree of subjectivity in Chinese geo-strategic thinking. Chinese strategists have thrown all caution to the wind and are acting aggressive militarily and needlessly assertive in all directions, concurrently. This directly contravenes the tenets of China’s own strategic culture of having only one strategic direction at one time. Currently, this is towards China’s east coast, where its key cities and wealth creation centres are located. Yet it chose to activate the East China Sea, Taiwan and South China Sea and then the Indian front in the west at the same time. China’s dangerously theoretical military elite ,who have not seen combat in the last 42 years, are putting far too much store on posturing as a means to frighten all its adversaries into tame submission. Their desire to prevail without firing a shot is reaching infantile levels of subjectivity. This can only succeed if all its adversaries display plain cowardice.
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It is time to call Chinas bluff in a major way so that the costs and consequences of its needlessly aggressive behaviour are made plain to China. The latest statement by the Indian chief of defence staff (CDS) must, therefore, be seen in this light. He stated clearly that we are trying all peaceful methods to resolve issues with China by dialogue. However, should that not work, India is ready for military options. Frankly, India has a slight edge in the Himalayas in forward deployed troops – very proficient in mountain warfare and white-out operations. Our Air Force has the distinct edge locally and with the arrival of the Rafales and the rapid delivery of 30 Su-30s and MiG-29 fighters along with S-400s, it will be a great shot in the arm.
IMR prays for peace but we will not be surprised to see conflict break out in the South China Sea and the Himalayas in the coming months ahead. China is leaving the world with very little options. China cannot make the world sick and then decide to kick around all the nations on its periphery without expecting a push back at some stage. That time seems to be approaching rather fast.
