A tale of two books written by men in high places

NEW DELHI, January 10: It had to be a book launch with a difference. After all, it is not often that a serving Foreign Minister who also ...

NEW DELHI, January 10: It had to be a book launch with a difference. After all, it is not often that a serving Foreign Minister who also happens to be involved in critical discussions on India’s post-Pokhran nuclear policy and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty pens a tome on the security challenges facing the country.

Presiding over a panel discussion on Jaswant Singh’s book Defending India (Macmillan India, 338 pages), Union Defence Minister George Fernandes today called for a debate on the “enemy within” and its implications for national defence. He declared: “Who of us can forget the fact that one-third to one-half of our troops from J&K to the north-east are engaged in dealing with internal insurgency?”

However, for the most part, Fernandes and the panellists — former foreign secretary J.N. Dixit, defence analyst K. Subrahmanyam, Lt Gen (retd) Satish Nambiar and Air Commodore (retd) Jasjit Singh — focussed on a theme echoing through Defending India: The absence of a “strategic culture” in India.

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The defence minister said one of the reasons for the lack of strategic thinking in India is that matters of defence have tended to be the preserve of a small, select community, with the result that the people at large have no stake in them. Besides, he said an honest analysis would have to take into account the fact that “the threats are such that sacrifices have to be made by the whole nation”. Earlier, Subrahmanyam described the book as “a laboratory technician’s report on what’s wrong with our national security”. Pointing to Jaswant Singh’s call for a more comprehensive diplomacy, he asked: “In the eight months since the nuclear tests, have we started reorienting our people, the defence forces, the foreign service on the new diplomacy and thinking that is required? There has been no change in mindset.”

Subrahmanyam said the book itself furnishes an answer that India has no national security establishment, no critical body of people which devotes attention to national security. “Unless we take steps toward a national security establishment,” he warned, “we will face serious challenges like 1962.”

Deeming the book “timely and well-compiled”, Nambiar added that this absence of a strategic culture stems from a shortcoming in the Indian psyche: “Our inability to think a problem through to a natural conclusion (and) our propensity for moral positions without taking into account the international reality”. He said while the national security apparatus set-up by the Vajpayee government was laudatory, the leader of the opposition should be taken into account during deliberations in the apex body.