I thank the Commandant and the Senior Directing Staff of the National Defence College of India for inviting me today to share my thought with the present course.
I am not a stranger to these precincts and was last invited eight years back on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee Celebration of this august institution. Much has changed since then; for one, I am now an octogenarian, no longer burdened with the responsibilities of high office, perhaps a bit freer about what I say, privileged as I am to be a citizen of an open society.
The broad theme suggested for today’s talk is ‘India’s strategic neighbourhood.’ Here two concepts need probing, namely the meaning of neighbourhood, and the import of the term strategic.
In regard to the first, all of us are aware of the old saying that ‘we make our friends, we make our enemies but God makes our next door neighbour.’ In relation to the South Asian landmass, the sub-continent is Indo-Centric with India having land borders with Pakistan, China, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar and across small stretches of sea with Sri Lanka and Maldives. Two of our neighbours are nuclear weapon powers. In the subcontinent itself there are dimensional disparities in terms of size and resources and this has an impact on attitudes and apprehensions.
A look at map of the region compels us to go beyond the landmass principle since our neighbourhood extends to lands beyond the vast stretches of water that wash our eastern, southern and western shorelines. India has a central peninsular position in the Indian Ocean; we are reliant on the seas for energy supplies, trade and overall security. This makes relevant the concept of ‘Extended Neighbourhood’ that covers the lands with whom we have had commercial and cultural contacts over millennia. The opening up of the economy in early 1990s gave an impetus to reviving or revitalizing these lost or dormant linkages with South East Asia, West Asia and Central Asia. Sector-wise and country-wise analyses makes evident the benefits and limitations of energetic engagement with them in terms of our own capacities and the past two decades have shed much light on them.
The term ‘strategic’ is linked to matters of security and national interest and is generally defined as protection of frontiers and the political system based on their respective national constitutions, sustaining developmental activities and management of relations with neighbours and regional and global powers to ensure regional stability.
The traditional ambit of security – state-centric and military-centric – has changed over time. It is now viewed as human security and covers political, economic, societal and ecological sectors in addition to traditional ones. The United Nations through General Assembly Resolution 66/290 of September 10, 2012 has defined it as ‘widespread and cross-cutting challenges to survival, livelihood and dignity.’ It thus goes beyond state security in the traditional sense and encompasses environmental protection, resource security, sustainable development, basic amenities, good governance, social justice, and human rights.
War too now has a meaning that transcends what is given in textbooks of strategy or international law. Instead, newer concepts like inter-polarity, hybrid wars, cyber war and networked adversaries have acquired relevance and are re-shaping strategies and tactics. Many years earlier Liddell Hart had observed that ‘old concepts and old definitions of strategy have become not only obsolete but nonsensical with the development of nuclear weapons. To aim at winning a war, to take victory as your object is no more than a state of lunacy.’
The collective impact of these perceptions dilutes the traditional paradigm and induces a comprehensive review of concepts and practices. Such an approach excludes compartmentalized thinking. The challenge for the strategist therefore is to link the traditional and the non-traditional and think beyond the obvious, visualize the improbable, perhaps even the impossible. The non-traditional threats are trans-national, difficult to predict, and resistant to national solutions. A tsunami, a pandemic, a global financial meltdown, organized crime and terrorism, a volcanic eruption of the kind witnessed recently are indicative of the type of challenges that national planners may have to confront in addition to the traditional ones.
So given the nature and typology of threats today, how prepared are we – nationally, regionally, and globally – to cope with the implications of the changes that events and our own actions have or could unleash? How can we improve our efforts in each of these sectors?
An answer to the question is inextricably linked to our perception of insecurity. The American publicist Walter Lippman had observed in 1943 that ‘a nation is secure to the extent to which it is not in danger of having to sacrifice core values, if it wishes to avoid war, and is able, if challenged, to maintain them by such victory in such a war.’
Threats to state security can be traditional and non-traditional, external and internal. Beyond and in addition to the traditional politico-military threats, any impediment to our stated goals and national efforts to achieve an inclusive and equitable society would be considered a threat. So a threat could be internal or external. In regard to the former, the dimensions of human security were spelt out by the UNDP many years back. The India Social Development Report 2005 used six indices to make an India-specific assessment, namely demography, healthcare, basic amenities, education, employment and social deprivation. These have been amplified in subsequent reports. Professors Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen have argued that even high levels of sustainable growth must ultimately be judged in terms of the impact of that growth on the lives and freedoms of the people and that ‘while India has climbed rapidly up the ladder of economic growth rates, it has fallen relatively behind in the scale of social indicators of living standards even compared with many countries India has been overtaking in terms of economic growth.’ They have drawn attention not only to the ‘mutual relationship between growth and development but also to an appreciation of the demands of social justice which is integrally linked with the expansion of human freedoms.’ This has been amplified in the chapter 18 of the Social Development Report 2016 where details of the composite ‘Social Development Index’ are spelt out pages 299 – 333.
The logic of this approach leads to the conclusion that a major source of threat is domestic and requires focused correctives in socio-economic policies that lie in the domestic sphere but nevertheless necessitate a general ambiance of peace and cooperation regionally and globally so that essential resources are made available and devoted to social development and cohesion to overcome4 shortfalls.
A reading of external threats necessitates an assessment principally of relations with immediate neighbours and their intention and capacity for acts of commission and omission aimed at or resulting in harm to Indian’s interests. By the same token, actions by India harmful to interests of neighbours could bring forth similar results.
I begin with our official assessment of the situation in the immediate neighbourhood. The Annual Report of the Ministry of Defence for 2016-17 (paragraph 1.3-1.4) observes that ‘The persisting salience of trans-national terrorism remains a primary security challenge, exacerbated by the interplay between states and non-state actors often used as proxies to spread extremist ideologies and foment violence’ adding that ‘the situation in India’s immediate South Asian neighbourhood remains difficult, with the overall security and political context in most neighbouring states continuing to remain volatile.’ A few years earlier the Report for 2013-14 (paragraph 1.20) noted that ‘the regional security environment in South Asia continues to be dynamic, with terrorism, insurgency and sectarian conflict emerging from our immediate neighbourhood, increasingly threatening the stability of our region’.
The military-strategic response to this is one aspect of the matter and there are enough people in this auditorium to dilate on it. There is precariously little that I can add to it.
No less relevant however are non-traditional threats that transcend political frontiers and pose challenges to human security. For this, trans-border cooperation is imperative. Global experience shows that regional integration and cooperation offers the means to overcome these obstacles and to be competitive in the global marketplace. Empirical evidence suggests that it also leads to dispute settlement mechanisms, to greater people-to-people contacts and to better political relations between the involved countries. Examples of this are to be seen in ASEAN, the African Union, the GCC (until recently), and some of the Latin American regional groupings.
In our region this was attempted through SAARC or South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation that was initiated with considerable fanfare in December 1985. It focused on the need of coordinating and reconciling interests and actions reflected in policies that promote cooperation. It has failed to live up to its expectations primarily on account of its Charter provisions of ‘unanimity’ and exclusion of ‘bilateral and contentious issues.’ The functionalist optimism that economic cooperation will circumvent political issues has not modified the perceptions and conduct of its members.
The resulting situation was summed up by the former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the 16th SAARC summit in 2010:
‘We have created institutions for regional cooperation, but we have not yet empowered them adequately to enable them to be more pro-active…The challenge before us is to translate institutions into activities, conventions into programmes, official statements into popular sentiments. Declarations at summits and official level meetings do not amount to regional cooperation or integration. Regional cooperation should enable freer movement of people, of goods, services and ideas. It should help us re-discover our shared heritage and build our common future. The 21st century cannot be an Asian century unless South Asia marches together.’
That this has not happened is evident from the assessment of the regional environment made in the Annual Report of MOD for 2016-17 cited above. The paragraph added that: The growing recognition of the need to take a united view against cross-border terrorism, leading to the cancellation of the SAARC Summit and calls for holding the meeting in an atmosphere free of terrorism, was a notable development.’
The impasse with regard to the SAARC summit was reiterated on April 7- 8 this year at the time of the visit to Delhi of Prime Minister of Nepal. Government of India spokesmen also said on the occasion that Nepal looked forward to hosting the BIMSTEC and as also that Nepal gave ‘a positive reaction’ to the sub-regional BBIN initiative of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal.
Both of these newer groupings have merits, and potential, but do not provide a substitute for the vision and objective visualized for SAARC under the accepted philosophy of regional cooperation – that challenges to development posed by situations where political borders are not aligned with economic and natural resources or where problems overflow political boundaries and require coordinated responses from immediate neighbours.
Three questions thus arise: Why has this happened? What is its opportunity cost? What is the corrective?
The primary cause of this situation has been mentioned above, namely ‘the persisting salience of trans-national terrorism remains a primary security challenge, exacerbated by the interplay between states and non-state actors often used as proxies to spread extremist ideologies and foment violence’ (paragraph 1.3) and the resultant need for taking ‘a united view against cross-border terrorism’ and ‘for holding the meeting in an atmosphere free of terrorism’ (paragraph1.4).
Thus transnational terrorism has emerged as the principal impediment to inter-SAARC cooperation. Its elimination would certainly improve the atmospherics but would it altogether address the ingredient of terror in challenge to national security? The Report of the Ministry of Home Affairs for 2017-18 (paragraph 2.2) categorizes four threats to internal security: (i) Terrorism in the hinterland of the country. (ii) Left Wing Extremism in certain areas. (iii) Cross-Border terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir, and (iv) Insurgency in the North Eastern States. It adds that ‘in the year 2017 the internal security in the country remained under control.’
This then is the official typology of threats and apart from cross border ones, others are squarely domestic, are of a socio-political nature and their persistence sheds light on perceived patterns of grievances in segments of the public relating to governance and developmental policies of the state in its local, regional and federal manifestations. They have been analyzed in considerable depth in government and civil society studies and are reflected in national and global assessments of human security. For want of time I will only mention here the UNDP’s Development Index for 2017 that places India at 131 among 188 countries and the various reports of our National Human Rights Commission and other national bodies that detail people below the poverty line and the levels of infant mortality, under nourishment, illiteracy and exclusion on various grounds including gender, caste, tribal habitat, religious minorities etc. that cumulatively or sporadically endanger social peace essential for sustained development.
It emerges from this that all violence is not considered ‘terrorist’ and that most nations have developed their own definitional parameters of what constitutes ‘terrorism’.
A recent American study by CSIS, Washington highlights some of the problems that emerge from studies of patterns of terrorism. These include: (i) the absence of an agreed definition of terrorism (ii) failure to clearly distinguish between insurgency and terrorism (iii) labeling of asymmetric threats and enemies as ‘terrorists’ for political purposes and (iv) focus on ideology and religion rather than the full range of causes of terrorism.
In this context, a hard question cannot be avoided. Governments in the region, including our own, are committed to the stated objectives of regional cooperation in the SAARC framework and in fact functional level meetings of SAARC continue to take place. Thus the question of the deferred summit becomes essentially a political one whose continuance and efficacy becomes a matter of political judgment.
Tactics apart, there are compelling reasons for taking a closer look at the totality of SAARC’s agenda, its relevance to human security, its Agreements and Conventions that have been put in place, the ecology of the region and its impact on developmental activities. The threat of environmental challenge and climate change is a real one and would influence millions of people who inhabit its different regions; the same holds for pandemics or other natural disasters and several other projects of mutual benefit inscribed on SAARC’s agenda from time to time. These transcend national borders and the opportunity cost of deferring them cannot be ignored.
It has been argued by some that in view of India’s wider regional and global perspectives, a single-issue focus may become a matter of diminishing return given the complexity of bilateral relations in South Asia. Knowledgeable observers have pointed out that SAARC is the only vehicle India has to bring about the kind of economic integration it is committed to and that without it hope of playing an effective regional or global role would be effected and that India’s ability to be more successful regionally as an Asian power, and ability to play a credible and effective global role, is very much dependent on how you manage your own periphery,’
Strategic thinking has essentially to be focused on medium and longer term perspectives. Experience suggests that while political crises follow an ebb and flow pattern, ecological and environmental challenges tend to aggravate if neglected. The longer term cost of delaying South Asian regional cooperation can thus be considerable.
In this perspective, a renewed effort at tapping SAARC’s potential, without relenting on bilateral, regional and global need to counter and erase terror may not be fruitless and would allow India to retain and reinforce its inherent centrality in the region and add to extra-regional endeavours currently underway.
Jai Hind.