India's Aspirations and Strategy for the Indian Ocean – Securing the Waves?

India has increasingly high aspirations in the Indian Ocean, as enunciated by politicians, naval figures and the wider elite. These aspirations, its strategic discourse, are of pre-eminence and leadership. India's maritime strategy for such a self-confessed diplomatic, constabulary and benign role is primarily naval-focused; a sixfold strategy of increasing its naval spending, strengthening its infrastructure, increasing its naval capabilities, active maritime diplomacy, exercising in the Indian Ocean and keeping open the choke points. Through such strategy, and soft balancing with the United States, India hopes to secure its own position against a perceived growing Chinese challenge in the Indian Ocean.     

China's Naval Ambitions in the Indian Ocean

This article argues that an increasingly sea-power-minded China will neither shelter passively in coastal waters, nor throw itself into competition with the United States in the Pacific Ocean. Rather, Beijing will direct its energies toward South and Southeast Asia, where supplies of oil, natural gas, and other commodities critical to China's economic development must pass. There China will encounter an equally sea-power-minded India that enjoys marked geostrategic advantages. Beijing will likely content itself with ‘soft power’ diplomacy in these regions until it can settle the dispute with Taiwan, freeing up resources for maritime endeavors farther from China's coasts.     

War and peace in contemporary India

ABSTRACT

This Special Issue looks at the importance of institutions and the role played by international actors in crucial episodes of India’s strategic history. The contributions trace India’s tryst with war and peace from immediately before the foundation of the contemporary Indian state to the last military conflict between India and Pakistan in 1999. The focus of the articles is as much on India as it is on Pakistan and China, its opponents in war. The articles offer a fresh take on the creation of India as a regional military power, and her approach to War and Peace in the post-independence period.     

Indian and Chinese espionage

India and China both have powerful spy networks; completely different in their approaches to espionage; both effective against their perceived enemies. China focuses first on internal threats, on Taiwan and Hong Kong, and then the US and Japan. India’s defense policy focuses on Pakistan and internal terrorist threats, and then on China. In reality, however, when it comes to spying on each other, both China and India suffer from incompetence and apathy – which endangers both their own security and regional stability. This article looks at how they spy on each other, and asks why and how they need to improve. The narrative also touches upon some of the individuals who are waging the spy war, from India’s wily spymaster Ajit Doval down to junior Chinese agents such as Wang Qing and Pema Tsering. The two countries are not friends. They have the largest territorial dispute in the world on their hands, covering an area the size of North Korea, and they have large armies facing each other along 4000 kilometers of frontier. But they also lay claim to the world’s two oldest and richest civilizations, with a rich history of exchange, and now with a combined population of 2.6 billion people and more than a quarter of the world’s economic output. If they cooperated, they could solve many of the world’s problems; but if they lurch into conflict, the potential consequences are terrifying to contemplate. Unfortunately, despite their geographical closeness, they do not know much about each other. They have few cultural interchanges, little diplomacy, few trade missions. They do not watch each other’s films, read each other’s books or listen to each other’s music. Chinese tourists would rather fly to New Zealand for their holidays than cross the border to India, and Indian students would rather study in Europe than China. China and India are neighbors that barely talk to each other. Most significantly, they do not spy on each competently. For countries that do not interact socially, defensive understanding is important for security – but China prefers the glamor of facing up to its Pacific and other maritime rivals such as the US and Japan. India, for its part, does talk a great deal about the China threat, but its resources and expertise are wrapped up in controlling its security threat from Pakistan and the Islamic world. When China and India do try to spy on each other, it is often without the benefit of a long-term focus or understanding. India has some very skilled operatives within the Research and Analysis Wing, but few that specialize in China. China has an enormous pool of resources spread across several government departments, including the Ministry of Public Security, and also has extensive facilities and manpower in the Joint Staff Department of the Central Military Commission (the JSD) and the new Strategic Support Force (the SSF). However, China’s intelligence services generally behave as if India is not worth spying on. Given that the two countries do not have the cultural or political machinery in place to understand each other, espionage and intelligence gathering is vital to ensure that miscalculations do not take place. This has been apparent over the last few years in stand-offs in the Himalaya, as well as top-level suspicions on each side about a variety of subjects including terrorism, covert operations in Sri Lanka and Burma, and the two countries’ nuclear weapons programs. Both countries do occasionally make efforts in espionage against each other, especially during sensitive periods such as the mountain stand-offs of 2014 and 2013 and during policy developments in nuclear warfare. In this article the author looks at actual spying incidents between the two countries, their methodologies, their staff, their technical capabilities, and how the act of spying, which is usually viewed as intrinsically adversarial, can be a force for good. The article relies on interviews with actual participants in intelligence from both countries as well as extensive use of contemporary online sources, and secondary analysis by both military and academic experts from China, India and NATO countries.     

India–Africa defence cooperation against the backdrop of the ‘Make in India’ initiative

Although India is a major importer of defence equipment, it has also been manufacturing defence equipment for some of its needs. The Government of India’s ambitious ‘Make in India’ initiative for the defence sector aims to achieve self reliance in defence equipment production. This essay explores the opportunities for bilateral arms trade between India and Africa, as a new facet of India-Africa defence cooperation. It covers India’s arms export policy, policy reforms in India’s defence sector, and the opportunities for Indian and African defence markets.     

The Evolution and Significance of the 1972 Incidents at Sea Agreement

As a consequence of the rapid growth of Soviet maritime power during the 1960s, hazardous incidents at sea and in the air became a regular part of the Cold War. Eventually, both Washington and Moscow came to recognize the importance of an agreement limiting this perilous set of interactions, resulting in the Incidents at Sea Agreement that was signed in May 1972. The set of rules and procedures agreed upon helped to calm tensions in subsequent crises and provides ample lessons for placing reasonable limits on other tense maritime rivalries.     

The long shadow of colonial cartography: Britain and the Sino-Indian war of 1962

ABSTRACT

This article examines British responses to the Sino-Indian border war of 1962. It illustrates how, in the years leading up to the war, Britain’s colonial legacy in the Indian subcontinent saw it drawn reluctantly into a territorial dispute between Asia’s two largest and most powerful nations. It analyses disagreements in Whitehall between the Foreign Office and Commonwealth Relations Office over the relative strength of India and China’s border claims, and assesses how these debates reshaped British regional policy. It argues that the border war was instrumental in transforming Britain’s post-colonial relationship with South Asia. Continuing to filter relations with India through an imperial prism proved unsatisfactory, what followed was a more pragmatic Indo-British association.     

India’s emerging space assets and nuclear-weapons capabilities

ABSTRACT

Over the last five decades, India’s nuclear and space programs have gone through several phases, from collaboration to divorce to supportive. An interplay of two factors determined the nature of the relationship. One was the state of India’s nuclear-weapon program. The second was international conditions, especially India’s relationship with the nuclear-nonproliferation regime. In the early decades, because of the rudimentary nature of India’s nuclear and space programs, the relationship was collaborative, since the rocket technology being developed was a necessary adjunct to the nuclear-weapon program. Subsequently, as India’s rocketry capabilities and nuclear-weapon program began to mature and concerns about international sanctions under the non-proliferation regime began to grow, the two programs were separated. The Indian rocketry program was also divided, with the civilian-space and ballistic-missile programs clearly demarcated. After India declared itself a nuclear-weapon state in 1998 and the programs matured, the relationship has become more supportive. As the two programs mature further, this relationship is likely to deepen, as the nuclear-weapon program requires space assets to build a robust and survivable nuclear deterrent force.     

Airpower in India's 1999 Kargil War

For 74 days in mid-1999, India waged an intense war against intruding Pakistani forces on the Indian side of the Line of Control dividing Kashmir in the Himalayas. The Indian Air Force (IAF) was a key contributor to India's eventual victory in that war. Among other things, the IAF's combat performance showed how the skillful application of air-delivered firepower, especially if unmatched by the other side, can shorten and facilitate the outcome of an engagement that might otherwise have persisted indefinitely. It also showed that a favorable position in the conventional balance remains strategically useful even in conditions of mutual nuclear deterrence.     

Reconsidering minimum deterrence in South Asia: Indian responses to Pakistan’s tactical nuclear weapons

India’s nuclear doctrine and posture has traditionally been shaped by minimum deterrence logic. This logic includes assumptions that possession of only a small retaliatory nuclear force generates sufficient deterrent effect against adversaries, and accordingly that development of limited nuclear warfighting concepts and platforms are unnecessary for national security. The recent emergence of Pakistan’s Nasr tactical nuclear missile platform has generated pressures on Indian minimum deterrence. This article analyzes Indian official and strategic elite responses to the Nasr challenge, including policy recommendations and attendant implications. It argues that India should continue to adhere to minimum deterrence, which serves as the most appropriate concept for Indian nuclear policy and best supports broader foreign and security policy objectives. However, the form through which Indian minimum deterrence is delivered must be rethought in light of this new stage of regional nuclear competition.     

ANALYSIS OF CONFLICT WITHIN A CONTESTED LAND: THE CASE OF KASHMIR

This paper considers the case of Kashmir to examine the relation between the people of the contested land (Indian-occupied Kashmir) and one of the nation states claiming it (India, in this case) in a game-theoretic framework. The motivation for this paper was whether it was possible to rationalize the lack of democratic space in Kashmir, relative to other states in India (especially since the founding fathers of the country had announced such democratic practices to be the guiding principles of the new nation) and at the same time, a highly rigid stance of the Indian Government on the Kashmir issue. An otherwise standard political economic model is used to capture how the way in which citizens determine their allegiance to one or the other nation state (India or Pakistan) can, in turn, affect the nation state's (India's) policies towards the contested land. I conclude that if the Indian Government perceives allegiance of the citizens to be determined primarily by partisan preferences of the citizens, not so much by their preferences for policies, then the government rationally concentrates on minimizing its disutility due to deviations from its ‘most-favorite' policy. This understanding rationalizes the policies of the Indian Government towards Kashmir. More importantly, it points towards areas that need consideration for any peace-making process to take-off.     

India’s Taliban Dilemma: To Contain or to Engage?

India’s Afghanistan policy in the 1990s is termed a zero-sum game of influence with Pakistan. New Delhi’s aversion to the pro-Pakistan Taliban regime is considered a marker of this rivalry. This paper revisits India’s approach towards Afghanistan and examines if New Delhi was necessarily averse to engaging with pro-Pakistan political factions during 1990s. Based on fresh primary interviews with former Indian policymakers, media archives, and official reports, the paper shows that India engaged with and accommodated pro-Pakistan factions after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 until 1996. The Taliban’s rise to power in Kabul in September 1996 challenged India’s engage-with-all approach. Nonetheless, the decision to sever ties with the Taliban and to bolster anti-Taliban factions was highly debated in New Delhi. Many in India saw the Taliban as a militant Islamist force sponsored by Pakistan. For others, however, it was an ethno-nationalist movement representing Pashtun interests, and not necessarily under Islamabad’s control.     

UNCLOS and maritime security: the “securitisation” of the South China Sea disputes

This Critical Comment seeks to situate the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) within the context of South China Sea (SCS) dispute. Bearing in mind that maritime actions of the main disputants – China, Vietnam, and the Philippines – increasingly “securitise” these long-standing disputes and vice versa, the study examines the concept of a maritime “regime complex.” Whereas efforts have being made to examine UNCLOS and indeed the dispute within the framework of a maritime “regime complex,” the key finding shows that the increased “securitisation” of the disputes makes it difficult to envisage effective engagement of UNCLOS as a resolution mechanism. It will also reveal that China's firmly established expansionist agenda in the SCS region is indicative of Beijing's susceptibility to compromise a diplomatic solution to these long-standing disputes. These discoveries are structured around the knowledge that the spatial relation of the SCS critically espouses not only its geo-strategic significance in terms of natural resources endowment, but also the enduring maritime disputes within the region.     

India’s nuclear counter-revolution: nuclear learning and the future of deterrence

ABSTRACT

The India–Pakistan near war of February–March 2019 highlights India’s ongoing evolution in strategic thought and practice since its emergence in 1998 as an overt nuclear-weapon possessor. These changes, involving an increasing willingness to engage in the intentional escalation of conflict with a nuclear-armed rival willing to be the first to use nuclear weapons, challenge certain academic assumptions about the behavior of nuclear-weapon states. In particular, they undermine the expectations of the nuclear-revolution theory—which anticipates nuclear and conventional restraint among nuclear-armed rivals through fear of mutual assured destruction—and the model of nuclear learning which underpins this theory, in which new nuclear-weapon states gradually absorb this restraint through policy-maker learning. This article explores how India’s learning pathway since 1998 has deviated from these expectations. India is instead pursuing its own “revolution,” in the direction of creating capabilities for flexible response and escalation dominance. It concludes by illuminating the similarities between Indian strategic behavior and contemporary practices of other nuclear-armed states, and suggests that New Delhi’s emerging de facto nuclear doctrine and posture is part of a broader empirical challenge to our current conceptions of the nuclear revolution and of nuclear learning.     

Rising Tide,Dispersing Waves: Opportunities and Challenges for Chinese Seapower Development

Abstract

This article surveys China’s current naval forces and considers key dynamics and possible Chinese naval futures to 2020, the projected end of Beijing’s ‘strategic window of opportunity’, the idea that a peaceful external environment for economic development, globalization, and integration of China into the global economy allows China to benefit from diversion of US attention to countering terrorism. It considers broad possibilities through 2030, the general limit of public US government projections, and by which time multiple factors will likely slow China’s growth and compete for leadership focus and resources.     

Acrimony,asymmetry, and the Sino-Indian nuclear relationship

ABSTRACT

While most contemporary analyses of South Asian nuclear dynamics acknowledge the presence of a strategic triangle between the region’s three nuclear players, the primary focus usually remains on the rivalry between India and Pakistan. Discussions of Sino-Indian relations remain limited. This is likely attributed to the stability in the two countries’ relations, yet it is worth asking why this stability exists and whether it is likely to continue in the future. Although China and India have an acrimonious relationship, their asymmetric nuclear capabilities and threat perceptions mitigate the danger of a traditional security dilemma. India may perceive China’s nuclear aggrandizement to be a security threat, but the same is not true of China, which has a vastly superior nuclear force and is largely shaping its nuclear-force structure in response to the threat it perceives from the United States. This dynamic makes a serious conventional or nuclear conflict highly unlikely.     

Japan as a Seapower: Strategy,Doctrine, and Capabilities under Three Defence Reviews, 1995–2010

Abstract

This article draws upon previously unavailable document materials to question views pointing to a degree of stagnation in Japanese maritime thinking. It similarly reviews claims about trends to compensate the decline of national military power with the build-up of projection capabilities. The article’s main argument is that Japanese seapower is not declining. The Japanese Navy is evolving to combine enhanced capabilities to retain sea control in the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea with extended operational reach and flexibility, including an expeditionary component to meet alliance and diplomatic commitments in East Asia and beyond its confines.     

Fighting Separately: Jointness and Civil-Military Relations in India

How do countries transition from single service to joint operations? This article engages with the discussion on military innovation to argue that civil–military relations are the most important driver for jointness. In doing so it examines jointness in the Indian military. Relying on archival research and primary interviews this article sheds new light on the operations of the Indian Peacekeeping Forces (IPKF) in Sri Lanka from 1987–1990, the 1999 Kargil War and the Post-Kargil defence reforms. The main argument is that the Indian military’s transition to jointness has been ‘incomplete’ primarily because of its prevailing model of civil-military relations. This model prevents civilians from interfering in the operational issues of the military, including on matters pertaining to jointness. It therefore recommends more forceful civilian intervention to overcome the prevailing single service approach.     

The ‘Indian’ staff college: Politics and practices of military institution-building in Twentieth century India

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the twentieth century administrative and institutional history of the ‘Indian’ Staff College. This institutional focus on the Staff College helps reveal the political, military and intellectual fault lines that have intersected with the processes of military institution-building in India. By focussing on the administrative challenges of the Staff College, I am to chart the historical development of the practices which have undergirded the delivery of professional military education on the subcontinent.     

Indian Military Modernization and Conventional Deterrence in South Asia

In recent years, headline grabbing increases in the Indian defense budget have raised concerns that India’s on-going military modernization threatens to upset the delicate conventional military balance vis-à-vis Pakistan. Such an eventuality is taken as justification for Islamabad’s pursuit of tactical-nuclear weapons and other actions that have worrisome implications for strategic stability on the subcontinent. This article examines the prospects for Pakistan’s conventional deterrence in the near to medium term, and concludes that it is much better than the pessimists allege. A host of factors, including terrain, the favorable deployment of Pakistani forces, and a lack of strategic surprise in the most likely conflict scenarios, will mitigate whatever advantages India may be gaining through military modernization. Despite a growing technological edge in some areas, Indian policymakers cannot be confident that even a limited resort to military force would achieve a rapid result, which is an essential pre-condition for deterrence failure.