Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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Rony
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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Not sure if these videos are posted before

The Reluctant Superpower
abhishek_sharma
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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Prelude to a war: Inder Malhotra
In April 1965, Pakistan started a sudden conflict in the Rann of Kutch, a marshy plain that divides the Sind province of Pakistan from the Indian state of Gujarat, that diverted the country’s attention from all other crises. Regrettably, Lal Bahadur Shastri’s government was taken by surprise, though something of this kind should normally have been expected.

For Pakistan’s military regime, headed by Field Marshal Ayub Khan, had scant trust in Shastri’s constant refrain that he was keen to settle all disputes and differences with Pakistan through peaceful negotiation. In October 1964, Khan got his first opportunity directly to take a measure of the man. On his way back home from the Cairo Conference of the non-aligned, Shastri made a stopover in Karachi to impress on Khan his sincerity. After a one-to-one meeting between the two, as Khan and his foreign minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, walked towards their cars, the then Indian deputy high commissioner to Pakistan, K. Shankar Bajpai (later, ambassador to Pakistan, China and the United States), overheard him tell Bhutto, in English: “What can I talk to him? He seems to have no authority at all.”

More shockingly, what was to become crystal clear only a few months later but wasn’t yet known to Indian intelligence or anyone else in this country for that matter, Pakistan’s makers of policy on India at the highest echelon were then engaged in deciding what was to be their next step to “defreeze the Kashmir issue”. This matter will be discussed in necessary detail at an appropriate stage. Here, it would suffice to say that Bhutto and his hardline cohorts, including his most hawkish foreign secretary, Aziz Ahmed, Defence Secretary Nazir Ahmed and Major General Akhtar Hussain Malik (who had prepared an elaborate operational plan, codenamed Gibraltar, to send military and paramilitary infiltrators into Kashmir to foment internal revolt), were arguing that Pakistan had its “last chance to wrest Kashmir from India militarily”. It was “now or never”. For, the huge expansion and modernisation of the Indian army, started after the humiliating defeat at the hands of the Chinese, once completed, would shift the balance heavily in India’s favour.

General Mohammed Musa, then commander-in-chief of the Pakistan army, as he later wrote in his books, was “totally opposed” to the plan advocated by Bhutto and his supporters. President Khan was not in full agreement with either side, but being a cautious man, was in no hurry to approve Operation Gibraltar. However, he readily endorsed the plan for a military adventure in Kutch to “lean on India and test Shastri’s mettle”, in the words of the then CIA deputy station chief in Delhi, William Barnds.

Those days, there was no such thing as the Border Security Force. India’s frontiers with Pakistan were defended by the usually lackadaisical police forces of the states concerned. It was no surprise, therefore, that a well-planned swoop by Pakistan dislodged a long-established Indian police post at a place called Kanjarkot. Immediately thereafter, the Gujarat police noticed that armed Pakistani policemen were briskly patrolling an 11 km road in an area India considered to be on its side of the border.

Given the inadequacy of the Gujarat police to cope with Pakistan’s incursions and tactics, an army brigade was moved to Kutch. A whole Pakistani division was already entrenched in opposition to them on the Pakistan side. Without going into the intricacies of the fighting that followed for a few days, it has to be admitted that Pakistan’s forces did “outmanoeuvre” the Indian troops deployed against them. Pakistan made no bones about its “glee” over the outcome of

the Kutch venture, which inevitably delighted the hardliners.

Army Chief General J.N. Chaudhuri had advised the prime minister that the Kutch terrain was not suitable for fighting a war, and that if it was necessary to deter Pakistan there, this should be achieved by action elsewhere. Remarkably, his Pakistan counterpart, Mohammed Musa, was on the same wavelength. He told his superiors that it would be wrong to send more troops to isolated Kutch, for this would weaken Pakistan forces in strategically more important centres along the border.

Consequently, some time in May, both countries accepted British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s proposal for a ceasefire as a prelude to a plan to “settle” the Kutch dispute. This should explain why the ceasefire was enforced but not announced. Interestingly, during the interval between the de facto ceasefire and the de jure Kutch agreement, both Shastri and Khan were in London for the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference. At a briefing for the Indian press, Shastri said that he would like a bilateral with Khan, but not on British soil — only in India or Pakistan. However, he added, he wondered if a meeting between the officials of both countries could be arranged in London. “That, sir,” I ventured to say to him, “should be very easy.” “How?” he asked. “Because both delegations are often seen in the bargain basement of Selfridges at the same time,” I replied.

All through the earlier stages of the Kutch conflict, Shastri emphatically maintained that there was “nothing to settle”, because the Kutch-Sind border was well defined since 1871, and if it was not demarcated on the ground, the reason was that there “was no dispute between the province of Sind and the Kutch durbar”. He realised rather late, and only after Pakistan had rubbed it in, that he was uninformed about the contents of a 1960 agreement between Indian and Pakistani ministers, Swaran Singh and Lieutenant General K.M. Shaikh, on how to settle any dispute over the border, whether in the east or the west. Why did the PM’s advisors in the foreign office and the PMO keep him in the dark, perhaps deliberately?

Eventually, an agreement for the settlement of the Kutch dispute, largely on the basis of Wilson’s proposals and on Pakistan’s terms, was reached in the last week of June. It was signed in Delhi on June 30 by M. Azim Husain, Commonwealth secretary, and Arshad Hussain, Pakistan’s high commissioner in India. Typical of the many complexities and ironies of the India-Pakistan situation, the two were brothers-in-law.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator
abhishek_sharma
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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The strange march to the 1965 war: Inder Malhotra
On June 30, 1965, an agreement on settling the Kutch conflict was signed (‘Prelude to a war’, IE, November 12) and the process of forming a three-member international tribunal to settle the issue continued all through July. And then, on August 5, some graziers in the Kashmir Valley spotted Pakistani infiltrators, many of them evidently soldiers in mufti, and reported this to the authorities. Eighteen years earlier, Pakistan had used precisely the same stratagem of sending in “raiders” as the first step in its first invasion of Kashmir. Yet the Indian government refrained from declaring Pakistan’s diabolical action to be an act of war. Presumably, Lal Bahadur Shastri hoped that the strong personal message he had sent to Field Marshal Ayub Khan would solve the problem.

Inexplicably, New Delhi delayed the announcement of this grave development until the late evening of August 8. The next morning I took the first available plane to Srinagar. There was fear in the air but life in the city seemed to be going on normally. At 6 pm, when the whole Valley went under curfew, the mood changed. Suddenly, there appeared in my hotel room Sushital Banerji, a dear friend and an outstanding civil servant. In numerous capacities, he had handled many of Kashmir’s myriad crises. He insisted that I pick up a change of clothes and my shaving kit to accompany him to his home.

Only on reaching there did I discern the cause of his anxiety. The situation was fragile and chaotic. Infiltrators were getting dangerously close to Kashmir’s capital, and nobody senior to Banerji was around to direct the beleaguered administration. The dynamic state Home Minister D.P. Dhar and the equally effective chief secretary, Mangat Rai, had gone off in opposite directions to inspect how the rather paltry paramilitary forces and the police were coping with the Pakistani challenge.

Banerji’s phone never stopped ringing. At one stage, I heard him virtually shout: “What, only one

company left at the police headquarters? Please make sure that it is not sent away for any reason whatsoever.” He then rang up the army’s divisional commander at Baramulla, Major General Sarup Singh Kalan, and informed him that three tanks were urgently needed to protect Srinagar’s airport, radio station and telegraph office. But the general would hear none of this. The job of taking on the infiltrators, he said, was that of the paramilitary. His instructions were to act only if the Pakistan army moved in. Luckily, at that precise moment Dhar walked in, took the phone from Banerji and charmingly persuaded the reluctant Kalan to do the needful.

Dhar and Banerji then pondered their next big problem. Kashmir was very short on paramilitary forces. Large-scale reinforcements were desperately needed. But how to convey this to Delhi when Pakistani agents had access to the contents of every phone call? Ultimately, they decided that Banerji should ring up M.G. Kaul, a joint secretary in the PMO who, though a Kashmiri, spoke fluent Bengali because he was a West Bengal civilian.

The next morning, only one battalion of the Punjab Armed Constabulary, headed by super cop Ashwini Kumar and accompanied by the state’s home minister, Darbara Singh, flew in. There was no sign of other promised formations. Months later in New Delhi, I learnt from the Union home secretary, L.P. Singh, why several states had initially dragged their feet until warned of dire consequences: the Centre had failed to pay for the previous occasions that they had sent their forces to Kashmir or elsewhere. UP’s chief secretary had pleaded helplessness. His chief minister, in response to an “audit objection”, had issued strict orders that no request from Delhi for state forces should be entertained until outstanding bills were cleared. The CM was away. It took a lot of time to trace him at a remote village and persuade him to reverse his order. In another state, the chief secretary lamented that he had enough law-and-order problems on his hands and couldn’t spare any armed personnel. He had to be told that he was making himself liable for action under the Defence of India Rules!

However, regardless of the above, it has to be said for this country’s administrative system that after its usual bumbling, confusion, buck-passing and blamegame, it eventually rises to the occasion during a national crisis or calamity. And so I witnessed in Kashmir during those deeply troubled days.

Planeloads of reinforcements had started coming in, there were adequate arrangements for their prompt and planned deployment, and a seemingly hopeless situation was gradually being brought under control. Partly because of Parliament’s anger, the army had joined the task of killing, arresting and chasing out infiltrators. The biggest factor behind the fiasco of Pakistan’s Operation Gibraltar was that there was no revolt among the Kashmiri people.

By the end of August, Kashmir was not only cleared of armed Pakistani intruders, but the Indian forces had also occupied several Pakistani posts and positions across the ceasefire line. The most important of these was the Haji Pir Pass that was Pakistan’s easiest route to send infiltrators through. Its conquest, at a rather heavy price in blood, had given this country an enormous strategic advantage. Probably for this reason, as also because the army had made great sacrifices to capture the pass,

Shastri went on declaring that India would never vacate Haji Pir. At one stage, he even proclaimed that if Haji Pir had to be returned to Pakistan, “some other prime minister” would do it. This was unnecessary and, as we shall see as the story unfolds, was to cause him and the country much difficulty and embarrassment.

There were some Indians, even within the government and the press, who thought that the India-Pakistan equation would slowly return to the usual no-war-no-peace situation. They had their rude awakening on September 1, when the Pakistan army mounted an armoured attack on the Chammab-Jaurian sector of Jammu and Kashmir, and India had to use air power to interdict it. For how this happened and what followed, watch this space.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator
abhishek_sharma
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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From Gibraltar to Grand Slam: Inder Malhotra
If the massive Pakistani infiltrations into Jammu and Kashmir on August 5, 1965 were codenamed Operation Gibraltar, the September 1 armoured attack on the strategic Chamb Jaurian sector (‘Strange March to 1965 War’, IE, November 26) had a resounding codename, Grand Slam. Two important and intriguing questions about this operation, which the Indian army halted successfully, arise. The first is: How did Pakistan President Ayub Khan, who was initially reluctant to sanction even Gibraltar, later approve a much wider and highly risky military action? The answer, provided by his information secretary, confidant, biographer and alter ego, Altaf Gauhar, is simple.

Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, his trusted foreign secretary, Aziz Ahmed, and other cohorts, persuaded him that if Pakistan were to “wrest” Kashmir from India by force, 1965 was its “last chance”. It was now or never. Their arguments did seem convincing. India, they said, was “demoralised and vulnerable” because of the “humiliating defeat at the hands of the Chinese”, Jawaharlal Nehru’s death, the “palpable weakness” of his successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, (Khan, after a brief, informal summit with Shastri at Karachi airport in October 1964, had got the same impression), a virulent anti-Hindi agitation in south India and an acute food shortage across the country.

At the same time, the votaries of war with India told Khan that the expansion and modernisation of

the Indian armed forces was in full swing. Once it was completed, the balance of power would shift back in India’s favour, and Pakistan’s “last opportunity would be lost”. The clinching argument of Bhutto and company was that “fear of China would deter India” from extending the war beyond Kashmir. This took care of Khan’s prime concern. He had once confided to some advisors: “While winning Kashmir, I don’t want to lose Pakistan.”

As Gauhar records, it was around this time that a sand-model presentation was made to Khan at Murree where he suddenly put his finger on Akhnoor on the map and asked, “Why don’t you go for the jugular?” The point was well taken because Pakistan’s occupation of Akhnoor would have cut the Kashmir Valley from the rest of India. Khan then embarked on the standard Pakistani self-delusion: The Hindus could not fight. “Hindu morale would not stand more than a couple of hard blows at the right time and right place. Such an opportunity should therefore be sought and exploited”.

When Major General Akhtar Hussain Malik, GOC of the 12th Division of the Pakistan army and the author of Gibraltar, said that occupation of Akhnoor would require more manpower and money than he had been given, the president agreed to provide both, and told all concerned to go ahead with Grand Slam. That is where the second question comes in.

From day one, Malik was commanding Operation Gibraltar, and he was also expected to command the attack on Chamb Jaurian. But at the last minute, there was a change. The command was handed to the swashbuckling Major General Yahya Khan who was later general and army chief, and, later still, president of Pakistan. Many Pakistanis are still asking why.

In his two books, Jawan to General and My Version, the then commander-in-chief of the Pakistan army, General Mohammad Musa Khan, has stated candidly that from the beginning, he was opposed to Operation Gibraltar because he knew it wouldn’t work. No preparatory work had been done among

the Kashmiri people, and even the “president of Azad Kashmir”, K.H. Khurshid, was not consulted. When the latter learnt belatedly what was afoot, he protested and landed in prison for his troubles. By this time, Musa detested Malik, and therefore took the earliest opportunity to remove him. He insists, however, that he would have appointed a different commander of Grand Slam anyhow.

Musa does not say so, but Gauhar categorically does, that the crowning irony was that while Khan was sanctioning Grand Slam he “did not know that Gibraltar had already failed”. It is noteworthy that Khan’s Man Friday recorded this long after his subject’s death. In August-September 1965, he never told his president the truth. On the contrary, his own propaganda machine churned out fairy tales about the exploits of the Mujahideen in Kashmir and the bravery of Pakistani troops “marching to Srinagar”. Consequently, the Pakistani public was confident about the imminent “liberation” of Kashmir, and India’s defeat. Evidently, the Bhutto-Ahmed line had full sway because no one was taking any notice of Shastri’s public warnings that India would fight the war “at a time and place of its own choosing”.

It must be added that Shastri had spoken out well after telling the army and air chiefs, General J.N. Chaudhuri and Air Chief Marshal Arjan Singh, to prepare to be in Lahore before any Pakistani soldier reached anywhere near Srinagar.

At first light on September 6, reality struck Pakistan like lightning when Shastri did exactly what he had said he would. He sent the Indian army in Pakistani Punjab’s heartland in the direction of the prized city of Lahore. In Gauhar’s memorable phrase in his biography of his boss, “When India attacked Pakistan, the most surprised person was Ayub Khan.” “Ayub’s surprise,” he adds, “was shared by the commander-in-chief of the army. Ayub was now facing the moment of truth”.

Here, diverting from the narrative a little, let me underscore a historical conundrum. Origins of too many wars remain disputed till today. The 1965 India-Pakistan war has the unique distinction that there is utter confusion about when exactly it began. For Pakistan, it did only on September 6 of that year, and the Pakistanis observe this date as “Defence of Pakistan Day” each year. For us in India, the war started on September 1, with Pakistan’s attack on Chamb-Jaurian. In all our writings, we call it a 22-day war.

It is a different matter, however, that in all the resolutions of the UN Security Council, the demand on both countries was to “withdraw their forces to the positions they had occupied on August 5 (the day Pakistani infiltrations into Kashmir were first detected)”. And this is precisely the basis of the Shastri-Khan agreement in Tashkent on January 10, 1966.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator
ramana
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

Post by ramana »

^^^^
...Two important and intriguing questions about this operation, which the Indian army halted successfully, arise. The first is: How did Pakistan President Ayub Khan, who was initially reluctant to sanction even Gibraltar, later approve a much wider and highly risky military action? The answer, provided by his information secretary, confidant, biographer and alter ego, Altaf Gauhar, is simple.

Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, his trusted foreign secretary, Aziz Ahmed, and other cohorts, persuaded him that if Pakistan were to “wrest” Kashmir from India by force, 1965 was its “last chance”. It was now or never. Their arguments did seem convincing. India, they said, was “demoralised and vulnerable” because of the “humiliating defeat at the hands of the Chinese”, Jawaharlal Nehru’s death, the “palpable weakness” of his successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, (Khan, after a brief, informal summit with Shastri at Karachi airport in October 1964, had got the same impression), a virulent anti-Hindi agitation in south India and an acute food shortage across the country.

At the same time, the votaries of war with India told Khan that the expansion and modernisation of
the Indian armed forces was in full swing. Once it was completed, the balance of power would shift back in India’s favour, and Pakistan’s “last opportunity would be lost”. The clinching argument of Bhutto and company was that “fear of China would deter India” from extending the war beyond Kashmir. This took care of Khan’s prime concern. He had once confided to some advisors: “While winning Kashmir, I don’t want to lose Pakistan.”.....
Thanks to BRF member RLN Sarma, I have copies of the 1963 Foreign Affairs Article by Ayub Khan where he makes the very same arguments that were supposed to be made by ZAB et al as to why its time for TSP to strike India before the post 1962 armament program matures.

Also ignored in above article is the excerpt of the book "Crisis Games" by Sidney Griffin which is quoted massively in US strat books where Operation Gibraltar was gamed with US and TSP army officers.

KS garu writes of his shock on reading the book in 1968 while at LSE on his sabbatical.
Rony
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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An Indian grammar for International Studies
Exploring our rich past can offer a vocabulary to understand the world in nuanced ways that go beyond the western constructs of realism and liberalism

A little over three years ago I wrote in The Hindu that at a time when interest in India and India’s interest in the world are arguably at their highest, Indian scholarship on global issues is showing few signs of responding to this challenge and that this could well stunt India’s ability to influence the international system.

As we meet here now, at the first real convention of scholars (and practitioners) of International Studies from throughout India, we can take some comfort. A quick, albeit anecdotal, audit of the study of International Studies would suggest that the last three years have been unusually productive. So much so, that we are now, I believe, at a veritable “tipping point” in our emergence as an intellectual power in the discipline.

Stanley Hoffman, Professor of International Relations (IR) at Harvard, once famously remarked that IR was an American social science. The blinding nexus between knowledge and power (particularly stark in the case of IR in the United States) perhaps made him forget that while the first modern IR departments were created in Aberystwyth and in Geneva, thinking on international relations went back, in the case of the Indian, Chinese and other great civilizations, to well before the West even began to think of the world outside their living space.

Having absorbed the grammar of Western international relations, and transited to a phase of greater self-confidence, it is now opportune for us to also use the vocabulary of our past as a guide to the future.

2011 survey

Recovery of these Indian ideas should not be seen as part of a revivalist project or as an exercise that seeks to reify so-called Indian exceptionalism. Rather, interrogating our rich past with its deeply argumentative tradition is, as Amartya Sen put it, “partly a celebration, partly an invitation to criticality, partly a reason for further exploration, and partly also an incitement to get more people into the argument.” In the context of international relations it offers the intellectual promise of going beyond the Manichean opposition between power and principle; and between the world of ideas and norms on the one hand, and that of statecraft and even machtpolitik, on the other.

In doing so we are not being particularly subversive. A 2011 survey of American IR scholars by Foreign Policy found that 22 per cent adopted a Constructivist approach (with its privileging of ideas and identity in shaping state preferences and international outcomes), 21 per cent adopted a Liberal approach, only 16 per cent a Realist approach, and a tiny two per cent a Marxist approach. When academics were asked to “list their peers who have had the greatest influence on them and the discipline,” the most influential was Alexander Wendt, the Constructivist, and neither the Liberal, Robert Koehane, nor the Realists, Kenneth Waltz or James Mearisheimer.

Mohandas Gandhi once said that “if all the Upanishads and all the other scriptures happened all of a sudden to be reduced to ashes, and if only the first verse in the Ishopanishad were left in the memory of the Hindus, Hinduism would live forever.” Let me make what may seem like another astounding claim, and which I hope, in the best argumentative tradition, will be heavily contested. If all the books on war and peace were to suddenly disappear from the world, and only the Mahabharata remained, it would be good enough to capture almost all the possible debates on order, justice, force and the moral dilemmas associated with choices that are made on these issues within the realm of international politics.

Uncertainty in the region

Beyond theory, we are faced with a period of extraordinary uncertainty in the international system and in our region. Multilateralism is in serious crisis. While the U.N. Security Council remains deadlocked on key issues, there is little progress on most other issues of global concern, be it trade, sustainable development or climate change. As academics, we cannot remain unconcerned about these critical failures.

Our continent is being defined and redefined over time. Regions are, after all, as much shaped by the powerful whose interests they seek to advance as by any objective reality. Whatever nomenclature we adopt, and whatever definition we accept, we are faced with, what Evan Feigenbaum and Robert Manning described as two Asias: the ‘Economic Asia’ whose $19 trillion regional economy drives global growth; the “Security Asia,” a “dysfunctional region of mistrustful powers, prone to nationalism and irredentism, escalating their territorial disputes over tiny rocks and shoals, and arming for conflict.”

The Asian Development Bank says that by nearly doubling its share of global GDP to 52 per cent by 2050, Asia could regain the dominant economic position it held 300 years ago. Yet, as several academics have pointed out “it is beset by interstate rivalries that resemble 19th century Europe,” as well the new challenges of the 21st century: environmental catastrophes, natural disasters, climate change, terrorism, cyber security and maritime issues. An increasingly assertive China that has abandoned Deng Xiaoping’s 24-character strategy of hiding its light and keeping its head low, adds to the uncertainty of the prevailing strategic environment.

India’s military and economic prowess are greater than ever before, yet its ability to influence South Asian countries is less than what it was, say, 30 years ago. An unstable Nepal with widespread anti-India sentiment, a triumphalist Sri Lanka where Sinhalese chauvinism shows no signs of accommodating legitimate Tamil aspirations, a chaotic Pakistan unwilling to even reassure New Delhi on future terrorist strikes, are symptomatic of a region being pulled in different directions.

Can our thinking from the past help us navigate through this troubled present? Pankaj Mishra, in his brilliant book, From the Ruins of Empire: the Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia, describes how three 19th century thinkers, the Persian Jamal-al Din al-Afghani, Liang Qichao from China and India’s Rabindranath Tagore, navigated through Eastern tradition and the Western onslaught to think of creative ways to strike a balance and find harmony. In many ways, these ideas remain relevant today as well. For if Asia merely mimics the West in its quest for economic growth and conspicuous consumption, and the attendant conflict over economic resources and military prowess, the “revenge of the East” in the Asian century and “all its victories” will remain “truly Pyrrhic.”

(Professor Amitabh Mattoo is President of the Indian Association of International Studies. This is an edited version of his presidential address to the Annual Convention of the Association in New Delhi on December 10, 2012.)
abhishek_sharma
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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Towards a ceasefire, slowly: Inder Malhotra
Why Ayub Khan took 12 days to accept the UN-sponsored ceasefire ending the war with India in 1965

SINCE Pakistan President Ayub Khan knew that with the collapse of his counter-offensive on September 11, 1965, the war with India was over for his country (‘Rude awakening for Pakistan’, IE, December 24, 2012), why did he take 12 tense days to accept the UN-sponsored ceasefire for which the Security Council and the then UN secretary-general, U. Thant, were working overtime? From all accounts, there were three main reasons for his dithering.

In the first place, he was deeply worried that his people, misled by his government’s false propaganda that Pakistan had won the war, might not accept a ceasefire on the terms set by the UNSC. Since Pakistan’s entire strategy was to use brief military action within Kashmir to force India to negotiate on this “core issue”, he insisted that the ceasefire be accompanied by an agreement to “settle the Kashmir issue through negotiations and, if necessary, arbitration”. Indeed, he seemed convinced that he could shame his American allies — who had “betrayed” him after the “Indian invasion” — into supporting Pakistan over the inclusion of Kashmir in the UN resolution.

He was in for a shock, however, because the United States refused to do so, emphasising that an unconditional ceasefire was imperative. Worse, the US ambassador to the UN, when approached by the Pakistani envoy with the request that India should at least be named “aggressor”, was told that the UNSC “wasn’t a court of law”. The American side had then added that the armed forces of both sides would have to withdraw to the positions they had held on August 5, the day that Pakistan’s infiltrations into Kashmir had been detected.

Second, on September 12, when Khan conferred with his military and civilian confidants as well as political leaders, he believed, to quote his biographer Altaf Gauhar, that if Pakistan couldn’t continue the war, neither could India. His judgement, therefore, was that “from now only ding-dong battles could take place here and there”, and consequently he would “prefer a prolonged struggle to a ceasefire that did not guarantee a settlement of the Kashmir dispute”.

This comforting view was also punctured before long. Nazir Ahmed, his defence secretary, who was a member of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hardline coterie that had thought up Operation Gibraltar, reported to Khan that the army and air force were “facing acute shortage of spare parts, ammunition and petroleum, and that neither Turkey nor Iran (the two great allies) was willing to provide armour-piercing ammunition”. Gauhar adds: “Ayub was mortified. He was stunned to find that the GHQ had been importing the wrong kind of ammunition”. He became worried that the Indian army “might occupy Lahore”. To add to his woes, the US started hinting at the “possibility of sanctions being applied against Pakistan”, and the British prime minister, Harold Wilson, having initially delighted the Pakistanis by condemning “Indian aggression”, started pressing them immediately to accept the UN resolution.

(Incidentally, Wilson’s September 6 statement holding India responsible for starting the war so infuriated this country as to put paid to the cosy friendship he had developed with Lal Bahadur Shastri since December 1964, when the two had first discussed a “nuclear umbrella for India” in London. Shastri had great difficulty in restraining Parliament from passing a resolution demanding withdrawal from the Commonwealth.)

Despite all the setbacks he had had, Khan persisted in his efforts to delay the ceasefire as long as possible because he had resolved to play the China card. Even on September 12 he was conscious that this was his ultimate weapon, but he must resort to it only at an “appropriate moment” and not too soon, for fear of reprisals by the US and the West. That moment arrived on September 18, when the UN gave both India and Pakistan its final resolution on ceasefire, together with the deadline of noontime on September 22 for its acceptance. Accompanied by Bhutto, Khan embarked on a secret flight to Beijing from Peshawar on the night of September 19-20 and returned the next night after most detailed talks with Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi, the Chinese foreign minister.

China had, of course, been supporting Pakistan from the word go. Two days before the Indian army crossed the border, Chen Yi was in Karachi, where he offered his country’s support to the “just action taken by Pakistan to repel the Indian armed provocations in Kashmir”. On September 7, Beijing condemned “India’s criminal aggression”, adding that the Indian government was perhaps relying on the “backing of US imperialists and modern revisionists [read the Soviet Union]”. Moreover, in order to put pressure on India and to ensure that its troops on the China border could not be moved to Pakistan, China had started accusing India of “acts of frenzied provocative activities” on the Chinese side of the Sikkim-Tibet border. After many days of acrimonious exchanges between the two countries, on September 12, the Chinese gave India a three-day ultimatum to “dismantle all military works on the Chinese side” and to return “all stolen sheep and yak” or face the consequences. Needless to say, the “ultimatum” was extended more than once.

During his long and candid talks with the Chinese premier, Khan asked how long China would maintain its pressure on India. Zhou smiled and replied: “For as long as necessary.” But there was a clear proviso to this commitment: Pakistan must be ready to fight a long war, regardless of India’s “numerical superiority” or America’s support to it. “You must go on fighting even if you have to withdraw to hills and cities like Lahore are lost.” Neither Khan nor Bhutto had ever thought of such a war. They knew now that there was no escape from the ceasefire.

Back home, on September 21, Khan presided over a very high-level meeting. The army chief, General Musa Khan, and the air chief, Air Marshal Nur Khan, were in favour of the ceasefire. The most powerful support for it came from the Nawab of Kalabagh who, as governor, controlled the whole of west Pakistan on Ayub Khan’s behalf. Even so, Ayub made his broadcast accepting the UN resolution barely an hour before the deadline’s expiry.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

Post by ramana »

A street fellow from Kerala has more IR knowledge than the IFS elite.

This is in their intellectual heritage.

I always value my Kerala colleagues views on Int Rel. They dont need any Ken Walsh!
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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Fragile ceasefire, faltering rupee: Inder Malhotra
For Lal Bahadur Shastri, the last three months of 1965 required fire-fighting both at home and abroad

AFTER protracted and painful negotiations, the India-Pakistan ceasefire in the 1965 war came into effect in the wee hours of September 23. But its beginning was so bad as to discourage any hope that it would hold. Indeed, in his broadcast to the nation announcing the cessation of hostilities, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri was constrained to remark: “Even after accepting the ceasefire, Pakistan had behaved in a most unworthy and atrocious manner by deliberately bombing the civilian population of Amritsar and by shooting down an unarmed plane carrying the Gujarat chief minister”.

He also instructed the army chief, General J.N. Chaudhuri, that if the Pakistanis fired, violating the ceasefire, the Indian army should fire back. The instruction was timely, because Pakistan chose to start violating the ceasefire the very next day. The number of violations shot up so fast that on September 27, the UN Security Council found it necessary to hold an emergency meeting and pass a resolution demanding “that the parties urgently honour their commitments to the council to observe the ceasefire”. Pakistan was unimpressed, and three days later, its foreign minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto explained in London why. He declared that the India-Pakistan ceasefire was “tenuous” and that it “would remain tenuous unless the Kashmir problem was equitably settled”.

Bhutto was in London, on his way back from New York where he had gone to address the UN General Assembly to rake up the Kashmir issue. He did not succeed in doing so, but had the satisfaction of delivering a long anti-India tirade. Thereafter, the dual process of ceasefire violations at home and the vilification of this country at the UN went on for months. The lowest depths were reached on October 26, when the Security Council met in response to Pakistan’s request to consider “the fast-deteriorating situation inside Jammu and Kashmir”. Disregarding the chair’s repeated directive to stick to the agenda, Bhutto used such foul and vicious language against India that the Indian delegation, led by the usually imperturbable foreign minister Swaran Singh, walked out of the Council’s meeting for the first and the last time.

Needless to add that the dangerous fragility of the ceasefire and Pakistan’s constant attempts at the UN to besmirch India’s image over Kashmir remained one of Shastri’s principal worries during the last three months of the year. But it was not the only one. The PM was troubled even more by the state of the economy and the problem of food shortage he had been wrestling most of the time. To this had now been added a very delicate problem — that of the external value of the rupee — and it had to be grappled with.

Devaluation had become the buzzword, but it was uttered more in secrecy than in the open. Rival passions over it were exceptionally strong. Shastri’s worries were two-fold. First, he and his government were under relentless pressure by the World Bank and, to a lesser extent, the International Monetary Fund to devalue the rupee immediately and introduce some consequential changes in Indian regulations on imports and exports. Because of the country’s dependence on the foreign aid channelled through the World Bank-sponsored Aid India Club, saying no to the Bank wasn’t easy. Aid-giving countries, particularly the United States, that were even more insistent on early devaluation, had to be tackled even more gently. Yet, India had to do something to resist the hectoring tactics that both the World Bank stalwarts and representatives of donor countries were adopting to force a downward revision of the rupee’s exchange rate.

This inevitably compounded Shastri’s second problem, which was domestic and therefore much more troublesome. Most of his close advisors, including L.K. Jha, his secretary and closest confidant, B.K. Nehru, then ambassador to the US, and P C. Bhattacharya, governor of the Reserve Bank of India, were strongly in favour of devaluation. So was I.G. Patel, chief economic advisor, though with some reservations. Shastri’s own instinct tilted towards devaluation. But he knew, better than most of his advisors, that for the bulk of the political class, including members of his own party, devaluation was an evil to be avoided at all costs.

Ironically, no one hated the idea of devaluing the rupee as furiously as did T. T. Krishnamachari, better known as TTK. He was Shastri’s finance minister, as he had been Jawaharlal Nehru’s, and if he did not want to devalue, no one could force him to do so. His relationship with the PM was fraught, and Patel, the chief economic advisor, has best described it. “Shastriji’s thinking was anathema to TTK,” he recorded, “and there grew between them much hostility — real and outspoken on one side [Krishnamachari’s] and real and unspoken on the other.” No wonder, then, that eventually Jha and Bhattacharya “convinced” Shastri that TTK “had to be replaced — a suggestion that would not have been unwelcome to the PM in any case,” in Patel’s words.

Fortuitously, an opportunity to ease the finance minister out and find a pliant successor to him presented itself fairly soon. Minions of a fast-expanding and increasingly influential business house, in a memorandum to the PM, levelled serious charges against TTK. With his usual courtesy, Shastri told the finance minister that he was sure the charges were baseless, but he could not reject them on his own without at least an “informal inquiry” of some kind, to which TTK should agree. An enraged TTK replied that the relationship between the PM and the finance minister should be one of total trust, “like that between husband and wife”, and since this trust seemed to be lacking, he would rather resign. Shastri advised patience and calm consideration. A bitter exchange of letters between the two only made matters worse.

On the evening of the last day of 1965, TTK resigned, stalked out of Shastri’s office and went straight to the house of Indira Gandhi, whose own relations with Shastri were under great strain. (See ‘The Beginning of a Breach’, IE, September 27, 2012). After hearing out TTK, she exploded: “I would be the next to be thrown out.”

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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Minions of a fast-expanding and increasingly influential business house, in a memorandum to the PM, levelled serious charges against TTK.
Who is that?
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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Subbu Forum and IDSA are holding the 2013 KS garu Memorial lecture on Feb 6 at 5:30pm.

The subject is "India's National Security: Challenges and Priorities" by P. Chidambaram.

Venue: IDSA Auditorium.

Please try to attend is feasible.
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

Post by svinayak »

Business houses are Nanda and Birla during those times
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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Off late have been thinking about Chanakya teachings. I think they are good for consolidating a fractious political body and coming to power. They don't help in retaining long duration power. His bigger idea was the melding of the small states into a big geographic state with a strong center: the idea of Bharat.

The Maurya dynasty which he helped establish and was the first large state in historic India, was only three-six kings and didn't last too long. On the other hand the Satavahana, Gupta, Chalukya, Chola Calukya, even Vijayanagara dynasties lasted centuries. But they were not the largest states on the sub-continent.

We need to understand how and why these dynasty states lasted so long.

Indian freedom struggle has consolidated the idea of Bharat which is the consolidation that Chankya advocated. But linguistic states again fractured the idea of Bharat within a decade.

Now I see the death of regional languages being subsumed in the Modern age recreating the former idea of Bharat.
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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An op-ed on Rao-ABV handoff in 1996.

One india site

Rao handed onus to Vajpayee. Can today's leaders larn?


By Shubham Ghosh

Two contrasting news struck me. One is the relentless bickering between the Congress and the BJP over every other issue. And the other, the recent revelation by former President of India APJ Abdul Kalam that late Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao almost went ahead with the nuclear tests in 1996 but later handed over the onus to his successor, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, after suffering an electoral debacle.

Act of statesmanship, something terribly missing today

Whether Rao was discouraged by the poll loss or whether he was put under considerable pressure by the west to retreat from carrying out his plan is for the insiders to reveal. But the fact that Rao treated the issue as a national issue above partisan politics demands words of appreciation. It was a great example of statesmanship, rarely seen in today's politics.

Why can't a similar gesture be expected from the leaders of the current generation? Can we ever expect a Manmohan Singh handing over a robust policy on foreign direct investment to Narendra Modi, in case the latter becomes the Prime Minister in 2014? Hard to imagine.

As far as India's nuclear programme is concerned, successive Congress governments have treated the issue consistently since the days of Indira Gandhi. While Indira Gandhi led the nation in the Pokhran-I blasts in 1974 and restarted the development programme of the weapons after Morarji Desai stalled it, the credit to assemble the weapon goes to her successor, Rajiv Gandhi. Rao was the man who operationalised it on a priority basis. Indira Gandhi had also wanted to test an improved nuclear weapon system in 1983.

Rao never shelved the national interest despite defeat in election

Rao's greatness lied in the fact that he did not shelf the initiative in the face of internal and external challenges. It was in 1991 when Rao, despite leading a minority government, decided to adopt a posture of what experts call "recessed deterrence" in order to keep components of nuclear devices ready at diverse locations so that they could be deployed as per the strategic need. In Dec 1995, his government wanted to go ahead with the nuclear test but US satellites spotted the preparations and the American media also exposed it.

But Rao never gave up his dream and kept Vajpayee in the loop about the progress in the country's nuclear programme. It was evident from the fact that the BJP did not create any ruckus on the issue in the parliament even though the general impression was that India's nuclear ambitions had been crippled under US pressure.
Can such political understanding between two rival political camps be expected today?

I felt obliged only to Atalji, said Rao

Rao's statesmanship also became evident when prominent strategic affairs analyst K Subrahmanyam had asked the former whether he owed it to the country and the future generations to give his account on the evolution of a nuclear policy. Rao had said he felt obliged just to one person and it was Atal Bihari Vajpayee, his successor. He had also briefed Vajpayee on the matter, something which Kalam recently revealed.


The strategic affairs expert said the Kargil Committee had sought an explanation from Rao about the cut in defence budget during his time. Rao said it was done because the nuclear deterrent mechanism was under development and that was the priority of his government. He also said how the nuclear arsenal was operationalised during his days as the PM.

Rao did not object to give his account

Rao did not object to his account on the progress of nuclear programme during his premiership for it is normal by today's standards that politicians do not want their credit to be hijacked by somebody else. It is understandable why the NDA did not show any interest in publishing the annexures for Rao's account could have diluted the BJP's claim for a nuclear weapon development. But why did the UPA government led by Rao's own party not show interest in releasing them? :mrgreen:

It is very important for the Congress today to learn Rao's legacy instead of naming civic projects and hospitals after Jawaharlal Nehru and his successors. It is unfortunate that the man, who had striven towards economic liberalisation, nuclear programme and charting fresh routes in India's foreign policy affairs, has been so conveniently forgotten by his own part. Did the party loyalists recall the contribution of Rao even once at the recent Jaipur conclave? We have two political camps today indulging in provocative politics both in the parliament and outside and they do not even care to put the nation's interest at peril. Can they wait for a moment and look back at history to see how Rao and Vajpayee handled a far more important issue with an immense maturity?

For the current generation, 1996 was a watershed despite the fact that Rao could not go ahead with his N-tests. It was a year when one statesman handed over a responsibility of national importance to his successor, also another statesman. Politics was a continuity then. We have gone a long way down.
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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IPKF debacle was a Boer War moment for India under immature Rajiv Gandhi. That it didn't lead to further unraveling is a result of his being dethroned due to Bofors corruption.
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

Post by SSridhar »

ramana wrote:
Minions of a fast-expanding and increasingly influential business house, in a memorandum to the PM, levelled serious charges against TTK.
Who is that?
That should have been the Mundhras (who are defunct now). The case was that LIC intervened to stabilize the Mundhras financially after they had contributed funds handsomely to the Congress party.
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

Post by ramana »

But Mundhra scandal was atleast a decade before during JLN tenure.

The one quoted above is during LBS tenure to ease out TTK.

BTW one of TTK's grandsons was a senior at IIT Madras.
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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From Ind Exp.

Will tie this vignette on PVNR with my quest to understand Chanakya in a few days.

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/outsi ... /1067537/0
The Outsider
By KK Kailash

Sadly for Narasimha Rao, his affair with the Congress was one-sided

Former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, while delivering the 7th R.N. Kao Memorial lecture last week shared a vignette about someone it appears we are condemned to forget, P.V. Narasimha Rao. In that tiny tidbit, Kalam gave us a glimpse of how the former prime minister and once Congress president worked. On the one hand, he was alive to the proprieties of parliamentary traditions and, on the other, the nugget revealed that he was not chasing history. Rao has seldom received credit for any accomplishment and has more often than not been in the public eye for his miscalculations and omissions.

The disclosure about Rao and the bomb is, in any case, not new. The PM who succeeded him, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, as well as K. Subrahmanyam, another person closely associated with the nuclear policy, had previously acknowledged Rao's key role in operationalising India's bomb. This, however, is not about the unsung hero or about parliamentary niceties, but about Rao and his party, the Congress.

The man himself is singularly unusual among contemporary PMs. He was the last PM of a single-party cabinet and also the last to head both government and party at the same time. Significantly, he was also probably the last PM who exercised real power, controlled Parliament, set goals, determined policy lines and got decisions executed. As a leader, Rao backed his own political instincts and was willing to take bold decisions, which he thought would benefit the country and his party, even if it made him unpopular.

He was elected leader of the Congress and chosen to head the government not because he held specific views, but probably because he did not seem to have any. :rotfl: For those who elected him, Rao was, in many ways, the quintessential party man. And he remained so to the very end. He is reported to have said a day before he was sworn in as PM, "As an individual, I feel overwhelmed, utterly humble. But as a representative of a great party, I feel like a colossus." He was clearly proud of his party. In 1996, when he was defeated and faced a revolt within his party, he told veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar, "Those who ask for my resignation do not appreciate my agony on the compulsion to continue. I have no choice. I have to rehabilitate the party, revive its ethos and put it back on the track." Once again, it was the party.

Sadly for Rao, his affair with the party was one-sided. The party did not reciprocate this goodwill. For the Congress, he was an outsider. He is not recognised, acknowledged and remembered, and is probably spoken of only in whispers. He serves as their punching bag, to be blamed for all the wrongs. All this after he led the party and the government through one of the most turbulent periods in post-Independence India.

Why does the Congress want to bury Rao? As leader of the Congress and as PM, Rao was probably more concerned with achieving goals and showing results than with how those goals were reached. He knew that he had neither the luxury of time nor the support of friends who were willing to go the distance. Rao, therefore, did not tell us about his dreams or of his pet policy aims, but doggedly tried to set right what he thought was wrong. His single-minded pursuit of often unstated ends, without concern for the means employed, was not necessarily new. Indira Gandhi had been ruthless in her pursuit of partisan ends.


Party organisational literature may provide us with some clues as to why the Congress today wants us to believe that there was no Narasimha Rao. There is always a certain tussle between different elements in any party, especially between the party in public office and the party central office. Scholars of the Congress party identify three distinctive relationship patterns. In the first phase, the Nehru era, the party central office and the party in public office were distinct. The two elements respected each other and worked almost in tandem, with the party in public office playing a lead role. This relationship continued till the mid-1960s.

In the second phase, the difference between the elements collapsed. Indira Gandhi, who controlled both the government and the party, reportedly famously quipped, "Where is the party? I am the party." Not only did she inaugurate the personality cult, but she also promoted her family. With Rajiv Gandhi taking over, the party and the family fused.

The third phase of the Congress party-government relationship carries features from the past. Inaugurated in 2004, the party central office and the party in public office are formally distinct, as in the first phase. However, the roles are reversed, with the government playing a subsidiary role to the central office. But unlike anytime in the past, the party-family link is much stronger.


Rao's tenure came during phase two. As PM, he formally controlled both the party and government. However, the party-family link continued to exist, albeit informally. He was the first non-family Congress PM to complete a full term. Given his loyalty to the party or his own personal preference, depending on one's perspective, he probably attempted to chart a new path, breaking those links. The winds of change threatened many who were accustomed to living "from, rather than for, politics". For them, their position in the party was perhaps more important than the state of the party itself. Before any change could take root, those invested in the links hit back. When the party was defeated, Rao's position as leader of the party weakened and he was forced to quit.

So, in today's Congress, Rao is an odd man. He had attempted to steer a new path, which the party refused to take. If the party were to acknowledge him, it would implicitly give him and his actions legitimacy. It pays, therefore, to discredit him or, even better, to forget him.

The writer is with the department of political science, Panjab University, Chandigarh
I will tie all the bolded parts together.
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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The road to Tashkent: Inder Malhotra
How the Soviet Union brought India and Pakistan to the negotiating table after the 1965 war

As early as August 18, 1965, the Soviet prime minister, Alexei Kosygin, had written to his Indian counterpart, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and Pakistan President Ayub Khan, asking them "not to take any steps that might lead to a major conflict". He wrote again on September 4 appealing for "an immediate cessation of hostilities and a reciprocal withdrawal of troops behind the ceasefire line". He also offered the Soviet Union's "good offices" in negotiating a peaceful settlement of differences between India and Pakistan. Neither country reacted to this offer for the obvious reason that two days later the war had escalated, and the Indian army was on the march to the prized Pakistani city of Lahore.

On September 18, Kosygin sent his third letter to the two South Asian leaders, proposing that they "should meet in Tashkent or any other Soviet city for negotiations", and even offered to take part in the discussions himself, "if both sides so desired". He underscored his serious concern because the war was taking place "close to the Soviet Union's borders".

Shastri waited until September 23, when the ceasefire came into force, before disclosing to Parliament the Soviet offer, adding that he had "informed Mr Kosygin that we would welcome his efforts and good offices". In Pakistan, however, there was complete silence on the subject because of its extreme reluctance to take part in Soviet-sponsored negotiations.

"Ayub," records his closest confidant and biographer Altaf Gauhar, "was quite disturbed that the US and the British should leave the field to the Soviet Union... the subcontinent had been traditionally the area of Western influence, and the induction of the Soviet Union into the region as a mediator would only strengthen India's position". Consequently, even after agreeing to the Tashkent talks on November 11, he decided to go to London and Washington to persuade Harold Wilson, the British prime minister, and US President Lyndon Johnson to so arrange things that some "self-executing machinery" could be set up to resolve Kashmir, preferably before the Tashkent meeting. In both capitals he drew a blank. Wilson bluntly told Ayub that China was the "greatest danger in the region because it was far more expansionist than the Soviet Union or India". His foreign secretary added that in its present mood, "China was an extremely dangerous friend to have". Wilson's concluding remark at the end of a marathon meeting was: "We cannot hurry the Kashmir issue, though we realise the conflict is driving India and Pakistan to orbits we fear".

On way to Washington, Ayub stopped over in New York to deliver a speech at the UN General Assembly. He devoted it almost entirely to Kashmir and ended his oration with the demand: "Let India honour her agreement as we would, to let all the people of Kashmir settle their own future through self-determination, in accordance with past pledges." In Washington the next day, at his prolonged meeting with Johnson, he returned to this theme and said with some emotion that the Kashmir problem must be resolved. "If India could not comply with the UN resolutions then arbitration by an independent body was the only peaceful way to settle the dispute."

According to Gauhar's account, Johnson said little about Kashmir but dilated at some length on America's problems in Vietnam, where both the Soviet Union and China were helping North Vietnam. The US president then told his guest that he was "praying for the success of the Tashkent meeting". Whereupon Ayub "regretted" that US and Soviet policy "had come to coincide in India, and that was why the Soviet Union was helping India, and the US, too, had allowed itself to be 'suckered' by the Indians".

While the two presidents were engaged in one-to-one talks, Pakistan officials told their American opposite numbers that throughout the "crisis", the feeling in Pakistan was that the US "had let down Pakistan and equated it with the aggressor". Ayub said the same thing somewhat politely at his final meeting with Johnson: "Let us hope we get more comfort in future out of our alliance with the US."

As was perhaps to be expected, China acted promptly to vindicate Johnson's apprehension that it would "fish in troubled waters" in both South Asia and Indochina. No sooner had Pakistan announced its willingness to partake in the Tashkent talks under Soviet auspices, that the Chinese tried to throw a spanner in the works by suddenly opening fire on two Indian posts on the Sikkim-China border and making repeated intrusions across this frontier. What added to Indian worries was a report by the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies that China had "massed 15 divisions in Tibet, of which at least six were stationed near the borders of Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal". However, New Delhi's assessment was that Beijing was only trying to create tensions and wasn't paving the way to a renewed invasion.

Shastri's greater worry was about the withdrawal of troops to the positions they held before Pakistan's infiltrations into Kashmir on August 5. The Indian army had paid a heavy price to wrest from Pakistan the highly strategic Haji Pir Pass, the most convenient route for Pakistan's infiltrators. There was a strong feeling in the country that Haji Pir should never be returned to Pakistan. Though normally a cautious man, Shastri himself intensified this sentiment by declaring repeatedly that if Haji Pir were to be given back to Pakistan, "some other prime minister would do it".

Meanwhile, the Soviets invited foreign minister Swaran Singh to Moscow a week before the start of the Tashkent conference. The message he brought back was that while the Soviet Union stuck to its traditional stand that Kashmir was a part of India, it was also of the firm view that peace between India and Pakistan must be established on the basis of the UN Security Council resolution of September 20, which demanded the "withdrawal of all armed personnel to positions held prior to August 5, 1965".

This, as we shall see, was to be a source of great trouble during the Tashkent talks, as well as afterwards.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator.
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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So Haji Pir was lost again.
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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ramana wrote:Subbu Forum and IDSA are holding the 2013 KS garu Memorial lecture on Feb 6 at 5:30pm.

The subject is "India's National Security: Challenges and Priorities" by P. Chidambaram.

Venue: IDSA Auditorium.

Please try to attend is feasible.

A news report about the same:

http://www.bharatdefencekavach.com/News ... cture.html
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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Thinking about why Brajesh Mishra let Rabinder Singh defect to US, I think he had three things in mind:
- Catching RS would have led to embarassment for both India and US leading to more questions than answers
- It makes the US think they have a edge on India
- RS might have useless info based on the vast amount of surveillance recounted in retrospect
- RS might be conveying to US something India wants them to know

However, it might really be a failure on part of RAW and IB in letting the guy escape
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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Once he was detected the info he was passing became BS. Incompetence, subversion, and political climate enabled him to escape.
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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Roadblocks at Tashkent: Inder Malhotra
On the bright and sunny, if also cold, afternoon of January 3, 1966, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and Pakistan's president, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, arrived in Tashkent within an hour of each other. Led by their prime minister, Alexei Kosygin, the Soviet hosts welcomed both with scrupulously equal warmth and courtesy. For instance, the two delegations were taken to where they were to stay by different routes, each of which was bedecked with an equal number of flags of the two guest countries and those of the Soviet Union.

Similarly, at the inauguration of the Tashkent conference the next day, in his speech welcoming Shastri and Ayub, Kosygin spoke of "India and Pakistan" and "Pakistan and India" exactly the same number of times. By previous agreement, however, he invited Shastri to speak first. Residential arrangements for the two delegations were also fastidiously equal. Shastri and Ayub had a villa each. There was a nice, compact hotel, within walking distance of the prime minister's villa, where the Indian delegation was put up. The Pakistani delegation was accommodated in an equally comfortable guesthouse in the vicinity of Ayub's villa. A third, "neutral" villa was used for Kosygin's meetings with Shastri and Ayub jointly, and for the meetings of two delegations, headed by the two foreign ministers, Swaran Singh and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, respectively.

More significantly, this was the first — and so far only — time the leaders of India and Pakistan went outside the subcontinent to meet under the auspices of a third country for "peace talks". In an interesting twist to history and the Cold War, the United States, Britain and other NATO countries were fully supportive of Kosygin's role as the intermediary between India and Pakistan, a region from which they had vowed to keep the Soviet Union out.

As the three-way talks meandered on, it became evident that Kosygin had done his homework with awe-inspiring thoroughness. He knew, therefore, how difficult the peacemaking exercise was going to be, because the basic objectives of India and Pakistan were so contradictory that neither side could accept the other's demands. India wanted the two countries to sign a no-war pact without the Kashmir issue being dragged in. Pakistan considered such an agreement "unthinkable" until the Kashmir "dispute" was resolved "satisfactorily". It demanded, instead, that some "joint, self-executing machinery be formed to settle the Kashmir problem".


After the first two Shastri-Ayub meetings, with Kosygin shuttling between them, produced no result, the two foreign ministers were asked to hold meetings of full delegations. Bhutto, whose differences with his old mentor were, by now, public knowledge, seized the opportunity to add to the discord between the two sides, helped greatly by his even more intransigent foreign secretary, Aziz Ahmed. The unflappable Swaran Singh tersely told them: "Kashmir is non-negotiable".

Ayub summarily rejected the advice that another meeting between the principals would be useful. Thereupon, a senior member of the Indian delegation suggested that a firm letter be sent to the president of Pakistan. Shastri vetoed the idea and said there need not be any further communication to the Pakistanis.

No wonder then that the Tashkent talks ground to a halt by January 7, and 24 hours later the deadlock was complete. Yet, at the three press conferences — India's, Pakistan's and the Soviet Union's — that were held every evening, the hope for the eventual success of the conference was kept alive. After all, the Soviet prime minister, assisted by his veteran foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, was trying his utmost to rescue the conference from looming failure.

On January 9, all concerned apparently gave up. Both the Indian and Pakistani spokespersons told the nearly 500-strong world press corps assembled at Tashkent that the talks had all but failed. (The Russians had cancelled their "briefing"). The next morning, every newspaper wrote the virtual obituary of the Tashkent conference with differing flourishes. The dispatch that I had sent to The Statesman, the paper for which I then worked, had begun: "Tonight the Tashkent talks are teetering on the verge of collapse".

After a late and long dinner with my colleagues — all of them seemed to agree that the talks were beyond redemption — I was about to change in order to get into bed at last, when my reporter's instincts suddenly stopped me. The Russians, I argued with myself, had too high a stake in Tashkent talks to allow them to fail. Moreover, Lyndon Johnson shared the Soviet objective. Indeed, his was the invisible presence at the conference table.

Thanks to the round-the-clock transport arrangements our hosts had made for us, I went to Shastri's villa, where one could smell that something was cooking. The core of the Indian delegation — Defence Minister Y. B. Chavan, Swaran Singh and three top officials, the prime minister's secretary, L.K. Jha, Foreign Secretary C.S. Jha and Home Secretary L.P. Singh — was in conference with the PM. The rest of the large delegation, including the only military representative, Lieutenant General (later general and army chief) P.P. Kumaramangalam and the external affairs ministry's officer on special duty, K. Shankar Bajpai, were patiently waiting in the anteroom.

At one stage, C. S. Jha came out and whispered a question to the general. On hearing his reply, the foreign secretary muttered: "In that case we can perhaps sign it". "Sir, sign what?" asked Bajpai. "I will tell you later," replied Jha while returning to the PM's chamber.


Using the villa's excellent phone connection to Delhi, I rang my office and amended my story. What appeared in The Statesman on January 10 read: "Late tonight Mr Kosygin was trying desperately to save the talks from total failure but, at the time of writing, the outcome of his efforts was not known... The Soviet premier's current attempt seems confined to getting the two sides to agree to a joint statement to be issued at the end of their talks tomorrow". On arrival, Shastri had informed all concerned that January 10 was the last day of the trilateral talks because on the morning of January 11 he was to be in Kabul.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

Post by abhishek_sharma »

Triumph and tragedy at Tashkent: Inder Malhotra
With the signing of a peace agreement between India and Pakistan came the news of Lal Bahadur Shastri's passing

ON THE morning of January 10, there was a sea change in the atmosphere of Tashkent. The bickering, the blame game and intensely motivated accusations about the "impending collapse of the talks" had suddenly vanished. Instead, everyone seemed cheerful. For, word had spread fast that in the wee hours of the morning, the tireless Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin had brought about an agreement between Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri of India and President Ayub Khan of Pakistan. It was to be called the "Tashkent Declaration", and signed in the afternoon by Shastri and Ayub, with Kosygin witnessing it. The text of the declaration was released only after it was signed, but there was striking unanimity among Indians, Pakistanis and Soviets that it was a "triumph of statesmanship".

At precisely 4 pm, the accord was signed, and a long, lavish and exuberant reception by the Soviet hosts followed. Shastri left early. Those who shook hands with him and saw him off testified later that his hold was firm, and he seemed calm and carefree. My colleagues and I had left much earlier to report and analyse the welcome accord. On careful reading, however, it seemed an arrangement only for the disengagement of troops that were too close for comfort and for the return of occupied territories. Major issues had been slurred over. This became even clearer when reactions started coming in from Delhi and Rawalpindi. The public in both countries was unhappy.

In India, the harshest criticism not only by the political class, but also by members of the PM's family, was focused on his decision to "give away" Haji Pir, which he had vowed never to do.
Little did his critics know that Kosygin had explained to him the dire consequences of defying the UN Security Council's resolution insisting that the armed personnel of both countries "return to the positions they had occupied before August 5", when Pakistan's infiltrations into Kashmir were first detected.

For his part, Ayub had wanted to hold on to the Chhamb area in Kashmir his troops had captured. Kosygin explained the facts of life to him, too. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, anxious to sabotage an agreement somehow, suddenly demanded that the entire paragraph committing the two countries to "discourage hostile propaganda against each other" be deleted. Kosygin turned on him and asked: "How do two countries that agree to make peace and maintain good-neighbourly relations also proclaim that they would carry on hostile propaganda against each other?"

Ayub's difficulty with his countrymen was not Chhamb, however, but the glaring fact that their "core issue", Kashmir, had been "dismissed" in the declaration with the bland statement that "Jammu and Kashmir was discussed and each of the two sides set forth its respective position".

It was amidst this troubling situation that Shastri's five top advisors — his secretary, L.K. Jha; the foreign secretary, C.S. Jha; the home secretary, L.P. Singh; the ambassador to Moscow, T.N. Kaul; and the PM's most trusted official, C.P. Srivastava — suddenly arrived at our hotel. They sought out four of us — K. Rangaswamy (The Hindu), G.K. Reddy (The Times of India), Krishan Bhatia (Hindustan Times) and yours truly (The Statesman). Over generous libations of Scotch, they tried to convince us that India had achieved both its main objectives: a no-war agreement with Pakistan, and its commitment to honour the "sanctity" of the ceasefire line in J&K.


We refused to buy this. How could a mere reaffirmation by both countries of their "obligation under the UN Charter not to have recourse to force and settle their disputes through peaceful means" add up to a no-war pact? As for the "sanctity" of the ceasefire line, it was something of a joke, because all that the Tashkent Declaration said was: "both sides shall observe the ceasefire terms on the ceasefire line".

{So as usual the babucracy was deluded and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and wanted the Press to spin it as a victory for a bottle of Scotch@##}

Disappointed and dejected, the top officials left. After some more chit-chat, we also decided to retire for the night. Each one us was in bed when came the stunning and sorrowful news of Lal Bahadur Shastri's death so far away from home. Another phone call from the delegation's spokesman told us to hold the news for a while because "Russian doctors are trying to revive him". As we found on reaching the villa, the PM's passing was manifest. The Shastri era had turned out to be sadly short-lived.

Normally, this should have been the end of this tragic narrative. But it cannot, because of what follows about the subsequent happenings in both Indian and Pakistani camps. At Shastri's villa, where all the Indians in Tashkent that night had assembled, grief was overwhelming. Yet top officials also had to do their duty.

Under the Constitution, when the PM dies, his cabinet also ceases to exist. A new PM has to be sworn in immediately. For that to happen, then President S. Radhakrishnan had to be informed. Despite the foolproof telephone connections the hosts had organised, this did not prove easy. An obviously sleeping phone operator at Rashtrapati Bhavan, when awakened, brusquely said that the president could not be disturbed at that late hour and banged down the phone. Whereupon General P.P. Kumaramanglam rang up the army's operations room and got through instantly to the duty officer, Major Tandon. Barely had the general said, "Tandon, I am Kumaramanglam..." when the major cut him short with the words: "If you are General Kumaramangalam, then I am the Queen of Sheba". Luckily, by this time, L.P. Singh had spoken to the cabinet secretary, Dharma Vira, who promptly drove to Raisina Hill. G.L. Nanda was sworn in as the stop-gap PM for the second time in 18 months.


{So even petty peons in GOI think they run the govt.}

At the guesthouse where the Pakistani delegation was staying, sad to say, the news was greeted with uproarious joy, even though the next morning Ayub was to be one of Shastri's pallbearers. Disturbed by the noise, Bhutto opened his door, saw senior members of the delegation in a boisterous mood, and demanded of his foreign secretary: "What is this Aziz?" Aziz Ahmed replied: "Sir, the ******** is dead". Bhutto: "Which one?"


{As I said before TSP has been reduced to gloating over Indian hurt. The hatred is too much and they need to destroy themselves as they are doing so well now.}
The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator.
Last edited by ramana on 10 Apr 2013 23:51, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: Added highlights ramana
ramana
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

Post by ramana »

So what was whispered in Kumaramangalam's ears and what did he reply?

Looks like Haji Pir was given up on his say so.
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

Post by Prem »

ramana wrote:Looks like Haji Pir was given up on his say so.
It was a big blunder. Paki now use this area to their full advantage to send terrorists into the Valley.
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

Post by ramana »

Look like MMS to lay foundation stone for National Defence Uty in May 2013.

This was advocated by KSgaru since 2004.

Now on its last legs with nothing to show MMS is laying the foundation stone to ensure he gets some credit on the plaque when he did noting in the ten years he was in power.

I hope he has the decency to name it after KSgaru and not some 2G scamsters name.
For all the 2Gs did was to reduce national security.

The timing shows there is change in the air and they think UPA wont come back.
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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>>I hope he has the decency to name it after KSgaru and not some 2G scamsters name.

Or SoniaG, or worse RahulG. Maybe the "Beehive University of National Defence" (BUND)
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

Post by ramana »

More pappucock
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

Post by Prem »

Indian strategic thought=The name of Nehru Khandan is engraved On Every fundamental Weakness of India . Harek Indian Kamjori / Budnami pey Likha hai Chache ka Naam.
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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X-Post by RoyG....

I had never heard of Thirukkural. We should do a comparative analysis with the Arthashastra.
The incomparable Thirukkural on courage and love

Culture Editor Tamil Guardian 20 February 2008

We conclude our three part introduction to the 2000 year old Tamil classic on ethical living, the Thirukkural, by looking at two popular themes from its three books: love and courage.

We saw previously that concepts such as fairness and justice cut across one book to the other. The concepts which often appear in a personal context in the "Path of the householder" in the book of virtue reappear in a national context in considering the "wealth of nations". Replaced much by many: Many of the principles enunciated in the context of a country naturally lend themselves to the modern corporate world.

Whereas love in the sense of love for mankind is an important part of the book of virtue, and romantic love is the theme of the book of love, the Kural importantly places courage in the wealth of the nation.

We start first with a reprise of the foundation to the wealth of nations. As we saw in part II of this series, in the Thirukkural the wealth of nations is founded on good leadership, good advisors and expertise and on the qualities of the country: natural qualities (defensive location, a fertile land etc), good alliances (and its opposite, weak enemies) and a strong defence capability. We see this in the respective sections "merits of a king", "merits of ministers" and "qualities of a country".

Much of the principles enunciated in the context of a country naturally lend themselves to the modern corporate world. Here, the Thirukkural is similar to ancient Chinese classics such as the "Art of War" which in a modern context has been applied not just to physical war, but corporate strategy and in some American interpretations, to marketing, for example. But whereas the "Art of War" is a treatise on achieving victory, the Kural is in essence a treatise on ethics.

The approach is broad and all-encompassing. As Dr Albert Schweitzer said the Thirukkural addresses “the most varied questions concerning the conduct of man to himself and to the world"

For example the chapter called "merits of ministers" deals not only with the giving of advice but also the qualities of ambassadorship, the general ability to win over people to one's point of view, to judge and sway an audience, for example. But here again the Thirukkural is just as applicable to the modern corporate world as it is to politics and media.

The Kural considers the defensive capability of a nation in three parts: fortresses, the merits of the army, and military pride.

In the chapter entitled merits of the army in the book of wealth, the Thirukkural begins by telling us that:

"Foremost among a monarch's possessions stands
a conquering army, complete and fearless"

The Thirukkural's usual approach to a subject is to consider it from different angles. It describes the different facets of the ideal without necessarily giving instructions on how to achieve the ideal. As with the Chinese approach, the Thirukkural's aphorisms are meant to be a subject of meditation and personal interpretation.

So on the nature of the ideal army, the Kural looks first at tradition, desertion and defeat:

"Commanding a long tradition of valor, acquainted
with neither defeat nor desertion that defines an army"

It looks at unity and cohesiveness.

"That indeed is an army that stands together
even when faced with death's grim fury"

The sentiment expressed is of course open to denigration as fanaticism, but only when taken out of the military context, the context of the defence of the nation's wealth in which the Kural has carefully placed this subject. It would be difficult for a military strategist to disagree.

On the personal qualities of soldiers:

"Valor, honor, trustworthiness and a tradition
nobly upheld, these four are the army's protective armour"

On the importance of leadership:

"though courageous troops abound
there can be no army without commanders"

On size versus strike capability of an army:

"So what if a legion of rats roar like the sea?
The mere hiss of a cobra will deaden their din"

On the causes of failure:
"An army will prevail as long as there is
no desertion, no privation and no contention"

Consider how succinctly this line considers the need for absolute unity and the need for supplies and essentials, privation includes for example the starvation of a group or a country via embargos.

Interestingly the Kural tells us that even when an army is merely for decoration it may be useful:

"Even without winning offense and defence
an army of splendid appearance may still win acclaim"

But more importantly it tells us that where there is an army which is not purely for decoration, how defense may be followed by offense:

"Well trained armed forces will withstand every offense
then outflank and storm the foe"

The Thirukkural and Tamil culture are inextricably and symbiotically linked. We chose courage as the theme for the wealth of nations in this third part because it is such an important cornerstone in the hierarchy of Tamil values.

And this is echoed in the Thirukkural in the chapter called "military pride" which in a much more personal way defines the character of the soldier. Although we have considered the Kural in the context of the wealth of the nation, we must remember that the concept of duty ("dharma") is integral to Tamil culture.

So while the section on leadership is also an enunciation of the duties or ideal characteristics of the king, and we are also told the duties or ideals of ministers, ambassadors, householders, monks, here, this chapter of the thirukkural is mainly concerned with the soldier. Recognising the communal nature of the soldier's service, the ideal soldier is in fact part of the "qualities of a country". Compare for example with the householder who is in a separate book.

This chapter (military pride) begins, as it means to go on, with an attitude:

"Dare you not, my enemies, stand against my monarch
Many who did, stand now as stone monuments"

Note how the chapter starts in the first person.

It goes on to define the ideals in terms of scope of ambition, fearlessness and clemency.

"It is more gratifying to carry a lance which missed an elephant
than to hold an arrow that hit a thicket dwelling rabbit"

"Having hurled his spear at a battlefield elephant
the hero found another piercing his side and grasped it with glee"

"Intrepid courage is what they call valor
but clemency towards the defeated is its sharp edge"

There are many couplets on the soldier's attitude towards death which echo the culture which the Thirukkural shapes and is shaped by:

"Who would dare deride as defeated
men who die fulfilling valour’s vow?"

We find echoes of Homer's Achilles:

"To fasten the warrior's anklet on one who desire glory
more than life is to decorate heroism with distinction"

And yet if the Thirukkural extols martial valour it does so in the context of the country. Whereas on the other hand it sees love and associated concepts of charity, as a personal virtue of every householder.

For the Thirukkural, if the army is the foremost of a nation’s possessions, without love, life is hardly worth living:

"With love enshrined in the heart, one truly lives,
without it the body is but bones encased in skin"

The Thirukkural's chapter "possessing love" contains the most poignant poetry in the entire work:

"They say it is to know union with love
that the soul takes union with the body"

But consider, this where love is linked to sacrifice, and perhaps even back to the soldier:

"The unloving belong only to themselves
but the loving belong to others to their very bones"

"Life without love in the heart
is like a sapless tree in the barren desert"

We end here our look at a work which is widely considered to be the world's oldest and most complete treatise on the art of ethical living. So intrinsic is the Thirukkural to Tamil culture that it is taught in schools in Tamil Nadu and Tamil Eelam, and sworn in the law courts.

Mahatma Gandhi said: “I wanted to learn Tamil, only to enable me to study Valluvar’s Thirukkural through his mother tongue itself…. There is no one who has given such treasure of wisdom like him.”

We urge the interested reader to explore the Kural on his own.

There are a number of excellent translations available online (see references below) of which we prefer the American English Himalayan Academy translation, for its closeness to the meaning of the original.

As before we leave with you an excerpt from the ever entertaining book of love from NV Ashraf's comparison of translations:

http://www.tamilguardian.com/article.asp?articleid=1610
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

Post by RoyG »

Thank you Ramanaji for attaching the post. It's interesting that both texts lay emphasis on alliances and other stratagems to avoid full on confrontation. Perhaps there are prescriptions which can help us secure our neighborhood.
Espionage

KURAL 581
Competent spies and the respected codes of law—consider these two the eyes of a king.

KURAL 582
Duty requires the monarch to swiftly acquire knowledge of all happenings among all men each day.

KURAL 583
Without assessing the intelligence reports of informants, a king can never achieve victory.

KURAL 584
The working staff, close kindred and known enemies—all such people are the legitimate study of spies.

KURAL 585
An able spy is one who can assume an unsuspicious disguise, is fearless when caught and never betrays his secrets.

KURAL 586
Disguised as a monk or a mendicant, the master spy moves about investigating all, never careless, come what may.

KURAL 587
A spy must ferret out hidden facts, assuring himself that knowledge found is beyond doubt.

KURAL 588
Before believing one spy’s espionage, have another spy espy the information.

KURAL 589
See that informants do not know one another, and accept their findings only when three reports agree.

KURAL 590
One must not openly honor operatives. To do so is to divulge one’s deepest secrets.

http://www.himalayanacademy.com/book/weavers-wisdom/149
The Country

KURAL 731
Where unfailingly fertile fields, worthy men and wealthy merchants come together—that is a country!

KURAL 732
A land coveted for its vast wealth, free from calamities and yielding in abundance is indeed a country.

KURAL 733
Call that a nation which bears every burden that befalls it, yet pays in full all tariffs owed to the king.

KURAL 734
Free of famine, endless epidemics and ravaging foes—now that is a flourishing country.

KURAL 735
Proliferating factions, ruinous subversives and murderous gangs harassing the king—a real country is free from all these.

KURAL 736
An incomparable state is one never devastated; yet if devastated, it would not diminish, but prosper.

KURAL 737
Rain waters, underground waters and rivers shed from well-situated mountains, plus strong fortresses, are features of a fine country.

KURAL 738
Five ornaments adorn a country: good health, abundant harvests, wealth, happiness and safety from invasions.

KURAL 739
A land where prosperity comes easily deserves the name country, not one where wealth entails laborious toil.

KURAL 740
Even if a country acquires all these blessings, it is worth nothing if it lacks harmony between the ruler and the ruled.

http://www.himalayanacademy.com/book/weavers-wisdom/185
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

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Book Review in Hindu by Prof at JNU, New Delhi.....

Complex dialectics of Hinduism

Posting so we are aware of the book. Ignore the johalawala bile.
Complex dialectics of Hinduism
Swaran Singh

Hinduism and the Ethics of Warfare in South Asia: by Kaushik Roy

Violence, when legitimate and organised can be a positive force for social progress. Proponents of War believe that use of force constitutes the ultimate arbiter in international relations. One could even say that minus War, humans would still be living like apes; hunting, gathering and nurturing in caves. It is only through use of force in domesticating animals (distinct from hunting) and enslaving weaker clans that victors felt secure and had the leisure to settle down and think of art, poetry, literature and culture.

Over time, this ‘security-and-leisure’ led to the unfolding of new technologies and new philosophies that sought to make War more predictable and a cost-effective enterprise. This is where Ethics of War presents itself as an agency that sets and regulates rules of the game to ensure that these cost/benefit analysis and code-of-conduct are not restricted to the victor’s perspective but take into account all possible stakeholders to achieve lasting peace.

This book is an examination of multiple overlapping Hindu texts since ancient times that debate on this complex binary of just and unjust war namely, dharamyuddha and kutayuddha. It outlines an awe-inspiring enormity as also a blending of continuity and change that has remained unexplored. It contextualises these texts into their material and social circumstances and compares these with contemporary trends in Chinese, Greek, Byzantine, and European traditions.

Beyond Arthashastra

The author concedes that while it is difficult to establish a direct correlation between these classical texts and modern military strategies or to present Hinduism as one coherent monotheistic continuum over two millenniums, yet his extensive research successfully debunks Western contentions that ancient India had no major texts except Kautilya’s Arthashastra or that ancient India lacked disciplined standing armies and complex war-fighting strategies.

The moot point established by this book is that Hinduism has been a rather porous and diverse ‘Way of Life’ and yet in various guises, it has structured the thought processes of successive generations. Hindu ethics widely entrenched Indian psyche through its popular epics. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata portray actions of warriors in moral heroic drift as they present a complex intertwine of rajdharama, kshatriyadharma, kuladharma which offer no easy choices. But there is always space for interpretations and individual initiatives.

Ramayana portrays an ideal narrative of a war against non-Aryans and yet it involves ambush to kill Vaali (Baali). Krishna, the realist of Mahabharata, wants victory at all costs. He gives unethical advice to Yudhishtra to tell a lie to Drona that his son Aswathama had been killed, asks Arjuna to kill his teacher Drona and elder brother Karna while they were unarmed and not aboard their chariots.

Buddhism also challenges sacrificial rituals of asvamedha and rajasuya yajnas and yet in Mahaparinirvana Sutra, Buddha allows his disciples to take up arms to defend Buddhist order. Medieval Jain poetry extols heroic actions of warriors. But unlike the Western classical texts dominated by material and technical details, the ancient Hindu texts are much closer to Chinese as they focus on the moral and the cosmic. Like Sun Zi, the Tirukkural of Saint Valluvar, composed around 11 century, :eek: talks of exploiting enemy weakness as the way to victory. But in addition to imposing numerically strong armies he emphasised strong leadership. Brahmins served as generals in the armies of the Cholas and Chalukyas during 10 and 11 centuries.

Impact of Islam

Advent of Muslim rulers from the 9 century saw Muslim theologians describe Hindustan as the land of Kufr which shaped their war ethics as also the Hindu response to it. This period saw a rise in the vanity of personal valour amongst Rajputs at the cost of expediency and strategy.

In 1296 CE, when Delhi Sultan Alauddin Khilji attacked Jaisalmer, 16,000 women committed Jauhar and Tilak Singh with 700 men fell in the battlefield. This also led to the scripting of Sukranitisara which talks of allocating 50 per cent of revenues for armies. It preaches asanayuddha i.e. cutting of enemy supply-lines by attacking civilians and also permits kutayuddha in defending the homeland against ‘demonic’ Muslims.

Most interesting was the ethics of Rajput commanders in the service of Muslim kings. Udairaj Munshi, secretary of Mirza Raja Jai Singh, edited his master’s military dispatches, published as Insha-i-Haft Anshuman in 1699. Like Bhishma of Mahabharat, Jai Singh puts his rajdharam above everything. As he advances into Maharashtra, he negates Maratha King Shivaji’s attempts for diplomatic negotiations and advises him to “place in your ear the ring of servitude to the slaves of the imperial court.” He also feels no qualms in using kutayuddha by ordering plunder, bribery and desertions in Shivaji’s armed forces. Almost till early 20 century when British colonial rule finally produced a ‘national’ consciousness and created groundswell for subcontinent-wide anti-colonial sentiments, :eek: :eek: wars under successive rulers were seen as an opportunity for social mobility for men of the lowest classes who could achieve a permanent, often inheritable, elevation of social and material position. Even the British had created a martial race theory around Sikhs, Gurkhas, Dogras, Rajputs, and Pathans and some of these communities regarded military service as honourable while the British showed due deference to their religious sensibilities. Indeed both the militant as also the anti-militaristic freedom movements of India were entrenched in Hinduism. Gandhiji’s Hind Swaraj linked the moral regeneration of India with the political emancipation from the British and Subhas Chandra Bose’s insistence on equal participation of women in Hind Fauj was shaped by his aggressive Hinduism of Mother Goddess paradigm. :eek:

Secular India

Though independent India was set up as a secular state, episodes of violent partition, setting up of Islamic Republic of Pakistan and four wars and continuing low intensity conflict with that country have added a slant to all post-independence strategic debates. Western trained intellectuals of India have not only remained preoccupied with conforming to liberal and realist paradigms, they have been equally wary of highlighting any connections between ancient Hindu theories and modern strategic thinking lest they be dubbed as communalists. :rotfl:

However, this proverbial civilisational inheritance was clearly underlined by Nehru’s writings as also in his principles of non-alignment and Panchasheel. This is equally true of several other leading writers from amongst India’s political, scientific and business elite. For laymen, this Hindu incline remains visible in the very naming of India’s nuclear tests and ballistic missiles. Even India’s internal dissensions and insurgencies over years have become far more entrenched in religious affinities.

In this continued neglect of the enormous role of Hindu traditions, the book makes a critical addition to indigenously rooted analyses of Hindu texts on statecraft and should be a must read for students of Indian history as also those interested in Indian traditions in sociology of war studies. Only, the mention of ‘South Asia’ in title seems unclear as this is a rather recent and colonial category. Besides, it does not really look at traditions — like Hindu Kingdom of Nepal — which are distinct yet part of the South Asian reality. Instead of South Asia, perhaps ‘Indian subcontinent’ represents what it seeks to achieve.

(Swaran Singh is Professor of Diplomacy and Disarmament at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)

I think the honorable prof at JNU is not familiar with Valluvar's period. Its sad that Hindu anchired in South India has allowed this to be published and shows the fall in standards.

I also submit the reviewer is unfamiliar with both the Ramayana and the Mahabharats for he shows very superficial DOI/Bharat Ek Khoj type of knowledge of the foundational epics of India.


Sad to say he also is unfamiliar with the foundation of the Republic of India and the Consitituion that was altered so many times by the INC. The word Secular was inserted during the 1975-77 Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency.

However am thankful to him for having brought Mr. Kaushik Roy's very good book to notice.


Mr. Roy is military correspondent for The Telegraph from Kolkata.
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

Post by ramana »

X-post...
We need to consider the whole decade of the sixties as one unified whole to understand what was happening. 1965 India-Pak war had its roots in 1962 China_India war and that had its roots in the world picture in the 50s.
ramana
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

Post by ramana »

Excerpts from B Raman tributes thread:


C. Uday Bhaskar wrote:
Raman's recall of the Indian security experience, both external and internal, was extraordinary. He could link disparate developments dating to the 1950s; the challenge posed by the erstwhile Left-wing cadres, the perfidy of the major powers including the USA and China, the turf battles among the intelligence agencies, political pusillanimity and more -- issues that he often wrote about in the national media.


{IOW everything has a past. If we have short term memory then everything appears strange. Modern learning relies on current pitcure ignoring past antecedents and looking in silos or isolation}

All of this was later distilled in his book, The Kao-boys - Down Memory Lancer (2007), which provides a valuable account of the Indian external intelligence agency, R&AW in the run-up to the Bangladesh war and more.

In the last decade with the explosion of the audio-visual medium, cyber and social media outlets in India, Raman, who was always a prolific writer, blossomed as it were. He took to the new communication technology like a natural and his many wry and insightful comments were disseminated through various outlets.

Raman became a one-man cyber guru. In this regard, his contribution will remain distinctive. From the Web site that he maintained in a methodical manner to his Facebook and twitter comments and TV appearances, Raman was everywhere.

Post Kargil, the effete Indian response to the complex national security challenges was a matter of deep anguish and muted anger. Raman felt very strongly about the need to create a more informed national security community in India and bemoaned the fact that there was a dearth of such committed professionals.

{Reminds one of the railings of Vyasa at the end of the Mahabharata about people ignoring dharma the right way of conduct.}

Many of his writings and public appearances had that ring of deep concern at the sorry state of affairs. His own expertise in the intelligence domain made him more acutely aware of the many inadequacies in the system.

A pragmatic realist, he was always committed to what he perceived to be the national interest and advocated radical policy initiatives, but his advice often fell on deaf ears.

{A pragmatic realist works with what is available and not seek to disengage from reality. I think his support for UPA was from this prespective. Its in power and needs his professional advice. And also his endorsing Modi in his latter phase also is based on this realism.}

Vikram Soood:

In this book, Raman is remarkably chatty as he takes the reader through his days in the intelligence world and its interactions with the powers that be. Raman expresses his anger at the US State Department of the Bill Clinton [ Images ] era pressuring us on Pakistan and the eternal hyphenation between India [ Images ] and Pakistan that was the hall mark of the nineties till Kargil 1999.

His final remark on the US and perhaps the Western attitude is still valid when he says 'An over-anxiety to protect Pakistan from the consequences of its misdeeds still continues to be the defining characteristic of policy making in the State Department.' Secretary of State John Kerry might do himself a favour by heeding Raman's last warning ' ... I am convinced in my mind that if there is an act of terrorism involving the use of weapons of mass destruction one day, it would have originated from Pakistani territory.'
We should try to understand this deep rroted US desire to be a frenemy(friend enemy) of India. We see this in the long duration across many generations of US officials in SD, some in military and many in academia and the in-between world of chatterati who move in and out of govt. Its like some institutional wisdom imparted by seniors to carry the torch. Young whipper snappers also spout same nonsense.

Status quo, stability, Western image in Musilm world and all sort of things are bandied about but the end cause is some how to undermine India.

On China the principal challenger for India in the long century:
CUB:
Pakistan apart, China had become an area of special focus for Raman and the Chennai Centre for China Studies benefited from his many writings and oral contributions. One of Raman's last public articulations was a tweet about China where as @sorbonne75, he advised: 'Ind-Japan shld make Chinas seeming strengths into strategic vulnerabilities.'

Like many of his cyber contacts, I always looked forward to his regular mails and the last one (May 15) was about the troubled India-China relationship and the Chinese premier's visit to India. The comment was vintage Raman-esque. Cogent, numerically arranged and closing with a policy prescription that could have been put up to the Indian Cabinet.

The last paragraph noted: 'It would be in India's interest too to work for a border accord as early as possible.'

'At the same time, India should not accept the Chinese formulation that the absence of a border accord should not come in the way of the economic and other relations. This formulation has immensely benefited China.'
His brother B.S. Raghavan
On coming to know of Raman’s death, Nicholas Manring, Acting US Consul General in Chennai, was one of the first to convey the entire Consulate General’s “deepest condolences” and “heartfelt sympathies”, and praised him as “an important member of Chennai’s strategic affairs community” who “impressed numerous Foreign Service Officers over the years with his breadth and depth of knowledge and his willingness to engage in thought-provoking discussions”. Manring held Raman’s demise to be “a great loss to the think-tank community in India and to his friends in the diplomatic community”.

MOST NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT
The print and electronic media in India, and the tweets and blogs of all those who had been keenly following his views, are overflowing with similar sentiments. Raman, to my mind, was among the first to have mastered the great scope and sweep of tweets and blogs for forging enormous networks of audiences in a given field of interest. That he could make them instruments in campaigning for a point of view or cause and in creating instant and widespread public awareness is perhaps his most notable achievement. Within a very short time, he built up a huge following and with each of his close and constant aficionados avidly reproducing his stand through their own tweets and blogs, he was able to reach out to, and make an impact on, netizens on a global scale.

For instance, one of his tweets asking for Narendra Modi being given a chance to become Prime Minister created a firestorm on the Internet for days. He not only had clearcut opinions on issues, however complicated, but had the ability to make it the centre-piece of spirited advocacy by all the means of communication at his disposal.

For all his occasionally frontal and unsparing critiques of persons and policies, Raman was universally held to be a professional to his fingertips, with no personal axe to grind. That was why both the National Democratic Alliance and United Progressive Alliance governments readily made him a member of various bodies such as the National Security Advisory Board, the Kargil Inquiry Committee and the Naresh Chandra Committee on redesigning the security architecture.

Professional he was, masterly in marshalling facts and arguments, impeccable in distilling the essence to the last nuance of an event or an issue, and forceful in articulation often characterised by words tumbling out at a fast and furious rate, but he was also too pungent and too consumed by likes and dislikes in respect of official and non-official actors in diplomacy, governance and politics. He himself admits to one such situation when, having kept a poker face for much of his period in service, on reaching home on the day of retirement, he loudly shouted “********”, a reference to the US State Department officialdom. :rotfl:

{For my :rotfl: see the comment from the Chennai consulate official.

Raman Garu would have been reported on this forum for shouting that word by the ever watchful members!}



CONCRETE SOLUTIONS

Having myself been at one time part of the security and intelligence community, and having had a hand in the drafting of the original paper for the creation of RAW and the Border Security Force (BSF), I used to caution Raman during our conversations to temper his judgments in the interests of greater credibility and acceptance.

......
Subjects falling within the domains of security and intelligence are necessarily intricate and complex, and their treatment will understandably tend to be erudite. This is why the political class — even informed but lay readers — for no fault of theirs, may not be quick to grasp the implications.

If they have to be fully involved in decision-making, a commentator should not just stop with expounding the various dimensions and ramifications of issues, but also give in intelligible terms his recommendations for possible courses of action to be adopted by state actors.
I was happy to find Raman appreciating my advice and giving concrete solutions in his later writings,

I never thought I would be one day writing about his passing. He was always so full of life, so full of ideas on what was his life blood: security, intelligence and the fight against terrorism.

All his waking hours he was holding on to his iPad, poring over the day’s national and international news, commentaries and columns, tweeting, blogging and churning out essay after essay of his own, two or three per day sometimes, on what he found to be right or wrong with happenings around the world.

Even when he had slipped in his last days into a delirious state (I later learnt from a study of write-ups on Web sites that this was one of the pointers to the inevitable hour with regard to terminally ill cancer patients), his mutterings were all about measures to banish the scourge of terrorism from the face of the earth and ways of reordering political and strategic relations among the existing and emerging global powers.

...
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

Post by SSridhar »

Understanding Kautilya's Four Upayas - P.K.Gautam, IDSA
The four upayas or approaches, i.e., ways of realising aim or object have existed since the period of the epics and the Dharmasastra. The upayas are sama- dana- behda- danda: conciliation, gifts, rupture and force. The upayas have a wider application, being useful in securing the submission of anyone. In a 1954 essay “The Four Upayas of Hindu Diplomacy” in The Indian Year Book of International Affairs published by The Indian Study Group of International Affairs, University of Madras in 1954 R. Bhaskaran invited attention to history to show that upayas existed in the Dharmasastras, Sukra Niti, Agni and Matsya Puranas, and Nitisara of Kamanadaki, besides many other texts. The South Indian Jain scholar Somadeva Suri, in the Nitivakyamitra written in the 10th century, mentions the four upayas. In Sanskrit literature, the upayacatusthaya or the “four expedients” and the “turiya” or fourth upaya invariably means Danda or force. By the time of the Ramayana, these four upayas had become such well-known commonplace that the poet could put these quite casually in a soliloquy. For example, Hanuman argues “Here the situation is beyond the three upayas and the fourth alone is indicated. One can not negotiate with demons nor bribe people abounding in wealth. A strong nation cannot be divided against itself, only superior force can win.” (R. Bhaskaran, “ The Four Upayas of Hindu Diplomacy” in The Indian Year Book of International Affairs published by The Indian Study Group of International Affairs, University of Madras in 1954). In Mahabharata and later Smrtis, the upayas are mentioned as well and in the famous commentary on Yajnavalkya (the Mitaksara), the four methods are held applicable not only in diplomacy but in all human relationships, including those between father and son, and teacher and pupil. Further, each upaya has many variations or procedures. V.R. Ramachandra Dikshitar, in War in Ancient India (1944), noted that the Puranas and later niti works like that of Kamadakiya add three more upayas to the original four—upekha, maya and indrajala. Maya is an aspect of danda, and upekha and indrajala aspects of bheda. In this commentary, in order to avoid complexities, I prefer to stick to the basic four.

Interestingly, without any reference to Kautilya, the 20th century pioneer of power politics theory Hans J. Morgenthau, in the chapter of different methods of balance of power in his book Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, (1966) mentions that “The balance of power can be carried on either by diminishing the weight of the heavier scale or by increasing the weight of the lighter one.” His chapter has sections on: 1.) Divide and Rule; 2.) Compensation; 3.) Armaments; and 4.) Alliances. The four sections are very close to the Kautilyan concepts of bheda (divide and rule), dana (compensation), danda (armaments) and sama (alliances).

It appears that the four upayas are not well studied by scholars and are often used in a casual, off-hand manner. Another variation, in its worst form, is the issue of (mis)quotation of Kautilya out of context in various instances. A few examples can be provided to demonstrate this:

(a) The historian Kaushik Roy in an article “Just and Unjust War in Hindu Philosophy”, in the Journal of Military Ethics (Vol. 6, No. 3, 2007, pp. 232-45) concludes with the bizarre idea that in its counterinsurgency strategy, India employs Kautilyan bhedneti (divide and rule) where it employs Hindus and Christian Nagas from Nagaland to crush Muslim Kashmiri insurgents. This conclusion is false and the analysis is flawed logic. Worse, it has been constructed and painted in an artificially manufactured Kautilyan framework. In reality, the turn-over or rotation of units is a practice followed by the army since independence. Units spend two to three years in field and operational areas, and their identity is well-known. The author fails to provide any evidence to support his claim. Such a statement is based on incorrect or partial/superficial understanding of military operations. The Indian military posts units to peace and field areas on rotation, never on caste or communal lines.

(b) The word ‘Kautilya’ is being used by some Western and Indian scholars very loosely, as advocating the concepts of treachery, cunningness, and divide and rule. A Norwegian scholar from PRIO, Ashild Kolas, in her article “ What up With Territorial Council” in the December 2012 issues of The Seminar, on selective peace talks with various insurgents by Indian negotiators in Assam, writes: “...it is obvious that Kautilyan tactics remain popular with India’s security establishment.” The author, however, does not clarify what she means by “Kautilyan”. The work of Kautilya includes 6,000 sutras and has been described as a “library of ancient India” by German Indologist Johann Myer in 1926. It appears that this is again Ms Kolas’ superficial understanding of the four upayas.

(c) Cascading and repetitive use of secondary sources continues. To sound profound, with little clue on the text of the Arthasastra, weak formulation continues. For this, there are some more examples which must be explained. Some Western scholars are very enamoured to use selectively borrowed secondary ideas of some Indian authors. A book written by a former intelligence officer, Asoka Raina, titled Inside RAW: The Story of India’s Secret Service (1981) alludes to ancient Indian scriptures and the laws of Manu and Kautilya on intelligence. In his journalistic account of the Sino-Indian rivalry titled Great Game East: India, China and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier (2012), Bertil Lintner picks up from Raina’s work and a similar work by former BBC correspondent Subir Bhaumik’s Troubled Periphery: Crisis of India’s North East (2009). Lintner again parrots sama-dana-bheda-danda being employed as an evil strategy by the Indian state in the Northeast. These authors ignore the post-colonial nation building experience. It is no wonder that vague accounts based on superficial reading of secondary sources flourish in most of the writings by Western authors who cannot then be called scholars on Kautilya (barring, I must add here, Indologists). This is best exemplified further by the work of Terry Crowdy in his The Enemy Within: A History of Spies, Spymasters and Espionage (2006), who assumes the fiction of Vishakanyas as to be true, whereas in fact it is based, as alluded to, on the 5th century CE play Mudrarakshaka by the playwright Vishakhadatta.

(d) In a very comprehensive survey of the history of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), Nani Gopal Mahanta, in his book Confronting the State: ULFA’s Quest for Sovereginity (2013) again puts forward an idea incorrectly. Mahanta at page 142 writes that the basic premise of Kautilyan statecraft of four upayas is: “...that longer the negotiations, the easier it is to wear down rebel leaders.” A careful reading of the Kautilya’s Arthsastyra (KA) shows that this concept of “wearing out by delaying” is not mentioned anywhere in the text. It is obvious that this is Mahanta’s own idea or a commentary or bhasya which must be attributed to his analysis, and not to be fired from Kautilya’s shoulder.

Arthasastra sutra 22 in chapter 13 of Book One, “Concerning the Topics of Training”(1.13.22) mentions: “Those, however, who are enraged or greedy or frightened or proud, are likely to be seduced by enemies.” Kautilya further suggests that “He( the King) should manage those who are discontented by means of conciliations, gifts, dissention or force.” I do not agree with Kautilya, but at the same time I need to add here that Kautilya cannot be faulted as he just explained the practical aspects of state craft during a specific period of history. Experience in independent India of the 20th and early 21st century shows that insurgents are not enemies. The word dushman or enemy is never allowed to be used by the Indian military to describe the misguided countrymen. Out of the four ways or upayas of sama- dama- -bheda- danda, it is clear that bheda or ‘divide and rule’ would not work in the long run in a counter insurgency. Yes, some force or danda may be required, perhaps minimal. The main argument is that all the four upayas are not to be applied in a rigid template on issues of internal security in dealing with insurgents in a nation-building process.

Thus it is important to locate the text of traditional indigenous knowledge in their correct context. By picking up one idea such as bheda and then saying it to be a Kautilyan idea is limited understanding of it. Scholars should avoid false attribution and heresy accounts when the working text of the Arthasastra is not fully known to them. It is better, as is given in the Arthasastra, to mention that what one writes other than the text is a bhasya or a commentary and not necessarily what Kautilya said. Thus this commentary.
ramana
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

Post by ramana »

Very good find.

Thanks, SS.

Will try to invite folks to this thread...
ramana
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Re: Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

Post by ramana »

India's appearance of lack or absence of strategic thinking or cluelessness is India's strategy for dealing with stronger or bigger powers.

To understand this read my favorite story of the Brahmin and the Tiger from the prespective of the jackal.

Over the weeks will show how it was implemented after 1857 and got us here.
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