Evolution of Indian Strategic Thought-1

[A_Gupta]

Not sure what the confusion is of India’s goal of Vikasit Bharat.

Concomitant with prosperity is the means to defend it.

Given recent events, India needs to develop a strategy to deal with decapitation strikes.

India also needs to develop an effective lever against each major or peer power.

For example, India needs to be able to selectively block the Malacca Strait - this is a strategic lever over China.

India needs to figure out something similar to hold over the US (like China’s rare earths chokehold).

And so on.

[A_Gupta]

“We need a lakh drones” is to be facilitated by the Raksha Mantri; but the demand for it has to come from the strategists in the Armed forces.

Further, this polarization that every unmet idea requires a shuffle of personnel is ridiculous. This is not strategic thought, this is Twitter-giri.

[bala]

start with the defense minister move him to some other position
put in qualified younger person in his 50's

Listen to Lt. Gen Raj Shukla:

India needs a defence and Military technology partner

Shukla ji is tired with the entire defence procurement rigmarole and wants action and orders. He wants bright start ups to be at the helm of creation, bring up Indian talent pay them whatever including videshi origin indians. Have a crack team in key projects that are of national importance and make it happen hook or crook. He is tired of process/procedures in the defence sector created by the Babus of IAS. At the same time he wants tie ups with those that can part technology on mutual basis. He is advocating domain experts in every field being nurtured properly.

[S_Madhukar]

I don’t see a problem with the state. It is the mindset of the people. I see the government cleaning up the piles of garbage around the Yamuna; but people in automobiles littering, throwing stuff out of the vehicle and over the high fence on the Yamuna bridge, so the situation barely improves.

And of course, the state is run by many such people.

If the people were Gandhian, civic cleanliness would be one of their top values.

The “system” can readily be amended. Cultural shortcomings are much much more difficult to change.

To think that a new Constitution will change things is a bit of a fantasy.

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Also, from a historical perspective, the Indian Constitution is the Motilal Nehru proposal of 1929 or thereabouts and Ambedkar. It is not Gandhian. Gandhi wanted to give primacy to the village panchayats, and saw the Indian state as a confederation of panchayats, for example.

Have we coddled the masses too long for the pains they have suffered for last 1000 years…. specially the last 200 years when the definition of a democratic nation state took over from a civilisational state? Again I know only some % of people visibly get coddled at the expense of those that need real help. Reservations and subsidies might have been ways of taking care but lack of jurisprudence and legal enforcement has meant coddling continues. The same Abdul who was happy to have escaped with just a couple of sticks from the Ahmed on the orders of gora, today is emboldened to STSJ. Bit like Indians follow rules in NY And Dubai but not in Delhi .This coddling behaviour emboldens even weak citizens to extract more from the govt. I am not able to articulate this well but looking at someone like LKY, I feel we did not get have the real fatherly figure that was needed after independence. Maybe Yogi or AS might be better at it.

[Manish_Sharma]

https://x.com/san_x_m/status/2044825659265171813?s=20

His name was Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

In 1930, he was 19 years old. A boy from Madras is boarding a ship to England on a scholarship to Cambridge.

During that sea voyage, he opened his notebook and started calculating.

By the time the ship docked in Southampton, he had worked out something no one in the history of science had understood before.

Stars do not simply fade and die. Stars above a certain mass collapse into themselves with such force that nothing can stop them. Not light. Not time. Not physics as anyone understood it.

What he had discovered on that ship would eventually be called black holes.

He arrived at Cambridge. He spent four years refining his calculations. He showed them to Arthur Eddington. The most famous astronomer in the world at that time. The man who had proven Einstein right.

Eddington watched his progress. Encouraged him. Asked him to present his findings at the Royal Astronomical Society in January 1935.

Then Eddington gave his own presentation immediately after.

He publicly ridiculed Chandrasekhar in front of the entire scientific establishment. He said the theory had no physical meaning. He called it absurd. He used his enormous reputation to crush a 24-year-old Indian student in front of everyone who mattered.

Chandrasekhar left that conference devastated.

He appealed to the president of the International Astronomical Union. He was told not to respond to Eddington publicly.

He left England.

He went to America. To the University of Chicago. He drove 150 miles every week to teach a class of just two students. Those two students were Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang.

Both of them won the Nobel Prize before he did.

He spent 50 years working quietly. He never stopped.

In 1983, the Nobel Committee called.

53 years after he worked out the existence of black holes on a ship as a teenager, the Nobel Prize in Physics was his.

NASA later named its most powerful X-ray telescope after him.

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

The universe he described is real. Eddington was wrong. The boy on the boat was right.

Most Indians have never heard his name.

They should say it every day.

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