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.

—-
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.

Follow for real stories about Indians who changed the world.

[A_Gupta]

This article touches on Indian strategic thinking; but I'm posting it here also so as to keep an eye on the author.

Farah N. Jan is a senior lecturer in the International Relations Program at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in nuclear security, alliance politics, and threshold wars in the Middle East and South Asia. She is completing a book on the Saudi-Pakistani alliance.

Iran and the Indispensable Broker: How Pakistan Outmaneuvers India on the World Stage
https://warontherocks.com/iran-and-the- ... rld-stage/

India’s record over the same period is one of conspicuous abstention. In the Persian Gulf, where millions of Indian nationals generate remittance flows exceeding $40 billion annually, India has deepened its economic ties and cultivated warm bilateral relationships, but has never converted that weight into a security role. There is no defense pact, no troops stationed on Gulf soil, no joint command structure. Pakistan, with a fraction of India’s economic footprint in the region, has all three. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has cultivated personal relationships with Gulf leaders assiduously — the visits, the investment pledges, the carefully staged bilaterals. What he has not built is the architecture that would make India indispensable rather than merely welcome. India has built relationships everywhere and obligations nowhere.

{emphasis added}

Also:

India’s foreign policy underperformance relative to its capabilities is, at its root, a product of the same logic that explains Pakistan’s overperformance. India is secure enough not to need patrons, wealthy enough not to need remittance corridors, and large enough to set the terms of most bilateral relationships rather than adapting to the terms of others. These are, in the ordinary sense of the word, advantages. In the specific sense of generating diplomatic entrepreneurialism, they are constraints.

The ideological framework that governs Indian foreign policy, strategic autonomy, or in its current variant, vishwabandhu, a phrase that roughly translates as “India is a friend to all,” is not without internal coherence. It reflects a genuine reading of India’s interest in preserving optionality in a world dividing between American and Chinese orbits. But optionality is not strategy. A state that refuses to impose costs on Russia over Ukraine, maintains arms exports to Israel while abstaining on Gaza, and declines to take a position on any contested question of regional order is not exercising strategic autonomy. It is performing it, and performance without commitment generates no alliance relationships, no dependent states, no clients who owe their security to Indian support.

The civil-military dimension deepens the same pattern. Indian foreign policy is produced through complex coordination among competing institutions — thoroughness at the cost of speed. Pakistan’s foreign policy is made, for better and for worse, by the army. This produces pathologies that are well-documented, the tolerance for militant networks, the double game that has frustrated every American administration since 2001. It also produces speed and coherence at precisely the moments that matter, which is why it was Pakistani Chief of Army Staff Asim Munir, not any Indian counterpart, on the phone with Trump and Tehran in the same week.

Briefly, I think India is following the strategy that a country that has much to grow should follow. Two and a quarter centuries ago, the American President Thomas Jefferson said something that Farah Jan, who is an academic in the US, should have been aware of.

Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801:
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/jefinau1.asp

...commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none;....

Of course, it would be utterly unfashionable to compare, say, PM Modi to Thomas Jefferson; the modern world would prefer to compare him to Mussolini or some such.

[S_Madhukar]

My personal pet peeve (thinking as a benevolent Baki and nationalist Bharatiya) is despite the population we have not expanded the armed forces as a tiny European country would dream of to gain leverage either through expeditionary means or tactical deployments. Heck we don’t even arm our forces properly and while I don’t want it to be a merely job generating opportunity, I feel like somewhere we let that excess energy bleed inside the country than outside it.

A Baki would think naturally if they had half of $700B in investments they would be kings of the Ummah whereas we look at China and say man that’s not good enough. Chinese look at the US on the other hand and say man we are not good enough yet to deploy at scale like them so let’s wait it out

Our UN deployments in the past should have showcased our expeditionary abilities but that isn’t acknowledged as much in the kind of media narratives we have today. While fools rush in where angels fear to tread, there is no doubt that Bakis reach an acme with every new dictator , only to leave their country in a bigger ditch. Running fast only to jump down a cliff is something Bakis and their media will never admit and this is the real disadvantage of owning all narrative channels where you get no real feedback

Agree on our bureaucracy and overthinking, no doubt we need to be more agile. Past few years we have been more agile but we need to do better.

[chetak]

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 ji,

If wishes were horses, ..........

This is the topmost subject on the govt's mind and has been since 2014

and yet nothing seems to have materialized so far.

Blaming the govt ad nauseam is not the answer

It takes two hands to clap, no.....

At every stage, impossible conditions are sought to be enforced on the foreign sellers and insultingly small orders are placed, if at all, on local manufacturers, so how do these guys survive in such a disinterested market subject to the whims and fancies of various "operators" who pass by like ships in the night. Various lobbies and self interest groups further muddy the waters by seeding the presstitutes and, creating doubts of "corruption". This is the govt's fatal flaw, they do not want their good name sullied, so the rest of it all can go take a jump

For instance, if someone says, they spent 12 Billion$ on this or that tech, that's just the tip of the iceberg

Years of developing an ecosystem to nurture leading edge technologies is never factored in or costed, and if it was, the true costs would would be many, many multiples of 12 billion$..................just saying onlee

Instead of TOT, look for a complete buyout of the tech and hopefully build from there on. Which agency can be trusted to take the baton and run with it until the engine is well and truly done.

Academia and industry are parasitic organisms, and in a two way support system, each with a dual defined role of host nurtures the other. This is how the amriki MIC works. Is there any evidence of this happening here

we have a messy democracy with an end user market controlled by corrupt gatekeepers who have always gamed the system

A nurturing ecosystem to produce not just competent players but ensuring that a vast cohort of innovative stakeholders are fed into the technology space is where we are lacking

Are we to understand that over the past tens of decades the IITs and other academia, including research institutes were just unable to produce such innovative exemplars who could possibly have addressed the design aspects of a jet engine and brought it into production

How come our expensive IITs have, thus far, only managed to feed such technology rich ecosystems in foreign lands

How many trillion$ has that cost us over so many decades of foolish "generosity". Is it something that we could afford..........

almost all of our accomplished tech heavy academic institutions, baring a few like TIFR, have become heavily contaminated with urban naxals in the humanities departments, with no one being able to control them. This is a planned BIF knife thrust to gut these centres of excellence using these woke urban naxal commie criminals to create unrest and strife in such institutions.

The govt, at times acts like an intermediate host, and at other times, it changes it's role to one that functions as a vector or delivery host. At either ends are expected supporting and sustaining networks, feeding into the industry academia ecosystems to complete the whole

For the orchestra to deliver a symphony, every one has to first perform in his / her assigned role

India does not own the malacca straits, there are other players that may / may not cooperate with such grandiose schemes like blockading. Each of those players have different dependencies and linkages with the cheen and like any country, they are also driven by self interests dominating all else

BTW, if anyone is actually capable of "blockading" the malacca straits, it is the amrikis. To think otherwise is a pipe dream. India is not there yet and will need a much bigger navy to pull it off, and that will happen in the fullness of time, provided we continue to grow economically

This is not the time to piss away hard won advantages that has taken decades to acquire, just to thump the chest and see it all disappear down the drain like the pakis, lankans, maldives and the beedis have done

The pakis and the cheen, and GOK who else, are following the very effective israeli /amriki methodology used in eyeraan to take out the leadership in India, if and when the fertilizer hits the rotating parts mounted on the ceiling.

The cheen have a huge collection of internet enabled cameras spread out all over India, and that data is being shared with the pakis in real time, and now we are slowly realizing why. The cameras have been installed in PSUs, airports, MIL bases and secure installations, docks and also to monitor city wide traffic movements (may be even BARC and ISRO) and train stations

(For the most part, these cameras have been purchased and installed by the GoI, state governments and thousands of municipalities, all directly supplied by cheen companies, or conveniently re stickered / label changed to show some unknown Indian company to enable the masking of the cheen sourcing)

[Vayutuvan]

Academia and industry are parasitic organisms, and in a two way support system, each with a dual defined role of host nurtures the other. This is how the amriki MIC works. Is there any evidence of this happening here (1)
...

Are we to understand that over the past tens of decades the IITs and other academia, including research institutes (2)
How come our expensive IITs have, thus far, only managed to feed such technology rich ecosystems in foreign lands

(1) It used to happen in Hyderabad. Look at the number of people in Defense Labs, APJAK Research Imarat, BDL, HAL (avionics), ECIL who are in the top positions. Quite a few (I dare to say even a majority) have graduated from University College of Engg., OU, JNTU (then Nagaurjuna Engg College) and/or earned their MTechs and PhDs from these institutions.

(2) IITians were good for research as their fundamentals were solid. The degrees were hard-earned. Since there was a paucity of research opportunities (only development) in India then, they had to go to foreign lands, mostly the US. The UK/Canada/Australia/NZ academia was not as good as the US. They have degraded further. Germany, France, and Switzerland were not suitable due to the language of instruction. Some went to USSR. They came back and did well. Some DPSU folks went to (now Ukraine) and USSR on two-three stints. They also contributed in a big way to the DPSUs.

After the fall of the USSR and the opening up of the Indian economy, the floodgates opened for IT.

I want to ask all of those IITians here on this forum who have advanced degrees in STEM (excluding MDs) to work in the areas in which they got their degrees.

I guess that a good chunk, even a majority, have switched careers to IT, if they ever had a job in their area of training.

(edited to improve grammar and style)

[Vayutuvan]

A few lucky people landed tenure-track jobs in the US. Unfortunately, that was not possible for folks who did basic sciences. It had long been the case that if you had a PhD in Physics, Maths, Chemistry, or Biology PhD, you needed to be a genius to get into a good department. There too all of these departments have become service departments with a large teaching load and very few PhD students. That means no or very few TAs.