Strategic Matters

What would be your strategy if you were leading in a two yacht race?

History is like a Radiohead song, long boring stretches followed by short spasms that really rock. The past few months in India (and possibly a few more to come) will etch a stronger mark on the pages of history book than most periods in recent times.

For one thing, we saw our decades old strategic paradigm changed in a mere fortnight. That the non-alignment thing was a sham and a practical impossibility was never in doubt, but at least India had a few firm principles that no one would dare violate.

It was interesting to watch the Devil's Advocate interview of Arun Shourie.

Karan Thapar: Yes. The whole of interpretation of the Hyde Act is irrelevant to the NSG

Arun Shourie: You are making assertions about the Hyde Act which are absolute bunk.

Karan Thapar: The NSG has given India fuel assurances. There is no bar on the size of strategic reserve. It gives India unlimited access under NSG concerns to non proliferation and enrichment technologies. It also allows India the right to reprocess. All of those were deemed to be deficiencies by some analysts — deficiencies in the 123 that have been taken care of by the NSG.

Arun Shourie: You are just completely fabricating things which are not there in the guidelines at all. Where is this bit about unlimited supplies in the NSG guidelines?

Karan Thapar: There is no bar. The NSG waiver permits India access to fuel supplies without restriction, it permits India to develop strategic reserves without limitation, it permits India access to proliferation technologies that are so defined to do with enrichment and reprocessing.

Arun Shourie: You are completely lying through your teeth to your viewers.

Karan Thapar: The point is — there is no bar on them. This is a waiver which is an exemption.

Basically Arun Shourie's contention was that the waiver didn't have explicit provisions for building strategic fuel reserves. Karan Thapar's view was that, the waiver didn't explicitly prohibit building of strategic reserves either!

It would be absurd to pretend that the NSG countries will act as though the US did not exist. So, it is futile to argue which item (Hyde Act, 1-2-3, NSG Waiver) supersedes what. As we see it, the point of these supposedly legally binding treaties is to ensure that if in future these countries try to impose any sanctions or take even more severe measures - they have something to fall back upon to make a pretense of being "moral" in front of the whole world. This pretense of morality is highly necessary for the North America/Western Europe bloc. We are not suggesting that they are being unfair, despite their overwhelming military and economic might - but even the mighty needs a layer of propaganda.

According to some experts, ultimately the NSG countries, whose list looks like a who's who of US client states, will act according to prevailing geo-political conditions of the world. Hence one should not get too worked up about strict interpretations of those documents.

This is an acceptable view, except that it drastically changes our strategic doctrine. From the dire and urgent need to maintain our nuclear sovereignty in view of hostile neighbors, we clandestinely moved to where we feel no need to test, i.e. hope and prayers.

We strongly recommend reading B. Raman's article in The Outlook and Shobori Ganguly's article in The Pioneer. We are willing to bet many of the facts in either article will come as a complete shock to many cheerleaders of the Nuke Deal.

Karan Thapar has a point, Arun Shourie is being pessimistic. But optimism is a poor substitute for strategic thinking.

Coming back to the yacht race, the best strategy is to exactly emulate everything the trailing yacht is doing. You can't go wrong - even if both makes the same mistakes, the lead will be maintained.

The Congress strategy is essentially the same. In a Tehelka interview, P. Chidambaram said that the BJP does not have any original economic policy. This was a remarkable statement which gave away the anxiety of the FM. Actually it is the Congress which does not have any strategy. They did, in the earlier decades of Nehruvian Socialism. We had tonnes of doctrines, principles etc. etc. both on economic matters as well as strategic. After the collapse of that regime, essentially Congress is just trying to beat others to the shore - by even making the mistakes the others are about to make. The OBC quota scheme is a case in point. It was not something they planned to do but it was an idea whose time had come. They had to beat the regional parties in the race.

The same thing is happening in economic areas also. After being a very belligerent opponent of any reforms of the BJP led NDA Government (this war was fought both inside and outside the parliament, by launching psyops and deploying a cavalry of evangelical socialists), suddenly Congress had a bad case of reform-envy. Hence the hurried Nuke deal which changed our strategic doctrine in a fell sweep.

So, our foreign policy is now held hostage to electoral politics. This in itself is a mind blowing change, whose repercussions will be felt for decades to come.