Anit Mukherjee
Crises, especially ones that do not end too badly, can be a good thing. India’s democracy is full of such examples. For instance, the trauma of the Emergency discredited the appeal of authoritarianism among most Indians and the 1991 balance of payments crisis led to first-generation economic reforms.
This also applies to our military experience. The 1962 defeat led to massive militarisation and helped achieve a more credible outcome in the 1965 war and a famous victory in the 1971 war. Similarly, the 1999 Kargil war resulted in significant, long overdue national security reforms. How might historians look back upon the current India-China border crisis and what can we take away from it?
But two caveats. First, this crisis was not of India’s making as revealed by the military’s scramble in responding to Chinese troop deployments in May 2020. Distracted by the pandemic, the government took a while and eventually came up with an appropriate tit-for-tat manoeuvre in end-August. Second, the Indian military has just embarked on perhaps its most significant institutional reform, triggered by the prime minister’s (PM)’s decision to create a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS). However, apart from speculative media stories, there has been no official document released by the first CDS, General Bipin Rawat. Commenting on unconfirmed reports, then, just becomes an exercise in punditry.
Yet, to the credit of the Indian Army, the senior leadership appears to be raising deeper questions. For instance, one of the offensive strike corps, historically tasked to operate on the western border, is now being given a responsibility towards the north. Such “rebalancing,” as Army Chief General MM Naravane, put it, was long overdue but raises more questions. Was a crisis necessary to bring about such a change? If the answer is yes, then there is an even more chilling prospect — what other skeletons lie buried, undiscovered, till the next crisis?
There also seems to greater awareness of the need to reform professional military education — the most-effective method to engineer an intellectual shift. Reportedly, this initiative has also come from the Army Chief and there are hectic consultations within the organisation.
