Daily Times

Is India really turning into a Garrison State? The way of the Samurai in ancient Japan was a chivalric code grounded in personal honour, battle field elan, and self-immolation, regardless of the outcome of the combat. The objective was to humiliate the adversary by subjecting him to defeat in detail leaving no room for him except hara-kiri. The panache of battle colours and Samurai’s armpur was a personal statement bordering on a sacred ritual where the fight was privileged over the victory or defeat. Pakistan and India have also been caught in a time warp of battle field glory, martyrdom, and deification of the combat regardless of the outcome. Both countries revel in the cut and thrust of the combat minting new heroes and martyrs every time they go to war. All typical Garrison States like the pre WWII Japan and Nazi Germany display similar traits.

In Pakistan the warrior code was sedulously nurtured due to the insecurity complex made worse by an implacably hostile bigger neighbor. India which took a divergent track due to Nehruvian pacifism and democratic resilience of political system was expected to turn into a pluralistic political entity, engendering a climate of hope and amity for the small neighbours. Instead it has metamorphosed into a regional predator, riven by communal feuds and inspired by the rabidly misanthropic Hindutva creed. It is a creed that has all the negatives of a Samurai warrior ethos minus its pluses. Hindu Rashthra riding exclusivism besides being pugnacious is a predator that likes to prey upon the lives, property, and culture of the religious minorities in India. This combative Durga spirit is actively promoted and celebrated in the epistemic and verbal narratives of BJP apologists. The same spirit unfortunately animates the Indian world view vis a visneighbouring countries.

India unfortunately under the present communal minded leadership has regressed towards a non-democratic past where might was right amongst several feuding principalities. It was that chaos and disorder that had invited a colonial intervention

You are with or against us hubris so redolent of a global power’s hegemonism has been adopted as a foreign policy template by India after agreeing to act as a regional surrogate for a global power. The political revanchism of Indian political leadership gets its inspiration from a primordial atavism that pays court to its own deities at the cost of other symbols of religious affection belonging to low castes and ostracized religions. It was all very well if India and Pakistan were pitchforkedin ancient Japan but here they are smack in the middle of a nuclearized region with the potential to initiate a war that could threaten the entire world. The Samurai ethics therefore should give way to a new era of nuclear balance of power. It is a balance of power born out of a mutually assured destruction, that as a notion of nuclear strategy, has edged out all other fancy notions peddled by such academics and scholars as Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, Thomas Shelling, Lawrence Freedman, and Martin Van Creveld.

All notions of nuclear strategy have died their natural death after having choked on their own absurdities. The balance of terror is what we are left with if we parse apart carefully all the 44 rungs of nuclear escalation propounded by Herman Kahn. So if the balance of terror in fact is the balance of power the essence of nuclear strategy is the mutual deterrence. Any attempts at upsetting that balance of terror or the nuclear balance of power are fraught with the risks of accidental nuclear wars. The anti ballistic shields and enhanced protection are all costly red herrings for a determined foe prepared to cross the nuclear Rubicon. With the addition of naval dimension the second strike capability of both nuclear adversaries stands confirmed. What then is this strange Indian preoccupation with discovering a space for conventional conflict well below Pakistan’s nuclear tolerance thresholds?

India unfortunately under the present communal minded leadership has regressed towards a non-democratic past where might was right amongst several feuding principalities. It was that chaos and disorder that had invited a colonial intervention. The dominant Hindutva narrative that sets great store by domination of the weak has become the weltanschauung of the present Indian leadership. The above inexorably leads towards a militarization of national policy making. A nation state in the grip of such paranoia suffers from a Garrison State mentality where the “specialists on violence” as per Harold Laswell, rule the roost. Indian journey from a non-aligned Nehru led pluralist democracy towards a jingoistic and revisionist state is a sad saga in the sub continental political development. The negative peace spawned by such an attitude in South Asia by putatively the largest democracy in the region has condemned the region to perpetual conflict and under development.

The new civil-military entente cordiale in Pakistan bodes well for the democratic system of the country. The civil-military balance and the gradual strengthening of the civilian oversight institutions for national policy formulation promise to lessen the burden of a militarized paradigm of policy formulation. As the civilian institutions gain more traction in the policy making arena the guns versus butter equation would start tilting more favourably towards the butter, laying more premium on development than security. In India however the strategic policy formulation is getting more militarized with a propensity to find military solutions to political problems. The repression in Kashmir and the hybrid war imposed upon Pakistan are indicative of the creeping militarism in Indian policy formulation. The above represents in stark terms the Indian Garrison State recidivism, whereas in Pakistan a new spring of civil-military amity promises loosening of military stranglehold on national policy formulation. The region would be best served if both India and Pakistan shun their ideological and political prejudices to embrace a human development and security oriented model of internal as well as external policies. The choice is with Indian leadership to slide slowly and inexorably into a Garrison State abyss or to rise above the petty communalism to be counted as a modern pluralistic democracy, into whose worldview the winter of human discontent figures well below the spring of human security.

The writer is a PhD scholar at NUST