In Hard Times

Recent years have seen a steady decline in budgets committed to India's military modernisation. The authors of this book state that India needs a national security strategy grounded in its reality, rather than aspirations. Hard Times is an important collection that suggests ways out of the country's strategic predicament.Pranay Kotasthane tells us why a guns versus butter approach to defence spending will result in a situation where we have neither in sufficient measureAdmiral Arun Prakash says that India's neglect of its maritime domain represents an economic missed opportunity and a potential security vulnerability.Sanjaya Baru argues that a bi-multipolar system offers opportunities to India in the coming years.Praveen Swami concludes that minus political instruments and civic intervention, counter-insurgency by force is likely to end in an uncomfortable stalemate.Manoj Joshi, a Delhi-based journalist and commentator, and Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, is the author of Understanding the India-China Border: The Enduring Threat (London: Hurst and New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2021) and Kashmir: The Lost Rebellion (New Delhi: Penguin, 1995). He was a member of both a Government of India task force on reforming India's national security system and the National Security Council Advisory Board. Praveen Swami is an award-winning journalist, who has reported on regional conflicts in South Asia for over two decades. He is the author of India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad (London: Routledge, 2006) and The Kargil War (New Delhi: LeftWord, 1999). He lives in New Delhi. Nishtha Gautam is an academic, researcher and journalist, who has published essays and articles in several international journals and books. Her research areas include gender, security and conflict, and popular culture.Since the mid-1990s, Indian thinking on national security has been based on the assumption that the country would progress on a growth trajectory sufficient to modernise its defence capacities and thereby enable some form of parity with a rising China. The reality has been otherwise. China's spectacular growth - and accompanying military modernisation - has hugely outpaced that of India while the Indian military modernisation has moved fitfully. In the past several years, budgets have committed less than 2 per cent of GDP -the lowest levels since the war of 1962 - for the military. Even if spending were to rise to 3 per cent, little funding would be available for modernisation after allowing for rising pensions, salaries and other components of the budget. Put simply, the authors state, India needs a national security strategy for hard times. It would be a strategy grounded in reality - India's priority has to be the raising of vast numbers of its people out of abject poverty, even if the strategies of countries like China and the United States, economically more developed, can aim at being global powers. In Hard Times is an important collection that highlights the major challenges India confronts and the ways they can be tackled, especially in the light of the upheavals caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Its contributors include former military officers, including Admiral Arun Prakash and Lt Gen. D.S. Hooda, whose views have helped shape discussions on strategy, as well as commentators such as Dr Sanjaya Baru. Experience tells us that in war it's often the smarter side that wins, not the stronger one. These essays point us in that direction.Recent years have seen a steady decline in budgets committed to India's military modernisation. The authors of this book state that India needs a national security strategy grounded in its reality, rather than aspirations. Hard Times is an important collection that suggests ways out of the country's strategic predicament