NonAlignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the 21st Century (10 page)

India’s extensive land and maritime borders pose significant challenges to India’s national security. The system for prevention of illegal movement and maintaining the integrity of India’s borders needs to be reviewed to increase its effectiveness. Presently, the maritime borders are jointly guarded by the Indian Coast Guard, navy and elements of the coastal state governments. A new system has been put in place consequent to the lessons learnt from the Mumbai attacks in 2008, but it is too early to comment on its efficacy. A constant review is, however, called for to minimize the dual responsibilities. The land borders are essentially guarded by the Central Armed Police Forces and paramilitary forces during peacetime, except for the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir and some portions of the Line of Actual Control on the Sino-Indian
border, which are guarded by the army. Considering the sensitivity of the Sino-Indian border, there is a need to improve the integration between the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) and the army. This is required because the Sino-Indian border, unlike most other land borders, is characterized not by illegal movement of peoples but instead is often subjected to transgressions. Therefore the present arrangement of two forces (ITBP and the army), each operationally under different ministries, does not lend itself easily towards integrated functioning. The way forward will require streamlining the operational command and control arrangements especially during peace.

Dealing with the challenges presented by Pakistan and China requires several crucial changes to our defence and security structures. First, we should establish a maritime commission that will guide the development of India’s maritime capabilities, and which should include ocean development, coastal infrastructure, shipping industry and naval capability. Second, we need to increase functional efficiency and improve civil–military relations, and this will require the establishment of an integrated Ministry of Defence by populating the ministry with civilian
and armed forces personnel. We need to break with the present structure, based on an integrated defence staff that attempts to integrate only the service elements and actually acts as an additional layer between the individual services and a civilian Ministry of Defence. A Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff should head the existing Integrated Defence Staff, which should become the Military Department of the Ministry of Defence. Third, we should establish integrated commands. These integrated commands will be organized operationally as integrated regional commands. Some integrated commands would be organized on a functional basis that could include Special Forces, air defence and logistics, among others. Fourth, the regional commanders should report to a Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff, who will be supported by the Military Department. The pressing choice here is the decision to embark on a road map of structural changes commencing with the creation of the post of Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff. While the arguments in favour of such restructuring and greater integration have been in the air for some time and have been broadly accepted, little in practice has been done in this regard. Given the type of potential threats India faces, this now needs urgent action. The restructuring of India’s hard power must be animated by the idea of aligning it with envisaged political objectives.

India contains many potential sources of conflict, and a variety of causes that can serve to activate these potentials at different times. Economic and material interests are one such source, while claims to recognition of identities, whether social or cultural, are another recurring one. The causes that incite conflicts can range from slow processes of historical awakening among groups, leading to the valid assertion of rights, to sudden contingencies that can inflame once-calm parts of the country. The crucial point from a strategic perspective, however, is that the particular forms in which conflicts, whether deep-set or newborn, manifest themselves are heavily dependent on the political skills through which they are handled. How a group of people chooses to engage with the state—whether by violent protest, by civil dissent or by electoral participation—is a matter which is very much in the hands of political elites, of the elected leaders and state managers, and their would-be challengers. It
is important to insist therefore that how conflicts are articulated, and in particular whether or not they reach a point where they threaten India’s internal security, is a direct consequence of political actions and agency. There is nothing predetermined or inevitable about how these conflicts develop, no matter how deep-set their structural causes may be. Politics matters, and from a strategic point of view a primary goal must be to foster the political judgement and skills required to contain and minimize such conflicts—and to make them amenable to political solutions.

Politics indeed matters. Failure to recognize that, and the implications it carries for a strategic perspective on internal security matters, results in haphazard adoption of uneven policies, pursued in ad hoc ways, as supposed remedies for the root causes of conflict. So, whether it be Naxalism or ethnic conflict, there is a standard toolkit for addressing root causes that is invariably articulated: investing in development, providing social services, lifting a sense of siege, or in some cases overcoming geographical isolation, providing cultural protection, and so forth. The list is often unexceptionable, and not difficult to conjure up. But what is harder to diagnose is why this wish list is difficult to implement even by well-meaning governments, and why so little is affected by it. A strategic approach
needs to proceed not by proliferating more ‘need-to-do lists’, but by identifying the main existing and coming sources of conflict (while recognizing of course the always present surprise factor: there are, from time to time, quite new and unexpected conflicts that emerge), and creating political conditions for defusing in advance such conflicts. India has plenty of experience in the more or less effective management of conflict; but a strategic vision must have conflict prevention as its goal.

A full analysis of the challenges of internal security is beyond the scope of this document. It is widely recognized that if internal security challenges proliferate, India’s global prospects are diminished in many ways. The viability and prestige of our developmental model is diminished. The potential of outside powers exploiting internal fissures increases. The allocation of resources required to deal with internal conflicts inflicts a huge opportunity cost. And we are less authoritatively able to take moral leadership on a global stage. Internal security should therefore be as much an object of all-party consensus as external relations.

While operational aspects are beyond the scope of this document, a few general points ought to be kept in mind when thinking of internal security. Internal security challenges are largely exacerbated by three kinds of state failures. The Indian state has the capacity to address these
failures. But our failure to address them speaks poorly of our commitment to internal security.

The first failure is state abdication. In significant parts of the country, the state has simply abdicated its role in providing basic services and vacated the space for all kinds of groups to acquire control. Examples of state abdication include the absence of effective civilian administration in several tribal areas. But they also include absence of effective justice systems in some urban areas. Various armed groups step into this vacuum to effectively provide a parallel, if predatory, government. Once these groups take control of the local political economy, it is difficult to dislodge them. The strengthening of all aspects of routine civilian administration, and giving the state an effective presence, must be top priority. So much of our recent discourse on the state has been about taking the state out of particular domains. We have neglected to ask where we need to bring the state back in.

The second failure is the state as predator. We need to openly acknowledge this blunt truth. In many parts of the country, the state has a history of a protracted and brutal suppression of violence, and of abuses of human rights. Often this is not because the state is ill-intentioned but because it is weak, and compensates for weakness by acting with impunity. In many parts of India, the law and
order machinery is considered a source of
insecurity
. Often the sense of insecurity produced by the state leads to a vicious circle: repressive measures by the state lead to more alienation, and invite greater repression in turn. It is in this context that human rights are important. Protecting human rights is not an antithesis of security; it is one of its preconditions. The state needs to strengthen its protection of human rights, even—indeed, above all—in conflict-ridden areas.

The third state failure is the state’s failure to be impartial. The Indian Constitution’s moral promise is that no citizen will be targeted for their identity. The Indian state has often failed to live up to this promise. Whatever may be the reality, the
fear
that the state is partial to one community or the other is a source of alienation. The sense that the machinery of the state is partial is reflected principally in two domains: policing and politics. There is a perception that Indian policing is very much inflected by considerations of identity. These considerations sometimes lead it to come to premature judgements about which individuals or groups pose a threat. In politics, our failure stems from the fact that there is almost no investigation of major events like communal riots or encounter killings that are not subject to political controversy. The state is often unable to project the idea
that it can be credibly impartial. Some parts of the state—perhaps the judiciary—are able to do it more than others. But if the state cannot credibly project impartiality in its investigations, prosecution and justice, it will remain at risk internally.

The republic’s large scale has been an advantage for us, since it makes it very difficult for any single ethnic group to seriously challenge the state in ways that fundamentally jeopardize the state’s survival. Since challenging a large state is difficult, this often reduces incentives to engage in state-subverting secessionism. It does not, though, eradicate them entirely: and such incentives can become attractive when the state is itself perceived as posing a threat to a particular region or group. But success, based on our sheer size, must not make us complacent.

In the long run, the greatest hope for dealing with internal security problems remains the strength of our democracy. So long as citizens have the belief that they are genuinely being heard, the incentives to violence will come down. In fact, all the historical evidence makes clear that secessionist movements that aim to subvert the state tend to arise—or become more virulent—when central governments have themselves weakened democratic provisions and have adopted more centralizing or even authoritarian forms of conduct. Secessionist movements
in Punjab, Kashmir and the North-East have each in equal measure drawn sustenance from local perceptions of the Centre’s meddling and authoritarianism. On the other hand, whenever the state has respected the federal spirit and principles and tried genuine democratic incorporation, it has more often than not succeeded. The best strategy to achieve internal security thus remains a commitment to practices and procedures of democratic incorporation of all citizens via the federal architecture. In this context, both human rights and political and civil liberties cannot be seen as discretionary grants from the political authorities, or as optional values that can be rescinded in pursuit of internal security. They have to be the bedrock of our federal democracy.

It is important to remember that as much as the formal guarantees embodied in the Constitution and in legislation, it is informal mechanisms of working together—what one might call a ‘culture of federalism’—that can sustain incorporation and make diversity one of India’s distinctive strengths. Purely constitutionalist approaches will not have much effect unless they are followed in the context of political processes premised on the experience of working together.

Politics—in the sense of the informal practices of negotiation—have been important to India’s success as
a democracy. But politics more broadly can sometimes exacerbate conflict through a number of mechanisms. First, in many instances, rather than objective circumstances, it was in fact politics—judgements and choices on the part of leaderships, both national and local—that transformed movements of political dissent into a crisis that threatened the state. The role of ‘political entrepreneurship’ in fostering grievance without significant root cause, or by misdiagnosing the cause, must not be underestimated. Second, the state’s misjudgements about the use of force, at times employing too little, at times too much, become a crucial variable in escalating conflict. But these judgements are often hostage to political considerations. Third, politics that takes into account identities of citizens is inevitable in a country like India. Often this is necessary because identity can be the axis around which injustice is structured. But politics can sometimes create the conditions for competitive communalism by generating a sense of insecurity in one community or the other.

India needs to have faith in the power of its democracy. There is absolutely no doubt that India faces risks of home-grown terrorism in several communities and regions. These need to be dealt with through appropriate and effective security measures. But the important thing to remember is that the fringes in any community can grow
more extreme even as the mainstream is moderating. The challenge is to cut off political support for the fringes.

The North-East and Kashmir pose a special challenge for a number of reasons. First, the absence of cross-cutting elite penetration between state-level politicians and the Centre makes political management difficult. Second, these regions are, at least in principle, examples of ‘asymmetric’ federalism. Many of these states had, ironically, stronger protections of their special status and identities than other states (for example, restrictions on immigration in many states of the North-East and Kashmir). Third, the transnational dimension to conflict is significant and plays out differently. Fourth, the central state has had a more protracted and brutal history of suppression of violence, suspension of democracy and humans rights abuses in these two regions. Indeed, these regions have been subject to very ambivalent treatment by the Indian state, which has been simultaneously very accommodating and repressive, producing what might, in Machiavelli’s words, be called a state that is neither feared nor loved.

The North-East itself is a highly differentiated region: the problems of Assam have very different social roots as compared with Manipur. In many other areas of the country, the alignment of territoriality and ethnicity could
provide a basis for resolving demands. Not so, though, in the North-East, where attempts to align territoriality and ethnicity only functioned to generate more demands. Once the dominant framework became territoriality, it led to more conflicts because it made minorities in each potential state insecure; it led to conflicting claims over territoriality; and it gave a greater incentive to mobilize around territorial self-determination. The region thus remained entrapped in conflicting territorial claims. The simple truth is that no territorially based solutions alone are likely to work in the North-East. Alternatives that were suggested included mechanisms like non-territorially based representation in the assemblies of particular states and the guarantee of cultural and linguistic rights. It was felt that the structures of representation needed to move away from a fixation with territoriality, in order to facilitate accommodation of various competing interests. For instance, it will not be possible to redraw substantially the boundaries of a given state without risking more unrest from other groups. The alignment of territoriality and representation may not always work. The terms in which inclusive governance is achieved need to be changed.

There has been no shortage of analysis of the policy measures that need to be undertaken to ‘restore’ the North-East. The region has long been a ‘frontier’ zone,
tenuously attached to the Indian ‘mainland’ and with sensitive international borders: all of which have made it subject to the security imperatives of the Indian state. This has created a sense of siege in the North-East. The region needs access to traditional trade routes, opening of transport corridors and in general improvement of connectivity with other parts of India as well as the regional neighbourhood. This is a worthwhile objective, for altered patterns of trade have the potential to lift the sense of siege and change the local political economy. But we need to ask the conditions under which such measures are likely to succeed or even be attempted.

In almost every conflict zone, ‘development’ itself has not been able to bypass or dismantle existing structures of violence. It has sometimes fed into them. To prescribe development as a remedy for the North-East is an analytically blunt assessment. The institutional architecture that delivers development will be vital.

Migration, from within, but also from outside India’s borders, is a considerable source of conflict, putting immense pressure on land and jobs. In many ways, migrants are now an integral part of the economy of the North-East, and in the new economy much more labour is coming in. While migrants had become an integral part of the economy, their political rights and status could not
officially be acknowledged because many were considered illegal. The state’s approach to managing illegal migration has been largely to see it as a problem of policing: based on the hope that more border fences, border guards and periodic hunts would deter migrants. But the fundamental fact is that the economy and ecology of the North-East is deeply intertwined with that of Bangladesh, and both the demand- and the supply-side factors (for example, lack of economic opportunities in the border areas of Bangladesh) make it unlikely that migration will stop any time soon.