Indefensible Defence - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 227

Even though Antony's stance accounts for policy blockages from 2006 to 2013, there
is a larger question of why earlier governments did not try to improve domestic perform-
ance and reduce India's reliance on foreign suppliers. Structurally, the problem lies in the
make-up of the Ministry of Defence where, under the defence secretary, who is the top bur-
eaucrat, there are two secretaries separately responsible for production and procurement.
The defence production secretary has line management responsibility for the performance
of DPSUs and the ordnance factories, so is in effect required by his remit to support the
public sector and not the private sector, which therefore has no top official in the ministry
whose job it is to argue its case.
'Arming without Aiming'
More broadly, it has been suggested that tolerance of the current system stems both from
a deep post-colonial ambivalence about the use of force, and from the country's avoid-
ance of foreign entanglements, which together limit its desire for foreign clout. This lack
of a broad-based strategic foreign and defence culture means it is only necessary for In-
dia to equip its army and air force, and to a lesser extent the navy, to defend the country
against its neighbours, notably on the long and disputed Himalayan borders with China,
where it lost in 1962, and with Pakistan, against which it has fought and won three wars
and one undeclared near-war. Based on that argument, guns, tanks, missiles and aircraft can
be bought haphazardly or developed domestically, even more haphazardly and unreliably,
to fight across mountains and deserts, plus ships that are required more now that China is
muscling in on nearby oceans and seas. For this limited canvas, defence and arms equip-
ment do not need to be planned at the strategic policy level that happens, for example, in
the US, the UK and China.
Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta of America's Brookings Institution described this
as 'the puzzle of enduring shortcoming in Indian defense policymaking', in Arming without
Aiming , a book that was originally published in 2010. They looked at 'the enduring nature
of these weaknesses', and why the Indian political system had allowed them to persist for
so many years. 'Previously, others have argued that culture and identity, caste and class
divisions, poverty, the absence of political will, and the threat environment, explain Indi-
an defense policy choices,' they wrote in a new preface to a paperback edition. 32 ' But we
noted that India's defense policy was rooted in a doctrine of military-strategic restraint that
was, at its outset, an ideological rejection of the use of armed force as the tool of colonizers.
In rejecting colonization, India also rejected the instruments used by the colonizers. After
independence, the cold war's neo-colonial hue solidified Indian preferences for restraint.
Since then, the bureaucracy has institutionalized restraint in so thorough a manner that a
breakout is hard to imagine in the absence of a major crisis.'