UNHEEDED SAGES

India has more closed borders than open minds. And so when a mature Indian diplomat speaks his mind, we on this side of the permeable sealant should listen.

Few Indian diplomats possess the credentials Shivshankar Menon has. He served as Ambassador to Israel, to China, High Commissioner to Pakistan, Foreign Secretary, and then National Security Adviser. Fluent in Chinese, he is the quintessential mandarin – sage, suave, secretive, supportive of every government, and in the end, a survivor.

Unlike his senior J.N. Dixit who wrote a veritable library analysing India’s foreign policies (no country as large or as long lived as India can have only one), Mr Menon has chosen to distil his experience in a slim but pungent monograph titled Choices: Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy (2016). It will undoubtedly be read by everyone in India’s MEA. It should be memorised by everyone in our Foreign Office.

They should know that following the Mumbai attacks in 2008, Mr Menon advised his government to take ‘overt action against LeT headquarters in Muridke or the LeT camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and covert action against their sponsors, the ISI.’  Indian papers touted this bellicose disclosure but neglected to turn the page, which begins: ‘…sober reflection and in hindsight, I now believe that the political decision not to retaliate militarily and to concentrate on diplomatic, covert, and other means was the right one’.

Former HC Menon’s opinion of us - honed by familiarity - borders on overt contempt: ‘Pakistan’s steady slide into incoherence, its disintegration into multiple power centers, and the diminishing writ of the state also mean that support for cross-border terrorism could actually grow in the future. Even if the Pakistani state regains some coherence, the institutional interest of the Pakistan Army and the ISI in controlled confrontation and hostility with India will enable and support terrorist groups that target India.’

He goes even further. He considers that should another Mumbai 26/11 style attack take place, ‘some public retribution and a military response would be inevitable.’

Will such retribution be a surgical strike?  It will not be only one, Mr Menon argues.  ‘This is a long conflict that cannot be solved – it is protracted and intractable’.

Will it lead to a nuclear ping-pong match?

Mr Menon may have known the structure and role of the National Command Authority in Islamabad then (‘Pakistan’s is the only nuclear weapon program in the world that is exclusively under military control’). His identification of who controls the nuclear red button in Pakistan is not likely to find many takers in Islamabad now. 

His perception of Pakistan’s security strategy is as precise as it is comprehensible: ‘Pakistan clearly wants India to believe that it will use its nuclear weapons for tactical military uses if certain thresholds are crossed, and tries to convince India that the threshold is so low as to deter meaningful operations by the Indian army.’

So here we have two neighbours, each nursing grudges and possessing a nuclear arsenal that can precipitate Doomsday for over a billion brown-skinned people.  One, according to him, irresponsible and vulnerable to a ‘rogue Air Force pilot’ or a zealot ‘brigadier who decides to wage nuclear war, with or without orders’; the other, mature and responsible,  with all the potential to be a great power, yet struggling to emerge from the chrysalis of being ‘a significant power with many poor people.’

As India’s former National Security Adviser, he is qualified to assert India’s nuclear capability: ‘It is not the number of nuclear weapons that India or its adversaries possess that matters.  What matters is India’s ability to inflict unacceptable damage in a retaliatory strike or strikes…by any enemy or potential combination of enemies’ (for ‘potential combination’, read Pakistan and China), and the ‘best way known today of ensuring survivability is to locate these weapons at sea, on submarines’ (for ‘at sea’, read off Gwadar). 

China is still a major presence in Mr Menon’s psyche. He interprets China’s resurgence with a benign almost patrician condescension. China disports ‘an increasingly nationalist and chauvinist narrative replacing the lost ideology and mock humility of the past’. He sums up Sino-Indian relations as a search to find an appropriate ‘balance between rivalry and incentives for good behaviour, between competition and cooperation’.

One of Mr Menon’s admissions will definitely find resonance in Pakistan’s Foreign Office and its two Gog/Magog Advisors: ‘Institutionalization of foreign and security policy making in India has been weak.  In foreign policy, policy making has always been almost entirely within the individual domain of the prime minister.’ In other words, a nation’s foreign policy is too serious a matter to be left to professional diplomats.

That is why Indian prime minister Modi should read and heed Mr Menon’s astute, timely observation: ‘…governments today are under stress, and could seek external release from internal difficulties.’

© F.S. AIJAZUDDIN

Dawn, 1 December 2016