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Sundarji has dealt with a wide range of security-related
problems facing India: internal security threats, religious
intolerance, ethnic chauvinism and regional imbalances in
economic growth, standards of living and "quality of
life". One wishes that he had also covered here the
irrational priority given in India to internal security, often
at the cost of external security, or for that matter his own
role and views on Operation Bluestar, which took place when he
was the Army Commander of the Western Command (two subjects on
which his comments would have been enlightening). He is bang on
target when he opines that what we need is "a secular,
democratic polity that is seen as generally clean with parties
that are not blatantly self-serving." Commenting on China,
he writes, "China no longer sees Russia as its greatest
threat", and "as a large, populous country with an
ancient civilisation, China wants to be in the major league of
world powers by right and not accepted grudgingly as an 'also
ran'." His opining that India having accepted China's
sovereignty over Tibet makes the former a 'potential friend' of
China, may, however, be slightly off the mark considering that
an interest clash would always be there, with our border issue
still unresolved and our own desire (whether expressed openly or
not) to also join the super-club one day, as China also hopes
to. On Pakistan and its strategic aims until 2025, Sundarji
feels that it would like to see "the emergence of many
independent states out of the Indian Union", and that the
"permanent solution for the bullfrog (Pakistan) which
cannot possibly become a bull (India), is to convert the bull
into a bullfrog!". A slightly unlikely observation as far
as the first part of his assessment is concerned, for in these
times no nation, and definitely not a small one, is permitted to
dismember countries into smaller principalities. Pakistan could
not be all that immature, if it is at all thinking along those
lines.
Sundarji is in his
elements when he discusses the nuclear and the NBC (nuclear,
chemical and biological) environment and strategy. A restless
thinker, never rigid, and blessed with a deep insight and
visionary frame of mind, he often found it difficult to stick to
the beaten path of conventional warfare. He foresaw the
possibility of the Indian Army having to face a battlefield
nuclear strike in the future and ordered the teaching of
suitable military doctrines to help the Army prepare for such an
eventuality. Those who today take credit for the positioning of
the National Command Authority, "the surviving command
authority" when the first rung of command has been
decapitated in a ‘first strike' by the enemy, need to know
that such matters were being debated upon by the likes of
Sundarji and others in those times.
But it would not
be right to imply that Sundarji always had all the aces up his
sleeve. The disastrous foray into Sri Lanka, the unnecessary
wounding of the Army's senior officer cadre by thrusting in the
Command and Staff stream concept (which died a natural death
within two years of its inception in any case), and his
exuberance at times when peace-time war games nearly led to a
war with Pakistan moving its Strike Corps to the border, are
some of the minuses that will be counted against his name. But
his grip and understanding of the National Security Management
was unparalleled and beyond question. He draws attention to the
earlier practice of the Ministries of Home, Foreign Affairs and
Defence operating in isolation except for "occasional
coordination in the past", and hammers home the point that
today one cannot get away with such an approach. "Today
even so called peace, is complicated by the instant gymnastics
involved in dealing with activities such as Coercive diplomacy,
Nuclear deterrence, Adversary states using inspired insurgencies
and terrorism as tools..., and Undeclared and prolonged and low
intensity wars", he writes perceptively.
In this book,
Sundarji has a telling message for India's ruling political
classes and the all-powerful bureaucracy (which often buries its
head in the sand), that the military and its thinkers also have
the right to make decisions at the highest level that deals with
the security and strategic concerns of the country. This is a
powerful book that makes one sit up and think. Possibly this is
its greatest value.
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THE
late General Sundarji, a former Chief of the Army Staff, was never a
man to be lost in a crowd of the mediocre. Strikingly impressive in
look and manners, smart and dashing, and every inch one who looked a
General, Sundar, as he was affectionately known among his peers and
friends, was well ahead of his times in his plans for the Indian
Army, over whose destiny he presided in the 1980s. This magnum opus
completed just before he died, covers a vast array of subjects like
nuclear strategy, force structures, conventional strategy and
national strategy management in various contingencies of war, and
the handling of the no-war-no-peace scenario that India has been
long saddled with on its western front, and which has harboured
insurgency and terrorism in its folds. Actually Sundarji would have
been read even if there had been no Foreword by Raja Ramanna or an
Introduction by K Subrahmanyam, for his clear and concise thinking
on security matters will continue to have considerable importance.
