Empower military with strategic heft

A significant development that has gone unnoticed and uncommented upon is the involvement of military commanders in trying to ostensibly resolve the 54-month-old standoff at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) that forms the de facto border between India and China.

Beginning June 6, 2020, Indian and Chinese military commanders held talks in the Chushul-Moldo region following the violent confrontation on May 5, 2020, between Indian and Chinese troops in Pangong Tso.

The second round of talks between Lt Gen Harinder Singh and Maj Gen Liu Lin, Commander of the South Xinjiang Military District, were held on June 22, 2020, in the wake of the unfortunate Galwan conflagration. Since then, 19 more rounds of talks have been held till February 19, 2024. The 22nd round has still not been scheduled.

This was perhaps after a long time that the military was so overtly involved as a concurrent track in efforts to resolve the question of Chinese transgressions into Indian territory or our perception of the LAC. Of course, there have been flag meetings on India’s borders with the frontier forces or militaries of the neighbouring countries. Over the past 54 months, the Ministry of External Affairs has been issuing readouts on a regular basis after each round of talks.

Is this a good or a bad thing? If one looks towards the past for guidance or even at the practice that is followed in other countries, one would find that the military has been intrinsically embedded in politico-military strategic diplomacy.

The military representatives of India and Pakistan met in Karachi from July 18 to 27, 1949, under the auspices of the truce sub-committee of the United Nations Commission for the establishment of the ceasefire line in Jammu and Kashmir.

The Indian delegation consisted of Lt Gen SM Shrinagesh, Maj Gen KS Thimayya and Brig SHFJ Manekshaw, while the Pakistani side was represented by Maj Gen WJ Cawthorn, Maj Gen Nazir Ahmad and Brig M Sher Khan. Bureaucrats and Foreign Office functionaries were only observers. HM Patel and V Sahay C from the Indian side and M Ayub and AA Khan from Pakistan made up the quorum of the civilian component.

On December 11, 1972, senior military commanders of India and Pakistan met at Suchetgarh to sign and exchange maps delineating the 800-km Line of Control in J&K, extending from the Chhamb sector to the Partapur sector, in accordance with Paragraph 4 (II) of the Simla Agreement dated July 2, 1972. This agreement was a sequel to the understanding reached between the Army Chiefs of India and Pakistan at their second meeting in Lahore on December 7, 1972, where Pakistan conceded to India’s claim that Thako Chak formed a part of the International Border and that it should withdraw its troops from there. The maps were exchanged between Lt Gen PS Bhagat on behalf of India and Lt Gen Abdul Hamid Khan representing Pakistan.

It is noteworthy that there was a summit-level meeting between Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, followed by a meeting between then Chief of the Army Staff Gen Manekshaw and his Pakistani counterpart Gen Tikka Khan before the operational-level exchange of maps between Lt Generals Bhagat and Hamid Khan.

After that, the role of the military in the politico-strategic-diplomatic arena was either recessed or took a back seat till the time it briefly seemed to have emerged in May 2006 to ostensibly oppose the demilitarisation of Siachen.

India’s former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran records in his book, How India Sees the World: Kautilya to the 21st Century: “When the CCS meeting was held on the eve of the defence secretary–level talks, [Mr] Narayanan launched into a bitter offensive against the proposal, saying that Pakistan could not be trusted, that there would be political and public opposition to any such initiative and that India’s military position in the northern sector vis-à-vis both Pakistan and China would be compromised. [Gen] JJ Singh, who had happily gone along with the proposal in its earlier iterations, now decided to join Narayanan in rubbishing it.”

The reference is to then Army Chief Gen JJ Singh, who ostensibly along with former National Security Adviser MK Narayanan had opposed the proposal to turn the Siachen glacier into a mountain of peace in the most productive years of the India-Pakistan relationship after the ceasefire agreed upon by then Prime Minister Vajpayee on November 26, 2003, in the aftermath of Operation Parakram that ended on October 16, 2002.

Unlike in India, the military is embedded in the politico-military hierarchy of democracies around the world. Though under very strict civilian control, the six US theatre commanders report directly to the American President through the Secretary of Defence. Though the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff in the US is the Principal Military Adviser to the President, he has no executive authority to command combatant units. This enmeshes various streams of the military into the political decision-making process on critical questions of national security.

In China, the theatre commanders report directly to the Central Military Commission that is headed by the Chinese President and the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, thus institutionalising their role in the strategic decision-making process. Similarly, in the Russian system, the Chief of the General Staff does not exercise direct operational control over Russian forces; the superintendence is vested in the President in terms of Articles 4 and 13 of the Federal Law on Defence.

It is, therefore, imperative that beyond the CCS (Cabinet Committee on Security) paradigm, the role of the military in the national security decision-making framework is also formalised, given that India has a Chief of Defence Staff and is moving towards theatre commands, though the only functional and integrated theatre command as yet is the Andaman and Nicobar Command.