E-Paper
Why does India not need Cold Warriors of the past?
By proposing “one nation, one uniform”, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is increasing stakeholders in the civilizational state of India in the face of rising China and global uncertainty sparked off by Covid and the Ukraine War.
Addressing the first Chintan Shivir of state home ministers and top police officers on October 28, Prime Minister Narendra Modi pitched an idea of “one nation, one uniform” for the Indian police forces. “The one nation, one uniform for the police is just an idea. I am not trying to impose it on you. Just give it a thought. It may happen, it may happen in 5, 50, or 100 years. All the states should just think it over,” PM Modi said, adding that he believed the identity of police across the country should be the same.
Since law and order is a state subject, and central para-military forces just are in aid of state police in case of escalating law and order situation, many in Opposition may have thought that PM Modi was preparing, yet again, to assault the federal structure of India. Rather than divide the police in different states in different uniforms, PM Modi was trying to create more stakeholders in India by having a single uniform, single law, and single enforcement strategy. This proposed step is also part of PM Modi’s “Paanch Pran", or five oaths, he defined from Red Fort this Independence Day where he called for removing all symbols of colonial slavery in the 75th year of Independence. One must remember that it was the British that divided the Indian Army by raising martial or provincial regiments and not Bharat battalions to ensure their loyalty was to their caste, creed and province not to their country. Had their loyalty been towards India, then the British would have been forced to leave India in the 19th century itself.
While Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is undertaking the “Bharat Jodo Yatra” to revive the fortunes of his party, PM Modi is trying to increase the stakeholders in the civilizational state of India as even today the Indian bureaucracy is self-serving and has little stake in the overall development of the country. The Cold War was over more than thirty years ago on December 26, 1991, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union but the mindset of a large section of Indian civil-military bureaucracy and the public at large is dictated by the leftist narrative of Russia vs the West while giving a free pass to China. Even today we see the Russian invasion of Ukraine through the Cold War perspective and not through pro-India strategic calculations. The X-Y generations of India including many political leaders and those in national security still get visions of the US sending the USS Enterprise nuclear-powered carrier in the Bay of Bengal in 1971 while conveniently forgetting the role played by the erstwhile Soviet Union and the US in the disastrous India-China 1962 war.
In his seminal monograph “China’s Decision for War with India in 1962”, expert John Garver writes: “ On October 8 (1962), Beijing had formally notified Moscow that India might launch an attack on China forcing China to respond. On October 14 (four days before Mao decided to wage war against India) China’s ambassador to Moscow, Liu Shao, had secured from (Nikita) Khrushchev guarantees that if there was a Sino-Indian war, the USSR would stand together with China.” Garver attributed the change in USSR's stance towards neutrality as a quid pro quo for Chinese support to Khrushchev in the event of war with the US over the Cuban missile crisis which erupted on October 22, 1962. India had lost the war by that time and it was all over on October 19, 1962.
While the US under Richard Nixon decided to play the China card and in effect support its client state Pakistan in 1971, the US help to the Nehru government in the 1962 war is as undeniable as the Soviet Union’s support to India in the Bangladesh liberation war and the Indo-Pak conflict of 1971. Simply put, the two erstwhile superpowers acted in their supreme interests and China played the two for its own interest. It is an influential section of Indian intellectuals and the bureaucracy that still does not act in the national interest while still caught up in the Cold war, where India was merely a client state of the Soviet Union as it had no other options, for the US was supporting both China and Pakistan. The largely pro-Russia stance of Indian public and armchair pundits is dictated by the same ex-USSR loyalties despite the world moving ahead to a new level. The fact is that while the Modi government publicly recognizes the hardware support of Russia in dire times, it also has told Moscow that the Ukraine war is a wrong idea in this day and age as the global south is suffering on this account.
Just as the Ukraine war shows no signs of any ceasefire soon, China under Xi Jinping clearly poses a military threat to India with the trailer being played out in East Ladakh in April 2020. For a chaotic democracy like India, to tackle a communist dictatorship like China, the Indian military-civilian bureaucracy has to become stakeholder in India and promote what is best for the country. This is what Prime Minister Narendra Modi is trying to achieve. It is an onerous task.
