The writer, a former rear admiral in the navy, is author of ‘A Nuclear Strategy for India’.
Needed: A 25-year horizon
With China’s rise, India needs to start formulating strategic and defence needs for the future
Even a casual survey of retired ICS officer Penderel Moon’s monumental work on the transfer of power from Britain to Independent India shows how the joy in Delhi eclipsed any thoughts of the islands in the Indian ocean. It took the benign intervention of Lord Mountbatten on the Indian side to force Whitehall not to retain the Andaman and Nicobar islands and the Lakshadweep Islands as part of the wider British Indian Ocean territories. In 1947, or even two decades later, there was no strategic community in Delhi — the earliest strategic noises from Indians began to be heard only in the 1980s. Panicked by Pakistan’s attempt to capture Srinagar in 1947, the Chinese war of 1962 and Pakistan’s second attempt in 1965, the entire government closed ranks and concluded that India had only one strategic choice — to hold onto the territory the British had transferred to us. It was the right strategy for the time to preserve our territorial integrity. A foreign policy of non-alignment to get the best deal out of the Cold War in support of the national strategy also cannot be flawed.
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