J L Khayyam Coelho  

Without a doubt, one of the terrible after effects of Pokhran II was the instant creation of a large number of Western "experts" on India, who leapt at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, to promptly fill the airwaves and academic publishing houses with their "scholarly" opinions on the "problem" of South Asia.

Far worse was its effect on the intellectual chattering classes of India. As part of that strange colonization of the Indian intellect, it was once de rigueur to welcome every barely literate Western academic who knew the difference between Old and New Delhi, as a specialist on India. Grateful for being noticed by the "phorener", the nonsense they spouted was politely ignored and much was made of their interest in India. The hope, usually unfulfilled, was that sooner or later these "experts" would "get it". Of course, they never did. Anymore than a child learns without being taught or corrected. The net effect was to create a class of public intellectual in India, who believed that to be sophisticated a la their Western counterparts, required that they had to consistently and vigorously denigrate anything "Indian" as unsophisticated, backward or just too "third world".

This class of India's public intellectuals reached their apogee after Pokhran II. From years in the wilderness where all they had to critique were India's "poverty, corruption and incompetence", now they finally had a topic that was on a par with the subjects much discussed by Western dissidents. Nukes after all are not just dangerous. They're downright sexy in the world of moral self-flagellation that such people inhabit. Without the slightest understanding of the security, geopolitical or national interest, these public intellectuals joined with Western "scholars" to lambast the Indian government's moral failure and insanity in going nuclear. And in the discourse on India's nuclearization, the signal-to-noise ratio rose exponentially.

I find it therefore, a real pleasure to read the work of Ashley Tellis. Tellis is an Indian born American. He obtained a BA and MA from Bombay University in Economics and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago. A former political analyst at RAND, he is currently the senior policy advisor to the US ambassador to India, Robert Blackwell.¹

Tellis has written a number of works dealing with various aspects of national security. The most relevant to this review is his book India's Emerging Nuclear Posture: Between Recessed Deterrent and Ready Arsenal² written before the article being reviewed here but very relevant in this context.

I find Tellis to be eminently readable for the rather simple reason that he clearly has a deep knowledge about his subject. The scholarship makes all the difference. His work is all the more pleasant because Tellis is in marked contrast to the usual US "expert" and the Indian intellectual described above. Refreshingly free of the arrogance mixed with ignorance and bias that is the hallmark of the "expert", without the stultifying inferiority complex that so marks the "intellectual", his article provides a glimmer of hope that there does exist a cadre of experts on India that actually know their subject. Whether you agree with his conclusions and methodology is not relevant here. It is certainly possible to criticize his work on various grounds, which I do below, but there is no doubting that the "signal-to-noise" ratio in his work is extremely low on the noise side.

This review is in two parts. The next part outlines Tellis' paper in some detail, perhaps excessively so, but I found it necessary to pay close attention to his work. The third section is my critique of Tellis' paper. Note that in this review, whenever I quote from Tellis I give the page number of the pdf file version of his paper. General references are denoted by superscripts.

Tellis' paper

Tellis' paper² seems to be a supplement to his book.³ It aims to analyze India's nuclear doctrine on the premise that India's doctrine will be critical to understanding when and under what conditions India might use its weapons. Tellis' thesis is that ...India's emerging nuclear doctrine is fundamentally conservative in orientation and exemplifies a systematic internalization of the lessons of the nuclear revolution... and that ...India's nuclear weapons are primarily pure deterrents intended to ward of political blackmail that might be mounted by local adversaries in some remote circumstances, while simultaneously providing strategic reassurance to India's political leaders if the country were to face a truly dire threat to its security. [page 5]

The paper is divided into three sections, the first dealing with Tellis' methodology in analyzing India's doctrine. The second describes the declaratory and operational aspects of India's doctrine and the concluding section takes a comparative look at India's doctrine and its foreign policy implications.

Methodology

Tellis' basic methodology is simple but important. He draws on the large literature of Indian writings on the subject as well as extensive interviews with political figures, bureaucrats from the PMO, MEA, MoD, DRDO and serving and retired senior military officers. The discussion in the paper is schematic, since any greater detail would require access to classified Indian material which he does not have. It is also a static analysis in that it does not discuss the possible influence of the other nuclear powers on India's doctrine.

A key part is Tellis' theory of India's nuclearization as a force-in-being, which he describes as ...a deterrent consisting of available, but dispersed, components that are constituted into a usable weapon system primarily during a supreme emergency... [and which is a] ...strategically active, but operationally dormant, entity [pages 8-9]. Tellis attempts to analyze India's nuclear doctrine in terms of his force-in-being theory and in the context of the Draft Report of [the] National Security Advisory Board on Indian Nuclear Doctrine.⁶

He is careful to say that India is in the "initial" stages of nuclearization and; [that] the experience of previous nuclear powers has demonstrated that doctrinal innovations usually occur in the aftermath of technological breakthroughs, which, by their very nature, are often unanticipated... [so] ...objectives being pursued today [do not] represent an ironclad consensus that will survive immutably over time. [Consequently] the conclusions drawn at several points in this analysis are also much more contingent than the declarative tone in which they are expressed might suggest. [Pages 5-6, 14].

It would be quite easy to miss the importance of what Tellis does. Most analysts in the West tend to "orientalise" their subject matter when writing about non-European societies. By imposing their own theoretical constructs, however unwittingly, they turn complexity into an easily digested mass that fits into their preconceived notions of what the "other" should be. Tellis avoids this by simply allowing, in essence, the subaltern to speak. By focusing on what Indians actually say, rather than what some scholars think they're saying, Tellis manages to argue his case quite rigorously. (Tellis is not, of course, unique in this. Such methodologies have been used very successfully by others, such as the Cato Institutes Victor Gobarev in his essay on India⁴ and Michael Pillsbury's work on China.⁵)

India's Nuclear Doctrine: Declaratory Aspects

Acknowledging that there is no accepted definition of "doctrine" in modern strategic thought, Tellis defines India's "doctrine" as its weltbild - world view - that nuclear weapons are, foremost, political instruments which are emphatically not usable weapons in any military sense [page 17]. Quoting, among others, Prime Minister Vajpayee, President Narayanan and analysts such as Jasjit Singh and K Subrahmanyam, he emphasizes that India views nuclear weapons as embodying a capability beyond the rational ends of politics [page 18]. The Indian view, says Tellis, is primarily about the utility of nuclear weapons to ensure that India is not blackmailed by its principal adversaries, Pakistan and China, due to its "abject vulnerability".⁷

Using the jargon of the nuclear age, India's nuclear weapons then, are primarily countervalue, since the emphasis is on nuclear weapons not nuclear weapons. A conclusion that Tellis finds reinforced even by those classified as "hawks" in India, such as Bharat Karnad, who while advocating a stockpile of hundreds of nuclear weapons, does so primarily to reinforce the doctrine of deterrence by punishment [page 24].

Tellis points out that this weltbild comes from India's historic ambiguity about nuclear weapons. An ambiguity that still survives because even when they have spoken about nuclear matters, they have sought to describe not what India might do in the event of deterrence breakdown, but rather only what needs to be done to prevent such a breakdown from ever occurring [page 26].

 More important however, are three issues of practicality that tend to buttress this doctrine. Referring to India's conventional superiority (in the theatre) to both Pakistan and China, Tellis states that the Indian view derives from the fact that the country does not face any onerous security challenges that require a more expansive view of the utility of nuclear weaponry [page 21]. New Delhi he says, believes it faces a reasonably permissive geopolitical environment regardless of the seriousness of the Pakistani or Chinese nuclear capabilities because; neither would take a risk that would bring a nuclear response from India since it would inflict more damage than is worth any of the political objectives sought [page 27].

The second issue that reinforces the Indian view of nuclear weapons as political and not military tools is, in Tellis' view, the unique nature of India's civil-military relations. According to Tellis, India's model of civil-military relations is [An] authoritarian model, characterized by permeated boundaries between the civil and the military, strong civilian control, and a military oriented to coping with both external and internal threats.⁸ This civil-military structure is characterized by the absolute civilian control of the military, to the extent that the Indian services are not part of the Ministry of Defence and; all strategic, budgetary, acquisition, and personnel decisions are controlled by the Indian Administrative Service, the civilian bureaucracy that consists of the principal, additional, and joint secretaries... The opinions, requests, and recommendations of the service chiefs are thus vetted by civil servants who, thanks to their ability to control the flow of paperwork, formulate budgets, and influence senior service promotion decisions, remain ultimately responsible for the military posture of the Indian state despite the fact that they may have neither the knowledge-edge nor the perspective to assume such responsibility. The weaknesses of this system of control are widely recognized in India but, being content with the protection afforded by the country s great size and inherent strength relative to its adversaries, Indian security managers historically have consciously avoided altering the structure of strict civilian control no matter what benefits in increased military efficiency may accrue as a result. [Page 38].

This structure grew out of India's first generation of leaders distrust of things military and their experience of the military as a force enforcing subjugation to the colonial power. It was reinforced by the experience of many third world countries, and the political evolution of Pakistan in particular. Tellis believes that Indian security managers appear determined to regulate the role of the military in nuclear matters to the maximum extent possible... [and] Indian policymakers... seem ready to sacrifice the increases in operational coherence and efficiency that may arise from unobstructed military involvement in nuclear command, control, and operations... [with] military participation occurring primarily under conditions of supreme emergency [page 39]. This would not be possible if India adopted a counterforce strategy. The bureaucratic structure in other words, reinforces the practicality of India's nuclear doctrine.

The third reason that Tellis gives for India's view of nuclear weapons as deterrence and not war fighting, is the issue of cost. Emphasizing the political instrumentality of nuclear weapons allows New Delhi to minimize the cost because if they were treated as offensive warfighting implements, India s conventional military forces would have to be radically redesigned and re-equipped for the conduct of military operations on a nuclear battlefield. This task would require not only new organizational structures and tactical doctrines but also enormous amounts of financial investment in new technologies in order to enhance the mobility, protection, and firepower of India s maneuver formations [page 45]. And this rather prosaic understanding of reality strengthens the political character of India's nuclear weapons.

India's Nuclear Doctrine: Operational Policy

What happens when deterrence breaks down? The declaratory level of considering nuclear weapons as political tools becomes pointless at this stage. This contingency requires an operational policy that explicitly addresses the question of nuclear use [page 49]. India has never articulated such a policy, and probably never will. According to Tellis however, an analytical reconstruction is possible based on some authoritative Indian declarations combined with insights gleaned from other non-official Indian commentary and several private conversations with high-level Indian politicians, bureaucrats, and military officers. [And] this operational policy consists of four distinct and specific components [page 50]. These four components are:

1. The centrality of the policy of no-first-use of nuclear weaponry.
2. The insistence that if nuclear weapons are used it will be solely for the purpose of retaliation/punishment.
3. An emphasis that this retaliation, even if delayed, will be assured.
4. And that this retaliation will be at countervalue targets.

This is a fundamentally defensive policy. Each of the points flow, at some level, from the declaratory aspects of India's doctrine coupled with its ambiguity about the use of nuclear weapons as anything other than political tools.

Tellis points out that the no-first-use policy is not only in accord with the declaratory aspects of India's doctrine, but consistent because India s strategic circumstances are favorable enough so as to prevent New Delhi from ever having to use nuclear weapons first against any of its adversaries. So it allows India to underscore its pacific intentions vis-à-vis Pakistan and China and thereby procure all the political benefits that accrue from being perceived as a moderate, responsible, and peace-loving state in the international system. [Page 54].

The second concept of "retaliation only"⁹ follows from India's refusal to consider nuclear weapons as military tools and; from the more mundane fact that it simply does not possess the capabilities to utilize its nuclear weapons in... [counterforce or countermilitary modes which] ...would require a large nuclear arsenal and incredibly accurate delivery systems maintained at high levels of readiness, a real-time intelligence gathering capability, a highly automated mission planning system, and robust strategic defences capable of coping with the ragged retaliation that will inevitably follow in the aftermath of any disarming attack. It would also require great proficiency in planning complex offensive military operations. Developing such a strategic infrastructure would be extraordinarily costly and would involve high levels of military participation in both national security planning as well as day-to-day control over the nuclear arsenal. These are exactly the outcomes Indian policymakers seem intent on avoiding and consequently, will neither encourage the military to walk down this path nor provide it with the resources that would enable the pursuit of any such strategies. [Page 54]

The emphasis on retaliation being assured is because Indian security managers believe that the ability to retaliate is more important for purposes of deterrence than the actual retaliation. [Page 63]. A conclusion driven by the fact that India's priority is to ensure that deterrence does not break down and that this is best done by the absolute certainty of punishment. It is interesting to note that this is quite similar to the Chinese concept of "launch at uncertain time", where the aggressor has to worry about retaliation for days, weeks or even months, but knowing all the time that retaliation was inevitable.

The fourth plank of India's policy follows logically. Since India does not have the capability to mount a counterforce or countermilitary nuclear system, and since the entire focus of India's doctrine is based on retaliation/punishment, the logical choice of targets are therefore countervalue targets. Tellis then informs us that activities to identify strategic targets appear to be already underway: various planning cells in the Indian Ministry of Defence, particularly the DRDO, and in the service headquarters have begun to examine targeting requirements in some detail though the scale of effort, the extent of direction from the civilian leadership, and the degree of coordination between the civilian nuclear weapons designers and civilian and uniformed operational planners is not known. This is all done in secrecy because Indian policymakers, in fact, have consciously sought to avoid replicating the kind of provocative rhetoric that emerged from Pakistan in the aftermath of its Ghauri missile test, when a number of Pakistani politicians took the stage in order to gloat about their new offensive reach, some even publicly identifying a host of cities in India that supposedly would be targeted by Islamabad s new strategic systems. [Pages 82-83].

Tellis concludes that India's nuclear doctrine, reflecting the lessons of the nuclear revolution, serves India's security objectives vis-à-vis China and Pakistan. He does point out that; what India may do to obtain the objectives of its doctrine is not necessarily what the US may consider appropriate [page 105]. However, he does consider India's doctrine to be conducive to South Asia's stability since the logic of its doctrine frees it from the necessity of obtaining parity with the arsenals of other nuclear powers.

A critique of Tellis' paper

I have stated at the start that I admire Tellis' work for its scholarship. He has very lucid, cogent arguments and his conclusions follow rigorously. In my view however, I do not find them persuasive. In what follows, I detail my own arguments and critique of Tellis' paper. Prima facie Tellis's logic and arguments are stronger than the criticisms I detail here. However, by questioning some of his assumptions, it is possible to question a fortiori his conclusions.

Consider for example, his methodology. His primary sources are the open literature and his interviews with politicians, bureaucrats and military officers from which he draws his conclusions. I find this problematic for the following reason: Traditionally, India's security management has been marked by a deliberate policy of opacity, obliqueness, deception and an unwillingness to talk openly about "defence". This served to both hide any weaknesses that the country may have had and; to introduce an element of uncertainty in the calculations of any potential aggressor. Tellis' reliance on the open literature is, therefore, quite possibly a serious flaw. And while his interviews are undoubtedly important, there is no reason to assume that India's security managers would break the habits of a lifetime and tell him anything other than what they want him to know.

At the declaratory level too, it is not at all clear whether this can be accepted at face value. Given India's historic opposition and moral ambiguity with respect to nuclear weapons, much of its declaratory policy can be accounted for by simply pointing out "well what else would the Indian's say?" Consequently, even if India's policy with respect to nuclear weapons changes, so that a willingness to look on them as more than just political tools exists, it is highly improbable that such a change will be announced. It should also be recognized, that the strong peace rhetoric associated with India's nuclearization may well be a hangover from a different time. The times have certainly changed, and it way well be that the rhetoric will stay the same, even when the reality has changed, until India's polity adjusts to new circumstances.

Of the three reasons that Tellis gives for India's weltbild - conventional superiority (in the theatre) over Pakistan and China, the civil-military relationship and the cost factor - all have fairly straightforward counter-arguments. Firstly, there is no guarantee that India will be able to maintain such superiority over both nations, given the economic growth of China and the Chinese-Pak alliance. Secondly, the civil-military structure is evolving, a fact that Tellis acknowledges but discounts - in my view too precipitately. And thirdly, the cost factor may not be as important given India's own economic growth. (Although it is unlikely that India will allow itself to fall into a nuclear trap and risk an economy that is barely a decade and a half out of its "socialist" quagmire). If any of these three conditions change, then the rationale for Tellis' arguments collapse and India may well construct a new weltbild.

The civil-military relations require a better explanation. It is here that Tellis makes, in my view, a cardinal error. Indian democracy is frequently characterized as "messy". More so because the decision making style is "consensual". Quite frequently, outsiders, as well as Indians, miss the incredible importance of consensus in India (as a consequence of which, you can generally hear them prattle about India's "million mutinies"). This is one of the most important threads running through the Indian polity. Although it can lead to "weak" decision-making and even an abuse of process, which allows India to be characterized as a "soft state", it also gives an extremely strong sense of "ownership" that binds the stakeholders together. It is this much underestimated and little discussed cultural artifact that underpins much of India's astonishing resilience in the face of the most incredible odds. The military is simply unsuited to this sort of decision-making, and India's state managers are not about to jeopardize a fundamental characteristic of the state for little gain. It is in this sense that India's civil-military relations must be understood because the bureaucratic "control" of the military is an aspect of this decision making process. It cannot, in my view, be used to buttress an argument of the sort that Tellis puts forward nor can it be used to discount the evolution of the system as Tellis does. (The characterization of India's state managers fearing a Pakistan style "man on horseback" is so ludicrous, that it deserves no further comment).

At the operational policy level, there are two significant points that undermine Tellis' postulates. Firstly, on August 17 1999, the government of India released the Draft Nuclear Doctrine (DND)⁶ which ...served to unnerve many in the international audience, including India's traditional adversaries, Pakistan and China; the principal overseer of the global nonproliferation regime, the United States; and numerous nonproliferation advocacy groups in Europe, Asia, and the Americas [page 2]. The critical point of the of the DND relevant here is Section 2.5. A non-nuclear state allied to a nuclear state is, according to the DND, a possible target for retaliation. Clearly, this undermines the no-first-use policy since a non-nuclear state cannot threaten India with nuclear forces. Tellis discusses this point [pages 53-54] but concludes that the DND can be discounted since numerous senior politicians and bureaucrats moved to distance themselves from the DND. I disagree with this, not least because the DND has, on its own, an internal logic that is compelling. But perhaps a better view is given by Bharat Karnad [page 54] who says "no first use ... is something of a hoax. It is one of those restrictions which countries are willing to abide by except in war".

There is a very strong sense that Tellis is defending a thesis. But the thesis he's defending is not his version of India's nuclear doctrine that this paper describes. Instead I get the feeling that Tellis is defending his force-in-being theory³ of India's nuclearization. The DND, with its language of "effective, enduring, diverse and responsive [as well as] sufficient, survivable and operationally prepared" nuclear forces based on a "triad" and which is organized for "very high survivability" does not sound like a "force-in-being". I could be badly misreading Tellis here, but the sense that this is an attempt to show that the DND does not undermine his force-in-being concept is very strong.

The second point which undermines Tellis' version of India's nuclear doctrine is slightly more subtle, but much more compelling and relates to the nature of Tellis' discussion. Specifically, the analysis is static in the sense that it ignores the Indo-Pak-China triadic relation. Tellis acknowledges this, but fails to acknowledge two other weaknesses. Firstly, the analysis is also static in time since its discussion begins, implicitly, in May 1998.

In the context of, say, discussing the geopolitics of the tests this is correct. But in the context of a theoretical discussion of India's nuclear doctrine, it badly misses the mark. It is usually forgotten that India's nuclear program began, officially, in the 1950s. By the late 1950s, Homi Bhabha, the "father" of India's nuclear program, had already thought about weaponisation.¹⁰ With the first test in 1974, and with India living with China's nuclearization since the 1960s, India undoubtedly began to look at the issue of nuclearization systematically at least since the mid 1980s when Pakistan's "Islamic Bomb" became a reality, and when India's defence expenditure reached its peak.¹¹

Yet by ignoring this, Tellis implies that all of this is irrelevant. That India began to get "serious" only after the 1998 tests. This confuse the public and political narrative of nuclearization, which certainly jumped after May 1998, with the internal debates that India's security managers have been engaged in for decades, no matter how desultory they may have been.

More problematic however, is that the analysis is also static in geography; it is "the dog that did not bark". While Tellis acknowledges the China-Pakistan aspect of India's security concerns, he simply ignores the other P-5 nations and the US in particular. And from an historical perspective, the US has played no small role in India's nuclear thinking. It is therefore, a strange omission since India's current concerns with respect to the US have certainly been noted before⁴. Of course, this is not something new. India, caught in the "Pakistan trap" so assiduously cultivated by the US, China and Pakistan, - with no little help from the Indians themselves, let it be said - is quite frequently relegated to a "regional" role. It hardly needs to be stressed that this is not the way Indians view things, especially since the use of nuclear weapons as a currency of power is very well understood. I find it a little curious that Tellis does not raise, even in passing, the implications on India's doctrine of their muted, but nonetheless very real, ambitions for a global role.

Tellis makes a persuasive argument for his basic thesis. India's policy may well be "fundamentally conservative", but the definition of "conservative" remains open. The nomenclature is a leftover from a previous era and radical change in a "conservative" sense is very possible. India's nuclear weapons may well be "pure deterrents", but this is a truism. Are not armed forces the world over euphemistically labelled as "defensive?" The force-in-being concept I find difficult to accept. Nuclear weapons are a currency of power (one of many). And I find it far more likely that if aspects of the force-in-being are true, then it is probably a function of available resources than a weltbild. Tellis may well be correct in his summation of India's nuclear doctrine, but I do not find it convincing. And in the fast changing climate after the terrorist attacks on the WTC and India's parliament, I find it even less so.