THE
CASE FOR WAR
Ajit
Chaudhuri – October 2015
‘Join
the Army - Travel to far-off, exotic places - Meet unusual, exciting people -
And kill them’[1]
My
Days in J&K: I am gallivanting around in J&K again!
This time, i.e. the past year, has been different from earlier occasions in
that I have travelled around freely, and at no time have I felt unsafe, insecure,
or threatened. I am often reminded of earlier sojourns, when the same could not
always have been said.
My first visit into J&K was back in 1995, by bus from
Delhi to Leh via Manali when I entered the state after the descent down the
Baralacha La pass. ‘Wow!’ I remember thinking while looking at the yellow mountainous
landscape (that part of J&K is a high altitude desert). I returned on foot,
journeying from Leh to Spiti on to Manali and Delhi and leaving the state via
the almost 6,000 metres high Parang La pass.
I next had a series of visits between 1997 and 1999, this
time while coordinating a research study in Changthang and Batalik (both in
Ladakh). The latter required me to visit border areas in the days of shelling,
when journeys between Dras and Kargil were done at night with lights off (there
is a two km stretch of road that is in direct sight of our friendly neighbour’s
artillery), a deeply unpleasant experience on those mountainous roads to the
extent that I think I would prefer to have been shelled.
I saw the Kashmir valley only after the 2005 earthquake,
when duty took me to Uri and Tangdhar for the next two years. My organization
of the time, along with the Army, built a students’ hostel in Tangdhar (said to
be the best in the state) – made possible by the 2003 ceasefire along the
border that ensured no shelling. Travelling within the state, i.e. Srinagar to
Tangdhar/Uri (via towns that anyone following the news would be familiar with,
Baramulla, Kupwara, Sopore, et al) was not so much fun – do it in a military
vehicle and face attacks by the militancy, and do it in a civilian vehicle and face
long searches and make explanations every 25 km, usually with three AK-47s
pointed at different body parts until one’s identity was established.
As I said, notwithstanding the drama on our news channels,
it is much better today!
The benefits of long term peace and stability should be obvious
to all; flowers bloom, infrastructure builds up, the wheels of the economy
churn, growth, development and prosperity are ushered in, democracy flourishes,
blah, blah, blah, and we can have children in the knowledge that they will not
have to face the brutality of war.
The
Case for War: Why then is war such an attractive option? Why
is it touted so often, by the powers-that-be and the general public, even as a
solution to minor problems and as a course of action to address irritants? Are
people idiots, that they don’t know what war costs? Or is there something about
war that is sensible, rational, and sane? This note examines the case for war,
in general and in the case of the current environment in India and its
immediate neighbourhood.
The
economic perspective: War is a stimulant to an economy, especially
in its initial moments, creating demand for all things military and revving up the
defence production sector. It can become a drag as it goes on, as the warring country
prints more notes to finance it (thus reducing the currency’s worth), and as the
‘guns vs. butter’ argument over the use of scarce resources slants away from
food. Long wars are the luxury of the large economies, and that is why superpower-hood
(defined as the ability to conduct two remote wars simultaneously) is a one
country club.
The
military perspective: Armies tend to like war! This is for
obvious reasons; generals decide things in armies, and a) they tend not to die
in war, and b) war reminds a country why it has an army in the first place (in
peace, an army is a non-productive expense and therefore a burden on the
exchequer). War builds an army’s profile, and helps justify its budget demands.
But also, a good army needs to have a war every generation for practical
reasons – generals need to have fought wars as captains and majors, when they
are in the frontline, to be competent generals, and they therefore need
opportunities for the current crop of captains and majors to gain the necessary
experience to be the generals of tomorrow. It is in fact a little disconcerting
to note that the Indian armed forces are soon going to be led by people who
have no first-hand knowledge of the ‘fog of war’.
The
societal perspective: Policy makers often have to deal with the
problem of large numbers of useless young men – they are disruptive, they challenge
status quo and they upend established power relations in society. They scare
the powerful and elite, to whom policy makers are accountable. The traditional
method of dealing with them was to send them off to war – this killed them in
numbers, and those that came back did so respectful of structure and authority,
ready to go on to a life as part of the system, lawyers, accountants, etc. This
had the added advantage, from the perspective of the elite, of leaving large
numbers of young women available to them. It is no surprise that most of the
major wars across history took place when the warring entities were
experiencing spikes in the population of young people. Long term peace leaves
policy options like skilling programmes, subsidized universities, and creating jobs
in sufficient numbers, to address the menace – less effective because (apart
from neither culling them nor freeing up the women) these are no guarantee
against them exerting their disruptive influence on society at large.
The
political perspective: Politicians tend to like being seen as
war-time leaders for the obvious benefits that winning a war brings to their
political careers – and the option of war is particularly attractive to those
whose CVs have little else to offer; who have no experience of or interest in nation
building, and whose inclinations are more towards destroying institutions and
systems rather than creating to them. You are thinking it – politicians like the
crude, bigoted provincials in our central cabinet[2].
Most of our current masters share two more dangerous traits.
One – they are semi-educated. While shrewd enough, they have limited knowledge,
a zero world view, and an inability to distinguish between mythology and
reality, the products of a broken education system and a reason for their
inability to fill public positions that have intellectual requirements. And
two, while Pakistan serves them as a convenient object of hatred, it is also their
role model for India. They lack the intellectual capacity to take into account
the arguments against military adventurism – that you cannot fight geography
(and therefore that Pakistan will always be your neighbour, whether you like it
or not), that while Pakistan may be a dump it does have a fighting army, and that
nobody wins a nuclear war. That even if they ‘win’ (i.e. assuming no nukes and
interventions by the US or China, all big ‘if’s), they will then have to
administer the most un-administrable parts of the world (the thought of these bozos
running Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa and FATA, which even the British left alone, anyone?).
To Conclude: War as a continuation of politics by other means (to quote
the military strategist Carl von Clausewitz) is one thing. And war because of some
fools’ ideological bindings, proclivity for groupthink, and need to compensate
for the inability to do anything constructive, quite another. We are in for
interesting times.
