PART 41 CDS & JOINTNESS INDIA The Civil & the Military in India

SOURCE:
https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/civil-and-military-india
https://www.theindiaforum.in/sites/default/files/pdf/2020/03/06/the-civil-and-the-military-in-india.pdf


CDS

Part 41 of N Parts
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-civil-military-in-india.html

Part 30 of N Parts
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/11/cds-jointness-pla-part-central-theater.html

Part 29 of N Parts
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/11/part-29-cds-jointness-pla-strategic.html

Part 28 of N Parts

https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/11/part-28-cds-jointness-pla-snapshot.html

Part 27of N Parts
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/10/chinas-future-naval-base-in-cambodia.html

Part 26 of N Parts
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/10/part-26-cds-jointness-pla-n-strategic.html

Part 25 of N Parts
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/10/part-25-cds-jointness-pla-southern.html

Part 24 of N Parts
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/10/part-24-cds-jointness.html

Part 23 of N Parts
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/10/part-22-cds-jointness-pla-chinas-three.html


Part 22 of N Parts
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/05/peoples-liberation-army-deployment-in.html

Part 21 of  N  Parts 
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/09/cds-part-9-cds-jointness-pla-part-x-of.html

Part 16 TO Part 20 of N Parts

https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/10/part-16-to-part-20-cds-jointness-list.html

Part 15 of  N  Parts 
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/09/cds-part-10-pla-q-mtn-war-himalayan.html

Part 11 of N Parts
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/09/china-defense-white-papers1995.html

Part 10 of N Parts

https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/09/part-10-cds-jointness-pla-series.html

Part  9 of N Parts
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/09/source-httpwww.html

Part  8 of N Parts
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/09/cda-part-goldwater-nichols-department.html

Part 7 of N Parts
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/08/cds-part-6-chief-of-defence-staff-needs.html

Part 6 of N Parts:
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-constitutional-provisions-for.html

Part 5 of N Parts:
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/08/part-4-cds-or-gateway-to-institutional.html

Part 4 of N Parts:
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/08/chief-of-defence-staff.html

Part 3 of N Parts:
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/08/fighting-separately-jointness-and-civil.html

Part 2 of N Parts:
  https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/08/jointness-in-strategic-capabilities-can.html

Part 1  of N Parts
https://bcvasundhra.blogspot.com/2019/09/cds-part-zero-cds-explained-what-is.html

                                          ABSENT DIALOUGE

       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yph_tRZVqu4&t=16s

                           

The Civil & the Military in India                         

                    Srinath Raghavan

A Brief History and the Challenges Ahead

14 FEB 2020

                  

The Madras Regiment of Indian Army marching during Republic Day parade | Mannat Sharma (Wikimedia)

The military now has an important seat at the high table of decision-making. Yet, a number of things have to happen – including an overhaul of professional military education – before the military can contribute effectively to decisions on national security.

****************************************************

WHERE IS THE DEFENSE UNIVERSTY ?

                                                          

                                                       - Vasundhra 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHtvbvFzFHQ

General Bipin Rawat is India's first CDS. Former Soldier breaks down Civil-Military relations

on New Year’s Day 2020, the Government announced the appointment of a Chief of Defence Staff. As India’s first CDS, General Bipin Rawat, will perform multiple and overlapping functions. He will act as the principal military advisor to the defence minister, though the service chiefs will continue to advise the minister on their respective services.

The CDS is envisaged as the first among equals. To enable the CDS perform this function, the Government has also created a Department of Military Affairs within the Ministry of Defence that will deal with issues relating expressly to military matters—including jointness, integration, prioritizing for budgets—leaving wider defence policy—including capital acquisition—to other parts of the ministry. The CDS will also hold the post of permanent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, in which capacity he will oversee tri-service organizations and be part of the chain of nuclear command.

The recent moves accord the military a prominent seat at the high table of decision-making.

These moves have been hailed as major reforms—possibly the “most significant development in the national security domain since Independence.” This is may well be true in institutional terms, though the jury will naturally be out for a while on what these changes actually accomplish. The idea of a CDS (or some variant) has been mooted for decades, including by the Group of Ministers in 2001 as well as successive committees. The Government has not only established this office, but has ushered in related changes. The Department of Military Affairs does away with the peculiar arrangement whereby the service headquarters were kept at arm’s length from the Government as “attached offices” of the ministry. The military had long maintained that this arrangement enabled bureaucratic dominance of—not to say monopoly over—defence policymaking. The recent moves accord the military a prominent seat at the high table of decision-making. Similarly, the CDS appears well positioned to deliver on longstanding, if also contentious, goals of integration—including the creation of integrated theatre commands.

As we ponder the tasks and challenges that lie ahead in defence and national security, it may be useful to take a longer historical view of the evolution of civil-military relations in India. The institutional pattern and its infirmities that we now look to transcend were not cast in stone at the time of Independence. Rather, they evolved over a period of time. Further, even its more problematic aspects—such as the desire to limit the military’s role in policy-making structures—evolved against broader concerns about its implications for democratic politics and not merely owing to unfounded fears of a military coup. Reviewing these older debates and developments might help us check the impulse to assume that everything that happened in the institutional domain of national security was either wrong or wrong-headed.

Military in the British Raj

The received wisdom has it that the tradition of political control over the military was bequeathed to independent India by the British. On the contrary, the British empire in India was in its origins a military autocracy and the military remained prominent in the British Raj throughout its existence. Even in peacetime about 40 per cent of the central government’s revenue was spent on the army in India. In 1900–01, for instance, the government spent nearly three times more on the army than it did on irrigation, famine relief and education.

This was not merely because of the deployment of the Indian army for imperial wars or the payment of “home charges” as held by theorists of the “drain of wealth” from India. Rather it was because of the institutional heft of the military and the consequent ability of the Commander-in-Chief of India to lay claim to a large chunk of the government’s budget on grounds of military necessity. Following the spat between Viceroy Lord Curzon and Commander-in-Chief General Kitchener, which led to Curzon’s resignation in 1905, the institutional balance of power tilted further in favour of the Commander-in-Chief. The latter was not only the commander of all military forces in India, but also became the Military Member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council—a post that was hitherto kept separate. In effect, the Commander-in-Chief was also the defence minister of the government. This gave the military an outsized position within the government—hardly a model of political control of the military.

[I]n its final years, during and after the Second World War, the Raj returned to its origins as a military autocracy with the promulgation of Defence of India rules and the appointment of military officers as governors general.

The emerging Indian nationalists were quick to grasp these issues. In his speech on the budget of 1903, Gopal Krishna Gokhale argued that “Indian finance is virtually at the mercy of military considerations”. Military security, he conceded, was undoubtedly a “paramount consideration”, but military preparedness had “no definite standard and might absorb whatever resources can be made available for it practically without limit”. The military’s own assessment of its requirements was being accorded excessive weight in the government’s consideration of the matter. In 1907, Gokhale argued against privileging the narrow standpoint of the soldier: “whose principal idea is to raise the efficiency of the Army to as high a state of perfection as possible, and who wants to take for this purpose all the money he can get.”1

These issues came to the fore after the First World War. The “Army in India Committee”, led by Lord Esher, asserted the importance of imperial duties, rejected increased democratic control over the military, and proposed buttressing the Commander-in-Chief’s position. These recommendations drew sharp criticism in the newly-constituted legislative assembly. Indian members of the house tabled 15 resolutions as recommendations to the Viceroy, which covered the central structural problem of civil–military relations.

The absence of “a fully responsible government in India”, they argued, did not warrant a different form of civil–military relations from Britain. To realize the “principle of ultimate supremacy of the civil power”, it was imperative that the Commander-in-Chief ceased to be a member of the Executive Council. Instead, the portfolio of defence should be entrusted to a civilian member. The Commander-in-Chief should not be allowed to commit the Indian government to “any pecuniary responsibility or any line of military policy that has not already been the subject of decision by them.”2

Even before he held the levers of the state, Nehru realized the importance of keeping the military subordinate to the political authority.

The Motilal Nehru Report of August 1928 built on these points. The report asked for “the representation of the army in the legislature by a responsible minister [as opposed to the Commander-in-Chief], who will, in actual administration, no doubt be guided by expert advice”. For considering questions of defence policy, the governor general should appoint a “Committee of Defence” consisting of the prime minister (who would chair the committee), the defence and foreign affairs ministers, the Commander-in-Chief and other service chiefs, and two other experts.

Nearly two decades would pass before this change occurred. Indeed in its final years, during and after the Second World War, the Raj returned to its origins as a military autocracy with the promulgation of Defence of India rules and the appointment of military officers as governors general. It was only when the interim government was formed in September 1946, that a civilian, Sardar Baldev Singh, was appointed the military member of the Executive Council. At the time of Independence, the chiefs of air force and navy were designated Commander-in-Chief, thereby reducing the primacy accorded to the army. Still later, in 1955, the title of Commander-in-Chief was abolished altogether and the heads of the defence services were designated chiefs of staff.

Independence and After

In establishing the norm of civilian supremacy in the new republic, Jawaharlal Nehru played a key role. Even before he held the levers of the State, Nehru realized the importance of keeping the military subordinate to the political authority. On the eve of Independence, the army’s Commander-in-Chief had issued orders to keep the public away from the flag hoisting ceremony. Rescinding this order, Nehru wrote to General Rob Lockhart: “In any policy that is to be pursued in the Army or otherwise, the views of the Government of India and the policy they lay down must prevail. If any person is unable to lay down that policy he has no place in the Indian Army.”3 This set the tone for civil-military interaction in the years ahead.

The most controversial episode in civil-military relations during the Nehru years was the army chief, General K.S. Thimayya’s offer of resignation in September 1959. The traditional account holds that Thimayya’s resignation was sparked off by a disagreement with Defence Minister V.K. Krishna Menon over the promotion of senior army officers. However, the reasons for the resignation ran deeper. Just a few weeks before the affair, Indian and Chinese forces had clashed along the eastern frontiers. 

To meet the threat from China, Thimayya wanted the political leadership to consider the proposal mooted by Pakistan’s President, General Ayub Khan, for joint defence arrangements between India and Pakistan.

[I]n Nehru’s own time the institutional balance of civil-military relations began to shift.

Nehru had already turned this down as antithetical to non-alignment. Menon, too, was opposed to the idea. Thimayya took things up directly with the Prime Minister. When matters did not progress, Thimayya sent his resignation to Nehru. The Prime Minister naturally saw this as an attempt to force his hand on policy matters. Nehru managed to persuade Thimayya to withdraw his resignation. When questioned in Parliament, Nehru played down the episode as arising out of temperamental differences. Yet Nehru’s concerns were evident when he emphasized the point that “civil (Political?) authority is and must remain supreme”.4

Yet in Nehru’s own time the institutional balance of civil-military relations began to shift. The origins of this change can be traced to the defeat against China in the winter of 1962. After the war, the political leadership came under sustained attack for having interfered in military matters, which was held to have led to the debacle. This interpretation was flawed. The military went along with the strategy (“forward policy”) proposed by civilians not because the latter rode roughshod over them, but because the professional military had no viable alternatives to offer. Besides, many of the key decisions in the run-up to the war were actually taken on the advice of the top military leadership. This is not to claim that the politicians bore no blame for the defeat—the buck stopped with Nehru—but that the claim about civilian interference as the cause of defeat was wrong.5

[T]he then Defence Secretary later noted, “In the view of the public outcry since the 1962 debacle about the relative role of politicians and the Services and their chiefs”, the military leadership had been given “a long rope."

This narrative soon became an article of faith with the military. The principal lesson drawn from it was the importance of “standing up” to politicians who sought to intrude in professional matters. More importantly, the civilians—unnerved by the war—tacitly accepted this critique. Thereafter, they restricted themselves to giving overall directives, leaving operational issues to the military.

As the then Defence Secretary later noted, “In the view of the public outcry since the 1962 debacle about the relative role of politicians and the Services and their chiefs”, the military leadership had been given “a long rope.”6 Within a decade this became the new norm in civil-military relations. Writing in the mid-1970s, a senior Ministry of Defence official observed, “while the operational directive is laid down by the political leadership, the actual planning of operations is left to the chiefs of staff, and, over the years, a convention has been established that in purely operational matters such advice of the chiefs is almost automatically accepted.”7

The military’s operational autonomy—including crucially the autonomy to define what was “operational”—emerged in parallel with the bureaucracy’s dominance over other aspects of defence policy. The Study Team on Defence Matters set up by the first Administrative Reforms Commission of 1966 noted that there was some misapprehension that civilian control amounted to “civil service control”.8 In fact, the military’s resentment of the bureaucracy went back a long way. As early as 1951, the first defence secretary of independent India, H.M. Patel, observed that the military leadership deeply disliked the role of civilian bureaucrats in policy and administrative matters alike.9

In his important, new book on Indian civil-military relations, scholar Anit Mukherjee aptly terms the peculiar institutional set-up that emerged after the China war the “absent dialogue”. He defines this as comprising: “(1) lack of civilian expertise in military issues at both the bureaucratic and political levels, (2) an institutional design wherein the military is under strong bureaucratic control, and (3) considerable military autonomy over activities that it considers to be within its own domain.”10 As Mukherjee persuasively argues, this has had deleterious consequences for national security.

Challenges Ahead

Over the years, the Indian “strategic community” has come to regard the integration of the military into policy-making structures as the silver bullet for institutional problems in national security. There is much to be said for this view. But it always obscured the fact that the problem was as much politicians and bureaucrats steering clear of the military turf and refraining from a probing engagement with military matters, especially those falling within the baggy domain of the “operational”. The changes now ushered in will hardly solve this crucial problem. If anything, political leaders will now be more susceptible to military advice without any corresponding increase in their ability to interrogate them or benefit from alternative and informed views on these issues.

Unless there is a thorough overhaul of professional military education, the military will be unable meaningfully to work the new structures that are taking shape.

Equally important, is the military’s ability to operate in the new domain of policy-making. It is no exaggeration to say that the military is deeply deficient on this count. This is not only because the military was kept out of this space, but because the armed forces’ conception of professional military education has been narrow, unimaginative and crimped. None of our military educational institutions offers any serious training in international relations or economics, history or public policy. They continue to prepare officers primarily for operational and logistical roles, and have no conception of serious academic training. Unless there is a thorough overhaul of professional military education, the military will be unable meaningfully to work the new structures that are taking shape. Just as we looked to other countries to make the case for integrated structures of policy-making, we must learn from their willingness to put their officers through serious education and prepare them for serving as policy-makers as well as soldiers.

Finally, it is important that the military and its leadership are cognizant of dangers that lurk as they embark on this new institutional journey. In his seminal work on civil-military relations, the late Samuel Huntington differentiated between subjective civilian control over the military and objective control. The latter he defined as marked by an inviolable military sphere of action whose counterpart was the military’s evacuation of the sphere of politics. Subjective control, by contrast, operated on an ideological affinity between military and political leaders. In the past, we have had a system that approximated objective control. And, as we move ahead, it is imperative not to slip into any variant of subjective control.

The conduct of certain senior military officers has also shown a propensity to go beyond the thin line dividing military matters and politics...

The new army chief, General M.M. Naravane, has rightly reminded us that the armed forces owe their allegiance to the values embodied in the Constitution. The BJP Government, however, has sought to mobilize the military community (including retirees) under the sign of a muscular nationalism: think of its campaign 2013-14 campaign for one-rank one-pension; the induction as cabinet minister of controversial former army chief, General V.K. Singh; the “celebrations” on the 50th anniversary of the 1965 war; the national war memorial; the milking of “surgical strikes” and the airstrikes on Pakistan for electoral purposes.

The conduct of certain senior military officers has also shown a propensity to go beyond the thin line dividing military matters and politics: think of former Army Chief and now CDS General Rawat’s comments about a planned influx from Bangladesh that was aimed at changing Assam’s political profile, his invocation of security challenges on the eve of state elections, or his recent wading into controversy over student protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens. General Naravane himself seemed unsure of this line when in his Army Day speech, he lauded the decision to rescind Article 370—a matter that lies before the Supreme Court.

The new CDS has his job cut out for him. But, in the months and years ahead, it will be up to our military brass to craft a course of action that enables the armed forces to contribute both well and wisely to national security.

Tags: 

Indian Military

 Indian Army

 Indian Military Reforms

 General Bipin Rawat

 General MM Naravane

 Chief of Defence Staff

 Indian Army Chief

 Ministry of Defence

Footnotes: 

1. W. R. Mujawar ed., Speeches and Writings of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, vol. 1 (Delhi: Mangalam Publications, 2009), pp. 41-42, pp. 144-45.

 2. Resolutions on Esher Committee, CID 119-D, CAB 6/4, The National Archives, London.

 3. Cited in Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (London: Picador, 2007), p. 760.

4. Srinath Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India: A Strategic History of the Nehru Years (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010), pp. 266-70. Also see, Jairam Ramesh, A Chequered Brilliance: The Many Lives of V.K. Krishna Menon pp. 502-6.

 5. Srinath Raghavan, “Civil-Military Relations in India: The China Crisis and After”, Journal of Strategic Studies, volume 32, no. 1 (February 2009), pp. 149-175.

 6. P.V.R. Rao to Additional Secretary Ministry of Defence, 18 May 1973; ‘Note on Incident’ by P.V.R. Rao, 5 September 1965 in Y.D. Gundevia Papers, Subject File 7, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. 

7. P. R. Chari, “Civil-Military Relations in India”, Armed forces and Society, volume 14, no. 1 (November 1977), p. 13.

 8. Cited in A.G. Noorani, “The Doctrine of Civilian Control” in A.G. Noorani, Constitutional Questions and Citizens’ Rights (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 392.

 9. H.M. Patel to General Roy Bucher, 23 February 1951, Roy Bucher Papers, 7901/87-33, National Army Museum, London. 

10. Anit Mukherjee, The Absent Dialogue: Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Military in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 5.

The Shepherding to Disintegration!!

SOURCE:
https://olivescribble.com/2020/01/17/the-shepherding-to-disintegration-hybrid-warfare-against-india/


You are pulling that pin on yourself slowly but surely!

The Shepherding to Disintegration!! (HYBRID WARFARE AGAINST INDIA)

Posted byOliveblood57January 17, 2020Posted inIndian politics, Indian society, Pakistan, social media, television

Would the sheep know they’d be slaughtered? well, no they wouldn’t and so wouldn’t the credulous commoner being shepherded to his own peril in this manifestation of 

“New Age Hybrid Warfare“.

Been watching, letting it go sipping my ale and then it just kept growing, grown to the audacity of biting my conscience. That ideology,that “cool generation’s ignorance” which serves a catalyst to the whole plan of disintegrating, shredding this great nation to pieces, that pretentious, chichi little celebrities using their charm to woo some more sheep pushing an agenda that would eventually slaughter us all, the sheep included. Enough! that just bit me out of my slumber and here i write to tear into some 

“Breaking India – Annihilating me and my existence forces”.

Well then, i know already that my writing style isn’t pretty direct and i like to dribble with words, oh yes today i chose a serious affair to talk about and i lay all my propensities to rest and write as direct as a 7.62X51 MM bullet fired from a hardened sniper rifle.

  I WRITE ABOUT THE HYBRID WARFARE                              WE FACE 

                           AND 

       I WRITE WITH ALL MY HEART!

You are pulling that pin on yourself slowly but surely!

War! well my friend, you are not interested in that heinous act, war is interested in you, that’s on a prowl, scouting your streets. The callow ones wouldn’t agree though, the war is ubiquitous, its everywhere and it is biting you nimble and there are those cunning ones who wouldn’t let you feel the pain till you bleed out the last ounce of life!

  – Someone Opinionated

Yeah, that warfare that tends to drain you out, eat you hollow and kill you as you lay in slumber is called Hybrid Warfare and  unfortunately it has started biting you already. The recent experience i gained interacting with young boys and girls who would just share anything that looks cool online on social media platforms is that people don’t even know what ramifications their one act of careless, cool looking online behavior can have. They form an opinion without even an ounce of knowledge about any serious subject and then start sharing propaganda material for the same, least would they know that they are being used as skateboards for someone else’s sinister purpose that would eventually come to haunt themselves. That is one particular streak of behavior our online generation has that assists Hybrid Warfare.

DEFINITION :

Hybrid Warfare is a Military Strategy which employs political Warfare and blends conventional Warfare, Irregular Warfare and Cyber Warfare with other Influencing  methods such as fake news, Diplomacy, Lawfare and Foreign electoral intervention.

CERTAIN PECULIARITIES OF HYBRID WARFARE  :

• Waged by state, non state actors or combination thereof
• Employment of all forces and capabilities at disposal
• Targets cognitive domain with population as target and means
• No limitations of time in achieving the aim

“Why be in a messy war when you can just light a fire and watch people fight among-st themselves”

That would just sum it all up, why would your enemy fight a war when he can just light a fire and see you fighting among-st yourselves? that is the best case scenario for him and that is what your enemy has come to now and mind you, you are assisting him too. The Hybrid Warfare targets the minds and also uses the minds from within the target population for propaganda which allows the enemy to recruit propaganda agents without any cost and the agents in turn ruin their own nation or society. The aim of any kind of warfare is just to destroy the enemy, various means and techniques have been used in past for the destruction of adversary’s military thus subjugating him however in modern times, destruction is not limited to only military targets. Population and Institutions are prime target of this new-age warfare. Minds are targeted under hybrid warfare strategy for propaganda and these minds further keep the propaganda on as a chain reaction specifically now in the age of Whatsapp and other social media tools. Adversary just waits and sees the manifestation of his plan without a direct involvement.

  “Propaganda is not a flawed description but a script for action”

HYBRID WARFARE IS THE BEST STRATEGY FOR A WEAKER PAKISTAN TO TAKE ON MUCH STRONGER BUT DIVERSE INDIA : DIVERSITY AND RESULTING FRACTURE LINES ARE EXPLOITED

Ingredients for Hybrid warfare

• Diversity – Ethnic, Religion, Caste, Linguistic  :  Though traditionally diversity in our nation has been treated as a strength, it brings with it many fracture lines and those make a nation susceptible to hybrid warfare which tends to exploit the fracture lines to break the nation eventually.
• Socioeconomic differences : Well, that can be a common factor for any nation, all nations have Socioeconomic differences and that is not specific to India but it remains a factor which can be exploited for waging a hybrid campaign. Naxal problem India is a perfect example of its exploitation.
• Partition – 1947 and its aftermaths : Jinnah’s Pakistan was carved out of India in 1947 and though Indian leadership chose moral high grounds with adopting secularism, the partition left a scar and a mistrust between the two largest communities i.e. Hindu and Muslim and that mistrust continues to be exploited.
• Historic Schism : Islamic Invasions and campaigns against native Hindus has left its footprint in ruined temples and certain mosques. One man’s hero is other man’s savage plunderer, that sure adds up to the friction and differences that can be exploited.
• Corruption : Corruption in the nation leaves so many hurt individuals forming part of the “Have not” clergy. These may be someone financially hurt, emotionally persecuted or an unemployed, underprivileged individuals, they sure make good candidates to be exploited.
• Unabated political vendetta : Political parties have shown in past that they won’t exhibit any ethics and would go to any neighborhood for gaining power. Refer Mr Mani Shankar Aiyer of the Congress making a statement to Pakistani media while in Pakistan, he actually called upon Pakistan to help Congress thwart Mr Modi. Does Political ambition score over national interest?
  

Some quintessential Hybrid Characteristics and their manifestation in Indian context:

1. Cost vs benefits : Hybrid is way more rewarding for Pakistan than a conventional war against a stronger enemy India.
2. Threatening the stability of the nation without crossing the  threshold to conventional war : Pakistan’s involvement in Kashmir is a direct example.
3. Deniability : Hybrid warfare waged through unconventional means i.e. not directly involving Pakistan’s military gives it an advantage of denying any hand in a terrorist attack, Parliament,26/11 and Pulwama attacks are blatant and glaring examples. Here it must be remembered how people within India handed over deniability on a platter to Pakistan for their ulterior political motives and blamed RSS for 26/11 attack ( refer Aziz Burney’s book – RSS ki Sazish). Another twist of deniability to Pakistan was provided by the politicians across India who questioned the Armed Forces after the Surgical Strikes even to an extent asking proof and denying its occurrence. All Pakistan had to do was just sing along the chorus.
4. Deep and Long-term Impact: Hybrid warfare which in itself includes propaganda and information warfare leaves a long term impact on generations and eventually the generations from within the target nation start working for disintegration of the nation. you may refer to the “khalistani” and “kashmiri” separatism which today is supported by agitating so called “students” right  in the National Capital Region.
5. Lesser Safeguards under the law of the land as law amendments take time to catch up with the fast paced mutation of the hybrid warfare tactics.
6. Lack of preparedness : Defence Forces are either not mandated to deal with the softer tools for the greater sinister ploy or keep themselves occupied with the harder upfront conventional threat and the softer, finer tools of hybrid warfare go unnoticed.
7. Plays outside the domain of def forces mandate to operate : persistent use of “student politics” and universities being done to exploit the inability of the establishment to deal sternly with the so called “youth” and “students” allows the agents of hybrid warfare go unscathed.
   
8. Hybrid play on a sub-critical level : Threshold of war flirted with, not crossed. Conventional mil kept as a deterrence and not overtly involved : reference may be drawn to Pakistan’s military providing training, recruitment, logistical and material support to Jihadi Terrorist groups but involving itself only as a credible deterrence to any credible Indian response.
9. An ubiquitous yet deniable war : Hybrid warfare lets the enemy to take fight to the streets, ghettos and daily regimens of the target nation’s citizen, it surrounds the citizen with the credible achievement of war objectives but holds the ace up it’s sleeve, thats deniability. Here reference may be drawn to the violent agitations and riots by religious groups, “students”, “University Politicians”. Any agitation that threatens to or does actually stall the nation’s economic progress and dents its international image thus discouraging any fresh investments into the nation falls into the domain of hybrid warfare. JNU leftists have done enough harm on this account– “afzal hum sharminda hain”?
10. Information and Intellectual domain : “The state of Pakistan has not deployed the army against its own people in the way that the democratic Indian state has.” – Miss Suzanne Arundhati Roy. Now statements like these only help annihilate the global image of our nation and a well disciplined army known to maintain high moral ethos.
11. Lawfare : some eminent lawyers of supreme court forced the supreme court to open midnight in support of Terrorist Afzal Guru. They provide immunity to likes of Sharjeel Imam and Kanhaiya Kumar who blatantly work to break the country

“A few clicks on your smart phone won’t make you as wise as a domain expert, unwittingly you’ll buy a narrative and an assumption of wisdom though, that my friend is a sinister combination”

THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE : This picture shows the various tools of hybrid warfare however hybrid warfare’s picture can never be complete as the ambit of hybrid warfare keeps expanding with every visitation of a new technology, recent case in point can be social media and artificial intelligence. The Social media platforms has given audience to every common citizen who otherwise might have been absolutely inconsequential to the mass. Social media gives a conduit to  propaganda in more than one way, advent of mobile phone and internet has dragged people away from a book reading habit to form some firm opinions and it has become easy for them to fall prey to the propaganda and further becoming a vehicle of its evangelism by sharing it further. Propaganda messages and videos go viral and the chain reaction ensues which cannot be stopped. Artificial Intelligence on the other hand captures the interest of the individuals and serve them the selective propaganda messages that they have liked or shared in past. ANY ATTEMPT BY THE ESTABLISHMENT TO STOP THE FISSION REACTION OF PROPAGANDA MESSAGES IS MOURNED AGAINST AS A WOUND TO BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS : reference here may be drawn to how government’s move to halt mobile internet services in Jammu and Kashmir is being protested against globally by a particular lobby in the name of human rights.

“Coordinated and synchronised actions that deliberately target democratic institutions and the very basis of existence of a nation state  while exploiting the systemic susceptibilities just under the threshold of war, flirting with it though”

“Once you start attacking nationalism, national identity, territorial identity. As people then you don’t have to invent much, if that is destroyed there is nothing left”

—- and that my friend is already happening in India, if any doubts please see any protest by JNU students.

Shaheen Bagh protests are clearly not in support of the democracy and the constitution, it only takes a serious reading into the history of Islam, Shaheen Bagh is just a show of strength in line with the principles of Muslim brotherhood (UMMAH). Indian Muslims will themselves have to choose between the Nation state that is their own or the UMMAH which just seeks brotherhood of a particular religious allegiance which totally would be against the principles of a secular republic. If Indian Muslims do respect secular constitution as claimed by the mainstream media, Muslims need to rise up for the constitution and not against it.

In the end i would sum it up to say, Hybrid warfare is happening in present times and you my compatriots are the target, tools, agents and means for the enemy to achieve his aim. It is you who will eventually decide the fate of this “Secular, Multi-linguistic, Multi-cultural, Ethnically diverse and Democratic” nation. Particularly the youth needs to use the social media responsibly and understand what one share would entail. India is a secular nation and we are all stakeholders in the existence of this nation, just be alive to this reality. If you be alive to your responsibilities the next time you are about to share something on social media, my entire write-up is successful or else, well, you are pulling that grenade’s pin on you, death won’t just be mine, you too have days numbered.

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Published by Oliveblood57

A dreamer, an architect, a mother, an army wife, a cook, a home maker, a traveller celebrating my everyday life to the hilt and making opinions as it goes View more posts