War and peace: India’s formal abandonment of strategic restraint takes South Asia into uncharted waters

India’s apparent retaliation across the Line of Control in Kashmir in response to the vicious attack on its troops by Pakistan-based terrorists, has the potential of fundamentally changing the dynamic of India-Pakistan relations. For many years, India was seen as holding on to a policy of “strategic restraint.” But before we understand the implications of the formal abandonment of this policy, it is worthwhile to clarify what the two-word term means.

The meaning of “restraint” is clearer — the avoidance of military action in the face of an imminent threat or a violent provocation (such as a terrorist attack), or its minimization in times of war. The prefix “strategic” however has at least two possible connotations. The first is a viewpoint that places overarching national goals such as economic growth at a premium over the relatively limited losses suffered in incidents such as Uri. The second implies a refusal to lock oneself into a dynamic of military tit-for-tat, thus leaving the door for diplomacy open to eventually achieve final settlements of long-festering disputes. In all interpretations of the term, it is important to note a sense of a voluntary decision to desist when the choice exists to go further in some form.

Defined in this manner, India has indeed historically practised a policy of strategic restraint with respect to Pakistan, a legacy of the strategic paradigm of moralism prominent in Nehruvian foreign policy. In 1949, India chose to go to the UN to resolve the war that ultimately led to the de-facto partition of Kashmir. In 1983, Indira Gandhi did not approve a plan designed to bomb Pakistan’s nuclear facilities before the country was nuclear-capable. 

The case of the 1971 war, seemingly a case of Indian non-restraint, is also instructive. After achieving total military victory in the east, India chose to withdraw its troops from East Pakistan within weeks, returned its territorial gains in the west, speedily released all Pakistani prisoners of war, and promptly entered into bilateral negotiations at Simla. Finally there is no evidence that India has used subconventional (i.e. covert) tools to respond in kind to Pakistani provocations that date right back to Operation Gibraltar in 1965. 

However, before its formal abandonment this week, the Indian doctrine of strategic restraint has increasingly been under pressure since the 1990s. Growing outrage with each major attack — including the Indian Parliament in 2001, in Mumbai in 2006, and again in 2008 — has led to a much stronger demand for retaliation among politicians, strategic analysts and sections of the citizenry. Three examples of weakening of strategic restraint can be cited — Operation Parakram’s massive military buildup in 2001-02, when India moved two of its three strike corps into forward positions, thereby flirting with large-scale warfare, the dilution in 2003 of India’s No-First Use (NFU) pledge on nuclear weapons, and more recently India’s major escalation of border firing in October-November 2014 in Kashmir. 

If the Indian state has then been attitudinally ready to retaliate for some time, why has it taken so long to do so? The seeming “restraint” shown by India in recent years can be better explained as due to deterrence (and secondarily the influence exercised by the international community) rather than any persistent doctrine of strategic restraint. It is these factors, not strategic restraint, which have given successive governments pause.

The deterrence most visibly operational in the India-Pakistan cold war is nuclear, and has been the focus of scores of analyses. There is an understanding within the Indian leadership and most policy practitioners that escalation to a nuclear level must be avoided due to its utterly horrific consequences on civilians. However, given that deterrence has already failed repeatedly on the subconventional front, recent developments have also called into question the durability of deterrence on the conventional plane. There is an implicit assumption in India that as long as any Pakistani escalation is limited to the conventional plane, the costs are acceptable.

That is a grave error. The weeks-long intense exchange of fire on the Kashmir border in October-November 2014, involving no more than machine guns and mortars with a range of 5 km, resulted in large-scale damage to border villages and the displacement of tens of thousands of civilians. But this was only a small sideshow compared to what could happen if serious hostilities were to break out in the months ahead, even if they are relatively short and remain confined to the conventional, non-nuclear plane. 

Unlike the Kargil war of 1999, such a conflict is unlikely to be confined to the border. Strategic assets located near cities could be targets. Mixed land-use is the norm in India’s urban areas, with strategic assets closely intertwined with densely packed civilian neighbourhoods and disaster management capabilities weak to nonexistent. The consequences will not be pretty.

The reality is that Indian cities have never experienced the effects of modern warfare, and the Indian people have no memory of what such warfare would mean to their lives. The last full-scale war between India and Pakistan in 1971 involved limited firepower and no ballistic and cruise missile capabilities. The last major conflict that reached into the core of India’s cities was the Great Revolt of 1857, well before the age of modern aerial and naval warfare. Thus the pain experienced by the ordinary Indian even in a conventional, limited conflict will be unprecedented, with potentially major political ramifications in a risk-averse society such as India that have not been factored into the analysts’ assumptions.

South Asia’s cold war has now moved into uncharted waters. Barring the unlikely emergence of a “Pakistani Gorbachev,” the avoidance of a conventional India-Pakistan conflict depends upon two factors — the continued sustainability of deterrence and the constraining influence of the international community. Neither can provide a guarantee that a tremendously destructive war is not in the future of South Asia.

The author is an independent consultant and researcher in energy security and strategic affairs