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'It is almost certain the SDR will not be made public'

The question no one has been asking is what happened to the much-touted India's first ever Strategic Defence Review, SDR? This acronym was the lead item of the Bharatiya Janata Party's national security agenda. Remember the famous one-liners: "The nuclear option will be exercised after SDR". "Changes in security management will come after SDR" and so on. The truth is: the SDR got buried in the fall-out of Pokhran II and the CTBT imbroglio. On the cocktail circuit the question is... Are you for or against CTBT misused or the SDR?

Logically, had the SDR preceded and not followed the nuclear tests, political and diplomatic damage containment tasks would have been less cumbersome. The long-awaited defence reforms would not have been stonewalled by the civilian and defence bureaucracies. And what is more, the National Security Council, NSC, would have found an agenda.

Now the good news is that the SDR has been completed. Like the Draft Nuclear Doctrine, DND, it is a consensual work of the National Security Advisory Board, NSAB, whose one year term expired last week. The DND was released with great fanfare, but it put the government in a spot politically and diplomatically. So much so, that the foreign minister and India's principal nuclear negotiator, Jaswant Singh had to distance himself from it, saying it did not even have the sanction of the NSC, leave alone the government. It is almost certain the SDR will not be made public.

The likely fate of the DND and SDR puts into question the action-ability of the recommendations of the NSAB. Who in government or the concerned department will review its reports? Will the strategic planning group of the NSC do as the independent SDR?

It is the MoD whose prerogative it is to do the SDR. But it has never had the chance to do one, ever. The first and last time any defence review was attempted was by the Defence Planning Staff in 1988. It received a mention in Parliament. Regretfully, the SDR is likely to remain an unofficial document and therefore not actionable. This is one of the several flaws of the structuring of the NSC.

During Kargil the NSAB provided periodic inputs to the national security advisor, though none of it was presented to the Cabinet Committee on Security. Conspicuous by its absence from the NSC scene has been the strategic planning group, which has not met even once so far.

The SDR is the dynamo for defence reforms. Kargil has shown the cracks in command, intelligence and equipment. Most of all, it has shown the poor readiness and response levels in an age of quick reaction forces and infotech.

After sacking Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, Defence Minister George Fernandes promised the integration of the service headquarters and the MoD. This could not be done in his last term due to differences among the parties concerned. It is a year since that commitment and more than two years since the BJP promised to introduce defence reforms.

Despite Fernandes's trial and error method of trying to change the system, thanks to the government rules of business and ego hassles, the bottlenecks remain. Streamlining higher defence management, sharpening decision-making and eliminating red tape are the key result areas. Change, however slow, is inevitable, but it has to come top-down.

Fernandes has an unfinished agenda on structural reforms. After his reappointment as defence minister, he discussed with this writer, his post Kargil priorities and problems. On integration, he said he was accused (by the Rajya Sabha) of trying to politicise the armed forces. But "I have to do it" he emphasised, adding "soon". There are internal hurdles too: like the air force's historical fear of losing identity and the bureaucracy, its turf.

Intelligence is the other area for integration. But this is also riddled with turf and temperament problems. The first step, according to Fernandes, is creating a defence intelligence agency. He indicated that the defence budget has to be hiked from the present 2.4 per cent to at least 3 per cent of the GDP which is also not enough. This is the first time any minister has linked money and modernisation with percentage of the GDP, as it should be.

On realigning the army's role, he said it has to be freed from its counter insurgency role so that it can be reoriented to fighting not just a proxy war, but a full-scale war. He was the first person to suggest this. One should not forget what happened in Pakistan when that country had a military ruler as in 1965 and 1971, he noted.

The next flashpoint is Siachen. General Pervez Musharraf is obsessed with recovering Siachen. It was his brigade that in 1986-87 made repeated but abortive attempts to retake Siachen. He wants to prove he is an exception to the rule that military rulers in Pakistan lose wars. Kargil, Musharraf says, was not a military defeat.

On his part, Fernandes pays routine homage to the soldiers at Siachen. Are his repeated visits (once every week, if he can manage it) some kind of penance for not being able to introduce reform?

General Ashok K Mehta