Thirty years back, in 1992, George Tanham had put the cat among the pigeons by noting India’s ‘lack of strategic thinking’. Tanham had called out the lack of strategic culture by pointing to Delhi’s ‘reactive’ instincts, as opposed to ‘active’ vision or pre-emptive doctrines. Expectedly, this had rankled many people. However, many professional and apolitical thinkers had silently conceded the point. The irrepressible former Chief of Army Staff, General K Sundarji, who had actually written India’s nuclear doctrine along with Admiral RH Tahiliani, was one such concerned thinker. In 1993, General Sundarji wrote his fiction (‘faction’) book, Blind Men of Hindoostan, where he likened India’s nuclear strategy to blind men misinterpreting an elephant by touching parts of it.
In today’s hyper-jingoistic times, when there is a dangerous conflation of the idea of nationhood with partisan identity, such a sobering and forewarning perspective by an international analyst would automatically lead to a sharp response from partisan apologists, who will also point to a host of civilisational literature on the statecraft, strategy and philosophy of ancient ‘Bharat’.