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Explaining Indian Moderation During Crises, 1999–2016

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Nuclear Weapons and Deterrence Stability in South Asia

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Abstract

This chapter is a comparative analysis of Indian decision-making in the four crises examined in Chap. 2. It asks why New Delhi consistently chose temperate, measured responses to significant Pakistani and Pakistan-abetted provocations. I argue that, in combination, three of the most common explanations—nuclear deterrence, U.S. crisis management, and a lack of favorable conventional military options—best account for Indian forbearance. Of these three causes, the nuclear factor is most important, because the other two are both linked and subservient to it. The Indo-Pakistani nuclear competition generates the urgent need for crisis management and sharply diminishes New Delhi’s favorable options for conventional retaliation. The least compelling explanation for Indian moderation is the ostensible doctrine of Indian strategic restraint, which stems from the deterrent power of nuclear weapons, not from any doctrine or abiding principle of Indian strategic culture.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Representative treatments include: Sumit Ganguly in Sumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur, India, Pakistan, and the Bomb: Debating Nuclear Stability in South Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Sumit Ganguly and Devin T. Hagerty, Fearful Symmetry: India–Pakistan Crises in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); Vipin Narang, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 253–82; and Kenneth Waltz in Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate, 3rd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013).

  2. 2.

    See Dinshaw Mistry, “Tempering Optimism about Nuclear Deterrence in South Asia,” Security Studies 18, no. 1 (2009): 148–82; Polly Nayak and Michael Krepon, “U.S. Crisis Management in South Asia’s Twin Peaks Crisis,” The Stimson Center, Washington, DC, September 2006; Polly Nayak and Michael Krepon, The Unfinished Crisis: U.S. Crisis Management after the 2008 Mumbai Attacks (Washington, DC: Stimson Center, 2012); and Moeed Yusuf, Brokering Peace in Nuclear Environments: U.S. Crisis Management in South Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

  3. 3.

    Works in this vein include: Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta, Arming without Aiming: India’s Military Modernization (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2010); Sunil Dasgupta and Stephen P. Cohen, “Is India Ending Its Strategic Restraint Doctrine?” Washington Quarterly 34, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 163–77; and Sarang Shidore, “India’s Strategic Culture and Deterrence Stability on the Subcontinent,” in Deterrence Instability and Nuclear Weapons in South Asia, ed. Michael Krepon, et al. (Washington, DC: Stimson Center, 2015), 119–47.

  4. 4.

    For works focused on the India–Pakistan conventional military balance, see: Christopher Clary, “Deterrence Stability and the Conventional Balance of Forces in South Asia,” in Deterrence Stability and Escalation Control in South Asia, ed. Michael Krepon and Julia Thompson (Washington, DC: Stimson Center, 2012), 135–60, and Walter Ladwig III, “Indian Military Modernization and Conventional Deterrence in South Asia,” Journal of Strategic Studies 38, no. 5 (May 2015): 729–72.

  5. 5.

    See the table in Sameer Lalwani and Hannah Haegeland, “Anatomy of a Crisis: Explaining Crisis Onset in India–Pakistan Relations,” in Investigating Crises: South Asia’s Lessons, Sameer Lalwani and Hannah Haegeland, ed. Evolving Dynamics, and Trajectories (Washington, DC: Stimson Center, 2018), 35.

  6. 6.

    The exception, of course, was India’s Kargil response, because the aggressors were on the Indian side of the LOC.

  7. 7.

    Devin T. Hagerty, The Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation: Lessons from South Asia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 163.

  8. 8.

    Robert Jervis, “Kargil, Deterrence Theory and International Relations Theory,” in Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict, Peter R. Lavoy, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 390.

  9. 9.

    There is a great deal of confusion in the literature about the nature of Pakistan’s aggression at Kargil in 1999. Narang refers to Pakistan’s “conventional aggression,” arguing that “India was unable to deter Pakistan from launching a relatively aggressive conventional attack.” Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era, 253. Also see pp. 7, 11, 296. Elsewhere, Narang notes India’s failure to deter “high-level conventional conflict, such as the Kargil War” (297), and India’s inability to deter “high-intensity wars, such as the 1999 Kargil War” (11). Other analysts use terms like “asymmetric operation,” John H. Gill, “Military Operations in the Kargil Conflict,” in Asymmetric Warfare, ed. Lavoy, 123; “limited military exercise,” Government of India, From Surprise to Reckoning: The Kargil Review Committee Report (New Delhi: Sage, 2000), 236; “limited war,” Michael Krepon, “Crises in South Asia,” in Crises in South Asia: Trends and Potential Consequences, ed. Michael Krepon and Nathan Cohn (Washington, DC: Stimson Center, 2011), 27; “low-intensity conflict,” Rajesh M. Basrur, Minimum Deterrence and India’s Nuclear Security (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 73–74; “sub-conventional” conflict, Moeed Yusuf and Jason A. Kirk, “Keeping an Eye on South Asian Skies: America’s Pivotal Deterrence in Nuclearized India–Pakistan Crises,” Contemporary Security Policy 37, no. 2 (May 2016): 11–12; “unconventional” conflict, Ashley J. Tellis, C. Christine Fair, and Jamison Jo Medby, Limited Conflicts under the Nuclear Umbrella: Indian and Pakistani Lessons from the Kargil Crisis (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2001), xi, etc. Pakistan’s covert infiltration of the Kargil area was not a conventional invasion. The territory was claimed by both countries, with the dispute between them unresolved. The Northern Light Infantry (NLI ) intruders were “lightly-equipped” forces, “not designed for major offensive operations,” who relied on “pack mules and human porters” for logistical and other needs. Gill, “Military Operations,” 97–98; Feroz Hassan Khan, Peter R. Lavoy, and Christopher Clary, “Pakistan’s Motivations and Calculations for the Kargil Conflict,” in Asymmetric Warfare, ed. Lavoy, 67. They fought in local civilian garb, i.e., shalwar kameez. The terrain was “highly glaciated and avalanche-prone, a desolate, uninhabited desert waste of serrated, knife-edge ridges piercing the sky” at altitudes of 13–18,000 feet. This was “not a very major operation either in terms of size or capability.” Government of India, From Surprise to Reckoning, 17, 103–4. With its forceful response, it was India that “conventionalize[d] the unconventional conflict.” Peter R. Lavoy, “Introduction,” in Asymmetric Warfare, ed. Lavoy, 4–5. Also see pp. 8–9, 26. Pakistan’s Kargil incursion did not represent a failure of India’s nuclear posture to deter a conventional invasion. (Emphases added.)

  10. 10.

    Samuel Black, The Changing Political Utility of Nuclear Weapons: Nuclear Threats from 1970 to 2010 (Washington, DC: 2010), 17–18. These signals consisted of three menacing statements by Pakistani civilian and military leaders, as well as the suggestive but ambiguous nuclear-related activity discussed in the Kargil section in Chap. 2.

  11. 11.

    Devin T. Hagerty, “The Kargil War: An Optimistic Assessment,” in Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia: Crisis Behaviour and the Bomb, ed. Sumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur (London: Routledge, 2009), 110. Also see: Michael Cohen, When Proliferation Causes Peace: The Psychology of Nuclear Crises (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017), 138; Toby Dalton and George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Options and Escalation Dominance (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2016), 7; Gill, “Military Operations,” 124; Jervis, “Kargil, Deterrence Theory and International Relations Theory,” 395–96; S. Paul Kapur, “Revisionist Ambitions, Conventional Capabilities, and Nuclear Instability: Why Nuclear South Asia Is Not Like Cold War Europe,” in Inside Nuclear South Asia, ed. Scott D. Sagan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 197; Lavoy, “Introduction,” 33; Sagan, in Sagan and Waltz, eds., Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 145–46; Todd S. Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann, Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 150; Waltz, in Sagan and Waltz, eds., Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 163.

  12. 12.

    Ganguly and Kapur, India, Pakistan, and the Bomb, 52–53.

  13. 13.

    V.K. Sood and Pravin Sawhney, Operation Parakram: The War Unfinished (New Delhi: Sage, 2003), 70–71, 106.

  14. 14.

    V.P. Malik, India’s Military Conflicts and Diplomacy: An Inside View of Decision Making (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2013), 127.

  15. 15.

    Narang, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era, 271. Also see: P.R. Chari, Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, and Stephen P. Cohen, Four Crises and a Peace Process: American Engagement in South Asia (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2007), 139 and Cohen, When Proliferation Causes Peace, 141.

  16. 16.

    Hagerty, “The Kargil War,” 112. Musharraf’s assertion that Pakistan did not have an operational nuclear weapons capability in 1999 is irrelevant in this context. At the time, Indian leaders had to assume that Pakistan might have such a capability.

  17. 17.

    Black, Changing Political Utility of Nuclear Weapons, 16.

  18. 18.

    Black, Changing Political Utility of Nuclear Weapons, 16–18. These signals included threatening statements by senior officials, raised alert levels, movements of ballistic missiles, ballistic missile tests, and movements of nuclear-capable aircraft.

  19. 19.

    Mistry, “Tempering Optimism about Nuclear Deterrence in South Asia,” 174; Sood and Sawhney, Operation Parakram, 9.

  20. 20.

    Praveen Swami, “A War to End a War: The Causes and Outcomes of the 2001–2 India-Pakistan Crisis,” in Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia, ed. Ganguly and Kapur, 150, 145.

  21. 21.

    Mistry, “Tempering Optimism about Nuclear Deterrence in South Asia,” 174.

  22. 22.

    Narang, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era, 278.

  23. 23.

    Narang, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era, 277. Narang’s analysis confirms and reinforces similar conclusions reached previously by scholars, for example: Rajesh Basrur, South Asia’s Cold War: Nuclear Weapons and Conflict in Comparative Perspective (London: Routledge, 2008), 62; Chari, Cheema, and Cohen, Four Crises and a Peace Process, 160, 163, 172, 173, 182; Ganguly and Hagerty, Fearful Symmetry, 167–86; Kapur in Ganguly and Kapur, India, Pakistan, and the Bomb, 58; Dinshaw Mistry, “Complexity of Deterrence among New Nuclear States: The India–Pakistan Case,” in Complex Deterrence: Strategy in the Global Age, eds. T.V. Paul, Patrick M. Morgan, and James J. Wirtz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 24; Rajesh Rajagopalan, Second Strike: Arguments about Nuclear War in South Asia (New Delhi: Viking, 2005), 204; Sood and Sawhney, Operation Parakram, 83, 97, 116, 144, and Waltz, in Sagan and Waltz, eds., Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 171–72.

  24. 24.

    “Interview: Ex-Pakistani Pres. Musharraf Mulled Using Nukes Against India after 2001 Attack,” The Mainichi, July 26, 2017.

  25. 25.

    Cohen, When Proliferation Causes Peace, 141–2.

  26. 26.

    Chari, Cheema, and Cohen, Four Crises and a Peace Process, 197.

  27. 27.

    Narang, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era, 279.

  28. 28.

    Krepon, “Crises in South Asia,” 9. Singh “reportedly asked whether Pakistan could misperceive an Indian conventional strike as a nuclear one and respond by launching its own nuclear forces. No one could answer with any certainty.” George Perkovich and Toby Dalton, Not War, Not Peace? Motivating Pakistan to Prevent Cross-Border Terrorism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016), 2.

  29. 29.

    Samuel Black, “Appendix I: The Structure of South Asian Crises from Brasstacks to Mumbai,” in Crises in South Asia, ed. Krepon and Cohn, 51; Black, Changing Political Utility of Nuclear Weapons, 15. Two of the threats involved increases in the alert levels of the Pakistan Army and PAF. One was a pointed statement by a senior Indian official.

  30. 30.

    Raj Chengappa, “Game Changer,” India Today, October 6, 2016.

  31. 31.

    Stephen P. Cohen, Shooting for a Century: The India–Pakistan Conundrum (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2013), 194; Ashley J. Tellis, Are India–Pakistan Peace Talks Worth a Damn? (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2017), 37, 71; Waltz in Sagan and Waltz, eds., The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 172–73; Krepon, “Crises in South Asia,” 11; Vipin Narang, “Posturing for Peace? Pakistan’s Nuclear Postures and South Asian Stability,” International Security 34, no. 3 (Winter 2009/2010): 64; George Perkovich, “Uri Won’t Lead India to Undertake Major Military Action,” rediff.com, September 21, 2016, http://carnegieendowment.org/2016/09/21/uri-won-t-lead-india-to-undertake-major-military-action-pub-64649; Dalton and Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Options and Escalation Dominance, 16; Rajesh Rajagopalan, “Annex B. India’s National Security Perspectives and Nuclear Weapons,” in The Strategic Chain Linking Pakistan, India, China, and the United States, eds. Robert Einhorn and W.P.S. Sidhu (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2017), 28.

  32. 32.

    Chari, Cheema, and Cohen, Four Crises and a Peace Process, 133.

  33. 33.

    Lavoy, “Introduction,” 12; also see p. 28. Similar arguments appear in: Jervis, “Kargil, Deterrence Theory and International Relations Theory,” 391; Rodney Jones, “The Kargil Crisis: Lessons Learned by the United States” and Peter R. Lavoy, “Why Kargil Did Not Produce General War,” in Asymmetric Warfare, ed. Lavoy, 374, 197, 200–1; Mistry, “Tempering Optimism about Nuclear Deterrence in South Asia,” 156; and Yusuf and Kirk, “Keeping an Eye on South Asian Skies, 7, 11.

  34. 34.

    Krepon, “Crises in South Asia,” 13. See pp. 20–26 for an overview of U.S. crisis-management efforts during all of the cases through Mumbai. Several detailed accounts of Twin Peaks and the Mumbai episode document the important role of U.S. diplomacy in helping to dampen India’s understandable desire to punish Pakistan. On Twin Peaks, see Kanti Bajpai, “To War or Not to War: The India–Pakistan Crisis of 2001–2,” in Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia, ed. Ganguly and Kapur, 163, 171, 175–77; Chari, Cheema, and Cohen, Four Crises and a Peace Process, 149; Mistry, “Tempering Optimism about Nuclear Deterrence in South Asia,” 163–75; Narang, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era, 275; Nayak and Krepon, “U.S. Crisis Management in South Asia’s Twin Peaks Crisis,” 37–43. On Mumbai, see Nayak and Krepon, Unfinished Crisis, 53.

  35. 35.

    Tellis, Are India–Pakistan Peace Talks Worth a Damn?, 36.

  36. 36.

    Ladwig, “Indian Military Modernization and Conventional Deterrence in South Asia,” 21–31; Clary, “Deterrence Stability and the Conventional Balance of Forces in South Asia,” 141–52.

  37. 37.

    Narang, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era, 281. Tellingly, Ladwig’s 2015 analysis of conventional deterrence in South Asia examines only limited Indian attack options, given the implausibility of larger operations in the shadow of nuclear weapons. “Indian Military Modernization,” 8–9.

  38. 38.

    Ali Ahmed writes: “Since the mid-1990s, a large proportion of the army has been deployed in Kashmir, perhaps over a third. Even though the army in the period acquired a third strike corps, Pakistan succeeded in bogging down in Kashmir any surplus conventional advantage India might have gained, thereby neutralising India’s conventional edge.” “Corrosive Impact of Army’s Commitment in Kashmir,” Economic and Political Weekly, February 25, 2017.

  39. 39.

    Ladwig, “Indian Military Modernization,” 16–17.

  40. 40.

    Ladwig notes that while force ratios vary, “in any instance the margin of India’s local force advantage is not decisive.” He puts the Indian manpower advantage in the Western theater at 1.1–1.2:1, well short of the 2:1 or higher ratios that would be preferable. He also puts the Indian advantage in tanks at 1.1:1 and “modern, high-performance main battle tanks” at 1.3:1, again much lower than Indian military planners would prefer. Ladwig, “Indian Military Modernization,” 27–30. Clary estimates that the ratio of combat power “may be closer to 1:1 at the theater level on day 1 of conflict than it is to 2:1. “Deterrence Stability,” 159–60, note 84.

  41. 41.

    Shashank Joshi, “The Mythology of Cold Start,” New York Times, November 4, 2011; Myra MacDonald, Defeat Is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War (London: Hurst, 2017), 135–37; Ladwig, “Indian Military Modernization,” 6; “Guns and Ghee,” The Economist, September 24, 2016.

  42. 42.

    Sood and Sawhney, Operation Parakram, 158–59, 77, 170, 145.

  43. 43.

    Government of India, From Surprise to Reckoning, 77.

  44. 44.

    MacDonald, Defeat Is an Orphan, 136.

  45. 45.

    Perkovich and Dalton, Not War, Not Peace?, 8.

  46. 46.

    Siddarth Srivastava, “Indian Army ‘Backed Out’ of Pakistan Attack,” Asia Times Online, January 21, 2009.

  47. 47.

    Ladwig, “Indian Military Modernization,” 7.

  48. 48.

    Pranab Dhal Samanta, “26/11: How India Debated a War with Pakistan That November,” Indian Express, November 26, 2010.

  49. 49.

    Ladwig, “Indian Military Modernization,” 6.

  50. 50.

    Pravin Sawhney, “Whither Our War Preparedness?” Pioneer, June 4, 2015. On India’s “effective conventional parity” with Pakistan, see Manoj Joshi, “Why Things Will Likely be All Quiet on the Western Front,” The Wire, September 26, 2016.

  51. 51.

    Dasgupta and Cohen, “Is India Ending Its Strategic Restraint Doctrine?” 163–77; Cohen and Dasgupta, Arming without Aiming, especially ix–xiii and 1–28; Shidore, “India’s Strategic Culture and Deterrence Stability on the Subcontinent”; Ali Ahmed, India’s Doctrine Puzzle: Limiting War in South Asia (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014), 110, 115–50.

  52. 52.

    Cohen and Dasgupta, Arming without Aiming, xiii, 1.

  53. 53.

    Dasgupta and Cohen, “Is India Ending Its Strategic Restraint Doctrine?,” 163.

  54. 54.

    Cohen and Dasgupta, Arming without Aiming, 147.

  55. 55.

    Shidore, “India’s Strategic Culture,” 119, 135.

  56. 56.

    Shidore, “India’s Strategic Culture,” 135.

  57. 57.

    Presentation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, January 23, 2015.

  58. 58.

    Shidore, “India’s Strategic Culture,” 133–35. With respect to Twin Peaks, Shidore also cites nuclear deterrence and U.S. crisis management as other causes of Indian restraint. On Mumbai, he argues that “there is no evidence that the Cabinet Committee on Security seriously considered a military response” (134). This is refuted by first-person accounts, including Shivshankar Menon, Choices: Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2016), 60–81.

  59. 59.

    Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). Johnston differentiates between a country’s “symbolic set” and its “operational set.” The former is a “symbolic or idealized set of assumptions and ranked preferences”; the latter “reflects [a] hardpolitik strategic culture [arguing] that the best way of dealing with security threats is to eliminate them through the use of force.” x.

  60. 60.

    Ahmed, India’s Doctrine Puzzle, 130, 150. For a particularly convincing critique of the “strategic restraint” logic in South Asia’s pre-nuclear era, see Rudra Chaudhuri, “Indian ‘Strategic Restraint’ Revisited: The Case of the 1965 India–Pakistan War,” India Review 17, no. 1 (March 2018): 55–75.

  61. 61.

    Gill, “Military Operations,” 114–19, especially 115; Rajesh Rajagopalan, “India: The Logic of Assured Retaliation,” in The Long Shadow: Nuclear Weapons and Security in 21st Century Asia, ed. Muthiah Alagappa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 204.

  62. 62.

    For a more complete summary of Indian military activities, see Ahmed, India’s Doctrine Puzzle, 129.

  63. 63.

    Dasgupta and Cohen, “Is India Ending Its Strategic Restraint Doctrine?” 166–67.

  64. 64.

    Chari, Cheema, and Cohen, Four Crises and a Peace Process, 139.

  65. 65.

    Vipin Narang, “The Lines That Have Been Crossed,” The Hindu, October 4, 2016.

  66. 66.

    Ankit Panda and Vipin Narang, “Nuclear Stability, Conventional Instability: North Korea and the Lessons from Pakistan,” November 20, 2017, https://warontherocks.com/2017/11/nuclear-stability-conventional-instability-north-korea-lessons-pakistan/.

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    Devin T. Hagerty

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Hagerty, D.T. (2020). Explaining Indian Moderation During Crises, 1999–2016. In: Nuclear Weapons and Deterrence Stability in South Asia. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21398-5_3

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