The INS Arihant nuclear-powered submarine, yet to get its missiles, has been a long time a-coming, as the old Eartha Kitt song goes. But it’s been worth the wait.

Not surprisingly, its arrival has been greeted with criticism from Pakistan’s strategic civilian community on the grounds that it sets off an arms race, fuelled by India’s overweening ego and ambition. For naval strategists who have been around for a half a century, these comments are mirth-inducing.

India’s naval thinkers went out on a limb as early as the 1960s, in declaring that they were not, and would not be, building a navy to fight Pakistan. In a capital not known for strategic boldness or originality, this stance was risky, and the navy paid a price for its boldness. At a time when the services competed for money to acquire hardware to thwart Pakistan’s aggression, the navy declined to go down the anti-Pakistan route, and got only a meagre share of the money. But it kept its head, when those all around were losing theirs. It ploughed a lonely furrow, to be rewarded in the 21st century, when strategy, national vision and Indian confidence began to simultaneously perceive that India’s destiny lay beyond its disorderly neighbors.

The Arihant, like the INS Vikramaditya, has little to do with Pakistan. It can cover anything between 15-25000 miles on a sixty-day patrol, and Pakistan is only 130 miles from the Indian border. But it appears that the comments from Pakistan reflect their own India-specific preoccupations and threat analysis. Unfortunately India’s own continentalist strategists have confined us to a territorial mindset, automatically limiting ourselves south of the Himalayas. Delhi is just beginning to rediscover Raja Raja Chola and a maritime future, interlinking India with what the East Asians call the dynamic East. It seeks to leave behind a quarrelling Middle East, which Islamabad has aspired to creep into ever since Olaf Caroe told them that was their future.

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