While India should be concerned about Beijing’s long-term strategic intentions, there are also lessons to be learnt. Even as China continues to pursue its national security objectives through careful defence planning and expenditure, Indian defence planning remains ad hoc in nature with no clearly defined end-state. The real issue in India’s case is effective management of available budgetary resources because a developing, democratic country like India will always be constrained in what it can spend on defence. While a major portion of the military budget continues to go towards revenue expenditure, India continues to lag behind in investing in research and development — which means it continues to rely on other countries for cutting-edge technologies, thereby perpetuating the vicious cycle. This is mainly due to the fact that India doesn’t have a coherent national security strategy that maps out its long-term security challenges along with concomitant defence planning. Effective defence planning and force structuring require a coherent grand strategy and an appropriate institutional framework, something that India has somehow never found the will to develop. It is here, rather than in matching defence expenditure figure by figure, that India should try to emulate China. 

The writer teaches at King’s College, London

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