The South Asia region — principally China, India and Pakistan — is involved in an arms race, with Western defence production units raking in trillions in new orders and their stakes going up each year. The principal buyer would, obviously, be India.
For instance, India would be signing defence contracts worth as high as Rs50,000 crore–Rs60,000 crore in the next six months this fiscal, over and above what is already ordered. This would take the total defence purchase orders by India to Rs3 trillion since the Narendra Damodardass Modi-led NDA took power in Delhi over two years ago, as per the government’s own revelation.
India is not alone in this frenetic arms race, though. Rather, under the prevailing regional and geopolitical situations, India has no go other than being part of what could be a disastrous arms build-up in Asia — South Asia in particular.
Pakistan’s military spend is in the range of $8 billion to $10 billion a year, set against India’s $51 billion last year. This would mean India spends more than five times higher than Pakistan for raising its military clout.
This spending is dwarfed by military spends by the US at $600 billion and China — that came global second — with $215 billion. Nations that had military budgets higher than that of India last year included Saudi Arabia with $87 billion, Russia with $66 billion and UK with $55 billion.
France, Japan and Germany spend less than India, according to independent estimates.
Admittedly, a nation has no clout as long as it does not have a military clout — something that Japan that had a pacifist constitution after World War II is now realising.
The great leaps Japan made in economic terms, its goods flooding world markets, did help in having a high quality life for its citizens. But Japan still has no way other than depending on the US and paying Americans through its nose to possess a protective military cover.
This was more so as China, with a new military clout, is breathing down Japan’s neck, as also down the necks of several other nations in the region. India has no way other than raising its military strength, as a bigger threat looms over its northern border from China, and a relatively lesser one from Pakistan on the Western border.
With China and Pakistan increasingly being hand-in-glove with each other in giving pinpricks to India in the form of border incursions from the north and terrorist infiltrations and border firings happening from the western side, the security environment in the subcontinent is becoming more and more dangerous.
Adding to this is the fact that China, Pakistan and India are nuclear-armed. It is unlikely that future generations in this region would live in peace.
India putting billions into Russian cash chest under an agreement this past week for aerial missile defence system, which is due for delivery four years hence, would provide the nation with a protective wall against aerial and nuclear attacks from Pakistan as well as China.
This is cited as one among the prized military purchases by India this year.
Alongside, India’s reliance on arms and sophisticated armaments from the US is on the ascendant of late. The point to note is that military technology is developing fast. With India getting a new powerful weapon, Pakistan can as well strive to outwit India by acquiring a new technology that could nullify the effect of the system that India gets. The same applies in relation to the military build-up by China as well.
With the hard-earned money of Asian nations going the way of the smart alecs in the West and Russia in the form of military purchases, chances are also that these big nations are only keen on raising the temperature in Asia vis-a-vis regional conflicts.
A puppet show of a kind might be on, with one military ware from the West raising India’s military strength high one day, and another raising the strength of the Chinese or Pakistani military another jot higher the next day. A Raheel Sharif or Nawaz Sharif could as well be pawns in the high-stakes game of western and Russian arms manufacturers.
It might not be insensible to suspect that even the Pakistan-based terror networks, too, are wittingly or unwittingly drawn into such games of arms race and are made to play mischief with India in the name of Kashmir.
Question is, ultimately who gains if not the West or the Russians at the grave cost of the poor in Asia?
