India's former nuclear commander proposes tolerance limits for hot exchange with China

[TamilNet, Thursday, 05 December 2019, 23:25 GMT]
A challenging China in the maritime domain [of India] cannot be allowed to pass without a strategic riposte and India would have to mark its ‘red lines’ in clear terms to China, write Vice Admiral (retd) Vijay Shankar, a former Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) of India's Strategic Forces Command (SFC) and C-in-C of the Andaman and Nicobar Command in the past. The retired 70-year-old Vice Admiral has posted a piece in his blog suggesting four ‘red lines’. One of them is any Chinese attempt to offer military support to any future internal war against the Indian State. Another red-line is China establishing aggressive deployments capable of disrupting Indian energy and resource traffic.

India and the USA are seeking to checkmate three gravitational aspects of China's Anti-Access and Area Denial (A2/AD) doctrine in the Indo-Pacific.

“In China’s case, it is the triumvirate of the Aircraft Carrier; nuclear attack submarine and security of the narrows and of its string of pearls,” Shankar writes in the piece titled ‘A Strategic Perspective for Change in the Navy’.

“The paradoxical effects of China’s actions are to undermine its own strategic standing, hasten counter balancing alignments and urge a global logic of cooperative politics over imperial strategies,” he writes further recognising the Quadrilateral Cooperative Security Dialogue (Quad) as the counter-balancing formation.

“The Charter of the Quad is yet to be fleshed out; but conceivably it may follow the NATO template. It may have three objectives. First, to reinforce a rule-based regional Order that rejects nationalistic ‘Navalism’ of the kind that has emerged. Second, to promote a liberal trading regime and freedom of navigation. Third, to provide security assurances.”

Shankar's command and field experiences also include IPKF's unsuccessful operation, Operation Pawan, against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

External Links:

Strategic Dialogues :

A Strategic Perspective for Change in the Navy

Chronology: