File photo of Ajit Doval. Tauseef Mustafa—AFP
The Narendra Modi-led government in India is supposed to have a “defense” doctrine focused on Pakistan that is hardly “defensive” in nature. Devised by National Security Adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval, it is popularly known as the ‘Doval Doctrine’ and builds off Modi’s “India first” sloganeering and his government’s emphasis on Delhi adopting “an independent stand on national security.”
To better understand this doctrine, one must consider the man responsible for it. According to Indian journalist A.G. Noorani, Doval likes to wade into the thick of things. “He [Doval] went to Iraq on a rescue mission for Indians taken hostage by the Islamic State; organized the Indian Army’s hot pursuit into Myanmar and then went over to smoothen ruffled feathers; phoned Pakistan’s High Commissioner in New Delhi and instructed his counterpart in Islamabad to berate Pakistan for the firings on the LoC; questioned the Delhi Police on the Uber cab rape case; and much else,” he writes. “This is a real man of action, the kind of whom we have never seen before,” he added.
Now we come to the Doval Doctrine itself. In February 2014, a few weeks before becoming the NSA, Doval stated: “Terrorism is a strategic threat to India because it was an international phenomenon; because Pakistan fed and promoted it; and because India has a large Muslim population. However, terrorism could not be fought because it was an idea, a word. Only terrorists could be fought (or ‘degraded’ in capacity), because only a tangible enemy could be defeated, not a word. India thus had to name its threat, in this case, Pakistan.”
Having identified the enemy, he questioned how this “threat” should be tackled before proceeding to answer his own query: “I talked about their having reached the nuclear threshold, having the strategic weapons systems, missiles, strategic partnership with China. How do we tackle this?” His solution: India attack Pakistan in various ways short of conventional war. “Work on the vulnerability of Pakistan. It can be economy, internal security, it can be political. International isolation. I am not going into details. But you change the engagement from the defensive mode,” he suggested. These remarks established the blueprint for how India has been acting in its neighborhood, and partly explains the resurgence of terrorism in Pakistan, especially in Balochistan, through militants funded by hostile actors.