By Nitin Gokhale
Last May, just days before India’s general election results were announced, the country’s highest policy making body for security matters was convened by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Its mandate: Find ways of enabling India’s military to take on an increasingly powerful (and belligerent) China.
The goal is to plug existing gaps in India’s preparedness along the Arunachal Pradesh-China frontier, and the two divisions, consisting of about 20,000 well-armed troops, will include a squadron of India’s armoured spearhead—Soviet-built T-90 tanks and a regiment of artillery. The Indian Air Force has over the past year deployed 36 Su-30MKI, its most advanced multi-role fighter aircraft, to Tezpur in the country’s north-east in response to the People’s Liberation Army Air Force’s seven airbases in Tibet and southern China.
Indian Navy is working to build and acquire new, varied and potent platforms including an aircraft carrier, nuclear submarines, stealth frigates and long-range maritime reconnaissance planes. By 2014, it hopes to have 160 ships in its fleet, up from its current strength of 136. But the most surprising revelation to many analysts was India’s public admission that it was inducting a Russian Akula-class Type 971 nuclear submarine into its forces, in addition to an indigenously designed and built submarine, earlier called the advanced technology vessel but now officially named the INS Arihant (The Destroyer).
In addition, in recent months, India has also successfully test fired its long range Agni-III strategic missile, capable of hitting targets deep inside China, while the head of India’s missile building programme, VK Saraswat, announced in May that India will go one step further by testing the 5,000-kilometre range, nuclear-capable Agni IV missile in 2011.
