Watch Ajit Doval say if Pakistan does 'one Mumbai' it may lose Balochistan
In a speech in 2014, the NSA explained his principles in dealing with terror from across the border.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government came into power promising a radical re-think at several levels of decision-making. The main selling points might have been sweeping out the Congress's corruption approach to power and the economy, but Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party also made much of the United Progressive Alliance's inability to guarantee national security and particularly it's incompetence at dealing with Pakistan. Modi was supposed to change all of that, with National Security Advisor Ajit Doval at his side.
Doval's image might take a little bit of a beating in the aftermath of the Pathankot attack, when six Pakistani terrorists entered an airforce base near the border in Punjab and managed to kill seven Indian military personnel. But it is nevertheless instructive to hear what principles govern Doval's approach to taking on Pakistan, which he conveniently layed out for us to understand in a speech at the Sastra University while delivering the Nani Palkhivala Memorial Lecture in 2014. Speaking about the reaction of the government in the aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Doval said it was "weak and misplaced." He said that India's approach has primarily been defensive, always reacting to what Pakistan does, effectively allowing Islamabad to decide when it wants to have talks and when it wants to attack.
Instead, Doval argued for a defensive offence. While all-out offence might provoke war, too dangerous an outcome for nuclear neighbours, Doval's defensive offence approach would "work on the vulnerabilities of Pakistani." This could be exposing their terrorist activities, it could be hurting their internal security, it could be undercutting their political position in Afghanistan.
"When you change the engagement from the defensive mode, because in the defensive mode you throw 100 stones on me and I stop 90, still 10 will hurt me. And I can never win. Because either I will lose or there is a stalemate," Doval said. "Once they know that India has shifted its gear from the defensive mode to the defensive offence, they will find that it is unaffordable for them. You can do one Mumbai, you may lose Balochistan."
