India's most respected guru of strategic and nuclear affairs, K. Subrahmanyam, passed away on Feb. 2, 2011, at age 82. In his lifetime, he came to wield a profound global influence that few Indian policy thinkers can claim. His analysis of India's difficult strategic environment was repeatedly borne out by events; his pragmatic recommendations had a direct bearing on some of New Delhi's most profound national security decisions of the last half-century.
Subrahmanyam's career as scholar, advisor to governments, and policymaker spanned the pivotal six decades from India's independence to its emergence as a major power. And his forging of a realist worldview in the nation of Gandhi and Nehru -- and his ability to make his ideas consistent with their thoughts -- was central to that development. He was an early and controversial advocate of New Delhi developing an atomic bomb, although he also advised the government to shackle it with an explicit policy of "no first use" -- in both cases, his advice won the day. Although he was labeled a nuclear hawk in the 1970s and 1980s, both in the domestic press and in international nonproliferation circles, he later surprised many by becoming in recent years India's most prominent voice in support of the campaign for a nuclear-weapon-free world championed by U.S. elder statesmen Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Perry, and Sam Nunn. But this position was actually consistent with his larger goal -- for India to work credibly on the global stage. In this sense, to be a player in the anti-nuclear game, it helped to have actually achieved building the bomb.
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Age did not ossify his thinking. Once a pointed Cold War critic of U.S. policy, Subrahmanyam strove successfully in his later years to convince skeptical compatriots that rapprochment with Washington -- underpinned by the historic 2010 U.S.-India civil nuclear deal -- would be a great victory for India's national interest. In one of his final media interviews, he defined this partnership of democracies as a natural way to counter both authoritarianism and Islamist extremism. The United States, he said, "does not have much of an option but to make India its leading partner."
Krishnaswamy Subrahmanyam arrived in New Delhi from his southern home
state of Tamil Nadu in 1951. He was then a young recruit to the elite
Indian Administrative Service, a chemist with a piercing intellect who
had achieved top scores in the highly competitive national civil
service examination. After the 1962 border war with China -- a
humiliation for Nehru's India -- and the shock of Beijing's subsequent
nuclear tests, the young Subrahmanyam sharpened his interest in
security issues. By 1966, as a midranking defense official, he had
become a player in an informal committee on India's nuclear policy
options, and two years later, he was appointed to head a new think
tank, the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, meant to fill what
was then a glaring gap in Indian security research and policy
innovation.
From this post, Subrahmanyam made a name for himself with bold
statements to India's civilian and military establishment. He warned,
for instance, about Indian military unpreparedness before what became
the 1971 conflict with Pakistan and -- as Indians proudly call it --
the "liberation" of Bangladesh. But his most forceful foray into
India's hesitant national security debate was his advocacy of nuclear
weapons. In his landmark study, India's Nuclear Bomb, George Perkovich
notes that in 1970 -- the year of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty --
Subrahmanyam openly called for an Indian nuclear deterrent against
possible future coercion by China. Extraordinary at the time, this view
became the official rationale for the 1998 nuclear tests and now can
be assumed to inform New Delhi's strategic policy as China's rise
continues apace.
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