Worries about Indian military build up

What can Pakistan do?

Pakistan has disputes with India. India is in the process of a big military build-up placing orders for costly state of the art weapons systems. Naturally this worries Pakistan. But worries must not lead to paranoia. What is needed is to act rationally to deal with the situation.

On Saturday Sartaj Aziz sounded alarmed over ‘nuclearisation’ of Indian Ocean. This is just one part of India’s militarisation.

With forex reserves of over $367 billion in 2016 and a big reservoir of scientific and technological manpower, India can offer to buy 200 F-16s or a similar number of Gripen E fighters if Lockheed Martin or the Swedish defence giant Saab is willing to produce them jointly inside India. India has also successfully test fired its homemade interceptor missile. India cal do all this because compared to Pakistan, it has a much larger economy and a higher growth rate during the last three years hovering between 7.3 pc to 8.4 pc. Pakistan has a much smaller economy where growth rate has slowly risen from 3.65 to 4.25 over the same period.

There are things that Pakistan can do to secure its defence with whatever weaponry it possesses. To start with it needs to complete the CPEC on time ensuring consensus of the provinces so that hundreds of cargo laden vehicles start plying daily to and from Gawadar port. Pakistan should invite more countries to join CPEC. This would ensure that several nations have stake in peace in the region. Pakistan needs to particularly improve its ties with Afghanistan and Iran and develop closer relations with Russia. While doing this it should maintain good relations with the US. Pakistan would not then be alone in case of aggression against it.

The best guarantee against the enemy is the nation’s internal strength. A war can destroy a country’s infrastructure but if the nation possesses a reservoir of scientists, engineers and technical manpower combined with enterprising people it can rebuild all over again whatever has been destroyed. To strengthen its defence Pakistan has therefore to invest much more in education and manpower training than it is presently doing.