Military strength-driven prosperity for India

Ancient India, say, till the 7th century CE, was very rich, in fact, India and China were two richest countries of the world, and that's why it attracted hordes of adventurers from all over from Central Asia and from as far as Macedonia and Greece. Rich India was, however, not so powerful militarily. Except for few notable victories like Chandragupta Maurya's over Alexander's general and satrap Seleucus and Skandagupta's over the Shakas (Scythians), generally, the invaders would succeed in penetrating into Indian plains but in two-three generations they would be absorbed in our society as Kshatriyas.

The real damage to India was done by the Arabs by their conquest of Sindh in 712 CE. It was India's first encounter with violent Islam and it could not absorb Arabs because they belonged to a religion of the book. After a respite of three centuries, India was a fair game for all kinds of Muslim invaders, Afghans, Turks, various Turkiks of Central Asia and finally the Mughals in 1526. Why was that? Only because India continued to be extremely rich and India continued to be militarily weak. Tens of millions Indians were massacred by Muslim raiders, invaders and conquerors, they looted, desecrated and destroyed our Hindu, Jain and Bauddha temples, world famous universities and seminaries, also the world's richest kingdom of Vijayanagar.

In the meantime, in the beginning of the 16th century, the Portuguese attacked and won for themselves large tracts of our western coast, the Konkan area including the present Goa. And they were perhaps worse than the Muslims, they razed to ground very many Hindu temples and forcibly converted a large number of Hindus. Again, our not properly defended riches proved to be our biggest problem. The Portuguese were the first to have transferred capital on a large scale from India to their homeland.

Then came the Britishers, more than in killing Hindus and in converting them to Christianity, they specialised in looting India, killing its thriving industry, reducing it only to a supplier of primary goods and most damaging of all, creating in India a big class of people who were so morally debased that even 72 years after the Britts were forced out of India, of course having pauperised it and then partitioned it to permanently benefit their Muslim League boot-lickers, these people still swear in their name.

Finally, it was Jawaharlal Nehru's turn to humiliate India, now an independent country, in the eyes of the world by making it suffer the ignominy of being invaded by a non-state like Pakistan just two months after independence, losing the age-old buffer state of Tibet to Nehru's great friend Chou en Lai's China, and then in Oct-Nov 1962 lead India to a costly and insulting defeat by China, from the shame of which we have not been able to put behind us despite a limited scale victory at Nathu La in 1967 and 74 day standoff at Doklam in 2017, where we had more than the measure of the Chinese.

Expressed in the above hundreds of words are cogent and sufficient reasons for my unshakeable belief, this, in fact, is an article of faith with me, that India must do everything possible to become militarily powerful. And this we have to do by becoming a modern military-industrial economy, a natural corollary to which will be our fast-paced economic growth.