India-obsessed Pakistan jacks up defence budget again

Pakistan Generals must be a delighted lot as Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, who is a Chartered Accountant and a Kashmiri descent, has followed their instructions in letter and spirit by enhancing the defence budget for the year 2023-24 by around 13 per cent. The government aims to spend Rs 1.804 trillion on defence over the next year that too when the country is facing massive inflation and political upheaval.

Well, the defence budget makes up nearly 1.7% of the GDP and 12.5% of the total expenditure planned for the next year. Last year, Rs 1.57 trillion was allocated for defence affairs and services and subsequently revised to Rs 1.59 trillion.

Clearly, the Shahbaz Shariff-led government is more interested in keeping the military happy than providing support to the anguished citizens.

Even when the world was facing the crisis of Covid-19, the then Imran Khan government increased its defence budget for the financial year 2020-2021. So, the Pakistani government does not seem willing to shift its spending priorities. It does not matter who the Prime Minister is. To avoid hard questions from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Islamabad refuses to be fully transparent about its military spending. Major acquisitions by the armed forces, spending on the public sector development programme (PSDP), expenditure on nuclear programme and para-military forces, payments for military pensions, a newly set-up national security division and a few other military expenditures are not reflected in the budget.

The increase in defence spending comes at a time when Pakistan is forced to allocate 41 per cent of its expenditure to debt servicing. The economy was underperforming even before the onset of Covid-19, surviving on an IMF loan package of $6 bn. The gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate had plummeted from 5.5 percent in the 2017-2018 financial year to 2.4 per cent in 2020-2021. Following the coronavirus outbreak, it decreased further to -1.5 percent. This marked the first time that Pakistan recorded a negative growth rate.

Pakistani watchers say that currently it is facing the additional challenge of feeding some 2.05 crores poor families that can no longer make a living due to Covid-19. Moreover, the country saw a 30 per cent reduction in tax revenue, due to government incompetence and decreased spending caused by the lockdown. This led to a reduction in overall health spending, as the provincial governments received lesser funds from the federal government.

To why Pakistan spends so much on defence, Pakistan affairs expert Shalini Chawla explains, “Pakistan claims that it is India's military posture that has a deep impression on Pakistan's defence planning. The early 1970s comprised the era of Bhutto and the late 1970s that of General Zia, who resisted almost all ideas aimed at defence reduction. Being a military man and dependent on support from the army, General Zia never supported cuts in defence spending.”

This high level of defence spending during the 1970s also resulted in heavy growth of force levels. The effect was a substantive increase in military power, especially between 1972 (after the war) and December 1979 (before the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan) when the size of the army nearly doubled, the navy grew three times and the air force grew by one-and-a-half times.

During the 1981-1990 decade, defence expenditure grew at a slightly slower pace, but the spending was maintained at a much higher level after 1988. In the 1980s and 1990s, its policy-makers quoted the "threat perception" as the root-cause of the high defence spending.

During General Zia's time, Pakistan faced tremendous pressure from international institutions to cut its defence spending. He did not allow any cuts in defence allocation, while stating "How can you fight a nuclear submarine or an aircraft carrier with a bamboo stick? We have to match sword with sword, tank with tank and destroyer with destroyer. The situation demands that national defence be bolstered and Pakistan cannot afford any cut or freeze in defence expenditure, since you cannot freeze the threat to Pakistan's security".

Experts say that the country’s strategic environment has been, to a great extent, conditioned by its perception of a security threat from India. Its adversarial relations with India definitely play a vital role in the formation of its official threat perception and national security plans. The two nations have fought a number of wars and experienced countless border clashes. This perceived threat from India has led the nation's security planners to constantly search for a situation that could generate a sense of security. It has led the defence planners to raise well-equipped modern armed forces. It looks at India as a powerful state with hegemonic ambitious. The most disconcerting factor is their rationalisation of the inequality between the two nations. This insecurity has taken strong roots due to the fragmentation of Pakistani society. The governments in Pakistan have used security issues like Kashmir and nuclear deterrence to generate a national consensus. Eventually, this has increased the fear of India in the minds of the people.

The logic of Pakistan's nuclear weapon programme is Indo-centric. It aims to neutralise the inevitable conventional military superiority of India. The impetus for Pakistan's nuclear development came in January 1972, when Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto announced a plan to develop nuclear arms at a meeting with Pakistan's top scientists in Multan. Pakistan's terrible defeat in the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War and India's proven conventional military superiority over Pakistan were the main reasons for its decision to go nuclear. Pakistan's nuclearisation has been aimed at managing the Indian threat with an equal nuclear capability. Bhutto's remarks that Pakistan will "eat grass" if necessary to stay at par with Indian nuclear capability demonstrate the depth of insecurity in the nation.

Naturally, the huge spending of defence has negative influence in the form of retarded growth of the social sector. The social conditions are pitiful and the state of development deplorable. Pakistan ranks ninth among 117 market economies in terms of government's expenditure on defence as a percentage of total expenditure. On the other hand, it ranks second among the 34 poorest economies. It ranks 17th in education and 34th in health per capita expenditure among the 34 poorest economies. With hardly any earning from exports, things are rather bad for Pakistan but that does bother either its political leaders or army personnel.

(The author is Delhi-based senior journalist and writer. He is author of Gandhi's Delhi which has brought to the forth many hidden facts about Mahatma Gandhi)