Aiming without arming: The message from the latest defence budget

The increase in defence spending for 2023-24 is not enough to even offset inflation, let alone any further decline in the rupee-dollar exchange rate.

“I know that today’s era is not the era of war,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Russian President Vladimir Putin during a bilateral meeting last September.

Though most Western officials hailed the Indian leader’s words, many others believed Modi was making a rhetorical point in order to create the right optics before the Bali G20 summit in November. But that statement seems to have been lent some credence by the Union Budget presented by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who gave defence short shrift and not even a perfunctory mention in her 87-minute-long speech on 1 February.

Of the central government’s …

Author

Sushant Singh

Sushant Singh is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. He has taught at Yale University (Fall 2019 and Fall 2021) and was deputy editor of The Indian Express. A winner of the prestigious Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards in 2017 and 2018, he had earlier served in the Indian Army for two decades. He is also the author of Mission Overseas and co-author of Note by Note: The India Story.

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