Starving defence even as military edge erodes, and the enemy flexes muscles

As a share of GDP, defence expenditure is down to 1.5 per cent in the fifth Budget of the Modi government, from 1.8 per cent in the terminal year of the last government

One of the abiding mysteries about the Narendra Modi government is the way in which it has ignored the emerging contours of the country’s external security situation, and squeezed the defence budget year after year. The Budget for next year continues in the same vein, with the allocation for defence going up by less than 6 per cent, about the same as for the current year. Over the five Budgets that cover the full span of the Modi government, the defence Budget will have gone up by just 38 per cent, which works out to an average of less than