ABSTRACT
Invited to lunch at the Nehru home in January 1947, Patrick Blackett was seated beside the acting Prime Minister. Jawaharlal Nehru knew of Blackett’s experience in war and military affairs, and asked him how long it would take ‘to Indianise the military’, meaning both its command structure and its weapons production and supply. He was not yet the Prime Minister and India was not yet an independent nation. Blackett’s reply was a challenging one, obliging Nehru to explore two different kinds of strategy and thus two different military set-ups. For the ‘realistic’ strategy Blackett preferred, he told Nehru that Indianisation could be completed in 18 months: this would prepare India for conflict with other similar powers in the region. For the ‘unrealistic’ strategy, in which India would prepare for conflict with major world powers, Blackett predicted it would take many, many years to ‘Indianise’. Nehru liked his approach, and wrote to him soon afterwards to ask Blackett to advise him on military and scientific affairs. From this invitation much followed. One wonders if Nehru’s memory cast back to 1924, when his father, Motilal Nehru, with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, was a member of the first committee to try to accelerate the process to ‘Indianise’ the military (the Skeen Committee). The question the Prime-Minister-to-be posed to Blackett, like other questions in India, had a long history.
