ABSTRACT
DEMANDS TO RECTIFY LACUNAE in India's higher defence man-agement have been a recurrent theme since the country's defeat in the Sino-Indian war of 1962. Institutional mechanisms for managing
national security, devised at the time of independence in 1947, were found to be either inadequate or ignored by the top political leadership. Failure to attend to this vital area was one of the main reasons that contributed to the 1962 humiliation. In the immediate aftermath of the war, while there was broad consensus on this point among opinion-makers and the opposition parties, the government's response never went beyond increasing the annual defence budget. With the exception of a few defence ministry-level reforms, no institutional reform was undertaken.
