NEW DELHI: Calling the seas the preferred medium of power projection, Indian Navy Chief Admiral R Hari Kumar on Saturday said that the time for ‘salami slicing’ is over. The term means the practice of using a series of many small actions to produce a much larger action or result that would be difficult or unlawful to perform all at once.“The steps to make the Navy indigenous are being taken and a time will come when the Indian Navy will have personnel serving from every district of the country,” he said.
“We have resolutely responded to security challenges. There will be no room for compromise. I think there will be no more ‘salami slicing’ or ‘bleeding the country through a thousand cuts’. That is the clear message the nation has been sending,” the Navy chief added. The Navy Chief was speaking at a policy workshop on national security organized by The Indian Futures, a New Delhi-based think tank.
Warning of salami slicing by the Chinese, it was former Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat who, immediately after the 72-day-long Dokalam standoff warned the armed forces to not let their guards down. He said, “As far as the northern adversary is concerned, the flexing of muscles has started. The salami slicing, taking over territory in a very gradual manner, testing our limits of threshold is something we have to be wary about and remain prepared for situations emerging which could gradually emerge into conflict.”
The term salami slicing is a modification of a phrase, salami tactics used first by communist political leader of Hungary Matyas Rakosi during the 1940s which meant cutting his opponents off like slices of salami. The so-called philosophy of bleeding India with a thousand cuts was propounded by General Zia ul Haq, former dictator of Pakistan. The General died in a helicopter crash in 1988.
China claims the 90,000 sq km of Arunachal Pradesh and also calls the 38,000 sq km of Ladakh as its own. More than one lakh soldiers of the Indian Army and the People’s Liberation Army are deployed close to the Line of Actual Control since the standoff that began in May 2020. The standoffs persist at Depsang and Demchok.
Calling the process of indigenization of arms and ammunition production as important the Chief said that in the last 10 years, India has commissioned 32 ships and submarines constructed in India. “Of the 67 ships and submarines on order, only two are being constructed in Russia. We have no intention of taking them from outside thereafter.” The Navy has planned to be fully self-reliant in production by 2047.