The curious case of INDU

I received a call recently from a young research scholar who said she was writing a paper on the institutions engaged in the conceptualisation and implementation of strategic policy in India. The question addressed to me was specific.

Why did I think it had taken such a long time for the implementation by the government of an idea mooted as far back as 1965? The reason for her call was that I had been associated with the reiteration of that idea in 2002. Her reference was to the committee constituted in 2001 to examine the establishment of a National Defence University (NDU).

The committee was chaired by the late K Subrahmanyam, the eminent strategic policy guru. It included retired service chiefs, heads of educational and business organisations, experts in the fields of national security, defence research and public policy. I was included in the committee as a member of that last category.

The proposal for such an institution was first mooted by the Chief of Staff Committee in 1967, following the India-Pakistan war, and the need for it was reiterated on several occasions by other defence policy administrators. It was finally in 2000, after the Kargil war, that the then Defence Minister, Jaswant Singh, and his adviser Arun Singh constituted the NDU committee.

Our terms of reference were explicit. We were asked specifically to examine the working of the NDU in the United States and China and, after studying all aspects of the establishment of such an institution, to "examine the recruitment to subsume/ incorporate existing institutions funded by the MoD into the proposed NDU and also to evaluate the requirements of new institutions within the NDU ambit."

The Subrahmanyam Committee submitted its report to the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in May 2002. It took a decade before the Manmohan Singh government finally approved the idea and procured land for the establishment of the institution. The only change that the Singh government made to the Subrahmanyam report was to rename the NDU as the Indian National Defence University (INDU). Someone in the system wanted to pay tribute to India's famous 'Indu'.

Prime Minister Singh laid the foundation stone for INDU in 2013. A 200-acre campus lies vacant in Haryana, save for the foundation stone and a roof over a guard's head. Meanwhile, the Narendra Modi government quietly renamed INDU as IDU, for obvious reasons, and set up another committee under the chairmanship of Anil Kakodkar, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, to further examine the proposal and define the remit for such an institution.

I confessed to the young scholar that I had not kept track of the progress of INDU or IDU. Her enquiry prompted me to study the matter. Google led me to an article by Lt Gen Prakash Katoch, titled cryptically ‘Who Killed INDU?’ published in the Indian Defence Review in 2021. My research revealed that as recently as February 2025, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament had asked the ministry of defence to explain why there had been an 'inordinate delay in the setting up of Indian National Defence University'.

The PAC observed that "the entire process of setting up the Indian National Defence University has been beset by delays owing to extensive deliberations for several years without any concrete results." In its 'action taken report', the defence ministry said that the delay was on account of a review meant to "broaden the mandate of IDU as an institution of Excellence to study various areas of emerging challenges such as modern warfare, our neighbourhood environment, space, seas, cyber and other areas."

The PAC, however, expressed disappointment at the fact that "fifty-seven years after it was first mooted, and over seven years after the Indian National Defence University (INDU) Bill, 2015 was made available for public consultation, the University has still not been established."

The 2021 article by Katoch points to an interesting development that may explain why the INDU/IDU idea remains in limbo. Katoch draws attention to the fact that the Raksha Shakti University (RSU) established in 2009 at Gandhinagar, by the Gujarat state government, as an internal security institute, has since been taken over by the Union Home Ministry and renamed Rashtriya Raksha University (RRU), through an Act of Parliament. Some believe it will play the role assigned to IDU.

This is because RRU's stated mission echoes that of IDU: "To identify, prepare and sustain statecraft of national strategic and security culture through continuous enhancement and development of educational, research and training cadres from the military and civilian society." While the original mandate of RSU and RRU was to focus on internal security, it is now increasingly focussing on national security, including defence policy. Many retired armed forces brass have been employed by RRU.

When I began asking people in the know what the status of IDU was, now that there was an RRU, I was told by one person, "RRU is the IDU." But RRU has been placed in the charge of the Union Home Ministry while IDU was to be under the charge of the Defence Ministry. Has the Defence Minister yielded ground to the Home Minister? What happens to the 200 acres and the foundation stone in Haryana? As in the case of so many institutions and industries, has IDU too been usurped by Gujarat, taken away from Haryana?

The question for IDU is whether it has been 'killed', as Katoch's essay suggests, or merely buried and can be exhumed, as some armed forces leaders hope. The fact is that the recommendations of the Subrahmanyam committee were based on a study of the NDUs in Washington DC and Beijing and both are institutions of excellence under the leadership of the armed forces. The case for INDU/IDU still stands.

The author was a member of the INDU Committee and the National Security Advisory Board in 2001