It is about time that we relook at our nuclear policy, but many of the arguments in this article aren't really valid.
India is in the unenviable position of being the only country in the world that faces
three different kinds of credible nuclear threats. As a result, creating a single nuclear policy that can respond all the different threats is a highly complex challenge.
India's nuclear threats come from 3 different actors -
China:
The most rational player in the Indian nuclear stage. China's nukes are mainly a lever against US aggression but will at a pinch be used against India. China will nuke India either as a reprisal against Indian strike or to stop Indian conventional movement into too much of Chinese territory. Or it can nuke military or civilian targets as a precursor to a full scale invasion (despite its avowed No First Use policy - but who cares about policy in wartime?). Given the fact that currently China is superior to India in conventional strength, the first case is unlikely. And India's MAD based massive retaliation posture actually is a decent foil against potential Chinese first strikes.
India would actually be "mad"
to abandon NFU - any preemptive strike against China would invite a devastating retaliation.
Pakistani Army:
The nuclear goal for the Pakistani army is to protect against a massive incursion of Indian conventional forces into Pakistani territory. This is where MAD falls short - because a countervalue Indian strike in response to a Pakistani tactical nuke is overkill and I don't think the Indian politicians have the balls to authorize such a strike. There is an additional problem with massive retaliation - the moment there is a Pakistani nuclear attack on Indian forces, the global diplomatic community will definitely go into overdrive to pressurize the Indian gov to not retaliate. So here we need a graded response mechanism - you baby nuke us, we baby nuke you and so on. But there needs to be one more critical addition - any response to Pakistani (army) nuclear attack will invite a
Counter Force response. So the Indian nuke will target to cause disproportionate damage to armed forces installation. This disincentivizes the Pakistani army from attacks.
Pakistani Terrorists:
The biggest wildcard in the equation. The terrorists (unless stopped by there ISI minders) are not likely to even respond to MAD. They would actually want to provoke a massive Indian attack - this gets them to their martyrdom faster and gets a bunch of innocent Pakistanis & Indians killed to boot. Also, the terrorists are also likely to use dirty bombs when they can't get their hands on a nuclear device. There is not much we can do to here (except for catching them before the attack), but the graded Counter Force response is a workable option - the Pakistani army is incentivized to control the crazies (for whatever that's worth).
So for TL/DR -
abandon MAD for a Graded Counter Force response, but retain NFU.
PS: Why the hell does the author think that a tactical nuke will kill "at the most a few tens of our soldiers"?