Forewarned apparently does not, for the Bharatiya Janata Party government, mean being forearmed.
In writings prior to and in my recent books — Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet) in end-2015 and Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and India’s Global Ambition in late 2018, and in articles, op/eds and media interviews since, have been warning incessantly of the deep hole Prime Minister Modi is digging India into by thoughtlessly climbing on to Donald Trump’s bandwagon at one end and reflexively appeasing Xi Jinping and China at the other end. Troubles, as a result, may be coming home to roost in flocks.
After the over-hyped Houston tamasha and the equally overwrought media coverage of the PM’s UN General Assembly peroration which fell flat because, other than painting India as a do-gooder nation and cultural icon — a view there’s no international consensus about, Modi harped on terrorism and its source — the unnamed Pakistan. As former MEA Secretary Vivek Katju (in an op/ed) has correctly surmised, the terrorism issue has about run its course in terms of diplomatic traction it affords Delhi and puts the brakes on Pakistan’s attempts to get out from under the terrorist sponsor tag. This issue has been milked for all it is worth and has now become a barren cow. That Islamabad will not transit from the “grey list”to the “black list” automatically triggering sanctions is a certainty primarily because Washington can’t do without its help in re-starting talks with the Afghan Taliban. Moreover, the sunni Gulf nations’ siding with India has about peaked, the evidence for which is the fact that Prince Mohammad bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia used Imran Khan as the medium to initiate backdoor negotiations Tehran rather than stick with the US’ blow hot-blow cold strategy. The Iran-aided Houthi rebels’ drone attack on the premier Saudi oil refining complex that virtually instantly collapsed 40% of that country’s oil production capacity, sobered up Riyadh damn quick. So the sunni Arab states want to cut a deal with shia Iran, and the country most to benefit from this rapprochement will be Pakistan. As repeatedly stressed in previous posts, had India maintained its neutrality in the US-Israeli-Gulf versus Iran fight and not treated Tehran shabbily at Washington’say-so, Modi would have been in a position not only to mediate — a role successfully assumed by Imran Khan, but to secure unending long term energy supplies at a basement price from that region by subtly playing off Iran and Saudi Arabia, while retaining leverage with both. This in turn would have beefed up Delhi’s bargaining power with Trump. This power to strike beneficial deals with Washington, Tehran and Riyadh is no longer available to Delhi.
With Trump in a political slump and headed towards impeachment, leaders of countries who risked closeness with his Administration will feel the heat. While Volodymyr Zelensky of the Ukraine, Boris Johnson of Britain and Scott Morrison of Australia are in the line of fire in their own countries for cultivating proximity to Trump and their regimes may suffer should the Democrats cease control after the 2020 elections in the US, India may suffer some. Modi has made himself a target by openly canvassing the NRI vote for Trump at the ‘Howdy, Modi’ do as stated in my preceding post. Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar airily downplayed such a downturn by giving a twisted and unconvincing explanation for Modi’s foray into domestic American politics. Except, unlike Zelensky, Johnson and Morrison, Modi may not be hurt by this development because he will continue to sell himself to the Indian masses as someone Trump has special fondness for even if such supposed fondness has not, and will not in the future, fetch India any give on Washington’s part on any of the issues where the interests of the two countries collide. This much is clear.
At the World Economic Forum, for instance, the US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross asserted that a trade deal with India could be obtained in “five minutes” if India conceded American demands on e-commerce benefiting Amazon, etc. and, in any case, that his counterpart Piyush Goyal would have to make all the concessions to equalize the terms of trade. The fact that he did not raise the matter of US agricultural and dairy exports to India — the other sticking point, suggests that Delhi has already thrown in the towel. So, we can expect a surge in imports into this country of American agricultural and dairy produce, with the effected small trader, farmer and milk producer in India, being thus left in the lurch — as predicted in a post prior to the last one. Incidentally, Ross also waved aside concerns about the US treating India and China in the same way even though the trade deficits with the two Asian states are $17 billion and $419 billion respectively! So, which country, do you reckon, Trump would like to be on the right side of? So, why is Jaishankar sanguine about reaching a trade deal? That is because as experts in succumbing to charms-qua-pressure at the negotiating table, Delhi will compromise and keep compromising the national interest until there’s nothing left to compromise. Relations with China epitomize this Modi tendency institutionalized in MEA by Jaishankar.
The lead for setting the agenda for the Modi-Xi summit in Mamallapuram Oct 11-13 has been taken by Beijing. Luo Zhaohui, former ambassador in Delhi and currently vice minister after conferring with Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale, glided past all the Chinese provocations, the latest being Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi pointedly voicing support for Pakistan on Article 370 at the UNGA, one of only two leaders to do so, the other being Erdogan of Turkey, to say that the emphasis would be on keeping the “Wuhan spirit” — whatever that is — in play. “It’s clear that both sides won’t give up their longstanding positions on core issues”, he told a newspaper, “and the summit will be about carefully calibrating positions to satisfy the other partner and to take care of each other’s sensitivities.” Come again!! The only country whose sensitivities have so far been taken care of is China; this being the case, why would Beijing not want to continue with what has transpired so far?
Consider: Regarding Kashmir, China claims territorial interest even though it annexed most of the Aksai chin area, constituting almost a third of the erstwhile princely kingdom of Kashmir, as early as 1958, and then was ceded more parts of it by Pakistan vide the 1963 Ayub-Zhouenlai accord. But the Indian government has never, but ever, diplomatically raked up this matter of forcible absorption of Indian territory.
India gave up its inherited rights and privileges in Tibet even though, per the 1913 Simla Agreement, Tibet’s status was formalized as an Indian protectorate. With the HH Dalai Lama’s forced exile in Dharamshala India has been cagey about supporting him and the Lamaist traditions and, with Vajpayee’s 2003 visit, all but washed its hands off the issue. So, that option that India had, and still has, of activating the Tibet card has not materialized because Vajpayee’s recognition was for the Tibetan Autonomous Region as part of China, but because China has never permitted Tibet any autonomy that recognition is void — or so I have argued for years together, allowing India to get back into the Tibet tangle. But the fainthearted pussies in GOI/MEA want to have nothing to do with it. The Indian military has played its part in this sordid affair by not appropriately building up its warfighting capability in hinterland Tibet, choosing to stay stuck on a defensive line with Indian officers occasionally quaffing down maotai with the Chinese at flag meetings (as recently reported in the press)!
Further, Tibet, as I have maintained, should have been equated with Taiwan and Beijing’s insistence on the öne China, 2 systems-principle should have been countered with “One India”-principle with China requiring to acknowledge Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and the Aksai Chin it occupies as parts of India’s Jammu & Kashmir province. Delhi may then negotiate with Beijing for the latter to keep its part of the Aksai plateau, but the principle has to be held sacrosanct. Because China will not be easily moved, India should establish full-fledged diplomatic relations with Taiwan and formally ramp up its defence linkages with Taipei.
And most egregiously, Beijing has so far got away with nuclear missile arming Pakistan. A strong-minded government in Delhi should long ago have retaliated by transferring like armaments to all countries on China’s periphery, especially Vietnam with the kind of fighting spirit that India can only dream of. That would quieten down China as nothing else would. But again instead of tit-for-tat, we have stayed our hand. Talk of self-abnegation and outdoing the Mahatma!
And at the UNGA, when Wang Yi raised the matter of Kashmiris, was even a First Secretary at the UN Mission tasked by way of right of reply, about all of Xinjiang being turned into a vast concentration camp with Uyghur Muslims disallowed from manifesting any symbols of their religion — Islamic names, beards, prayer beads, madrassas? (When a hyperventilating Imran, talking a mile to the minute about the poor Kashmiris oppressed by the Indian army, was asked about the state of the Uyghur Muslims he answered blandly that he knew nothing about them!)
And talking of trade, it is so unbalanced it is surprising the Modi government has done less than nothing about it even as it presides over wealth flowing in torrents from the Indian coffers to the Chinese treasury. And yet there are Fifth columnists in the corporate world eager to drag in the Huawei — an out and out PLA funded operation — 5G system Trojan Horse inside India’s portals, chief among them Sunil Mittal of Bharti Airtel who, incidentally, is also the lead financier of an American Trojan horse already active in Delhi policy circles — Carnegie India.
With the entire caboodle of Indian political class, government, the corporate world, military, and the intelligentsia, seeing nothing wrong about the course the country is embarked on, India’s future cannot be other than bleak.
A lot of things were wrong, or went wrong, with the Houston-do starring Narendra Modi and Donald Trump. Not that anyone here noticed them, everybody being too busy singing hosannas for the budding Trump-Modi camaraderie on display.
Let’s start with the pic above: See Trump’s condescending, proprietory, hand on Modi’s shoulder? No self-respecting leader — unless he heads a rank small and inconsequential country and hence has no choice — would allow a big power leader to show him up in an obvious sort of way as junior partner (or, should that be pardner in Texan lingo?).
It reminds me of the US-Philippine war (1899-1902) that the US waged against the freedom movement led by Emilio Aguinaldo after Spain ceded that Asian colony to America vide the 1898 Treaty of Paris. That military campaign was justified by Washington as “saving our little brown brother” and in terms of a programme of “benevolent assimilation” in the American sphere. The publicity photos and posters distributed by the US military from its headquarters, in Manila and outlying areas, in fact featured two standing figures — one a big, white, smiling American with a hand on the shoulder of the smaller brown befuddled Filipino.
True, Modi, far from befuddled, rejoiced in the Trumpian display of insulting physical familiarity, something he brought on himself with his prior record of trademark hugs and embraces. In his first term, it startled foreign leaders but are now shrugged off by them as hazards of their trade. He went so far to curry favour with Trump as to offer his own successful election campaign slogan to suit the US President in his upcoming re-election campaign — ab ki baar Trump sarkar! It is not for nothing that Trump at this venue called Modi “America’s most devoted and loyal friend”.
That apart, Modi, in a small way, sought to influence American people to vote Trump. With the Impeachment proceedings underway against Trump in the US Congress and the issue of Russia assisting Trump in the 2016 elections with offensive cyber strategy of fake news that hurt Hillary Clinton’s chances, being investigated threadbare, Modi’s enthusiasm in pitching Trump to US voters could come in for some scrutiny. Especially because a couple of Democratic Party presidential contenders, including Bernie Sanders, have already hit out at India’s treatment of Kashmiris, etc.
Even if no Congressman takes notice of Modi’s attempts at interference in the internal affairs of the US, the fact that such a thing happened formally and openly could be a precedent for legitimating such influence peddling by foreign powers in Indian elections. Is it too much of a stretch to see a re-elected Trump mosey over to India on a state visit to return the favour and try and secure a 3rd term for Modi in 2024? Indeed, what was until now covert activity — the US routinely provided election funds to Right-thinking politicians while Moscow filled the Indian Communist parties’ coffers and, emerged as a principal funder of Indira Gandhi’s Congress party in the early 1970s. But such help was usually hush-hush except hereafter foreign entities will feel less inhibited in this regard. It is a ripple effect Modi did not ponder before becoming a carnival barker for Trump in Houston.
All this would be fine if the entire Houston tamasha was perceived as a bit of escapist political theatre and dismissed as so much diplomatic dross. Except, Modi and his government seems inclined to read more into the optics of the event than is warranted. The truth is all the posing, sweet talking and hand-in-hand “victory” lapping by Trump joining with Modi, comprised just a contingent ploy by Trump to be nice to the foreign leader he was sharing the moment with. However, Modi, Jaishankar & Company deliberately or otherwise misread and misrepresented this whole affair.
Thus, the Modi government’s joyous take on Trump’s voicing his antipathy towards “radical Islamic terrorism” as an endorsement of Modi’s Kashmir related-actions was falsified soon enough. When Trump was asked whether he sided with India against Pakistan when he talked of Islamic terrorism he stated that he was referring to Iran and, disingenuously, that that was the country he thought Modi was alluding to as well!!
Now switch over to Trump’s meeting Imran in New York yesterday. Sure, Imran didn’t get much traction from his nonsensical nuclear war-mongering spiel. It afforded the US president an opportunity to publicly revive his offer of mediation on Kashmir; but he failed to bring up the matter of Islamic terrorism because, well, Islamabad holds the Afghanistan card.
So, it doesn’t seem Modi got more out of Trump than Imran did with lot less effort and and near zero expenditure of money (versus millions of albeit NRI dollars for staging the show at the NRG Stadium in Houston). But there was a difference. Modi gave a lot to receive very little from Trump. For instance, as anticipated in my previous blog he has compromised on allowing US agricultural commodities to be sold in the Indian market to the detriment of the beleaguered Indian farmer. There may even be a provision permitting the imports into India of dairy items at the cost to the country’s dairy industry. And, of course, Delhi will be hard put to resist the American push the antiquated F-16 under the guise of transferring military technology and, God alone knows, what other dated technologies at the expense of the infant indigenous defence industry.
Is this fair exchange — Trump’s jollying Modi around for the emptying of the Indian treasury, and hollowing of Indian agricultural and industrial economy?
[Around 1999, Modi outside the White House fence on a US State Dept-hosted trip]
A public interview of Narendra Modi at 1800 hrs last evening on ‘India’ TV channel featured the host, Rajat Sharma, lobbing fluff-ball questions but, on occasion, receiving surprisingly revealing answers from the Prime Minister. For instance, Modi said he lets his “heart rule his head” when meeting with world leaders and relies on “personal chemistry”, but uses his head when it comes to negotiating. Amplifying on his method, he added: “hum na aanken utha ke bolte hain, na ankhen juka ke, hum ankhon mein ankh daal ke bolte hain.” (I don’t raise my eyes, nor lower them, I meet the gaze of the other person.)
This “Modi operandi” about squares with his personality attributes and his approach and way of working. [For a psychological profile of Modi and comparison with the other strongmen currently on the international stage — Vladimir Putin of Russia, Donald Trump of America, Erdogan of Turkey, Xi Jinping of China and Shinzo Abe of Japan, and how his personality traits have impacted Indian politics and policies, see my latest book — ‘Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and India’s Global Ambition’.] It leads one to ponder the trade and other deals he will be striking with Trump when they meet Sept 22 in Houston at the ‘Howdy, Modi!’ reception by the NRIs, and on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session the PM will address on Sept 26.
However these deals turn out, the US State Department apparently hit the jackpot when, at the turn of the last Century, it invited Narendra Modi, then a senior BJP apparatchik in Gujarat to partake of a trip for a select lot of youngish Indian political leaders who the US government hoped would be useful to US interests in the future. It was a trip Modi alluded to yesterday in the TV event. Bedazzled by the wealth, order and prosperity of the US, Modi, with his small town background, was by his own reckoning instantly besotted. The problem for the country is that he has stayed besotted ever since, when as Prime Minister he’s expected to show a bit more restraint in his enthusiasms for America, or any other country, if only to preserve India’s leverage with them, and especially Trump who believes in pushing his advantage to the max.
Modi seems now to be circling back to what generated excitement early in his first term at least among NRI communities in different parts of the world and won him international media attention. A vast arena filled with some 50,000 prosperous Indian-origin Americans, gathered in Houston, who when not screaming their support for Modi will raptly hear his speech — the usual string of self-congratulatory spiels laced this time with references to the Balakote strike and Article 370 abrogation, aimed at making the NRIs feel good about themselves, about Modi, about India. Such an event is god-sent for any politician. More so because it will be beamed live back home by Indian TV channels and lapped up by the travelling press corps.
Not one to miss a political trick or a friendly crowd, and opportunity to make capital, US President Trump has happily signed up for the event. The external affairs minister S. Jaishankar predictably deemed Trump’s presence at the Houston show as “high honour”. That Trump will thus kill several birds with a single stone, is another matter.
Trump will try and ride Modi’s coat-tails in terms of translating the regard and fan-following the BJP leader enjoys among NRIs into votes for himself and his Republican Party slate of candidates in next year’s presidential elections. Besides, Trump, like Modi, likes big boisterous tamashas with TV cameras whirring– and the Houston affair will fit that bill. But, as has already been indicated, Washington will use Trump’s agreeing to be with Modi on the podium to leverage a more advantageous trade deal for the US. That Jaishankar is overseeing the Indian negotiating team’s efforts spells danger for the national interest because his record is one of accepting the most onerous US conditions in return for small returns. His most disastrous handiwork is the 2008 nuclear deal he negotiated as Joint Secretary (Americas) in MEA, which by formalizing Delhi’s willingness to forego further underground explosive testing capped the technology level of India’s nuclear arsenal at the basic fission armaments-level.
Modi, on the other hand, besides furthering his personal diplomacy by hugging and embracing the US President, will try and project his great camaraderie with Trump as at once consolidating the special relationship he says he enjoys with Trump and as reflecting the warmth in Indo-US friendship. Modi has stoked this “friendship” by nearly “zeroing” out oil supplies from Iran at the cost of imperilling the Chabahar port and India’s geostrategics pivoting on land connectivity to Russia, Afghanistan and Central Asia. He will seek small-time favours such as asking Trump to upbraid Pakistan for its role in sponsoring and spreading terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir, and on this score to read the riot act to Imran Khan when the latter meets him New York. This will be hugely popular with people here. Despite this Imran will be successful in getting Trump to water down the stiff terms for the IMF loan Pakistan is seeking to tide over economic difficulties. What choice does Washington have after all considering that without Pakistan the US military retreat from Afghanistan is not possible, not if saving face is also on the agenda.
Modi will return home before Imran Khan starts retailing his sob story to the UNGA about “genocide” in Kashmir — has Islamabad consulted the dictionary when using this word? — and how global inattention could lead to a nuclear war that will engulf the globe! It is not clear how all this will occur considering the Indian government has made a purely domestic political move of revoking Articles 370 & 35A, unless Islamabad follows up by facilitating some damn fool terrorist incident that will be easily traceable to ISI and GHQ, Rawalpindi, to which India will respond. Imran has been realistic enough to concede that Pakistan will lose a conventional conflict that may ensue whereupon, he and others have threatened that Islamabad will be left with no choice other than to use nuclear weapons. Except doing so will make Pakistan extinct. Indeed, Imran’s cabinet colleague Ali Mohammad Khan, with even less restraint, has upped the rhetoric by giving the emerging situation a hard religious tint. The unification of J&K with India, he claims, is the first step in the Guzhwa-e-Hind (War for India) predicted in the Hadith. Of course, none of this will obtain in the main because the party with everything to lose — the Pakistan Army, wouldn’t want to!
But to return to our main theme, as one can readily see, between Modi’s eagerness to be satisfied with little by way of quid for India’s quo, and Jaishankar’s willingness to give away the store in return for next to nothing, the Indo-US trade deal that’s to be finalized BEFORE Trump sets foot in Houston, will likely feature an easing of restrictions on American agricultural commodities and, particularly, dairy products. Soon we may find costlier US-sourced milk, butter, cheese and other such goods pushing out Amul items and their local counterparts from our shop shelves. Poor gau-mata! And, Good-Bye to the “white revolution” that the milk cooperatives-based Amul dairy industry of Gujarat began in the country!
Next, Modi’s supposedly close friend, Trump, will demand that India hurry up and take the aged aunt of a fighter plane — the venerable all gum and no teeth F-16, off Lockheed’s hands while filling its corporate purse. And because the Modi regime is disinclined to trust small Indian companies with advanced tech capabilities, inclusive of patents and intellectual property rights to produce the 5G wherewithal and the Chinese Huawei 5G is ruled out for security reasons, Trump will pressure Delhi to buy American 5G telecom gear and systems produced by Cisco and Qualcom, making India cyber security-wise vulnerable to the US instead.
Modi’s trade deal will thus darken the already bleak prospects of the Indian farmer, the Indian dairy industry, and the indigenous technology sector, with the combat aircraft sphere in the van with the foundational Tejas LCA project. Yet, when all is lost, the PM will crow about how his ‘Make in India’ is such a roaring business success producing what? Ah, yes, a 50-year old fighter aircraft the rest of the world is discarding.
There may be some interest in hearing a videographed talk by me on covert warfare in traditional Indian statecraft and in the country’s external policies for the Srijan Talks forum. It is available on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8MzHkuvU_Q&feature=player_embedded
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been hosted by President Vladimir Putin at two successive showcase events staged at the two ends of Russia – the 22nd “International Economic Forum” in St. Petersburg in May 2018 and, last week, the Fifth “Eastern Economic Forum” (EEC) in Vladivostok. Moscow has traditionally used such conferences to consolidate its relations with friendly countries and to sweeten up states it seeks to cultivate, whence the invitations to attend the EEC, besides Modi, to Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed and Mongolian President Battulga Khaltmaa.
Russo-Indian relations are stuck in a rut and have been for a while, notwithstanding the flowery rhetoric. In a September 2017 meeting with his then Indian counterpart, Sushma Swaraj, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described Indo-Russian friendship “as strong as stone”. This was presumably in response to Pakistani leaders routinely talking of relations with China as “higher than the mountains, deeper than the sea, and sweeter than honey” (in Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s words) and Beijing reciprocating in a more measured tone by calling Pakistan an “iron brother”.
What these descriptions mean, and whether they suggest that Sino-Pakistan relations are stronger than Indo-Russian ties – because iron cuts stone, is anyone’s guess. In practical terms though Russia, and its predecessor state the Soviet Union, have over the last seven decades put out for India. It has not, however, made for satisfactory relations.
But in pursuit of newer geopolitical schemes to fit their changing national interests and the uncertain times, neither country has thought it fit to pull away from the other because both governments appreciate the geostrategic utility of keeping close. The importance to Delhi of Russia to prevent the United States and China from becoming overbearing is matched by Moscow benefiting from proximity to India in its big power politics. While the intention to grow their uni-dimensional relationship into a multi-dimensional one is not lacking, India seems unable to move other than with great deliberation when fluid international circumstances demand a faster pace and more driven policies.
To date, Russian assistance in licensed production of equipment and sales to India of advanced military hardware (such as the S-400 air defence system) and of lease of otherwise unavailable weapons platforms, such as the Akula-II class nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) and, possibly in the future, long range Tu-160M long range bombers, have been the strategic glue. But this aspect is sought to be underplayed.
In the run up to the EEC, the press reported numerous arms deals awaiting signature in Vladivostok, including Indian production of AK 203 assault rifle and Kamov 226 helicopters, none of which were signed. Delhi apparently feared riling US President Donald Trump. Instead, in an attempt to enlarge the engagement envelope Modi talked up the one billion dollar Indian credit line to provinces in the Russian Far East, approval of 50-odd accords worth $5 billion, and the 150-member strong delegation of Indian entrepreneurs and industrialists accompanying him to explore business prospects.
The September
5 Joint Statement issued at the end of the annual 20th Indo-Russian
summit between Modi and Putin that piggybacked on the EEC, declares their interest
in diversifying the bilateral links. To emphasize which, some 28-29 of the 81 points
in the Statement pertain to trade, commerce and economic issues generally,
including those referring to Russia as supplier of oil and gas, versus 16-17 points
dealing with security-related matters. Also, there was mutual support for each
other’s geopolitical tilts. Eight points – some of them elaborated at considerable
length, stress the importance of multilateralism and multilateral forums, which
are anathema to the Trump Administration but music to Putin’s ears. Likewise,
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is touted as a means to obtain “a
multi-polar world order based on equal and indivisible security” – a common
Indo-Russian goal directly challenging Beijing’s and Washington’s designs tending
to bipolarity in the international system. It was the G2 concept the Barrack
Obama government was partial to but Trump has jettisoned, preferring the
confrontational style of the Cold War that saw USSR, its primary opponent,
decimated.
India, of course, would like nothing better than to see another bout of “hot peace”, this time to reduce a bumptious China in the Indo-Pacific. Whether or not that goal is achieved, Beijing’s preoccupation with America’s security initiatives will lessen Chinese military pressure along the Line of Actual Control and is welcomed by Delhi. But the attitude of a passive beneficiary is unbecoming, because Modi seriously underestimates India’s leverage with the U.S. and with China. No other Asian country has India’s all-round heft to balance China strategically, and with Beijing’s access to the U.S. market closing, only the vast consumerist-minded Indian middle class can absorb what China manufactures.
The Joint Statement, however, hints at the larger geostrategic gains from opposing detrimental moves by US and China on the global chessboard. If India’s Eurasia policy is pivoted on connectivity to Afghanistan and Central Asia and landward to Russia via a rail and road grid radiating from the Iranian port of Chabahar, Russia’s Middle East strategy rests on a Turkey-Syria-Iran linkup under Moscow’s aegis to balance the Islamic bloc headed by Saudi Arabia supported by Washington, whence Moscow’s warning to Trump to not take its neutrality for granted in case he imposes a war on Iran. Thus the Vladivostok Statement favours (1) “an inclusive peace” in Afghanistan that Delhi has sought, (2) respect for “the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of the Bashar al-Assad-ruled Syria propped up by Russia, and (3) “mutually beneficial and legitimate economic and commercial cooperation with Iran”, which Washington has already sanctioned several Indian and Russian entities for.
A timid Modi feels India cannot get too close to the US without upsetting Russia and vice versa even as China looms, as much a security threat as an economic and ideological one and, therefore, fails to take the hard decisions to escape the thrall of the big three powers. Without a truly grand strategic vision and plan, his government makes do with tactical counters, actions and maneuvers. A security architecture that neutralizes China and minimizes the role of an unreliable America in non-Sinic Asia’s security is not valued. A geopolitical setup to further these objectives based on loose security-minded coalitions minus the US and China, to wit, BRIS (Brazil-Russia-India-South Africa), not BRICS, and “Mod Quad” (India, Japan, Australia, and a group of rich and capable Southeast Asian nations), and not the Quadrilateral, is not followed.
Parts of such potentially decisive groupings are already in place owing to India’s involvement in BRICS and its “Look East, Act East” policy. But the missing vision and direction from the Modi government mean policy voids that events such as EEC cannot fill.
The bureaucratic winner of John Bolton’s ouster as National Security Adviser to President Donald J Trump is Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State. It was well known in Washington that Bolton and Pompeo got along like two favourites with competing charms in the harem angling for the Sultan’s attention, meaning each sought to undermine the other, with the latter having the inside track. Pompeo is oily, always adjusting to Trump’s mood and attitude to issues on the day. Bolton was his gruff — take it or leave it — self, confident that his proven neocon credentials since before the presidency of George W Bush, would not only protect him but permit him to push his own agenda. Wrong presumption.
The fact is that between a disruptor President intent on cutting big legacy deals and an unilateral interventionist sidekick resisting them, the sidekick had to go! Bolton had a long list of interventionist achievements — in the main, pushing the US into “regime changing” policies in Iraq (based on the entirely fictitious notion that Saddam Hussein was embarked on a nuclear armaments programme) and to remove the Mullah Omar-led Taliban government in Kabul in the wake of the 9/11 attack on New York, resulting in the near complete disorder in West Asia that persists to this day, and an endless war in Afghanistan against a foe long known for frustrating foreign invaders. And, he was also the main proponent for an air strike on Iran’s nuclear complex — an attack that was all to set to go in — with Israel active in support, and only awaited a go signal from the White House — which never came. Trump may be a shallow and a callow US President, but his domestic political instincts cannot be faulted.
With 2020 re-election in mind, Trump is serious about extracting America from the 18-year war in Afghanistan, reversing his predecessor Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) riveted together with major West European countries to put off Iran’s going nuclear, and forging a deal, any deal, with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, even at the expense of a treaty ally South Korea, as long as it allows Trump to crow he had brought “peace” to the Korean peninsula. Let’s briefly see what’s at work on these three issues.
Having promised withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan he couldn’t go into the next presidential election cycle with the Taliban gaining ground and getting into a position to redo in Kabul vis a vis the US what the Viet Cong-North Vietnam did in Saigon with the last American troops desperately helicoptering out of Afghanistan and out of trouble, except now it will be the advancing Taliban columns in sight. Such bad optics would defy any “fake news” that Trump and Fox News may concoct, and ignominiously terminate his presidency.
Negotiating a face-saver with Kim would be considered a success. Because Kim has not only stood up to Trump’s threats but countered by upping the ante and repeatedly rubbing America’s face in the mud, demanded that the warmongering Bolton be removed — a message delivered periodically with the firing of missiles to remind Trump he means business, but held out the prospects of a deal that could be personally negotiated with the US president. It has telegraphed to Trump the dangers of another war — this time in the east — that the US would willy-nilly get sucked into, and played on Trump’s confidence in his self-advertised deal-making skills. So far, Kim has had his way in every thing but Trump believes that he could render Kim pliable with offers of a “Marshall Plan” to develop North Korea as another East Asian economic success story. With such a deal in hand on the eve of the elections, he would win it as the maker of enduring peace in Korea, and stabilizer of an “American order” in Northeast Asia.
Iran is a nettlesome problem. Egged on by Bolton and the Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump almost ordered a catastrophe in the Gulf with the proposed air attack. Had the USAF sorties gone through, Tehran would have been forced into a situation where not to use its huge stock of missiles of various range, even if indiscriminately, against any and all targets in Saudi Arabia, UAE and Israel would be to permanently lose them. Under attack by American forces, Iran’s reasonable “use them or lose them” posture would have ended in much of anything of economic and military value in Iran being reduced to rubble, of course, but the Iranian missiles — developed with much care and diligence with Russian and Chinese assistance, especially by the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guard), would have rained ruin on all the oil and commerce rich sunni Arab kingdoms, sheikhdoms and emirates in the Gulf. It would have plunged the international energy trade into a death spiral, reduced both the leading and sunni and shia countries of the world, and pretty much spelled finis to US influence in the extended region. And because Russia, in order to head off just such a denoument, had warned that it would not remain neutral in the face of such war against Iran, and because with Israel being hit — and depending on the scale and degree of destruction — Tel Aviv could well have unsheathed its nuclear sword. It had the potential of a nuclear Armageddon, something that had been avoided during 50 years of the Cold War-hot peace between the US and the Soviet Union post-World War Two. Even a duffer in the White House would have had such a scenario play out in his mind. It was enough provocation in any case for Trump to call an end to this madness round the corner by getting rid of Bolton. The better path, therefore, was to think about jaw-jawing with his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani, who would be inclined to some sort of compromise, short of reverting to the JCPOA, that would lift the sanctions off his country’s back.
Imagine three grand “negotiating successes” — with the Taliban in Afghanistan, Kim in North Korea, and Rouhani in Iran, it’d be unprecedented and make him — Trump would reason — irresistible to the voters in next year’s election.
Except Bolton, paradoxically, was good for India. He didn’t care two bits for India, of course, but he did for certain principles of action. In February this year when the Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval betook himself to Washington to curry support for the Balakot strike post-Pulwama terrorist incident, it was Bolton who signaled approval on the basis that India had every right to “self defence”. Such an approval may not be forthcoming the next time India considers forceful action because Bolton’s replacement — whosoever he/she is — will likely mirror Trump’s essential tendency to maximize leverage and not go with any principle. An inkling of what Delhi can expect in the future was available yesterday, the very day when India and Pakistan were squaring up on 370 and Kashmir at the 42nd session of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva. Unbidden, Trump again offered himself up as a possible mediator despite the clearest indication by the Modi government that no such external interference was necessary or would be countenanced. The trouble is Trump is aware that Modi is no Mullah Baradar, Kim or Rouhani and that, surrounded by appeasers in his Cabinet, like Jaishankar, he will be inclined, when he is squeezed, to squeal and compromise just to be in America’s good books.
And, re: the UNHCR session: Two things were noticeable. Secretary (East) who put forward India’s case, did not once mention Pakistan’s irrefutable record of ethnic cleansing since Partition when the non-Muslim population in that rumps state was reduced from 15% to less than 1%, this when Islamabad has used the international media megaphone to blast India for abrogating Articles 370 & 35A as prelude to “ethnic cleansing” in Kashmir. Nor did the Secretary harp and iteratively on the state of Gilgit and Baltistan (G&B) where methodical genocide is being committed against the shias of that region by the sunni state by way of straightforward killings and resettling of Mirpuri Mussalmans to change the demographic profile, and adding to Pakistan’s disreputable record on human rights.
Indeed, MEA has only recently started to mention G&B when talking about Pakistan-occupied Kashmir — a wrong long pointed out in my writings. Because it neglected for whatever reasons to desist from bringing in the status of, and the deplorable conditions of shias and others demanding freedom in, G&B, the world has been led to believe that the outstanding dispute is only about Indian J&K. This is entirely the Indian government and MEA’s fault.
The other thing was the televised speech, perhaps, in a follow-up session of UNHCR by someone who seemed to be a mid-level functionary in India’s UN Geneva mission. This person read from from the paper in front of him so rapidly, almost as if he feared a guillotine coming down on his neck, to be all but incomprehensible to anyone who was listening. One can argue it didn’t matter because most attendees at these meets are bored to tears and usually manage to sleep with their eyes open! The problem with Indian diplomats in Western settings is their accent, pace and diction when making India’s case. Even in the best of instances, there’s the trademark slightly Indian sing-song lilt when they speak, to which is coupled the haste to make the point. The result usually is the intended audience gets the drift without quite making out what’s said. This is a longstanding problem compounded in recent times by those who have joined the Foreign Service via the UPSC on the basis of regional language competence — a growing proportion of the ‘A’ stream in IFS. May be it is time for the MEA to find funds to set up a language lab for English at the Foreign Service Institute that all entrant level officers would be required to undergo for English language certification. And to think the Indian diplomatic service was, albeit very long ago, known for its drafting prowess.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will soon be in Vladivostok, there to attend an Economic Conference as chief guest. That the Russian President Vladimir Putin is hosting the Indian leader for a second such summit — the last time was in the former’s stomping ground, St. Petersburg, suggests that despite the Modi regime signaling Delhi’s closeness to the US at every turn, Moscow still espies some utility in having India figure prominently in its great power political game. And, of course, to have the Russian defence industry continue to benefit from such major arms sales as may fructify.
After all, Putin has been spectacularly successful, even though playing with a weak economic card, to push America geopolitically into a corner. He has stymied the US in the Middle East by simultaneously drawing Erdogan’s Turkey into its military sphere of influence with the foot-in-the-door sale of S-400 anti-aircraft system and propping up the Bashir al-Assad government in Syria, and thereby established itself as a seminal power in greater West Asia. Capitalizing on the estranged relations between West European members of NATO and Washington that the maladroit US President Donald Trump has managed to obtain, and his own threats to cutoff gas supplies to Germany, the strongest European state, Putin has ensured that NATO is about neutered. In Central Asia, lacking China’s economic ability to buy regimes with infrastructure projects and trade on concessional terms, he has sought a negotiated solution with Japan for the return of the Kurile Island chain to Tokyo, whence the certainty that Japan will be strung along. It will increase the degrees of separation between the US and Japan, on the one hand and, by cultivating Tokyo, put China on a strategic leash, on the other hand. Keeping things humming with India fits into this larger plan because, besides an Indo-Russian check on Chinese ambitions in the extended region, it at least notionally pulls Delhi away from Washington — a move aided and principally assisted by the Trump Administration’s almost pathological drive to alienate its allies and partners everywhere, including particularly in Asia.
Does Modi have any grand plan and strategy to rival that of the master Russian strategist gladhanding him in the Russian Far East? Apparently not (if one goes by his floundering and fairly unimaginative, non-Article 370 abrogation-related, foreign policy and the leanings of his reported foreign policy adviser, the RSS apparatchik Ram Madhav. Madhav’s level of intellect can be gleaned from his revealing op-ed quoting Francis Fukuyama, who became irrelevant over a decade ago. This is in line with ample past evidence that Madhav has a basic incapacity to do other than think derivatively. But this can also be said about such “thinking” as is being done by Ministry of External Affairs led by S Jaishankar. Picking up on the “Please the Master”-game fast, Jaishankar, for instance, had scheduled the annual heads-of-missions meeting, where else, at a Gujarat government resort at the feet of the gigantic Vallabhbhai Patel statue on the Narmada — a ploy designed mightily to please his boss. Shades of US Vice President Michael Pence, on a state visit to Ireland, to please Trump staying at a Trump-owned golf resort in Doonbeg on the west coast of that country, some 180 miles from Dublin, on the opposite, eastern shore, where he pow-wowed with the Irish Prime Minister — the gay, half-Indian, Leo Varadkar).
So, no great strategic game plan here. Consider that Defence minister Rajnath Singh had a meeting with his Japanese counterpart in Tokyo and did not once mention the Shinmaywa US-2 maritime recon aircraft project the Shinzo Abe government many years ago offered India on a platter, prospectively even with financing! And Modi has been talking — yea, just talking — about ‘acting East’ from when he became prime minister 5 years ago. But why would Modi need a game plan when he can brandish promises to buy this and that pricey armament instead — a ploy he has time and again used with Trump, Macron, May and every other leader whose country has any kind of weaponry (and, in the case of Xi of China, Huawei 5G telecom systems that will implant Chinese spy and cyberwarfare wherewithal controlled by Beijing in the Indian communications grid) to sell? The fact that the Indian economy is running on empty has not deterred him, nor prompted him to rethink his policy of seeking to buy friendship with mega arms purchases. But then he doesn’t seem to have a better idea by way of leverage. Nor has Beijing’s hand-holding of Pakistan on the Kashmir issue (in the UN Security Council and elsewhere) elicited anything remotely punitive. Like say, censorious statements by MEA to chastise China for suspending civil rights and imposing an emergency in Hong Kong — the very thing Beijing accuses Delhi of doing in Srinagar Valley!
So Modi has gone to Vladivostok — a veritable Santa Claus bearing gifts — touting his proximity to his “good friend” Vladimir. He means to sign, per press reports, an accord to set up an “energy bridge” for Sakhalin oil to make up for the loss of oil from Iran, but also multi-billion dollar contracts for the AK-203 assault rifle production in India, the Kamov 226 utility helicopters, and the lease agreement for the second Akula-II nuclear-powered attack submarine.
As it is, the US Defence Department is weighed down by a lemon of an aircraft in US armed services’ inventories, the F-35! But Modi will not touch the one weapons platform that will make mincemeat of this plane and is sending shivers down Pentagon’s spine — the Kinzhal hypersonic missile-armed high-performance, 5th generation, Sukhoi-57. It is another matter that Moscow had long ago offered to co-develop this advanced fighter-bomber aircraft with India, which project the IAF, in its by now legendary wisdom shied away from, because it preferred the 4.5 gen French Rafale — the same generation combat aircraft, incidentally, as the indigenous Tejas LCA and, because Modi will feel the need to balance these Russian arms buys and to please Trump, the already 50+year old F-16!!! And this because the PM believes that producing or, more correctly, assembling, the F-16 in India will somehow add value to this plane and elevate it to the league of what — the Tejas, Su-57, Rafale, or the junky F-35? And all this at the expense of the Indian defence industry (Tejas), and relations with Russia (Su-57) and Japan (US-2) — the US-2 being the best aircraft of its kind in the world!
Way to go Modi, Indian government, and Indian military! Foreign defence industries have certainly hit a jackpot with you!
( US Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad with Pakistan COAS Gen. QJ Bajwa)
In the aftermath of the 9th Round of talks in Doha with the US the chief Taliban negotiator Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar announced that a deal for the withdrawal of some 13,000 American troops from Afghanistan was at hand. After 18 years of hard fighting the US has had enough and is calling it quits. General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated that the 8,600-personnel strong military contingent that President Donald Trump said would stay on, were there to ensure that “Afghanistan is not a sanctuary” for the assorted Islamic terrorists and freelancers from all over who are expected to seek safe haven in a Taliban-run Afghanistan.
Dunford’s claim, on the other hand, that the residual US force will also try and “bring peace and stability to Afghanistan” is nothing more than a fig leaf for America’s cut and run operation, because what a force of 100,000 US soldiers plus couldn’t do, 8,600 troops certainly won’t be able to. After spending over a trillion dollars in Afghanistan and sustaining 2,400 deaths and ten times as many casualties since 2001 the US is a beaten power eager to rush back home to lick its wounds.
It is the small Intelligence-heavy US presence that’s supposed to provide Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s government with the psychological, if not material, assistance and reassurance to conduct general elections later this year at a time when there’s no certainty of the Taliban permitting any of it, whatever Baradar may have committed to the Afghan-origin US Special Representative, Zalmay Khalilzad, tasked with putting together a passable deal. During the negotiations, Baradar and Company were, in any case, aware that Khalilzad had no extended time frame to work with considering Trump’s looming 2020 re-election campaign, and hence they could dictate terms. Trump being Trump, he has hinted that, depending on how successful a Taliban-headed coalition government is in keeping the Islamic extremists out of their country, US troops could be redeployed in Afghanistan. This is the usual hot air ejected by a defeated party scampering from the scene, even though the US has, over two decades, built a huge military infrastructure comprising 700 small and big bases and facilities, and can, in theory, use them for armed interventions in the future.
Not that any US President is ever likely for any reason to initiate another military adventure in Afghanistan. But why is Washington’s insistence that the Taliban in Kabul not allow al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and similar radical terrorist outfits to shelter in Afghanistan, important for India? Because, in the wake of the regularization of the status of Jammu & Kashmir within the Indian Union, Pakistan army’s Inter-Services Intelligence has no option other than try and lure these experienced IS and Qaeda fighters sporting the Iraq and Syria battle honours with cash and stoke their jihadist impulses to fight the kafir Indian state in Kashmir. ISI cannot get out of their heads the enormous success it has had using such means to trounce the Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan and now the US-led International Security Assistance Force, which record it hopes to embellish in J&K.
The ISI will prosecute its IS-Qaeda strategy because Pakistan is now bereft of other options. After all, how much effect will Imran’s recommended mode of protest — Pakistanis standing in silence in public places and wherever for half an hour after Friday’s jumma prayers to express their solidarity with Kashmiris supposedly under the Indian yoke, have, really? Imran’s harrumphing threateningly about nuclear war, the cigar-chomping blunderbuss of a railways minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmad predicting onset of war by November (he didn’t say which year!) and General Qamar Bajwa’s visiting with formations of the Pakistan army’s strike corps (on Aug 28) and praising them for their splendid fighting posture in the face of Delhi playing it cool and responding with dismissive statements, has done two things. It has shown up the Pakistani leadership as a bunch of reckless dolts, while hiding the basic fact that Pakistan has no money to finance even minor hostilities and its military is in no position to wage any kind of war because its stock of spare parts and ammo won’t last more than a week at intense rates of expenditure. (This should not console Indians much, because our armed services’ counterpart stores are down to a fortnight’s worth of fighting — the comparative situation that exactly resembles what obtained during the 1965 conflict!)
Sans options what are GHQ, Rawalpindi, and Islamabad to do? There’s one thing they can do. They can order a change in tactics. The Valley boys and Mirpuri mussalman youth, previously trained and supported by ISI under the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba aegis, will be asked to pelt stones, place IEDs, and carry out similar actions, to keep Indian units busy and preoccupied, but leave the hard fighting to the murderous IS-Qaeda gangs channeled to J&K from Afghanistan. Such a strategy will serve many interests. It’ll help the Taliban regime to be on the right side of the US, Pakistan to escape the tightening UN Financial Action Task Force noose by pointing out that the troublemakers are from Afghanistan, and to keep the larger sunni cause of Islamizing Kashmir as the first step to realizing the Guzhwa-e-Hind (a balkanised India) objective — a long term project propelled and funded by Saudi Arabia and rich Gulf states, on track.
Should this be the course ISI follows then it will require some real changes in the way Indian forces have so far tackled the insurgency/secessionist problem in J&K. The Rashtriya Rifles (RR) on the frontlines, and the Indian army generally, will need to be more bloody-minded and ruthless to match these characteristic traits of the IS-Qaeda fighters, who give no quarter and ask for none. The RR may be found wanting. The fact is the best units to take on the battle-hardened Uzbek, Somali, Afghan, Arab terrorists comprising IS and Qaeda cadres are the Special Forces with the three armed services. Fielding them in Kashmir will be a test of their mettle. Their advantage is that they are not expected, or even supposed, to “fight by the book” and can match the terrorist fighting hordes in their cut-throat, irregular, tactics.
But for this SF policy to succeed will require fool-proof intelligence on a sustained basis to identify the origin of the terrorists fighting in any particular section of the operations grid. Because pitting the Indian SF against minor league terrorists and misguided Valley youngsters bursting with adrenalin, would be a waste of time and effort, and would result in the inexcusable — a strong force targeting minnows even as the real threat avoids engagement.
For Indian Special Forces, it will be a boon — an opportunity to take on the terrorist elite and best them, and while doing so sharpen their own considerable skill sets. This surely is better than whiling away their time in small-time incursions of small consequence across the Line of Control (that the Pakistanis say they will now treat as a ceasefire line) whilst being penny-packeted as Northern Army reserve, or in similar useless deployment.
(Prime Minister Imran Khan and Pakistan COAS General Qamar Javed Bajwa)
With the long overdue overturning of Article 370, the status of Jammu & Kashmir is now regularised within the Indian Union. In its wake, the Bharatiya Janata Party government seems inclined to gloat over diplomatically wrongfooting Pakistan and the United States and to consolidate its control over that province. It has entrenched Pakistan’s enmity which, in the larger strategic perspective, is not a good thing to happen.
The Imran Khan government will now move closer to China, firm up the Sino-Pakistani military nexus and, notwithstanding the possibility of running afoul of the Financial Action Task Force, persist with terrorism to keep the Kashmir issue alive. India can do something to pre-empt such a denouement, but it will require Prime Minister Narendra Modi to go against his own ideological grain and court political risk in order to achieve the ambitious multi-pronged goal of calming and stabilising a fraught situation, distancing Pakistan from China and drawing it as well as other adjoining countries into a loose South Asian security and economic arrangement, and of otherwise obtaining a pacified neighbourhood—the first necessary step to India attaining great power status.
This may be considered a tall order, but it is eminently realisable. It will mean Modi unilaterally implementing two telling but military-wise safe and significant security-related measures to address Pakistan’s perceptions of India as an existential threat and to reshape its attitude. What the Pakistan Army most fears are India’s three Strike Corps which, considering the opposition, is way in excess of need and, depending on how the costing is done, consume almost a quarter of the defence budget. The fear of being overwhelmed and compelled to use its tactical nuclear weapons is for General Headquarters, Rawalpindi (GHQR), the worst nightmare because it would result in getting coiled in a war of annihilation it cannot control and whose end—Pakistan’s extinction—it cannot avoid.
In contrast to this are the limited wars of manoeuvre that it has fought in the past and is prepared to fight in the future for which contingency India doesn’t need more than a single composite armoured-mechanised corps plus a few independent armoured brigades. But here’s the nub! The Indian armoured and mechanised forces constitute a bureaucratically powerful combat arm that will brook no restructuring even if the freed manpower and materiel are converted to light tanks and airborne cavalry to equip three desperately needed offensive mountain corps able to take the fight to China on the Tibetan plateau. Modi, however, can impose new force planning predicates on the military as he has done the Chief of Defence Staff system, especially because a meaningful Indian mountain offensive capability will strengthen his hand in dealing with Beijing.
The other decision Modi should take is to withdraw the forward deployed nuclear-tipped Prithvi short-range ballistic missiles from the western border, which other than shortening the nuclear fuse and turning every small crisis into a hair-trigger situation, serve no useful purpose. Should GHQR be rash enough to initiate nuclear action for any reason under any circumstances, the hinterland-based Agni longrange missiles can cover all target sets within Pakistan, so it is an entirely safe move to make.
Consider the consequences of these decisions. They will hollow out Pakistan’s view of a spiteful and malevolent India bent on destroying it, devalue China’s importance, erode the credibility of its nuclear arsenal and, in time, not only weaken the army’s primacy in the Pakistani state and society but also its rationale for cornering a big chunk of national resources. Further, it will lay the foundations for easygoing India-Pakistan relations that Mohammad Ali Jinnah had envisaged wherein, to use foreign minister S. Jaishankar’s words vis-a-vis China, “differences don’t become disputes”. The ripple effects of demilitarising the border, moreover, will be to induce Pakistan to formalise the ceasefire line in Kashmir as an international boundary and smaller neighbouring states to see India as a benign power.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be headed this weekend for Biarritz, on the southwest coast of France, where the G-7 Summit is being held. The informal UN Security Council session on Kashmir a few days back has complicated things for Modi on several counts. Despite US’ formal stance supportive of the Indian position that revocation of Articles 370 and 35A of the Constitution was an “internal matter”, President Donald Trump did not take no for an answer where mediation is concerned. Undeterred by the Indian government’s brush-off after such an offer was first made during the press conference he had in Pak PM Imran Khan’s company, Trump once again offered mediation on the Indo-Pak dispute yesterday and promised to raise the matter about his peace-making role with Modi when they meet in Biarritz.
Pakistan has, with some success, weaponized the human rights issue by lacing it with the imminence of a nuclear exchange. Imran has argued thus: the anger of Kashmiris owing to abrogation of Article 370 could result in a terrorist incident which Delhi will blame Islamabad for. It will launch a punitive strike, as happened post-Pulwama, to which the Pakistani military will reply, and this action-reaction sequence could result in conventional hostilities which, if they begin going against Pakistan, will lead to it ordering first use of N-weapons. By way of a historical metaphor, he said Pakistan would act like Tipu Sultan, not Bahadur Shah Zafar who abdicated his throne after the failed 1857 Mutiny, therefore, accepting before hand that, like Tipu, Pakistan would rather go down fighting — in nuclear terms, become extinct, than do nothing at all. (Refer youtube.com/watch?v=jMFIXhrdlebA .) If this is not a lot of hoo-ha I don’t know what is! This hot air got pumped when Indian media created a controversy out of nothing — Rajnath Singh’s fairly anodyne statement about Delhi in the future, depending on the circumstances, rethinking its no first use commitment.
But the mix of disputed territory, “occupation” forces, a restive native population, and nuclear weapons is a politically combustible story and Pakistan has made capital out of it. It is an endeavour China has helped overtly and UK covertly (as at the informal session of the UN Security Council and by permitting the violent demonstration outside the Indian High Commission in London). UK now has Trump’s “poodle”, Boris Johnson, in 10, Downing. Trump and Boris often talk to each other and given how impressionable the former is, there’s every chance of his being influenced by the latter’s Pak-leaning attitude. Who is to say this wasn’t manifested in the US President’s repeating his mediation offer to Modi in his telephone talk of Aug 22? Trump is motivated to act this way in the main because he does not want his special rep Zalmay Khalilzad’s “get the hell out of Afghanistan fast” plan by cutting a deal, any deal, with the Afghan Taliban to be imperilled by Pakistan potentially sabotaging it, which ISI can do. Washington apprehends it will do this if Islamabad perceives the US as standoffish on the 370-Kashmir issue. Which is to say that there’s lots there for Pakistan to work with to ensure the US stays entangled.
The problem for Modi is this: Trump can turn truculent and verbally vicious if he is frustrated on his initiatives by leaders of friendly states (to wit, Danish PM Mette Fredericksen, who having dismissed Trump’s offer “to buy Greenland” as “absurd” was called “nasty” by Trump, who then proceeded to cancel his planned state visit to Denmark!). Insulting statements by fellow strongmen, like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, on the other hand fetches from the US President — who is growingly recognized as an unreliable, unpredictable, dilettante, the sort of fawning attention that would embarrass even the smarmiest spittle licker in Lutyen Delhi.
So, would Modi be better off showing a bit of spine when the two meet on the sidelines of G-7, and what exactly should the Indian PM do? He can be rude and flatly turn down Trump’s offer — which approach, no matter what the Indo-Pacific security stakes, will lead to a rupture in personal relations that Modi has invested too much in by way of hugs and embraces and, more seriously, by way of buying at great cost to the country antique combat aircraft (F-16) and guns (M-777 howitzers) and, when in need to pacify Washington, with the military-MOD’s procurement staple of recent years — C-17 and C-130s transporters, to easily discard. Modi also daily faces Trump’s threats to raise tariffs on all imports from India pursuant to his belief that India, like China, doesn’t anymore deserve the “developing country” tag and hence the preferential treatment under WTO rules. Moreover, Trump has trashed Modi’s repeated personal pleas and the Indian government’s more formal pleadings over the past two-odd years by shutting down the H1B visa route to legal immigrant status taken by Indian techies and professionals, as well as the provision to deny entry to family members of these immigrants. This is Modi’s less than esteemable record — a consequence of giving in routinely to Washington, which he takes to Biarritz.
What is Trump expected to do in this context other than see Modi as a chump who, in exchange for small gestures, such as a counter-hug, gives away the store without getting anything in return? It is a one-way deal of the kind preferred by the transaction-minded Trump who otherwise respects counterparts who have a clear view of national interest and won’t bend but will happily massage his brittle ego as a means of playing him — something Putin and Kim Jong-un effortlessly do. (Trump, for instance, went nearly girly on August 9 re: Kim’s “very beautiful letter” and sided with the North Korean dictator, excused his missile firings, and berated the US-South Korean joint wargames and military exercises as waste of US money! See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqdS5hIdp4Q .) But becoming another Kim is obviously beyond Modi and, in any case, such a conversion may be too late in the day to be credible.
The real trouble ahead for Modi lies less in Trump’s being mediator than in his using human rights excesses supposedly committed on the allegedly hapless Muslims of the Srinagar Valley, laced with fears of a “nuclear flashpoint” that Imran and the Pakistani strategic enclaves have propagated, as a battering ram. In fact, he has indicated publicly that he’d do just this. In the wake of Islamabad’s sounding the nuclear tocsin to keep Kashmir in the international limelight and, per chance, to persuade more and more countries to support its case for UN intervention, the possibility of Trump leading the charge is a disquieting prospect. Already, Western Press and media have gone to town on this theme of the Indian armed services oppressing Kashmiris. Yesterday’s announcement by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh of establishing a cell in MOD to look into human rights complaints is a move to preempt this issue from becoming a major diplomatic headache. Will this stanch the growing criticism? No.
But there’s a tack that Modi can take that will stop Trump cold and almost instantly terminate US’ moral grandstanding, and prevent America’s European lackeys from following suit. He can tell Trump in Biarritz, in the friendliest terms but without the equivocation that foreign minister S. Jaishankar would advise him, that the nuclear alarms are a whole load of nonsense and a ploy to gain global attention but the harm done by Washington’s raking up the human rights issue and by its petty economic-trade policies, would be real, compelling his government to reconsider India’s involvement in strategically partnering with the US in the Indo-Pacific. The PM can refer gently to the case-by-case constraints on the full realization of LEMOA and COMCASA, which has raised the Trump Administration’s hackles, but which he should be warned, would become much worse with this American policy generating genuine ire among the Indian people and ill will for America.
Such a clear cut Modi message along with, ideally, Rajnath Singh being dispatched expeditiously to Moscow, will drive home that point nicely. Will Modi do this to earn from Trump a modicum of respect for himself and for India? Nah!
——————-
(Modi & Macron near Arc de Triomphe)
With Modi once again in France, can an order for additional Rafale combat aircraft be far behind? As long ago predicted by this analyst, the initial order for 36 Rafale combat aircraft was merely the French foot in the door. With Paris preparing to hardsell a second tranche of 36 Rafales, the larger IAF-French plan of outfitting the full 125 aircraft requirement for “medium” combat aircraft is fully underway. The French President Emmanuel Macron will probably offer for like initial sum (for the first batch but inflation-indexed) — nearly 8 billion euros — 2 more squadrons worth of Rafale.
Why Modi would accept such an offer when HAL has made a competing offer to produce 4 squadrons of the “super Sukhoi” variant of the Su-30MKI, with HAL chairman R Madhavan, calling it the “fastest means of getting” the IAF up to 42 squadron strength, is unfathomable. Madhavanm, playing hard ball, told the press that HAL, Nasik, produces a dozen Su-30s a year and has outstanding order from IAF for only 8-10 of this aircraft and then just to replace the losses due to accidents, and unless the Company’s order book is enlarged by year end, the entire Su-30 assembly line will become defunct. (See https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/hal-pitches-for-4-more-squadrons-of-su-30mki/articleshow/70668419.cms ) Perhaps, Modi is convinced that Rafale is an all round better, more economical buy than the upgraded “super Sukhoi” Su-30? If so, then really??!!
Now the nationalist Shri Modiji can buy into the IAF’s case that HAL is the premier white elephant defense PSU (along with Mazgaon Dockyard Ltd), which despite its awful production record is sustained expensively at taxpayer’s expense and produces flawed aircraft, all of which is true. But the Prime Minister confronts a dilemma: If he cold shoulders HAL, and permits it to run down, he increases IAF’s dependence on imported aircraft and, more, ends up transferring tens of billions in Euros to make Dassault Avions — the maker of Rafale, the French aviation industry and France wealthier. Is he willing in this way to impoverish India, kick the infant aerospace Indian defence industry in the guts, and politically risk flaring the Rafale embers? The political opposition may be non-existent now but Rafale can live on as an election issue for decades.
There’s an an optimized choice among options which, again, he is loath to make. Namely, as I have advocated, getting the Indian private sector centrally involved in combat aircraft production, which will create millions of jobs — unemployment being the country’s chief worry. It will require putting together a national industrial consortium of reputed Indian corporations, including L&T, Tata, et al, who will be transferred LCA source codes and algorithms by DRDO, who will then embellish the designs of LCA variants, develop and manufacture Tejas-1A, Tejas-2 and, derived from these, the AMCA (advanced medium combat aircraft) for IAF’s use as bulk combat aircraft, with derated versions (of IA, 2) designated for export from get-go. It will incentivize the private sector to become aviation players of note and provide competition to HAL making the latter more efficient and effective, and able to amortize the government’s investment of hundreds of billions of dollars into it over the last seven decades rather than (as newspapers report) have its low productivity and unaccountable work force agitate against government measures to “corporatize” it, other DPSUs and Ordnance Board factories.
This option, if it is taken, will mean the Modi government, for the first time, doing something tangible and substantive to promote indigenous design and production of capital military equipment rather than merely yacking about it and repeating the hollow mantra of “Make in India” ad nauseam.
So, what are the chances of such innovative indigenization programmes getting implemented on a war footing? Zero!
(Armed services chiefs meeting Modi at the Red Fort — Aug 15, 2019)
Sometimes Prime Minister Narendra Modi comes up with pleasant surprises. There was the announcement in his address from the Red Fort ramparts about the chief of defence Staff (CDS). And the other was an exhortation to trust in locally-made products village-level up. Presumably, this applies to the Indian armed services as well who have, over the years, loudly voiced the indigenization mantra but, in practice, reluctantly supported home-grown defence R&D projects and outright rejected the hardware (Tejas light combat aircraft, Arjuna main battle tank) that resulted from them in order to protect their import options.
A CDS system has been in the works for the better part of forty years with every passing flag rank officer in the three armed services expressing a need for it, but those from the Indian Air Force in particular also offering caveats and urging a go-slow. Why so? No great secret this, because IAF has always feared that as the senior service and the one most directly involved in border clashes and counter-insurgency operations and, therefore, more in the public eye than either of the other two Services, the Indian Army would end up monopolizing the CDS post. The IAF is a large enough force for its opposition to CDS to not be ignored by any government. The Indian Navy, on the other hand, is too small to matter and other than extolling the virtues of a CDS, tactfully, kept itself out of the fray. So the CDS issue got strung out over the differences between the army and air force.
Post- Kargil border conflict, a high-powered Committee chaired by the late K. Subrahmanyam stated in the clearest terms that the absence of a CDS led to the slow and sketchy reaction and build-up to action of the Indian military to the capture in Spring 1999 of the Kargil heights by the Pakistan Army’s Northern Light Infantry. Some years later, during the Vajpayee interregnum a committee with Subrahmanyam in it and chaired by former defence minister KC Pant was constituted to look at the Higher Defence Organization. It too recommended establishment of a CDS structure for singular military advice to the government of the day. Too often, Prime Ministers and Defence Ministers, seeking the military’s counsel in a crisis, usually got advice favouring the Service the current Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee, was affiliated with. But because the Chairman was a rotational post and did not outrank his fellow chiefs, his advice to the government was as often disputed by the other Services chiefs, leaving the government in its normal state of confusion. In this system, naturally, not only was an optimized military solution or decision difficult to obtain, and if made it was by happenstance, but the spurned chief ensured his Service’s role in coordinating military actions was half-hearted, and left something to chance.
Deposing before the Pant Committee I referred to how military “unification” was achieved in the US chiefly by President Harry S. Truman imposing the integration plan drawn up inside of three weeks by, no not a committee, but by one man — a chap called Ferdinand, adviser to Truman’s confidante, friend and Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson. As a consequence, the Chairman, US Joint Chiefs of Staff-system came into being.
There is an anecdote worth retailing here to emphasize just how a strong political leader can cow down an equally strong military leadership opposing his moves. This is important: Truman took ownership of the Ferdinand Plan and hearing murmurings of dissent against it in the senior Service, the US Navy, called a meeting of frontline admirals — Chester Nimitz, Arleigh Burke, et al, who at one end successfully prosecuted massive fleet actions in the Pacific theatre against the Imperial Japanese Navy, and at the other end fought off German submarine wolf-packs and mounted the famous Atlantic and Murmansk convoys conveying American war materiel to European Allies and to Soviet Russia. Striding into the big hall where the beribboned admirals were seated, Truman simply said that he had heard that his unification initiative had attracted opposition and, in the event, he said, those who were against it should step up and resign right there and then! Stunned naval brass headed by Nimitz said nothing, and Truman signed the unification order for implementation soon thereafter.
I suggested to the Pant Committee that the PM impose a CDS on the military because such radical structural change in the higher defence organization could not be realized by consensus, and that under no circumstances should the government ask the Services’ chiefs for their views. Alas, an over-cautious Pant and his Committee recommended just this, eventuating in a dissenting note from the then Chief of the Air Staff, whence the matter was once again consigned to the cellar.
It is a very good thing that the Prime Minister publicly announced his CDS decision — so there’s no chance of back-pedaling. As Modi spoke the TV camera panned to show the relief on the face of the CAS, Air Chief Marshal BS Dhanoa, because now the decision to veto the CDS decision was taken abruptly out of his hands. The IAF will have to lump it and Dhanoa will be spared incoming fire from his air force colleagues and predecessors who had derailed such moves in the past.
The question arises: What kind of CDS system does the PM have in mind? The CDS secretariat in-being has been in existence for over two decades now in the form of the Headquarters Integrated Defence Staff. That’s a functioning body and not a problem. But how far will the process of integration go? Will the separate and purposely not co-located theatre commands of the three Services numbering some 19 Commands in all be pared drastically to a more manageable, say, ten military Commands, including the already (if inefficiently) integrated Andaman Command? These Commands could be Northern, Western, Central, Peninsular, Eastern, Space, Cyber, Special Forces, Transport and Logistics/Maintenance, with Northern, Western, Peninsular and Eastern being comprehensively-capable Theatre Commands and Space, Special Forces, Transport and Logistics supportive Commands. Common sense suggests that in such a scheme Peninsular, Cyber and Andaman Commands be headed by the navy, Space, Northern, Transport and Eastern Commands by the air force, and Western, Special Forces and Central Commands (the last also a reserve holding and hence numerically the largest Command able to deploy/switch its forces as required between theatres) by the army, and the Logistics/Maintenance Command with its chieftancy held in rotation. (Why such a distribution of Service responsibility will be discussed in another post, another time.)
The stickiest issue for Modi will be who to appoint the first five star Chief of Defence Staff in the rank of Field Marshal and equivalent — Marshal of the Air Force and Admiral of the Fleet (because the CDS will necessarily have to outrank the services chiefs of staff if the whole exercise is not to be reduced to an impractical mess). In this context, the selected CDS will have to be an officer who has shown foresight, displayed vision (which two attributes presume a certain level of intellect), and exhibited tact. US Chief of Army Staff General George C. Marshall when confronted with choosing the Supreme Commander Allied Forces, Europe, to lead the war effort against Nazi Germany advised President Franklin D. Roosevelt to appoint Dwight D. Eisenhower and not a “fighting General” like George Patton or Omar Bradley, because of his proven organizational skills — something Modi should keep in mind when nominating the CDS.
So, the trick question — who among the extant service chiefs or among all the three star-rank officers below them in the three Services has a professional record manifesting the skills to get the most out of diverse oganizations and will make the best CDS?
———–
Modi in his Red Fort address to the nation spoke about trusting in locally made products. Does he really believe this? If so, why hasn’t it been evident in his government’s major military procurement decisions all of which without exception have settled on or are inclined towards imported armaments and foreign military-use systems? The score card on this count is irrefutable: the French Rafale combat aircraft (and Swedish Gripen and American F-16 in the wings), the US Apache attack helicopter, Russian T-90 MBT, prospective Spanish, French, Russian, or German involvement in the Project 75i diesel submarine programme, etc.
To claim, as the armed Services do in their own defence, that no indigenously designed and developed weapon system meets their operational standards, is a lot of bull. Arjuna MBT has beaten the T-90 hollow in all test trials in different terrains and weather conditions. Tejas is a beautiful 4.5 generation fighting platform given short shrift by IAF when it could fill the IAF fleet and be the basis for future derivative combat aircraft of all kinds and meet the Service’s light, medium and heavy fighter-bomber requirements. Arihant-class “boomers” — nuclear powered longrange ballistic and cruise missile-firing submarines (SSBNs) are of indigenous design, developed and manufactured at home, and yet, if navy is to be believed, we need foreign design and technology for the technologically simpler and less demanding conventional submarine — when all that is needed are specific technologies, such as electro-optic masts, AIPS (Air Independent Propulsion System), and cavitation and other noise reduction. And why Apache when there’s the HAL’s attack helicopter and Kamov 226 utility helos when there’s Dhruv?
Once the armed services know they cannot opt for foreign hardware, they’ll perforce commit heart, mind, and resources to indigenous armament projects with enormous export potential to Africa, the immediate neighbourhood, Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Latin America. These are military products with a ready market. From having the shameful tag as the world’s largest arms importer, India could become a very consequential exporter of arms.
Modi is supreme leader with no rival on the horizon within his party or elsewhere in the Indian polity and can do anything he wishes. He made the decision for CDS. Following on his reference to indigenization he should now declare that his government will not anymore permit armament imports, that’s it, khalas, no foreign military goods. This decision will unleash precisely the “änimal spirits” he says he wants to see driving the Indian economy, generating new technologies, and jobs by the millions in Medium and Small Scale Enterprises — India’s mittelstand — at the cutting edge of this national effort.
And, oh, yes, he will also need to get HAL, Mazgaon Dockyard Ltd and other “white elephant” defense public sector units, who have dragged the Indian defence industry into the mud, out of the frontline of defence industry and get the more productive and efficient Larsen & Toubro, Godrej Aerospace, Mahindra Aviation, Bharat Forge, and even Reliance Defence centrally into the game. Private sector companies driven by the profit motive are the future and answer to India’s defence problems.
As a Gujrati with “business in my blood” as Modi put it, the Prime Minister should see clear to doing these above things. He has wasted five years on his romance with the bureaucracy and the public sector. Time to wake up, Mr Modi, and do what’s right for India because you politically can and because no matter how much time you think you will have in power, it could all change in a trice!
[Building a Fully Connected Chinese Intelligence world alright!]
Soon after trashing Article 370, the first instinct of the Modi government was — no guesses here — to conciliate. S. Jaishankar, the external affairs minister and designated batter whenever China or the US hove into view, was sent off running to convince Beijing that this move did not threaten China’s interests, and to offset the effects of pleadings by his Pakistan counterpart Shah Mohammad Qureishi who had hightailed it to the Chinese capital to drum up support. But with Modi having previously described the abrogation as a purely “internal” matter, where was the need to reassure or explain a move to obtain a more perfect Indian Union to the eastern neighbour with no locus standi on the Kashmir issue other than as an annexer by stealth of India’s Aksai Chin territory (the Maozedong regime in the mid-1950s expropriated an eastern portion of this region to build the Highway connecting its western Xinjiang province to the mainland through Chinese-occupied Tibet), and as acceptor of a gift in 1963 of another, contiguous, part of the same Aksai Chin that China coveted by an Ayub Khan eager to court Beijing’s patronage vide the Sino-Pakistan accord. In this context, the Zhongnanhai had the gall to say that revoking Article 370 impugned Chinese sovereignty! Instead of reacting strongly to such ridiculous statement followed by equally silly advice urging Delhi to show restraint because, according to Beijing, the situation was fraught in the region, Modi dispatched Jaishankar to apply balm and seek understanding. Rather, shouldn’t the MEA have publicly reminded China about the unrest in Hong Kong and about sustained Chinese actions unsettling the South China Sea and told Beijing, in so many words, to mind its own damned business?
Despite the gravest affronts and provocations to India’s territorial integrity and sovereignty over the years, Delhi has steadfastly refused to come out with its own ‘One India’ Doctrine and to equate it straightforwardly with the ‘One China’ principle Beijing insists all countries respect. Either China accepts all of the territory of the erstwhile “princely kingdom” of Kashmir, including Gilgit, Hunza, and Baltistan, and every last square inch under occupation of the Forces Command Northern Areas, Pakistan Army, as inalienable Indian territory, or India treats Tibet and Hong Kong under differentiated Chinese control, and Taiwan a fully independent and sovereign country, as very separate national entities. This is the sort of hard choice no Indian government has ever offered the hard-headed authoritarian rulers of Communist China. Indian governments from Nehru’s days have unfortunately sought China’s friendship and repeatedly got kicked in their teeth for their trouble. The Modi regime just as frequently and haplessly invokes the “Wuhan spirit”, urging “sensitivity to each other’s core concerns”, and allows Beijing to pile insult on injury (with its media arm, Global Times, warning that integrating Kashmir with India raises doubts about India’s credentials as potential permanent member of the UN Security Council — a status China enjoys — it must never be forgotten — because Nehru gifted it to Beijing, when international circumstances conspired to have both the Soviet Union and the US in the mid-Fifties wanting India to take the seat vacated by Chiangkaishek’s Taiwan!).
If Beijing has toyed with India in the diplomatic field, it has just as successfully played India for a sucker in the trade realm, mounting serious pressure on the Modi government to relent on security considerations and permit Indian telecommunications market leaders — Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel, with their architecture based on the Huawei 4G gear, to upgrade to that Chinese Company’s 5G equipment, and also to keep relying on other Chinese-origin manufacturers such as ZTE. Huawei, incidentally, was funded and nursed to maturity by the People’s Liberation Army and almost all Chinese telecom Companies have such PLA and Chinese intelligence linkages. The only apparent reason Modi did not succumb is because of the Trump Administration’s counter-pressure to bar Huawei 5G from the Indian scene, and not because the Indian government concluded on its own that for the country’s communications grid to pivot on Huawei systems would be to drag the Chinese dragon dressed up as an attractive Trojan Horse right into the centre of India’s communications hub, thus creating untold cyber security vulnerabilities.
If this wasn’t the case, why were Vodafone and Airtel allowed to go in for the Huawei 4G in the first place? This, mind you, was in the face of a public campaign launched at the time — among other writings that warned against such buys, see my innumerable posts on this issue at the time — opposing the entry of key Chinese telecom technology and highlighting the almost farcical assurances the Manmohan Singh government accepted from Huawei that, security-wise, its goods were clean, posed no dangers and that the technology checking centre it proposed setting up at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, would adequately address India’s anxieties. It is another matter that no such centre ever came up, Airtel and Vodafone plonked for the Huawei 4G, and India’s capacity to resist Chinese cyber attacks that PLA has indicated will be in the van of its military offensives, was instantly undermined.
According to a recent Report authored by NK Goyal, President of the Association of India Communications Multimedia And Infrastructure (CMAI) “The malware/ backdoor can be made possible either in the equipment supplied initially or upgraded/modified by software later on, hence the risk. It’s really hard to find a security hole unless one know[s] exactly where to find it. A backdoor could be hard-coded into the silicon on a Huawei chip, then activated remotely, potentially opening with a few keystrokes the contents of an entire network to the Chinese military.” After warning about the official tendency of the Department of Telecommunications (DOT) and the Indian government generally to pooh-pooh the very real cyber dangers posed by the Chinese telecom technologies, the Report warned that in the process of trying to find “evidence of spyware” in “all our phone/computer chips, and in the Artificial Intelligence who-knows-where”, India shouldn’t get stuck with buying and installing Chinese-origin equipments embedded with electronic bugs, viruses to disable whole networks and backdoors to tap information. After all, Goyal concludes logically, “China is leading the world in spying on its citizens: Can we possibly imagine that they’re not planning on spying on us?”
The Modi government is embarked on the same blundering path that Manmohan Singh opted for, by not completely closing off the Indian 5G market to the Chinese telecom giants. Learning nothing from the past and ill-informed about the longstanding Chinese intent and efforts at subversion, a Committee headed by the Principal Scientific Adviser — a biochemist with little knowledge of cyber warfare-related telecom technologies, will reportedly soon recommend that Chinese equipment be included in the 5G rollout. This committee, per revelation by Smita Purshottam, only consulted with the telecom Companies who are hand-in-glove with Chinese equipment suppliers. Purshottam retired as our Ambassador to Switzerland and now heads SITARA (Science, Indigenous Technology & Advanced Research Accelerator), an organization dedicated to promoting indigenous technology at all levels in every sphere of national life, and particularly in the defence sector,
But returning to Purshottam’s point, it makes commercial sense for Airtel and Vodafone with Huawei 4G, for example, to upgrade cheaply to Huawei 5G than switch over to qualitatively matching or better Indian-developed technologies and systems, national security be damned! This Committee supposedly took enormous care to ignore Indian Companies (such as Saankhya Labs) fully capable of designing and manufacturing 5G and even 6G hardware and software, for which technologies they already have patents and hold Intellectual Property Rights! So it is reasonable for Purshottam to argue that India “leapfrog to 6G”, while also indigenously designing and producing 4G and 5G telecom systems for the extant Indian market and for exporting to developing countries who will be receptive to purchasing Indian technology. The African Union headquarters, for example, not too long ago discovered that the Chinese had hacked its classified communications network. Such a policy of fully indigenizing Indian telecom for national deployment and as export revenue earner will generate employment and act as “massive multipliers” consolidating India’s position in the forefront of telecommunications tech. This is now an imperative also because, according to Purshottam, 80% of “India’s sensitive networks…are already in Chinese hands, thanks to the Department of Telecommunications’ irresponsible handling of a strategic asset — our telecom networks.” Capture of Indian 5G, she avers, will “exponentially magnify” Beijing’s capacity for “cognitive communications [which linked to Artificial Intelligence] means we are surrendering control over unknown realms” to a belligerent adversary nation.
Worse and astonishingly, the Modi government is taking the same approach to de-indigenizing the telecom sector and forcing end-users to rely on foreign imported hardware and software, as it has done in the defence field where, willy-nilly, it is promoting armament imports even as the soaring Modi rhetoric exhorts ‘Make in India’ — sadly, a thinly veiled programme for screwdrivering and license-producing US, Swedish, French, Russian, Israeli military-use systems!
Purshottam discloses how this deplorable imports-fixated official mindset and procedures and procurement system-in-place prevailing in the defence field is being replicated in the telecommunications sphere. It is an approach involving (1) Chinese companies subsidised by Beijing being allowed “ruthlessly” to “underbid Indian Companies in telecom tenders”, (2) DOT refusing to release outstanding dues amounting to over Rs 1,000 crores owed to Indian Companies, (3) “one-sided discriminatory” bank guarantees being demanded of Indian telecom companies, and none from Huawei and that lot, and (4) Indian Companies being thus forced to “run around the world seeking expensive certifications”. By such means Indian Companies were ruled out of the running to supply 4G tech. (Refer Smita Purshottam’s eye-popping Aug 13 op-ed in Financial Express at https://www.financialexpress.com/opinion/telecom-networks-the-changing-face-of-conflict/1673863/ )
Come another Independence Day, and tomorrow we will all once again hear Modi, the Prime Minister, with rapt attention as he lists the achievements of his government. But look deeper, and one sees that so little has changed. As a nationalist and promiser of “maximum governance, minimum government” he is presiding over the worst excesses of empowered bureaucrats, not empowered people. The country, as a result continues to reel, its economy continues to plunge, but an unaccountable government continues happily to splurge monies the nation doesn’t have on imports and more imports, even as the benefits of transferred wealth and millions of high-paying jobs in defence and telecom sectors are enjoyed by Western defence majors, and China is helped to root telecom monopolies in India. If this is nationalism, then it is of a type I’m unaware of.
The most offending and offensive Article of the Indian Constitution — Article 370 has finally been rid off (and automatically also Article 35A). Good riddance! Why there was so much hesitation for so long by ruling parties across the board (including the BJP government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee) in deboarding an Article described in the Constitution as “temporary” is beyond understanding and cannot be explained except as political calculation routinely taking precedence over the national interest. It only kept fueled the legal fiction that J&K was separate from India and, hence the impression that was abroad, that it was negotiable.
This is the first substantive good and correct step relating to national security that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken in an otherwise bleak 5-year record in office of seemingly endless series of misconceptions of national security, and equally serious misreadings of the regional and international reality, resulting in patently wrong foreign and military policies and diplomatic missteps that have progressively weakened India and its geostrategics. But re: 370 Modi has done the right thing, and has to be lauded for it.
(All the gassy rhetoric in Rajya Sabha about J&K, as a consequence of the tabling of the’Reorganization Bill’, soon turning into another Palestine, or a South Sudan, or an East Timor, or whatever…is nothing more than fear-vaping by the opposition who, odds-on bet, know nothing about any of these places mentioned, leave alone their histories, whence their facile forebodings.)
There were a lot of historical tid-bits revealed by some of the speakers in Parliament, especially the RSS ideologue and BJP nominated MP Rakesh Sinha, most importantly that Lal Bahadur Shastri contemplated trashing 370 in 1964 not long after Jawaharlal Nehru’s death in May that year. But one must be aware of the political thinking behind Nehru’s decision to stop the Indian Army’s push to Muzzafarabad and thereafter to fully recover what is now PoK, which was followed by his most unfortunate decision to take the issue to the UN. But as Subramaniam Swany rightly pointed out in the debate as regards the latter move, Nehru did so in 1949 without his Cabinet’s approval, leaving the door open for the Modi government legitimately to withdraw the issue from the UN and reversing 70 years of international interference and frustration for India!
But Nehru had, at that time, made a defensible political decision. The situation was this: With the India Army poised to retake PoK, Sheikh Abdullah told Nehru that were he to recover PoK, the Mirpuri-dominated population of that region aligning with the competitor Muslim Conference party would, in an election, vote against siding with India and create trouble, but that he, a “democrat” would ensure that his National Conference party would vote to stay with India. It convinced Nehru to terminate the military recovery of PoK and even to take the matter to the UN where, per Mountbatten’s advice, the Security Council would quickly decide in India’s favour; in thee event, killing two birds with a single stone. Nehru the gullible bought into this perfidious design of Britain. (Much of this is supported by archival material, see Prem Shankar Jha’s book — ‘Kashmir 1947’.)
The scrubbing of 370 has, among its other virtues, a realpolitik reason. By making Ladakh a Union Territory, Delhi can cultivate the shias of the Kargil region in order to influence the Hazara shias and the still majority shia population of Gilgit and Baltistan (G&B) in PoK — areas hosting Pakistan Army’s Forces Command Northern Areas. This will create a sort of shia equipoise in the larger erstwhile Kashmir territory vis a vis the dominant sunnis among the Punjab mussalmans of Mirpur (Mirpuris) and the Srinagar Valley, and making life that much more politically difficult for Pakistan in G&B.
But Modi will now face a Trump suddenly beholden to an Imran Khan who promised to ease the retreat of the US-led International Security Assistance Force from Afghanistan by persuading the Taliban to hold off as the US military cuts and runs. Part of the Trump-Imran deal was renewal of American pressure on Delhi to allow US or other international mediation, as Islamabad has publicly announced, to preempt which Modi hurried through with throwing out Art 370 and related impedimenta.
How will Modi hold up under Washington’s full court press — because Trump will have to show his hand before Imran (read GHQ, Rawalpindi) delivers on the last mile, as it were? Besides brushing off pressure and threats of dilution of US commitments on the antique F-16-level technology etc that Modi seems enamoured by, the Indian PM will have to show that India means business. This last will have to be evidenced in the manipulation of the Indian hand in Afghan Taliban’s affairs. A section of the Afghan Taliban has been successfully courted and cultivated by Indian intel (just as it has done its sister outfit — the Tehreeq-e-Taliban Pakistan). These contacts will need to be activated to torpedo the US-Pak plan, to prove India cannot be ignored. But this will have to be done in tandem with making peace with Tehran, whom the Modi dispensation has seriously alienated, and to recommit to Chabahar and the connectivity projects linking up with Afghanistan, Central Asia and Russia.
This is obviously a tall order for Modi who has swung Indian foreign policy so far over to the American side, that it has eroding creds with Moscow. Meanwhile, Xi of China sits on the sideline like the wily giant panda ready to put its weight behind the winning move. Absence of geostrategic foresight is why and how India has thus further empowered an already strong China. This is what all my warnings over the years were about. Now, Modi is in a double squeeze and Trump will only hope he will cry “Uncle (Sam)”!
The dust has not quite settled on the little matter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi requesting Donald Trump, per Trump, to mediate on the Kashmir dispute. Because, in the face of foreign minister K Jaishankar’s “categorical denial” in Parliament regarding any such request, the US President’s Special Assistant Larry Kudlow asserted before TV cameras that “the President does not make up things”. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iriKCIeiF0U ]
So, no one’s any nearer to knowing what actually transpired in Osaka and what it is that Modi said to the US President, 20 days later, to prompt Trump’s offering himself to Imran and the world as potential arbitrator. And, oh, yes, all the usual retired diplomats — foreign secretaries and the like, and the entire lot of lesser commentators, who until now vociferously backed Modi’s policy of cultivating America as a central pillar of Indian foreign policy, suddenly discovered the US cannot be trusted!
Imran returned home a hero having consolidated Pakistan’s status — surprise! surprise! — as the indispensable front line state the US desperately needs to zero out its military presence in Afghanistan at any and all cost, along with a goodies bag for the Pakistan armed services, which indubitably is the first tranche of upfront payoffs — a $125 million package to retrofit 12 PAF F-16Cs and six two-seater trainer version F-16Ds with the technologically updated Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-229 jet engine with 79 kiloNewton dry thrust and 129.7 kN with afterburner. Most likely, senior PAF officers accompanying the COAS General Qamar Bajwa, who was part of Imran’s delegation, wangled the EEP (Engine Enhancement Program) version.
The P&W website reveals the EEP as incorporating advances in such areas as turbine materials, cooling management techniques, compressor aerodynamics, and electronic controls, from the F-22 Raptor’s turbofan engine and from the propulsion system in the latest American combat aircraft F-35 jet power plant, thereby increasing the “Depot maintenance interval” of the warplane from 4,300 to 6,000 hours or, to put it differently, from 7 to 10 years, while easing upkeep procedures and reducing the lifetime costs by almost a third. In other words, PAF is well on its way to at once refurbishing its entire F-16 fleet, lengthening its life, and making it more affordable.
Again by design and, perhaps, to suppress any hard reaction from Delhi, the US insisted on placing 60 Lockheed representatives in Pakistan (whether on PAF air bases, is not clear) constituting a Technical Security Team (TST) to monitor the end-use of these revamped F-16s. Except, a Pentagon official told Indian news agency, PTI, that the Americans would be there to also, as he put it, protect the engine technology, presumably from being onpassed to China — one of the usual channels Beijing has used over the years to access US technologies. Pakistan, for instance, shipped an F-16 for Chinese engineers to study and reverse engineer its many technologies when it was first inducted into PAF in 1982 and, likewise, moved the high-performance, silenced, rotor system in the US helicopter that crashed during the 2011 American Operation Neptune Spear to take out Osama bin Laden, to China for a decent amount of time before returning the damaged ‘copter to America.
The fact is even with Americans exercising physical oversight of the revamped F-16s, there’s no way they can prevent these aircraft from being flown to satellite air fields ostensibly on routine exercise either for the Chinese aviation designers and engineers to closely inspect them there, or to embark them on offensive sorties (assuming the TST is really there to deter such uses, which is doubtful).
Curiously, at the same time as the F-16 deal was announced in Washington a couple of days after Imran’s departure, the US Defence Security Cooperation Agency issued a statement saying that India had asked to buy spare parts and test equipment for IAF’s C-17 transport planes, and that it “is seeking personnel training, among other things, “for an estimated cost of $670 million.” India, it added, “needs this follow-on support to maintain its operational readiness and ability to provide Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HA/DR) assistance in the region…[and] will have no difficulty absorbing this support into its armed forces.” Both the press releases announcing the F-16 upgrade and the the Indian buy of C-17 support, iterated that these sales “will not alter the basic military balance in the region.”
And, outside of hightailing it out of Afghanistan, that’s the entire US strategic game plan and objective isn’t it — to maintain by whatever means and at all cost “the basic military balance” in the subcontinent? It is also apparently China’s. Because, such military balance encourages Islamabad to continue engaging in cross-border terrorism, keeps India distracted with the Pakistan bogey and unprepared and incapable of diverting the limited resources to tackle the more substantive China threat, even as Washington and Beijing are free to carry on with their big power struggle to gain ascendancy in the Indo-Pacific while exploiting, in separate and similar ways, the squabbling India and Pakistan for their own purposes.
The pity is the Modi government (and the section of the Pak-phobic Indian media) are so blinded by their hate as to miss seeing the larger Sino-US strategic scheme in play to keep India down.
Below is US President Donald J Trump’s controversial quote in extenso pertaining to his offer of personal mediation to resolve the Kashmir dispute. This was in his exchange with the Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan presently in Washington ostensibly to “reset” Pakistan-US relations:
“I was with Prime Minister Modi two weeks ago [at the G-20 Summit in Tokyo] and we talked about this subject (Kashmir). And he actually said, ‘would you like to be a mediator or arbitrator?’ I said, ‘where?’ (Modi said) ‘Kashmir’ Because this has been going on for many, many years. I am surprised that how long. It has been going on (for long).”
“I think they (Indians) would like to see it resolved. I think you would like to see it resolved. And if I can help, I would love to be a mediator. It should be….we have two incredible countries that are very, very smart with very smart leadership, (and they) can’t solve a problem like that. But if you would want me to mediate or arbitrate, I would be willing to do that. So all those issues should be resolved. So, he (Mr. Modi) has to ask me the same thing. So maybe we’ll speak to him. Or I’ll speak to him and we’ll see if we can do something.”
Obviously and, as he is known routinely to do, Trump invented the lie on the spur of the moment to burnish his image as potential peacemaker — that Modi asked him in their Tokyo meeting if he would be “mediator or arbitrator” on the Kashmir dispute. But just as he time and again trips over his own lies, he did so again in his very next bunch of statements, when he stated that for him to mediate Modi would have “to ask” him to do that. Trump apparently warmed up to that idea of mediation after Imran iterated the old Islamabad line of the Kashmir problem needing a US intervention to be resolved, whence the American leader’s prospective lunge for that peace-maker role with his declaration with the royal “we”: “We’ll speak to him [Modi]” before immediately moderating it to “I’ll speak to him [Modi] and we’ll see if we can do something.”
Now, whatever else Prime Minister Narendra Modi may be he is not politically daft and, considering how much of a live-grenade issue Kashmir is, simply couldn’t have said anything of the kind attributed to him by Trump. But was there a reference to Kashmir in his tete-a-tete with Trump that led the latter to concoct a story around? It would appear so.
Based on the fact of Delhi, over the past two decades and especially during Modi’s tenure, incessantly squawking to Washington about Pakistan’s nefarious hand in Kashmir affairs, one can reasonably surmise that the Indian PM brought up Kashmir in their talk by way of, perhaps, a throwaway complaint and may have added for good measure that were Pakistan to butt out, all related problems would be promptly resolved. So, when Imran brought up Kashmir, Trump probably impulsively responded the way he did, in part because while Modi’s grasp of the English language is adequate, it is not nuanced and so any passing reference to peace in that region may have been interpreted by Trump — who in any case hears what he wants to hear rather than respond to something that was actually said — as some sort of invitation to him to arbitrate. The US President’s ability to spot Kashmir on the map of the world may be suspect but he was free with his views about what prevails there. With Imran looking on, scarcely believing what he was hearing, Trump described the Kashmir situation “as bombs everywhere, bombs all over the place… it’s a terrible situation”! ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jff2Cp7vLjg ) How does that sit with the Indian government and with Modi who has staked so much of his foreign policy on making India revolve around US interests?
Sure, the US State Department sought to douse any political fire in India that Trump’s statements may have started by quickly endorsing the Indian government’s line of any resolution of the Kashmir dispute necessarily being through means of bilateral negotiations. But Trump’s ham-handed attempt only highlights the ever-present danger of Washington somehow insinuating itself into the dispute resolution process, which the Indian government willingly disbelieves until a televised event such as this happens.
I have for a long time now maintained that Modi is doing just about every thing wrong with his policy of unilateral friendship and strategic concessions vis a vis the United States. Much of this is due to his unrequited enthusiasm, even love, for America and things American that blinds him to the serious cost of his approach — a steady erosion of the national interest. But Trump extemporaneously also made clear his dichotomous view of the world when, in referring to Afghanistan, he said that the US would not any more play “the policeman” of the world — meaning that he was “extricating” US forces from that country, but added that if he wanted to he could end the Afghanistan war in no time at all by killing “10 million” people, by using weapons of mass destruction, such as thermobaric bombs (fuel air explosives). In other words, he set up the US as either playing the global policeman or using WMD! And this is the American President, also with his curious views on Kashmir, that Modi is banking on to assist him in furthering India’s interests?
There’s lots Modi can do to right his policy of tilt. He can begin by resisting the temptation to show of his English language skills and speak to world leaders, and particularly Trump, only in Hindi (even better, in Gujarati) in which he’s more fluent. It will also put the foreign leaders off their game — a strategy routinely used by the Chinese nomenklatura and perfected by Maozedong’s premier, Zhouenlai. It is a diplomatic method studiously followed by North Korea and other countries that have successfully dealt with the US and the West generally.
Native languages as diplomatic tool is something MEA has never used, leave alone exploited, to the country’s advantage. Because in head-to-head exchanges between leaders, the one using other than English is always at an advantage. For instance, were Modi to carry on diplomatic business only in Hindi or Gujarati — albeit inconveniencing foreign minister K. Jaishankar with only street-level acquaintance with Hindi and none at all of Gujarati — foreign interpreters/note-takers helping out their leaders will be hard put to get it right. So when aide memoirs/diplomatic notes are shared the Indian note will naturally have precedence. This is precisely the tactic Chinese interlocuters have traditionally used to baffle foreigners, and to obtain the diplomatic edge. President Vladimir Putin too speaks only in Russian in his formal exchanges even though he has a better handle on the English language than Modi.
It is by now a historic habit for India to miss opportunities, avoid contestation and, when absolutely pushed, lose from a winning position, in the main, because we can’t seem to keep our heads or our wits about us. This is as true for cricket as international affairs. At Old Trafford the supposedly famed top batting order collapsed with, on paper, a doable run chase to realize. In the external realm the Indian government for over two decades now, and helmed in the last five years by Narendra Modi, has likewise shown negligible strategic sense and intent, not appreciated the country’s many strengths nor leveraged them, and finds itself in reality collared by both Washington and Beijing, confused only about which side to appease at any given time and with what (making capital buys here, compromising on trade there, or offering some other concession.
Those who claim and believe that all this tilting, bowing, scraping and fawning is for show and that the alleged masters of the strategic game, namely, the firm of Modi, Jaishankar & Doval, is manipulating all comers to India’s advantage ought to be alerted to the fact that this Indian trio has fared worse on the realpolitik scale than the two predecessor regimes in the new Century, and have proved themselves amateurs going up against US and China — the most prominent and ruthless practitioners of hard realpolitik with a long record of success. Indeed, there’s not a single instance of an Indian foreign policy feint, initiative, measure or move of Modi’s in the last half decade and counting that surprised, offended, or pushed Washington and/or Beijing on the defensive– a simple metric to judge whether Delhi is doing something right by upsetting everybody equally. In fact, far from racking up any noticeable positives or substantive gains for the country, the Modi regime’s attitude, performance, and policies have smacked of gullibility laced with unwarranted complacency that it is doing great, and that persisting with whatever line it has been following so far is best.
Look at the recent record. Delhi countenanced a year of US tariffs on Indian steel and aluminum before responding weakly in kind, and then softened the blow by cleaving in half the perfectly legal imposts under WTO provisions on Harley-Davidson motorcycles coming into India only because every time Trump opens his mouth he raises this issue, making it some sort of benchmark for bilateral trade. Elsewhere, the US International Commission on Religious Freedom socks it to India, the terrorism-funding Sikhs for Justice Forum is permitted to indulge in activities in the US to reignite the Khalistan cause in Indian Punjab, India is frozen out of the Afghanistan peace talks at Pakistan’s behest, and the visiting US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warns India, as Kipling had the tommies tell Ganga Din, to “put some juldee” in de-friending Iran and severing its arms supply links to Russia lest the boom of economic sanctions under the 2006 Iran Sanctions Act (ISA) and the 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) respectively, be lowered. He made it clear that the waiver of sanctions was temporary, meant to afford time to Delhi to zero out imports of oil from Iran, and of armaments from Russia. And on Delhi’s push-for issue — the H1B visa, Trump has decisively shut this channel down!
But knowing how much Indian leaders crave a shabash from Westerners, Pompeo interspersed his fingerwagging with praise for the Modi-Jaishankar duo for turning off the Iranian oil spigot in India and, flushed with the US success in achieving this outcome, which is completely unfair to India and antithetical to its larger geostrategic interests of accessing Russia-Europe, Afghanistan and Central Asia to balance the spreading Chinese influence via Chabahar port, he urged Delhi to sign on to an equally inequitable “fair trade” as the US sees it, which will do in the Indian economy. It entails, among other things, an eased up flow of US agricultural commodities into India at the expense of the Indian farmer, allow US companies generating consumer data to retain it in servers abroad, stricter intellectual property rights enforcement to cripple, say, the Indian pharmaceutical companies specializing in reverse-engineering cheaper formulations of expensive drugs marketed by Western pharma majors which has proved a boon for affordable healthcare the world over, including America, blocking Huawei and China out of the Indian market for 5G systems for the sake of “security stability”, without any Indian official refering to just about every bit of telecom and computer hardware and software purchased from the US and the West being similarly packed with as many, if not more, electronic bugs, back doors and Trojan Horses.
However, the safest, most secure, option of relying fully and comprehensively on locally designed and produced 5G systems which Indian companies with advanced technological capabilities (such as Sankhya Labs) can easily design and develop in- country, but which capability remains unused because, ironically, the BJP government headed by Modi that bills itself as “nationalist” does not trust anything Indian! Just as the Indian armed services want to have nothing to do with home-designed goods even though the 5th generation Tejas light combat aircraft out-performed the Rafale for mountain ops (in so basic a thing as a cold start at the Leh air base, for instance), and the Arjun main battle tank beat the Russian T-90 hollow in all the rigorous test trials conducted in different terrains and altitudes. What more do India-produced weapons systems have to do to prove their mettle? Oh, yes, they cannot generate commissions for middlemen and funds for the party in power!
It is in this socio-cultural context, that Delhi entertains a constant stream of, when it is not senior American officials from the Pentagon and US Commerce Department, then American and Western defence industry representatives and arms salesmen, all of them stressing the virtues of India switching from the hardy Russian military equipment to the delicate American and European hardware that require kid treatment to operate at even reduced efficiency levels. To wit, French Mirage 2000 and Rafale combat aircraft and their requirement of airconditioned hangars. The US with much less need of Indian custom but able to muster lot more pressure on the Modi government is determined to sell the 1960s vintage F-16 hung out with bells and whistles to impress a Third Wold military and a new and alarmingly bulbous midriff that makes nonsense of its stealth claims. Even if the IAF resists, will Jaishankar, who came straight to the foreign minister’s chair from canvassing for this aircraft as an employee of Tata Corp keen to manufacture this plane under license, do other than counsel Modi to green-signal this project? And, in the event, will the current CAS, BS Dhanoa, or his successor (Nambiar, AOC-in-C, Western Air Command or some one else) have it in him to offer his resignation to stall such procurement?
It is another matter, that this ‘Make in India’ F-16 project mocks the very purpose of the PM’s ídea to make India self-reliant in arms with what — a fourth generation minus fighting platform long past its sell-by date? But this is precisely the arms imports path charted by Nirmala Sitharaman, who as Finance Minister has continued from where she left off as defence minister, by making provisions in the 2019-2020 budget for the military services to obtain foreign armaments at will on the specious basis that the armed forces need quality weapons. Implicit in this view is the belief that anything designed, developed and produced in India is second rate. She never applied her mind, and neither has the PM or anyone else in the Modi government, to setting up the private sector as a competing supplier of arms by compelling DRDO to share the source codes for the Tejas warplane and the Arjun tank, for a start, with firms like L&T, Bharat Forge, and Mahindra Aerospace, et al with the will and the wherewithal to produce world-class military goods for the Indian services and for export from the get-go in order to provide the scale and to attract massive investments and ensure quality products. That’s the surefire way, pradhan mantriji, to set up employment and economic value multipliers, and to rejuvenate the slovenly defence public sector units and ordnance factories. Stories of just how bad DPSU products are, are legion. Just one example: Newly assembled Jaguars coming out of HAL sport leaking fuel lines!
But India’s reliance on imported guns, etc has a long history. As pointed out in my book ‘Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and India’s Global Ambition’, Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in 1498, and some of his gunsmiths jumped ship and set up a foundry to sell guns to the Zamorin — they sold 400 of guns within a year but no indigenous industry ever developed in Calicut or anywhere else. But the same Portugese reached Canton in 1521, started the same arms trade, but within a period of 2 year the Chinese began designing and forging guns. A similar pattern emerged in Japan in 1654 where the Portugese arrived and sold guns and within 20 years Japanese guns exceeded European guns in quality. It also reveals why India remains poor and technologically backward and China and Japan are superior economies and powers.
Then again, when forced to rely on oneself India has produced the goods in the strategic sphere, ranging from nuclear weapons, accurate long range missile and even the Arihant-class “boomer” — a longrange ballistic and cruise missile firing nuclear powered submarine, for God’s sake, and the Indian Navy still thinks it needs to go in for yet another conventional submarine from abroad that will decant even more of the national wealth into foreign pockets and defence industries with its Project 75I, and the IAF still hungers for an augmented Rafale fleet and even antique American aircraft when from the Tejas template can be derived all manner of differently missioned combat aircraft.
All that is required is for Modi, Rajnath Singh and Sitharaman to sit down, think clearly, generate some slight foresight to see that imports will only keep India an arms and technological dependency, and that now’s the time for them to make the hard decision of banning all arms imports, getting the private sector into the defence business, and changing the parameters of the game so long skewed against the national interest. Because there’s nothing well-heeled foreign countries are more grateful for to the shortsighted Indian government and military than that they keep buying weapons systems, telecom equipment, etc from them even though India is eminently capable of making them all at home.
[Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on the way to presenting her first budget]
There has been only a notional increase in Finance Minister Sitharaman’s defence allocation. It may not be sufficient to deal with even the rate of real inflation, what to speak of price tags on military hardware that gallop at almost a geometric pace.
There’s one aspect of the general budget with impact on defence acquisitions that Sitharaman did not clarify — whether the amendment of the slabs in the existing Goods & Services Tax (GST) structure will be part of her effort to simplify and streamline it, which is what she promised in her budget speech, because of the glaring anomalies in the GST slabs that Arun Jaitley created. The sort of absurdities that resulted were flagged in my recent book ‘Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and India’s Global Ambition’ (Pages 317-318). But here’s reiterating some of them.
The current scheme boasts of numerous and confusing rate-slabs often not aligned with the larger objectives. It was early recognized as being flawed, as they inflated the procurement costs all round. Putting all production machinery in the 28% GST bracket has meant, for instance, that if machinery is bought related to intermediate and capital goods for, say, Rs 100, with GST of 28%, Rs. 128 is lost right away by the buyer. With 3 years as payback period – the average age of a modern machine, where are the funds to invest even under the ‘Make in India’ rubric?
Similarly, if building infrastructure – roads, highways, etc. is a priority for the Modi government, shouldn’t excavators, road rollers, and so on have been in the 5% GST category? Likewise, as regards the Swacch Bharat Abhiyan, sanitaryware attracts 18% GST! Also consider the Jan Awas Yojna (for low cost public housing) – the doors, window frames, etc. that go into a house costing Rs. 2.5 lakhs under this Yojna has a GST component of 18%. In the event, won’t fewer houses be built for the same fund allocation?
In any case, the GST slabs of 5%, 12%, 18% and 28% are arbitrary. On what basis did Jaitley decide 5% for this item, 8% for that and 18% GST slab for ‘services’.
Now ponder the GST effect specifically on defence production costs. Warships and aircraft are in the 5% slab. But the propulsion system in warships is pegged at 28%, army’s tanks are pegged at 28%, and 3-tonners – the trucks most commonly used to move troops, etc. was originally in the 28% category. Moreover, everything connected with the railways attracts 5% GST, anything connected with space is 0%.
Without the 28% GST more goods would be produced in the country, more people would be employed, the country’s wealth would grow faster and India will progress faster.
If 100 trucks get made now, without GST 128 trucks would have been manufactured, with more impetus provided for steel production, rubber production for tyres, and so on. Worse still is the working capital requirement. The GST rules mandate that an input tax credit can be claimed only when the next producer up the chain pays up. An aircraft is produced in 3 years, so the manufacturer of components, say, has to wait for three years to get paid.
Hopefully, Sitharaman will get round — sooner the better — to ironing out such GST kinks. The armed services will then be able to purchase more of what they want for the allotted quantum of funds. But, significantly, this kind of a wonky GST system ends up making arms imports cheaper because the global supply chains tied to major foreign armaments makers are not subjected to Indian GST.
[Kim Jong-un and Trump at Punmunjom on the DMZ, Korea]
“I never expected to meet you at this place,” a smiling North Korean supremo Kim Jong-un said to the US President, after he had induced the latter with the hinted promise of a quick deal to cross the line on the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) and step into North Korea. “Big moment,” Mr Trump replied, a little lamely, “tremendous progress.”
There’s tremendous progress alright but mostly by Kim to compel Trump to back down, two steps at a time, from the forward position staked by his NSA, John Bolton, the main architect of a policy to denuclearize North Korea by force or through talks. Except, Washington discovered that talk of force merely prompted Kim to up the ante and promise nuclear reprisals if the US acted tough. It was a response that had sufficient credibility for Trump to sue for peace on North Korean terms. This much is evident from reports after the Trump-Kim meeting at Punmunjom in the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) yesterday (June 30) that referred to the US being reconciled to letting Pyongyang keep its existing nuclear arsenal if the North Korean dictator agreed, in principle, to have his main nuclear complex and associated facilities periodically inspected by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEA).
Kim agreed to these terms after verifying the hydrogen bomb designs gifted by China through repeated testing of thermonuclear weapons. The fifth and sixth tests were of hydrogen bombs, with the last such underground explosion on 3rd September 2017 clocking in at as much as 270-370 kiloton yield — a genuine thermonuclear blast. So, before Kim agreed to safeguards on anything, he had ensured that his thermonuclear weapons inventory was physically proven and in fine fettle.
Contrast this with India’s negotiating strategy executed by the then MEA Joint Secretary S. Jaishankar, and now foreign minister, that secured for India an outcome that guarantees the country will remain a pretend thermonuclear power. This because the pre-conditions built into the 2008 civil nuclear cooperation deal are such they are actually an economic deterrent against Delhi resuming testing, thus reducing that option to a theoretical one which, Washington is certain, will never be exercised.
A major economic deterrent, for instance, is the supply of low enriched uranium fuel for the imported American Westinghouse AP 1000 reactors and the French Areva 1000 reactors costing tens of billions of dollars being instantly terminated if India tests again, resulting in electricity going off the grid and these reactors slowly grinding to a halt and becoming dead investments. One can see just how fearful any Indian government would be of violating the no-testing terms. This then is the strategic corner Jaishankar, with supposedly finely honed negotiating skills, pushed India into because he ignored the history of big powers intent on imposing their will being repeatedly frustrated by states, such as North Korea and to an extent even Pakistan, with the overarching will to forcefully advance their national interest and prepared to be seriously disruptive if they don’t get their way. With PMs and the governments since 2004 led successively by Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi being content with Western flattery and with having their egos skillfully massaged, what is consolidated is India’s status as a large but hollow power that can be any super power’s handmaiden.
If North Korea proceeds down the road Kim has picked for his country, it is near definite that it will, by itself, have de-fanged the United States and so conspicuously that America’s residual will to assert itself in Asia for any reason will be zeroed out. Will India, with its billowing reputation for following the US, pack the same political punch as an otherwise lowly North Korea? No, and for the good reason that Pyongyang has the most destructive thermonuclear weapons and the ultimate adjudicator of interstate relations, at hand, even as India will be left brandishing its piddling fission bombs that scare nobody.
[Abe with a “there he goes again”-look , a bemused Trump, and an earnest Modi, perhaps, repeating something the other two have heard many times before! — at the G-20 summit in Tokyo]
The most important meeting at the G-20 summit in Tokyo from India’s national interest point of view was the one Prime Minister Narendra Modi had with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. It was left to Xi to utter the substantive — that China, Russia and India take “global responsibility” for the downward-spiraling international economic situation and protect it against the vagaries of US President Donald Trump’s whimsical turns and about-turns, in the main pitching for new financial instruments and channels to prevent the trade and commerce of these three countries being held hostage by US policy of economic sanctions as first resort. While Delhi has apparently firmed up a Euro channel for hard currency payments to Russia for import of armaments, it does not want to be too vocal about thus bypassing US sanctions.
In response to Xi’s voicing the above meta-strategic economic concern, Modi, true to his growing “one-tune canary” reputation, tagged terrorism as “the biggest threat to humanity” and, by extension, put Pakistan in the dock, insisting that Moscow and Beijing join Delhi in convening an international conference to fight terrorism. It is such small successes the Modi regime seems to excel in. So, yes, Russia and China may well support such an Indian initiative because it means expending very little political capital while notching up IOUs with Modi. The PM apparently feels buoyed by his success in selling this line to the US, with Pompeo in an interview to an Indian daily talking about Washington doing “a 180-degree turn with respect to Pakistan” and referring to America’s role in pressing Islamabad on the UN Financial Action Task Force provisions. This sort of Delhi-pleasing gestures, as I have long maintained, mean little because the US is unlikely to let go of Pakistan or permit it to sink in a terrorism morass, certainly not until Pakistan remains the indispensable front line state for war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and now the means of frustrating China’s plans for securing the Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea — the 21st Century version of the 19th Century Great Game in which Britain did all it could to stop Imperial Russia moving south across the Hindukush to acquire a warm seawater port, except now China replaces Russia and a whole bunch of Asian states, including India, and the US are in the place of Britain.
Meanwhile, the meeting of Modi, Japanese premier Shinzo Abe and Trump produced another variety of hot air — “sharing views” about joint efforts in the security, connectivity and infrastructure fields to counter the lure of China’s Belt & Road Initiative in Southeast Asia and offshore states in that region and in the Indian Ocean region generally. So even as China builds and rapidly consolidates its presence in the extended region, this threesome of democracies just talks, and talks some more!
Back home in the wake of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s visit, foreign minister Jaishankar made public the fact that he stood his ground on the purchase of the Russian S-400 Air Defence system on the basis of “national interest”. This last came as great relief considering every right thinking person in Delhi is on tenterhooks every time he sits down to negotiate anything with the Americans — his tell-tale record of giveaways to Washington being too obvious to ignore. But then one recalls the Modi government’s announcement a fortnight before Pompeo’s trip of a buy of 10 additional P-8I armed maritime reconnaissance aircraft worth $3 billion to augment an existing fleet of 12 such aircraft already in Indian Navy service, and the unavoidable conclusion is that this purchase was a pre-concession made to the US to prevent Pompeo raising a stink over the S-400 and Iran.
So, how is the national interest served when the Modi-Jaishankar duo merely bought peace in the short term and forked out $3 billion for the privilege?
With both the prime minister and his new external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, tilting towards the United States, India’s status and stature in the world is all set to decline.
[Minister for external affairs S. Jaishankar, national security adviser Ajit Doval and Prime Minister Narendra Modi]
India has spent trillions of rupees since 1947 on education, social welfare programmes and defence. But, 70-odd years later, the country has the largest population in the world of ill-educated, unskilled, unemployable youth, certain health and socio-economic indices that are worse than those of some of the world’s poorest states, and a showy but short-legged and second-rate military dependent on imported armaments.
Yet look at India in macro terms using the somewhat dubious ‘purchasing power parity’ concept and it gets rated as a trillion-dollar economy. What explains this anomaly?
Tufts University political scientist Michael Beckley’s pioneering theory of international relations suggests that gross measures – such as population, GDP, defence budgets, size of armed forces, etc. – are less accurate in assessing the power of nations than “net” factors, such as how effectively national resources are converted into measurable and decisive political, economic and military capability and diplomatic leverage and clout.
In other words, it’s the outcomes that matter. By this standard, the more advanced countries of the West seem to be more efficient converters of their human and material resources into usable policy assets relative to India and other middling powers, or even China, which in this respect falls somewhere in between these two sets of states.
So analysing the outcomes of Narendra Modi’s foreign policy – which is a continuation of the Indian government’s approach and policy from the days of P.V. Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh – and of S. Jaishankar’s central role in crafting several crucial agreements in service of this policy, may be a good way of judging its success.
The distinctive feature of India’s external relations in the new century is the pronounced tilt towards the United States. Narasimha Rao worked to obtain a rapprochement in the 1990s, and Vajpayee agreed on the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP). This culminated in 2008 with the civil nuclear cooperation deal with the US and, during Modi’s first term, in India signing two of the three “foundational accords” proposed by Washington – the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) and the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA). The third, Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA) for sharing geo-spatial information, is awaiting signature.
Jaishankar helped negotiate the nuclear deal and thereafter in his various posts facilitated and relentlessly pushed the foundational accords through the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). Briefly, what are these various agreements about and what do they say about Modi’s and Jaishankar’s thinking?
Senior functionaries in the Manmohan Singh government, it may be recalled, ballyhooed the civil nuclear cooperation deal with the US as all gain and no pain. They declared that the deal had left India’s nuclear deterrent intact, protected its weapon-grade plutonium producing capacity and preserved the option to resume testing in the future, and that imports of the 1000 MW light water reactors from abroad would obtain for the country “20,000 MW by 2020”. Remember this endlessly repeated mantra of Manmohan Singh’s to justify the accord?
[Then US President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi on March 2, 2006.]
The US, on the other hand, made no bones about its intent at a minimum to “cap and freeze” India’s nuclear weapons technology at the fission weapons-level achieved with the 1998 Shakti series of tests, and to prevent it at any cost from advancing to the thermonuclear weapons threshold.
The US government, however, happily joined the Manmohan Singh government in touting the energy rationale, especially because Indian purchases of the AP 1000 Westinghouse light water reactors would also revive a moribund US nuclear industry. As to what was actually accomplished in the negotiations was made plain soon after the nuclear deal was sealed by the chief US negotiator, under secretary of state for political affairs Nicholas Burns.
“To strengthen the nonproliferation system for the future, it just [made] every bit of sense to bring India into it and to do that in such a way that doesn’t strengthen its military arsenal,” explained Nicholas Burns in a 2007 interview to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “It allows [India] to put 14 of [its] 22 power reactors under safeguards and all future breeder reactors [a reactor that produces energy and weapons grade plutonium]. And within 25 years, I think 90%-95% of the entire [Indian nuclear] establishment will be fully safeguarded. So the choice [was]: Should we isolate India for the next 35 years, or bring it in partially now and nearly totally in the future? I think that [was] an easy choice for us to make strategically.”
Because of the deal, not only is India’s nuclear arsenal frozen at the elementary fission weapon stage – no amount of computer simulation and component testing can rectify the design flaws in the failed thermonuclear weapon design tested in 1998, leave alone produce a credible hydrogen bomb or fusion weapon the Indian armed forces can have confidence in without additional nuclear testing. Except testing is prohibited on the pain of the US imposing sanctions and terminating the deal. Also voided is India’s capacity for surge production of fissile material with most of the heavy water-moderated natural uranium-fuelled CANDU reactors shoved into the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards net.
With the “islanding”, or separation of Indian weapons directorate, from the rest of the work in Trombay, moreover, the earlier cross-pollinating milieu of scientists and engineers from any field getting involved in solving difficult weapons-related problems that often resulted in innovative solutions, is lost and, with the no-testing regime in place, the best and the brightest have gravitated away from weapons work.
To add insult to injury, even the power reactors India is in the process of buying from the US and France are a risk on two counts. Of the 12 low-enriched uranium fuelled light water reactors India is seeking to purchase, six each from the US and France, the American Westinghouse 1000 reactor has not been cleared by the US regulatory authority for safety reasons.
In addition, the smooth functioning of these imported reactors is ensured only so long as India refrains from conducting nuclear tests. Should India resume underground tests, the supply of foreign fuel will be instantly and permanently terminated, the electricity sourced from these power plants will peter off, and the industries dependent on them will progressively close down, with untold effects on the economy. Further, the tens of billions of dollars expended in acquiring these reactors will become dead investment.
This is the economic deterrent against India resuming tests. And, by way of closing all weapon options, the deal decrees that the spent fuel from the foreign reactors can only be reprocessed in a specially constructed, IAEA-safeguarded, reprocessing unit put up at this country’s cost.
All this is Jaishankar’s handiwork. Why the nuclear deal is hailed as a great diplomatic victory for India and Jaishankar as a diplomat par excellence is a mystery, considering he gave away the store. The first responsibility of an official negotiator is not to undermine the nation’s sovereignty or cede even the smallest ground in this respect, and to protect and further the national interest to the maximum, and here Jaishankar defaulted.
The normal thing to do if something minor is conceded is to get disproportionate benefits in return. It is the sort of bargain Chinese negotiators routinely manage when dealing with the US. But what did India get in return?
This giveaway mentality is even more conspicuous in the so-called ”foundational” accords – LEMOA, COMCASA and BECA – that Manmohan Singh agreed to mull over and which Jaishankar pushed as ambassador in Beijing (2009-13) and, more centrally, as ambassador in Washington (2013-15), and finally as foreign secretary when the Modi dispensation formally signed LEMOA in August 2016 and COMCASA in September 2018.
Ponder this: LEMOA allows US military forces to stage military actions in the region out of Indian air, naval and army bases and, hence, willy-nilly embroil India in the US’s wars, and COMCASA will permit US intelligence agencies seamlessly to penetrate the most secret Indian communications networks, including the nuclear command and control links.
BECA under consideration, concerned with the digital mapping of the country, potentially provides the US militarily useful digitised Indian target sets – information that Washington can at any time pass on to friendly states (such as Pakistan, and even China) in crisis and conflict to serve its larger strategic-cum-geopolitical purpose of maintaining the balance in South Asia – the overarching US aim since the 1950s.
On the flip side, it will reinforce India’s dependence on the US for the digitised information related to targets in adjoining states. Again, in agreeing to become a virtual regional sidekick of the US, what did India get? Absolutely nothing, other than endless promises of advanced military and technology collaboration, for example, that so far have turned out to be so much hot air.
[Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former US Secretary of Defence James Mattis and ex-foreign minister Sushma Swaraj and former defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman]
These accords obligating India to render assistance are particularly egregious considering they are entirely redundant. The Indian government was always in a position to contingently assist the US armed forces on a case-by-case basis if Delhi considered it politic and the costs of doing so were deemed bearable. It would have amounted to tremendous diplomatic and political leverage. Thus, US Air Force planes from the far east theatre refuelled in Mumbai before flying on to Kuwait during the 1992 Operation Desert Storm. There was no LEMOA then.
Communications compatibility, likewise, could at any given time be established between the fighting platforms of the two countries without COMCASA by plugging into jerry-built technical interfaces, like the UNIX system, used in the earlier versions of the Malabar naval exercises.
Such arrangements would have protected the country’s freedom of action and political manoeuvre, the integrity of India’s communications system at-large and of the software driving it. Most significantly, the country’s standing as an independent player on the international scene would have been enhanced. But mindless compromises and one-sided agreements seriously hurtful of the national interest have characterised the Indian foreign policy in the new millennium and Jaishankar’s diplomatic oeuvre, as it were.
One of the reasons India invariably gets the short end of the stick in negotiations with the US as the nuclear deal, LEMOA and COMCASA reveal is because Indian diplomats, like civil servants, are generalists and have no legal training, nor are they backed up in a sustained manner by legal experts. It disadvantages them against their American counterparts who, if not lawyers themselves, are supported by teams of legal specialists who conduct negotiations with an eye on the minutiae of legal rights, responsibilities and obligations that nations undertake in treaties they sign.
No wonder, then, that the MEA teams, including the one Jaishankar led when shaping the nuclear deal, relied on draft agreements originally produced by the US State Department as working text for negotiation, a pattern repeated in reaching an understanding on LEMOA and COMCASA. Under the circumstances, no prize for guessing which nation’s interests got served.
Prime ministers may set the direction of foreign policy but it is the professional diplomats who finesse and flesh it out. It is another matter that the political goal of bettering relations with the US is sought to be reached by turning away from “strategic autonomy”. Rao’s motivation to rebalance India’s foreign policy by leaning less on Soviet Russia at a time when it was falling apart was sensible. Vajpayee’s NSSP was devised as a step function to improve relations with the US but also to develop leverages. But it was Manmohan Singh’s partiality, in his own words, for “short term [benefit] maximiser” policies, that really greased India’s slide into a subsidiary partner status that Jaishankar cemented via the nuclear deal and LEMOA and COMCASA.
Until a really strong-willed Indian leader with a powerful national vision, and someone not besotted by, or beholden to, the US in any way emerges on the scene, India’s quest for great power status will be futile.
But why is Modi so pro-US? Other than the aspirational reason to see India become as materially prosperous as the US, it is a socialisation issue. Influenced by his long apprenticeship with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and immersed in its socially conservative ethos and culture Modi, as detailed in my book Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and India’s Global Ambition, is much influenced by the RSS norms lauding hierarchy with seniors and superiors given deference.
In the external realm this gets translated by Modi into deferring to his “superiors” – Trump and Xi Jinping and, by extension, India, to the US and China; his actions, perhaps, even conforming to some kind of international varna order and a social given. (Observe, in this respect, his interactions with Trump and Xi when he is fawning and eager to please, and contrast it with his meetings with African and other Third World leaders when his back straightens up, his chest is out, and he is correct and officious.)
[Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Chinese President Xi Jinping]
In this setting, the need for the country to retain its historical role as a power balancer in the international system and using its potential tipping weight to lever substantial benefits to India from the US, China and Russia (which still has the military muscle to stop the other two cold) has been ignored. But Jaishankar’s policy formulation, like Modi’s, excels in small politics as one of his service-mates stated, of siding with one state to counter another for the nonce, with a series of such small balancing acts amounting to nothing, nor fitting into any grand strategy or larger game plan.
But some of these tactical moves are beginning to tax the patience and goodwill of India’s more steadfast friends, and there’s bound to be adverse reaction. India’s growing military closeness to the US and its seeming compliance with Washington’s demand that it cut its reliance on Russian arms has already stirred Russian President Vladimir Putin, called the “apostle of payback” by former US Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and ambassador to Moscow, into selling Kamov utility helicopters to Pakistan as a warning to Delhi. More lethal and technologically sophisticated military hardware at “friendship prices” could be headed Islamabad’s way in the future. Should Moscow get really punitive, India would face the nightmare of a Russia-China-Pakistan nexus.
Egged on by Jaishankar, the Modi government’s short-term, short-sighted, policies to placate the US and turn around and try and pacify Russia will succeed only if Moscow, used to giant meals, is content with breadcrumbs from the arms sales table. The sideline contracts, such as the one for Russian shipyards to build two Grigoryvich-class frigates for the Indian Navy, are unlikely to be enough recompense for Moscow, or make up for its loss of multi-billion dollar transactions for “big ticket” military items.
Should things get out of hand, Putin could tighten the tourniquet by ending India’s lease of high-value weapons platforms such as the Akula-II class nuclear powered attack submarines – the sort of fighting asset the US will not loan India for democratic love, liberal values, or money. By way of perspective, the US is unwilling even to transfer conventional submarine technology it no longer uses, what to speak of in-date and advanced military hardware.
None of this apparently concerns the Modi-Jaishankar duo. But the Indian armed forces have to worry about whether the government will be able to resist the US unloading the antiquated 1960s vintage F-16 fighter plane dressed up in the new F-21 combat aircraft guise, and the overpriced and unproven electro-magnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS) to equip aircraft carriers under construction in Kochi. EMALS is something the US Navy is leery of after testing it on the Gerald Ford-class nuclear-powered carriers and President Donald Trump has publicly rejected it. The Modi regime’s response to the US opposing its buy of the Russian S-400 air defence system reflects the confusion at the heart of its foreign policy.
India is being pressed by Washington to junk the S-400 contract signed with Moscow and to opt for the less effective, more costly and technologically inferior American counterpart – the medium range National Advanced Surface-to Air Missile System (NASAMS) or the fast reaction Patriot-3 missiles, instead. The offer of the NASAMS/Patriot-3 is on the one hand baited with the promise of the F-35 – the latest US combat aircraft that veteran American combat aircraft designers, such as Pierre Sprey, have damned as unable to fight or scoot out of trouble and, on the other hand, comes freighted with the threat of sanctions under the US Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.
Presumably advised by Jaishankar, Modi is attempting simultaneously to placate both Russia and the US by proposing to also buy the redundant NASAM system. It is a solution that will at once send the defence procurement budget soaring, complicate the country’s air defence problem, put the country in a double bind by exposing it to disruption by two rival and competing suppliers at odds with each other, and fail to address the basic US fear of the S-400 radar getting insights into US-sourced combat aircraft.
The first two years of the Trump administration ought to have sobered up Modi, familiarised the MEA about the US president’s “art” of cutting deals, and convinced the Indian government to lower its sights where the US is concerned. None of this has happened.
[Prime Minister Narendra Modi hugging US President Donald Trump in 2017.]
While his first visit in June 2017 to the Trump White House – replete with Modi hugging a somewhat nonplussed US president – passed off without incident, the first bad signs appeared soon thereafter. The US withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord and Trump lambasted China and India as the main culprits for carbon emissions and atmospheric pollution. He threatened to charge India as a “currency manipulator” which would trigger its own set of economic sanctions, and slammed India’s tariff barriers against US goods, especially Harley-Davidson motorcycles, and American agricultural commodities.
More recently and to show he means business, Trump removed India from the Generalised System of Preferences permitting duty-free entry for Indian exports valued at $5.7 billion-$6.3 billion out of the total exports of some $55 billion to the US. Of course, Trump left some slack for the restoration of GSP as a bargaining card to finagle a slew of high-value military sales.
Accommodating the US on agricultural commodities would imperil the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s stock with the farmer community, which is in distress across the country, so that’s out. But the purchase of the seriously decrepit F-16, and of the F-35 as follow-on aircraft – which was what Lockheed Martin, the producer of these aircraft, first offered the Indian government nearly 15 years ago, may mollify Trump.
But on the matter closest to Modi – the H1B visa – Trump has slammed the doorson the Indian prime minister’s face. The US intake of Indian techies has been reduced, the processing time has been lengthened, and life has been made difficult for visa holders by eliminating work visas for spouses and the “family reunion” provision, the last liberally used by a generation of Indian professionals to bring their extended family members into the US as lawful immigrants.
Trump has almost incentivised foreign countries to be wary of the US. He has had no compunction in treating the US’s treaty allies and partners in Europe and Asia with the utmost disdain, admonishing, hectoring and insulting them in turn, calling their leaders names, pressuring them to reimburse the US for the costs of protecting them, and otherwise ordering them to toe the US line on everything, or else.
In the economic and trade spheres, Trump has been just as harsh towards friendly states, closing down the Trans-Pacific Partnership that was meant economically to compete with and constrain China, and forced a “fairer” US-Canada-Mexico [trade] Agreement down the throats of the US’s northern and southern neighbours, and then within hours of signing it nullified it by tweeting a message critical of it.
Modi, a believer literally in hands-on diplomacy, innocently thought that the hugs and embraces he bestowed on Trump would soften the US stance but discovered these had zero effect. With historical allies and partners suffering Trump’s lash, what chance does Modi reckon India has of being treated decently or getting reasonable deals?
Of course, Trump is transactional but his negotiating method is really quite simple and transparent, which Modi and Jaishankar haven’t got the hang of yet. He uses the US’s market clout, technological edge and diplomatic reach like a bludgeon. Trump does not give a fig for the niceties of diplomacy, for the usual diplomatic give and take, of compromise, of IOUs that can be encashed later – the stock-in trade of international relations.
As ex-US deputy secretary of state William Burns recently observed in an interview to New Yorker magazine, “In the Trump era, what’s happened is the [White House is] cavalierly disregarding that there are trade-offs at all and not even recognising them.” In other words, as far as Trump is concerned, success lies in taking a mile without giving an inch. There’s also no exchange of favours or concessions because for Trump each transaction is a singular, discrete event in itself with no connection to anything that preceded it or might follow it. Meaning, a foreign country accommodating the US in one forum or deal does not automatically merit Washington’s consideration in another transaction.
[US President Donald Trump does not give a fig for the niceties of diplomacy.]
Acting as if unaware of this reality, Jaishankar apparently has a plan to tackle Trump and his administration – the primary reason why Modi brought him into the loop at an elevated position in the first place. Jaishankar’s supposedly bulging phonebook of contacts in the US government and in Washington at large is expected to do the trick.
It will be of no avail because the Washington Jaishankar knew a few years ago as ambassador is not the Washington he will be visiting as foreign minister. Most of his contacts are out of the picture – eased off their sinecures in a purge of the US State Department that saw 74 career ambassadors resigning in 2017 alone or being shoved out the door. Senior positions in the State Department have remained unfilled, and its budget has been slashed by 30%. William Burns has called it “diplomatic disarmament”.
The pattern of Trump’s involvement in policymaking is that, without doing any homework or reading policy briefs, he alights on some position or the other and expects that the country of his momentary interest will jump to it. Trump’s all take and no give negotiating strategy unfortunately dovetails with the Indian government’s method as evidenced in its record of being all give and no take. After all, where’s the problem for the US if India, rather than engaging in hard negotiations, gives away what Washington desires for free – to wit LEMOA and COMCASA?
Even on issues where the differences have predated Trump and Modi, such as over Russian arms, Venezuelan oil and Iran, India has chosen to give in. Particularly disturbing is the marked decrease in the inflow of oil from Iran to avoid US sanctions, when a more self-respecting and strategic-minded nation would have immediately coordinated efforts with the other major importers of Iranian oil (China and Japan) to explore setting up an alternative payment channel to the dollar system.
Such a move would have strengthened the country’s energy situation and propelled India’s strategy for Afghanistan and Central Asia pivoting on the Chabahar port. Located on the North Arabian Sea and outflanking the Pakistani and Chinese navies ex-Gwadar, and landward constructing rail and road corridors to link up with the Russian Northern Distribution Network, it would have consolidated Indian trade, market access and civil and military cooperation with Russia, Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republics. Such a plan would also constitute a massive leverage, ensuring good US behaviour.
[Chabahar in Iranian Balochistan.]
Trump’s foreign policy decision-making for all practical purposes is restricted to himself, his whims and fancies and his Twitter handle, with the US secretary of state Mike Pompeo present there to realise his boss’s desires the best he can but, more often, to clean up after him. The only person Trump pays some slight heed to is national security adviser John Bolton. Except, the Indian embassy in Washington and the MEA have almost no ready access to him – NSA Ajit Doval’s getting through to his US opposite number during the Pulwama crisis was a one-off thing, covering up for Bolton’s contempt for India which took root, or so it is rumoured, at the UN when he was President George W. Bush’s ambassador. So, Jaishankar’s traditional diplomacy will draw a blank there.
The sure shot way of commanding Trump’s attention is by being disruptively combative – the method perfected by Kim Jong-Un of North Korea. It is one Modi has no stomach for and will never attempt. Trump’s initial threat against Kim was met with panache. He responded to the US leader’s threat of “raining down fire and fury” by calling him a “deranged dotard” and daring him to carry out a strike, revealing his own plans of firing nuclear missiles to take out the mid-Pacific US military island base of Guam.
A sobered up Trump quickly backtracked, and offered to meet. In the two summits – in Singapore in June 2018 and in Hanoi this year – Kim dismissed Trump’s call to denuclearise his country, demanding the US remove all its nuclear weapons from the region. It won Kim more than respect; “We are in love!” trilled Trump. All the hugging did not extract for Modi any similar reaction. The lesson to learn is that desirable outcomes are best reached by being immovable when the national interest is at stake.
Kim’s modus operandi is unlike Modi’s and, even more, Jaishankar’s. The Indian prime minister seems unwilling to accord primacy to India’s national interest above every other factor when transacting with the US. On this count, Jaishankar’s recent views and the manner in which he has dilated on foreign policy concepts that he has borrowed from others, do not inspire confidence. He has talked of “multi-alignment” proposed by Shashi Tharoor in his 2012 book Pax Indica without explaining just what he understands by it and how he expects to work it, given that the Indian policy during Modi’s watch has leaned so much to the US side. And he has referred to “issue-based coalitions” mooted in my 2015 book Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet), talking of it as an instrument for “positioning” the country and not, according to him, for “balancing” regional and international power. This last is passing strange and begs the question: Positioning being a static notion, how will limiting policy manoeuvre further the country’s interests?
Jaishankar’s attitude clashes with these concepts, in the main, because they presuppose India having a free hand and a foreign policy unencumbered by the need to play second fiddle to any country, or to conform to US aims and objectives in the Indo-Pacific. Having tilted over so much to the US side, Modi and Jaishankar may soon discover that Trump will compel them to bend backwards some more.
India is already a much reduced presence in the world. Absent the strategic will and vision for the country other than, in essence, turning it into an American camp follower, India, in the next five years, will find its status and stature shrinking fast. At the heart of Modi’s foreign policy is the big worrisome question: Does the prime minister actually believe that what is good for the US is good for India?
The Swiss Pilatus P-7 trainer aircraft for the air force was a new government’s turn away from becoming a full-blown public scandal. (Please refer all my past posts on the Pilatus in the ‘Indian Air Force’ section of this blog.) The only real surprise is that the Modi regime in its first term did nothing to pursue the arms middleman Sanjay Bhandari who, along with Deepak Talwar, kept a whole bunch of politicals and babus during the Manmohan Singh era liquid. Talwar is the man who ensured the Air India buy at high rates of passenger aircraft and the preferential treatment of various Gulf airlines until now when the latter all but monopolize the lucrative to- and fro- traffic and also the onward routing of growingly large numbers of Indians to Europe and North America. Both Bhandari and Talwar can expect no leniency unless they begin leaking detailed information, especially of the beneficiaries of the secret flow of monies to offshore accounts and diverted to property purchases in London, and so on.
While newspapers report that certain MOD and IAF officers have also been collared, there is no mention of any names. The real question is how high do the investigating agencies want to go in bringing senior IAF officers to book? Or, rather what’s the level of military officers the Modi dispensation would consider politic to bung into jail? This is the most intriguing part because, at the time the Pilatus contracts were signed, some very senior officers were rumoured to have been on the take.
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June 25th sees the American Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alighting in Delhi to try and smooth out ruffled feathers at both the India and the US ends. The danger is that the foreign minister S. Jaishankar, a khandaani babu, is more adept at taking orders, following instructions, and embroidering the policy line dictated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And where the US is concerned, Modi has shown himself a pussy, always angling, this way and that, to be in the good books of the current resident of the White House — Barack Obama, initially, and now Donald Trump. To therefore expect that Jaishankar will do anything unusual like drawing a firm line and telling Washington where to get off and telling him that India would not be kicked around as it has been for the last decade and more, is to expect the unthinkable. Because remember, Jaishankar is the person who delivered to the US what it desperately sought for decades — a denatured Indian nuclear deterrent in perpetuity (vide the nuclear deal)
Have written two big books (Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet), and Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and India’s Global Ambition) detailing and analysing at great length why India should be wary of the US and why distrust of America (or Russia and China and Western European ) should be this country’s default option. Indian diplomats and MEA staffers who, according to one of their own, Natwar Singh, are not known to read books after joining Service — his exact words and so featured in one of my books, were — “The last time they read anything was when they sat for the UPSC exam!” mean that they are unwilling to learn anything except what they pick up during their careers. This leaves a whole world of analyses and insights out of their reckoning. To top it all, like the Americans with Trump, we have Modi who reads little but, nevertheless, is his own fount of foreign policy wisdom and ideas.
Iran is the sticking point here. The Modi government has done enough by siding with the US to not only rile Tehran but also Moscow. If this trending policy is not soon righted India will pay a heavy strategic price. India may be well advised then to prepare for a future in which, as I have repeatedly warned, it is America’s regional appendage.
Thus with Modi satisfied that the US is all good, benign and into furthering shared interests — the sort of thing that Jaishankar would enthusiastically second, despite a meager body of evidence — helping get Azhar Masood in the dock, putting the FATF squeeze on Pakistan, with these events touted by a compliant Indian media as outstanding diplomatic achievements denoting the heights the Indo-US relationship can supposedly scale, the Indian government willfully ignores the larger American game plan that’s in play. It is a plan the motivated caucus in Delhi — the Delhi chapters of Carnegie/Brookings-led camp of Indian commentators in the media, thinktankers and and academics, and hordes of retired civil servants and, increasingly, military officers, all eager to cadge invitations to the “seminar circuit” in the US by saying and writing stuff supportive of the current Washington stance. How else to explain the routine, mindless and ill-informed writing by former Indian officials and the like over the years extolling the virtues of the as-is hobbled Indian nuclear arsenal?
In this flood of subservient opinions and verbiage backed by no real knowledge within and outside government, the basics of the US plan for India never get forensically addressed. So what’s the US strategy?
It is as follows: The US needs to
have a sub-par nuclear weaponized India armed with second-rate American conventional weaponry to hold up the western end of the Indo-Pacific to complement a conventionally militarized Japan that has improved on first rate US equipments, but not one to be trusted with its own nuclear weapons which will only spin that country out of Washington’s control, at the other end of Asia to prevent a hegemonic China from emerging.
by fear of consequences and threat of sanctions prevent India from resuming thermonuclear testing in order to, by and by, have the Indian government rely on the US for its strategic security, in other words, to outsource the country’s meta-strategic concerns to Washington’.
sever India from its Russian arms supply links and place US Companies to provide military technology that the US armed services have either phased out or, for good reasons, never inducted. Such as the Guardian sea drones, the F-21/F-16 combat aircraft, the unaffordably expensive EMALS (electro-magnetic aircraft launch system) for Indian navy’s aircraft carriers, and the long-in-the-tooth M-777 light howitzers for use against the PLA on the Tibet front, and the offer of the vastly inferior NASAM/Patriots missile systems instead of the Russian S-400 which costs less! This when China is negotiating for the still more advanced S-500. The bigger aim being that via military supply links to gain the political edge in Delhi that Moscow has enjoyed.
begin capitalizing on the foundational accords — LEMOA and COMCASA signed by a clueless and gullible Indian government, and prepare the ground for the US military to permanently access Indian military bases, facilities, installations and communications capabilities as prelude to staging all-year, all-weather operations out of India in the Indian Ocean arc Simonstown-Western Australia, with the Indian armed services acting as backup.
But how to get around the real differences on trade, H1B visas, etc? As stressed in my book and writing to-date, these are less hurdles than things to get around by small-time and contingent gestures to mollify the Indian government. In this respect, first imposing sanctions and then removing them piecemeal is portrayed as great concessions by the US. Washington has realized it can get anything past the foolish and shortsighted Indian government if small benefits are dressed up as big American giveaways — the result, it is put out, of “hard negotiating” by the likes of Jaishankar.
Thus, the H1B visa door is all but closed to Indian IT professionals. But on the eve of the Pompeo visit Trump announced that the US immigration service would hold off on hunting down unregistered aliens — there are over 700,000 Indians in the US who have overstayed their visas or been smuggled into America via Mexico and elsewhere — and evicting them. And the Modi-Jaishankar duo would feel great about these kinds of US tactics? Likewise, re: data portability and GOI’s insistence that all commercial and other electronic data generated through the Net and various portals, be housed in-country, Pompeo is here to pressure the Modi regime into giving in — in the name of India’s role in globalization. But at the same time he will reject India’s demands for free movement of labour and services, and to follow WTO guidelines. The give on the US’ part, in this particular instance, will be a certain dilution of the Generalised System of Preferences as applied to India. The US is also seeking GOI measures in intellectual property rights that will end up crippling the Indian pharmaceutical industry — among the biggest export revenue earners, and denying the world cheaper but equally effective medicines derived from Western pharma formulae.
On Huawei and the 5th gen communications gear, however, it may be no bad thing if the Indian government, lacking any sense of how to promote Indian telecom technology competitiveness, is pushed by Pompeo into terminating Huawei sales and rolling back the presence of this and other Chinese companies specializing in mobile telephony. The fallout of this will be to reduce Beijing’s capacity to wage cyber warfare through electronic bugs and Trojan Horses embedded in the Chinese communications systems that the Indian government has so far allowed free entry, which in an instant can disrupt financial networks, power grids and of course, communications systems, including critical ones. If Delhi doesn’t have the brains to see the onrushing Chinese cyber warfare train, better it removes India from the tracks even if at Washington’s prompting.
So tips to Modi-Jaishankar:
In pure geostrategic terms, the US needs India far more than India needs America. Internalize this basic fact into all negotiations and prepare to shut down all channels.
The US does not any more have the will or the wealth to be security provider to littoral and offshore Asia, so to rely on America when all its traditional allies (NATO, Japan) are exploring arrangements to defend themselves the best they can by themselves, is to be perversely foolish.
Stop obsessing about Pakistan and start worrying meaningfully about China, and absolutely end the pattern in place of contentment with being fobbed off by the US with pinpricks against Pakistan. If you think FATF, etc will convince GHQ, Rawalpindi, from rethinking terrorism as tool of symmetric warfare, then India is in greater trouble than anybody thought possible.
Alternative arrangements to bolster India’s national security oriented to China and solely China (so Pakistan will ipso facto be taken care off) have to be put in place. It will require that, at a minimum, the roles of both the US and China in Asia be minimized. In this respect, the most promising sets of loose security coalitions are offered by BRIS (Brazil-Russia-India-South Africa), i.e., BRICS without China, and the modified Quadrilateral or Mod Quad of India, Japan, Australia and a select group of rich and militarily capable Southeast Asian states led by Vietnam and Singapore, i.e., the Quadrilateral without the US. BRIS and Mod Quad are detailed in my book ‘Staggering Forward’. In the last, the US can come in as and when it cares to without this coalition making its concerns central to the working of the Mod Quad.
The hankering for cutting edge US technology is a fool’s errand. India will not get it, no matter what. Remember, the US has not parted with the source codes of the F-35 aircraft the UK, its most intimate friend and partner, has chosen for its air force and navy, and which programme it invested in. That’s a fact of life. Where realistically should India then be placed with respect to the UK, say, in America’s affections?
Appreciate the leverages India has and start using them, rather than treating them as free goods for Delhi to squander to win Washington’s attention. India has an unsurpassed geographic location as the central strategic pivot in the Indian Ocean region and landward in Central Asia, its vast manpower that however require to be rapidly and massively upskilled can become a national resource, and its market for all kinds of manufactures and capital goods, ranging from Boeing and Eurobus transport aircraft — just the order of 243 Eurobus aircraft by Indigo Airlines is going to keep European aviation companies in the clover for a long time, and denial of access to which can be a powerful means of bringing US, China and, even more, any European state, to heel.
The above mandates Jaishankar talks with Pompeo and US interlocuters from a position of strength rather than, as has been the case to-date, from a presumed position of weakness.
Above all else, the Indian government has to understand that the biggest stick India wields is its inherently strong status as an independent actor on the world scene that can no more fit into the American bandwagon than into the Russian or Chinese basket. That keeping a distance from Washington will serve the national interest, in the short as well as long term, immensely better than jumping into bed with America. Because doing the latter will only gain for India the passing advantages of a harlot, a country to hire by the hour.
In the Indian system, political leaders don’t have to know much about anything. The civil servants manning the apparatus of state get by knowing even less but can and do argue the virtues of their generalist background (usually BA or MA in History or in English). So the requisite technical proficiency necessary to make decisions related to national defence has to be mustered by armed services’ chiefs — the designated providers of “professional advice” to the government. And then they can only offer their recommendations, in light of which the prime minister/defence minister-defence secretary combo decides. Except, and this is a very important factor, the armed services chiefs — even though no part of the final decisionmaking — have to sign off on decisions pertaining to their Service before it is sent up to the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) for final formal approval.
Presently everything and everybody, including the CCS, is a sideshow. If Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants something done, services chiefs play ball. To ensure this, pliable armed services chiefs are the norm. Because a lot of homework goes into carefully choosing them, the political inconvenience of having a chief who disagrees and hence is disagreeable is absent. The fact is the country has not had a strong-minded and strong-willed service chief since the 1980s when General K Sundarji, single-handedly, convinced PM Rajiv Gandhi to intervene militarily in Sri Lanka and, separately, to approve the plan for the last major restructuring of the army. That he was wrong in the first instance there’s no doubt. That the restructuring elevated mobile warfare when it had long since become passe is another story. But he didn’t lack for conviction and that’s the point here. Such officers have been few and far between. The only other service chief prior to Sundarji to fit these metrics was General SHFJ Maneckshaw.
The reason these issues are raised here will become clear soon.
Modi is given to making odd utterances to showcase his supposed insights into technology that often end up revealing a slightly wonky grasp of science. In the service of a mythical India, he famously recounted, it may be recalled, to a flustered audience of doctors of medicine at AIIMS during his first term, the country’s ancient expertise in plastic surgery and cited the example of the elephant-headed Lord Ganesh heading the pantheon of Hindu dieties. Post Balakote aerial strike on 26 February he referred in an interview to radar and cloud cover. “The weather was not good on the day of air strike. There was a thought that crept in the minds of the experts that the day of strike should be changed”, the PM said. “However, I suggested that the clouds could actually help our planes escape the radars.” It created a bit of hub-hub in air force circles.
Troposcatter technology still constitutes some small parts of the Indian air defence system on the western front. Radar based on this technology is, in fact, susceptible to atmospheric disturbances, and indicates security weakness the IAF is trying to address by replacing these with more modern systems. But Pakistan has had for a long time the modern, powerful and now augmented SILLAC (Siemens Low Level Air Control) System for early warning, based in Sargodha, District Miani. As far as is known, there are no vulnerable troposcatter systems in Pakistan’s Air Defence. So, Modi’s contention that his pushing the IAF to strike despite bad weather doesn’t hold up.
What actually happened is this: CAS Air Chief Marshal BS Dhanoa asked the PM for a delay of two days for the strike mission to go in. He explained that the helmet-mounted targeting system requiring the Mirage 2000 pilot to keep his eyes on target in order to guide the Israeli SPICE (Smart, Precise Impact, Cost-Effective) electro-optically guided bomb to it, would function sub-optimally with cloud cover as the pilot would not be able clearly to see the target. Dhanoa preferred as alternative the original IAF plan to deploy a more accurate munition with a 1 metre CEP (versus 3 metres CEP for SPICE) which too needed better weather. The meterological department said that the clouds would clear starting Feb 28. At this meeting there may also have been talk of Pakistani radars, etc. All the technical details of the strike plans, weapons, radar systems, weather, etc. apparently got garbled in Modi’s mind leading to the confused statement (above), occasioning much mirth on twitter and elsewhere.
If Dhanoa was convinced that delaying the attack on Balakote was best, why didn’t he stick to it, after all it was his Service that would execute the strike and how and when to do it was his call, not the PM’s. Especially because there was no real urgency as postponing the mission by two days wouldn’t have altered its political profile or in any way complicated the diplomatic dynamic then in play. Had the CAS stuck to his guns, Modi would have had perforce to accept it. Maneckshaw firmly diverted pressure by Indira Gandhi to begin operations against the Pakistan Army in East Pakistan in April 1971 because, as he informed the Prime Minister, his forces weren’t ready or mobilized and if Mrs Gandhi still insisted on the early dateline for action, she’d have to find another army chief. The Bangladesh War was a far bigger issue for the then COAS to stake his reputation and career on compared to Dhanoa re: the retaliatory strike on Balakote. And yet the CAS didn’t stand behind his professional recommendation.
If the CAS didn’t act on his expert assessment, neither did the army chief General Bipin Rawat do the honourable thing when several months back the then defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman ordered the “opening” of military cantonment roads to all manner of civilian traffic in the teeth of COAS’s strong advice against such move. Rawat could have threatened to resign and right there and then stopped the defence minister’s harebrained scheme — that newspaper reports alleged would personally benefit her owing to a school run by her family and located on the edge of a cantonment — from taking wing. But he didn’t do any such thing and the effect is there for all to see. It may not take very long for terrorist outfits to consider the ease of just motoring into cantonments to launch their attacks. Then, Sitharaman, now safely ensconced in the Finance Ministry, will happily disavow any responsibility for it. A terrorist strike is what it will take to reverse this perfectly idiotic decision taken under Modi’s watch. As Gujarat chief minister, he actually wanted the cantonment in the centre of Ahmedabad to be moved to the outskirts of the city, making nonsense of the whole idea of “peace station” where frontline troops are rotated to charge their batteries, as it were. Modi sought this military land for “public use”. (It is an episode detailed in my book ‘Staggering Forward: Narendtra Modi and India’s Global Ambition’.) If it is the opening of cantonment roads today, who is to say the proposal to sell off military lands to private developers, something mooted by Sharad Pawar when he was defence minister, won’t be revived in the cause of serving “public good”?
Resignation is the most powerful weapon armed services chiefs have to not do what’s not in the nation’s interest and in the individual service’s interest but which elected political leaders persuade them to do. It is the brahmastra that curiously has not been used by the Chiefs of Staff, considering just how many patently wrong decisions are pushed through by MOD/GOI, and how much wrong doing and plunder takes place under their noses to which they are parties, courtesy their silence. Thimayya raised his stock when he resigned to protest defence minister VK Krishna Menon’s untoward interference and then besmirched his reputation by withdrawing it on Nehru’s say-so. The mere threat of resignation by a COS can keep the politicos on the straight and narrow path. The pity is our military leaders don’t use it and instead are content with merely complaining about it.
Visit any cantonment, and they are a mess with the traffic and the attendant habitation taking over military roads, negating the very notion of a “peace station” where frontline troops are rotated to charge their batteries as it were. Sitharaman, perhaps, took her cue from Modi who as Gujarat chief minister wanted the Ahmedabad cantonment shifted to the outskirts of the city so that the vacated and very valuable land could be used for public purposes (an episode discussed in my book ‘Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and India’s Global Ambition’). Who is to say that with the cantonment roads thus forcibly expropriated for “public use” — a political decision facilitated by an unresisting army chief, cantonment lands in the future won’t be? And more, what’s to prevent terrorist outfits from now quite literally motoring into cantonments to attack them? Having moved to Finance Ministry, Sitharaman will happily not be blamed for it.
Then again, pliable armed services chiefs are political assets to any government, less because the Indian military can win laurels in war, than because they do the government’s bidding on any and every issue.
In terms of rewarding rectitude, the Modi government, however, did the right thing by trashing the seniority principle and selecting Admiral Karambir Singh, a helicopter pilot, as the new Chief of the Naval Staff. Hope he will show the grit and “spine” in his dealings with MOD/GOI that he did, for instance, as a lowly Lieutenant Commander on the staff of a Flag Officer Commanding in Chief when he did not waver in the face of immense pressure to “modify” the requirements of naval aviation he had worked on, and otherwise refused to compromise offering, in fact, to resign if his recommendation was overturned. His willingness to stand up for what he believed was right so impressed, he made a fan of that particular FOCINC, much as he did his other superiors in his upwardly progress. Indeed, the Admiral’s career record is a warning to the government to not trifle with him.
Over a million residents of Hong Kong came out on the street to protest the Extradition Bill that the stooge Beijing regime of Chief Executive Carrie Lam wanted to enact into law in this once British crown colony that after the expiry of its 99-year lease was returned to China in 1998. “This is a very important piece of legislation that will help to uphold justice and also ensure that Hong Kong will fulfill her international obligations in terms of cross-boundary and transnational crimes,” Lam explained. The authoritarian government of Mainland China then run by Chairman Dengxiaoping agreed that the system of freedoms Hong Kong enjoyed under British rule would be retained on UK’s withdrawal. It was to reconcile the continuation of the Western notions of rights and freedoms with the absence of these and other freedoms (including of free press and the freedom of expression) in the rest of China which led to the Chinese government conceiving the “One China, two systems” concept. These freedoms have steadily been encroached upon by the Xi Jinping dispensation, eager to iron out all anomalies under the rubric of uniting China.
The Hong-Kongers would have none of it. By coming out on to the street in unprecedented numbers, they frustrated the initial decision to let loose a reign of terror by the puppet police which might have worked had there been only a few protesters and sporadic violence. With a million plus people out peaceably resisting Lam’s move, the CEO threw in the towel and publicly announced the act of rendition to be held in abeyance. But the opposition wants a complete abrogation of that law and seems confident they’ll get it. The reason this act is anathema to the people is because — and this is how Beijing had hoped it would work — that any “trouble maker” was shipped to China for whatever “re-education” or other punishment the Orwellian Chinese state can dream up. This to prevent a contrasting model of a free people existing within China’s fold and making mainland Chinese wonder if they too shouldn’t be enjoying the same freedoms.
Recall that members of the harmless and entirely peaceful religious sect, the Falun Gong, were hunted down and hounded into near extinction with leading members harvested for their organs in hideous transplant operations or skinned alive and injected with formaldehyde until one could see the human body — a punishment meted out to criminals as well. These bodies then toured the world in exhibitions and became a hit mainly because they were so awfully macabre. It is the sort of medical actions not carried out anywhere since European Jews headed for the gas chambers were picked out by the Nazi surgeon Josef Mengele for the grossest surgical experimentation — with children and women being especially favoured for his treatments.
If Xi at the SCO summit in Bishkek felt free to advice Prime Minister Narendra Modi to talk to Pakistan and resolve the outstanding Kashmir issue, what keeps the Modi government and MEA from publicly and loudly and repeatedly counselling Beijing to respect the rights and freedoms of the people of Hong Kong, something they undertook to do vide the conditions in the lease termination agreement with Britain?
But, of course, with Modi always respectful of Xi, Minister S Jaishankar of his master’s voice, and MEA filled with “honorary Chinamen” of China, surely Chinese sensibilities will be respected and nothing untoward will be said by the ministry spokesman even as Hong Kong is enveloped in tear gas smoke and the people beaten with truncheons and pummeled by water cannons as they become targets of opportunity for the HK police — the handmaiden of the Chinese communist state. Will Modi ever muster the gumption to payback China and Xi in theur own coin? Nah! He lacks the strategic vision and, quite simply, the guts. (No such deficiency where Imran Khan and Pakistan are concerned.)
Then again the sucking up to countries he considers Big Powers seems this government’specialty. At the other end of extended southern Asia is an oil tanker on fire which Washington claims is owed to Iranian mines attached to the ship by Iranian OPVs. And the Trump Administration has been flashing a grainy video of a supposed Iranian boat caught in the act. America’s closest allies Germany and Japan dismissed the evidence as unconvincing. A 2020 Democratic Party presidential aspirant Pete Buttigieg, a naval intel veteran in Afghanistan, has come out and charged Trump with manufacturing an incident to start a war against Iran, likening the attempt to George W Bush’s entirely concocted reasons of nuclear weapons with Iraq to trigger the war against Saddam Hussein’s regime 2001 that so destabilized West Asia and the world, everyone is still suffering its backwash — the Islamic State, Syria, etc.
The fact is such invention is par for the course for the US government. In August 1964, President Lyndon Johnson used the “attack” on the American naval ship USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin — a small insignificant naval encounter involving the US and North Vietnamese navies to secure a carte blanche from the US Congress for increased military involvement in Vietnam.
Now Trump’s NSA John Bolton appears to be on like mission. He has been recommending regime change in Tehran from the time he had President George W Bush’s ear. Now that he is in a position to do something about it he’s itching to start a war to realize that goal, seeking any lame excuse to do so. The tanker fire is coming in handy, with the unscrupulous Saudi regime of Crown Prince MbS aka Mohammad bin Sultan doing its bit to force America’s hand in the hope of ridding himself of his country’s main ideological rival — the shia regime led by Hassan Rouhani in Iran. Except, neither the US Congress nor America’s NATO allies are in a mood to accommodate him. And Trump seems to be in two minds and for good reason. Brazenly starting hostilities with no certainty that the theocratic regime in Iran won’t come out fighting and involve US forces in a costly war in a proximal theatre to Afghanistan and Iraq which he will be fully blamed for and, perhaps, sink his chances of reelection in 2020 is what’s holding him back.
With the US in a sort of jam of Trump-Bolton’s making, shouldn’t the Indian government get into the act of sagely urging Washington to cease and desist and not disturb the peace more than it already is in the region and, to put the knife in, suggesting Trump talk to the Mullahs? After all, not an incident on the LoC passes without some Pentagon or State Dept spokesman telling Delhi to calm down and not react harshly to some Pak-sponsored terrorist attack or the other. Having deliberately and without much forethought imperiled India’s close relations with Iran by obeying American orders to cut off Iranian oil supplies, this publicly offered advice to Trump is not much of a recompense, but such a statement from Delhi asking both countries to get to the negotiating table — something Tehran wants — will retrieve the situation for India some. It would be a nice diplomatic tit-for-tat. Except, again, Modi is into hugging and humouring Trump and the US and not into restoring for India a measure of self-respect and its now lost room for diplomatic maneuver.
Prime Minister Modi’s flight took some 2-3 hours longer to reach Bishkek from New Delhi, having to go around Pakistan and the northern Arabian Sea and over Iran than if his plane had just flown north directly over and across the neighbouring state to the west, permission for which overflight though delayed by Islamabad was ultimately given.
Why did the PM decide to take the longer route and stay in the air so much longer? Because MEA veterans on Monday June 10 — Vivek Katju in an op/ed and his compatriot KC Singh at a ‘strategic seminar’ in Kasauli (the latter on a panel with this writer) — wondered why Modi was refusing to restart talks with Pakistan but seeking permission to overfly that country. Caught out on this supposed inconsistency, the PM swiftly reversed course and the Air India aircraft lumbered for hours before landing in Bishkek for the annual SCO bash.
Couldn’t, shouldn’t, he have graciously accepted instead the Pakistani decision and overflown that country and while doing so telegraphed the customary Good Wishes to Imran Khan and the Pakistani people? It would have been an indirect sign of his desire to resume a dialogue, which would in no way have diluted India’s formal position he voiced at the plenary session about no real possibility of an advance towards normalcy if the Pakistani Army-qua-state continued to rely on terrorism as a diplomatic tool because far from bringing Delhi to the table it was driving it farther away from it. That gesture plus this message would have left open that wee little space for the “back channel” to become active once again and it’d have been in sync with Imran’s cooing to the Press about a negotiable Kashmir solution. That didn’t happen. Perhaps because that would have been a dissonant note in his policy of cultivating Pakistan as a bogey to beat up on.
Trouble is Modi is ever mindful of correcting small inconsistencies but entirely oblivious to the larger inconsistencies of his foreign policy approach. He seeks to retain a degree of warmth in relations with Putin and Russia and not upset the apple cart with Xi and China while leaning over so much towards the US as to fall right into America’s lap. In fact, that’s exactly where Washington hopes India will be with Modi as the willing tool. This much was signaled by the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Even as Modi was characteristically hugging a somewhat uncomfortable Putin — no matter how many times one is hugged it is hard to get used to!, and a more skeptical Xi was holding him at arm’s length, the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was repeating a Modi election slogan — “Modi hai toh mumkin hai” (Every thing is possible with Modi there) before the US-India Business Council in Washington. Clearly, the Trump Admin expects that Modi — hand-held by his chief minion and foreign minister S. Jaishankar — will do whatever the US government asks him to do.
The US has made clear its priorities where India is concerned. Pompeo, besides aping Trump, his vocabulary-challenged boss, who repeats the word “incredible” quite often, mostly to describe himself and his presumed successes by mouthing “incredible” twice in the first minute of his speech, he explained that during his Delhi trip later this month he will push (1) the F-16/F-21 for the IAF and the F-18 Super Hornet for the Indian Navy, to enable India, he said, “to become a full-fledged security provider throughout the Indo-Pacific”, (2) to eliminate tariffs on max number of American goods and services exported to India, (3) to remove curbs on the functioning of social media companies (Facebook) and American firms doing commerce over the Net (Amazon) and, most significantly, (4) Delhi to finalize the sale of Westinghouse nuclear power plants and increased imports of LNG and crude oil from the US to, as Pompeo put it, “give Indians reliable, affordable, diversified energy independence so they will no longer have to rely on difficult regimes like those in Venezuela and in Iran.”
What Pompeo naturally failed to concern himself with was, for instance, the cost to the Indian armed services of two additional and new types of combat aircraft in an already horribly, and counterproductively, diversified air-order-of-battle. Or, the effect of alienating Iran which may end up depriving India of access to cheap oil at concessionary rates, but also to Chabahar port around which pivots this country’s long term and long-reach strategy for Gulf and Russia, and Afghanistan and Central Asia. Such willful distancing by Delhi from Tehran will also lose India the shia counterpoise and leverage to potentially use against the sunni Arab bloc led by the wahabbism-promoting Saudi Arabia.
It is astonishing just how ignorant Modi and his chief minion, Jaishankar, seem to be regarding the basic logic of India’s geopolitics which, in no way, is convergent with that of the United States, and how cavalierly they are going about undermining India’s strategic options, national interest and national security.
Were the Modi government not so top-down driven, there would be a point in urging the PM to restrain his foreign minister from jumping on to the American coattails on every issue and otherwise turning India into a virtual banana republic. But this is Modi’s thoughtlessly pro-US reflex too.
This is the full version of the shortened paper posted earlier in the day. All the Papers by CPR faculty are to be compiled in a booklet — ‘Policy Challenges 2018-2024: The Key Policy Questions for the New Government and Possible Pathways’ and to be published soon as a booklet.
Several mega-trends are visible in international affairs on the cusp of the third decade of the 21st century. After a trillion dollars spent on the 18-year old war with the Taliban in Afghanistan following a similar amount expended in Iraq and Syria, the US is drained of its wealth, stamina and will for military confrontations of any kind. A reactive and retreating America under President Donald Trump, besides generating unprecedented levels of uncertainty and anxiety, has accentuated the conditions of unusual flux in the international system. Second, with the old certainties gone, traditional alliances (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), trading regimes (Trans-Pacific Partnership), schemes of regional peace (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), and technology and supplier cartels (Missile Technology Control Regime, Nuclear Suppliers Group, et al.) are all alike in disarray; their concerns are now matters of contestation with China staking claim to the pole position vacated by the US. And finally, these developments are compelling major countries to try to protect themselves the best they can by handling things on their own, in coalition with other similarly encumbered nations, and by exploring new security/military cooperation agreements. There is particular urgency in Asia to blunt China’s hegemonic ambitions and preclude its domination from taking root.
State of Play
Unfortunately India finds itself on the wrong side of these trends in the main. This is because it has, in the new millennium, accelerated its efforts to join the very same nonproliferation regimes and cartels that had victimized it all along. Worse, by sidling up to the US and virtually outsourcing its strategic security to Washington, India’s historical role as prime balancer in the international balance-of-power set-up – courtesy its hoary policies of nonalignment and its latter-day avatar, strategic autonomy – has been imperiled. This is at a time when doubts about the US commitment to other countries’ security have increased along with the apprehensions of allies and friends. With security made a transactional commodity by the Trump administration, treaty alliances have been weakened, unsettling West European and Far Eastern states traditionally close to the US.i India’s trend-bucking policy, in the event, will only cement the growing perceptions of the country as unable to perceive its own best interests and to act on them. Its downgrade, as a result of its more recent strategies, to the status of a subordinate state and subsidiary ‘strategic partner’ of the US means that India will have restricted strategic choices. Its foreign and military policies will therefore lose the freedom and latitude for diplomatic manoeuvre that they have always enjoyed.
Thus, the 2008 civilian nuclear deal, for all practical purposes, signed away India’s sovereign right to resume underground testing and froze its nuclear arsenal at the sub-thermonuclear technology level (as the 1998 fusion test was a dud). Agreeing to the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement and the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement – the so-called ‘foundational accords’ – will, respectively, permit the US to stage its military forces out of Indian bases and embroil India in its wars in the extended region, and (ii) to penetrate the most secret Indian communications grid, including the nuclear command and control network.
The Indian government’s eagerness to cement the partnership is astonishing considering the trust deficit evident in a long history of duplicitous US behaviour and policies.ii By clinging to a feckless and demanding US, India’s profile as a fiercely independent state has taken a beating, distanced the country from old friends such as Russia (which is pivotal to balancing China and the US) and Iran (central to India’s geostrategic concerns in the Gulf, Afghanistan and Central Asia), lost the nation its diplomatic elan, and has seriously hurt vital national interests.
Placating China is the other imprudent theme that Indian foreign policy has latched on to. It has mollycoddled its most dangerous adversary and comprehensively capable rival in Asia with giveaways – such as non-use of the Tibet and Taiwan cards, refraining from nuclear missile-arming states on China’s periphery as a tit-for-tat measure for Beijing’s missile-arming of Pakistan, giving the Chinese manufacturing sector unhindered access to the Indian market through a massively unfair and unbalanced bilateral trade regime, etc. On the other hand, it has treated Pakistan, a weak flanking country, as a full-bore security threat when, realistically, it is only a military nuisance. This strategy is at the core of India’s external troubles. It has practically incentivized Beijing to desist from peaceful resolution of the border dispute. It has also undermined India’s credibility and credentials as ‘security provider’ to and strategic partner of a host of Asian littoral and offshore states fearful of an ambitious and aggressive China, as well as complicated the country’s attempts at obtaining a tier of friendly nations around it as buffer.
A topsy-turvy threat perception has also meant a lopsided Indian military geared to handle Pakistan but incapable of defending well against China, even less of taking the fight to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on land, air and distant seas; it is also laughably unprepared for future warfare featuring cyber pre-emption, remotely controlled armed drone swarms, robotic weapons systems managed by Artificial Intelligence, space-based weapons platforms, and clean micro-thermonuclear bombs. In the context, moreover, of a recessive foreign policy and a military that seems unable to wean itself away from imported armaments, it is almost as if the Indian government and armed services have given up on national security. This bewildering state of affairs is in urgent need of drastic overhaul and repair.
Geopolitical Vision and Strategy
Strong nations in the modern era have transitioned into great powers not only through expansive national visions, but also, more significantly, by pursuing policies disruptive of the prevailing order and multilateral regimes they had no hand in creating. India in the 21st century, on the other hand, seems content with the existing international system, measuring its foreign policy success in terms of entry gained or denied in congeries of international power (UN Security Council) and trade and technology cartels (Nuclear Suppliers Group, Missile Technology Control Regime, etc.). In other words, it covets a place at the high table on terms set by other countries. It is not a mistake made by China or the US (or, to go back in history, Elizabethan England, Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union and now Vladimir Putin’s Russia). The Indian government is hampered by its mistaken belief that upholding the current regional and international correlation of forces and mechanisms of order, and stressing its soft ‘civilizational’ power, will make the country great.
India with its many infirmities is in no position to undertake system disruption by itself.iii For India to rise as the premier Asian challenger to China and as the other economic-political-military power node in the continent in the shortest possible time – which should be the legitimate national aim and vision –it requires a subtle but telling approach. It needs a double-pronged strategy. One prong should stress absolutely reciprocal positions and policies. Thus, Beijing’s insistence on ‘One China, two systems’ should be met with a ‘One India’ concept. Similarly, the non-acceptance by Beijing of all of Jammu and Kashmir (including the Pakistan-occupied portion) as inalienably Indian territory should lead to formal recognition of and relations with Taiwan; it should also spark off New Delhi’s world-wide advocacy of a free Tibet and a free East Turkestan, and of campaigns against ‘cultural genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Tibet and Xinjiang.iv And China’s nuclear missile arming of Pakistan should, even if belatedly, trigger India’s transferring strategic missiles to the states on the Chinese periphery, so that China too thereafter suffers permanent geostrategic disadvantage.
Hamstringing China should also involve meta-measures to carve out separate, loose and specifically anti-China security coalitions from the two important groups India is part of. BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) is an entity dominated economically and trade-wise by China. This is something that arouses wariness in the other three countries, which can be mobilized to form a smaller, informal, security-cooperation-minded coalition, BRIS (Brazil-Russia-India-South Africa). It will assist in hedging Beijing’s military options and affect China’s economic expansiveness. Likewise, the US’s importance to international security has to be whittled away. The Quadrilateral (US-Japan-India-Australia) proposed by Japan’s Shinzo Abe to contain China in the Indo-Pacific is problematic owing to the centrality accorded to the capricious US. India could propose a different set-up – a modified Quadrilateral or ‘Mod Quad’ with India, Japan, Australia and the leading littoral and offshore states of South East Asia (Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore) disputing China’s claims in the South China Sea; a cooperative Taiwan could be accorded ‘observer’ status. This would at once define the strategic geopolitical face-off between ‘rimland Asia’ and a hegemonic ‘heartland’ China, and reduce the uncertainty attending on America’s security role (given that the US and China, owing to their close economic and trading links, are inseparable). Mod Quad will clarify the strategic calculi of member states, while encouraging the US to contribute militarily to the extent it wants to at any time but as an outside party.v
BRIS and Mod Quad are extremely practicable geopolitical solutions to share the cost, divide the danger, and generate synergy from the wide-spectrum capabilities, singly and together, of the member states in these two collectives. At the same time, they would stretch China’s military resources and minimize the uncertainty and confusion attending on any US participation. These new arrangements adhere to the time-tested principle of vision shaping strategy but geography driving it, which makes for cohesion and sense of purpose. BRIS and Mod Quad will enable their member states to be less inhibited in cooperating with each other to deal with the overarching security threat posed by China, but without the intimidating presence of the US (which, typically, pursues its own particular interests). They will instill in the Indian government’s external outlook an outcomes-oriented, competitive bent. It may result, for instance, in getting the east-west Ganga-Mekong connectivity project – as a rival to China’s north-south Belt & Road Initiative – off the ground.vi
But BRIS and Mod Quad leave Pakistan out of the reckoning. Pakistan is strong enough to be a spoiler and, in cahoots with China, pose a substantial problem. More than 70 years of tension and conflict with India haven’t helped. For a lasting solution it is essential to break up the Pakistan-China nexus. The military palliative for terrorist provocations – air and land strikes – will only drive Islamabad deeper into China’s camp. A Kashmir solution roughly along the lines negotiated with General Pervez Musharraf in 2007 that Prime Minister Imran Khan has said Pakistan will accept, is a reasonable end state to work towards.vii But India can lubricate such an offer with policies to co-opt Pakistan (along with India’s other subcontinental neighbours) economically, by means of trade on concessional terms, and easy credit and access to the Indian market for manufactures and produce. This will obtain the goal of unitary economic space in the subcontinent and lay the foundations for a pacified South Asia – the first step in India’s long overdue achievement of great power. Such actions should, however, be preceded by several unilateral and risk-averse military initiatives (outlined later) to establish India’s peaceful bonafides and to denature the Indian threat that Pakistan perceives. Simultaneously, prioritizing strategic and expeditionary military capabilities against China and for distant operations jointly with friendly states in the Indian Ocean Region and in Southeast Asia will secure India’s extended security perimeter.
National Security Policy Priorities
Lack of money has never been the hitch. Rather, the problem has been and continues to be the misuse of financial resources by the three armed services with their faulty expenditure priorities. Intent on equipping and sustaining inappropriate force structures geared to the lesser threat, they have squandered the colonial legacy of expeditionary and ‘out of area operations’. Consequently, they have shrunk greatly in stature even as they have increased in size.viii Persisting with thinking of Pakistan as the main threat long after it credibly ceased to be one post the 1971 war has resulted in an Indian military able to fight only short-range, short-duration, small and inconclusive wars. Indeed, so geared to territorial defence and tactical warfare are the Indian armed services that they have paid scant attention to strategic objectives and to the means of realizing them. The political leadership, for its part, has shown marked lack of interest, failure to articulate a national vision, and inability to outline a game plan and strategy in this respect. It has chosen the easy way of relying on the armed services professionally to do the right thing by proffering the right advice – which they haven’t.
Breaking the Pakistan-China nexus is an imperative. It requires the Indian government to first seed a conducive political milieu by making certain safe unilateral military moves. What the Pakistan Army most fears is India’s three Strike Corps; if this ‘threat’ is denatured, a milieu with enormous peaceful potential can be created. Considering the nuclear overhang and zero probability of the Indian government ever ordering a war of annihilation – which is the only time when these armoured and mechanized formations will fight full tilt – three corps are way in excess of need. They can be reconstituted and the resources shifted to form a single composite corps adequate for any conceivable Pakistan contingency. The rest of the heavily armoured units can be converted to airborne cavalry, and to light tanks with engines optimized for high-altitude conditions; three offensive mountain corps can thereby be equipped to take the fight to the PLA on the Tibetan Plateau. The nuclear backdrop can likewise be changed for the better by India removing its short-range nuclear missiles from forward deployment on the western border and perhaps even getting rid of them altogether, because hinterland-based missiles can reach Pakistani targets with ease. These two moves made without demanding matching responses will cost India little in terms of security, establish a modicum of trust, persuade Pakistan of India’s goodwill, and confirm China as the Indian military’s primary concern. It will hasten normalcy in bilateral relations.
Tackling China at a time when it is widening the gap with India in all respects necessitates India using the playbook the Chinese successfully used against the US – Pakistan against India, and North Korea against America – when facing an adversary with a marked conventional military edge. It means resorting to Nuclear First Use (NFU) and deploying weapons to make this stance credible. Emplacing atomic demolition munitions in Himalayan passes to deter PLA units ingressing in strength across the disputed border is one tripwire. Another is to declare that any forceful Chinese military action that crosses a certain undefined threshold may automatically trigger the firing of canisterised medium- and long-range Agni missiles, now capable of launch-on-launch and launch-on warning. Additionally, the large numbers of Chinese missiles positioned in Tibet should be seen as the third nuclear tripwire. As there is no technology to reliably detect and determine the nature of incoming warheads, any missile PLA fires will reasonably have to be assumed to be nuclear-warheaded. Such a hair-trigger posture leaning towards action will create precisely the kind of uncertainty about the Indian reaction and response that will bolster its deterrent stance.ix
Exorbitantly priced aircraft carriers are unaffordable and, in the age of hypersonic and supersonic missiles, a military liability. The Indian naval budget should instead prioritize nuclear-powered ballistic missile-firing and attack submarines, and a surface fleet of multipurpose frigates. The Indian Air Force needs to radically cut the diversity of combat aircraft in its inventory, rationalize its force structure and streamline its logistics set-up. This will be facilitated by limiting the fleet to just two types of fighter planes and a strategic bomber. The multi-role Su-30MKI upgraded to ‘super Sukhoi’ configuration in the strike and air superiority role and progressively enhanced versions of the indigenous Tejas light combat aircraft for air defence, the follow-on Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft for longer reach and bigger punch, will suffice. The lease-buying of 1-2 squadrons of Tu-160M2 ‘Blackjack’ strategic bomber from Russia as the manned, recallable, vector will make the country’s nuclear triad more versatile.
Politically, the most difficult policy decision for the government will be to resume nuclear testing. In the wake of the failed fusion device tested in 1998 (S-1 test), this is absolutely necessary to obtain proven thermonuclear weapons of different power-to-yield ratios. India has got by with a suspect thermonuclear arsenal for 20 years. It is time India’s strategic deterrent acquired credibility.
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i An unreliable US, in fact, so concerns its NATO allies that the French defence minister Florence Parly in Washington asked a little plaintively, ‘What Europeans are worried about is this: Will the U.S. commitment [to NATO] be perennial? Should we assume that it will go on as was the case in the past 70 years?’ See ‘French defense chief questions US commitment to NATO’, AFP, RadioFreeEurope, Radio Liberty, 18 March 2019, https://www.rferl.org/a/french-defense-chief-questions-us-commitment-to-….
ii Bharat Karnad, Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015), 187-219.
iii For a detailed analysis of its various infirmities that preclude India’s becoming a great power anytime soon, see Karnad, Why India Is Not a Great Power (Yet).
iv China sees itself as the main protector of Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Visiting Islamabad during the Pulwama crisis, the foreign minister Wang Yi declared: ‘No matter how things change in the world and the region, China will firmly support Pakistan upholding its independence and territorial integrity and dignity.’ See Sutirtho Patranobis, ‘China firmly with Pakistan, says Beijing as Islamabad raises Kashmir in top talks’, Hindustan Times, 19 March 2019, https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/china-firmly-with-pakistan-says-beijing-as-islamabad-raises-kashmir-in-top-talks/story-5qM8HPgUQkl7ZwPCQEfh3O.html.
v Bharat Karnad, ‘India’s Weak Geopolitics and What To Do About It’, in Bharat Karnad, ed., Future Imperilled: India’s Security in the 1990s and Beyond (New Delhi: Viking, 1994), 19-20.
vi Bharat Karnad, Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and India’s Global Ambition (New Delhi: Penguin-Viking, 2018), ch. 4.
viii Karnad, Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet), ch. 5.
ix Bharat Karnad, ‘Shifting the Nuclear Security Focus to China’, in Lieutenant General A.K. Singh and Lieutenant General B.S. Nagal, eds., India’s Military Strategy in the 21st Century (New Delhi: Centre for Land Warfare Studies and KW Publishers, 2019); Karnad, Staggering Forward, 344-349.
Instead of disruptive foreign and national security policies, India seems content with the existing world order. It covets a place at the high-table but on terms set by other countries.
International affairs is witnessing several megatrends, but India is yet to respond actively. And it won’t do anymore.
A reactive and retreating America under President Donald Trump has accentuated the conditions of unusual flux in the international system. With the old certainties gone, traditional alliances (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), trading regimes (Trans-Pacific Partnership), schemes of regional peace (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), and technology and supplier cartels (Missile Technology Control Regime, Nuclear Suppliers Group, et al) are all alike in disarray, their concerns now are matters of contestation with China staking claim to the pole position vacated by the US.
There’s a particular urgency in Asia to blunt China’s hegemonic ambitions and preclude its domination from taking root.
State of play
Unfortunately, India finds itself on the wrong side of these trends because it has accelerated its efforts to join these very same non-proliferation regimes and cartels that had victimised it all along.
Worse, by sidling up to the US and virtually outsourcing its strategic security to Washington, India’s historical role as a prime balancer in the international balance-of-power system, courtesy its hoary policies of nonalignment and strategic autonomy, has been imperilled.
So, the 2008 civilian nuclear deal, for all practical purposes, signed away India’s sovereign right to resume underground testing, and froze its nuclear arsenal at the sub-thermonuclear technology level (1998 fusion test was a dud). Agreeing to the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement and the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement – the so-called “foundational accords” will, respectively, permit America to stage its military forces out of Indian bases and embroil the country in its wars in the extended region, and to penetrate the most secret Indian communications grid, including the nuclear command and control network.
By clinging to a feckless and demanding US, India’s profile as a fiercely independent state has taken a beating, distanced the country from old friends, such as Russia, which is pivotal to balancing China and US, and Iran – central to India’s geostrategic concerns in the Gulf, Afghanistan and Central Asia.
Placating China is the other imprudent theme that Indian foreign policy has cottoned on to. Mollycoddling the country’s most dangerous adversary in Asia with giveaways while treating Pakistan, a weak flanking country, as a full-bore security threat when it is only a military nuisance, is at the core of India’s external troubles.
A topsy-turvy threat perception has also meant a lopsided Indian military geared to handle Pakistan but incapable of defending against China.
It is almost as if the Indian government and armed services have given up on national security. This bewildering state of affairs is in urgent need of drastic overhaul and repair.
Geopolitical vision & strategy
Strong nations in the modern era have transitioned into great powers by pursuing policies disrespectful and disruptive of the prevailing order and multilateral regimes they had no hand in creating.
India, on the other hand, seems content with measuring its foreign policy success in terms of entry gained or denied in congeries of international power (UN Security Council) and trade and technology cartels (Nuclear Suppliers Group, Missile Technology Control Regime, etc.).
The Indian government is hampered by its mistaken belief that stressing its soft “civilisational” power will make the country great.
India with its many infirmities is in no position to undertake system disruption by itself. Rather, for India to rise as the premier Asian challenger to China and as the other economic-political-military power node in the continent in the shortest possible time needs a double-pronged strategy.
One prong should stress absolutely reciprocal positions and policies. Beijing’s insistence on ‘One China, two systems’ should be met with ‘One India’ concept, and acceptance by Beijing of all Jammu & Kashmir (including the Pakistan-occupied portion) as inalienably Indian territory. And, China’s nuclear missile arming of Pakistan should, even if belatedly, trigger India’s transferring strategic missiles to the states on the Chinese periphery so that China too, thereafter, suffers permanent geostrategic disadvantage.
Second, hamstringing China should also involve meta-measures to carve out separate, loose and specifically anti-China security coalitions from the two important existing groups India is part of – BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) and the Quad (India-Japan-Australia-US). BRICS can be mobilised to form a smaller, informal, security-cooperation BRIS (Brazil,-Russia-India-South Africa). Likewise, a modified Quadrilateral or ‘Mod Quad’ with India, Japan, Australia, and a group of leading Southeast Asian states, including Vietnam and Singapore to replace the US, would reduce the uncertainty of America’s security role given that the US and China owing to their close economic and trading links are inseparable.
BRIS and Mod Quad will enable their member states to be less inhibited in cooperating with each other to deal with the overarching security threat posed by China, but without the intimidating presence of the US.
But BRIS and Mod Quad leave Pakistan out of the reckoning. Pakistan is strong enough to be a spoiler and, in cahoots with China, pose a substantial problem. A lasting solution is essential to break up the Pakistan-China nexus.
A Kashmir solution roughly along the lines negotiated with General Parvez Musharraf in 2007 that Prime Minister Imran Khan has said Pakistan will accept, is a reasonable end-state to work towards. But lubricating such an offer with policies economically to co-opt Pakistan, along with India’s other subcontinental neighbours, will help it obtain the goal of unitary economic space in the subcontinent and lay the foundations for a pacified South Asia.
National security policy priorities
Lack of money has never been the hitch. Rather, the problem has been and is the continued misuse of financial resources by India’s three-armed services with faulty expenditure priorities.
Intent on equipping and sustaining inappropriate force structures geared to the lesser threat, they have squandered their colonial legacy of expeditionary and “out of area operations” and, consequently, shrunk greatly in stature even as they have increased in size.
Seeing Pakistan as a threat long after it credibly ceased to be one post-1971 War, has resulted in an Indian military able to fight only short-range, short-duration, small and inconclusive wars.
The political leadership, for its part, has chosen the easy way of relying on the armed services professionally to do the right thing by proffering the right advice, which they haven’t.
Breaking the Pakistan-China nexus requires a conducive political milieu making certain safe unilateral military moves. What the Pakistan Army most fears are India’s three Strike Corps, which “threat” if denatured can obtain a milieu with enormous peaceful potential. The nuclear backdrop can likewise be changed for the better by India removing its short-range nuclear missiles from forward deployment on the western border and, perhaps, even getting rid of them altogether, because hinterland-based missiles can reach Pakistani targets with ease. These two moves will cost India little in terms of security and persuade Pakistan of India’s goodwill and China as the Indian military’s primary concern.
Tackling China at a time when it is widening the gap with India in all respects necessitates India using the playbook the Chinese successfully used against the US, Pakistan against India, and North Korea against America, when facing an adversary with a marked conventional military edge. It means resorting to Nuclear First Use (NFU) and deploying weapons to make this stance credible.
Politically, the most difficult policy decision for the Modi government will, however, be to resume nuclear testing. This is absolutely necessary to obtain tested and proven thermonuclear weapons of different power-to-yield ratios. India has got by with a suspect thermonuclear arsenal for 20 years. It is time India’s strategic deterrent acquired credibility.
