Indigenization and the Indian Navy

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Passing strange that there has has been so little  (or no) coverage of the Navarms2013 symposium in Delhi January 31-Feb 1. The Navarms meet is apparently a once in 3 years affair (last held in 2007 and 2010).  There have been some interesting nuggets dropped from the panel by senior naval officers. VCNS VADM RK Dhowan revealed that full indigenization in warship production were in percentage terms — 80-90% in the “float” (hull, body work) category, 60% in the “move” (propulsion), and only 30-40% in the4 “fight” (weapons) category. He also iterated that old saw reflecting the navy’s policy — an excuse really to keep relying on foreign supplied products  — that indigenization would not be at the expense of the “combative edge”. CNS ADM DK Joshi, who followed, however, called Dhowan’s figures in the three indigenization categories “generous”, implying that these percentages in reality were lower — how much lower he didn’t say. He did mention the quite serious deficits in the indigenous efforts in “gas turbine” propulsion, weapons systems, and fire-control systems.  Even with the foreign-supplied whole assemblies, armaments, and so on Dhowan said that 43 of the 45 warships the navy had ordered (with Vikramaditya and another vessel in Russian yards), were under construction in Indian shipyards. This is a solid beginning. DefMin Antony was his usual self — incomprehensible in reading out his prepared speech!

Posted in Defence Industry, DRDO, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Navy, Relations with Russia, russian assistance, South Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Technology transfer | 3 Comments

China’s Tibet handicap

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

China’s attitude to its own security is like the United States’, or of any great power in earlier times. It seeks absolute security, which means absolute insecurity for every other country, especially states in its vicinity. The chimerical nature of absolute security results in ever more aggressive, frenetic, and inventive efforts to achieve it, putting peace at risk in the extended region. India is a laggard in the great power race and, unlike China, defines its national security as territorial defence. Combined with a propensity to appease Beijing, it has resulted in a pitiful approach to tackling the ever-growing Chinese menace.

With such a mindset, there’s seemingly no insult by Beijing that New Delhi isn’t prepared to swallow, no provocation it isn’t willing to ignore, leading to uncontested consolidation of Chinese presence in India’s backyard — the Indian Ocean, and landward in Pakistan and Myanmar. The question arises: Is there anything that will get the Indian government and military to wake up from their self-induced stupor? Maps routinely show land and sea territory belonging to neighbours as Chinese, leading to still bigger claims. The Indian government dutifully protests such cartographic aggression, Beijing makes conciliatory noises without correcting the offending maps, and the issue dies down until the next time when another display of such brazen-ness is detected. This is the Chinese modus operandi to define and legitimate a greater China. India has suffered from this policy as have Southeast Asia and Japan, with the latest map, for instance, encompassing 130 more islands than in the last series of maps. It generates paranoia in Southeast Asia and the Far East, which New Delhi should fashion into a solid front, but hasn’t, believing that would be needlessly provocative.

Map-wise, Tibet constitutes more than half of mainland China and its status is disputable, especially as Chinese maps have depicted Arunachal Pradesh as ‘southern Tibet’. It should long ago have led India to show all of Tibet, including portions of eastern Tibet — the regions of Kham and Amdo merged into five Chinese provinces, in a different colour to indicate its indeterminate status. This map-rejig should have been in lock-step with New Delhi raising the issue of Tibet in bilateral meetings, pointing out that India had accepted Chinese sovereignty but only over the Tibet Autonomous Region, and insofar as Tibet does not enjoy true autonomy, New Delhi is not bound by the old formulation.

Logically, India’s leading an international movement for autonomy in Tibet that the Dalai Lama has campaigned for, should have followed. If, geopolitically, Southeast Asia is the ‘weak underbelly’ of China, the Tibet issue has the potential for ripping apart the Chinese pretence of peaceful assimilation, encouraging other suppressed peoples, like the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, to seek similar distancing from Beijing. Internal dissent and turmoil within China is, from the view of Asian states fearful of irredentist Chinese policies, a good thing to keep a growingly hegemonic Beijing distracted, preoccupied by internal problems.

It will highlight the matter of forcible assimilation of minorities that, in the words of Sun Yatsen, president of the first Chinese Republic of 1911, means ‘rubbing’ them out, which is precisely what the Communist Chinese regime has tried to do. Sixty-odd years of this policy of eliminating the distinct cultural and ethnic identity of Tibetans has bred anger and resulted in unending self-immolations, highlighting the bankruptcy of the Chinese policy of Han-ization. That a stream of young Tibetans — products of Chinese socialism with only distant memories of Lamaist traditions — are willing to kill themselves in this way has alarmed Beijing. The depth of Tibetan disillusionment and despair, the Chinese ruling cabal fears, will spread the discontent to other parts of that country.

The absence of an international response to Hitler’s holocaust against European Jewry still engenders much hand-wringing. The decimation of Tibetan culture and people pricks the international conscience but has so far generated precious little global pressure on Beijing to ‘cease and desist’ its inhumane practices in Tibet. Even the supposedly strongest power, the United States, has done little more than appoint an ornamental special representative for Tibet, even as a much reduced Europe is cowed by the fear of adverse Chinese reaction to any support for the Tibetan cause. India’s failure of nerve to lead the international charge against China on the issue of Tibet is nevertheless a major geostrategic opportunity to hinder Beijing’s march that’s being lost by a diffident New Delhi. It reflects India’s shrunken policy horizon and fear of adverse response. Except, what more can China do to needle India? It has not retreated from its cartographic adventurism. It has vetoed low-interest loans from the Asian Development Bank to fund development projects in Arunachal, persisted with its policy of providing assistance to insurgencies in Assam and the Indian northeast and safe-haven to rebel leaders, such as Paresh Barua, and nuclear missile-armed Pakistan.

In return, the Indian army brass, like the government, pooh-poohs, the Chinese threat, insisting that as long as the borders are inactive, there’s no threat from the north, while talking up distrust of a weak Pakistan. Indian defence secretary Shashi Kant Sharma betakes himself to Beijing for the fifth annual strategic dialogue with China, and agrees on the resumption of joint military exercises with the People’s Liberation Army. Remaining engaged with China in the military sphere is no bad thing if, mirroring the Chinese tack, separate policy streams to seriously handicap China at every turn are also activated — fuelling the movement for a truly autonomous Tibet, ending the neo-colonial trade involving mainly export of Indian iron ore, and upgearing security cooperation with the US, Japan, and the Southeast Asian countries, including deals enabling Indian naval and air presence in the Philippines to bookend similar arrangements with Vietnam.

The Indian government and armed forces have still to appreciate the basic dictum of national security that an adversary is best neutralised far from home shores. Such thinking backed by appropriate force deployments will win New Delhi respect in Beijing, not a knavish attitude and posture.

[Published January 25, 2013 in the ‘New Indian Express’ at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/article1434370.ece.]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Central Asia, China, China military, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, United States, US. | 1 Comment

Baser Instincts at the Border

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

The beheading of Lance Naik Hemraj of the Rajputana Rifles, confirmed by the Army Chief General Bikram Singh on January 14, is an act that strays beyond incomprehensibility and into the area of the unfathomably egregious. The habit of mutilating bodies of slain Indian soldiers, a bizarre throwback to primitive warfare is, of course, giving the Pakistan Army a bad name. If the corpse of Captain Saurabh Kalia (4 Jat Regiment), returned quite literally in pieces after the 1999 Kargil border conflict, could be dismissed as an aberration, the latest such incident suggests a new standard operating procedure for Pakistani troops — ambush Indian soldiers, shoot them dead, lop off their heads to carry back as prize and otherwise disfigure the dead bodies, and scoot back. Where’s honour that the Pakistan Army, like the Indian Army, swears by in such atrocities? A competition in grisly and gruesome actions on the Line of Control could follow. The government was barely able to contain a fully mobilized Indian Army from launching a massed offensive during Operation Parakram after Pakistan-trained militants struck the army camp at Kaluchak in May 2002.  Flag meetings on the LoC notwithstanding, it may not be able to prevent retaliatory actions contravening the Geneva Convention.

As if India and Pakistan did not have trouble enough already in dealing with each other to now have this hugely emotion-stirring problem run bilateral relations that were on an upswing into the ground. The reason for change and optimism was the reading of the trifecta of threats by Pakistan’s rulers. There is (1) the shrinking US and NATO presence in Afghanistan but a sustained “drone war” against terrorist targets within Pakistan that alienates the people, (2) the military, economic, and development aid to the Karzai regime by the West, Iran, and India whittles away Pakistan’s leverage in obtaining a peace accord to its liking; and (3) conventional military-wise and economically India grows stronger, retaining a strong hand in Afghanistan with an assist from Kabul, nursing its old friendship with the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance, and opening lines of communication to sections of the Afghan Taliban. The ending of the US military role in Afghanistan, in the event, would seem to Islamabad to be a mixed blessing. Its involvement in covertly indentifying targets for the American drones to hit has sufficiently riled powerful elements within the Afghan Taliban to make Islamabad really uncomfortable.  Meanwhile, Pakistan’s “all-weather friend”, China, has been noticeably cagey in this period of Pakistan’s toil and trouble. Apprehensive about driving India into a full-fledged entente with the US and Japan, which would blunt the edge Beijing enjoys in dealing with them separately, China even blamed Islamabad for sunni mullahs propagating jihad in the Uighur Muslim province of Xinjiang.

More alarming still from the Pakistani perspective is the near complete breakdown of internal order. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan is waging war against the state and society. The Saudi and Gulf-funded salafi sunni extremist groups, such as the Sipah-e-Sahiba, are mounting pogroms especially against the Hazara shias of Gilgit-Baltistan, thereby violently deepening the sectarian divide in the country, stoking the freedom movement in the Northern Areas, and bringing Iran in support of the beleaguered minority, whence the growing incidence of attacks by suspected armed shia groups against sunni targets.  Pakistan has been turned into a vast free-fire zone.

In this domestic milieu, presided over by the politically weak government of President Asif Zardari, where whatever could possibly go wrong is going wrong, the Pakistan Army Chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, stepped in to firm up the country’s security situation, starting with a bit of plainspeak. In his Independence Day address August 14, 2012 at the Pakistan Military Academy, he declared war on “extremism and terrorism” and challenged the presumed infallibility of the religious zealots and, implicitly, downgraded the threat from India. Taking the cue, Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf talked of reconfiguring Pakistan’s military doctrine at the National Defence University. Espying a glimmer of hope in a reforming Pakistani attitude, New Delhi resumed the “composite talks”, the resolution of the Sir Creek dispute seemed imminent, trade norms were eased, Indian land access to Afghanistan and Central Asia was dangled, India voted for Pakistan to replace it as non-permanent member in the UN Security Council, the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project was sought to be revived, the visa regime was loosened, cultural interaction followed, and then, with the first reports of the beheading, and just like that, wham! the rapprochement process hit a stone wall.

The question is: Will India and Pakistan ever escape their baser instincts to work on their natural affinities, and muster the strategic good sense to ride over the invariable bumps on the road to a necessary peace in the subcontinent that’ll enable India to deal better with China and Pakistan to prosper?

[Featured in India Today, January 28, 2013]

Posted in Afghanistan, Asian geopolitics, Central Asia, China, China military, civil-military relations, Geopolitics, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Army, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Terrorism, United States, US. | 1 Comment

What to do about Pakistan

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

In the wake of the beheading of a slain Indian soldier by 29 Baloch Regiment regulars on the ceasefire line, Air Chief Marshal N.A.K. Browne, Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee, warned about “other options”, implying something stronger by way of a reaction than the usual harrumphing by New Delhi.

Such expectations were toned down by the Army Chief, General Bikram Singh, on January 14, who said the Army would choose the time, place and type of retaliation. This latter statement is actually the right response. The Indian Army will go punitive, do whatever it has to do, whenever it chooses to do it. Provocative acts can be the result of plain cussedness, or bad blood owing to particularly aggressive actions by this or that unit on the LoC, marking it out as an entity to be “dealt with” by units on the other side. Straying soldiers, who would be waved off in more placid times, become targets in these situations. This is an aspect of the blood sport the two Armies have engaged in for the last 42-odd years since the Line of Control (LoC) formally came into existence.

The trouble is that India-Pakistan relations have always occupied the indeterminate grey area between intimacy and enmity. The organic links of kith and kinship, ethnicity, religion, and culture have tied up the two countries in a difficult embrace, and their relations in knots. Reflecting this affinity are the “wars” the Armies of India and Pakistan have fought, which the late Major General D.K. Palit, director, military operations in the 1962 China conflict, memorably described as “communal riots with tanks”. These essentially counter-force engagements are space, time and scale-constrained affairs which, in peacetime, transform into a sort of ill-natured intra-mural blood sport involving the occasional gruesome act, sniper kills and localised special forces-created mayhem.

It is clear that other than the Prime Minister and politicians heading the defence, home and external ministries, the political class generally knows nothing of this reality on the LoC, evidenced in the Opposition demanding Pakistani pound of flesh. This was nothing compared to the bombast in the media, especially the television channels. Swayed as much by ignorance as by the need for tamasha and raised TRPs (television rating points), over-wrought, mindlessly provocative anchors were outdoing even William Randolph Hearst. Hearst, owner of the New York Journal who, with the US intervention in Spanish-held Cuba in mind, in 1897 supposedly told the painter, Frederick Remington, “You furnish the pictures, I will furnish the war”! In the event, Hearst got his Spanish-American War, and Manmohan Singh stopped the rapprochement process in its tracks. “No business as usual”, he said, suspending, in the process, the policy of issuing visas at the border for Pakistanis 60 years or older, driving Pakistani stars out of the Hockey League, and disinviting the Pakistani team to the Women’s World Cup to be held in India later in the year. These measures came into force just as General Headquarters on both sides agreed to strictly observe the ceasefire and the Pakistani foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, mouthed the Congress Party Rajya Sabha MP Mani Shankar Aiyar’s mantra, of dialogue between the two countries to be “uninterrupted and uninterruptible”.

This mantra is right not for the reasons adduced by Aiyar, but rather because the Indian policy establishment is simply not sophisticated or farsighted enough to conceive and conduct a non-linear foreign policy simultaneously prosecuted with different approach and attitude at different levels, with all policy activity driven by a single strategic vision. Aiyar’s view in that sense falls short but is useful to the extent that it seeks normalisation of relations regardless of any disruptive incidents, which is in line with the principle of non-linearity of policy. The Chinese, for instance, are masters of the non-linear, multi-layered approach, and do this so well that India is effortlessly disadvantaged. India’s attempt at prosecuting a multi-level policy, like in the case of Pakistan, is ham-handed and buckles at the first hint of pressure. Thus, the Manmohan Singh government kept aloof from the beheading hullabaloo for some 10 days, saying and doing nothing to suggest that a breakdown of the diplomatic interaction was in the offing, and using IAF Chief Marshal Browne and Gen. Bikram Singh to signal its anger. But then it abruptly capitulated in the face of the media-induced hysteria, exposing once again India’s absence of strategic vision of course, but also the lack of conviction and political will to persist with policy initiatives that New Delhi, in any case, will be compelled to revive after the situation cools down.

This is to say that India’s bilateral relations with Pakistan will, in practice, have to be more nuanced and multi-layered. The composite talks have to be resumed, but larger volumes of trade and commerce between the two countries do not have to depend on the Sir Creek issue being resolved tomorrow, or a solution for the Kashmir dispute being nigh, and neither does the whole slew of interactions in the other spheres — sports meets, the movement of drama troupes and cinema and music stars, and the easing of visa norms to allow freer travel and tourism. None of this means India and Pakistan will see eye to eye on Afghanistan, China, the US, Indian Ocean, or nuclear strategic issues. Even less likely is it to blunt the combative instincts of the Indian and Pakistan militaries. Therefore, there will continue to be tensions, and cross-border firings and inconsequential artillery duels, which should be left to the directors-general, military operations, and flag meetings to deal with. The future of South Asia cannot anymore be hostage to isolated incidents and occurrences involving the Indian and Pakistani Armies.

“[Published January 18, 2013 as “Out of control on line of control” in the Asian Age, at http://keralawww.asianage.com/columnists/out-control-line-control-031 and in the Deccan Chronicle at http://deccanchronicle.com/130118/commentary-columnists/commentary/out-control-line-control ]

Posted in Afghanistan, Asian geopolitics, China, civil-military relations, Great Power imperatives, India's Pakistan Policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Ocean, nonproliferation, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Special Forces, Terrorism, United States | 15 Comments

Redefining India-Pakistan Relations

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Pakistan faces a dissimilar set of existential threats. The sole external threat is clear enough — India. The more alarming threats are internal — regional-aspirational in terms of separatist/secessionist movements (in Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan), and of ethnic-regional assertion (Sindh, the Muttahida Quami Movement in Karachi, and the Seraikis in southern Punjab), and the still greater danger from Islamic terrorism, and are entirely self-inflicted. The religious extremist outfits cultivated at America’s behest during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, 1979-’87, instead of being immediately disbanded and the mujahideen offered peaceful livelihoods, were deployed by the Pakistan Army’s directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence against India in Jammu & Kashmir, with some of them veering off to fight the Americans in Afghanistan. These enterprises having largely failed, the frustrated jihadis have turned on their minders, engulfing the Pakistani state and society in spirals of uncontrollable violence.

The Pakistan state, not so subtly fashioned by the Pakistan Army in its own seemingly inflexible image, has spawned a brittle polity designed to take care of the army’s requirements but otherwise incapable of accommodating provincial interests or meeting the aspirations of the people. With the military, moreover, accounting for 20 per cent of the annual budget in 2012-’13, programmes for socio-economic development remain severely underfunded. The average Pakistani with a large family to feed is left with little choice other than to gift his male children to the Salafi madrassas financed by Saudi and Gulf ‘charities’ where they are fed, clothed, and pickled in sectarian hatred and Wahabi values. At last count, some 30,000 registered madrassas and thousands of unaccounted ones, mass produce youth committed to jihad, who only await more specialised indoctrination and small arms training to take to the field, whether it be against the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, in Waziristan, Indian counter-insurgency units in Kashmir and, now more than ever before, against the agencies of the Pakistani state — principally the Pakistan Army and police — regarded by these newly minted ‘soldiers of Allah’ as zalim for a host of reasons, or against the Shia population, thereby deepening the sectarian divide. It is a country in the process of consuming itself — the first instance of a nation engaged in self-cannibalisation.

The shaken Pakistan Army now faces the raging monster it created but has no good ideas to contain it. In a little noted address at the Pakistan Military Academy on Pakistan’s Independence Day, August 14, last year, General Pervez Ashraf Kayani for the first time and without mincing words talked of home-grown militancy and terrorism as posing the greatest security threat to the nation, and specifically mentioned the need to, in effect, focus national resources and effort on fighting the various armed Lashkars and extremist Islamic gangs. Restoration of internal order is easier said than done, however. Even so the Pakistan political establishment has taken the cue. Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf recently spoke at the National Defence University about the “need to work on a strategy which can comprehensively tackle (terrorism)… (and) to redesign and redefine our military doctrine to achieve this objective”. He also referred to the “nameless and faceless” “non-state actors who are targeting symbols and institutions in a bid to impose their agenda.” Tehreek-Taliban Pakistan threatening to forcefully implement the Sharia in Pakistan, and extend it to India, is not a faceless enemy, but identifying other terrorist outfits would only highlight the Pakistan Army’s role in raising and nurturing them.

This is a climacteric of sorts in India-Pakistan relations. The question is whether the Indian government will muster other than the usual policy of sceptical inaction to any promising development across the border. It is fortuitous that Pakistan is being compelled by domestic factors to become more reasonable where India is concerned. New Delhi can help this positive trend to take root by rolling out policies to reinforce it, as part of a larger strategy to distance Pakistan from China, and break the nexus between them. Such a policy will, moreover, be in line with the Operational Directive issued to the Indian Armed Services in 2009 by defence minister A K Antony instructing them to redirect their main effort China-ward.

If imaginatively handled, this could be the great breakthrough in relations between the two countries with tremendous natural affinities. However, hollow gestures by New Delhi won’t do. Unilateral and substantive actions that are at once low-risk but politically and militarily potent will obtain disproportionate results. For instance, India can unilaterally remove all liquid-fuelled Prithvi missiles with nuclear warheads from the border with Pakistan. This is a zero risk confidence-and-security-building measure because all target sets within that country are in any case covered by the longer range Agni missiles. To insist on reciprocity in such force draw-downs as the government and even Indians participating in track two diplomacy have been doing in the last few years, is a grave mistake because it, in effect, endows Pakistan with parity that it craves but in no way deserves. Unilateral Indian actions in the military and trade spheres and the easing of the visa regime, will create the right momentum (that can survive the localised firing/killing incidents on the Line of Control).

Pakistan’s move to redefine its military doctrine is no small thing and marks an end point of a progression from Ayub Khan’s days when the myth of a Muslim being the equal of scores of Hindus was propagated. (The last believer in such martial nonsense, ironically, seems to be the Andhra MLA Akbaruddin Owaisi) It doesn’t mean that General Headquarters, Rawalpindi, will tomorrow stand down its forces. It does mean that the Pakistan Army — feeling more secure with nuclear weapons in hand — is rethinking its threats and perceives India as less of a danger to Pakistan than the armed religious zealots. It affords India the opportunity to rework its own military stance, emphasising China as both the imminent and immanent threat. Such emphasis will, in turn, raise the Pakistan Army’s comfort level with a more easeful posture of its own. Only good can come from such mutually reinforcing moves.

Published in the ‘New Indian Express’, January 14, 2013 at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/article1420115.ece ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Terrorism | 22 Comments

Don’t talk Charlie Browne, act!

Posted on January 12, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

COAS and chairman, chiefs of staff committee, ACM “Charlie” Browne, for no reason that makes sense, thundered that stronger actions may be resorted to to maintain the sanctity of the ceasefire. For god’s sake, if the military or GOI mean to do something by way of hard retaliation for the mutilation of the bodies of Indian soldiers, please, please, please don’t talk about it. Just do it! But Indians indulge in big talk — it is free!, but don’t follow up with action, as the US does. Act first and don’t talk at all, should be India’s motto — that is what true karm yogis, such as the Israelis do. If as I mentioned in my preceding blog, it is army’s issue to avenge Pakistani misdeeds — well, why are the Special Forces not doing anything? There better be something brewing at the SF-end.  And someone needs to quiet the terrorist loudmouth, Hafiz Saeed.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, India's Pakistan Policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Terrorism | 4 Comments

Pakistan army’s penchant for mutilation and how to deal with it

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

It is either a serious breach of discipline, or it is implementation of a considered policy by the Pakistan army High Command. In either case, it reflects poorly on the Pakistan Army that, until Partition in 1947, was part of the Indian Army that has exalted personal ‘honour’ above all other virtues. It seems to be a deliberate policy because there’s a discernible pattern to the beheadings, the gouging out of eyes, the cutting off of genitals dating from the Kargil skirmish, which evidenced the extreme brutality visited upon Captain Kalia, by the Northern Light Infantry intruders, revealing a regression to primitive warfare.  In the latest incident in the Sona Gali area of Poonch, variously the 22 Baloch, the 29 Baloch, and the Special Service Group commando, have been held responsible for the barbarity. (There is even talk of the terrorist LeT being part of the raiding party working under Pakistan Army aegis that actually committed the atrocity, though this story seems to be a belated Pakistani attempt to distance the army from this heinous act.) That several different regiments are talked of as having engaged in such inhumane practices suggests that a policy of mutilation was carried out by Pakistan Army soldiers  under orders. May be, the Pakistan Army action was in retaliation for one of its jawans killed in the Uri sector two days previous. But that does not justify the post-death horrors inflicted on the bodies of the slain Indian troopeers.

Islamabad certainly jumped on the opportunity to get the UN involved in a Kasmir-related issue, setting a trap by getting India to agree to the UN Military Obesrver Group for India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP)  investigating and judging the veracity of what Pakistan claims are mere allegations of mutilation. Fortunately, GOI did not fall for this ruse. India has paid a heavy price for involving the UN in 1948 when it could easily have taken back all of J&K, including the Northern Areas (Gilgit and Baltistan) under Pakistni occupation, but Nehru sought UN intervention instead in the expectation of a fair verdict requiring Pakistan to vacate all the areas previously part of the erstwhile princely state of J&K that had acceded to the Indian Union. That didn’t happen, and India has been discommoded ever since.

That leaves the Indian Army to mete out condign punishment in any manner it chooses below the bilateral relations-diplomatic radar. This the Indian Army, hopefully, will do. After all, what is the Special Forces commando, penny-packeted as force reserve with the GOC-in-C, Northern Command meant for other than to mount, among other things,  severe punitive missions on such occasions? Meanwhile, Indian TV comperes frothing at the mouth should wipe the foam of their lips, calm down, and the GOI get back to the normalization talks. This is an issue between the armies — a bit of intra-mural blood sport the two forces have been indulging in since the Line of Control came into being in J&K. The Indian Army will do whatever it has in mind to do, in its own time, to exact a heavy enough cost on its Pakistani counterpart for the latter to rethink its policy of excess.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, India's Pakistan Policy, Indian Army, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Special Forces, Terrorism | 16 Comments

No Churning on China

Posted on January 5, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

No churning on China

Situation awareness is a prime tactical, operational and strategic level military attribute and also, one assumes, a quality equally prized by politicians who need to be sensitive about every fold in an unravelling situation. In the military sphere, situation awareness has hardware and software components. Sensors of all kinds on land, sea and air-borne platforms and satellites, such as radars, infra-red and high resolution photo-imagery, etc. comprise the hardware. Common sense accounts for the basic software and demands nothing more than an awareness of the world around us. The year 2012 ended with evidence of the different levels of this awareness at which the Indian government and the individual armed services find themselves.

But first let’s set the context. In 2009, the defence minister issued an operational directive to the three services headquarters stating, reasonably, that China was the country’s main security threat. The directive thus issued required the military to now wheel their big guns, ships and aircraft China-ward. Three years on this hasn’t happened. The Army and the Air Force continue to concentrate their effort on the Western border; the Navy likewise, but less conspicuously, justifies its “North Arabian Sea” tilt, except it now touts piracy as an operational consideration. In effect, the Indian military’s effort and capabilities are majorly tuned to dealing with the inconvenience posed by Pakistan, which in reality is more a nuisance than a genuine military threat. (True, a militarily inferior adversary can effectively utilise terrorism, but to squash a pestiferous fly an elephant gun may be inappropriate, given the potential collateral damage, when a rolled-up newspaper — targeted intelligence operations — may serve the purpose better.) It means that the military is willfully ignoring a straightforward order from the government perhaps because it finds it hard to tear away from the rationale that the Pakistan threat provides for the plains warfare-heavy weapons profile — in particular, vast armoured and mechanised formations and an inventory full of short-legged and medium-range aircraft — of the services. But also because when the armed forces look around, they see a government that, far from walking the talk, seeks desperately to placate Beijing, striving at every turn to remove from the official Chinese mind even smidgeons of doubt about New Delhi’s “peaceful” intentions. Zhongnanhai (the complex of building in central Beijing housing the Chinese policy establishment) has only to raise its eyebrow for the Indian government to fall to its knees, ready to kowtow to China.

But reality has to be faced and, much as everybody would like to keep bashing the Pakistanis, there’s China to be reckoned with. Rapidly enlarging itself, its political role, its military capabilities, its presence in the extended areas far from its home shores, China now demands attention. The question is not whether or not to appease China because India’s record in the last few years is damning enough. Going back in history, reacting to the first calls by Hitler for amalgamation of Czech Sudentenland into Germany — a brazen grab at lebensraum (territorial space for the natural expansion of a vigorous nation) — was deemed prudent politics in the mid-1930s but tipped over into unacceptable appeasement at Munich in 1939 by Neville Chamberlain, who promised “peace in our time”. Nobody now contends that Munich was anything else than abject surrender. Historical parallels are often loosely discerned, but the similarities between the Sudentenland crisis and the Chinese claims on almost all of the free seas off the southern Chinese coast, a pitch for a maritime lebensraum no less, cannot be missed. The best spin one can put on New Delhi’s China policy is that the Congress Party is too scared to spell out India’s strategic stakes, and too blinded by its desire to buy time with an authoritarian-state capitalist system in Beijing to consider the costs of doing so.

It is in this setting that the year-ending incident involving the two service Chiefs makes for stark evidence of appeasement at work. Naval Chief Adm. D.K. Joshi’s warning that any attempt by Chinese vessels to board Indian warships would be thwarted with counter-actions that the Indian Navy has been practising was instantly negated by New Delhi attempting to first compel Adm. Joshi to backtrack, failing which for national security adviser Shivshankar Menon, in Beijing at the time, to emphasise cravenly the need to respect Chinese “sensitivities” and to issue a curious statement saying Adm. Joshi was “misled” by the press. Predictably, the ministry of external affairs piled on, urging “restraint” on the Indian military. The Army Chief, Gen. Bikram Singh, then stepped in helpfully with the kind of statement the government presumably welcomes. Disregarding geostrategics and the 450-odd trans-border military “incidents” that took place on the disputed India-China border last year, he pronounced Sino-Indian relations to be “absolutely perfect”, thereby revealing the senior service’s alarming lack of situation awareness. Gen. Singh seemingly bought into the government line, which is content with pointing faintly at the foe but not keen for the armed services to follow up with appropriate measures, like taking their main bearings from a manifestly more dangerous and challenging enemy, China, and moving away from the near-idiotic military preoccupation with Pakistan, an idée fixe that has over the years reduced the regional and international reputation and standing of the Indian armed forces.

Governments come and go, but the great Indian military is the nation’s constant guardian and in lieu of a strategic mindset of the government, it is the armed forces that need to develop one and order their priorities accordingly. Because when push comes to shove with China, the Indian politicians and bureaucrats will not be there to take the blame.

[Published January 4, 2013 in the Asian Age at www.asianage.com/columnists/no-churning-china-401 and in the Deccan Chronicle at www.deccanchronicle.com/130104/columnists/commentary/no-churning-china ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Cyber & Space, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East | 19 Comments

Chandigarh Meet downloads

Posted on December 16, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

The Seminar organizers are having some difficulty uploading viodeo on YouTube and have given the sites below for the feeds for those interested.

Part One  http://www.adrive.com/public/ET74vh/IndiaChinaNov2012A.mpg

Part Four http://www.adrive.com/public/DYR7g7/IndiaChinaNov2012D.mpg

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, civil-military relations, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia | 5 Comments

Chandigarh Meet — Malik, Karnad, Tipnis, Madhav

Posted on December 14, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

For those interested in a video, I believe,  (or, it may just be audio) record — the first part — of the Nov 25, 2012 Seminar hosted by the Centre for Strategy and Security, Chandigarh, on ‘Ïndia and China:  Five decades after the 1962 Sino-Indian War’ featuring General Ved Malik, Air Chief Marshal Anil Tipnis, Bharat Karnad, and Ram Madhav available at www.adrive.com/public/BESTeB/IndiaChinaNov2012A

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, civil-military relations, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia | 1 Comment