Gandhian Guerilla

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

‘‘ ‘Twas in truth an hour Of universal ferment; mildest men”, wrote William Wordsworth in his moving poem on the French Revolution, “Were agitated; and Commotions, strife, Of passions and opinion fill’d the walls Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds The soil of common life was at that time Too hot to tread upon.”

Last week, the common man in India experienced, perhaps, a bit of the excitement that must have gripped Parisiennes and provincials alike in revolutionary France as Anna Hazare brought the Congress Party-led coalition government to its knees. Long used to the comforts of power in a system gilded by corruption it has helped entrench in the country and to popularize among the political class, the Congress party, its coalition partners, the opposition, all nervously hope the extant system somehow survives. But, the Hazare protest gathered critical mass around the country as young and old, sensing the purity of his motive, mobilized behind the 72 year old ex-Army Havaldar.  The initial dismissal of his fast by Kapil Sibal and Abhishek Singhvi, as yet another Jantar Mantar tamasha, turned in short order into abject acceptance of Hazare’s terms – an adjustment in sync with the gathering, but entirely unanticipated, storm.

The Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi apparently weighed the political cost of obduracy against the uncertain outcome of the proposed Jan Lokpal Bill process, and opted prudently for the latter. Sibal believed the Hazare phenomenon was a hollow “media creation”, but nudged by Law Minister Veerappa Moily Prime Minister Manmohan Singh fell in line. The government, however, expects that as co-chair of the joint civil society-government committee drafting the Lokpal Bill, the crafty Pranab Mukherji will cut a deal that will retain for those so inclined among the politically privileged and the armies of facilitator bureaucrats the “perks” of bribe-taking and thievery on the side. All the while, Dr. Singh, who has seen at close quarters how the system has been milked by its minders, predictably sidestepped responsibility. Like Herod, he washed his hands off the mess – the umpteenth time he has done this — by mouthing insincere banalities, such as: “[Corruption] is a scourge that confronts us all.”

By the end of the second day of the fast, it became clear that Hazare was no religious rightwing religious stooge as Singhvi had implied, and that his personalized fight against omniscient corruption had touched a raw public nerve and was fast snowballing into an uncontrollably bad situation for the Congress party. But critics questioned the legitimacy of Hazare’s tactics, railing against the dangers of lawlessness and disorder inherent in seeking system and course correction outside Parliament. Behind the joyous, optimistic, resolute, but determinedly peaceful Movement at Jantar Mantar, it was darkly hinted, hid Jacobin terrors. Such hyperbollicised commentaries missed the obvious.

Anna Hazare is a throwback to the genuine Gandhian, to an age when the Mahatma’s fasts brought British India to a screeching halt even as the colonial authority fretted impotently. The Indian government some seventy years later seems no better equipped to tackle such methods. Hazare’s track record of persuading authorities to comply with demands for probity in public life, combined with a guerrilla sensibility – his insistence that all proceedings of the Joint Committee be videographed was a brilliant move to cut off all avenues of escape and dissimulation by the government – makes him a formidable political protagonist but not a latter day Indian avatar of Maximillien Robespierre, who as head of the dreaded “Committee for Public Safety” unleashed the Jacobin “Reign of Terror” in France of 1792.

Gandhian methods are deeply unsettling to those presiding over the extant order as well as to outsiders who have learned to pull the strings, in the main, because of their unpredictable consequences. Hazare admitted he had not foreseen the mass appeal of his fast-unto-death. But it has spawned unease. Liberal sceptics — in some ways the counterpart of the Girondists in the French Revolution, fear that system overhaul induced by pressures from the street, would cause ruction and instability, undermine the “democratic” functioning of the state, and put the country a step closer to mob rule. Their cry that if Hazare wants change he should contest parliamentary elections, begs the question: How does a reformer get elected without being contaminated by the system and relying on money power and, in any case, as a collective can Parliament sever its moorings and pass laws to banish corrupt practices?  The futile four decade long wait and that too for an Anti-Corruption Bill with more loopholes than restraints, suggests otherwise.

The larger question is the one involving the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion that animated the likes of Robespierre of sovereignty resting with the “General Will” of the people. Mature democracies have evolved to a point where elected legislatures do reflect such Will. In India, once elected, representatives by and large join the ruling class of self-aggrandizers supported by an administrative and legal system that fans their worst instincts. To imagine that the remedies for grave social, economic, and political ills afflicting the country will be generated by this lot is to expect too much.

In the event, Hazare manifests the “General Will” of the people, and his promise of future agitations to shame politicians and compel the system to right itself, may be no bad thing. Indeed, his civil society campaign serves as precisely the check and balance, that Constitutionalists crave, against the venality and “grab as grab can” mentality of many of our elected rulers and their minions in the bureaucracy. True, some of his civil society allies may have dubious antecedents, but they are nowhere as critical to realizing his agenda as Hazare himself. The enduring impact on the polity of his campaign will depend on how it conditions the attitude of the masses to the imperatives of good governance. At a minimum, the youthful activists will be able to recall in tones mirroring Wordsworth’s awe: “Bliss was it in the dawn to be alive But to be young was very heaven!”

[Published in ‘The Asian Age’ & ‘The Deccan Chronicle’, April 14, 2011, at www.asianage.com/columnists/gandhian-guerilla-540 ]

Posted in Indian Politics, Internal Security | Leave a comment

Weak PM, Limp Policy

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

Dr. Manmohan Singh, by his own reckoning, is “an accidental prime minister”. That he has no leadership credentials worth talking about, is not a surprise. Install a career economic bureaucrat — he has been successively adviser to the commerce minister, economic adviser to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi – reward for supporting the Emergency, deputy chairman, planning commission, finance secretary, governor, Reserve Bank of India, and financé minister — at 7, Race Course Road, and what you get is Dr Singh, the perfect stopgap PM – something the Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi apparently desired. He has all the obvious virtues. He willingly takes dictation, uncomplainingly accepts everyday humiliations heaped on him as a nominated PM without a political base or constituency, by hard-bitten politicians and cabinet colleagues, and is ready to vacate his post in a trice.

The trouble is Dr Singh’s reputation as the Great Economic Reformer is also bogus. As a senior economic ministry official present at the meetings recalls, when he was asked by Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao in 1992 to produce a “revolutionary” budget, Manmohan Singh offered a draft that was “budget as usual”. An infuriated Mr. Rao, threw down the document and curtly ordered his finance minister to do what was asked of him, namely, configure a scheme to dismantle the license-permit raj and connect the Indian economic system to the globalizing economy. Luckily for his reputation, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s initiative worked, and Dr Singh acquired the halo.

It is revealing that in his so far seven years stewardship of the nation, Dr. Singh has not progressed the country beyond the 1992 liberalization threshold. Promises apart, there have been no second stage economic reforms, no revision of labour laws, no new land acquisition norms, no easing of  the bureaucratized functioning of the state to enable business and industry to really take-off and produce wealth for the country (as has happened in China), no nothing. Par for the course, because Dr Manmohan Singh does best when he is given orders that he can implement, but there’s no Narasimha Rao to provide guidance and take political responsibility, only a fractious National Advisory Council running interference, speaking at will, in different tongues, and advancing disparate mainly statist agendas under the aegis of Sonia Gandhi, who has nothing to offer Dr. Singh by way of policy direction or content. Absent a sustained push by the government, such traction as the hugely innovative Indian industrial and business sectors were able to generate, could be maintained for only so long. Predictably, the previously high economic growth rate Dr. Singh ballyhooed to cover up for his do-nothing approach, has dipped to the 7.2% level, and slumping.

With Manmohan Singh at the helm, the inevitable has come to pass elsewhere as well. With the central political will and programmatic thrust missing, foreign and national security policies have, for some time now, been auto-piloting into the doldrums. An opinionated National Security Adviser – M.K. Narayanan, who knew little about strategic issues, understood even less, but had strong views about everything and was particularly susceptible to  American flattery and blandishments that secured for the US the nuclear deal, was replaced by the smooth-talking Shiv Shankar Menon, who was ushered into the post straight from the Foreign Secretary’s seat. At External Affairs, meanwhile, Minister S.M. Krishna spends more time, it is said, adjusting his wig in his vast office than in running the Ministry, assuming he is aware of what his senior officers are up to. This last cannot be vouched for because NSA Menon at the PMO continues to run foreign policy, in the main, because Nirupama Rao, who succeeded him simply does not have the gumption to cut him off. The result is one of the weakest MEA setups in years – an out-of-his-depth Minister relying on a Foreign Secretary with a not so stellar career graph overseeing satraps manning the regional desks who are conflicted but wary enough to also report to the NSA. In all these shenanigans, what’s missing are any clear directives from the Prime Minister, the PMO, or even the NSA. Having barely survived the civilian nuclear deal with the United States in 2008 and then stepping into a storm he had unwittingly unleashed at home owing to concessions he allegedly made to his Pakistani counterpart, Reza Gilani, at Sharm al-Sheikh, Manmohan Singh is in no mood to take chances.

On the other side of South Block, sits the Defence Minister, the very proper A.K. Antony, Buddha-like, mouthing Boy Scout homilies to military commanders, working on a one-point principle: No defence deal with the slightest trace of corruption. In the event, the well-oiled payoffs system has gone deeper underground, doling out rewards to helpful uniformed Service officers and Defence Ministry officials alike. Alas, how can a bordello do business with the Madame insisting there can be no hanky-panky?  It has eventuated in purchases of, for instance, the M-4777 howitzer from the US Foreign Military Sales programme where Washington plays the middleman. Except India has ended up with less effective artillery to outfit the new offense-capable Mountain Divisions at a higher price than the light, long-range gun Singapore Kinetics Limited, blacklisted for minor bribery, had offered, inclusive of simulators and assembly line relocated to India at no additional cost.

As the government lurches from scam to scandal and Manmohan twiddles his thumbs, Home Minister C. Chidambaram, sensing the vacuum, has busily extended his turf, managing to make himself at once the intelligence and the internal security czar. Except his bureaucratic empire-building has not produced results. The National Intelligence Grid (Natgrid) is only partially functional because the reluctance of the intelligence agencies to share information hides behind flaws in the system interlinks. The National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC), some three years after 26/11 is still at the talking stage, a “concept paper” doing the rounds, Chidambaram doing nothing to inject a sense of urgency into the proceedings. On the Naxal front there is desultory operations underway, except with army encampments especially in Jharkhand and Chattisgarh portions of the “red corridor” – the one big innovation and success story, Maoist excesses are tapering off in that region, signal for the concerned agencies of government to slip into infructuous debates, for instance, over whether and how to employ combat aircraft in anti-Naxal operations, which has the Air Force fuming. But, didn’t the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal S.P. Tyagi, pitching for the Hawk jet trainer some years back, justify this multi-billion dollar acquisition from Britain on the basis that this aircraft could also be deployed in the COIN (COunter INsurgency) role?

Half way into its second term, the UPA-II government is paralyzed and the country’s foreign and external and internal security policies are in a state of petrified animation. A non-functioning PM, a laid back External Affairs Minister, a corruption-fixated Defence Minister, and an aggrandizing Home Minister, may make for a dramatic tableau, but not for successful policy or effective governance.

[Published in ‘The New Indian Express’, June 16, 2011, at http://expressbuzz/op-ed/opinion/weak-pm-limp-policy/284622.html ]

Posted in Great Power imperatives, India's Pakistan Policy, Indian Army, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Military Acquisitions | Leave a comment

Nuclear borderline

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

Ever year, come January the Indian and Pakistani governments exchange lists of nuclear facilities (along with their coordinates), that each side undertakes not to attack in case of hostilities. Presumably, new power stations and other sensitive nuclear military-related installations are added to the lists as and when these go on stream. This is a civilized way of dealing with an adversarial fellow nuclear weapons-state. It provides some assurance that, even in the most volatile situations, neither government will slip in actions to make bad situations infinitely worse. It is an aim that’ll be furthered by the Foreign Secretaries presently meeting in Islamabad discussing other nuclear confidence-building measures (CBMs) and, more importantly, ways to foster links between the Indian and Pakistani militaries.

That vulnerable nuclear power stations provide attractive military targets  is an issue I have plumbed in my writings. It was a problem that troubled NATO and Warsaw Pact member-states during the Cold War for which the protagonists found no solution such as the one India and Pakistan have devised. Bennett Ramberg, a sometime official in the George W Bush Administration, in the 1970s had first voiced the danger of nuclear power plants located in or near Western European cities proving high-value targets in the first wave of Soviet attacks were the Cold War to turn hot.

In the subcontinental context, the worrisome question is this: Notwithstanding any agreement with India prohibiting such strikes, will the Pakistan army be able to resist the temptation of hitting or holding hostage proliferating Indian nuclear power stations per Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s ill-thought out plan to produce 40,000 MW of nuclear energy by 2050? Indeed, considering the disproportionate payoffs that could accrue to Pakistan, not so much from taking them out as holding these power plants hostage to “good behaviour” on the battlefield, meaning, India’s not exploiting, say, such advantage as has been obtained by its conventional forces.  Assuming GHQ, Rawalpindi, will not pass up this stratagem in war, it is best Indian war planners take such a contingency seriously.

What is the best antidote to such thinking? Construct a string of nuclear power plants at sites along the border with Pakistan so as to neutralize the remotest chance of the Pakistan Nuclear Command Authority considering such strikes in the first place.  The reasons why Pakistan will shrink from attacking nuclear power plants on the border are obvious enough. There is no way of guaranteeing that the plumes of radioactivity arising from damaged nuclear power stations will not drift across to affect the Pakistani heartland of the Punjab. This prospect will also deter Pakistan from launching missile salvos at bunched reactors in the Indian hinterland, because should Pakistan opt for “total war”, the more reactors on the border the better, paradoxically, the chance these will not be hit.  The other reason Pakistan will desist from striking nuclear power plants is that it has a number of the Chinese-built nuclear complexes at Chashma and Khushab, and the civilian nuclear power plant in Karachi that are readily available as targets. The certainty of like response to Indian reactors being struck will incentivize the Pakistan army and its directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence to keep close tabs on the terrorist outfits they have nurtured lest, in their zeal, they mount such an attack and start an affray that will end up costing Pakistan dearer than anything Pakistani strikes can inflict.

The Nuclear Power Corporation Ltd. has already identified several sites in Indian Punjab to host high-yield nuclear power plants. Rajasthan and Gujarat too have been scouted for this purpose. It will not be difficult to tweak the plans a bit to ensure that most of these reactors are located in the border zone. Who can deny Punjab, Rajasthan, and Gujarat, need nuclear power? This strategy will turn potential nuclear hostages for Pakistan into counter-hostages against Pakistan within this country.  Such ruses may seem hard and bloody-minded to the Nervous Nellies populating the Indian government at the political leadership and bureaucratic levels, and, perhaps, even the Indian armed services (not to mention the Commentariat in the Indian media). But, as history shows, preparing for the worst usually prevents the worst from happening — a lesson India seems terminally incapable of learning.

In the nuclear context, it is not clear what additional CBMs Nirupama Rao and Salman Bashir discussed. But Raja Menon and Lalit Mansingh, involved in officially-sponsored Track-II dialogue, have revealed one particular issue that, perhaps, was on the agenda, to do with the mutual withdrawal of the early generation short-range ballistic missiles – Prithvi-I, Abdali, Ghaznavi.  The trouble with formalizing reciprocal actions using a diplomatic agreement is that it accords Pakistan parity with India in the nuclear realm that Islamabad has been seeking for many years, and sets a precedent. As part of second-stage CBMs, for instance, it will hugely complicate arriving at mutually acceptable nuclear force-size and quality levels considering that the Indian strategic deterrent is primarily keyed to the China threat, and Pakistan’s fears are India-centric.

It would have more advisable if, as I have advocated in my 2002 book — Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security: The Realist Foundations of Strategy,  India had unilaterally withdrawn the nuclearized Prithvi-I batteries from deployed status on the western border, as a means of diluting Pakistan’s mistrust and inspiring confidence. This symbolically and politically potent gesture would have reassured the Pakistan army and people without India in any way conceding an equal nuclear status for Pakistan. Moreover, it would have been a safe thing to do because all potential target-sets within Pakistan can be reached by the longer range Agni missiles fired from hinterland launch points.

The fact is positioning the Prithvi-I at the forward edge of the battlefield – whichever genius thought that up — is a damn fool idea; worse, an obvious tripwire neither the existing situation nor the correlation of forces warrant. That the Indian government actually ordered such deployment and it has been in place for over a decade suggests a void in official thinking where substantive nuclear military knowledge ought to be.

[Published in ‘The Asian Age’ & ‘The Deccan Chronicle’ on June 23, 2011, at www.asianage.com/columnists/nuclear-borderline-071 ]

Posted in India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons | Leave a comment

A Flying Lemon

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

The anger and angst in Washington policy circles when the US fighter planes — the Lockheed Martin F-16IN and the Boeing F-18 Super Hornet — did not make it to the Indian Air Force’s Medium-range Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) shortlist was something to behold. It was as if a done deal had been ditched by an ungrateful Indian government reneging on rewards promised the United States for the latter’s efforts in easing India’s entry on to the verandah of the five-country nuclear weapons club – the self-appointed guardians of the global order, and putting it outside the pale of the technology sanctions regime overseen by the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

The American incomprehension with the Indian decision is itself incomprehensible. Lockheed and Boeing actually believed they could win the MMRCA race with products of late Sixties vintage jazzed up with a downgraded Raytheon APG-79 (or even a de-rated “81”) version of the Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar. The Indian Air Force is not the most advanced, its leadership has its limitations, but damned if it doesn’t know when it is being palmed off with goods long past their sell-by date. It didn’t help that, as enticement, Lockheed offered a “one for one” replacement for the F-16, a decade or two from now, with the Joint Strike Fighter – F-35 Lightning II – the Company is in the process of rolling out to its customers, and which aircraft is precisely the kind the IAF would have loved to fly in early to mid-21st century. As it turned out, the French Rafale and the EADS Typhoon Eurofighter more nearly fit the bill.

To my consternated acquaintances in Washington, who sought an explanation, I offered an analogy. Some two decades back, the Daimler-Benz car Company entered the Indian market with older Mercedes models, perhaps, convinced that the cash-rich yokels would splash good money for anything with the three cornered star on the bonnet. The cars, by and large, remained unsold and the investment in production jigs and tools in their factory in Pune went waste. The German Company quickly made course correction, revamped its operations until now when the newest model cars available in Dusseldorf can be found in Delhi showrooms.

Had the US the wit to dangle the F-35, the IAF would have snapped it up with the US-friendly Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hurrahing the decision along. The American Companies opted instead to squeeze some last few dollars out of the long running F-16s and F-18s at the end of their useful life, and paid the price for it. But why are the Americans squawking? The Indian government has tried to pacify the US defence industry by buying the heavy lift transport plane, the  C-17, the military rationale for which purchase is weak, and for C-130s the smaller, more versatile, transport aircraft, which IAF should have bought more of. Indeed, 20-25 C-130s could have been bought for the $4.5 billion price tag of ten C-17s. The point is the total monies expended for these two aircraft will equal, even exceed, the initial $11 billion cost of the MMRCA.  With the MiG-35 rejected, the Russians too have been mollified by the multi-billion dollar contract for joint development of the 5th generation fighter.

That aspect apart, the addition of three new lines for servicing and support of the chosen MMRCA, C-17 and C-130 to the existing separate infrastructures in place to maintain 27 other types of aircraft already in the air force inventory, will mean the immeasurable worsening of an already unmanageable logistics setup. This apparently does not concern the IAF brass and even less the generalist bureaucrats manning the Defence Ministry, who are habitually clueless about anything remotely military-technical, but whose “advice” the Raksha Mantri relies on to make decisions!

A slight digression this, but the C-17s are expected to be tasked, per IAF’s rationale, to carry tanks to forward battlefields – one tank to a plane — with China. But experts who know about aircraft and have visited Daulat Beg Oldi, Thoise and other forward bases reasonably claim that landing the C-17 in any of these places would strip the surface of the existing air fields. Then again, does the Army really plan on deploying heavy tanks by air to fight the Chinese on the Himalayan uplands, when there’s the relatively easier land route via the ‘Demchok Triangle’ for such armoured vehicles to debouch on to the Tibetan plateau? And, in any case, shouldn’t the Defence Research & Development Organization and the Avadi tank factory be forward-looking enough to design a light, more lethally armed, tank for offensive warfare by the Light Mountain Divisions in the high-altitude desert conditions of Tibet? A slight digression this, but the C-17s are expected to be tasked, per IAF’s rationale, to carry tanks to forward battlefields – one tank to a plane — with China. But experts who know about aircraft and have visited Daulat Beg Oldi, Thoise and other forward bases reasonably claim that landing the C-17 in any of these places would strip the surface of the existing air fields. Then again, does the Army really plan on deploying heavy tanks by air to fight the Chinese on the Himalayan uplands, when there’s the relatively easier land route via the ‘Demchok Triangle’ for such armoured vehicles to debouch on to the Tibetan plateau? And, in any case, shouldn’t the Defence Research & Development Organization and the Avadi tank factory be forward-looking enough to design a light, more lethally armed, tank for offensive warfare by the Light Mountain Divisions in the high-altitude desert conditions of Tibet?

But to return to the deals for the American transport aircraft that are connected to the MMRCA decision, isn’t a biggish fleet of multi-purpose C-130s better suited generally for logistics purposes than a few very large military cargo carriers? Unless the idea is to placate both the Boeing Company by buying the C-17s and the Lockheed Company by  going in for the C-130s. Then again, the Indian government seems to be in the business of sustaining foreign defence industries. To the list of Russian, French and  Israeli defence industries prospering from Indian largesse, one can now include the US defence industry.

But to return to the deals for the American transport aircraft that are connected to the MMRCA decision, isn’t a biggish fleet of multi-purpose C-130s better suited generally for logistics purposes than a few very large military cargo carriers? Unless the idea is to placate both the Boeing Company by buying the C-17s and the Lockheed Company by  going in for the C-130s. Then again, the Indian government seems to be in the business of sustaining foreign defence industries. To the list of Russian, French and  Israeli defence industries prospering from Indian largesse, one can now include the US defence industry. That aspect apart, the addition of three new lines for servicing and support of the chosen MMRCA, C-17 and C-130 to the existing separate infrastructures in place to maintain 27 other types of aircraft already in the air force inventory, is now mandated. That this will immeasurably worsen an already unmanageable logistics setup, seems not to concern anybody, not the Air Force brass dominated by combat fliers, not the generalist bureaucrats manning the Defence Ministry, who are clueless  about anything remotely military-technical, but whose “advice” the Raksha Mantri relies on to make decisions.

This brings the discussion to the two favoured aircraft – the French Rafale and the EADS (European Aeronautic Defence and Space) Company’s Typhoon. Whatever the merits/de-merits of these two planes, the fact is the sale to India will save either the Dassault Company and the French aviation sector from going under or throw a lifeline to the four country European consortium producing the Typhoon that an expert acquaintance dismissed as an aircraft “Germany doesn’t want, Britain can’t afford, and Spain and Italy neither want nor can afford!” Given the record of visionless and spineless Indian negotiators, who are either bought off or are satisfied with near nothings, such as technology licensing arrangements, there is every likelihood that, despite being in an advantageous position, India will end up getting a raw deal.

[Published in ‘The Asian Age’& ‘The Deccan Chronicle’, May 26, 2011, at www.asianage.com/columnists/bharat-karnad-067]

Posted in Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Relations with Russia, Strategic Relations with the US & West | Leave a comment

Terror of Apathy

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

The terror bombings in Mumbai – by now a periodic occurrence – are like the cyclones that hit India’s east coast every other year which nobody can do much about. Like in earlier instances, this time around too, it has engendered the usual mea culpas of “There was failure but we’ll do better next time”-kind accompanied by the sight of befuddled politicians and frowning, file-carrying, bureaucrats scurrying about accomplishing much of nothing. Is there any excuse for the lack of in-built redundancy in the communications net that had the Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chauhan cut off from the various security agencies for the critical quarter of an hour and more after the carnage started, forcing him to rely on television reports to clue him to the bombings?

Chauhan in Mumbai and Manmohan Singh in New Delhi and everybody in between in position of authority ended up one way or another blaming “the system” for the failure, as if the “system” was something separate from those manning and presiding over it. Political leaders form the core and are apex level decision-makers.  But as the record of sustained misgovernance and non-governance that is increasingly becoming the norm shows, they are more interested in wringing lucre and political advantage out of it, than doing the people or the country any good. While entirely responsible for the mess they have created, they are loath to own up to failure, leave alone face punishment. So, mistakes, muddles, mayhem, malfeasance, scams, scandals, rail accidents, and horrid infrastructure are all readily attributed to weaknesses in “the system” as are the outcomes of deliberate acts of omission and commission by them. The resulting unpredictable, personalised, and ad hoc functioning of government and police agencies, in fact, is what marks out India, notwithstanding the hoo-ha about its being a big emerging market and potential great power, as just another run-of-the-mill disorganized and mismanaged Third World state in no way meriting a place amongst the elite nations.

How much of a Third World state? Well, comparing India and Pakistan using the “Failed States Index 2011”-data provides perspective sorely lacking in most analyses. Pakistan is ranked 12th in the list of failed states topped by Somalia, Chad, and Sudan in the seventh edition of this Index released last month in Washington, DC. This is an improvement over its 9th place finish in 2009. India is ranked 76th – actually dropping down three places from 79th a year ago. Pakistan earns its dubious honour owing to what is judged to be “poor” quality of civil service and police resulting in bad administration and even worse law and order situation, and “weak” political leadership and judiciary.  More specifically, as regards “group grievance” which accounts for violence and strife in society, and insurgency and secessionism, on a scale of 10, Pakistan scores 9.3 to India’s 8.2 – not that much behind a country habitually referred by the Indian political class and the commentariat as a “failed state”. The two countries are both rated 8.5 where “uneven development” is concerned, and graded about the same in the quality of their “public services” – 7.3 for Pakistan to 7.2 for India.  On the whole though, Pakistan is deemed to be in “critical” condition and India is declared “borderline”.

Just why India barely passes muster is best explained by considering what the Indian and state governments have not done since the 26/11 terror strike. Nearly three years on, few of the recommendations for streamlining intelligence gathering and dissemination, upgrading police capabilities, and structural reforms in the law and order apparatus have actually been implemented, with the decision processes mired in turf battles and bureaucratic wrangling. Such actions as were realized like acquiring armed armoured boats for Mumbai inshore water policing, for instance, has been  neutered by not providing adequate fuel for patrolling and allowing these expensive assets to rot. The problem at one level is the sheer multiplicity of organizations and agencies tasked with the same job without a clear authority line. It has led to each of these units working, if at all, at cross purposes with the others. It is a perfect setup for “pass the buck and blame”-game that invariably follows in a crisis. It permits everybody to escape accountability.  With the Congress Party both running Maharashtra and ruling in Delhi, in theory, there ought to be less reason for the official haplessness on display as was the case after the 26/11 attack and, again, in the wake of the July 13 terror bombings. In practice, it does not matter. Mumbai may as well be another country.

P. Chidambaram, the Union Home Minister, about as effective as the Maharashtra Home Minister R.R. Patil, was elevated to the sole command over all internal security programs and the plethora of Intelligence outfits. Despite being aware of the immanence of the terrorist threat, he has not thought it necessary to order the line agencies into realizing on the double – and no nonsense about it — corrective measures, such as the national grid for intelligence information, he had accorded priority after 26/11.  However, the NATGRID that was supposed to be the one point source for authoritative and continually updated information Central and State police and other relevant agencies can access and act on in real-time basis is still only an abstraction, providing grist for inter-agency squabbles. The formal excuse is that the Paper outlining this information coordination and diffusion mechanism is being evaluated. But shouldn’t Chidambaram have cracked the whip and brought closure to this interminable file-pushing and fighting  a long time back?

This brings the discussion to the nub of the problem: the unwillingness of ministers and political leaders in the loop to take hard decisions, because doing so will deny them the escape route should things going wrong. Their reluctance to hammer a more effective law and order arrangement into place is also because a large number of politicians everywhere are involved in collusive criminality with the underworld.  In Mumbai and Maharashtra, they have links with the Dawood Ibrahim gang and, indirectly the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence. Talk of enemy at the gate. He is inside the house.

[Published in ‘The AsianAge’ & ‘The Deccan Chronicle’, July 21, 2011, at www.asianage.com/columnists/terror-apathy-873 ]

Posted in India's Pakistan Policy, Indian Politics, Internal Security | Leave a comment

‘First Mover’ Disadvantage

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

                              India has an unbeatable record. There is no arms control bandwagon it has not jumped on to with reckless alacrity. Indian political leaders and  diplomats are no lotus eaters or yokels easily conned into disarming the nation even as powerful countries bristle with newer, more lethal, armaments. But confront them with agreements promising deliverance from the hyped-up dangers of an armed world and they act as if their brains are “on hold”, unable to resist the lure of the halo and the chance supposedly to burnish India’s reputation as a “responsible” state even if this imperils national security.

Jawaharlal Nehru, who outlined the contours of Indian foreign policy, was a master at using morality to extract foreign policy benefits. A statesman in the classical mould, he was motivated by realpolitik – a seminal fact missed by most in the ruling Congress Party and two generations of Indian historians and hagiographers, and still not sufficiently  appreciated by media commentators, academics and their ilk. When he had India in the vanguard of the campaign for “general and complete” disarmament in the 1950s (which, other than banning nuclear weapons, required the reduction of all conventional militaries to constabulary status), he did so knowing that, precisely because this goal was beyond reach,  it would fetch India otherwise unobtainable dividends. And it did – shoving the superpowers, Soviet Russia and the United States, on the defensive, making an end-run round the 1947 Baruch Plan forwarded by Washington aimed at international control of all nuclear-related ores and natural resources everywhere, providing political cover for the dual-purpose Indian nuclear energy programme whose weapons thrust Nehru was secretly nursing to maturity, and benefiting  from security as a free good offered by an America driven by ideology more than common sense. Together with its leadership of the goodwill-generating anti-colonialism and anti-racism movements in the United Nations, India enhanced its standing and ability to box above its weight class.  These were no mean benefits at a time when India, a rag-tag nation, had little to bank on except its pretensions.

With less gifted leaders at the helm, however, the larger strategic calculations were lost sight of as policymaking steadily veered towards self-validating postures and a Pavlovian response of energetic me-tooism to every self-serving arms control initiative by the great powers. It is another matter that, in each case, wisdom dawned late and on further consideration India retreated to less exposed but still vulnerable positions that the big powers exploited to push this country into a corner. It happened in the negotiations over the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and lately the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT). At the Committee on Disarmament currently contemplating the FMCT, for instance, instead of quietly encouraging Pakistan’s obstructionism as a means of stalling progress, which development will afford India additional time to further augment its fissile material stockpile, the Manmohan Singh government, has foolishly joined the Western states in dumping on Islamabad. The inane Indian enthusiasm for arms control-qua-disarmament measures means that expectations are raised all round and pressures on Delhi to fall in line in any related negotiations increase to a point where failing to do so costs the country plenty.

The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) India signed with undue haste in 1992 and ratified four years later, reflects the sort of problems the Indian government creates for the country by not thinking through its policy choices. In 2009 India declared that its entire holding of chemical weapons had been destroyed, joining Albania and South Korea as the only three countries in the world verifiably to reach the zero weapons level. Indeed, the National Authority for the Chemical Weapons Convention, working out of the Cabinet Secretariat, has so diligently monitored adherence to CWC provisions, it secured the ISO 9001 certification in 2008. But Delhi’s expectation that as a first and “fast mover” India would be rewarded with the top posts in the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) headquartered at the Hague and thereby control the secretariat, the sensitive information flows, etc., was belied when India was out-manoeuvred and the Permanent Representative of Turkey to the United Nations in Geneva, Ahmet Uzumcu, installed by “consensus” as Director-General, OPCW.

But the downside is more substantive because without ready chemical weapons at hand India may find itself in a real pickle. The Indian nuclear doctrine threatens nuclear retaliation, other than after a nuclear hit, in case of chemical and biological weapons attack. The trouble is that countering the use of chemical (or biological) weapons with an atom bomb goes against the fundamental logic of proportionate response and would be a difficult political decision to make in the face of concerted international opposition. Moreover, given how seriously the Indian government sticks as much by the spirit as the letter of arms control laws, it is reasonable to assume there is no cache of chemical weapons stashed away somewhere for just such contingencies.

What exists is a “defensive” capability permitted by CWC.  But, however quickly these so-called defensive warfare resources and in situ weapons capability can be marshalled to produce chemical devices for offensive use, there will still be a lag time during which two things can happen. Emboldened by the Indian non-reaction to its initial provocation, the adversary state could follow up with a series of new attacks. Or, it could utilize this time to firm up international pressure even against a retributive Indian counter-attack. With the Indian government’s proven tendency to fold at the first hint of pressure, it is very likely that a chemical (or biological) weapons strike will, in fact, go unanswered. So much  for CWC ensuring protection.

Despite repeatedly burning its fingers, India habitually accords undue importance to arms control agreements. Great powers know better. As Convention signatories the United States and Russia have taken their time to eliminate their chemical weapons inventories. Obliged to finish the job by 2012, they are still adrift of that goal.

[Published as “Nuclear Morality” in ‘The Asian Age’ & ‘The Deccan Chronicle’, January 15, 2011,  www.asianage.com/columnists/nuclear-morality-137 ]

Posted in Great Power imperatives, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Nuclear Policy & Strategy | 1 Comment

Message from Modi

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

Finally, there is a political leader of stature, with significant achievements to his credit, daring to think big for the nation. Having proved himself a remarkably adept administrator and a hard driver and shaper-upper of the ordinarily lax, lethargic, and slothful apparatus of state government, Narendra Modi has outlined some elements that, if fleshed out, would constitute a coherent ideology to rival the Left-of-centre, middle-of-the-road, vacuities that currently pass for state ideology.

Early in the speech ending his three day ‘Sadbhavana’ fast in Ahmedabad on September 19, the Gujarat Chief Minister exhorted the people to “think big, dream big”; without a grand vision for the country there is, he declared, no resolve and, hence, there’s no “possibility” of India ever becoming a great power. It was fresh thinking about 21st Century India, whose minders, for far too long, have been small, diffident, men with limited ideas and blinkered sights, incapable of articulating a potentially great nation’s sense of its self. Modi did not provide details, but it was enough that, for a start, he pointed to the lack of a grand national vision as the main reason for the ills that have befallen the country in the last 60 years. He followed up with an even more startling insight. The best thing the government can do for the people, he said, is to get out, and stay out, of their lives!  Were the people not required to deal with government agencies manned by bribe-seeking officials at every turn, their hard work and enterprise, he averred, would propel the country forward. Such a rousing indictment of the Nanny State and intrusive government has not been heard for over forty years now.

Narendra Modi’s economic ideas resonate with the views of the free market economist B.R. Shenoy, who in the 1950s vehemently contested the statist notions propagated by the statistician, “comrade” C. Mahalanobis – the master designer of the planned economy that has hobbled India ever since. From the same school of economic thought as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, Shenoy opposed deficit financing and the quasi-soviet state erected at Jawaharlal Nehru’s bidding, which reflected the worst attributes of  the laissez faire system, such as crony capitalism, and the totalitarian state.  Except, as a practitioner of a facilitative government, Modi has the unique experience of overriding the systemic defects, ridding Gujarat of much of corruption the governmental apparatus was prone to, and – within the constraints of a federal structure – extracting performance from the decrepit colonial-socialist machinery of state to deliver development and industrialisation on a scale unmatched by any other provincial government in the history of the Union.

Modi also targeted vote-bank politics. May be the show of Muslim “support” at the Sadbhavana event was a bit of political theatre, in the same league as Congress Party-wallahs staying overnight in dalit hutments in the full glare of television cameras.  But, there is little doubt that Muslims in the state recognise they are as much beneficiaries of good governance that Modi has delivered as anybody else, and that when he says he will not pander to them it means he will seek their votes as Gujaratis, not as Muslims. While the residents of Naroda-Patia seem unwilling to forgive and forget the incidents of 2002, their insistence on punishing Modi has the potential of again aggravating the communal divide that the spreading prosperity has begun to bridge.

Modi’s emergence on the national scene ensures that, for the first time, there will be a distinct, alternate, ideology for the voters to mull over while keeping in mind its successful run in Gujarat. He offers an antidote to the bankrupt, left-leaning, populism the Congress Party invariably falls back on when the going gets tough, to wit, the various social welfare schemes, such as NREGA, the Manmohan Singh regime has launched in recent times despite mountainous evidence showing that the billions of rupees allotted such programmes are effortlessly decanted by “middle men”, the local politicians and officials up and down the line. Modi’s success in Gujarat emphasizes the fact that a strong-minded leader determined on making the  administrative system responsible for producing results, can radically transform the defunct, over-bureaucratised, system of government the country is saddled with.

No leader in his own BJP or in any other political party, has come close to mustering Modi’s inclusivist development record. Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, is the exception; he has worked a miracle, and because Bihar was much less developed when he took over that state than Gujarat was when Modi assumed office, Nitish Kumar’s accomplishments may be greater, except he has to update his Jayprakash Narayan-derived philosophy for the new millennium. This makes Narendra Modi a standout in a political landscape littered, on the one hand, with former Chief Ministers like Lalu Prasad, Mulayam Singh Yadav and, prospectively, Mayawati, who having run their states into the ground, aspire to be Prime Minister to wreak similar havoc on the country as a whole and, on the other hand, the legion of politicians within the Congress Party and in its coalition who, when not owing their exalted positions to family connections, are in public life mainly for the loot, as the DMK leader Dayanidhi Maran  unabashedly explained to an US Embassy official (Wikileaks).

Modi’s rather novel views actually hark back to the Fifties and the Sixties, when, as founding members of the conservative Swatantra Party, “Rajaji” C. Rajagopalachari lambasted Nehru’s socialism for handicapping the private sector by forcing it to run in, what he called, a “three-legged or gunny bag race” refereed by “arrogant officials”, and Minoo Masani  lampooned Nehru for creating a class of politicians who, he charged, instead of living for politics, lived off politics. But it took another Modi, this one spelled with a ‘y’ as in Piloo Mody, in the Seventies, to really get up the ruling Congress Party’s nose and square up its socialism as dangerous pretence if not an outright joke.  Piloo slammed Indira Gandhi’s policies,  including the nationalization of banks and insurance companies, as an “equal sharing of miseries”, warned that her authoritarian bent tended towards fascism – a view substantiated by her imposition of Emergency, and he identified corruption as the biggest industry in the country. Some things never change.

Narendra Modi may be just what the doctor ordered to revitalize India’s ailing body politic and to unify a young and ambitious nation, yearning for freedom from nitpicking government, for skills, innovation and incentives;  a country deliberately fractured along sub-caste, caste, religious, and regional lines to serve narrow interests. He could fill the need, Rajaji writing in his newsletter, Swarajya, in August 1957 voiced, for “a strong and articulate Right” stressing small government and good governance, and a big ideological void as well.

[Published in ‘New Indian Express’ on Saturday, Sept 24, 2011, at http://expressbuzz/op-ed/opinion/Message-from-Modi/316608.html ]

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Books & Major Publications

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

‘India’s Rise: Why It is not a great power (yet)’ – tentative title, to be published by Potomac Books, Washington, DC in 2012

‘Strategic Sell-out: Indian-US Nuclear Deal’ [New Delhi: Pentagon Press, 2009], co-authored with P.K. Iyengar, A.N. Prasad, & A. Gopalakrishnan

‘India’s Nuclear Policy’ [Westport, CN, & London: Praeger Security International, 2008; special South Asian edition, New Delhi: Pentagon Press, 2009]

‘Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security: The Realist Foundations of Strategy’, Second edition [New Delhi: Macmillan India, 2005]

‘Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security: The Realist Foundations of Strategy’ [New Delhi: Macmillan India, 2002]

‘Future Imperilled: India’s Security in the 1990s and Beyond’ [New Delhi, Viking, Penguin India, 1994]

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Endless Delusion

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

                                       No Dearth of Delusion

Come the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in autumn and there’s India, predictably making the same old pitch for a permanent seat in the Security Council as part of “comprehensive reform” of the UN. As in the past, this year too efforts of the G-4 (Group of Four – India, Brazil, Japan and Germany) to obtain permanent membership,  have tanked.  This despite a desperate need for re-organizing the UN to facilitate  graceful stepping-down of legacy great powers, Britain and France, and their replacement by new powers in the offing, among them India.

     The G-4 aspirants alas have their separate detractors. Brazil is challenged by Argentina and Japan is vetoed by China. And then there’s India, whose candidature is at once the most credible and the least likely to fructify.  This anomalous situation is because India has all along approached the United Nations as a supplicant afflicted with the entitlement syndrome. It is not clear on what basis India feels entitled to secure a permanent seat, considering its policy reach is confined to South Asia, it has botched the job of pacifying its neighbours, and hasn’t done anything of note in the international arena since leading the charge on de-colonisation in the 1950s.

     The criteria of great power shared by the five permanent members – the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China – are, firstly, that they full-fledged nuclear weapons states with diverse nuclear and thermonuclear armaments of verified yields and reliable performance that can reach any point on earth. Secondly, they are managers of the global order, using coercive diplomacy, failing which they deploy military forces to maintain regional balance and global stability. A third factor is that these  states are also the main pillars of the international system of trade and commerce. And finally, there’s a decisive quality to their foreign-military policies that is missing from India’s thinking – their belief in the efficacy of hard power.

     Preparing to beat up on small countries, such as Pakistan, has actually hurt India’s reputation. If a country cannot distinguish the strategically consequential China threat from small time danger on its western flank, can it be relied on to make reasonable judgements on issues of war and peace that Security Council permanent members are called upon to do? Worse, India’s Pakistan fixation has permitted China, as an “all weather friend”, to intrude into South Asian affairs and shrink India’s natural sphere of influence. With India’s preening posture against Pakistan turning into a “tail between legs” attitude once China enters the scene, India’s image in the world has taken a hit. Pakistan may not have a veto but its patron, China, does and to date Beijing has exercised it cleverly. The Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao recently asked India to disengage from the G-4 effort as it involves Japan. Of course, should Delhi be foolish enough to follow the Chinese advice, Beijing will next stop India’s entry on the pretext of the unresolved Kashmir dispute. The hard-headed men leading China are not the self-abnegating kind and repeat the mistake made in the 1950s when, rather than grabbing Chiangkaishek-led Taiwan’s seat in the Security Council offered to India by the United States, Jawaharlal Nehru pleaded for China to be seated instead! In the event, India is in a losing position no matter what Delhi does. The obvious strategy of blunting Pakistan’s fear by reorienting the Indian military China-wards as a first step to co-opting Islamabad, has not occurred to the Indian government.

     To revive India’s international leadership role, the Manmohan Singh regime once again dusted off the Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan for time-bound nuclear disarmament, which has about as much chance in the real world as a spit ball in hell.  But it is in line with the Congress Party government’s mindless strategy of keeping the Indian thermonuclear deterrent unproven, unreliable, and thus permanently on par with Pakistan’s nuclear weapons inventory. Furthermore, the Manmohan Singh regime alienated its strongest backers – the United States, by neither expending political capital to realise a substantive strategic partnership nor coming up with an alternative scheme, and Israel, the source of most of the Indian military’s advanced technology edge, by joining in the call for a sovereign Palestinian state instead of leaving it to the two sides to thrash it out in negotiations, in the manner Delhi would prefer the Kashmir issue to be settled. The result was President Barack Obama rejected a meeting with Manmohan Singh in New York, and Israel is hurt.

     To be recognised as a great power, India will have to do what other great powers have done throughout history: Think big, act big, take risks, and  back up its diplomacy with force but only against an equal or bigger country, aggressively consolidate and extend Indian military influence into China’s backyard in the South China Sea and, landwards, in Central Asia, and secure the core wherewithal of hard power, namely, a versatile high-yield thermonuclear arsenal, which will require further testing, and Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles, in the face of American and Chinese pressure. Get the big stick first, talk softly later. An in-your-face attitude is more likely to get India an invitation to join the high table in the UN and elsewhere, than being agreeable. To believe India will attain great power by lesser means is to be delusional. Unfortunately, there is no dearth of deluded persons in Delhi who believe India’s “exceptionalism” is enough.

[the piece was published in ‘The Asian Age’ and the The Deccan Chronicle’ on Sep 9, 2011.]

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