Writing this post a few hours before the US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin touches down in Delhi and begins his meeting with Defence Minister Rajnath Singh. Washington has already indicated the line it will take to compel the Indian government to do what it desires, namely, cancelling the S-400 air defence system deal with Russia.
Austin will use the one-two punch — the soft left jab followed by a hard right, to use an old boxing metaphor.
In both instances — the jab and the right cross will be attributed to US Senator Robert Menendez of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who, here, is playing the villain. The soft jab is the supposed US concern with Human Rights violations in India, and Austin’s opening will be with the senator’s statement that the Defence Secretary will “raise democracy and human rights concerns in your discussions with the Indian government” and how the Indo-US “partnerhip” “is strongest when based on shared democratic values [which] the Indian government has been trending away from…”.
This has to be countered by Rajnath Singh telling Austin in as clear a language as the defence minister’s MEA minders can muster that the Biden Administration would be better advised to look inward and work on addressing the reasons for the breakdown in the democratic order in the United States — as mirrored in the insurrection by religious bigots and ideological exremists — and how this is endangering the lives of immigrant communities in America, and why the Indian government fears Indian immigrants may be next in line for such victimhood. And further — to give the dose of the same democratic medicine to the Biden Admin — that Delhi will be closely monitoring the developments in the US.
Next, Austin will use Menendez’s threat of sanctions if India does not resile from the S-400 deal, to indicate that President Biden’s hands are tied were the US Congress, in fact, to use this Russia contract as the prompt for harsh action against India. “If India chooses to go forward with its purchase of the S-400, that [](Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act] will clearly constitute a significant, and therefore sanctionable, transaction with the Russian defence sector under Section 231 of CAATSA. It will also limit India’s ability to work with the US on development and procurement of sensitive military technology. I expect you to make all of these challenges clear in conversations with your Indian counterparts,” Menendez apparently wrote to Austin on the eve of the latter’s visit to various Asian states.
Far from acting intimidated, Rajnath Singh, in the best Uttar Pradeshi tradition of responding to a threat with a counter threat, should tell Austin in no uncertain terms that this isn’t the Cold War period of the 1950s, and in the fight against China the US needs India as much, if not more — and stress this last — than India needs the US, and so while the US Government is free to take whatever actions it deems fit, the Indian government in service of its national interests WILL not let an external power dictate which country it wants to cultivate, or what it buys from where by way of armaments and military goods. And that Austin better understand what the exchange here is. And if the US government follows through on the CAATSA threat issued by the likes of Menendez , Washington should expect an equal and opposit reaction from India — for starters the voiding of the four foundational accords, and the potential loss of the Andaman-Nicobar staging area that the US Air Force, for one,has been eyeing with considerable interest. And that India’s Quad cooperation, that much is being made of, is also at risk.
Here Rajnath should not listen to the habitual queasy appeasers and collaborators should the S Jaishankar-led MEA advise conciliatory language. MEA have already spoiled the situation for the country vis a vis China, and if given the chance, will make India grovel before America, China and any other country that begins throwing its weight about.
The best results are obtained and respect won with the US when plain language is used, one without obuscation or any hint of mealymouthedness that could be misread by Austin and his advisers as a tendency to flinch — something they can exploit.
The trouble with Delhi has always been it doesn’t hold to the true North on a compass of national interests. Time for Rajnath and for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to understand and appreciate that the manner of correctly dealing with the Americans has not been learned by MEA or government interlocuters dealing with Americans, and to remind Austin and the Pentagon what’s at stake.
Results of the Austin trip will show if the Modi government caved in, or stood its ground.
US Secretay of State Anthony Blinken and President Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan]
The leading members of the new Joe Biden Administration — US Secretary of State Anthony J Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan will, for the first time, touch base with Yang Jiechi, director of China’s Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Anchorage, Alaska, on March 18. This meeting will be in the wake of the virtual summit last Friday (March 12) of the head honchos of the Quadrilateral — Narendra Modi, Joe Biden, Yoshihide Suga and Scott Morrison, and of Blinken and US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin’s visit to Tokyo and Seoul scheduled for March 16-17. That China agreed to this first meeting being held on “American turf” is considered an aspect of the U.S. approaching China, per the White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, from a “position of strength” and “in lockstep with our allies and partners.” This suggests that the issues the Quad partners are supposedly in “lockstep” on were at least notinally discussed at the Quad virtual summit.
The main achievement of the virtual summit, however, was elsewhere, in the agreement on the division of labour to get the Quad’s Covid-19 ‘vaccine diplomacy’ to outmatch China’s global efforts, underway. According to this schemata India will use its production facilities to produce the vaccine at a fast clip at low cost, the US will facilitate the transactions with due regard to intellectual property rights, etc for Indian pharmaecutical companies to mass produce the latest remedy in the field — the Johnson & Johnson one-shot vaccine and otherwise prepare it for speedy world-wide distribution, Japan will financially underwrite such commercial deals as are involved in joint manufacture, and Australia will pitch in with assistance in vaccine delivery systems.
Other than on the vaccine, the four leaders also decided to cooperate on what was referred to as “critical and emerging technology” areas, chiefly 5G telecommunications technology sector. China has taken the lead in terms of commercializing 5th-generation equipment but now finds itself stymied by a whole bunch of previous customer countries rejecting Huawei (and other Chinese company-produced) gear out of the reasonable security fear about deeply embedded electronic bugs prospectively activated by the their PLA masters that could hold hostage the communications networks of various countries. While there was a reference to strengthening India’s defence industrial base, there was no specificity about the US sharing any sensitive military technology with India, or any such thing. In the event, this issue is likely to go the way the DTTI (Defence Technology and Trade Initiative) has gone over the last 20 years, which is no where!
Blinken and Austin’s discussion with the Suga government will, logically, be around two issues: the increased presence of Chinese warships and fishing trawlers in the contested waters off the disputed Senkaku (Diaoyu for the Chinese) Island chain The numbers of Chinese vessels of all kinds in this East Sea area tripled in the period 2012-2020. The other issue concerns the protection provided by the Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force (MSDF) to the US Navy’s 7th Fleet staging out of Yokohama, and US Air Force combat aircraft operating out of Japanese bases. This more proactive use of the Japanese military muscle was made possible by the “reinterpretation” ordered by the previous Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe in 2014 that led a year later to the famous ‘Article 9’ of the country’s ‘peace Constitution’ being stretched to legalize this more offensive use of Japanese forces.
What the Suga regime will want to be reassured about is the extent to which Tokyo can depend on US naval and airforce assets attached to the 7th Fleet to buttress Japanese MSDF activity in defence of its Senkaku interests against the Chinese PLA Navy (PLAN). The Japanese government will want to work out a very clear understanding with Blinken and Austin about what exactly to expect by way of American military support and help should the simmering crisis with China begin to boil. The tension will be between what Tokyo would ideally like with respect to maximal deployment of US forces and what the Biden Administration is actually willing to commit to in the context of Washington’s less combative attitude to Beijing now than when Donald Trump was in the White House.
The Blinken-Austin duo’s conferring, across the Sea of Japan, with the South Korean regime of Moon Jae-in would be of a completely different character. Unlike the Suga cohort seeking more intensive US engagement on the Senkaku dispute, the high American officials will be wanting an iron-clad promise from the Moon Jae-in government to not be tempted, or get lured, by the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s play for rapprochement at the expense of the US thinning out its militaryforces from South Korea. It is a deal that a large section of the South Korean population pining for, if not reunification than, normal relations, support.
What transpires in the Blinken-Austin rounds with Suga’s and Moon Je-in’s representatives is the baggage Blinken and Sullivan will carry to Anchorage in their meeting with Yang Jiechi, the top Communist Party man and overseer of China’s foreign policy who, incidentally, outranks foreign minister Wang Yi. But what is the Biden template for the US’ China policy?
President Biden in his address to American diplomats at the State Department on 4 February ahd this to say regarding China: “We’ll …take on directly the challenges posed by (sic) our prosperity, security, and democratic values by our most serious competitor, China. We’ll confront China’s economic abuses; counter its aggressive, coercive action; to push back on China’s attack on human rights, intellectual property, and global governance.” This would have been encouraging had it not been for the wishy-washy stuff that followed. “But we are ready to work with Beijing when it’s in America’s interest to do so”, he explained. “We will compete from a position of strength by building back better at home, working with our allies and partners, renewing our role in international institutions, and reclaiming our credibility and moral authority, much of which has been lost. That’s why we’ve moved quickly to begin restoring American engagement internationally and earn back our leadership position, to catalyze global action on shared challenges.”
A month after Biden’s speech, Blinken in his first address (March 3) as boss to an audience at the State Department, embroidered the President’s statement. “Our relationship with China”, he declared, “will be competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be….The common denominator is the need to engage China from a position of strength.“ This could well be the mantra that the other Quad foreign ministers S Jaishankar, the Australian Marise Ann Payne, and the Japanese Toshimitsu Motegi and their governments will readily subscribe to as well. In the main, because it allows each individual Quad state an awful lot of slack in defining when their country needs to be competitive, collaborative or adversarial! It also reflects and reveals the greatest weakness of the Quad. It relates to Washington’s opting out on any issue dear to the other three individually or collectively. Thus, without the military resources of the kind that the US can muster being available, the remaining Quad states could find themselves left high and dry in a contingency or crisis involving China.
In any case, the Biden Admin is moving cautiously. Referring to the proposed meeting with Yang Blinken clarified that “This is not a strategic dialogue. There’s no intent at this point for a series of follow-on engagements. Those engagements, if they are to follow, really have to be based on …tangible progress and tangible outcomes on the issues of concern to us with China.” These “issues of concern” over which the two sides have, according to the White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, “deep disagreements” are, specifically, China’s “coercive and unfair economic practices,” the “crackdown in Hong Kong”, and “human rights abuses in Xinjiang”; and more generally America’s “concerns about challenges [China] pose[s] to the security and values of the United States and our allies and partners”. Psaki talked “about areas where we can cooperate, of mutual interest” without spelling out these areas but hinted that these may have to do with upholding “the rules-based international system and a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
And in this regard, Blinken stated that “China is the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system — all the rules, values and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to.” He then referenced the Pentagon “task force” constituted by Biden to “work quickly, drawing on civilian and military experts across the department to provide within the next few months the recommendations to Secretary Austin on key priorities and decision points so that we can chart a strong path forward on China-related matters”. This task force is to be chaired by Ely Ratner, a longtime Biden aide installed as Defence Secretary Austin’s adviser, who prefers the competitive (rather than the collaborative or adversarial) approach to China. This may or may not be reassuring to India.
What the Modi government will definitely be more wary of is the Biden Administration’s strident tone on two other sets of issues — trade & economic policies, and democracy and human rights. As regards the first set, Blinken reiterated the Trump line on domestic investment, in-sourcing and employment generation. “Our approach” will involve, Blinken said, fighting “for every American job and for the rights, protections, and interests of all American workers.” So, say Good Bye to the prospects of Washington encouraging US companise to invest in India or to move their manufacturing facilities to this country! And stressing on Biden’s favourite theme, Blinken talked about “Shoring up …democracy [as] a foreign policy imperative“. “Otherwise”, he added, “we play right into the hands of adversaries and competitors like Russia and China, who seize every opportunity to sow doubts about the strength of …democracy. We shouldn’t be making their jobs easier.“ But, he repeated Trump’s line against foreign interventions by the US but in a slightly different guise. “We will not promote democracy through costly military interventions or by attempting to overthrow authoritarian regimes by force” he added. “We’ve tried these tactics in the past. However well-intentioned, they haven’t worked. They’ve given ‘democracy promotion’ a bad name, and they’ve lost the confidence of the American people.”
As far as as India is concerned it leaves a great many foreign policy balls up in the air not least that matter about whether and under what conditions the four Quad countries will join in pursuing competitive, collaborative or adversarial strategies vis a vis China. This will be the great sticking point on which the Quad could render itself immobile. And then there’s the question of how long it will be before the Biden Government, prompted by the progressive element in the Democratic party led by the likes of Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, will make Kashmir and the eroding respect of the Modi regime for human and democratic rights the rock on which the ship of Indo-US relations will crash. There are enough signs already that that point will not be long in coming and, in any case, a clash is inevitable in the context of the Modi government’s reaction to the negative Western assessment of Indian democracy.
The US-based Freedom House last week downgraded India from “free” to “partially free” status. And the V-Dem Institute in Sweden deemed India less an “electoral democracy” than an “electoral autocracy”. Apparently, Modi has been hurt to the quick because in his travels to America and elsewhere in the West in the past few years, he has basked in the glow of massive electoral victories at home. This is reflected in Jaishankar’s waspish reaction over the weekend. Per news reports this is what he said: “You use the dichotomy of democracy and autocracy. You want the truthful answer — it is hypocrisy. Because you have a set of self-appointed custodians of the world, who find it very difficult to stomach that somebody in India is not looking for their approval, is not willing to play the game they want it to be played. So they invent their rules, their parameters, they pass their judgments and then make out as though this is some kind of global exercise.”
These are fighting words and the BJP government better be prepared for even closer scrutiny and criticism of its record on the human rights front by Washington involving US Congressional Hearings on the subject of a democratically sliding India. Jayapal and others will be in the forefront of pressuring Modi regime onto the right and narrow path they deem democratic and that could mean, you guessed it, sanctions in some form or the other even if Biden himself would be loath to go this far considering how alienating India could lose America strategic traction in the Indo-Pacific. Still the Western democratic purists may decide that this price is worth paying.
Then what do you reckon the Indian government will do? Because such things as attempts by Washington to win brownie points with Delhi, like including India in the US-hosted talks for peace in Afghanistan as rival to the Russian-led negotiating effort from which India is excluded, won’t help.
China’s approach to conflict resolution is unique. It works because it is surrounded by countries militarily weaker than itself and/or unwilling to up the military-political ante. First step: It uses force to change the status quo on the ground. Second step: the new territorial fait accompli is then legalized spuriously by some “law” or new rules and regulations the Xi regime issues to endow this initial status quo-changing action with post-facto legitimacy. Step Three: Beijing then uses this new territorial reality and supporting laws, etc. to demand that the victim nation adjust to the new reality on the ground so obtained by the Chinese military, and exercise restraint for the sake of order and stability!
The Xi cohort has had considerable success with this approach because the victimised states fall into the trap of accepting the new ground reality and doing what’s asked of them.
China has repeatedly pulled this three-step , besides eastern Ladakh, in South China Sea and in the East Sea. In the context of the supposed “disengagement” in Ladakh that, incidentally, has left the People’s Liberation Army units still in place on the Depsang Plains and in control of the Y-Junction, the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was at his oiliest.
Deliberately disregarding the fact that successive Indian governments in their desperate desire for peace on the disputed border have taken Beijing at its word, studiously followed Chinese instructions, accepted Chinese pre-conditions, and engaged in endless fruitless discussions at various levels,including at the Special Representative-level involving Indian NSA, Ajit Doval, designed to wear out the other side, Wang on the occasion of the National People’s Congress adopted an avuncular tone at a media event last Sunday. “It is important the two sides manage disputes properly” he said, “and at the same time expand and enhance cooperation to create enabling conditions for the settlement of the issue.” Having spouted this nonsense he then revealed that Beijing had neither moved from its original stance nor in its intention to impose its expansive claims on India. He used his reference to the Galwan incident last summer to say that “the right and wrongs at (sic) what happened at the border area last year are clear, so are the stakes involved.” He akso asserted China’s commitment “to settling the boundary dispute through dialogue and consultation” but without compromising its claims because “we are resolved to safeguarding our sovereign rights.”
But apprehensive about India finally responding more consequentially to Chinese provocations in South Asia such as its deep inroads into Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and even Bangladesh, by transferring Brahmos supersonic cruise missiles and other armaments to Asian states (Philippines, Vietnam, Indoensia, etc) contesting Chinese claims in the South China Sea, and firming up purposive partnerships in the Indo-Pacific — such as the Quadrilateral, a concept that falls owing to the proven unreliability of the US as partner but which the Modi government seems anamoured with, Wang warned of the negative impact of the Indian reaction on Sino-Indian friendship! Love such gall!! “China and India are each other’s friends and partners, not threats or rivals”, he averred. “The two sides need to help each other to succeed instead of undercutting each other. We should intensify cooperation instead of harbouring suspicion at (sic) each other.”
Obviously, Wang and his foreign policy team in Zhongnanhai are convinced the Indian government is a fool and will, once again, play it, and do China’s bidding. And, who is to say, they are wrong? After all, the Indian forces — steered “expertly” by the China Study Group (CSG) and MEA — withdrew post haste from the high points on the Kailash Range without requiring the PLA to reciprocate in like terms, didn’t they? The PLA pullback eastwards from Finger 4 to the Sirijap plains on the Pangong Lake shoreline can almost instantly be reversed by motor-mobile Chinese troops using metalled roads to reoccupy all the Fingers up to the Indian Dhan Singh Thapa post on Finger 3. Will the Indian Special Frontier Force commando be able to as quickly regain, unmolested, the highpoints on the Rezang La-Rechin La Ridge?
Then again, the geniuses in CSG and MEA didn’t discern the historic pattern (outlined above) in the Chinese policy in Ladakh and evidenced elsewhere as well. Like in the South China Sea. Had they done so and alerted the Indian military, the latter’d have been better prepared for, and not been surprised by, the PLA moves in eastern Ladakh in April-May 2020. So now mull over what Wang said vis a vis the South China Sea.
“Countries in the region and around the world in recent years can all see clearly that the factors for instability and security risks in the South China Sea come mainly from outside the region,” Wang said, referring to the US naval ships, including nuclear aircraft carriers, loitering in the sea expanse within the ‘9-dash line’. Such American sailings almost dared the Chinese Navy to do something and thus establish an operational baseline. The Chinese Navy did not rise to the bait. Instead Wang lied saying China and ASEAN had reached common understanding on maintaining peace and stability in the South China Sea. The truth, however, is that there is no understanding and agreement that Beijing itself has not repeatedly violated. It did not deter Wang from charging the “the US and some other Western countries” with thereby creating “instability in the region”.
In a similar situation with regard to the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Island chain in the East Sea, he responded to Japan’s concerns about a new Chinese law permitting its Coast Guard to fire on ships not respecting Chinese territorial claims on the sea by assuring Tokyo that that law was not targeted at any particular nation, especially not Japan.“The key to Sino-Japanese relations is to have perseverance, and not to let short-term events cause disruption,” he clucked soothingly.
The prompt for Wang’s statements was seemingly US President Joe Biden’s promise to beef up US military presence and security arrangements involving traditional allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific, and the upcoming virtual meet Washington has scheduled with Narendra Modi, Yoshihide Suga, and Scott Morrison, heads of government respectively of the three other member states of the Quadrilateral — India, Japan, Australia, a loose grouping Wang has dubbed the ‘Indo-Pacific NATO’. “An improvement in Sino-Japanese relations”, Wang concluded, “would be mutually beneficial for our people and regional stability and peace. It should not be taken for granted and we should treasure it.”
It is clear what Delhi must do. As I have long maintained, assuming that strategic mindset and sensibility are absent in the Indian government, members of the CSG and MEA should stop taxing their little heads and simply emulate China strategically, do what Beijing does which is this:
Step 1: Stop talking about how the Indian army CAN occupy vantage points along the Line of Actual Control, including sites well inside Chinese claim lines, and task the army to do precisely that, without losing time, in short, surrepititiously occupy these strategically located high points.
Step 2: Play up the 1962 Resolution of Parliament, which has force of law; better still, legislate a new law — call it ‘Restoration of Territories Act’, to sanctify all actions, steps and measures implemented to restore the India-Tibet border as existed in 1950 when the PLA invaded and occupied Tibet, and voice the country’s determination to implement bother the letter and spirit of this law, and call out Beijing to respect Indian sovereignty and to not heedlessly jeopardize the traditionally warm and friendly relations between the two countries by resorting to any precipitate actions leading to the breakdown of peace, etc. and here MEA can do what it does best — wax abstract, rhetorical, whatever. In Mandarin.
Step 3: Accelerate the buildup of infrastructure and forces on LAC buildup, and enlarge the system of provisioning and logistics system to enable sustained warfighting. After all, now with two offensive mountain corps (I and XVII) in the field a far larger, longer and stronger supply chain becomes necessary.
Step 4: Forward deploy nuclear-tipped short and medium range Agni ballistic missiles in Ladakh theatre as tripwire in case a conventional Chinese military advance gains traction. And pre-warn beijing about the Agni missiles and talk of them as a like response to the augmentation of Chinese SRBMs and MRBMs on the Tibetan Plateau — the densest such concentration outside the Fujian coast opposite Taiwan.
Step 4: Quite literally dump bunches of the Brahmos supersonic cruise missiles on priority basis on the militaries of all countries disputing Chinese claims on the South China Sea, including states that have not sofar been active/aggressive in advancing their claims — Brunei and Malaysia. And make the deals for the Brahmos unrefusable by making them available at low to very low “friendship prices”. This will require the tripling and quadrupling of Brahmos missile production. This can be facilitated by handing over the job to the more productive and efficient private sector. And along with these missiles should be sent, as per the deals, Indian army artillery teams to operate and service these Brahmos batteries and to train host country crews
As advocated in my 2018 book (‘Staggering Forward’), this single measure of bulking up littoral and offshore Southeast Asian states with the Brahmos missiles will “narrow the seas” to the Chinese Navy’s detriment and the advantage Beijing thinks it has gained by constructing new islands out of coral reefs, sand and cement mid-channel will be instantly neutralized. Because now Chinese warships passing through these narrower waterways on either side of these ersatz islands will be easy targets for the coastal Brahmos batteries of numerous nations. It will have the effect in crisis of bottling up the powerful Chinese South Sea Fleet in its Sanya base on Hainan Island.
Step 5: While all this is taking place, Delhi should take the offensive in bewailing the record of Chinese aggression and its history of inhumane activities, including the ‘ethnocide’ of the Tibetan people in Tibet and, in recent years, the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and take their case to the International Court, etc. At the same time, MEA should weekly enjoin Beijing to not let any of this spoil bilateral ties, and to even out the playing field for Indian companies in the Chinese market.
Step 6: Ask of Chinese companies what Beijing asks Western companies in China to do — sell in the Indian market but only on the condition that they transfer the technology-set whole — designs, source codes, and process and manufacturing technologies to Indian government certified Indian commercial entities. And not permit them to escape this obligation by doing what Huawei is trying to do now after the imports of its 5G system was banned. Correctly reading the atm nirbharta campaign as a sham — the Huawei India head says the company would be happy to jointly manufacture all its 5G telecom equipment in India by transferring its “production nodules” to an Indian firm — which is another way of saying — screwdriver tech. No way, Jose!
Such are the sort of steps India must implement to take the game to China on the pain of being driven from the Asian strategic field altogether. But will the Indian government, even in these dire circumstances, do any of this? Nah!
2021 is India’s turn to chair and host the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) summit. These are annual meetings held in rotation by the heads of government of a group that was self-consciously knitted together as counterweight to the US and West-dominated multilateral organizations and as peer influencer of global affairs. That more details about the 15th summit are being withheld suggests there is trepidation within the Indian government.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is hoist with a dilemma. Of course, he would like to convey the impression to the world that, under his management, all’s well with India, and to use this event to project normalcy. Except there is a serious downside, especially with the Chinese government cock-a-hoop about getting the better of India in the underway military disengagement agreement in Ladakh and with President Xi Jinping preparing to grandstand at the BRICS forum on Modi’s turf!
Consider this. Delhi’s summit announcement was almost instantly welcomed by the Chinese Foreign Ministry as an occasion “to consolidate the three-pillar cooperation” that China is committed to. The “three pillars” being “policy and security”, “economy and finance” and “culture and people-to-people exchanges.” With a strong military and economy, Beijing expects to continue dominating BRICS. To prevent the Indian government from backsliding on the summit decision that Beijing believes helps China’s international standing, Qian Feng, director of strategic research at the elite Tsinghua University, harped on the contradictions in Modi’s foreign policy. He pointed out to Global Times, a Chinese Communist party-controlled newspaper, how India uses BRICS to both “enhance its status as a major power and participate in global governance” and to “better balance the country’s diplomacy” tilted towards the US-run Quad. Had India conspicuous gains to show from this forked stance, Modi would have won Beijing’s respect for “riding two horses” at the same time. Alas, the Indian government seems unable to get atop either horse!
This much is clear from the conversation last week between foreign minister S. Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the partial de-escalation in Ladakh. While there was pullback of forces in the Pangong Lake area, with the Indian Special Frontier Force troops vacating the heights on the Kailash Range, the issue of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) ending its blockade of the Y-Junction on the Depsang Plains to prevent Indian patrols from accessing the strategic Indian territory northwest-wards of it, was not even on the agenda. Far from restoring the status quo ante the Ministry for External Affairs was aiming for, it amounts to India, in effect, ceding some 1,000 sq kms to China. It is a situation Beijing means to perpetuate, and was the reason for foreign minister S. Jaishankar’s calling his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi last week. Except Wang did not relent even a bit, sticking to Beijing’s position that the bilateral relations should not pivot on resolving the border dispute! All the give has been on Delhi’s part, leaving India militarily worse off than before the disengagement began.
The problem is India’s perennially timid approach that has freed-up a hard-nosed China to pummel India at will. Meanwhile, to silence even a squeak of protest from Delhi about the territorially skewed military disengagement, Beijing has dangled the carrot of increased investment, hoping it will also deter a frustrated Modi from choosing hard options, such as arming states on the Chinese periphery with Agni rocket systems and nuclearized Brahmos cruise missiles as a belated tit-for-tat gesture for China’s equipping Pakistan with nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Absent such Indian counter-mesures Xi and his cohort feel confident of having their way with the usual soft-headed Indian leadership.
It is time to arrest India’s strategic drift by weaponizing BRICS and the Quadrilateral comprising the four Indo-Pacific powers – India, Japan, Australia and the United States. In the first instance, by pulling the BRIS states in this group into a loose security coalition to contain an over-ambitious China of which Russia too is apprehensive. And, in the second case, by forging a modified quadrilateral – ‘mod Quad’, by getting a bunch of capable Southeast Asian nations, such as Vietnam, Indonesia and Philippines fronting on the South China Sea to replace the US; and easing the latter into its traditional role as an extra-territorial balancer. Donald Trump’s presidency proved just how unreliable an ally America really is. President Joe Biden’s “Indo-Pacific czar”, Kurt Campbell, is reinforcing that posture by voicing his opposition to militarizing any conflict with China. The strategic logic of BRIS and Mod Quad is that countries proximal to China with the most to lose have the biggest stake in containing this menace.
So, what to do with the upcoming BRICS summit? Tweak it by downplaying the affair and ensuring Xi is not accorded any special treatment. Further, under no circumstances should Modi seek a one-on-one meeting with the Chinese supremo; MEA should hum and haw if the Chinese request one. The idea is to undermine the half-risen BRICS edifice and simultaneously to raise the stock of the security-oriented BRIS – an idea whose time has come and which Modi should explore with Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa.
If a meeting with Xi becomes unavoidable, Modi should remind him that the principle of reciprocity requires Beijing to accept the ‘One India’ concept, inclusive of the erstwhile princely state of Jammu & Kashmir, including Gilgit, Hunza and Baltistan, in return for Delhi not disavowing the ‘One China-two systems’ concept, and to demand genuine autonomy for Tibet – the original basis for India’s acknowledging Chinese suzerainty over this ethnically and historically distinct nation that has been subjected to “ethnocide” using means Beijing now deploys against the Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Q 1: Do you see the ongoing military disengagement in Ladakh between the Indian and Chinese troops as having helped the Chinese consolidate on the gains they have made in Ladakh in 2020?
A: Definitely yes. The military advantage the Indian army had gained by the Special Frontier Force occupying the heights of the Rezang La-Rechin La ridge on the Kailash Range is lost without the PLA withdrawing to east of the Khurnak Fort line – where the Indian claims lie, rather than only some distance from Finger 8 on the northern shore of the Pangong Lake to the Sirijap Plain. And the Chinese continue to obstruct Indian patrols seeking legitimately to access Indian territory northwest-wards of the Y-Junction. Having achieved success at the negotiating table in getting Indian troops to climb down from the Kailash range hilltops, and India to accept Finger 3 as the limit of its army’s presence in the Pangong area (forsaking, in the process, Indian claims over the entire swathe of land stretching from Finger 4, past the Sirijap Plain, to way east of the Khurnak line and then, as expected, stalling the 10th round of talks (that occurred) a couple of days back at the Corps commander-level talks when it came to discussing the steps to lift the blockade and allow Indian patrols to Hot Springs, Gogra and other points northwestwards, the PLA is sitting pretty. And because the Chinese are big on symbolism, it may be noted, the PLA have fielded its so-called “southern Xizang (Tibet) military district” head Major General Liu Lin, junior in rank to Lieutenant General PK Menon, commander of XIV Corps at these border talks. Having recognized the rank-asymmetry — meaning the PLA had assigned less importance to realizing peace then the Indian side did — after the first such meeting last year when the then Leh-based Corps Lt Gen Harinder Singh officiated, the Indian army should have immediately followed up the next time around by sending Liu’s rank equivalent — some Major General, any Major General, from that formation. Losing out thus in both symbolic and substantive terms, how’s any of this a success for India?
Q. 2: I am going to quote from a recent article of yours which stated ` New Delhi’s desperation has led to a peace process of impermanent but linked des-escalations, which Beijing may convert into opportunity for annexing territory in small parcels’.Can you elaborate on this given that several defence analysts believe China is already sitting on over 60 square kilometres of Indian land taken in 2020 while the fate of the land taken in the Depsang plains is hanging in the air. Your comments.
A: Depending on how scrupulously one tabulates exactly how much Indian territory has been ceded, lost, or simply been eased out of Indian control by the inattentiveness and laxity of Indian forces – the army and ITBP — over the years compounded by the la di- dah attitude of the Indian government to such loss, the actual territorial gains to China may be quite considerable over the 3,400 km length of the Line of Actual Control. So 60 sq kms here, 1,000 sq km there (in Depsang) could only be the proverbial tip of the iceberg!
Q.3: Up to last year, India was patrolling all eight Fingers on northern shore of Pangong Lake as these were on the Indian side. Today this has been reduced to the area between Fingers one to three. Can you elaborate.
A: The astonishing thing is the Indian army stopped contending for the land east of Finger 8 for many years until now when Indian army has effective control only up to Finger 3. In effect, the Sirijap-Khurnak expanse has been permitted to slip into China’s lap without so much as a squeak from Delhi! India and its army seem to have no answer for this Chinese policy generally of creeping territorial aggrandizement.
Q.4: It is believed that this disengagement and the ones to follow after subsequent talks is taking us to the 2013 line. Do you think that is so? Then how are we going to see any kind of status quo ante at all in Ladakh?
A: I fear that the manner in which India has accepted the process of, and the conditions for, the mutual “verifiable” pullback by the forces, the Indian government may be preparing to accept the expansive Chinese claim line articulated by Premier Zhouenlai in his November 7, 1959 letter which Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru roundly rejected. This Chinese line was to protect the Tibet-Xinjiang Highway the PLA had completed by 1957, which cut through the northern part of Indian Aksai Chin, with the additional territory sought as buffer.
Q.5: About ten days after India occupied the Kailash Range within the areas held by it, the Foreign Ministers’ of India and China reportedly met in Moscow on the Chinese request. It is believed that the Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar and his counterpart had arrived at an agreement about the broad terms of disengagement. Is this perception correct and what are your views on this?
A: Not sure what agreement Jaishankar hammered out with Wang Yi in Moscow. But it certainly did not achieve then, or in subsequent meetings at various bilateral civilian and military levels, what he repeatedly and publicly identified as the Modi government’s priority – “restoration of status quo ante”.
Q.6: There is a perception in the Indian army that the Ministry of External affairs is always ready to give up any military advantage it has obtained where China is concerned, but does not require the army to back down vis a vis Pakistan. It leaves the Indian army weaker in future discussions with China?
A: This may be the case because of higher political direction of Pakistan policy by the PMO whereas in the case of China, it is usually left to the China Study Group (CSG) and MEA to cull the options and even choose one. Except the CSG is made up of Mandarin-speaking diplomats, intelligence officers, and the like and has long distinguished itself as a den of China appeasers.
Q.7: You talk about how India should have adopted a more proactive approach against Beijing such as having cleared the Y-junction by use of force and counter-blockading the PLA in Depsang. But how will it work when the Chinese army is effective in the use of force?
A: The Indian government and army have to decide whether, because they fear tensions escalating into hostilities owing to the Indian reaction, they are willing to let China have its way. If sticking by India’s traditional claims of the LAC in eastern Ladakh and elsewhere is important, then it is time the army made a stand. Its Special Forces acting covertly should be ordered to vacate the PLA blockade and, to give Beijing pause. Simultaneously should be announced the deployment of the N-warheaded 700 km-range Agni-1 medium range missile units to the theatre. All military actions have risk, but being institutionally risk averse has not served the country’s interest and has earned India the reputation of being a country that can be pushed around by China. It has hurt India’s regional and international standing. Time to change that image with some decisive action.
Q. 8: Why has China refused to discuss Hot Springs, Gogra and Depsang? What kind of bargaining power can we now hope to exert to get the Chinese to move out of these three places?
A: Realistically-speaking, India has no leverage to compel the PLA to end its blockade except to signal its willingness to escalate matters, whatever the cost, which Delhi seems loath to do.
Q. 9: Has this happened given that the Indian army is the second largest military force in the world with 1.4 million active military personnel? Would you attribute this to a lack of up to date fighting equipment, ammunition, or logistical support or is it a lack of political will? Surely, we are better prepared than in 1962?
A: The real Indian weakness is not due to any shortfall in deployable military power or even the shortages but in the lack of political will and gumption.
Q.10: What is the fall out of this going to be on our eastern borders between Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh?
A: None, if we keep our proverbial powder dry! Unless the developments in Ladakh are taken by the army to mean that the government will countenance territorial losses in the northeast as well.
Q.11: What has India done to secure Doklam if China forces Bhutan to vacate its claims on that area?
A: The Indian government has successfully encouraged Thimpu to stand its ground, and the Bhutanese government has complied and rejected Chinese claims on a large part of what is its ecologically protected national park area.
Q.12: What lessons has India learnt from Armenia’s recent defeat and what is India going to do to counter what Pakistan and China are doing to follow the tactics and strategies used by Azerbaijan to defeat Armenia with ease?
A: No real lessons other than this was the first instance of extensive use of armed drones in warfare (by Aizerbaijan against Nagorno-Karabak) and alerts India to what drone warfare may look like and the possibility of the PLA using them on the LAC.
After talking with the Chinese supremo Xi Jinping, a rattled US President Joe Biden warned that China will “eat our lunch”. Considering the underway military disengagement could end up consolidating Chinese territorial gains in eastern Ladakh, Prime Minister Narendra Modi ought to worry about China feasting on India’s dinner.
Delhi’s desperation has led to a peace process of impermanent but linked de-escalations, which Beijing may convert into opportunity for annexing territory in small parcels. Consider the withdrawal of forces from the Pangong Lake area. Until not too long ago all the eight mountainous features – the ‘Fingers’ abutting on its northern shore — on India’s side of the Line of Actual Control were notionally under Indian control; today only Fingers 1 to 3 are. So why is People’s Liberation Army’s moving to its Sirijap staging area east of Finger 8, which is also inside Indian territory, reassuring or proof of China’s good faith?
Since last August when Special Frontier Force troops preemptively occupied various hilltops on the Rezangla-Rechinla ridge inside the Indian claim line, China has tried to reverse this development because these posts afford a 360-degree view and help the India army get a fix on potentially adverse Chinese military activity in the extended Pangong area. This advantage will be lost with the pullback, especially because the PLA is not thinning its forces from the Moldo garrison. In any case, the past record of Chinese chicanery — easing tensions the PLA itself creates as at Nakula, suggests that once Indians depart the commanding heights, the Chinese will fill the vacated space.
Meanwhile the issue of PLA’s de facto control over 1,000-odd sq kms of Indian territory in the Depsang Plains in Sub-sector North, of utmost significance to India, is deferred. Here PLA’s blockade of the Y-Junction has rendered the area northwestwards of it inaccessible to Indian patrols, enabling China to bring this vital piece of land within its control without contesting India’s claims — a neat little trick of occupation by indirect military means! This area adjoins the Xinjiang Highway whose branch — the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, veers south at the nearby Karakorom Pass and, hence, is of strategic value. The Indian army could forcibly evict the blockaders but Beijing is betting Delhi lacks the guts and the gall to order such action.
Chinese adventurism, foreign minister S Jaishankar said, has “profoundly disturbed” India’s trust, but apparently not the Indian government’s gullibility and habit of taking Beijing’s professions and commitments seriously. Thus, the China Study Group making policy for the government seems satisfied with a “written agreement”!
The process of penny-packeting the ‘phased’ mutual withdrawal has helped China evade the eight “guiding principles” defined by Jaishankar as the basis for negotiation, including the two principal ones of respecting the sanctity of all past accords and of the LAC, which China violates on a whim. It has permitted Beijing to dictate the pace, tenor and content of interactions. For Delhi to proceed regardless is, in effect, to legitimate a new tabula rasa for resolving the border dispute and for Sino-Indian relations generally, one in which whatever China wants goes.
At heart the problem is the Indian government’s terminal diffidence. It has foresworn the option of discomfiting China by strategic missile arming states on its borders as a belated payback for Beijing’s equipping Pakistan with nuclear missiles, and shies away from using its leverages (Taiwan, Tibet, trade, Uyghurs). This attitude infects the Indian military as well. In an alternative universe, army Special Forces would long ago have cleared the Y-Junction and counter-blockaded PLA on the Depsang. While there’s talk by military brass about reorienting Indian forces China-wards, there’s little initiative on display. The Indian response in Galwan Valley, it may be recalled, was reactive and SFF is run by the external intelligence agency, Research & Analaysis Wing (RAW).
Accustomed to supinity the Indian government nevertheless believes it will not lose out to Beijing. How is anybody’s guess!
It is indicative of something that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has literally said not a word against China’s deliberately provocative behaviour and the aggressive military activity by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in eastern Ladakh since April last year. In the months since, the confrontation has sharpened with the Indian army – which’s traditionally focused on the minor foe, Pakistan, suddenly realizing it has another live border, this time with China, to contend with. It scrambled the best it could to pull together a credible force to the theatre in the higgledy-piggledy manner the usually unprepared Indian military behaves in a crisis.
Whether and how much of a worst case the Army assumed as its operational baseline for the purposes of filling the severely depleted WWR (war wastage reserve) of spares and petroleum, oil and lubricants and of war stock (ammunition of all kinds and chemical munitions), is unclear. But non-wartime shortfalls of around 60% are normal. The replenishment of these ‘voids’ was carried out frantically without the army really knowing whether the PLA would lurch into hostilities and then fight for how long. With the situation hotting up in the XIV Corps area, Modi maintained his public silence as did the Chinese President Xi Jinping at the other end of the redline telephone installed not too long ago between Delhi and Beijing. It was left to Defence Minister Rajnath Singh to mouth the traditional inanity about “not an inch of territory” being lost.
It is another matter that on the ground some 1,000 sq kms of land in the Depsang Plains are actually lost to China. This has been achieved by the simple expedience of the PLA blocking the Y-Junction and hence the route Indian troops took to reach Indian posts. Any piece of your land on the border you are denied access to isn’t yours anymore. And because the Indian army failed to breach the blockade because, per news reports, it didn’t want to “open another front”, it has lost that entire area to China for good. Elsewhere, we may soon find that with the Special Frontier Force (SFF) troops vacating the high points on the Rezang La-Rechin La ridge in the Kailash Range as required by the “verifiable” mutual withdrawal agreement, the PLA, which neither respects the letter nor the spirit of any accord, will occupy them too. The SFF at these heights severely discomfited the PLA because the Indians overlooked its garrison at Moldo and, from that perch, monitored Chinese military activity in the extended Pangong Lake area.
The most troubling aspect of the pullback accord, however, is how readily the Indian government accepted the Chinese offer to draw back its forces to the Sirijap expanse east of Finger 8 on the northern shore of the lake as some kind of concession by Beijing. This is a particularly surprising development considering the Indian claim line runs way east of Sirijap, even east of the landmark in that area, the dilapidated Khurnak Fort, which Indian and Chinese troops patrolled as late as 1958, and marks it as both the midpoint of the northern shore of the Pangong Tso and the mutually-recognized India-Tibet boundary. An Indian Brigade based in Chushul protected that entire territory and in 1962 1/8 Gorkha Rifles held the Khurnak post.
Indeed, India’s claims are really strong, bolstered by documents from as far back as 1863 showing the fertile Ote Plain featuring this fort as territory contested between the inhabitants of the Pangong area owing fealty to Ranbir Singh, the then Maharajah of Jammu & Kashmir, and the Tibetan authorities in Lhasa. This entire sub-region, in other words, was never part of Tibet even if one assumes, for argument sake, that China now exercises lawful suzerainty over Tibet.
In a November 1959 letter, Premier Zhouenlai first pitched to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru China’s extended claims not only in the Aksai Chin but also in eastern Ladakh – a sector well within the erstwhile Kashmir Maharaja’s domain and hence integrally part of India post-1947. Zhou did so to protect the highway the Chinese had surreptitiously built through northern Aksai Chin a year earlier connecting the mainland to the far western province of Xinjiang. In a tactic that Beijing has repeatedly used of annexing foreign territory, making extensive claims over it, and then offering to withdraw a small distance as a concession and demanding that the aggrieved country do the same, Zhou made just such an offer and was roundly rebuffed.
Recognizing the Chinese fait accompli for what it was, Nehru responded by saying “There is no sense or meaning in the Chinese offer to withdraw twenty kilometers from what they call ‘line of actual control’. What is this ‘line of control’? Is this the line they have created by aggression since the beginning of September? Advancing forty or sixty kilometers by blatant military aggression and offering to withdraw twenty kilometers provided both sides do this is a deceptive device which can fool nobody.” It is a line he never retreated from and, 50 years later, is proving a real problem for Modi.
PLA’s build-up and aggressive manuevers along the LAC in the last nine months or so intimidated Delhi but were insufficient to get Modi to buckle under pressure as Beijing had hoped would happen. The next best option that both Modi and Xi concurred in was to stitch together an accord for both leaders to ‘save face’ and so the unsatisfactory mutual withdrawal accord materialized.
Supposing this agreement is the basis for a final solution for the dispute along the lines of Zhouenlai’s 1959 claim line that bisects the area between mountainous terrain features Fingers 4 and Finger 5 on the northern Pangong shore and proceeds south across the lake to encompass the ridge heights from Helmet Top to Rezang La presently in Indian hands before slouching southeastwards to meet up with the Indian claim line, how will Modi get around the inconvenient fact that he will have surrendered an enormous amount of Indian territory here and in the Depsang, something Nehru – whom he, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, and its chief ideological influencer – Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh revile, never willingly did?
The high point of the recent AeroIndia air show in Bengaluru was the announcement by the Government of the purchase from HAL of 83 Tejas light combat aircraft MK-1A for Rs 46,898 cr, with the first delivery to begin three years from now. This decision by the Cabinet Committee on Security comes almost five years after the then Chief of the Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Arup Raha flew in a Tejas (on May 18, 2016), pronounced its performance impressive and said it was “ready” for induction, and 13 months after Defence Secretary Ajay Kumar promised the contract for this aircraft would be signed in 2020.
The LCA project definition was initiated in 1987, the design for a small, delta-winged, fighter aircraft was settled in 1990, full funding was approved in 1993, the first technology demonstrator (TD) rolled out in 1995 and the Tejas first took to the skies in 2001, and improved TD-2 flew a year later and in 2003 the aircraft broke the sound barrier, achieving Mach status. (For the full timeline of the Tejas project, refer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_HAL_Tejas ) Up to this point the Tejas development had done quite well considering the project had to proceed from a zero baseline in terms of in-house competence in aircraft designing experience and R&D skills.
Dr Kurt Tank, the lead designer of the world famous Focke-Wulfe series of fighter-bombers for Hitler’s Luftwaffe, built up a capability in the country alongside the Indian team led by Dr Ghatge-Patil. Tank developed and had the first prototype of the supersonic multi-role HF-24 flying by 1961, i.e., within 4-5 years of being commissioned by the Nehru government to do so. It made India the first country outside North America and Europe to accomplish this feat! That IAF pilots who flew the Marut still swear by it and go ga-ga over its fabled handling qualities. That it could supercruise (reach supersonic speeds without afterburners) tells its own story!
The dive of this tested and proven indigenous capability from that technology height to zero by the late 1980s is solely because the IAF, successively under Air Chief Marshals PC Lal and OP Mehra, mercilessly killed off in the early to mid-1970s the advanced Mark-2 variant of the indigenous Marut. This murder of the advanced Marut was facilitated by the government working in cahoots with the IAF brass. Designed by Dr Raj Mahindra, the most gifted protege of Dr Tank and stellar member of the Ghatge-Patil team, the HF-72/73/74 — the numeral is unimportant — was ditched whole in favour of the British Jaguar. This so-called ‘deep penetration and strike aircraft’ (DPSA), I had pointed out at that time, could either penetrate “deep” — and for the IAF that meant into Pakistan, or strike hard (carry a heavy ordnance load) but couldn’t do both at the same time — which attributes made this aircraft a dubious buy and an operational liability.
The Jaguar DPSA was bought by the Morarji Desai government and was promptly accused by Maneka Gandhi (in Surya magazine she edited) of huge corruption for okaying this transaction with British Aerospace. Maneka’s charge was that defence minister Jagjivan Ram raked in hefty commissions. It set the trend of commission-mongering as a distinguishing and permament feature of all Indian government deals in all spheres with foreign companies thereafter. The Indira and Rajiv Gandhi regimes, for instance, that followed stood out, in this respect, for the scale of corruption attending on massive multi-billion dollar contracts with the Italian firm Snamprogetti for turnkey fertiliser plants, with Sweden for the Bofors howitzer gun and for the HDW-209 submarine deal with Germany.
But, to revert to Tejas, up until 2003 or thereabouts things were as good as could be expected, with the short time taken by the LCA project to reach that stage in the Indian context (sketched out above) being creditable. Indeed, it compares well with the development schedule of the latest combat aircraft in the American inventory — the F-35 Lightning II, whose delivery was 15 years behind schedule and over-budget by literally hundreds of billions of US dollars and that too in a milieu, if anything, of an over-developed aviation industry with long entrenched global supply chains. By comparison, Tejas is a steal!
So, what happened post-2003? Well, everyone in the procurement loop — in the IAF, Department of Defence Production, Defence Ministry, Government of India, and in defence public sector units (DPSUs), including HAL, began getting the heebie-jeebies when faced with the prospect of a home grown product. The IAF brass wedded to the outmoded idea that everything foreign is better found the Tejas disconcerting, particularly because the younger pilots who flew this plane couldn’t be more effusive in their admiration for it. It robbed those in the defence procurement loop including in the IAF, defence ministry and government of India, of periodic trips to Europe and points farther afield and the many joys and considerations these provided them, and confronted HAL and DRDO outfits that had grown lazy over decades of screwdrivering foreign aircraft — under license manufacture contracts and, when not buying foreign items and putting their insignia on them and selling them to the armed services as Indian-made goods, with now actually having to work to deliver on the technologies they promised and received dollops of funds to develop.
This to say that Tejas upset the vested interests and stiffened resistance to this aircraft up and down the defence establishment, inclusive of DPSUs. Every one so hurt buckled down to derailing the project.
The 2015 Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India on the Tejas LCA programme is revealing about just how much the IAF, DRDO, Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) and HAL seemingly competed with each other in their attempts to make this project a non-performing asset. There’s not a page in the report where HAL, ADA, DRDO or IAF, singly or severally, is/are not pulled up and held responsible for unconscionable delays and cost-over-runs, and innumerable actions to slow down or otherwise hurt the progress of the aircraft design stage onwards.
Thus, in separate sections of the Report the CAG hammers the ADA — a special purpose vehicle established to bring the LCA project speedily to fruition, for the failure of its Full Scale Engineering Development to produce two prototypes owing to a shut down of all activities for six years in Phase I, causing a delay of 11 years; slams the HAL for the absence of indigenisation plan and for the the “shortfall in creation of production facilities [which] impacted induction of LCA”; the IAF for “lack of user involvement” and for frequently changing the Air Staff Qualitative Requirements (ASQRs), which necessitated major design changes leading to interminable push-forwards of delivery dates, and for just as frequently revising the weapons carriage profile, which entailed structural changes, raised costs and (again) delays in delivery. The CAG report also highlights the failure of the GTRE (Gas Turbine Research Establishment) despite developemnt expenditure of Rs 2020 cr to produce the Kaveri engine forcing ADA “to depend on GE imported engines for LCA” .
In its 114th report, the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament (2018-2019), 16th Lok Sabha, followed up. Having scrutinized the LCA programme and the CAG audit, it iterated the findings and conclusions of the CAG and ended by rounding squarely on the MOD, saying “the [Defence] Ministry have failed to ensure proper coordination among its own different wings, like ADA, HAL and IAF, to develop our indigenous combat worthy LCA aircraft which ultimately resulted in half hearted approach on country’s security and incurring huge expenditure for procurement of fighter aircraft from foreign countries.”
However, Parliamentary admonishment has had no effect. In January 2020, defence secretary Ajay Kumar said in Kolkata that the contract for 83 Tejas LCA apart, the government had okayed the issual of a Request for Proposal for another 110 aircraft to all potential foreign suppliers. Given that just the up-front cost of buying a mere 36 Rafales — a small fleet that I have argued will be good for absolutely nothing in real operational terms — from France was some Rs 60,000 cr, an additional 110 aircraft for IAF could set back the country’s near empty Treasury by another Rs 15 lakh crore at a minimum as total lifetime costs for the Rafales and whatever imported combat planes make up the 110 aircraft complement with spares and servicing support plus various mixes of exorbitantly priced weapons!!
This is at a time when, as I have been writing and shouting from any and every forum available to me, manned combat aircraft as weapon systems are on the verge of extinction, on the cusp of being replaced by intelligent and lethal drones operating singly or in swarms and absolutely effective in air-to-ground and air-to-air missions. But then IAF is a habitual laggard, happy to bring up the rear of every technological innovation in the world! And the MOD as well as GOI are bereft of sound common sense, leave alone expertise, to guide their decisions. It is like leaving the decision on whether tanks and machine guns would be useful to old school cavalrymen who, in the 1920s and 1930s in both the US and British armies opposed going in for these new fangled armaments!
If Rs 15 lakh crores is the kind of expenditure in combat aircraft the IAF is seeking and MOD is willing to back, wouldn’t it be more advisable — from the atm nirbharta (self-sufficiency) angle — to channel most of these monies into the programme to fast-forward the evolving Tejas series of aircraft — Mk-II, AMCA (advanced medium combat aircraft), etc? And if the Modi government is truly into reducing the fiscal deficit and government expenditure generally by going in for systematic privatisation, shouldn’t DPSU be the prime targets? And why did Modi, Rajnath Singh and the present dispensation, in the event, permit investment of thousands of crores of rupees into a second Tejas production line for HAL when the more cost-effective solution that I have been advocating is for HAL/DRDO transferring the LCA source codes to Tata Aerospace, Mahindra Aerospace and/or even Reliance Aerospace, say, and otherwise incentivising these private sector companies to have parallel production lines for the manufacture full tilt of the 4.5 generation Tejas to meet IAF needs, speedily augment its fleet strength to 42 squadrons, and for exports to flood the developing country market so that India is set up as a meaningful arms exporter?
Why, oh, why, can’t the GOI ever do anything remotely out-of-the-box while all the time talking about it (pace Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Amitabh Kant at Niti Ayog)!!
[Myanmar Senior General Min Aung Hlaing and Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu]
India has sometimes treated its foreign policy as morality play when actually it is hard business involving national interests. The Indian government, especially under Manmohan Singh, often jumped on to the Western bandwagon any time a military in some country displaced a civilian regime charging human rights violation, etc. The Modi dispensation has to resist the impulse to side with the US now that Washington is embarked on its usual sanctions diplomacy vis a vis Myanmar — India’s valued neighbour and friend. India should affect a strictly hands-off policy, and do what Myanmar’s fellow ASEAN members have done — claim it is an internal matter that brooks no outside interference of any kind by any other country. But discreetely convey to the senior General in-charge, Min Aung Hlaing, that Delhi is in his corner and can depend on India for help and material assistance.
Aung San Suu Kyi had tremendous democratic credentials but over recent years had almost become a stalking horse for Xi’s China. She rode the Chinese Belt-Road-Initiative (BRI)-derived China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) in the hope of consolidating the hold of her party — the National League for Democracy (NLD), and her personal grip, on the government and country, win popular approval for the prospective prosperity the CMEC is suppoed to deliver and thus gradually to sideline the Generals.
The Myanmar military, it must be appreciated, has always been wary of Beijing and, to the extent the circumstances permitted, sought to keep the Chinese at the proverbial arm’s length. It is precisely the distance that the NLD was unable to maintain and on which subject the two sides were unable to compromise on that led to the Generals, having had enough of Suu Kyi’s prevarication, and simply taking over direct control of government. In real terms, things may not have changed much because, as many critics attest, the NLD was a democratic fig leaf for the Myanmar junta any way. This last contention, however, is not true. The Myanmarese military, under Western pressure, had transferred quite considerable power and authority to the NLD government, in the hope that its leader Suu Kyi would not rock the boat nor depart much from the line the Generals have always taken of prudently cultivating India and Russia as counterpoise to China. Despite many warnings she went off-script, signed numerous CMEC-related and other agreements with Beijing and compromised, in the junta’s view, the national interest.
India is the country the Myanmar Generals instinctively turn to when in doubt or in trouble. Indeed, the revolutionary founder of the Myanmar army General Aung San (yes, Suu Kyi’s father) was succeeded by U Nu and, fearful of China, the latter pleaded with Jawaharlal Nehru in the early 1950s for a security pact. This the Indian PM grandly dismissed as unnecessary and advised him to make peace with China! On other occasions since, for reasons of infirm will in Delhi and lack of clarity about where India’s national and strategic interests lay, Indian actions have confounded the Myanmariese Generals. Worse, the criminally tedious and tardy manner in which the Indian government has rolled out its promised infrastructure programmes — like the Kaladan project initiated more than 20 years ago, which is still not complete, is a case in point.
It contrasts with the record of Chinese construction companies executing complex infrastructure projects apparently in a jiffy, which hasn’t helped India’s cause. Indian strategic interests will be permitted to go down the drain but the Indian government — with MEA in the van — refuses to reform its overly bureaucratised way of doing things, providing other countries with a road map for how not to win freinds and influence neighbouring states. It merely firmed up the Myanmar military’s view that, while perhaps well meaning, India is just too thin a reed to lean on. And that Nyapyitaw (the new Myanmar capital) better rely on another more credible big power to secure its interests. This other power not surprisingly is Russia. Moscow understands that nothing so touches the hearts of the Mayanmar Generals as a bonafide military super power enthused with forging close links.
So in 2016, Russia and Myanmar signed an accord for long term military cooperation. The Putin government expects it to be the wedge in the door to establish itself as the prime supplier of military goods and services to Southeast Asian states. Those in the Indian government — and there are many in MEA and elsewhere who think this way, who believe that China has reversed the rank order and Russia is now its lapdog, have only to look at how assiduously it is building up its presence in the region to know that in the emerging geopolitics China has to contend as much with Russia as with the US. The reason why, I have long been arguing, that Prime Minister Modi’s ham-handed moves in the last few years to please Washington that have alienated Moscow, are the most imprudent thing he has done. Sure, it is a position from which his government is only now beginning to draw back, but damage has been done and requires urgent repairing.
The offshoot of Delhi’s bungling is that the bulk of Myanmar military officers, who used to come to Indian military institutions for training are these days going to Russia instead. General Hlaing has visited Russia more than he has done any other country and, in January this year, signed on for enlargement of security cooperation when Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Shoigu visited Naypyitaw. General Hlaing welcomed Shoigu in the most friendly terms, and confirmed Myanmar’s willingness to be the anchorage for Russian naval forces in the Indian Ocean — a very big developlment.
Delhi realizing it is on slippery slope, Foreign Secretary Shringla visited Myanmar in October 2020 and extended an invitation to Hlaing to again visit India, his first trip was in 2017. But with Russia and China both upping the ante, the Indian government will have to do a lots more than promising to take the General around to Darjeeling and loading him with packets of Seeyok tea he relishes. MEA-MOD will be well advised to offer him a slate of substantial hardware transfers. Why not lead with half a dozen of India’s very own and modern Tejas LCA — and a slew of advanced training schedules tailored to meet the Myanmarese military’s needs and otherwise build on the recent gift of an indigenously refurbished Russian Kilo SSK submarine along with crew training that has won India loads of goodwill?
Moreover, with CMEC seeking to connect Kunming to Kyaukpyu and Yangon, time for Delhi to propose to Hlaing jointly operated elint and radar stations on the Coco Islands offshore, and for the Modi government to take a whip to recalcitrant babus in various ministries who have stalled on petty financial grounds Indian development projects in the extended neighbourhood and, in this specific instance, are required to coordinate their activities with MEA, to deliver speedily on the Kaladan project before Naypyitaw loses all respect for India, and India loses its toehold in Myanmar.
[Finance Minister Nirmala Seetharaman delivering the budget ]
Despite hostilities last summer and the prevailing tense situation on the disputed border — ‘Line of Actual Control’ — with China, Indian defence budget has actually not increased in real terms from 2018-2019! The defence allocation of Rs 4.71 lakh crore three years ago amounted to about US$65 billion which, incidentally, is the current US$ value of the total defence budget that has nominally increased to Rs 4.78 lakh crore announced yesterday by Finance Minister Nirmala Seetharaman in Parliament. In other words, the defence spend, for all intents and purposes, is both relatively small and static.
This reckoning in hard currency matters because the Indian armed forces are so completely dependent on imports for almost everything military, even slight force augmentation or filling of “voids” entails heavy US dollar outflow. Such are the straitened circumstances the country finds itself in. In a time of negative economic growth, the country is unable to afford even a reasonable level of security. This is showcased by that little statistic of defence budget accounting for only 1.6% of a slowing GDP growth.
Much has been made by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh about the Rs 1.35 lakh crore or US$18.5 billion (at current US$ value) being set aside for capital expenditure by the armed services. A lot of this money, alas, will not go into shoring up the country’s fighting capability against the PLA on or across the length of the LAC, but is committed expenditure related to the armed services’ pet procurement programmes — buying T-90 tanks, 114 more aircraft that the IAF will try and ensure are additional Rafales, etc.
So come April when snow melts, the Chinese will again begin stomping on Indian toes knowing fully well the Indian military can do damned little about it other than to hold on tenuously to positions they are in, leaving everything else to chance! I mean, how useful is it to bulk up the Rafale and T-90 fleets when the need is for more winter-equipped Special Forces to retake Depsang in the immediate here and now when the foul weather ability of the PLA to transport and maintain a large force is limited, a constraint that will be instantly removed once spring and summer come around?
More importantly, because this latter aspect — retaking Depsang — is not an operational priority these earmarked funds will do little to alleviate the main problem at hand. Namely, the reality of a large piece of Indian territory — some 1000 sq kms in size, in Sub-sector North northwestwards of the Y-junction on the Depsang remaining securely in Chinese custody. The longer this PLA occupation is unchallenged and not forcibly reversed, the more confident will Beijing feel in legally claiming it as part of Tibet and, control-wise, bring it under PLA’s southern sector command.
But to revert to the US$ 18.5 billion capital budget in this fiscal, a goodly sum has already been spent in the usual helter-skelter fashion reflecting desperation — the normal anytime genuine military hostilities loom. In the period July-December 2020, Indian army teams fanned out all over the world to secure at improbably high prices war materiel worth US$2 billion to replenish its war wastage reserve (in terms of critical spares) and war stock of ammunition and artillery shells. Indeed, supplier companies in France, the US, Russia, etc have been licking their chops eyeing the profit in store and stocking up since last summer, certain that India will make a run on their inventories when they anticipated extracting a kingly ransom from Delhi. This they have done. Not to waste an opportunity of the national wallet being opened, the air force indented for 20-odd MiG-29 air defence aircraft and a dozen Su-30MKI multi-role aircraft from Russia for roughly US$4 billion to bolster its force strength. The trouble is neither set of actions will prospectively blunt the edge the PLA and PLAAF can bring to bear in China’s Western Theatre Command when tensions again begin to rise.
True, Indian defence budgeting has always involved juggling with several balls in the air — partially funding a foreign acquisition here, another procurement there, in a patchwork that does little to comprehensively enhance India’s security or its ability to fight sustained, long duration, wars. Reason why, it is the military leaders who voice the need for the government to seek a diplomatic solution with China! Such is the perfectly awful state of strategizing and of resource planning in the PMO and in the Defence Ministry.
Atm nirbharta is, of course, reduced to a joke. It boggles my mind when Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Rajnath Singh, on down equate license manufacture with self-sufficiency in arms!! The obligatory noises about self-reliance apart, emergency buys such as the ones India has so far gone in for, only exacerbate the situation. All kinds of planning predicates get ditched, with the impromtu buys abroad especially at premium rates being the chief skewing factor. In the event, the demands for defence expenditures to reach the 2.5% of GDP, and 3% of GDP suggested by a past Finance Commission while rife, are simply unrealizeable. Especially in a COVID-devastated economy that has formally left India poorer than Bangladesh in terms of per capita GDP!
The Indian government is economically reduced to firefighting mode, trying to stretch, the best it can, the too few resources to cover too many domestic demands. It is a political context in which defence will always find itself deprived.
Security Wise 