The recent G-20 Summit offered Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi the occasion he has frequently used to bolster his political standing at home. Except, while the domestic audience lapped up the Indian media coverage attending on his umpteenth such outing, in the real world of global power politics the Indian prime minister, sans hard power and/or hard cash to wield, was reduced as usual to a prop by Donald J. Trump, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin. But Modi did in Buenos Aires what he has done in similar circumstances in the past – tried to make India relevant by seeming to be part of clashing coalitions. Thus, he met with Putin and Xi in a threesome to ballyhoo the prospects of the RIC (Russia-India-China) group before turning around and joining Trump and the Japanese Premier Shinzo Abe to extol the strategic virtues of Japan-America-India or “JAI”.
By not clearly indicating which side of the authoritarian-democratic divide India is on Modi hopes to firm up India’s standing as the balancer in the fluid global correlation of forces. This would be fine if the country was up for the great power game which it is not. Unlike other big powers India is not adept at realpolitik requiring an agile foreign policy and does not have a military clout with distant reach in support. This begs the question: Why has India with its size, strategic location and resources failed in the new Century to have impact?
India cannot become great only because of these attributes. It requires a leader with a powerful national vision, iron political will, and the ruthlessness to implement it by disrupting the extant balance of power and the extant balance of power in order to compel the world to deal with India on its own terms.
There was hope, now belied, that Modi would be such a leader. He has not articulated anew vision nor charted a new course but has doubled down on the retrograde policy of bandwagoning with the United States to ‘balance’ China in the Indo-Pacific region while distancing the country from old friends, such as Russia and Iran. By giving away free what could be sold dear, the Modi government finds it cannot wring concessions out of anybody. India signed the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement and the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement Washington desired and lost the leverage accruing from permitting contingent access to Indian bases, etc. or from playing ball on this or that issue in return for substantively furthering the country’s vital national interests. It permitted China unbalanced trade and finds it cannot easily reverse it.
Instead, Modi has made common cause with Washington in pressuring Tehran by reducing India’s off-take of Iranian oil by a third, and expensively retrofitting Indian refineries to handle Saudi crude, and alienated Russia by facilitating the US attempts to replace it as the principal arms supplier even though the American technology on offer is dated (F-16 versus Akula-II class attack submarine, for instance).And the US promise of collaboration on advanced military technology has produced nothing. Now India is facing the music for Modi’s gullibility.Washington has allowed Delhi just a 138-day reprieve on the CAATSA sanctions to zero out its oil purchases from Iran, and only a conditional waiver for its buy of the Russian S-400 air defence system. And, disregarding Modi’s fevered pleadings to desist from doing so, Trump shut down the H1B visa channel for Indian techies to work in the US and seriously hurt the $200 billion Indian IT industry.And Beijing allows grudging access to the Chinese market while China opens the Indian bazaar for its goods, small openings at a time.
The problem is more serious. Modi seems unaware of the geostrategic costs of surrendering India’s foreign policy space, freedom and flexibility. Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, for instance,declared without a trace of irony that “there’s no contradiction between strategic autonomy and strategic partnership”! That this overly-friendly attitude to America, which to-date has fetched meagre results, could lose India its access to the Iranian port of Chabahar, for example, and endanger its larger strategic plans of consolidating its presence in the Gulf and rail and road connectivity to Afghanistan and Central Asia as counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, of pincering the Pakistan and Chinese navies operating out of Gwadar, and generally of hindering the enlargement of the Chinese military footprint in the Indian Ocean apparently concerns Modi little, but having the armed forces bully a lowly Pakistan has priority.
The truth is the Indian government has not walked Modi’s big talk. India’s ‘Neighbourhood first’ policy can’t get over the Pakistan hump. Its ‘Act East’ policy is limping along. The build-up of military cooperation with the Southeast Asian nations, especially Vietnam, is slow-paced and lackadaisical, the freedom of navigation patrols by Indian warships in the disputed waters of the South China Sea infrequent, the annual summits with the Japanese Premier Shinzo Abe notwithstanding, the security links with Japan are in the doldrums with the Indian defence bureaucracy sidelining Japan’s flagship project it is willing to subsidise concerning transfer of the entire production line of the Shinmaywa US-2 flying boat, and Australia’s admission to the Malabar naval exercise remains barred by Delhi.
Elsewhere,the development assistance Modi promised the Central Asian Republics is floundering for want of an efficient delivery system. And all this while China is racing ahead to cement its domination of Asia. The odd “success”, such as Indonesia handing over Sabang port in Sumatra for eventual Indian naval use, highlights a receptive milieu should India care to capitalize on opportunities.
The most that even powerful countries think they can realistically do against a relentlessly assertive China eager to displace the United States as the predominant power in the world is, as Richard Haass, a former head of Policy Planning at the US State Department, has written is to “manage” relations with it. This is no great revelation to the Indian government which has been in the business of managing its neighbour since the humiliating military defeat in the 1962 Himalayan War when Delhi finally gave up the ghost of “Hindi-Chini bhai bhai” and the even grander aim Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru entertained in the years straddling independence of an India-China concert to oversee the affairs of Asia.
But the relationship management task is growing more onerous by the year simply because Beijing has so honed its game, is so strategically driven, and agile in its policies and posture and has such a wealth of resources to deploy to winning friends and influencing targeted countries, it continually advantages itself. Pitted against this seemingly unstoppable force is a whole bunch of countries on the Asian littoral and in the Indian Ocean, the weaker among them finding it hard to resist the Chinese promises of rapidly erected quality infrastructure financed by easy credit. It is “debt-book diplomacy” of a high order that no rival of China in the Indo-Pacific region is able to match – not Japan, and even less India.
It is quite another matter, however, that as Sri Lanka has discovered with the Humbantota port, the high-cost of the project and the resulting troubles with servicing debt has ended in a 99-year lease of this facility to a Chinese shipping company. The lesson is stark and is being quickly learned. Thus, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Thailand have shelved or curtailed infrastructure projects involving Chinese loans. Even in Pakistan, which thinks of the prospective China-Pakistan Economic Corridor as a boon, more and more people worry about the debt trap their country may be stepping into.
Just as important to Beijing’s design of achieving supremacy, other than an economic stranglehold, is the military objective of getting around what Chinese strategists call the “Malacca dilemma” – the necessity of protecting 80% of its trade transiting through the Indian Ocean having to negotiate the “chokepoints” of the Malacca, Lumbok and Sunda Straits which, the Indian Navy based out of the country’s eastern seaboard and the Integrated Command in Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar chain of islands can effectively control. This explains the frantic search for harbours and oceanic frontages, except such acquisitions can mitigate the problem somewhat without really solving it. Hence the Chinese investments in north-south road and rail projects to access all year warm water ports through Kyaukpyu on the Bay of Bengal in Myanmar and Gwadar on the Arabian Sea in Pakistan.
So what can be done to, if not stop, than to slow down the Chinese juggernaut? There is actually a military containment solution. The littoral and offshore states and India have to coalesce into a security group that can operationalize a hard strategy. India has military access to Duqm in Oman, the French base ‘Heron’ in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, Seychelles, Maldives, and Trincomalee in Sri Lanka. It now has to speedily develop the Sumatran port of Sabang and the Vietnamese base of Na Thrang on the central Vietnamese coast offered Delhi, for Indian naval use and as a beefed-up electronic intelligence-gathering station run jointly with Hanoi to capitalize on its line of sight on the Chinese Navy’s main base at Sanya on Hainan island.
This chain of military bases have to be complemented with continuous and rigorous exercising with the host, local and regional navies to send the message to Beijing that whatever concentration of forces it can manage on either side of the three straits, they will face difficulties. And India has to prioritize the transfer of the Brahmos cruise missiles in bulk to Vietnam and every other country that expresses a desire for it. It is the surest way to tie down the Chinese South Sea Fleet and the secret ‘’Fourth” fleet for the Indian Ocean. And it will make the countries disputing China’s monopolizing the South China Sea more confident of deterring the Chinese Navy than if they lacked such strategic impact armament
This is a far better coalition-based maritime strategy to dissuade China from exercising its superiority on the undelineated 4,700km land border, the so-called Line of Actual Control, than the “theatre switching” strategy the Indian government is betting on, which, frankly, is unworkable. Indeed, one manifestation of Beijing’s confidence that it can take care of India’s maritime counter and still press the Indian forces landward is the rapid conversion of satellite air fields into mainline bases with the updating of the necessary infrastructure and the augmentation of its air force and missile batteries in Tibet. India, in response, seems to get nothing right. It is leisurely raising a single offensive mountain corps and then fluffing it by establishing it along the strike corps model for the plains, rather than equipping it with light tanks!
The joker in the pack is the unpredictable Donald J. Trump’s America. The abrupt withdrawal of US forces from Syria and Afghanistan and the departure of General James Mattis from the Pentagon ought to give the Narendra Modi government and other Asian regimes who have to-date unthinkingly depend on the US for their security, pause. Trump, who has downgraded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, watered down military cooperation with South Korea, and is inclined to sacrifice the interests of US allies and partners without notice to be in good nick with President Xi Jinping, only reinforces America’s dismal track record post-1947 of hurting friends and fellow democracies, and cannot be trusted.
The Indian government forgets the cold-bloodedness with which, as recently revealed by declassified documents, the Democratic Administration of President Jimmy Carter heeded Dengxiaoping’s counsel in the late 1970s that for the sake of “stability” and to incentivize Islamabad to assist the US effort to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Washington should allow China to nuclear missile arm Pakistan. Recall the iconic photograph of Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski posing with an AK-47 at the Khyber Pass?
Love to repeat what’s become my favourite line — I TOLD YOU SO!
Immediately after his nomination by the Republican Party as its presidential candidate I had written that once in the White House, Donald Trump would be so self-centered and concerned only with advancing America’s narrow interests that Delhi should pragmatically prepare to get out of its traditional policy of leaning on big powers — the Soviet Union pre-Cold War end and in the new century, the US — for the country’s strategic security, and begin relying on itself and its national resources for its own protection because it will be compelled by the emerging circumstances to do so anyway. And hence, that Trump’s election would be a good thing because, finally, the value of self-reliance, especially in arms and national security, will be appreciated. (“Why Donald Trump is good for India”, Open magazine 20 July 2016, http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/politics/why-donald-trump-is-good-for-india and also posted on this blog).
Such tocsins that I sounded have, however, gone unheeded. Now that Trump has dumped on the Narendra Modi regime and other friendly states, leaving them high and dry, perhaps, some one in PMO, MEA, government will. The prompt is the decision by the President abruptly to withdraw the US military from Syria and Afghanistan. Defence Secretary, James Mattis, objected and resigned. He was the only man standing between India and Trump’s whimsicality.
So, consider the situation now: In Afghanistan, the Modi government suddenly finds it has lots of now hollow promises about sustained US commitment to realizing a Taliban-mukt Afghanistan and no US boots on the ground to achieve it. India has lost the military cover under which Delhi was running its own Afghan Taliban links. Oh, sure, Trump will leave a few Special Forces units in Afghanistan (and in Syria) to prosecute counter-terrorism( and anti-IS) actions, but for all intents and purposes the US has abandoned Afghanistan, leaving the Kabul government of Ashraf Ghani in a lurch, and the Pakistan-leaning sections of Taliban in that country ascendant. In the last such Taliban rule by the one-eyed Mullah Omar, terrorists professing the Kashmir cause hijacked an Air India flight to Kandahar leading to capitulation by the previous BJP government and the sheer humiliation of External Affairs minister Jaswant Singh handing over Azhar Mahmood to the Taliban.
With the Taliban-run Afghanistan once again available as a base in-depth, Inter-Service Intelligence of the Pakistan Army will be in a position to marshal that country’s vast terrorist resources in terms of religiously motivated manpower. Whether Indian intelligence agencies in league with other outfits can prevent such a denouement is doubtful. In the main because the sections of the Afghan Taliban, whose members also join up opportunistically with the Pakistani Taliban that Indian intel have cultivated over the years, are incapable of outfighting on two fronts — against the more rabid Taliban in Afghanistan and the Pakistan army in Pakistan. But India would have to keep a hand in in Afghan affairs by sustaining the friendly Taliban in the field. However, the best diplomatic bet for a solution is the underway Russian initiative for peace in Afghanistan. Nov 8 meeting hosted in Moscow by the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had invitees from United States, India, Iran, China and Pakistan, and the five former Central Asian republics, and hailed the meeting as an opportunity to “open a new page” in Afghanistan’s history. India’s role, insofar as can be made out, was just to mark its presence.
The Afghan escapade pulled by Trump meshing with his Syria decision was justified via twitter thus: “Why are we fighting for our enemy, Syria, by staying & killing ISIS for them, Russia, Iran & other locals? Time to focus on our Country & bring our youth back home where they belong!” In other words, the Islamic State core fighting forces and leadership, who are supposed to have bolted with a full load of hard currency and gold from their Syrian and Iraqi strongholds, are readying to renew jihad against darul harb (non-Islamic world) but Washington wants no part of it. Except this fight can seep into the Kashmir dispute. How?
Because Hindu India oppressing Muslims is a cause Islamists from all over can readily rally around. What with Adityanath and his hate Muslim-antics in Uttar Pradesh providing almost a pluperfect basis for the already active Islamic State, J&K branch, to base their war against the Indian state on. And because, an effete Indian state would seem to be an easy target for an IS-led international movement hungry for success after its thrashing in their West Asian redoubts by the combined military might of US, Europe, Iraqi forces loyal to Baghdad, and assorted Arab states, with the Saudis in the van, and Turkey seeking to lead this campaign. Indeed Recep Erdogan, with a subconscious motive of reclaiming the Ottoman domain in some sense has, in fact, been handed the helmsmanship of the fight against IS rump by Trump who has decamped from the region along with the US forces. With Ankara so elevated and Turkey’s intimacy with the powers that be in Islamabad (read Pakistan army) set aside the cold vibes Erdogan encountered when he visited Delhi and broached the topic of mediating on Kashmir, he may not be altogether averse to channeling the IS fighting horde, via a facilitative Talibanized Afghanistan, into Kashmir.
How does Modiji expect to deal with this onrushing train when his policy is tied to the rails of ‘strategic partnership’ with a completely unreliable and untrustworthy America? We will nevertheless hear from the Carnegie-Brookings crowd, including its leading lights here and in nearby countries via op/eds in Indian newspapers who will twist these developments and Trump’s wayward policy into a pretzel to argue that Delhi should tie India even closer to the US to reap strategic rewards, when the time actually is nigh for India to begin securing its future by itself.
At the heart of this policy mess is the fact that Indian politicians and the Indian government invariably make a hash of reading the United States correctly. In the main because, like Modi and everybody else in policy making circles, dependency on external players is instinctive, laced with personal profit, aspirations, and desires that are made to fit inconvenient reality. In this case, it has resulted in India giving in to Washington on every issue, playing the doormat, and making no substantive move to incentivize the states on China’s periphery to join together in shoring up our individual security by collective means. “Look East, Act East”, in the event, is just another slogan to be trotted out the next time a summit takes place in those parts or a head of state from there comes visiting.
India has much in its corner. It has military access to Duqm in Oman, the French Base Heron in Djibouti, Seychelles, Maldives, Trincomalee in Sri Lanka, Sabang in Indonesia and Na Thrang on the central coast of Vietnam, and the Indian Navy has worked up these and other maritime neighbours in its Indian Ocean Naval Symposium into a cooperative mood, but where’s the follow up action? What’s the point of these bases on distant shores if no Indian military forces are ever posted there?
Inaction always has cost. Tajikistan offered the Farkhor air base in Ainee for India to refurbish and to operate a squadron of IAF Su-30s out of. Had this squadron been immediately posted to Ainee soon after an Indian task force in the early 2000s had lengthened the runway to handle heavier aircraft and redone the tarmac — all with Indian monies, India would have had a military grip on China’s flank. Instead Delhi waited, displaying its usual lassitude, and IAF did nothing to prod the Manmohan Singh government into approving such deployment and, voila!, the Russians returned in this decade militarily to recover Ainee for their own use as a forward base. So now if Delhi invokes its original understanding with Dushanabe, Moscow may, depending on whether relations with India are frosty, exercise a veto.
This is how every extra-territorial military initiative that Delhi mounted has ended. In the maritime domain, for instance. Mozambique’s request to the Indian government to found a navy for that country equipped with phased out Indian corvettes and frigates and led by Indian Navy officers remains unaddressed from the time it was first made in the year 2000. That’s the sort of urgency the Indian government shows for anything remotely strategic! The Indian people’s dream of India as a great power is wrecked by such care-less attitude and sheer disinterest in doing anything worthwhile.
Not one of the services has a forward-looking plan for capability build-up for conflicts of the future, which will feature proactive and defensive cyber warfare wherewithal and Artificial Intelligence-driven robotic systems cued to assigned tasks by a multitude of space- air-, land- and sea-based sensors passing real-time intelligence on the enemy force disposition that are able to assess operational situations and even concert with other friendly ‘warbots’ in the field to attack the target(s).
Most such systems have progressed beyond the testing stage and are on the brink of deployment in the more advanced militaries. In India, there’s not a hint of any thinking about robotic warfare, and even less of robotic warfare systems being designed and developed. A basic rover to handle/disarm live munitions/improvised explosive devices is about the extent of our achievement in the military robotics field.
Rather, the Indian military remains committed to World War II-era genus of weapons platforms — tanks, artillery, combat aircraft, aircraft carriers, in the main and then they are nowhere near cutting-edge, technology-wise. This is evident in the force modernisation plans.
The army has the replacement of the venerable T-72 tank with the newer Russian T-90 tank as priority; the air force wishes to induct the French Rafale multi-role combat aircraft in large numbers. Except, 36 of these aircraft that have actually been bought are too valuable to commit to action and too few to muster operational clout; and the navy is so besotted by aircraft carriers that to afford them the country is compelled to make do with fewer, smaller, fighting ships (frigates and destroyers) and a thinned out presence in the Indian Ocean (unless the naval budget is increased manifold, which’s not on the cards).
Most such backward-looking schemes are deemed adequate because the political class and the military brass, quixotically, cannot think of danger beyond Pakistan, this even though China — the only credible threat — looms spectre-like. Thus, Pakistan is the adversary the Indian Air Force mentions to justify the Rafale buy and bungs in a nuclear bombing role for it to overawe the media and the people.
Likewise, the Indian naval chief assures the country in a Navy Day newspaper supplement that his force is superior to its Pakistani counterpart. The army chief on his part, when not advising Pakistan to become more secular if it wants to live in amity with India, warns of more “surgical strikes”. With the Pakistan bogey so much on the military’s mind, who has time for the real world?
Meanwhile, the Narendra Modi government, in lieu of any actual expenditure of scarce funds, gives the impression of buttressing the country’s defence effort with the periodic announcements of the Defence Acquisitions Council (DAC) approving purchases of major armaments costing thousands of crores. However, because the DAC’s approval is about the first step in an onerous process that involves a lot of bureaucratic grind, little that is announced comes down the arms pipeline quickly, and military modernisation schemes, such as they are, mark time. Consider this: In the period October 2017 and October 2018, total capital buys worth Rs 86,030 crore were cleared by the DAC, but no contract was signed.
This is part of the pattern from when the erstwhile defence minister Manohar Parrikar boasted of the DAC clearing Rs 3 lakh crore worth of military procurement in the first three years, with only a small fraction of the sum actually translating into weaponry with the forces. Of course, the tortuous defence procurement system is to blame but no government has sought to simplify and streamline it — perhaps, because it serves the purposes of the vested interests that continue to grow fat on arms deals or through ‘Make in India’ schemes of ‘screwdrivering’ hardware from imported kits.
This essentially leaves India exposed in the basic binary areas — nuclear and conventional. Nuclear security has traditionally been the Indian government’s blindspot, with nothing being done to resume underground tests and augment capabilities. This even as established nuclear powers induct new thermonuclear weapons and delivery systems, a trend likely to accelerate now that the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty banning nuclear missiles of 500-5,000 mile range from being deployed in Europe is defunct.
Meanwhile, the Indian military doggedly acquires short-legged aircraft, like the Rafale, not strategic bombers such as the advanced ‘Backfire’ Tu-22M3M or the more lethal ‘Blackjack’ Tu-160M2, invests in tank forces long after they are of any real use, opts for aircraft carriers vulnerable to supersonic cruise and hypersonic guided missiles, and struggles to raise its first offensive warfare-capable mountain corps to take the fight to China on the Tibetan Plateau and spurns light tanks as its main equipment.
Karnad’s critique of Modi’s foreign and security policies stands out as an important broadside from a prominent political commentator.
By Sumit Ganguly, India Today, December 8, 2018; ISSUE DATE: December 17, 2018
This book is an insightful but uneven critique of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign and security policies. It is perceptive because Bharat Karnad quite accurately describes the principal factors that propelled Modi into office in 2014 and the hopes that many in the electorate had reposed in him. It is also problematic because his criticisms are often much too sweeping and shot through with his own idiosyncratic preferences.
At the very outset, Karnad correctly argues that Modi had represented a potential break from India’s recent lacklustre past under the previous regime. Modi seemed to embody a clean image, a leader who was decisive and would bring about the much-needed reforms across the board. Few, if any, of these promises, Karnad argues, have been realised. Worse, stemming from his ideological convictions or because he is beholden to the foot soldiers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Modi has given free rein to highly divisive forces within the Indian society. Apart from this dubious domestic stance, Karnad argues, Modi has engaged in much fanfare on the foreign policy front, but has failed to produce commensurate results.
Karnad attributes a good deal of these shortcomings to certain features of Modi’s alpha male personality, traits that he apparently shares with a number of other nationalistic and populist leaders across the world. Whether or not one accepts the premises derived from this form of popular psychology, there are at least some superficial similarities that he does share with a number of other nationalist leaders ranging from Donald Trump to Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Some of Karnad’s criticisms of Modi’s policies, whether or not they can be traced to his personality, are clearly on the mark. Among other matters, he faults Modi for his failure to devise a coherent strategy for dealing with India’s principal long-term adversary, the People’s Republic of China (PRC). More to the point, he takes Modi to task for his preoccupation with Pakistan, a country that poses a far more limited threat to India’s critical national security interests.
The other charges that are levelled against Modi’s foreign and security policy choices seem to stem mostly from his ideological leanings. For example, he is overly critical of what he deems to be Modi’s inordinate fondness for the United States at the cost of a tried and tested relationship with Russia. Elements of Indian elite opinion across the political spectrum do share this view. However, they, along with Karnad, fail to recognise the obvious: in the present global order, Russia is, at best, a partial power and is structurally incapable of wielding the clout of the erstwhile Soviet Union.
Karnad also returns to one of his favourite hobby horses: why India should have pursued thermonuclear weapons and how the US-India nuclear agreement has, for all practical purposes, undermined that goal. Yet, it is far from clear that India needs a thermonuclear deterrent to keep its principal adversaries, Pakistan and the PRC, at bay. On the contrary, it can be argued that the acquisition of a thermonuclear option may actually undermine the strategic stability in the region.
Finally, Karnad remains an ardent proponent of an indigenous defence base for India and so has harsh words for the country’s willingness to import a range of advanced weaponry. The quest for domestic defence capabilities, no doubt, is admirable. Yet, surely, Karnad must be aware that its limitations did not emerge under the Modi regime. Hardly a single homegrown weapons system seems to have been produced in a timely or cost-effective fashion.
These quibbles notwithstanding, Karnad’s critique of the Modi government’s foreign and security policies stands out as an important broadside from a prominent conservative political commentator. Accordingly, it is an assessment that is worth heeding.
(Sumit Ganguly is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and holds the Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington)
It requires pointing out that Ganguly’s description of my treatment of the subject as “uneven” betrays his own desire to side with his adopted country, the United States, and to have his country of origin, India, join with it in countering China and to buy “advanced weaponry” from. If I have an ideological leaning it is towards hard realpolitik and agile policies untrammeled by sentiment or the personal proclivities of leaders, and the need for India to assume its role and responsibility as, potentially, the heftiest balancer of international power, forces, and interests in the world today. Whence the case made in the book for not leaning over-much on America’s side, or alienating old friends, Russia and Iran, to please Washington.
As regards his slamming India’s indigenous defence industrial capability with his remark that the mainly public sector-led campaign has to-date produced little worthwhile in time or within cost misses out on the model I have explicated in this and previous books and in my other writings that the indigenization effort would be better led by a capable, profit-minded, and exports-driven private sector. Except, the US defence industry is hardly a great example for anybody to emulate, considering that the US has squandered in excess of a trillion dollars to produce an absolute disaster of a combat aircraft — the F-35 Lightning-II, and that too more than a decade past its deadline. The US Air Force has grounded the plane for faulty design and performance, and the ‘C’ variant of this aircraft with the US Navy can barely manage 15% serviceability rate. And mind you, this is supposedly the world’s leading aerospace company we are talking about, one that over the last 100 years and more has produced over 150 types of combat and transport aircraft. Now pit the F-35’s problems against the 4.5 generation Tejas light combat aircraft, designed and produced in the country that has survived despite the unhelpful attitude of the Indian government, proven weaknesses of a defence public sector unit such as HAL and the Indian Air Force’s visceral antagonism to anything home-grown. To wit, IAF’s shameful role in the 1970s in killing off the successor aircraft, the Dr. Raj Mahindra-designed Mark-II of the redoubtable HF-24 Marut, thereby setting India on the course to importing aircraft and becoming an abject arms dependency. The Marut, it may be recalled, was the first supersonic jet fighter to be designed and manufactured outside of North America and Europe, which took to the Bangalore skies in 1961. It provides a very different perspective, doesn’t it?
To highlight the plight of the soldier incapacitated in war and other military operations, the army chief had declared 2018 as ‘The Year of the Disabled Soldier’. The Year was marked by General Bipin Rawat frequenting major military centres to meet with groups of disabled soldiery, to buck up their spirits, hear their complaints and, in dire cases, dispense financial help to alleviate immediate distress. The sad tales particularly of injured jawans somehow surviving, not always very well, who have fallen through the cracks in the system and into unbearably hard times, and otherwise forgotten, are many. And, that’s a shame.
But this is not because COASs over the years have not done their utmost to solve such problems. It is just that the formal anomalies in the system in which different benefit schemes with different classes of beneficiaries announced at different times, after different wars and contingencies, have created a confusing welter of benefits and categories of disabled. These range from jawans (from an earlier time) making do with a handshake by a commiserating chief, meagrely augmented pensions, and perhaps a prosthetic ‘Jaipur leg’ or a wheel chair (motorised, if he is lucky) to those given government jobs, granted petrol pumps by public sector oil companies, etc. and hence on easier street.
In the context of the ‘One Rank, One Pension’ Movement acquiring traction because of the disparity in post-retirement benefits, it is strange that the far more telling and intolerable disparity in the treatment of soldiers crippled in war and physically incapable of carrying on with life other than in abject penury, may have occasioned sympathy but not corrective measures that are desperately and urgently needed, whatever the cost. Prime Minister Modi to his credit came through on his OROP promise. He will do immeasurable, long overdue and lasting good if he, on his own, initiated moves and to equalize the benefits for equal military disabilty. With a possibly make or break 2019 elections in the offing, the extended social tiers of beneficiaries in the country who may gain from a more equitable schemata to match benefits with military service-related disability is a voter base that’s there to capture.
On the sidelines of an army seminar on mountain warfare yesterday, Gen. Rawat was discussing how, despite every effort made by army chiefs over the years to leave no disabled soldier uncovered by army/government welfare schemes, rehabilitation centres, and army medical institutions doing quality work, the older generation of disabled soldiers continue to suffer from severely truncated benefits. Time is nigh to change this inequitous regime.
Getting legs blown off by mines, legs scythed at the thighs by enemy machine gun fire, termination of eyesight or hearing, or brain damage owing to flying shrapnel, loss of toes and fingers to frostbite, etc. are the routine risks run by those partaking of military hostilities, including counter insurgency, or by those patrolling and monitoring the country’s long and disputed borders in difficult terrains on two fronts in peace time. But the minimum the soldiers would expect is that, in case they get grievously hurt or die while pulling duty, they are taken care of, and their families have fair prospect.
To highlight just how miserable a disabled military veteran’s life can be, Rawat brought up the instance of a stalwart of the 7 Maratha whose personal condition has been degenerating over the last 40-odd years because of a bullet lodged near his spine that was not surgically extracted because of the fear of inducing complete paralysis. The COAS met this old Maratha at a function for the disabled organised by Southern Command in Pune recently. This old man, seated next to Rawat at lunch, was being fed by his forty year old son. The son went away from the table to fetch his father something during which time the soldier tried to feed himself with a spoon. Given that his motor functions were all shot, the food dribbled down the side of his mouth and spilled down the front of perhaps his only decent set of clothes that he had worn for the event. The son returned and seeing the mess reacted in public view, to the astonishment of the COAS, by slapping his father hard across the face. When Rawat remonstrated, telling the man that his father was the army chief’s guest and his behaviour was unacceptable, the unapologetic younger man related to Rawat his family’s miserable story — a story of just how the differential in disability benefits had impacted them. It turns out the old Maratha warrior, a longtime widower, has been looked after by his son for some four decades now ever since the latter was 8 years old and who has remained unmarried, unemployed and the sole care-giver, eking out existence on his father’s small pitiable pension. The son then pointed out that the family of another MLI contemporary of his Dad’s, who was martyred in a later war, was given a petrol pump and in the years since has grown prosperous. He complained against the unfairness of this situation. Gen. Rawat asked the Command to make out a check for two lakh rupees in the soldier’s name — small recompense for the daily assaults on his dignity that he has to endure. On another similar occasion but in a northern city, the COAS was faced by an ex-jawan in a wheel chair with both his legs amputated at the knees who, referring to the bigger slate of benefits and increased pensionary payouts enjoyed by another like himself, present in that assembly, with only one of his legs shot off, remarked that “Benefits seem to be on the basis of legs lost or preserved”, implying that those who suffered no permanent physical harm benefited the most.
General Rawat, like his predecessors, has struggled to get a larger budgetary allocation for spending on modernizing and sustaining existing forces while being confronted by galloping pension and payroll expenditures, which include the costs of benefits and services for the disabled. Pensions and pay and allowances constitute 56% of the 2018-2019 defence budget of Rs 2,79,305 crores, up from 44% in 2011-2012. Very soon, at current rate of increase, the pension and P&A bill will outpace the actual defence spend. Even such schemes that require contributions by the beneficiaries –the Ex-servicemen’s Contributory Health System, for example, costs the exchequer some Rs 4,000 crore/year.
General Rawat is of the view that the Courts have compounded the problem. Thus, even short-service commission officers are accorded full canteen and ECHS benefits — something that is becoming unaffordable by the day. So new cutoffs are under consideration, such as benefits accruing only after a minimum 10 years service. Indeed the COAS revealed that the raft of canteen and health benefits are so attractive they are a big draw for would-be servicemen from among the white collar demographic.
In this regard, the COAS indulged in some humour. To rein in the spiraling costs all round, he proposed only half-jokingly, he said, to issue an order that all officers with hyper tension be denied their liquor quota from the canteen (of 12 bottles monthly) — which move would save the army several crores of rupees, because he said, the army couldn’t be expected to at once pay to create a problem — by providing cheap liquor that exacerbates hyper tension — and also to treat it! The response (presumably of his staff) was, as Rawat put it, “Sir, how can you do this?!”
On a more uplifting note, Rawat indicated he had approached some corporate leaders to fund a corpus from which the COAS of the day could write checks to aggrieved disabled soldiers who, for whatever reason, failed to get benefits. An ability to write a check of rupees five lakhs for an old soldier at any time, a process freed from bureaucratic interference, he felt, would go some ways to redressing some of the ills that have crept into the system. The fact is a corporate fund for disabled soldiers that COAS can draw on will be a wonderful way of involving the wealthy sector which benefits directly from the army keeping peace and protecting the nation. Some corporate leaders have already pledged Rs 200 crores to this Fund. One can only hope that this Fund will flourish and grow, and the disabled soldiers gain every which way they can. Rawat needs to be commended for a genuinely out-of-box initiative and will be long remembered if it takes off.
(The leading BJP trio in state elections of Amit Shah, Adityanath and Modi)
The drubbing Modi and, secondarily, the ruling BJP, was given by the Indian voter in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chattisgarh is a testament to his remarkable good sense and equanimity. The surging frustration with Modi, in particular, found expression in even relatively good chief ministers — Shivraj Singh in MP and Raman Singh in C’garh, with much to show by ways of good governance, being trounced. It has less to do with seeing the same old faces seeking an extension of stay in office, than with the people firing a warning shot across the bow of the BJP ship Captains Modi, Amit Shah are steering, and which long ago lost direction and sense of positive purpose. Let us succinctly jot down the main points and refer to some lessons prime minister Narendra Modi should learn unless he craves an early political vanvas in 2019.
There was no clearer message by the people than that they didn’t care for the Modi at the centre who is helming a growingly illiberal Indian state where the cow is venerated, huge gobs of public monies invested in gau-shalas, and what people can or cannot eat, drink and wear is dictated by a straitjacketed version of Hinduism foreign to the vedas. That the youth have had it with the absence of mass employment programmes that is sought to be covered up by talk of digitisation of governance, etc. They want the Modi of 2014 to emerge from the quagmire, but if he does, he will carry far less conviction, and his talk of re-working the government to make it more accountable and less intrusive in the lives of ordinary Indians, more readily dismissed as so much gas! And armed with evidence of five years, his emphasizing of ‘Make in India’ that involves little more than, as I keep repeating, screwdrivering imported equipment, and otherwise turbocharging a genuinely indigenous defence industry, will be readily refuted. In fact, he may well be accused of under-estimating the capability of the private sector that can, given its head, produce the most advanced technology. The issue is these are all things he actually promised in the 2014 Campaign, but did little to realize.
The question to ponder is will the Prime Minister pay heed and make a drastic course correction? Probably no. And even if he were to do so, where’s the time to show results? Hence the possibility that come next year’s general election the country will be staring down the barrel of a populist-wasteful, non-performing, coalition government that will retard India’s progress, leaving many of us ruing how Modi, armed with the people’s sanction to restructure government and set the country on a radically new, more productive course, fouled up.
Amit Shah, the BJP supremo and PM’s chief lieutenant, has proved he is no Chanakya of domestic politics (any more than Ajit Doval — Modi’s adviser on everything related to the working of government and the military — God forbid!, is Chanakya in the external realm), and that, if persisted with, his brand of political strategizing keyed to relentlessly low politics will only dig a still deeper hole for Modi to slip into next year.
Talk of Modi’s bad political instincts. He installed people he thought were like himself — pracharak of the RSS or Gorakhnath mutt type — Manoharlal Khattar, who made as big a god almighty mess in Haryana, as Adityanath has done in Uttar Pradesh, except neither of them had his political nous and resembled bulls flailing around in deep water and stirring trouble BJP could have done without. Whether Modi now appreciates the limits of the Hindu hardline and how it demotivated even party devotees in urban areas (the small trader class already hurt by GST and demonetisation) where Shah, for some unfathomable reason, had deployed the blundering Adityanath, may not be known. But it would be politically reckless of Modi to not recognize that Khattar, Yogi and their ilk are political poison and will sink BJP’s residual chances in 2019. And by extension that the Hindu fringe groups like the Bajrang Dalis the Yogi patronises may get out the vote in the countryside and elsewhere alright, but against the BJP! It doesn’t speak well for Modi and Shah’s supposed mastery of Indian politics and its slipstreams.
Rahul Gandhi, contrary to his reputation, has proved himself fast on the uptake. He revealed that the 2014 election was a great classroom. He didn’t do this in his post-election results press conference, but he may as well have thanked Modi for being such an adept tutor, and how all his temple-going and corruption charge hurling learned from Modi, fetched him results. Modi, Shah and that lot will hereon find it hard to trump Rahul on these and similar poll practices.
And, finally, Modi’s hubris — “excessive pride and self confidence” as the word is described, led him to believe that no one could better him, that he was lord of the Indian political scene he surveyed, and that a second term in office was his for the taking. The Gods have a way of mocking such pretensions, and not just in hoary Greek tragedies, as the public did in this case. Modi’s promises of fast-tracked development and gigantic jobs generating schemes persuaded lots of people, especially the young demographic. Five years later they will hear the same rhetoric this time from Rahul. The point is not that the Gandhi scion will be any more persuasive, but that widespread disillusionment with Modi will take its toll. It may not return him to Vadgaon, but will get him to Parliament (if he ensures a safe seat in Gujarat), perhaps, not as Prime Minister.
Returned after nearly a week’s trip to the Balkans visiting Dubrovnik in Catholic Croatia, Kutar and Budwa in Russian Orthdox Montenegro and Mostar in Muslim Bosnia-Herzogovina — all former provinces of a once unified Yugoslavia that Marshal Josef Broz Tito had forged into a union of disparate peoples in the ‘partisan war’ against Hitler’s military forces, and which religious separate states were carved out of the debris of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the post-World War I peace conference at Versailles in 1919. Croatia and Montenegro that I visited were Western, more modern and prosperous and contrasted sharply with the rundown, impoverished Bosnia, with the urban spread in, say, Mostar, featuring the famous 15th Century single arched bridge over the River Neretva built by the Ottoman Turks, and the familiar small shops crowding criss-crossing narrow lanes, and the smoke of grilled kebabs wafting through them — felt more like home but Third World plus. It is interesting to mention here that on my last trip to the then still existing Yugoslavia in 1983 — I visited Sarajevo, the western most outpost of Islam in Europe, and was told by the Grand Mufti of the great mosque there — a fine example of Ottoman architecture — that the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzogovina would have an independent state. It was a prospect pooh-poohed by the Yugoslav government officials I met in Belgrade. I wrote about it then — possibly the first mention anywhere of the likely emergence of an independent country in Muslim Bosnia!
I mention the majoritarian religions in these “new” countries because it is precisely the resurgence of the religious identity at the expense of national identity that some 25-30 years ago sank the great experiment in secular state building Tito had managed with aplomb. The supreme irony is this: While just about any and everyone I talked to in these independent states recalled Tito with great respect and even fondness, and conceded that life generally in a united Yugoslavia was more orderly and way better in many respects than what they presently have, they were all equally emphatic that the balkanisation of Yugoslavia, facilitated by numerous players but materially assisted by the US military intervention, was a good thing to happen and long overdue. Unsurprisingly, the Croatians and Montenegrans made no attempt to hide their antipathy, even hatred, for Muslims and Islam generally, which attitude of contempt the Bosnians heartily reciprocated for Christians and Christianity.
What I was told and how I perceived things there played out in my mind in the background of our own circumstances. Like the Balkans in the 1990s, South Asia, but on a far vaster and ethnically more heterogeneous scale, where every imaginable kind of people have lived, sometimes fist by jowl, but generally peaceably for millennia, and where the whole complex fell apart in 1947, on account of religion. Religious faith is a curious thing that’s often trifled with by politicians for low gain but to devastating effect. To state the obvious — it is the exploiters of religions who are the great dividers, not religions themselves. But religion does not centrally intrude into in India-Pakistan relations, in most part because, to the mortification of the Pakistan ideologues, there are now more Muslims in India. Imran Khan’s decision to construct a “Kartarpur corridor”, however, has a different religious tinge.
If you cut out the publicity-seeking hijinks of the boisterous middleman — Navjot Singh Siddhu, the sometime India opening bat and Punjab minister who’s proving a handful for chief minister Amarinder Singh, and consider Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s offer of free, visa-less, access to Indians and followers of Guru Nanak Dev to visit one of the most important Sikh holy places, then he needs to be commended, especially because there’s nothing comparable on the table from the Indian side. It is Imran’s own unique gambit — initially referred to by a Pakistani notable as a “googly” (where Imran is concerned, can the cricketing idiom be avoided?) that elicited a like trivial Indian response — an opening move is to resolve, if possible, the tiresomely disputatious relations between India and Pakistan that have done neither country any good, but prevented both and the subcontinent from emerging as a power bloc that the world would have to reckon with.
In his recent televised meeting with India media persons, Imran made many interesting statements, some in reply to questions. Among these in no particular order, that the Pakistan government has according to UN Resolution 1267 sanctioned Hafiz Saeed and his Lashkar-e-Tayyaba terrorist outfit, that the 26/11 case against Hafiz is in the courts and thus sub judice. When reminded about the several occasions in the past about the sequence of the Kargil intrusion following Vajpayee’s Lahore visit, the 26/11 attack on Mumbai in the wake of the 2007 meeting of PMs in Sharm el-Sheikh, he brushed it off by saying simply “I am not responsible for (what happened in) the past.” And then went on to say that the two countries better make move on from these incidents of the past and capitalise on the fact that “There’s no animosity between the peoples of the two countries” and reiterated that every section of Pakistani society, including the army, is now on “the same page” and agrees in the consensus view that neither nuclear-armed country has an option other than to live in peace.
But, there are problems. Pakistan has said that the basic predicate for peace is the resolution of the Kashmir dispute. India, on the other hand, while claiming all of the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, including Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, Gilgit, Hunza and the Northern Territories, has maintained there cannot be talks without- Pakistan ceasing its support for terrorism and giving evidence of it (by ideally handing over Hafiz Saeed, et al). The trouble is Delhi has stuck to this position for a while, disallowing resumption of any talks, “composite” or any other or even through the “secret channel” that in the Manmohan Singh era comprised Ambassador Satish Lamba from this side. Imran is showing more flexibility. He has suggested, for instance, that Kashmir be less in the public eye, which he claimed was because of the actions of the Indian army. Were the imagery of turmoil in the Srinagar valley to be absent, the optics, Imran implied, would become amenable for bilateral talks in his country. In a separate meeting with Pakistani editors he mentioned that he had “2 or 3 options” in mind to pursue on Kashmir which, he realistically says, he cannot presently do with India entering the 2019 general election season, but without spelling out these solutions. But surprisingly, to the Indian newspersons he indicated his preferred solution that he said Musharraf almost clinched in 2007 and which he said, in so many words, because it was supported at the time by GHQ, Rawalpindi, would be acceptable to Pakistan army in the future as well.
For Imran’s interaction with the Indian media see the youtube link below:
Imran, of course, is absolutely right. The 2007 plan Musharraf negotiated had three basic points. One, both sides of Kashmir would come under a commission manned by representatives from the two countries to oversee the affairs of all of Kashmir. Secondly, free travel, trade and other interaction would be permitted between the two Kashmirs, except every time Indian or Pakistani Kashmiri crossed the line he would have to have his identification papers stamped. And finally, other than police for constabulary duties there would be phased deconcentration of Indian and Pakistan army unit from their respective sides of the province. Why Delhi accepted this draft-accord is clear — the requirement that Kashmiris to-ing and fro-ing across the line would have to have their identity papers stamped in essence asserted both Indian and Pakistani sovereignty and acknowledged these territories as wholly and inseparably parts of India and Pakistan. Why Musharraf accepted the deal was the fig leaf provided Islamabad which, in reality, helped the Pakistan government to ease itself out of championing the Kashmiris’ cause and hence wash its hands off the Kashmir issue one and for all while claiming Pakistan would have its hand in on the steering heel of Kashmir affairs, courtesy the joint commission — supposedly a great concession extracted from Delhi.
Yes, this last was how Musharraf was going to ballyhoo the deal to ensure it slid down the throats of the Pakistan establishment and people without their gagging on it. Alas, even this small, nonexistent “victory” if conceded to Pakistan, the Congress party regime of Manmohan Singh felt would enable the Bharatiya Janata party in opposition to make an electoral feast of it, and so the done deal was turned down. As I have long asserted in my books and writings, this is the only and obvious solution to put the Kashmir issue to rest. Would a re-elected Modi be any more willing to change his stance and accept this solution considering Imran has already flagged it as his and Pakistan army’s choice?
Modi is forced into this position of having to react to Imran’s peace overtures because of two things: He messed up by not following through on the logic of his original move of inviting with much fanfare all South Asian heads of government to his 2014 inauguration — a grand and most effective gesture that promised so much, given that Pak PM Nawaz Sharif was there, all prepped to resume dialogueing and otherwise ready to partake of any other peace moves Modi had in mind to run with. Instead, Modi fell into the familiar Delhi rut except now the demonisation of Pakistan (on terrorism) kept pace with his domestic political agenda of firming the Hindu support base with intemperate Muslim bashing over cow slaughter and by keying up the Bajrang Dal type of vigilantism. Will a manifestly less liberal Indian state run by Modi, post 2019, be any more receptive to resolving the Kashmir issue and making enduring peace with Pakistan?
It is here that Imran has played a most brilliant card — “Kartarpur corridor”. It may not compel Modi to negotiate on Kashmir but it has preempted him from doing anything silly, like actually initiating military hostilities for any reason. Why? Because as Imran explained to Indian reporters the entire sector fronting on the corridor saw the most massive Partition massacres in either Punjab of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, and the promise of unhindered Kartarpur access will sentimentally and emotionally disarm the Sikhs (who fill some leading Indian army regiments of infantry and armour/mechanised units) and firm up their resolve particularly in Indian Punjab against disturbing the status quo with military action. Whence his confident declaration to the Pak media that “After Kartarpur, it will be very difficult for India to create hate against Pakistan.”
There’s only so much hate-mongering Modi, Adityanath and that entire cohort can do to wring political profit. because already, one senses the turning of the tide — the results of the state elections next week especially in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh are bellwether of this. The killing of the UP police SHO in Bulandshahr by a Bajrang Dali may have capped Adityanath’s ambition but, more importantly, also Modi’s tendency to go overboard with the Hindu-cow card.
But there’s the sharp side to Imran’s Kartarpur gesture that one cannot ignore because it also holds out an internal security threat to India should Modi continue with his anti-Pakistan rhetoric and policies after 2019. Hot-headed elements in Sikh communities in the West (UK, US and Canada, in the main) calling themselves ‘Sikhs For Justice’ (SFJ) have long nursed the thoroughly impractical notion of the Sikh state of Khalistan, which the late Khushwant Singh, I recall, had lampooned as an idea propagated by fellow religionists with a vacant space (khali stan) between their ears, and have always made more noise at the margins than their numbers would suggest! (Incidentally, in the recent Congressional elections in the US, the Khalistan campaign lost one of its most ardent supporters, California Congressman Dana Rohrbacher, who failed to win the election in the 48th District. He was a real pain in India’s ass because he also backed Pakistan on Kashmir — I was appalled hearing him expound his ill-informed views at a Washington conference on Kashmir in the mid-2000s.)
Well, SFJ means to influence the masses of Indian sikh pilgrims visiting Kartarpur starting next year when the corridor, as Imran has promised, becomes operational to support what it calls ‘Referendum 2020’ on an independent state of Khalistan per the UN Charter provision for self-determination. For which purpose SFJ plans to sponsor the travel to Kartarpur by 10,000 Indian sikhs in order “to educate and inform” them of this right that they can exercise. The SFJ founder, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, called the corridor “a Bridge to Khalistan”, saying the proposed “Kartarpur Sahib Convention is pivotal to referendum campaign as this will be the first ever global gathering of the Sikh separatists from foreign countries with the Sikh people from Punjab.”
Now SFJ has made plain its aim, even though the awful experience of the ruthless quelling of the last such uprising by the then DG, Punjab Police, the late, great and redoubtable KPS Gill, has chastened Sikh Punjabis against again being part of any such misadventure. The Pakistan army and ISI, however, couldn’t be more delighted at the prospect of thus reviving the Khalistan Movement in Indian Punjab and, at a minimum, needling India if Delhi continues to stiff-arm Islamabad and Imran on negotiating peace in Kashmir. But with the Sarajevo Mufti in mind SFJ phenomenon should be treated with the utmost caution and dispatch.
This is a nice one-two punch the Imran government has conceived. Either way Imran and Pakistan cannot lose, and Modi and India cannot win. More, the moral high ground as well as the optics are on Imran’s side as peace-seeker.
(Prime Minister Modi addressing the UN General Assembly)
The Indian ambassador to the UN in New York, Syed Akbaruddin, made the predictable pitch on behalf of the so-called G-4 — India, Brazil, Japan, and Germany, at the UN General Assembly (UNGA) debate on UN reform a couple of days back for these countries to join a revamped UN Security Council as Permanent Members but with a twist. “Naysayers”, he fumed, the frustration showing in his voice, “cannot be allowed to cast a dark shadow over the entire membership and hold the overwhelming majority back.” India’s position that all the tarrying and prevaricating and delaying tactics should end, and that a vote on the UNSC expansion issue be called soonest in the UNGA, where each UN member state has one vote and no country has veto.
Delhi/MEA surely isn’t so dense that it can’t see the obvious, that the 12 state ‘United for Consensus’ group, headed by Italy and including Pakistan, which opposes any reconfiguring of the UNSC, is not primarily to blame — though the procedural wrangles instigated by this group have pretty much tied up the deliberations in the Inter-Governmental Negotiations (IGN) forum set up to resolve this issue. IGN has been working for several decades with little to show for all the verbiage that’s been expended. The riposte by Maleeha Lodi, the Pakistan ambassador, was that if differences are found difficult for the US, Russia and China to reconcile in the present Security Council, enlarging the body with more permanent members would only ensure a complete gridlock or worse.
The principal hurdle specifically to India’s entry, however, are the two countries the Indian government in the new Century, helmed by both the BJP and the Congress party, has bent over backwards to appease — the United States and China. The Trump Administration has made it plain it supports only a “modest” increase in permanent seats. This by way of saying that Washington would happily countenance its treaty allies, Japan and Germany, in the UNSC but not India or Brazil — though to the Indian PM’s face US functionaries have assured support. China, on its part, has declared it is against “arbitrarily launching text-based negotiations” in IGN as demanded by India; the larger reason, of course, is to deny both its Asian rivals a leg up. Again, Beijing does not say it’s not for India at the high table but hints at its unwillingness to see Japan in the Council, knowing fully well that no move will ever be made to just ease India’s entry into UNSC.
India’s yearning for a permanent seat in the Security Council raises the pertinent question whether India deserves it. Because the five current permanent members (P-5) — US, Russia, China, UK and France are great powers and have traits in common (including the last two which are long into the imperial dusk). They all have hefty nuclear forces, modern militaries to reckon with, are security providers with extra-territorial military presence, with France even in the Indian Ocean (on Reunion Island in the French Indian Ocean Territories and the Heron base in Djibouti), generate advanced technologies in all fields and are frontline technology innovators, have a whole bunch of Third and Fourth World states the world as arms dependencies, courtesy vigorous arms sales schemes, are large foreign aid donors with extensive and tested development and infrastructure assistance programmes, high volumes of global trade and extremely strong and active economies, and relatively high standards of living. So, does India, other than possession of simple, low yield, nuclear weapons (that in quality, perhaps, lags behind a lowly Pakistani arsenal), meet any of these metrics?
Our case rests on the following arguments: that India (1) boasts of a large fraction of the world population, (2) is a “responsible state”, (3) is a longstanding democracy and an exemplar of liberal values (4) contributes disproportionately to UN peacekeeping missions, (5) shaped the post-WWII international system by championing anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and anti-racism, (6) is a steadying influence in a disordered world, (7) has always taken taken the lead role in furthering universal good — disarmament, climate accord, solar alliance, etc., (8) has never been expansionist or coveted foreign territories, but has no neighbour at peace with it, and (9) is a trillion dollar economy, except 40% of its population is below the poverty line.
The P-5 and India are divided neatly in the nature and the attributes of power they exercise — the former wield hard power which also helps their soft power to be more effective. India is a power mostly limited to the subcontinent, its impact and influence outside of it being iffy at best.
And yet the Indian political class and the bureaucrat-dominated system remain entirely innocent about the main ingredients of great power and what the country needs to do to become one. The irony is India has all the requirements of great power except the crucial ones — the political vision and will, the ruthlessness and drive, the resolution to not take guff from anyone, selectively to strengthen only military wherewithal with strategic reach and clout, the cussedness and single-mindedness to slyly but consistently prosecute disruptive, risk-acceptant, policies, that upend global regimes and upset every inimical P-5 state’s apple cart. That’s how China became a great power and now dictates to the world.
But India, alas, has no Dengxiaoping, no leader to challenge the world and motivate the Indian people to work for the nation’s cause, only gasbags furthering their advantage in domestic politics while using India’s democracy as an excuse for the country remaining a perennial also-ran.
Surely then such a country cannot credibly ask in good faith for a permanent seat in UNSC to preside over a world it had no role in making, and has even less of a role in running. The P-5 have to feel sorry enough for a “flailing” India to accommodate it, which won’t ever happen. So India is fated to remain on the outside, like a beggar with face pressed to the windows of a posh eatery.
(COAS Gen Rawat with the red-banded possibly Nepal army brass)
Reorganizing, restructuring and generally getting the fighting forces fit for future wars is a good thing and the exercise undertaken by the army chief General Bipin Rawat to do just this needs to be commended. Some four sets of studies are underway, with some of them in a more advanced state wending their way up the army and MOD bureaucracy.
A startling proposal (commented on in an earlier post) in one such study — if the balloons being floated for some time now in the press and electronic media to gauge public reaction are any guide — relates to doing away with the posts of Second Lieutenant and Lieutenant Colonel, and eliminating altogether the process to select officers for the Major General rank from among the pool of eligible Brigadier-rank officers. Any person making it past Colonel-rank, in other words, automatically becomes General! A lot wrong here.
Before discussing the problems that will be spawned by such a move, let’s be straight about the intent behind this automatic, double-promotion measure, because there’s nothing very secret about it. Military officers, top to bottom, have resented the fact that officers in the Indian Administrative Service and Indian Police Service step on a career escalator that takes them to the top most levels without a hitch. The army’s peeve is that 80% of IAS officers make it to Joint Secretary in the government of India (or Additional Secretary in state governments) where as only 6% of military officers become Major General — the Joint Secretary equivalent in the Warrant of Precedence.
The Army HQrs (representing the senior and largest armed Service) have tried long and hard and by all means at their disposal over decades to even things out some for its officer cadre in terms of salaries, perks and other career benefits by improving the odds of mid-level officer attaining two-star flag-rank. The trouble is the babus and the police have steadily created more posts at the higher levels (Inspector General rank and above) allowing more policemen to occupy them resulting in army officers of the same age and commissioning year being soon superceded in rank and salaries by their counterpart police officers. This rankles and the army has sought to match by inflating the strength pf officers at higher ranks and conjuring up new posts for them to fill.
In 2007, in the wake of recommendations by an in-house study, COAS Gen. Deepak Kapoor pushed for Brigadier rank to be re-designated ‘Brigadier General’ (as in the US military) with the accompanying uptick in salaries, perks, and allowed officers in this rank to, for the first time, fly their flag on staff cars, etc, a privilege hitherto reserved for Major General rank officers and above, which privilege they retain. Defence Minister AK Antony did not, however, approve the nomenclatural-cum-substantive upgrade to Brigadier General. There the matter festered and is something the Rawat plan for restructuring the army hopes to address. Except, the scheme equating or merging Brigadier and Major General ranks and the related move to fill the Staff roles at Army HQrs with Lt. Colonels and Colonels and reverting Captains, Majors et al to the field, may not be the right tack.
It is a truism that not every officer who excels in leading men in battle or in the field necessarily makes a good General. Indeed, the colonel-rank terminus for most army officers is the standard for most armies, and the Indian army too has hewed to it since 1947. To man the army’s 14 corps, 49 divisions, and 240 brigades, the government has authorized 49,933 officers. The shortfall is of some 7,000 officers per news reports. A recent, credible, approximate breakdown (available on Quora) of the strength of officers is 60 Lieutenant Generals, 270 Major Generals, 850 Brigadiers, 4,500 Colonels, and 41,000 Lieutenant Colonels and lower, for an army cadre of 46,681 officers in all in a 1.3 million strong army. These are credible figures because 6% of 4,500 (colonels) — which is presumably the personnel base in the army’s calculation for promotion to higher ranks — making Major General is 270 (Refer 3rd para above.)
How does this compare with the situation in other major armies/militaries? While in the Indian context, the Major General to Brigadier ratio is 1:3, the Brigadier to colonel ratio 1:5, and the Major General to colonel ratio 1: 16, the respective ratios for the US army are 1: 0.96, 1:33, and 1:33. For the Russian armed forces as a whole (after the reforms initiated in 2007 by Defence Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov and the slicing of the higher ranked officer strength by half), the ratio of higher ranked officers to colonels is roughly 1:6; and in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army the promotion climb is steeper still (no figures are hazarded by experts re: the breakdown of PLA officer cadre by rank). In this comparison, the US army boasts of the brightest promotion possibilities for colonel rank officers, and the absolute certainty that those who make it to Brigadier-General will go on to sport two stars.
There is an innovation the PLA has introduced in its structure in terms of designating higher ranked officers — especially with two grades in the crucial Brigadier category, one stream sent on “combat zone” postings, the other on Staff duties, because all higher formations in Chinese land forces are being reformed to brigade size as the optimum and highest formation in war and peace. There is some slight similarity here to what the Rawat reforms are envisaging with the contemplated merging of the Brigadier and Major General ranks, with the former designation reserved for field postings and the latter — seemingly higher rank for those pulling Staff duties. It would make more sense if the designations were reversed, and the Major General rank given to officers in the field, unless this is by design because desk jockeying is considered a higher calling. Though the immediate model may have been the navy where Brigadier-level officers afloat are called Captains and those ashore Commodores.
But whether this correction is made or not, such a measure would embed unresolvable tensions and friction between Brigadiers and Major Generals and generate perpetual bureaucratic feuding at the expense of operational efficiency. A now manifestly top-heavy structure — all Chiefs and no Indians! — will further dysfunctionality. If, on the other hand, the scheme sugars up the Brigadier category of officers in the field with promise of career incentives to compensate for the perceived designation edge, then the Major Generals will rise in revolt. In any case, what different metrics would be used for posting an officer as Brigadier or, alternately, Major General? How does the army plan to deal with the ensuing disaffection?
A more problematic aspect of this slate of reforms is the proposed zeroing out of the numbers of Captains and Majors at the Army HQrs supposedly to save money. The Indian Army, owing to its colonial past when Indian officers were denied posting and therefore experience in General Staff work, i.e. in war planning, force structuring, strategy, higher logistics management, etc. has always been handicapped by a weak General Staff. The failure to come up with imaginative offensive and defensive war plans is a stark evidence of that. (No, the success of the “blitzkrieg” in East Pakistan in 1971 doesn’t count, because the original operational plan under COAS, Manekshaw, and theatre commander Jagjit Singh Aurora, was for Indian forces to merely capture a thin sliver of East Pakistani territory and for the provisional government of a free Bangladesh in exile based in the Salt Lake area of Kolkatta to be installed there and to have it negotiate separation and freedom from Pakistan with General Yahya Khan’s regime. But for the Chief of Staff, Eastern Command, then Major General JFR Jacob’s inspired plan fashioned on the move of the forces deployed around East Pakistan to avoid Pakistan army strong points and to rush pell-mell towards Dhaka, the results would have been nothing as decisive as what transpired.)
The ultimate example of a brilliant General Staff tradition was the Prussian General Staff, founded in 1807 by General Gerhard von Schornhost who intended this body to “support incompetent Generals, providing the talents that might otherwise be wanting among leaders and commanders”. This General Staff reached its acme during WWII as part of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (High Command of the unified German forces), and is still the wonder of the military world in the imaginative war plans it time and again came up with in war and attendant crises.
The German General Staff, it must be noted, was formed out of a select group of officers, subaltern up, picked for their military intellect and skillsets, and rigorously trained in all aspects of war, posted to the field and back again, who enjoyed the right to appeal to a higher commander if they felt the plan of their field commander was flawed, and formed the spine of all military campaigns.
If Lieutenants, Captains and Majors in the Indian Army are to be denied intense General Staff experience and GS duties are to be the bailiwick of Lt. Colonels and Colonels with the background only of regimental work and holding down rotational posts then the army’s General Staff is destined to remain its greatest infirmity.
Security Wise 