Making a great power omelet

Posted on June 14, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

A review of my book ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ by Sandeep Unnithan, published in India Today dated May 25, 2016 and accessible at http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/why-india-is-not-a-great-power-bharat-karnad-books/1/677612.html
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A security hawk writes a masterful compendium of India’s strategic failings.

Diplomacy without arms, the 19th century Prussian soldier-statesman Frederick the Great once observed, is like music without instruments. India’s foremost national security hawk Bharat Karnad insists that India has stood the Frederickian analogy on its head- its orchestra can make big music, but uses just the piccolo to produce small notes.

In this masterful compendium of the country’s strategic failings, including the inability to field a robust military-industrial complex and, consequently, hard power, Karnad dives deep into military misfires like a 2001 project to provide a ‘simputer’ for infantry soldiers. Failures that have cascaded into a conundrum- a UN Security Council seat aspirant is today also the world’s largest arms importer. He’s quick to identify the problems: a void in strategy, geostrategic vision and other factors like pusillanimity, absence of strong leadership and a stifling bureaucracy.

Karnad was an early advocate of China and not Pakistan being India’s long-term strategic adversary. He harps on the absence of China-specific deterrents like thermonuclear weapons and strategic fortitude to stand up to its northern neighbour.

If India is indeed to become a great power, it needs to discard its please-all policy, become more disruptive in the manner of A-list powers who break eggs to make great power omelets for themselves.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Army, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, South Asia, UN, Weapons | 9 Comments

How important is it for India to be part of NSG? — Rajya Sabha TV discussion

Posted on June 12, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

There was an interesting discussion on the Rajya Sabha TV panel discussion show — ‘The Big Picture’ on the subject of ‘How important is it for India to be part of NSG?’ aired on Saturday, June 10, 2016, involving G. Balachandran of IDSA, former Ambassador MK Bhadrakumar, Nandan Unnikrishnan of ORF, and myself. It is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkoc42v1bsc

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Culture, disarmament, domestic politics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, nonproliferation, nuclear industry, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, nuclear power, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan nuclear forces, South Asia, Strategic Forces Command, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US. | Leave a comment

Comparing and Rating Modi’s address to the US Congress

Posted on June 10, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Resisted the impulse to react to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to the joint Houses of the US Congress June 8, until now. It must be said though that it was a mostly dull speech full of banalities and stock sentiments (shared democratic values, etc) and is not worth the trouble analyzing. Except I am prompted by the sheer hyperbolic reception in Indian newspapers and media where reporters counted the standing ovations and applause not realizing that that this is normal polite thing that US legislators do when foreign leaders address them. But I am provoked into commenting by an entrenched member of what I have labelled the collaborationist school of foreign policy heading — what else — Carnegie India, who takes off on Modi’s lines to crow about the “strategic symphony” now supposedly existing in India-US relations.

Have been in the House gallery on Capitol Hill on two occasions in the past when Indian PMs addressed the joint Houses of the US legislature — the first time in 1984, June 13, when Rajiv Gandhi made quite a splash, and in 2000 when I was part of a small team headed by senior BJP leader, Professor ML Sondhi, that interacted with numerous US thinktanks within the Washington Beltway preparatory to the state visit by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, which visit was topped off by his address September 14.

Objectively speaking, Rajiv’s address was absolutely scintillating and the best so far of any perorations before American legislators, including by his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru in October 1949. The secret of Rajiv’s success — besides his youthful good looks that proved an excellent foil for President Ronald Reagan’s practiced, almost cinematic, ease before cameras and the international media — was his speech drafted by then ambassador in Washington, K. Shankar Bajpai. This was important because Shankar Bajpai, who grew up in the city and was a student at the elite St. Albans School during the War years in the 1940s when his father, Sir Girija Shankar Bajpai of the Indian Civil Service was Churchill’s Political Agent to President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, and tasked with arguing against granting immediate independence to India — something that FDR and many in his cabinet were pushing for — a job he carried out entirely to London’s satisfaction, and picked on precisely the sort of things Americans could instantly relate to. (Sir Girija’s success proved very early that in India’s “colonial” administrative system, bureaucrats survive even when elected governments don’t, because from being some one who opposed Indian freedom, he ended up in a free India in the Nehru era as MEA’s first Director-General!)

Anyway, the Shankar Bajpai-drafted speech was studded with stunning nuggets of information historically connecting India and the US. Thus, when Rajiv asserted that he wished Elihu Yale, instead of founding a college in New England had seeded an institution of higher learning in Madras, where he made his wealth as a senior East India Company official, and that Cornwallis instead of surrendering to US forces at Yorktown, had surrendered in Delhi, etc. he was greeted with knowing laughter and such deafening and prolonged and heart-felt bouts of applause and repeated standing ovations that no Indian PM has since been able to match. That was the high point of convivialty in relations manifested in the two urbane and sophisticated leaders — one young Indian, with Western sensibilities, the other a proven crowd pleaser. Rajiv’s address was a spectacular success and instantly turned around the public perception of India from a land reeking of poverty to a modern nation.

Narasimha Rao followed on May 18, 1994 and stood his ground, shrugging off India’s Cold War Soviet tilt saying roundly that “Being transient, term-bound representatives of our peoples, you and I have neither the time nor the need to review what we do not wish to repeat.” Vajpayee followed and famously called India and the US “natural allies”, in the process providing the strategic undergirding for better relations.

Manmohan Singh came and muttered unintelligibly in English on July 19, 2005.The US legislators dutifully stood up and applauded several times even as, by and large, they sat there scratching their heads. Remember, in this respect, that the host US president, George W.Bush, later confessed he couldn’t make head or tail of anything Manmohan Singh said in their numerous one-on-one conversations and claimed he would, ideally, have appreciated the services of an interpreter! It is hardly surprising therefore that Manmohan’s audience in the US Congress was generally left glassy-eyed.

Modi, of course, was far clearer, and made himself understood, which Manmohan could not easily manage to do. This is no small thing considering how hidebound and parochial most US law makers are. Modi’s speech was received correctly with the regulation standing ovations, etc., but no great enthusiasm. What stuck in any Indian nationalist’s throat was his expression of gratitude for what — Washington’standard reaction to any terrorist incident, in this case, the 26/11 strike by Pakistan-based terrorists on Mumbai? Recall, in contrast, the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2015 address to the US Congress — a no-nonsense speech where he didn’t plead for US understanding or help, merely explained his government’s harsh measures against the violence-prone Palestinians as proper and merited. The context was Obama Admin’s conspicuous cold-shouldering of Tel Aviv for its use of “excessive” force.

The other thing that stuck in my craw at least was his repeated positive references to the US sucking up Indian talent — praising US “innovation” that drew Indian “creativity”, etc. Modi made it sound as if this continuous decanting of prized intellectual resources from India to the US is a good thing, and something his government lays much store by and seeks to promote! In this respect it is best to remind ourselves to see how little the situation has changed from the time when Nehru in his address 67 years ago said: “I realise that self-help is the first condition of success for a nation, no less than for an individual. We are conscious that ours must be the primary effort and we shall seek succour from none to escape from any part of our own responsibility. But though our economic potential is great, its conversion into finished wealth will need much mechanical and technological aid.”

It is sobering and shameful to see India still seeking technological help from the US. What’s worse is Modi taking pride in the country losing its prized youthful engineering, scientific, and managerial talent to America simply because the bureaucratized Indian government over the decades monopolizing the fields of education, industry, and skilling has made such a mess of everything that young Indians are desperate to get the hell out of the country to make their futures anywhere abroad. And Modi, far from minimizing the role of government, has persisted with it, compounding the problems for the country and ensuring India is stuck in a morass of the government’s making.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Culture, domestic politics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian democracy, Indian Politics, Israel, Pakistan, society, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, Terrorism, United States, US. | 11 Comments

IDSA Panel discussion on ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’

Posted on June 6, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

IDSA held a panel discussion on my book — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’on May 18 involving RADM Raja Menon (Retd), Shakti Sinha, ex-IAS and former private secretary to prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, V. Siddhartha, former Technology adviser, MOD, and Jayant Prasad, IFS, and currently DG, IDSA. It was a vigorous and interesting discussion and an audio record of it is available at:
http://www.idsa.in/idsanews/panel-discussion-on-bharat-karnad’s-book

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Dangers of a tight embrace

Posted on June 4, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

I was in Washington DC for a panel discussion on “India’s Asia-Pacific Outreach and Relations with China” at the Heritage Foundation on May 25. In the three days spent in the US capital meeting a number of Beltway thinktankers, what was palpable was the disappointment on several counts with the right-of-centre Bharatiya Janata Party government. The Wall Street Journal (May 26) published an interview-commentary as a curtain raiser to prime minister Narendra Modi’s second visit in two years that highlighted his inability or unwillingness to initiate “big bang” economic liberalization measures. Modi was damned, if not in so many words, as a waffler and only a more bombastic version of his predecessor, Manmohan Singh.

The economic interests in the US will be pacified if Modi signs up for a gigantic and manifestly unaffordable contract for Westinghouse and General Electric light water reactors as power plants under the rubric of controlling carbon emissions and climate change. The danger to India from the deal and from the dependency on imported power plants has been detailed in my writings and those of nuclear stalwarts like the late Dr PK Iyengar, AN Prasad, and A Gopalakrishnan against the nuclear deal — arguments that were convincing enough to fire a public campaign that all but stopped that deal with the US in its tracks in Parliament in 2008 (and available in the 2009 book comprising a voluminous compilation of these writings — ‘Strategic Sellout: Indian-US Nuclear Deal’ [New Delhi: Pentagon Press]).

In the ultimate analysis though, whether India matches the economic pace of the East Asian dragons or remains the perennial laggard matters less to US security enclaves who, with the strategically assertive China in mind, increasingly define the US interest in India. One of the metrics held up to judge the success of the visit is whether Modi will sign the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement. LEMOA, a differently worded version of the standard Logistics Support Agreement (LSA) the US insists on with its treaty allies and partners, is one of the three accords considered as prerequisite for close US military cooperation with India, along with the Communications Inter-operability and Security Memorandum of Agreement and the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement concerning geo-spatial information (and the sharing, for instance, of digitized target coordinates). It will allow US armed forces to repair, replenish, refuel at Indian air and naval bases, and to afford its fighting personnel rest & recreation, enabling the US military to pull sustained operations in the Indian Ocean region and to cut a more active profile landward.

Peninsular India as supply-support base perfectly fills the logistics gap in the large oceanic and air expanses between the US bases in Bahrain in the Gulf and Diego Garcia in the southwestern Indian Ocean, and Singapore on the southeastern littoral.

Washington’s perception is that in recent years India has wriggled out of committing forcefully to contain China owing to two factors of Cold War vintage: America’s inhibition about selling and transferring advanced military technology to India, and its worrisome relations with Pakistan. The US is minimizing the basis of these “excuses”. In the past fortnight, the US Congress voted an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act placing India in the same league as Japan and South Korea, and removing the legal barriers to its acquiring advanced US military technology.

Islamabad’s policy of asymmetric warfare using terrorist groups to discomfit India has boomeranged because many of these same outfits (the Haqqani Taliban faction, in particular) are fighting the Pakistan army and US forces instead upending, in the process, the peace plan for Afghanistan and raising the human and financial costs of American military intervention. So, US Congress has mandated vetting of Islamabad’s anti-terrorist stance prior to the disbursal of some $450 million in annual aid. Further, the US legislature vetoed the subsidy component in the $750 million deal for the sixteen F-16 combat aircraft on order, requiring Pakistan to ante up the full cost. The bad optics of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor that will establish a Chinese Naval presence in Gwadar in the future, haven’t helped Pakistan either.

But such de-hyphenation measures do not preclude US’s continued contributions to critically enhancing Pakistan’s military capabilities. Such as providing technical fixes for the naval Harpoon missile so it can be fired from F-16 aircraft to attack land targets – the reason why the Modi government strongly protested the sale of this fighter plane to Islamabad.

The developments at the US end are motivated by a higher geostrategic purpose, of course, but are being dressed up as uniquely India-friendly actions. The scheduled address to the Joint Houses of the Congress during his June 7-8 visit by Modi is to massage his ego in the hope this will get the Obama Administration what it wants. Lest the Prime Minister be overly impressed by this gesture, he should be alerted to the fact — which MEA surely hasn’t done — that, considering it is election season in America, he’ll find the benches filled mostly by young Congressional pages and petty officials instructed to fill the hall rather than by US legislators who will be in their constituencies.

Because LEMOA is sort of an American litmus test, it is imperative Modi appreciates what is at stake, and the gravity of the situation that will obtain should he make the wrong decision.

The draft-LEMOA has not been made public. But its wording is unlikely to violate the existing LSA parameters, or deviate much from Section E2.1.10 of the US ‘Department of Defense, Directive number 2010.9’ which describes the “Logistics Support, Supplies, and Services” that India is expected to provide. It will formalize the US basing option in India. So, calling LSA by another name will not detract from the reality of the US gaining the right to pre-position stores and set up military base structures and mechanisms in India under its control, and requiring related jurisdictional agreements to protect American military assets and personnel.

As has been detailed in previous posts on this subject, the fallout will include a grounding of the Indian conventional military forces as Russia will retaliate by slowly choking off the spares supply, and begin seriously to explore the sale of sophisticated armaments to Pakistan and, most damagingly for India, possibly consider pulling out of sensitive Indian strategic R&D programmes. And, extremist Islamic groups everywhere will gear up to attack the politically juicy US military targets in India and completely roil the already uncertain conditions of internal security.

To sum up, formally allying with the United States will result in a loss of India’s ‘Russia card’ and its room for diplomatic maneuver and policy freedom, which New Delhi has hitherto prized and jealously guarded. It will gut high-value weapons development projects, militarily strengthen Pakistan, encourage terrorist activity in the country, disturb domestic politics, spawn unmanageable internal security problems, and reduce India to the status of an American camp follower. How does this serve the national interest, especially when China can more effectively be constrained, as repeatedly argued on this blog, by India and the US acting separately but unpredictably to dilute the Chinese footprint in the Indian Ocean region and in Southeast Asia?

The Modi regime, however, is entertaining a slightly different agenda of gaining membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) to achieve which aim the PM will go, cap in hand, for support among the extant members of NSG as disparate as Switzerland and Mexico (included in this foreign trip). This is a show of unnecessary desperation that will fetch India nothing. Try as Washington might — and there are serious doubts about how much the Barack Obama Administration will put out for India, its NSG admission depends on China’s not objecting to it. Beijing has made it clear that its contrary hyphenation scheme — India gets in only if Pakistan too is admitted, is what it will stick with. The problem for New Delhi is that it wants to rouse the bulk of the NSG states to separate India and Pakistan and contest China’s position when, quite honestly, no one gives a damn whether India gets in or not. So, it will be, as usual, a futile effort with Obama making the usual promises to push India’s case, which means nothing.

This is what comes of nearly five decades of the Indian government raising Pakistan’s status as this country’s primary military threat — when it is nothing of the kind. Except it has helped, and continues to help, US, China, Russia, and any other country which wants to play the game, to place the two South Asian countries on the same scale — an end-state GHQ Rawlpindi cannot but be overjoyed by.

Posted in Afghanistan, arms exports, Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Defence Industry, domestic politics, DRDO, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Internal Security, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, nonproliferation, nuclear industry, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, nuclear power, Pakistan, Russia, russian assistance, society, South Asia, South East Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, Terrorism, United States, US., Weapons, West Asia | 23 Comments

Can the Shangri-La Dialogue Fill India’s Defence Diplomacy Void?

Posted on June 3, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

It’s a mere coincidence that while Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in Washington from 7-8 June, being pressured by President Barack Obama to sign the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement and formally ally India with the United States, his Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar will be in Singapore at the 15th Shangri-La security summit from June 3-5, trying to explain India’s non-existent defence diplomacy. The concern animating the discussions in both locations will be an assertively expansive China.

The conceit of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) from Jawaharlal Nehru’s days has been the belief that where China is concerned, diplomacy can score over military muscle – a point of view which endured despite the 1962 Himalayan drubbing of the Indian army by Chinese forces. Antipathy towards the hard power of the state unfortunately gets translated into neglect of defence diplomacy in the 21st century.

This means that while Beijing is backed by considerable military heft and outreach, New Delhi, afflicted by geo-strategic myopia, has the Indian armed forces equipped with imported armaments for territorial defence to fall back on.

Given this backdrop, what can Parrikar possibly say in Singapore? Oh, sure, he will mouth the usual inanities about India’s newly confident “Act East” policy. He may point towards the feat of Indian naval flotillas – the latest featuring INS Sahyadri and another missile destroyer, a corvette, and a tanker presently making its foray into the disputed South China Sea.

But he is unlikely to be very convincing, because successive governments have seemed clueless about how Indian military power and its projection can serve the national interest. Thus, the sale/transfer to Vietnam of the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile – which can sink the biggest warships with a single shot and frighten China’s powerful South Sea Fleet enough to confine them to the Sanya base on Hainan Island – has still not been implemented, and the BrahMos has still not reached Hanoi.

Perhaps Parrikar can show some courage and make haste to equip the existing Vietnamese coastal batteries with this indomitable cruise missile. Were he keen on leaving a mark and seriously signalling India’s intent, he could arrange to sell, at cost-price to Vietnam, a BrahMos-armed, indigenously produced, Kolkata-class destroyer.

But will the Modi regime be even remotely this strategically venturesome? Nah! Consider this: Hanoi has offered India the Nha Trang port as a military base. Instead of jumping at it, India is going slow, the way it’s lagging behind in building up the Agalega Islands leased by Mauritius as naval and air bases, while entirely ignoring Mozambique’s request to set up a naval base on its northern coast. So much for New Delhi’s appreciating the importance of distant defence and the political value of foreign bases.
Or consider that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe conceived of “the confluence of the two seas” binding India’s and Japan’s national security interests nine years ago, a perfect launch pad for a coalition of Asian “rimland” states to neutralise China.

In September 2014 Modi visited Japan and agreed to upgrade the bilateral relationship to a ‘Special Strategic and Global Partnership’. In the two years since, there has been no great progress – other than the Japanese Navy’s participation in the annual Malabar naval exercise along with the US – in fleshing out this “special partnership”. Nor have the consultations that were mooted in Tokyo for joint weapons development achieved much.

Even the finalisation of the sale of the US-2 amphibious maritime surveillance aircraft is proceeding tardily, despite the Shinmaywa Company’s desire to not only fully transfer technology but establish a production line near Hyderabad for this one-of-a-kind aircraft to meet world-wide demand.

Given the institutionalised habit of mind to waste such opportunities, chances are slim that MEA, and the Indian government generally, will suddenly see the light and be galvanised into strategic action. India’s reticence in owning up to responsibility for the defence of distant neighbours does not mesh well with New Delhi’s great power pretensions. This is something that Singapore’s great statesman, the late Lee Kwan Yew, repeatedly stressed. But, frustratingly, New Delhi has not quite cottoned-on to military power as integral to the conduct of diplomacy.
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Projects in the Pipeline
11 March 2015: India signed an MoU with Mauritius to develop infrastructure and build strategic assets in the Agalega islands.
26 May 2015: India and Vietnam sign a five-year defence pact, however lack of clarity still persists on the export of BrahMos missile.
12 December 2015: India and Japan sign a deal on sharing military information but the deal on the sale of US-2 amphibious aircraft couldn’t be concluded.
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Published in The Quint, June 3, 2016; at http://www.thequint.com/opinion/2016/06/02/can-the-shangri-la-dialogue-fill-indias-defence-diplomacy-void-shangri-la-dialogue-parrikar-visit-singapore-act-east

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Too late to make good in Iran?

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will betake himself to Iran May 21, there to finally sign the tripartite Chahbahar port agreement, also involving Afghanistan, and to deliver on the $20 billion promised that country as follow-up to Iran’s handing over the Farzad-B gas field to set up a gas cracker unit and a liquefied petroleum gas extraction unit. The more significant thing to see whether Modi will opt for the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipeline to carry the gas, the more expensive undersea pipeline to pump Farzad gas to an Indian port for onward distribution, or whether he’ll have the foresight to approve both these pipelines — there will not be a time in the next Century when India will not need Iranian energy. But if, given meagre resources, GOI has to choose, one hopes he will have the audacity to think strategic for a change — something his advisers have scant talent for — to opt for the IPI pipeline and initiate, at long last, the slow process of weaving the economies of the states of South Asia into a semblance of unitary economic space.

A critical mass of thinking is evolving in Pakistan that sees the futility of terminal enmity and the fact that this path is absolutely not affordable for Pakistan. (See two articles in todays’ Pakistani newspapers — The News, http://www.thenews.com.pk/print/121015-When-will-we-say-no-to-the-arms-race, and Express Tribune, http://tribune.com.pk/story/1106030/talking-peace-with-india/. Truth be told, India — even though limping towards the status of the third largest economy, can afford it even less because its problems are more massive and will require great foresight to tackle.

Iran has always been the energy lynchpin for India, a fact Tehran appreciated early on but New Delhi predictably didn’t, at least not in the decade 2004-2014. The Congress party government of Manmohan Singh regime was too busy trying to please and placate the United States by ensuring Indian policies conformed with Washington’s, to pause and contemplate whether this line helped India’s cause or even its larger security interests. If Washington decreed Iran a grave threat and sought to isolate that country by applying the financial tourniquet to its economic jugular, why, New Delhi was right there with America, in effect, supporting the regime of restraints imposed on Iran. Once the Obama Admin resolved the outstanding issues — in particular the future of Tehran’s Bomb programme — that regime was promptly ended, even as American companies rushed to Tehran to cut deals. The habitual laggard, India, followed but now with lot less leverage in Tehran.

True, the Iranian President Hassan Rouhani did say, in the presence of the visiting Indian external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj in April this year, that the India-Iran ties defined a “partnership which has the potential of connecting the entire region”, which’s a truism. (http://www.thehindu.com/news/iran-is-indias-reliable-partner-says-rouhani/article8486686.ece?utm_source=InternalRef&utm_medium=relatedNews&utm_campaign=RelatedNews). But it is nothing as effusive as what Tehran used to say during the long winter of its isolation when it was desperate for friends and, especially India, to help it out, assist in ways for it to transact with the outside world — “a friend in need…”. It was an opportunity Delhi irretrievably lost, because Manmohan Singh was intent on a nuclear deal with the US that, besides freezing India’s strategic capabilities at the level of a failed thermonuclear weapon design — necessitated, as his government saw it, hewing to US policy likes and dislikes. It was during this period that the first substantive offer was made to India of the Chahbahar port as India’s entrepot to Afghanistan and Central Asia and, not to be undervalued, its utility to the Indian navy as base outflanking the Chinese setup in Gwadar, just 70 miles or so down that coast to instantly neutralize any big Chinese naval designs in that area.

Modi’s government is still to figure out the means of transferring $6.5 billion in outstanding dues for Iranian oil and gas imports in the past because the usual international banking channels working out of New York, London and Western Europe were closed off by Washington. But this payments is a microcosm of the problem India faces every time its government loses sight of the national interest. New Delhi, I have long maintained, institutionally lacks what the great theorist and practitioner of geopolitics Halford Mackinder called, “the map reading habit of mind”. One deko at the map would have made it clear why Iran, for various reasons, is central to India’s strategic concerns, again something Tehran recognized before there was a flicker of understanding at the Indian end.

Quite apart from the military importance of Chahbahar, with road and rail grids radiating northwards through Afghanistan to Central Asia to the northeast and to Russia’s Northern Distribution Network to the northeast, India is offered trade lifeline skirting the sea route, connecting Chahbahar directly to St Petersburg or southwards to the ports on the Baltic coast. With the transport and communications lines in flow, Afghanistan can be endlessly supported from landward — to protect India’s centrality in that country, while offering Indian commerce easy access to the Central Asian markets. Not to be forgotten that, as part of this general scheme of things, Tajikistan had offered the Indian Air Force the use of its Farkhor air base in Ainee. Su-30MKIs based there would have been on line of sight target runs to the Chinese nuclear complex at Lop Nor in Xinjiang — a useful stick to have in hand should the situation ever heat up with China. Yes, the Russians are reasserting their presence in Central Asia, and the Farkhor base, that India has remetalled and enabled for launch of air operations and its use is a matter of contention (because Moscow fears India getting too close militarily to the US). But had Delhi shown the resolve and a genuinely independent foreign and security policy, many of these problems wouldn’t have arisen in the first place.

When the geostrategic relevance of Chahbahar was never in doubt, why did Delhi take so long to ink a deal? Once the decade long opportunity to get in close with Tehran was lost, and the occasion to capitalize on Iranian gratitude for befriending it when no other major country would, was wasted, once the Iran marketplace opened up the US eased up on financial and transactional restrictions, instead of being moved to head of the line for every consideration — which would have meant mainlining India’s manufacturing into the Iranian market, Delhi, without money muscle of a China, found itself at the back of the line, with Tehran looking and sounding less and less eager to give any concessions to India, or hand it any advantage whatsoever. Instead of tying up the Iranian domestic market — on pure barter terms because money transactions were difficult, we could have exported masses of automobiles and auto accessories, light industrial and consumer goods, besides traditional exports like Basmati rice, etc and otherwise kicked the Indian industry into a higher gear and solved a part of the unemployment problem — India now has next to no such gains and next to nothing by way of accumulated goodwill and leverage.

The negotiating therefore has descended to the bazaari level, even where Chahbahar was concerned. After all, Indian and Iranian bazaars are notorious for their skills at negotiating a price for any product. Access to Chahbahar is a big thing and Tehran was determined to get the maximum — because there was no great love or gratitude o anything. Being a straightforward, almost commercial, transaction, it became a matter of ego and negotiating tactics carried out with bazaari flair for bargain-hunting. When earlier Chahbahar was available for India with Delhi needing to help construct a south-north railway line, now India is paying dearly not just to refurbish and modernize the seaport itself but also for establishing and paying for the support infrastructure to extract and transport Farzad-B gas.

More and more, my posts on this blog, resemble an overlong lamentation about the Indian government making a hash of every opportunity that has come its way to make India a great power, as Admiral Arun Prakash wrote in describing the contents of my book — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ that he reviewed. But this reality of squandered opportunities cannot be avoided. It is a matter of wonderment how Delhi can get it so wrong so often?

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Run FONPs, solo, in South China Sea

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Yesterday, there was a maritime security dialogue with US officials, including commander of the US 7th Fleet. The Americans no doubt urged India to join them in FONOPs (freedom of navigation patrols) through the South China Sea. Today a Chinese delegation was in town, as a paper reported, trying to convince New Delhi about China’s claims to all of the SC Sea, and not to join anyone in upsetting China’s order in that area.

China’s case does not have a legal leg to stand on. What it lacks in substance, China makes up with relentless bravado. Its fantastical claims in the South China Sea indicated on maps by the so-called “9-dash line”, which when Changkaishek’s Koumintang regime originally drew it, it was the 11-dash line in 1947. Based on “Chinese activities dat[ing] back to over 2,000 years”, Beijing says it owns every one of the rocky outcroppings, low-tide elevations and submerged features, many of which the Chinese have over the past decade diligently augmented into airstrips, small naval bases, and areas for radar emplacements by pouring sand and cement to create “islands” out of virtually nothing. That’s strategic imagination for you!! These physical creations are, by its reckoning, encompassed by the line dashes and constitute sovereign Chinese maritime territory. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea all these claims are nonsensical. Nonsensical because UNCLOS recognizes only the sea area within the 12 nautical mile-limit as sovereign territory. Nor has Beijing articulated the coordinates of these dashes and the sea territories they cover. Like the MacMahon Line — LAC — drawn with a flat, fat, blunt red pencil dividing China and India in the Northeast on colonial era maps, these inked lines in SC Sea are too indistinct to translate into actual geographical features, even less exact coordinates on the map. In any case, China has not attempted definition, relying rather on bilateral negotiations with the 7-8 other states in Southeast Asia who also claim the same islands and seas and who have always disputed China’s rights over them, in order to arm twist each of them separately to gain the most advantage. In fact the reasons for Beijing’s unwillingness to sit down and actually mark out the areas covered by the thick MacMahon Line, is the same reason why it is reluctant to articulate what the dashes mean on the map and what areas they cover.

A US State Department study reveals just why China is so keen on its expansive claims — it involves 2 million sq kms of maritime assets (oil, gas, seabed minerals) amounting to 22% of its land area. But more significant than its exaggerated claims on and below the water is China’s trying to dissuade in-area and extra-territorial powers from mounting FONOPs under “innocent passage” provisions of international law. Because should China’s control of these extended seas not be challenged by FONOPs even in peacetime, then the legitimacy of its actions in keeping all countries outside its elongated maritime security perimeter way outside the 9-dash line, would be firmed up by custom and usage and, in time, acquire legitimacy.

This is plainly not in India’s interests. But neither is it in India’s interest to join the US Navy in patrolling the waters in these narrow seas. Because that, as Zhongnanhai warned in February this year, “will do nothing but show its hostility against Beijing and devastate [India and China’s] mutual strategic mutual trust” and compel changes in Chinese policies towards India.

This makes one wonder about what trust Beijing is talking about? Has GOI ever accepted there’s such trust? If so then the Indian government should clarify. If China doesn’t want India to take sides on SC Sea, why has it sided with Pakistan all these years on Kashmir, terrorism, and generally about every thing, and going to the extent of nuclear missile arming the small, weak, unstable, Islamized neighbour to the immediate west? And why didn’t Indian governments 1970s onwards raise Cain, make international noises, and warn Beijing that to take the step of nuclearizing Pakistan would be to invite India to do the same vis a vis its neighbours — and there are more of them fearful of China than there are adjoining states apprehensive of India? Considering the Modi govt has not mustered the guts to even dispatch the Brahmos missiles to Vietnam that it promised, can it be expected to undertake more onerous actions to raise the costs for, and impose them on, China?

That China understands no other language except a hard one that it uses is the point I have been making again and again for the last 30-odd years. Unless there’s absolute, definite and immediate tit-for-tat action/policy after a warning, Beijing will go on merrily shoving India into an Asian corner. If India doesn’t like this, it should push back but this New Delhi — no matter what party or coalition is in power — has no stomach for.

But to return to the SC Sea, it doesn’t make sense for the Indian Navy to join the US Navy in FONOPs in SC Sea because it is not a good idea for would-be great power — India, to follow any one’s lead or be part of another great power’s retinue because then India’s status as a camp follower is reinforced. This will not do. But it makes a great deal of strategic sense to send Indian naval flotillas openly, deliberately, and repeatedly on criss-crossing patrols across this sea that Beijing would like to “close” — creating a ‘mere closum’ (closed sea), stopping at Brunei, dropping anchor in Subic Bay and Manila, having R&R at Cam Ranh Bay and Nha Trang, and repeating it all over again — with one warship designated to the area to this mission on rotation. Because China simply cannot be allowed to prop up its pretence of sovereign rights over this vast swath where India, jointly with Hanoi, has invested in oil rigs and has concessions for oil and gas exploration. In any case, India has also to wait and watch how the international community deals with China. If it concedes China’s claims in whatever manner, then there’s a good case for India to make similar claims, follow Beijing’s actions to the T, in the waterways off Komorta and Campbell Bay, closing off access to the Indian Ocean except to friendly westbound traffic. China, in that sense, sets a legal and practical precedent — whatever it is. Just as it has set a strategic precedent by missile arming Pakistan which absolutely permits India to return the favour and respond in kind by nuclear missile arming Vietnam for starters as I have been advocating for, what, 20-odd years now.

But when has New Delhi shown the gumption to thump its 56-inch chest in China’s face — not the same as belabouring a weak and decrepit Pakistan, is it? Just how bereft of ideas MEA is may be evidenced in recent op/eds of former senior diplomats. Ex-Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal, other than saying, on the Masood Azhar issue that India needs to impose costs on China, has no ideas whatsoever about how to do so. (http://www.telegraphindia.com/1160517/jsp/opinion/story_85967.jsp#.Vzr4zfl96Ul). It will be safe to venture that pushed to explain what a reasonable counter to China would be, Sibal would probably support the Sino-Indian anti-terror pact on the anvil!!! Another diplomat, Hardeep Puri, member (still?) of the BJP foreign policy cell, (in a Hindustan Times op/ed, May 17, 2016) writes at an even more elevated and abstract level of focusing “on merits while mending the wall” as a way of earning “respect that is rightfully ours”. He says nothing about how to minimize the Chinese footprint in Sri Lanka and Nepal except to note that these two states have joined Pakistan in forging an “all weather friendship” with China. He offers no panacea other than use of the diplomatic “back channel” but whether this will right the skewed situation in the subcontinent, leave alone farther afield, is questionable.

If this is the passive-defensive best solutions to win “respect” that MEA types (and hence MEA) can come up with, than it won’t be long before India truly recedes to the millennial old jambudwipa — islanded in the Chinese seas lapping at all our borders.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Culture, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Indian Politics, Missiles, Pakistan, Pakistan military, SAARC, society, South Asia, South East Asia, Sri Lanka, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US., Vietnam, Weapons | 7 Comments

An Imploding China? How soon?

Posted on May 15, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Enough time has passed to dwell on bit of the back story of the recent Dharamshala Meet to discuss religious freedoms. The controversy generated by the withdrawal by India of the visa to the most famous Uyghur dissident outside Xinjiang or, as its majority Muslim population would have it, ‘East Turkestan’, Dolkun Isa, may have been by design. More interested in the publicity for his cause than attending a far-off conference Isa, according to insider sources at the conference, may have maneuvered GOI into cancelling his visa by granting an interview to the German media on the eve of his departure for Delhi, intended to draw Beijing’s attention. Isa was confident that a perturbed Beijing would insist India honour the Interpol notice, something the Modi regime wouldn’t have done, if Isa hadn’t gone public with the issue in the first place. Another Uyghur dissident Ilshaat Hassan, on a tourist visa, attended the Dharamsala do w/o ruffling official feathers on either side, even as he railed against the Chinese oppression of his people at the conference.

India could, of course, have preempted such a situation from developing had it followed through on its visa and welcomed the Uyghur nationalist with or without fanfare rather than peremptorily cancelling the visa and handing Beijing a major PR victory. But by now, however, we should be used to GOI preparing the mud for China to hurl at New Delhi’s face. And so rather than leaving it to Isa to not attend the Meet at Dharamsala, the Indian govt chose not to brave Beijing’s ire, and did what it did. It says something about India’s reputation, that has spread far and wide, for cravenness when confronting China that even the slight pressure of Zhongnanhai spokesman reminding New Delhi of the Interpol red corner notice was enough to buckle the Narendra Modi regime’s knees. The correct response should have been to advise President Xi and his government, in the most ringing terms, about the democratic compulsion of respecting political dissidence — something alien to the Communist system in China, and about (as stated in an earlier post) individual states being free to respect or not Interpol’s red corner notice where political dissidents are concerned. No major democratic country, incidentally, does otherwise. India has now proved to the world that it is the exception. What Beijing needed to be told in no uncertain language was that political dissidence is not terrorism, and dissidents are not terrorists, except in China.

The significance about the Conference at Dharamsala is that it is the seat of HH the Dalai Lama, who however else he may have failed the “Free Tibet’ cause, has used his moral weight to legitimate and sustain in the world the Tibetan opposition to Beijing’s policies of forced assimilation and cultural genocide. He is a one-man army that has kept China at bay for the last 65 years. So Xi will not have the courage to ask, as Stalin did the pope, “How many Divisions do you have?” because he knows only too well the power of this holy potentate to destabilize Tibet.

Beijing can’t wait to see the Dalai Lama pass from the scene and one can almost see a succession of Chinese leaders tear their hair out and rails in frustration as Jean Anouilh’s Henry II famously does against the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett: “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?!” Except, the Dalai Lama has been too restrained, not been meddlesome enough, in the affairs of Tibet. His nonviolent “Middle Path”, while beefing up his moral heft has left those among the Tibetan Exile community in India cold because of his refusal to sanction, leave alone encourage and instigate a violent uprising in the Tibetan strongholds in Lhasa, and in the eastern Kham region (of the Gansu and Yunnan provinces). The bulk of the youthful Tibetan exiles in India want India to train, arm, and launch them in guerilla operations behind PLA lines in Tibet and elsewhere. The irony is that, like Beijing, the young Tibetans too are waiting for this incarnation of the Dalai Lama to vacate the scene.

Tibetan and Uyghur militancy is still an outlier phenomenon for China. Not so the domestic political dissidence in that country. What the political dissidents in mainland China are desperately searching for is a Dalai Lama-like figure of irreproachable character and highest integrity, a moral heavyweight, in fact, to lead the Movement to unseat the totalitarian Communist regime in China, one who preaches and practices nonviolence as the means to compel the autocrats in Beijing to cede power to the Chinese people. One of the leaders of this Movement, who attended the Dharamsala Meet, is Yang Jianli, the US-based Chinese dissident who in 2010 accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the winner Liu Xiaobo, the jailed Chinese human rights activist, literary critic, teacher and principal author of the ‘Charta 08’ a manifesto for the gradual shift in the system of government from one party rule to a multi-party democracy along Western lines.

In a remarkably honest assessment of his own political stance and the evolution of his thinking, Liu has asserted that “My tendency to idealize Western civilization arises from my nationalistic desire to use the West in order to reform China. But this has led me to overlook the flaws of Western culture…. I have been obsequious toward Western civilization, exaggerating its merits, and at the same time exaggerating my own merits. I have viewed the West as if it were not only the salvation of China but also the natural and ultimate destination of all humanity. Moreover I have used this delusional idealism to assign myself the role of savior…. I now realize that Western civilization, while it can be useful in reforming China in its present stage, cannot save humanity in an overall sense. If we stand back from Western civilization for a moment, we can see that it possesses all the flaws of humanity in general….If I, as a person who has lived under China’s autocratic system for more than thirty years, want to reflect on the fate of humanity or how to be an authentic person, I have no choice but to carry out two critiques simultaneously. I must: 1. Use Western civilization as a tool to critique China. 2. Use my own creativity to critique the West.”

Liu is increasingly believed by the dissident community in China and the sympathetic Chinese diaspora all over the world, aided and abetted by CIA, of course, to be the moral centre their Movement has long craved. As a first step, they are seeking his release from incarceration. His potential for trouble is why Beijing will never let him out. One Dalai Lama appears too much for China to handle. Contemplating several of them in addition — Dolkun Isa as an Uyghur clone of the great Lama, and to have Liu directly challenging Communist rule would be sufficient to induce conniptions in the politburo.

Per Yang, there is enormous turmoil, largely invisible because it is roiling the society below the placid surface of Communist China. But flash crowds collect in city centres and in Tiananmein Square in Beijing to protest, commemorate anniversaries of the 1989 unrest, to show their disillusionment with Communist rule. So, if Yang Jianli is to be believed the Chinese state is being hollowed out from the inside because of its eroding legitimacy among the people. This situation will only worsen, because an imprisoned Liu Xiaobo will be a greater problem for Beijing as he is a “prisoner of conscience”.

For all this to amount to anything meaningful, however, will take a lot of doing and time. But Chinese dissidents are convinced that the point when a new order replaces the old is nearer than it might seem to outsiders. That is a comforting thought, but not one India should base its policies on. Maozedong didn’t flinch when 10 million Chinese died in the great dislocation and famine of the mid-Sixties. Xi is unlikely to be troubled by Liu Xiaobo and his Gang of democracy lovers because the central power in China has always been ruthless in bludgeoning those who have stood in its way. Recall that brave soul who stood in front of the tank on June 4, 1989, in Tiananmein Square, daring the crew within it to run him over, and by sheer force of his will pricked the conscience of the crew, compelling that tank to go around him. That protester was never heard from again and remains unidentified to this day.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Central Asia, China, China military, civil-military relations, domestic politics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, guerilla warfare, Indian Army, Internal Security, society, South Asia, Terrorism | 4 Comments

FGFA On — simplifies Parrikar’s aircraft choices

Posted on May 12, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

The word is the Modi government has informed Moscow it will soon sign the detailed long pending co-development agreement for the Su-50 FGFA (Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft). This simplifies the choices somewhat for defence minister Manohar Parrikar as regards the three large aircraft programmes on the IAF menu — other than FGFA, Rafale, and Tejas Mk-2. The Agusta-Westland corruption scandal has pretty much sunk the Rafale deal for fear that France’s cultivation of interested parties over the past decade could end up tarring the ruling BJP regime in some way considering a lot of the IAF brass and MOD officials spanning the NDA and UPA govts may be implicated in any future investigation and who, in turn, may drag the relatively clean reputation of Modi & Co., through the mud. Because there’s always someone compromised and dirty…in the decision loop.

With some $25 billion taken up by the FGFA project, and the politically safe decision to fund and propagate the indigenous Tejas, the prospects of the LCA Mk-2 have suddenly brightened. Even the usual naysayers among the Air HQrs brass are in a funk, seeing former CAS ACM SP Tyagi facing definite jail time — a matter of when, not if, and another Ex-AF chief ACK NAK Browne chewing his fingernails in Oslo, awaiting sessions with the CBI interrogators who are presently collecting information on the Pilatus 7C trainer acquisition, and Tyagi, and also Browne, whose names are also mentioned along with one service chief in particular around the turn of the Century — all of whom proved great lovers of the French Mirage 2000 and ready initial pushers of the Rafale, possibly for a consideration — which is what CBI are trying to find out. So preoccupied, there will be little squeaking by IAF over Tejas and FGFA choices — of that one can now be certain.

The skew factor is how much value prime minister Modi accords his impromptu commitment to President Francois Hollande to buy the French aircraft in fly-away condition. Such commitments are not significant except to an ingenue on the international stage, such as Modi, intent on making his mark. He’s perhaps not aware that as a buyer Delhi holds all the cards. France can be told — too bad but India cannot afford the Rafale at any price and Good Bye! That’s all there’s to it. Paris, as I have repeatedly mentioned, cannot act uppity or hurt because if it acts up it can end up losing access to the still lucrative Indian market altogether.

The air force’s immediate need to make up fighter squadron strength will be addressed by a solution Parrikar very early preferred — buy more than double the number of HAL, Nasik-assembled Su-30 MKIs upgraded with retrofitment of the Phazotron Zhuk AE AESA radar for the same amount of monies invested in Rafale. The investment and advancement of the Tejas Mk-2 in mission-mode will win the govt applause, which has been rare in its 2 years in office. Together with the upgraded MiG-29, Mirage 2000, and Jaguar fleets, IAF is — honestly speaking, not in all that bad a state

So Parrikar, will make pro forma noises about the Rafale deal under negotiation, but let this deal wither away on the PNC vine, notwithstanding desperate attempts by Paris to bag a contract by lowering the cost to 7.25 billion euros (from 8.2 billion euros) for 36 aircraft or around 9 billion USD or approximately $250 million per Rafale WITHOUT weapons! With the full complement of French-sourced A2A and A2G weapons, such as the MICA (advanced Sidewinder equivalent), the cost per aircraft will skyrocket to in excess of $300 million, which sum will buy India 2.5 AESA-equipped Su-30MKIs, each with full weapon load. No matter how you cut the deal, Rafale isn’t worth the oodles of money it will cost the Indian taxpayer.

But why did the Modi govt do a turnaround on the FGFA that IAF wanted to junk? This because, as stated in earlier posts, Modi government was warned about the outcomes of “buying West”. It weighed the danger of Russia simply terminating all engagement with this country in the military sphere coupled with a proportional link-up with Pakistan, and deeper weapons co-development with China that would place India in a deep hole. It would have instantly seeded dangers on numerous fronts. Firstly, the hardware void cannot be easily filled by Western sources because the bulk military armaments are ex-Russian. Secondly, the termination of technical assistance in advanced and sensitive projects would quite literally put all prestige Indian projects into a freeze, which cannot be thawed out by Western countries as few of them will willingly sell other than “cutting edge minus-minus”-quality weapons and weapons platforms, and none of them is prepared to cooperate in actual technology transfer of the substantive kind, leave alone co-design and co-develop with India sophisticated armaments for love or money.

India thus has no choice– an unenviable position India is in because for 60 years a succession of popularly elected governments in Delhi have talked big about meeting all military needs through indigenous sources but in reality invariably given into temptations of numbered accounts and payments in kind (green card, “scholarships” and jobs for progeny in foreign multinational companies, etc.) offered by foreign supplier countries, and remorselessly throttled promising military high-tech, high value, R&D DRDO projects in the cradle. The result is a hollow military and armed services that can at any time be stopped cold by any of a multitude of foreign suppliers turning off the spares spigot, and grounding the country’s fighting capabilities in a trice.

It is ultimately the political class that is to blame for this situation, because it cannot summon the vision or the will to decree NO MORE ARMS IMPORTS and stick by it, come what may, and it does not incentivize the domestic private sector to step in to produce all armaments, however they do it, at home. Military brass and IAS bureaucrats are ultimately only order-takers. They will swill at the foreign bad money trough when they see the politicians doing it.

Posted in arms exports, Asian geopolitics, China, China military, civil-military relations, corruption, Culture, Defence Industry, domestic politics, DRDO, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Navy, Indian Politics, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Relations with Russia, Russia, russian assistance, society, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, United States, US., Weapons | 14 Comments