Do not label foreign-made military hardware as ‘indigenous’

Posted on December 24, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

The country is coming to terms with the gradualist Prime Minister Narendra ‘Change does not happen all of a sudden’ Modi, who is relying on the existing decrepit apparatus of State, unimaginative policy establishment, and the government’s usual lackadaisical way of doing business to deliver results.
Even Modi’s flagship ‘Make in India’ programme is being driven into the ground by the old approach in the defence sphere of licence-manufacture now garbed in different rhetoric. Thus, in a ‘Navy Day’ newspaper supplement featuring a piece titled ‘Indigenisation of P75 is a good example of ‘Make in India’’, Bernard Buisson, managing director of the French government-backed private sector naval defence major DCNS (Direction des Constructions Navales), clarifies that by “indigenous” he means that local companies will do what defence public sector units (DPSUs) have been doing for the last 60 years — importing various components and ‘screwdrivering’ them together as per supplied blueprints.

If the French or any other foreign firm wins the contract, the resulting P-75i submarine will be about as ‘indigenous’ as the DCNS Scorpene boat currently produced by the Mazagon Dockyard, the slew of combat aircraft (British Jaguar and Hawk, Russian MiG-21, MiG-27, and Su-30MKI) assembled by Hindustan Aerospace Ltd, the Swedish Bofors gun outputted by the ordnance factories or the Russian T-72 tank by the Avadi Heavy Vehicle factory. Without the home-based design engineering element, foreign developed military hardware mislabelled ‘indigenous’ will continue to keep India a captive of foreign vendors, and the Indian government will be played for a fool it unfortunately has shown itself to be in these matters, even as the prospect of a truly indigenous, comprehensively capable, Indian defence industry keeps receding.

These conclusions are reached on the basis of recent developments. There is the Dhirendra Singh Committee report on reforming the defence procurement procedure. It has brazenly recommended cutting the political executive out of all procurement decisions and making the armed services solely responsible for them. This will ensure the Indian military remains industrial age, sub-strategic, cued to the wrong threat (Pakistan), and incapable of transforming itself in line with new technologies. Next, the defence ministry taskforce chaired by former DRDO chief VK Atre, asked to come up with an alternative to the disastrous ‘lowest tender’ system, has managed to at once subvert the government’s intention and retain for the DRDO-DPSU combine its primacy by keeping many private sector companies from competing for armament-development contracts with onerous entry-level financial conditions. And belatedly, the government has discovered ‘military diplomacy’. It has formed a committee led by deputy national security adviser Arvind Gupta to suggest ways to extract advanced technology from reluctant vendor states by using, as I have long advocated, our expensive armament buys as leverage, and mobilising Indian embassies to push exports of Indian-made arms to developing countries.

\The nested problems, however, are many. Gupta, a diplomat, will be hampered by the foreign service’s traditional antipathy to the military intruding into its turf. Also, it doesn’t seem that all departments of government making capital purchases abroad are being brought into the leveraging ambit as they should be. Hence, the civil aviation ministry, for example, is apparently free to permit — as it has just announced — private airlines to buy hundreds of passenger aircraft directly from Boeing or Airbus, costing hundreds of billions of dollars, without binding either of these companies to the offsets rule applying to military procurement (mandating 30-50% of the contract value to be ploughed back into India by way of designated technology transfers and co-production deals). And finally, how are developing states to be induced into buying India-made weapons systems when the Indian armed services don’t?
By way of a template for technology transactions, the Gupta Committee needs to study how China built its aerospace industry by buying McConnell-Douglas MD-80/90 aircraft in the 1980s in return for the American firm transferring its design and production technologies in toto, including the then cutting-edge design/computer-assisted manufacture technologies. That deal ended McConnell-Douglas’ run as an aircraft producer (it merged with Boeing) while germinating in China a major transport aircraft design, development, and manufacture hub.

But the Indian government seems institutionally incapable of assessing technological trends and prioritising technologies for absorption, mustering the fixity of purpose, or configuring a clear-eyed, cold-blooded, strategy and ruthlessly wielding the country’s political and economic clout in a buyer’s market. Instead, it is sending out confused signals. How were the representatives of Indian companies accompanying defence minister Manohar Parrikar to Washington, for instance, supposed to fish for possible US partners without any certainty of project contracts in light of the Atre Committee tilt? Worse, New Delhi is paying more attention than is prudent to Washington’s argument that signing the ‘foundational agreements’ — Logistics Support Agreement, Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for sharing geospatial data, and Communications Interoperability Security Memorandum of Agreement — will spur the ‘Make in India’ programme when, actually, they will insert the US into the Indian military’s operational loop and violate sovereignty. And, it is being swayed by the American pitch for things like the electromagnetic aircraft launch system on gigantic carriers that are extraneous to India’s security needs and interests.

Keeping in mind the imperative to strengthen the design engineering capability, it makes more sense to seek substantive US inputs into commercialising Indian-designed systems, such as the Tejas Mk-II fighter, (the abandoned) Kaveri jet engine, and in developing the navy warship directorate’s own 75i submarine design.
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Published in the Hindustan Times, December 24, 2015 in the print edition with the title “Economic clout as the currency” at http://www.hindustantimes.com/editorials/do-not-label-foreign-made-military-hardware-as-indigenous/story-tfhfakFmVymXNSNZk5pvAJ.html

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Endangering the Russia connection

Posted on December 23, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

On the eve of his trip to Moscow, Prime Minister Narendra Modi did well to remind the country that in time of desperate need Russia helped with military hardware and technical assistance in strategic programmes when no other country would. Gratitude, perhaps, counts for little in international affairs. But correct geostrategics is critical — something the Indian Foreign Office and, increasingly, the NSA Ajit Doval, handling foreign policy, seem often to forget.

A basic geostrategic constant is the fact that while the US, Russia and China are big and powerful powers, China is the obvious security and economic challenge to India, and in dealing with it, it is the continentally proximal Russia, with the ready ability to play off China and Pakistan against India, that matters more than the distantly seaward America. Russia’s record of assistance in sensitive strategic technology projects, moreover, remains unmatched by any power. Because the military supply relationship has been central to bilateral reflations, these policy fundamentals require iteration considering the tendency of the Modi regime is to take Moscow for granted and benefit Western defence companies at the expense of their Russian counterparts in the dog-eat-dog world of capital military sales — this even though economics dictate, as in the case of the Su-30MKI, that it is a far better option every which way and even in performance terms than the Rafale the PM unwisely and ill-advisedly committed to — by way of a personal initiative — on his trip to Paris earlier in the year, thereby majorly screwing up the laid down the Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft shortlisting and selection process geared by the IAF from the start to favour some Western aircraft or the other. But that’s a different story!

The above is by way of prelude — to set the context, as it were — for mistakes Modi may make in his Kremlin meeting with President Vladimir Putin, and what he expects to gain from it. The fact is, on the international scene, India is seen as a sort of rich yokel, a perennially dim-witted fool, who can be easily taken to the cleaners — divested of his monies with jingly-jangly, prohibitively expensive, armaments whose acquisitions make little sense. To wit, the Rafale! So, everybody pitches this and sells that as the answer to India’s security problems, with the government and the PM’s Office in particular — bereft of dispassionate outside experts without vested service and other interests on its staff and a knowledge base of its own and, hence, minus any deep understanding about geostrategics or about the genuine security-defence needs, relying on the armed services whose proven myopia is now creeping into the realm of the legendary. It is another matter that the Indian taxpayer ends up paying for their acquisition follies even as the country gains zilch in terms of its strategic military standing and capabilities.

The game being military procurement seller states will lie, cheat, induce us to sign lopsided contracts, take our money and then fail to deliver on contracted technology transfer, etc, without compunction, as has routinely happened in the past. GOI is not unaware of it. But how is it leveraging its manifest buyer’s clout? Pathetically, the NSA/Foreign Office is confident that the transfer of cutting-edge nuclear submarine technology, for instance, can be extracted from France in return for signing on with the Rafale — this according to a news report. If the past deals and contractual agreements with French and Western suppliers generally were to be dissected, the obvious would be discovered, namely, that the one thing these countries have always protected with the utmost zeal is their technology, being ultra careful to restrict transfers, and then in extreme circumstances, to only sell dated technology from which no further sales-revenue is possible. It explains why the US has been so reluctant to transfer advanced military technology and just pushes G2G (govt-to-govt) Foreign Military Sales (of C-17 and C-130J air transporters, Apache, Sikorsky Seahawk, and heavy-lift Chinook helos) and, when it comes to transferring tech, talks of joint programmes to develop batteries and small-time drones, playing on this govt’s phobia and claiming G2G means absence of hanky-panky! True, the technology producers in the US, more than in France UK, etc, are private firms for whom commercial sales and profits thereof make more sense than passing technology and helping a potential competitor in the global arms bazaar to set up. This is why S. Jayshankar and his MEA cohorts’ confidence in their ability to negotiate substantive technology transfer by holding the Rafale as bait, and by dangling Russia as alternative source of advanced weapons platforms (such as the SSN –N-powered attack submarines) and armaments is so misplaced. Can Messrs. Doval, Jayshankar & Co. manage to get the onpassing of nuclear submarine technology mentioned as a conditionality in the contract for the Rafale or in the French company DCNS’ bid for the conventional 75i submarine project, or in any legal deed, for that matter, the two sovereign govts could sign? That’s about as likely as India’s getting into the UN Security Council by begging for a permanent seat with every passing small and big power. That this hurts national self-respect is seemingly no one’s concern.

But, it is on such ridiculous premises that India’s foreign and military policies are run. Russia has been forthright, as regards the SSN. Russia has long voiced its willingness to lease an Akula-class boat — the Iribis, with the hull upgraded to Mk-III standard and reconfigured, if required, to fire Nirbhay cruise missiles (as an SSGN) and including sophisticated sensors in its nose, for instance, to detect thermoclines — the differently-temperatured layers in the waters of the “closed”, warm water, Indian Ocean, which makes it easier for submarines to lurk in them undetected for especially easy kills of surface combatants. But the Navy wants a Yassen-class SSN, when there are only two such boats in existence, both in Russian naval service. So Yassen won’t happen, unless Modi sweetens the deal enough for one of these submersibles to be detached for use by the Indian Navy. Such a sweetener, Moscow has hinted, could be Delhi’s taking up the $3.7 billion offer for three Sukhoi-50 PAK FA Fifth generation aircraft along with total transfer of technology — source codes and all, to any Indian entity– not excluding private Indian defence industrial companies. Can any other offer on the table from anywhere compare with such a composite deal? Does the NSA-MEA combo believe the French, Americans, the British or anybody else can top it? Really????

The most telling deal on the anvil is actually the low-key one Tata’s are negotiating with the Sukhoi Division of Russia’s United Aviation Corporation to manufacture nuts and bolts up, all the spares necessary to hereafter keep the Su-30MKIs in the Indian Air Force flying. In one fell swoop it will remove the ulcer afflicting the military supply relationship with Russia — the genuine concern about the spares shortages that have always plagued the serviceability and operational readiness of Russian/Soviet armaments in Indian employ. This could be the model for other Indian industrial majors to tie up for the spares for the T-72/T-90 tanks, for example.

The $3-4 billion purchase of the S-400 missile system which’s a great anti-aircraft system, but no good in the anti-missile defence (AMD) role — then again there’s no system anywhere able to take out incoming ballistic missiles, or 200 Kamov utility helos, 4 additional Talwar-class frigates, etc. are fine but are only a palliative for more serious ills. Moscow is convinced Delhi is climbing on to the Western arms bandwagon — which will mean the end of Moscow’s special relationship with India. These fears will not be addressed by buying more 1000 MW VVER reactors for the Kudankulum complex.

Hope Modi makes a course correction to ensure principally that all arms buys from any source go into strengthening not just the country’s defence manufacturing sector but in beefing up its design engineering capability — this last being the big void of arms dependency India stepped into when GOI first acquiesced in IAF’s mean-minded killing of the indigenously designed Marut HF-24 Mk-II in the Seventies. And Russia has so far proven the best bet in exporting “know how” aspects of technology rather than, as is done by Western firms and govts, trust in the “know who” factor to fetch them rich arms contracts..

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Response to Dr. Carafano’s review

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

Following is the response to James Carafano’s review of my book that I have posted at http://nationalinterest.org/feature/indias-machiavellian-moment-14691?page=show.
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Bharat Karnad •

Dr. Carafano has been generous in his review of my book, and I thank him for it. His main disagreement is about whether India is too big and consequential in the 21st Century effectively to play the US off against China, as it did during the Cold War when the country was admittedly “peripheral” to the interests of both the US and the Soviet Union and could, therefore, gain from the competing attentions of both, i.e., afford to play the nonaligned card. However, the implicit premise of the book in the Machiavellian context is precisely that China and Russia are too big, too powerful, and too proximal to India for New Delhi to alienate both by joining the American-led Western “club” even if this fetches it many “benefits” of a “real strategic relationship”with the US.

Per Machiavelli, a Prince primarily needs two things: military prowess (hard power) and what he calls luck or “fortune” (what I call the software of hard power), to improve his rank order and, by way of strategy, differentiated treatment of nobles at the Court . In this paradigm, if the prince is substituted by nation-state, Court by the extant global order, and nobles by the current great powers — the five Security Council members, India as an aspiring great power would best enhance its “fortune” by creating for itself both the space for maneuver and the latitude for action with deft foreign and military policies based on contingent cooperation with the extant big powers and by playing the balancer, taking care to see it is always on the right side of the changing “correlation of forces”. Indeed, it is India’s bigness and potential heft and its capacity to tilt the “correlation” this way or that as between the US and China, the US and China+Russia, and at the regional level between Iran and Israel, etc, that makes India “ïndispensable” to the global and regional balance of power systems as well as the international economy, and an entity none of the big powers or regional powers can ignore. It is this situation that provides India with opportunities. To capitalize on them, however, requires, as I argue in the book, that India arm itself with a sense of its own worth and a grand strategic vision, pursue agile Asia-girdling geopolitics and an elastic and calculative strategy and game-plan, acquire meaningful conventional and thermonuclear military capabilities able to blunt the major China threat and, hence, neutralize minor regional adversaries (such as Pakistan), and become genuinely self-sufficient in arms.

In the event, for India to side wholly with the US as Dr. Carafano counsels, could lose the country its “strategic autonomy” and curtail its strategic policy options. Whatever else it might do, it will not help India become a great power.

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‘India’s Machiavellian Moment’

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

My book — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’, reviewed by James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC,for ‘The National Interest’ at http://nationalinterest.org/feature/indias-machiavellian-moment-14691?page=show
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What distinguishes Bharat Karnad’s thinking about the future of India is that he is a true realist in the Machiavellian manner.
James Jay Carafano
December 20, 2015

Bharat Karnad is a professor of National Security Studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi—and the Machiavelli of India. His new book, “Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet),” lays out everything that’s wrong with his country’s foreign policy, bureaucracy and defense establishment and how to fix it.

What distinguishes Karnad’s thinking about the future place of India in the world is that he is a true realist in the Machiavellian manner. Realism is often confused with being realistic. That’s just wrong. Strategic thinkers of every stripe think they are realistic. Being realistic is figuring out what works. Realism is about why it works.

Realists contend ‘power’ serves as the operative force governing the relationship between states. Everything else—structure, treaties, bargains, deals, rules, sanctions, relationships, wars—are all just tools of statecraft. The hand that turns the tool is power.

When it comes to believing in power, Karnad is very much living in the Machiavellian moment. He is fixated on sweeping away generations of Indian geo-strategic architecture that prop up the policies of a non-aligned state obsessed with soft-peddling its influence. Karnad wants India to wield hard power like a hammer.

Machiavelli has been hated by history for just saying that power matters most. Frederick the Great, (ironically probably the most cold-blooded realist of eighteenth-century Europe) wrote a chapter-by-chapter critique rebuking Machiavelli’s every thought. The modern British philosopher Isaiah Berlin penned a famous essay on Machiavelli’s questionable morals.

Karnad has had his share of critics as well. When it comes to sub-continent security policy, the professor is far from the madding crowd. “Amongst thinkers who relish the notion of a non-aggressive, soft treading India,” notes one reviewer, “Karnad’s book will spark a fresh round of tut-tuting.” He is about as hawkish as they come, including advocating building atomic landmines to block an enemy’s passage to India.

But Machiavelli didn’t believe in power without moral purpose. Neither does Karnad. Sure, Machiavelli lauded princes who lied and murdered, not because might was right, but because they were trying to get it right. Machiavelli was sick and tired of tiny Italian city-states and their citizens being pushed around, exploited and subjugated by greater powers. He was looking for leaders who could unite the states and stand up to outsiders. Likewise, Karnad wants India to give up its smiley face of foreign policy not for the sake of being more powerful, but for the sake of India.

The Renaissance Florentine and the Post-Cold War Indian are also both prescient in their prescriptions for what ought to be done. If the Italians could have pulled themselves together in a single state they might have been spared centuries of being ravaged by each other and outsiders. Karnad warns his country needs to whip itself into shape and put out a “don’t mess with India” sign before others start encroaching on India’s space.

The backbone of Karnad’s thesis is a set of arguments he has developed for years: Pakistan has preoccupied India for far too long; China represents the greatest challenge to the future of Indian security and ought to be the focus of the country’s military and strategic planning; India needs a stronger and more reliable nuclear deterrent; the military ought to extend the country’s security perimeter by basing and joint operations with its neighbors; and New Delhi ought to have a strong strategic relationship with Washington. These are all bold ideas grounded in the realist perspective that hard power has an important role to play in enhancing Indian security.

While Karnad may be a good realist, there are good arguments that not everything in his 500-plus page tome is realistic. He insists, for example, that India can maintain sound strategic relationships with Israel and Iran, the United States and Russia. That might have been true when India was peripheral enough to the core interests of powers that a certain amount of infidelity didn’t matter much. New Delhi could play on both sides of the fence. That may no longer be true. Karnad can’t expect, for example, that the United States will share its very best military technology with a government that still thinks it’s okay to be buddy-buddy with Tehran and Moscow. That’s not to say that India should be prevented from having any dealings with both powers; after all, the United States does. But the hard truth is if New Delhi wants the benefits of real strategic relationship from the United States, it is going to have to join the club.

India ought to make the hard choice. There are real benefits for both the United States and India in managing their relationships with China. After all, containing Beijing is a nutty and impractical idea. On the other hand, demonstrating solidarity against Chinese efforts to rewrite international norms for their own purposes makes a great deal of sense. The most promising initiative would be a “Quad Dialogue,” a forum for developing cooperative, synchronized policies among India, Australia, Japan and the United States. These are the key Indo-Pacific powers that can get and keep China’s attention.

Beyond devising a diplomatic forum like the quad, the United States needs not only to revitalize its own military capabilities in the region, it has to invest in India becoming a first-class military power. U.S.-India defense cooperation could transform the global arms industry, not only delivering New Delhi the forces it needs, but developing a real export capacity as well.

In the end, Indian realism needs a dose of reality about the future of the U.S.-India relationship. Without that, Karnad risks a fate like Machiavelli’s: seeing the moment pass and the potential for greatness go unrealized in his lifetime.
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James Jay Carafano is vice president of the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy and the E. W. Richardson Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

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Wonky priorities with Japan

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

Shinzo Abe’s very politic schtick in Banaras re: “Clean Ganga” by further messing up the river by pouring milk, etc into it by way of Hindu ritual is, well, understandable — what choice did he have? But Modi and the Indian government’s permanent bee-in-the-bonnet — signing nuclear agreements with every passing state in order to get “advanced” reactor technology, however, is getting to be an intolerable joke. One of the persisting hypocrisies Tokyo indulges in mostly by habit, even as it climbs on to the cusp of obtaining nuclear weapons itself in the face of two things — a rampaging China and a retrenching America that has a hard time looking after its own security, let alone secure the futures of its Asian allies such as Japan. So Tokyo insists on far more stringent conditions for nuclear trade with anybody than almost any other supplier state. Technology-wise, Tokyo has little to offer except perhaps in the area of reactor safety. But its conditionalities — are they not insisting on Delhi signing the additional protocol? — are simply too onerous for India to accept unless Modi is willing to give away the last negotiating card and what remains of the leverage the Congress-Manmohan Singh regime so thoughtlessly surrendered with the useless nuclear deal with the US.
Far from changing gears and reversing direction Modi, among all the other continuities in his foreign policy run by the same persons who had “negotiated” the N-deal, is going full steam down the same road.

Not to be outdone by the predecessor govt’s wrong attitude, the BJP in power has just as wonky priorities. It has signed the deal for the Shinkansen “bullet train” tech to be implemented on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad sector, beating out the Shinkansen-derived Chinese high-speed railway tech, with a $12 billion loan on low interest. So, what’s wrong with this? Consider the alternative usages this amount could have been put to — for the full electrification of trunk lines. Or to double-track some important rail routes that are still single line and require complicated scheduling schemes which get routinely disrupted resulting in most trains running late/very late. Or, it could have been channeled into modernizing/digitalizing the signalling systems. Or, invested in procuring new radar guidance technology to run trains at speeds even in foggy weather, or in developing the vacuum technology to collect night soil (to be vacuumed out at major stops, as in passenger aircraft), which is splayed all over the tracks through holes in the floors that pass for toilets on Indian railways. Instead, we’ll have a shiny new train making the short 200 mile to-and-fro run as Modi’s gift to his home state and a testament to bad choices the Indian government invariably makes no matter who is in power. This is to say nothing about the sheer diseconomics of this damn-fool venture.

And there’s less than meets the eye on security cooperation, especially with regard to ramping up naval links and to get going on the US-2 Shinmeiwa flying boat project that’s been on the table for over a decade now. We should provide incentives to have India become the economical manufacturing base and source of sales of this aircraft for a world-wide market of littoral states. And there’s no mention anywhere of moves and measures to realize Abe’s trademark concept of the ‘security diamond’ of India, Japan, Australia and the United States as the bulwark of security in the Indo-Pacific.

Not sure, in the end, what was achieved except more ground has been ceded on the nuclear front, at which rate India will be reduced as in much else to an entity of minimal consequence.

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India-US defence industrial cooperation – Hudson Institute discussion

Posted on December 11, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

Hudson Institute held a panel discussion featuring Indian corporate reps as members of FICCI accompanying DefMin Parrikar to Washington conducted by former US Defence Under secretary Douglas Feith, and the reputed China expert Mike Pillsbury, who as Special Assistant To US Def Secy Caspar Weingerger in the Reagan Admin in the 1980s made the first forays to open up US mil sales to India, etc. It was held in Washington yesterday, Dec 10, 2015.

Pillsbury uses my book — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ extensively in his presentation. The astonishing thing to hear is an Indian medium industry-wallah (a Col Shankar) going overboard on a pacifist India and the overblown GOI rhetoric of defensive this and defensive that, echoing the nonsense that govt officials spout.

The Hudson panel disc at
http://www.hudson.org/events/1302-the-future-of-india-u-s-defense-collaboration122015

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Pakistan losing the America pillar

Posted on December 10, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

Pakistan, it was said, was defined by the three As — Allah, Army, and America! It is in serious danger of losing America as pillar to lean on, and without which the dyad of Allah and the Army will render that country even more unstable than it already is. This trend of the US retracting from its blind support of Pakistan may be seen particularly in the views aired by the ranking majority Republican Party and minority Democratic Party in recent Congressional Hearings on a possible nuclear deal with Pakistan along the lines of the one with India.

Members of the sub-committee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, in the Hearings held on Dec 8, 2015, were one with the four experts — former Pak ambassador to the US Husain Haqqani and currently at Hudson Institute, Daniel Markey of SAIS, Henry Sokolski of the Nonproliferation Education Center, and George Perkovich of Carnegie called in to testify, in stating plainly that a civilian nuclear deal to insert Pakistan in “the international mainstream” that the Obama Administration is considering (prompted principally by Michael Krepon and his colleagues at the Henry L. Stimson Center) has not a spitball’s chance in hell!

The Congressmen were scathing. Pakistan was called “the only schizophrenic nuclear state” in the world, one that was both confused and confusing the US about its intentions and policies, and described as a “difficult partner” in America’s counter-terrorism and nonproliferation missions. The Chairman of the subcommittee, Poe, went so far as to say that in the Eighties he was called “Pakistan’s man in the Congress” but he thinks he made a mistake then because he said going to Pakistan and interacting with Pak Army officers, who because they “looked like British officers, we believed were not radical!” and that he now thinks Pakistan which was “once a friend is now an enemy”! All of them voiced their anger at Pakistan channeling N-weapons technology to Iran, North Korea and Gaddafi’s Libya, and in the future, possibly to Saudi Arabia, and making a fool of America.

Haqqani was the most outspoken. Time and again he reminded the Congressmen that the US govt’s institutional and instinctive habit of bypassing the civilian authority and dealing directly with the army since 1947 has strengthened the military’s hold on the Pakistani state. And that Congressional conditions on aid to Pakistan were routinely ignored by the US President of the day. Moreover, he was straight forward in saying that all military aid sent by the US, the latest being the F-16s Obama has promised, end up being used solely against India. He was joined by the other three experts in saying NO when they were asked by the sub-committee if the US can anymore “trust” Islamabad not to undermine US interests and discard terrorism as aeapon. He also reminded the American legislators that Islamabad sought a civilian N-deal for the sake of “parity” of treatment and not because it’d buy any power reactors from the US, considering China was supplying all the reactors needed to generate electricity and w/o the onerous conditions that’d attend on a deal with the US. Tellingly, Haqqani likened Pakistan’s desire to be seen as the equal of India to Belgium wanting to be the equal of France and Germany!

But it was also an occasion for Sokolski and Perkovich — both of whom opposed the N-deal with India, to say that if ever there was a civilian N-deal with Pakistan that it will have to meet certain criteria — liking curbing its N-weapons growth and the rate of missile production, the sort of thing they rued was not insisted upon with regard to India.

The Pak embassy must have telegraphed the trending situation, because it had an immediate impact some hours later in the warmth with which Sushma Swaraj, the minister for external affairs, was received by PM Nawaz Sharif, and in the reasonableness the Pakistan Establishment displayed in quickly agreeing to discuss anti-India terrorist outfits, especially the LeT, operating fairly freely in that country, as part of the “comprehensive” talks. The opening to India is important to both the Sharifs — the politician Nawaz and the army chief, Raheel, to counter the impression gaining ground in Washington of an unreconstructed Islamabad bent on making trouble for everyone and, therefore, needing firm handling.

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Deleterious “Foundational” ags

Posted on December 7, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

Sujan Dutta of the Telegraph (Kolkatta) is usually a well-informed reporter and his Dec 6, 2015 story (at http://www.telegraphindia.com/1151206/jsp/nation/story_56997.jsp#.VmUdA9KYbVI) about GOI being pressured by Washington to accede to the so-called “foundational agreements” has substance. This subject has been tackled in extenso in my new book — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ including the differences between the armed services about the advantage/disadvantage balance of signing them.

Predictably, the Obama Administration is emphasizing that should Delhi sign these accords, the last institutional barriers at the US government-end to high-technology transfers needed to make PM Modi’s ‘Make in India’ policy a success, would be removed. Indeed, if you listen carefully to Ashley Tellis at the Carnegie event to launch my book Nov 12 (at http://carnegieendowment.org/2015/11/12/why-india-is-not-great-power-yet/ikva), you’ll hear him protesting my take on these agreements. I have argued for a long time that they violate sovereignty. For instance, the LSA (Logistics Support Agreement) requires that portions of Indian air, naval, army bases from where American military units would have permission to stage out of) will have to be carved out, and come under US dispensation and control. I said at Carnegie (and in great detail in the book) that this would be politically unacceptable. Tellis contested this reading. But one has only took at how the US air/drone ops out of the Jacobabad air base in Pakistan are managed, with parts of that base distinctly marked out where Pakistan military officials cannot stray, leave alone control, to see where this sort of agreement will take India. In fact, just how dangerous such ags may prove is evidenced in what happened immediately after the terrorist attack on Parliament, when the US govt and everybody else fully expected India to launch retaliatory air strikes. That’s when the US Embassy provided maps to GOI, among them of the Jacobabad Pak air base, where the area operated by the US military was clearly demarcated. In effect, it was Washington cautioning IAF to take care not to precision strike those delineated portions, if it did mount punitive attack sorties in the interior (and not just on targets in PoK). It is another matter that another BJP govt — Vajpayee’s, predictably, lost its nerve and did nothing, except uselessly announce a general mobilization for war!

In my book, unlike in Dutta’s news story, the Navy is as divided as the other two services. While there are many naval stalwarts, such as Rear Admiral KR Raja Menon (Retd) who believe that signing the LSA for instance would be a good thing as it will enable Indian ships to put in at Diego Garcia for rest, repair, and replenishment and thus enable the navy’s sustained coverage of the Indian Ocean. But as Dutta points out the Indian Navy already has a Fuel Exchange Agreement with its US counterpart (to facilitate the participation of US ships in the annual Malabar exercises, for example).

However, as I have long argued, the demerits overwhelm the merits of signing these agreements, in the main, because these will willy-nilly allow the US military access into the Indian military’s operational loop. Consider CISMOA (Communications Interoperability Security Memorandum of Agreement). It will involve as I have revealed in the book, US units openly to plug into the country’s military communications network right back to the highest command echelon. This is neither desirable nor even necessary. Interoperability has been facilitated during joint naval exercises, for instance, by utilizing the Centrix interface — a portable system that US naval personnel bring over to Indian ships during the exercise and operate, as channel for tactical ship-to-ship communications. This option protects the integrity of the communications systems of both parties. Such jerry-built solutions are always available to tide over particular situations. These may be suboptimal solutions but are quite adequate for the circumstances Indian military forces may find themselves in on occasions when they are cooperating/collaborating with the US military. BECA (Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for the sharing of geospatial data) is likewise a liability because it involves the sharing of micro-digitized maps. The specific problem here is not that the US has not digitally mapped India and sensitive areas within it. But rather having Indian digitised maps to compare with their own will help remove any anomalies and sharpen the US’ digitised targeting data sets, which can be potentially turned against India. Delhi is not given any such loaded gun to hold against the US.

Further, signing these agreements will permanently alienate Russia and may lead to Moscow shutting down its military supply relationship, which Washington actually desires, but leave India up a creek — a much reduced strategic entity without the room for maneuver in its dealings with the US and the West. This is something the BJP regime shouldn’t take lightly however much it may be inclined to get pally with the Americans, because there will be a hefty price to pay, other than further roiling the already unsettled domestic political milieu with the Congress Party led Leftist opposition even more determined to stop Modi policies in their track in Parliament.

The main aim of the US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter’s visit to Delhi a few weeks back was to convince the Indian govt to sign these agreements and it used the PM’s ‘Make in India’ programme as a shield behind which to advance its arguments. Except the US has always been wary of sharing and transferring especially military high technology, even to its closest allies. Just so one’s aware: Even though the UK signed on as financial partner to develop the F-35 combat aircraft and provided seed funding, Pentagon has denied it access to source codes for its avionics package. So, even if India signs these accords it is unlikely it will get really cutting edge stuff.

The Indian government with MEA in the van has time and again been bit of a sap, uncritically accepting whatever Washington dishes out by way of promises. Recall George W Bush’s about India enjoying the “rights and privileges of a nuclear weapon state” if only it signed the nuclear deal that the present foreign secretary K. Jayashankar as Joint Secretary (Americas) negotiated? It should induce enormous caution. Unless heedless of the past US record — which MEA and Jayashankar, are unlikely to remind him of — prime minister Modi wants to rush in because he thinks this will help him realize his ‘Make in India’ agenda. India has let itself be sucker-punched so often, what’s another devastating blow, right?

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India’s strategic diffidence

Posted on November 29, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

Reproduced below is my chapter “India’s strategic diffidence” in the European Council on Foreign Relations compilation of essays titled ‘What Does India Think?’ and is available at http://www.ecfr.eu/what_does_india_think/analysis/indias_strategic_diffidence
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India has not had a truly strategic foreign policy since before its 1962 war with China – if “strategic” means focusing on major issues of international import that concern Asian equilibrium and global security. The military humiliation India suffered on that occasion sucked the self-confidence out of the country, turning it inwards.

Before the war, India’s “Third World” status had not prevented it striding like a giant on the world stage in the period 1947–1961, led by Jawaharlal Nehru. India advocated nuclear disarmament in the First Committee of the United Nations; led the charge in international forums against colonialism and racism, winning the gratitude of recently freed peoples of Asia and Africa; facilitated disengagement from the Korean conflict; participated in the Geneva talks to restore peace in Indochina; and established itself as the leader of the non-aligned group – the key balancer in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

India viewed itself as so indispensable to the wellbeing of the world that Nehru (in a fit of startling self-abnegation for which the country continues to pay dearly) blithely rejected a permanent seat on the UN Security Council offered by Washington and Moscow to replace Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese government.[1] Nehru believed such membership would continue to be India’s for the asking, and argued that the seat should go to the then-pariah communist China instead! It was a period of splendid gestures, grand pretensions, and matching hubris.

However, it was also a time, and this is not widely appreciated, when Nehru planted the seeds for India’s emergence as a great power – both in its nuclear weapons capability and in the conventional military field. For example, he imported the renowned designer Kurt Tank to design and produce the HF-24 Marut – the first supersonic combat aircraft to be built outside Europe and the US.

Some 50 years later, the situation is much improved, but the self-belief required for India to be a leader, to do big things, is still missing. Indian foreign policy has aimed low, and achieved still lower; intent only on “short-term value maximising”, in the words of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, used in another context. This is reflected in the absence of a national vision, and the confusion about means and ends, soft power and hard power, and about how to get where it wants to go. Most immediately, India is unsure of how to deal with China. Standing up to this behemoth and emerging as the other nodal power in Asia may define India as a great power in the twenty-first century.

However, this ambition is undermined by diffidence and skewed capabilities. India, paradoxically, is self-sufficient in strategic armaments – nuclear weapons and delivery systems, including advanced and accurate ballistic and cruise missiles, and nuclear-powered submarines. But in the 50-odd years since the HF-24 first flew, India has become the world’s largest importer of conventional weaponry, leaving its foreign policy hostage to the whims and interests of vendor states.

A risk-averse mindset:

Attempts to take a bolder approach to foreign policy run into an institutional “mental block” and ideological debris from the past. The foreign ministry, for instance, equates military prowess with bellicosity, viewing power projection as “imperialistic” and foreign bases in India’s extended neighbourhood as neo-colonial manifestations (India currently has, amongst others, Ainee in Tajikistan and Nha Trang in Vietnam; with promised access to Subic Bay and Clark Air Base in the Philippines, the Agaléga Islands in Mauritius, Chabahar in Iran, and a naval base in northern Mozambique). The Indian army that won an empire for Britain is reduced to border defence, and Indian foreign policy is left without strategic underpinnings. It follows that India does not prize distant defence, and that its leadership lacks what the pioneering geopolitical theorist Halford Mackinder called “the map-reading habit of mind”. By focusing militarily on a measly Pakistan and ignoring China’s challenge, India inspires little confidence about its judgment, resolve, and prospects as a consequential power and potential gendarme in the extended region.

A risk-averse mindset has spawned tremulous policies and led to a shrunken role for the country. Where Nehru contemplated an Asian Monroe Doctrine backed by Indian arms, New Delhi now seems content dallying with the proposal of a “security diamond” involving India, Japan, the US, and Australia, and gingerly working the India–Japan–US and India–Taiwan–Japan “trialogues”. And despite China’s provocation in claiming an Indian northeastern state, Arunachal Pradesh, New Delhi’s desire to pacify Beijing keeps it from wielding the potent “Tibet card” and raising the issue of Tibetan independence as a counter-pressure.

A will to security:

Ironically, given India’s lack of political will to realise its ambitions, the current climate in Asia and internationally is conducive to India’s rise. The security situation is meta-stable, with conventional wars with China and Pakistan virtually eliminated due to the nuclear overhang. This has allowed India to proactively configure a security architecture native to Asia, with a generally unreliable US playing its stock role as an opportunistic extra-territorial balancer. A primarily maritime security scheme to India’s east would require getting the rimland states of Southeast Asia and Japan and Taiwan together for “compound containment” of China. Beijing’s belligerence in the South China Sea and over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands has aggravated the sense of urgency around this policy. Consequently, India is fleshing out its regional security system through security cooperation; multilateral military exercises; and partner capacity-building such as transferring BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles to Vietnam, training crews for the six Kilo-class submarines Hanoi has acquired from Russia, and servicing Malaysian and Indonesian Su-27/Su-29 aircraft, and signing a security cooperation agreement with the Philippines.

This arrangement, with India and Japan anchoring each end of the security system, will stretch Chinese forces at the country’s extremities in Asia, and keep Beijing distracted and uncertain about the outcome of any conflicts it may initiate. The India–Myanmar–Thailand highway agreement – the first stage of the long delayed east–west “Ganges–Mekong” belt mooted by New Delhi in the early 2000s to cut across China’s north–south corridors (through Myanmar and Indochina) – has just been inked. In addition, it helps that, notwithstanding its reliance on Beijing’s financial help, a wary Russia is taking measures to pre-empt a Chinese “demographic creep” into Siberia turning into a flood and the Chinese defence industry from easily reverse-engineering Russian military hardware.The “Look East” policy is complemented by India’s “Look West” policy, though this was slow to grow teeth due to New Delhi’s misplaced desire to please the US.[2] Investing in the development of the Chabahar port was neglected, along with the development of a south–north rail and road grid bypassing Pakistan to connect to Afghanistan and Central Asia, and to Russia’s Northern Distribution Network for Indian trade. The thaw in US–Iran relations should accelerate these outreach projects.

India can act to blunt the sharp edges of the Israel–Iran rivalry, on the one hand, and to mediate Saudi–Iranian differences, on the other. Its defence cooperation accord with Saudi Arabia and friendly relations with Iran straddle the Sunni–Shia schism. India has leverage because it has one of the largest Sunni Muslim populations in the world, and the second-largest Shia population, after Iran. New Delhi’s cultivation of both Riyadh and Tehran allows it to consolidate its energy supply sources, and gives it a potential role as stabiliser in a region rife with violence and turmoil. Israel’s alienation by the Washington–Tehran nuclear deal adds another mediator role to India’s policy toolbox. India is also reinvigorating security, trade, and economic partnerships with the Central Asian republics, which desire an Indian presence to balance spreading Chinese influence.

The Indian government under Modi has recognised the importance of Indian migrants in the West – the so-called Non-Resident Indians (NRIs), who are living abroad – in advancing India’s interests. NRIs contribute to local election campaigns, shape the thinking of local legislators, and take up senior positions in host-country governments. Not coincidentally, the US–India Political Action Committee has evolved into a lobbying force to be reckoned with in Washington. This development enhances India’s ample soft power along with its successes in the sectors of information technology and “frugal engineering” – producing less complex and cheaper versions of consumer goods for the Indian marketplace – and, more prominently, as a “brain bank” for the world to draw on.

India is not lacking in foreign-policy ambition, or the means to realise it. In practice, however, it translates into a will to security but not a will to power. As a result, India ends up using its resources neither wisely nor well, like the proverbial whale with the impact of a minnow.

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[1] The issue is tackled in the author’s book, Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet) (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 50–51. The source is K.P. Fabian, “Bitter truths”, Frontline, 19 September 2014, available at http://www.frontline.in/books/bitter-truths/article6365018.ece. Fabian, who served as India’s ambassador to Italy, sources this information to an official note to the Foreign Office written by Nehru after a June 1955 visit to the USSR.↩

[2] India refrained from pushing forward cooperation with Iran in order to placate the US. Had New Delhi gone ahead at the time – as this author had advocated all along – India wouldn’t be in the straits it is now, with Tehran – post-nuclear accord with Washington and the opening of its relations with the West – displaying reluctance to sign a Chabahar deal, and to let India invest in its southern gas fields.↩

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ECFR’s World in 30 Minutes: Modi’s visit to the UK and India’s relation with the EU

Posted on November 29, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

An European Council of Foreign Relations podcast dated Nov 9, 2015, on the eve of Prime Minister Modi’s visit to UK on the subject of Modi government’s foreign policy. It is available at https://soundcloud.com/ecfr/ecfrs-world-in-30-minutes-india.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, domestic politics, Europe, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian democracy, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Politics, Pakistan, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, UN, United States, US. | Leave a comment