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.

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Raha’s foot in mouth or IAF strategy? System rot?

Posted on November 29, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

For the chief of the air staff, Air Chief Marshal Arup Raha, China is no more either a threat or a security challenge — if it ever was so considered by the IAF and there’s much evidence to suggest it wasn’t ever, but only a fellow regional with “common interests” with whom India should empathize! To perceive China this way is the sign for Raha of “mature statesmanship” which, he claims, will help the two states to “reconcile” their differences, and to “cooperate and coordinate for development in the region”. And by way of an anodyne statement, that the growing economic and military powers can coexist. However, just a few weeks back Raha, as a newspaper noted, had said just the opposite. Referring to China’s inroads in the countries adjoining India — Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and the Maldives, he had said that that country posed a security challenge. So, what changed in the month of November for Raha to tack to a contrary wind?

The IAF has always operated with a tactical mindset, as explicated at length in my writings over the years and in my new book — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’in the most part to justify its incomprehensible love for Western, short-legged, combat aircraft. And because the acquisition of the French Rafale plane is going through its stages of approval, the IAF leadership feels the need to do everything it can to speed it along the lines it desires to justify such purchase. Here Pakistan looms large because otherwise the Rafale makes even less sense than it would in the inventory if China is the target. Astonishingly, Vayu Bhavan has apparently absolutely no qualms whatsoever in limiting the IAF’s utility and relevance in the future by advancing such procurement decisions.

Meanwhile, China builds up comprehensively for a strategic and tactical lock down of the Indian air force, even as the latter’s brass mouth inanities and pursue modernization polices to the detriment of the country’s defence and the national interest.

On a personal note: Raha (then Air Vice Marshal) was one of the officers deputed to attend the Strategic Nuclear Orientation Course (SNOC) begun in 2005-2006 at the instance of the then CNS and Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee, Admiral Arun Prakash, who wanted to have in the military a “ginger group” of senior officers who would have informed, hard line, views on strategic issues at variance with the establishment thinking of the kind perpetrated by the late Air Cmde Jasjit Singh-led Centre for Air Power Studies (CAPS) via another course, and had asked me to conceptualize and conduct it at CPR. My own view was that the SNOC should be institutionalized by bringing it within the ambit of the Integrated Defence Staff. This was facilitated some years later during the time Vice Admiral Anup Singh headed it. And so it happened that SNOC came under the Centre for Joint Warfare Studies under HQ IDS. Tragically, SNOC has turned into a paler version of the Course offered by CAPS and has subverted the original intention of SNOC. The result is the perpetuation of the inoffensive sort of strategic thinking services headquarters purvey in line with what is considered the establishment view.

Now to the Raha point — the last time I had a more direct hand in running this SNOC at CENJOWS some years back, I had allotted the part of PM to the future air chief in a brief, illustrative, nuclear tripwire war game I usually ended the course with. In fact, Raha was so in tune with the attitude of the government of the day he couldn’t have been bettered by Manmohan Singh himself had he been inserted in the game, in terms of the display of characteristic vacillation and unwillingness to take decisions!

The larger point that I have iterated frequently is how beyond the Brigadier-rank, the system of selection based on “seniority over merit” has resulted over the years in a “ji-huzoori” ethos in the military that’s scarcely distinguishable from that prevailing in the civilian services. And how this has continually depressed the quality of new armed services chiefs. If elsewhere in the world the best make it to selection grades, in India it is the mediocre, “go along to get along”-types who slip up the ladder. This is most visible in the army and air force; navy is sort of an exception — tho’even there a few duffers have made it to the top more by accident than design, because being a small service it has better career management practices in place, one in which swimming against tide is tolerated unlike in its sister services where it is a liability. The consequences are there for all to see in the strategic sensibility of the navy versus that of the army and air force.

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Response to Daniel Markey

Posted on November 26, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

Posted by Bharat Karnad, ‘Asia Unbound’blog of the Council on Foreign Relations, November 21, 2015 at 12:43 pm, at http://blogs.cfr.org/asia/2015/11/18/thinking-about-armed-confrontation-between-china-and-india/
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Daniel Markey is right in describing India-China hostilities as “low probability, high cost contingency”. The trouble is however low the probability it is a contingency India has to prepare for because the relative cost of failure will be immeasurably higher for India than for the United States. It requires New Delhi’s vision, strategy and policies to be more aggressive, proactive and preemptive and geared to prevent China having its way and, in the larger context, from implementing its geopolitical design for a Sino-centric order and security architecture in Asia, which will obviously be at the expense of the Asian rimland and offshore states and maritimist India and, in southern Asia and the Indian Ocean region generally, directly impact Indian national interests and the country’s natural sphere of influence. The marked difference in Indian and US perspectives reflects their different geopolitical realities and differing solutions to the ‘China problem’ faced by them.

The elaboration of a comprehensively hardnosed approach in my new book – ‘Why India is Note a Great Power (Yet)’ which, incidentally, the Indian government is realizing but only in parts, is seen as hurting the US objective defined by Dr. Markey as avoiding “a sharpening of the global competition between China and the United States”. To divert and dissuade India from a confrontationist stance, he recommends in his ‘Contingency Planning Memorandum No. 27’ that Washington not support New Delhi’s “offensive moves”, to restrict itself to enhancing India’s “defensive security capabilities” and “encourage India to accommodate Chinese demands on Tibet”. It is precisely such American thinking and appeasement-laced polices, I have argued in the book, that renders the United States an unreliable ally and strategic partner, and why Washington’s foreign and military policy focused narrowly on advancing its own interests and its unwillingness to step in on the side of its Asian friends and allies in any meaningful way makes it imperative for Asian states contesting the strategic space with China to look out for their own security by banding together in a military cooperation scheme “organic” to Asia, in which the US’ role is limited to the one it has always played – “an opportunistic offshore balancer”.

Washington’s punitive attitude to resumption of testing by India to obtain a credible thermonuclear arsenal even though a notional parity at the thermonuclear weapons level will help stabilize not just the India-China security situation but the Asian security order and help US interests, the Obama Administration’s reluctance to support Japan on the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute despite Premier Shinzo Abe’s pleading, and media commentaries voicing fear about Japan and the Philippines – the latter in a maritime dispute in the West Philippine Sea (aka South China Sea) — invoking provisions in the mutual defense treaties and drawing the US into a rumble with China, are indicative of , if not tilt benefitting Beijing, than in US’ desperate desire to avoid conflict with China except in the most extreme and, hence, the most remote circumstances. In this context, Markey’s proposal for a trilateral India-China-US commission to resolve fractious Sino-Indian issues, could well turn into a forum, as I have stated in my book, to pressure New Delhi into making security compromises India can ill afford.

The problem at heart is that Washington is un-reconciled to the growing scarcity of its resources and, hence, its inability to meet the China-derived challenges to Asian security in the face of a re-assertive Russia and NATO’s security pull towards Europe. It has led to confusion and lack of clarity about the emerging “correlation of forces” in Asia and to weak-willed policies. The US can afford to underestimate the China threat; Asian states do not enjoy that luxury. Thus, India will have to be ready for the worst, and increasingly configure hard-edged policies and posture, but also learn to live with the ire of Daniel Markey and many others in the Washington establishment who think like him.

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