A nation that aims low and hits lower

Posted on November 22, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

Reproduced below is the review of my book ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ by Air Marshal BD Jayal (Retd), former Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Eastern and South-Western Air Commands, Indian Air Force, published in the Telegraph (Kolkatta) Nov 13, 2015, and is available at http://www.telegraphindia.com/1151113/jsp/opinion/story_52771.jsp#.VlHgu2SrTZu
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A nation that aims low and hits lower

Brijesh D. Jayal

WHY INDIA IS NOT A GREAT POWER (YET) By Bharat Karnad, Oxford, Rs 875

The study is a factual narrative-cum-historical analysis based on extant literature and interviews and discussions with politicians and senior civil and military officials involved in decision-making in the last few years. According to the author, this, in effect, acts as a sort of a post-mortem on the performance of what he terms as, “the lost decade” in terms of economic reforms and strategic outreach of the last government. As such, it is also a primer for the new government on what not to do.

The author identifies the criteria that separate great and would-be great powers from the rest and is of the opinion that India can have a huge impact if it thinks and acts big; its foreign policy is friskier; its armed forces are organizationally sprightlier and strategically geared, and the defence budget is used judiciously to secure capabilities for distant contingencies and to meet China’s challenge, rather than to fight yesterday’s wars with a lesser foe (Pakistan). For the present, India has all the attributes, but is not a great power.

In the context of what kind of great power should India aspire to be, the author notes that India believes that it will secure a great position of power by goodwill and deft diplomacy unlike others, who have done so by sheer will, strategic vision and show of force. It is the troika of absences – the absence of a national vision, of the political will to realize it, and of the understanding of the utility of hard power – that has kept India down.

The author discusses in some detail the systemic constraints, which include a passive-defensive mindset, narrow perceptions of national interest and a strangely diffident view of India’s capacity to impact the external world. He concludes that the Indian government, the military and the policy circles are habituated to aiming low and hitting lower.

He points out that it is in India’s interest to make sure that the international system trends towards multipolarity so that India is not swamped by China in Asia. He also feels that Indian diplomats, scarred by the 1962 military defeat, are fearful of leading a collective security scheme in Asia, such as an Indian Monroe Doctrine to keep China in its place. He deals in depth with the geopolitical scenario and argues that a coalition of littoral States can blunt China’s aggressive posture. He also discusses the States that are pivotal to India’s interests.

According to the author, India overemphasizes its soft power with little attention to the hard-power deficit. At the heart of this infirmity are flaws in what he terms, the software component of hard power, namely the absence of a strategic vision, political will, credible threat perceptions and appropriate strategy and plans. Consequently there is little clarity in India about the kind of power it should be and considerable confusion about the role that hard power can play.

From the military standpoint, the chapter on the military strengths and weaknesses, has many messages, primarily with regard to organizational weaknesses, resistance to technology-related transformation, reluctance to unified command and integrated forces and a general preference for short-legged weapon platforms, tailored for short tactical operations such as those against Pakistan. For nuclear deterrence to carry weight, a case is made for the resumption of thermonuclear testing, revising and introducing opacity into the nuclear doctrine and the placement and public announcement of atomic demolition munitions to counter China’s itch for map changing, and thereby transferring the onus of tripping over the nuclear wire to China.

Allied to the above chapter is a vital discussion on the fatal weakness of the Indian armed forces, that is the dependency on external sources, which itself will prevent the achievement of a great-power status. The author suggests a revisit to an ambitious proposal to completely reorder the defence sector that was drafted for the first National Security Advisory Board, as a part of the first Strategic Review, which called for dividing all defence related research and development and manufacturing under two leading private sector firms.

Finally, the author covers the severe internal barriers of a corrupt and malfunctioning administrative system that runs on “silo based” decision-making and a foreign service resistant to the idea of hard power as hindrances to progress. Undoubtedly, both will need a radical overhaul.

The author notes that the young and aspiring India is different from the past and may now be impatient for India to become a great power. He closes on a mixed note. He sees the prime minister, Narendra Modi to be more direct in addressing adversaries, in the exercise of power and more confident about India’s place in the world, but sees the national vision and appreciation of hard power still missing. Moreover, rather than remaking the system, the prime minister is relying on the same old establishment to deliver on a new agenda. India would then have missed yet another opportunity.

In the field of geopolitics and national security, the author offers refreshing and innovative prescriptions that will prepare the ground for India to move towards its legitimate place of power and influence in the international community. Many in the Indian establishment, however, would be tempted to view these as hawkish and would want to bury this very incisive analysis through such clichéd stereotyping. This soft State mindset is precisely what this book highlights and attempts to redress. It should add greatly to the debate amongst both policy makers and practitioners on ways to steer India to its rightful place within the international community. If as a result, the policy makers and practitioners shed old mindsets and think innovatively, a new beginning can be made. Equally, it will be studied with great interest by the international community that sees the obvious potential of a rising India, but must wonder at its reluctance to exploit it.

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Crouching dragon, kneeling tiger

Posted on November 21, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

The esteemed defence analyst for the ‘Business Standard’ Ajai Shukla’s review of my latest book — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ published Nov 21, 2015 is reproduced below. It is accessible at http://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/crouching-dragon-kneeling-tiger-115112001203_1.html, and also on his ‘Broadsword’ blog (at
http://ajaishukla.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/book-review-crouching-dragon-kneeling.html).

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Followers of this country’s strategic and security policy know well that to read Bharat Karnad is to imbibe the most hawkish Indian world view and perspectives outside the Sangh Parivar. Over the years, Karnad has steadfastly advocated staring down China (India’s real rival, he asserts), ignoring Pakistan (irrelevant to a major power like India), developing, testing and deploying thermonuclear weapons (the final arbiter of power), establishing military bases abroad in areas like Central Asia (to outflank China and Pakistan) and a muscular, outgoing foreign policy (a la Israel) that tells any antagonist that she messes with India at her own peril.

A few lines from the first page of Karnad’s latest book sum up what he throws at you for the next 551 pages: “The United States did not become a globe-girdling country by staying behind the moats of the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans nor Britain ‘Great’ by restricting itself to the Dover Strait; Czarist Russia obtained strategic weight by extending its reach to the Pacific; Prussia was a truculent Central European kingdom until Bismarck used the Prussian Army to unify the Germanic states and elbow Austria and France out of their pivotal position in continental Europe; and Japan would have remained a small group of islands in the Asian Far East but for the Meiji Restoration and the vigorous policies it sparked. Great power-wise, the twenty-first century is no different than the previous ages in that a combination of widely defined interests; an outgoing, agile, and proactive foreign policy backed by economic might and military prowess; and the ability and, especially, the will to power and the determination to use it still matters.”

Those who dismiss Karnad as a right-wing crackpot are usually guilty of focusing mistakenly only on his more outrageous suggestions (more on that later). In fact, Karnad brings to his work a wide-ranging reading of history -though some would contest his interpretation of it – a compelling and often elegant writing style, and an unapologetic drive to conclusions that do not seek shelter behind caveats. Karnad’s expertise straddles the fields of strategy, diplomacy, nuclear weaponry and doctrine, and, importantly, defence planning and warfighting. This raises him above the bevy of former diplomats and intelligence officials who lord it over India’s think tank community without any clear idea of the grey realm where diplomacy shades into military coercion. This perspective imbues Karnad’s writing with a certitude that comes out in sentences like: “The problem in a nutshell is that the Indian government, military and the policy circles are habituated to aiming low and hitting lower.”

Among thinkers who relish the notion of a non-aggressive, soft-treading India – and there are many such, especially in the US and in India – Karnad’s book will spark a fresh round of tut-tuting. His plans for boosting India’s power include abandoning nuclear “no-first use” and resuming nuclear testing; placing “atomic demolition munitions” (miniature nukes) at Himalayan passes on the Sino-Indian border to block Chinese invading forces; basing nuclear missile submarines in Australia, from where Chinese targets are conveniently at hand; and arming Tibetan and Vietnamese guerrillas to fight China. India’s grand strategy must be to “meet China’s challenge, rather than … fight yesterday’s wars with a lesser foe (Pakistan)”; and to implement an “Asian Monroe Doctrine”, in which India becomes the sole security custodian of the Indian Ocean and other regional waters.

This is disruptive stuff, especially for conservative New Delhi policy elites, whose strategy has traditionally accommodated international sentiments. Yet strategic thinkers should read Karnad’s prescription carefully, knowing they bookend India’s most provocative policy options. With Prime Minister Narendra Modi more inclined than his predecessors to assertiveness (though, so far at least, his policies are characterised more by continuity than transformative change), some of Karnad’s scenarios may well come to pass. A key former policy maker, the previous national security advisor, Shivshankar Menon, noted during the book’s release function in New Delhi that many of Karnad’s prescriptions were already part of the Indian government’s policy, excepting, of course, the most aggressive and eye-catching recommendations. For the author, of course, this is not nearly enough. He believes India’s “ambition void” is ensuring that the country “is proving to be its own worst enemy”.

After deploring India’s namby-pamby strategy and diplomacy in his initial chapters, Karnad moves on to an equally hard-hitting critique of India’s military planning, structuring and war-fighting plans. These later chapters – with titles like “Hard Power and the Deficit of Strategic Imagination” and “Military Infirmities and Strengths” – analyse in detail India’s defence forces and the military-industrial complex that should be backing it with weapons and material. Karnad laments that India’s navy, air force and, especially, army, “haven’t implemented systemic changes to make them capable of obtaining decisive results fast…” Milder observers have been irritated by this comedy of errors; the irascible author, predictably, tears apart the subject with relish.

Amid this carnage, Karnad raises key issues. He dissects the viability of India’s “theatre switching” strategy – or New Delhi’s option to retaliate against Chinese land strikes into, say, the sensitive Tawang district of Arunachal Pradesh (where Chinese invaders would enjoy important advantages), by imposing a naval blockade on Chinese ships in the Indian Ocean (where the initiative and advantage would lie with India). Though this is a comforting thought for New Delhi policy makers, the author questions the viability of such a strategy: asking whether the navy could react quickly enough, and “is the sinking of a few Chinese warships and the apprehension of several merchantmen the equal of, and enough recompense for, the loss of valuable territory to China for good?”

A strategically and militarily educated reader will both enjoy Karnad’s book and be exasperated in equal measure by the certitude of his pronouncements. Even so, as one of the first studies of India’s security dilemmas to include a keen study of the military apparatus and the industrial backbone that undergirds it, this book will find a place in every strategic scholar’s library.

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Daniel Markey of CFR on the new Karnad book

Posted on November 20, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

A take on my new book — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ by Daniel Markey,former member of the US State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and now Head of Research at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, was published in the ‘Asia Unbound’ blog of the NY-based Council on Foreign Relations’ and is available at http://blogs.cfr.org/asia/2015/11/18/thinking-about-armed-confrontation-between-china-and-india/. It has been reproduced by ‘National Interest’ on its ‘Buzz’ site, at: http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/war-between-china-india-possible-14395. The Markey piece from CFR site is reproduced below.

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Thinking About Armed Confrontation Between China and India
by Guest blogger for Daniel Markey
November 18, 2015

As I was researching and writing the latest Contingency Planning Memorandum for CFR’s Center for Preventive Action, “Armed Confrontation Between China and India,” one of my top priorities was to avoid overstating the probability of the contingency. Throughout most of my conversations with Indian, Chinese, and U.S. policy analysts, I found a striking consensus about the relative stability between these two giant Asian neighbors. This was reassuring, but also slightly surprising given the lingering suspicions and growing competition between New Delhi and Beijing.

Then I started reading a new book by Bharat Karnad, Why India Is Not a Great Power (Yet), and quickly observed that nearly all of the avenues by which I thought a China-India conflict might conceivably emerge (land border skirmish, Tibetan protests, India-Pakistan standoff, and maritime disputes) were also areas where Karnad believes India should pursue far more aggressive policies. The one exception is Pakistan, where Karnad suggests India should principally deploy economic incentives to overcome longstanding hostilities (an approach he recommends for all of India’s smaller neighbors).

Karnad, a professor of National Security Studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, is unusually strident in his call for India to play an opportunistic power-balancing role in Asia without signing up to either Washington or Beijing’s agenda. He expects that India will never find the United States to be a reliable strategic partner and that China will inevitably represent India’s chief security threat. To chart its own path, India will need to play a more opportunistic and reckless game quite unlike anything we have seen in its history since independence.

Karnad’s prescriptions go well beyond garden variety calls for “nonalignment” or greater Indian “strategic autonomy.” He proposes that India needs to take provocative measures if it wants to be taken seriously on the world stage, and in particular, to “strategically discomfit” China. To these ends, he argues for steps such as mining the Himalayan passes between India and China with atomic demolition munitions, arming China’s neighbors like Vietnam not only with Brahmos cruise missiles but nuclear weapons, and actively bankrolling and assisting an armed uprising in Tibet. Each of these steps would undoubtedly make an armed India-China confrontation more likely and more dangerous.

Quite unlike Karnad, my Contingency Planning Memo assumes that the U.S.-India partnership holds significant strategic value to both sides. As a consequence, I argue that Washington should stand by New Delhi’s side in the unlikely event of an armed confrontation between India and China, even at the risk of heightened U.S. tensions with China. To be clear, however, I also assume that India will not unilaterally pursue the sorts of policies that Karnad advocates and I suggest that Washington’s interest in backing India should apply only to defensive security measures.

These competing perspectives are worth considering because India has important strategic choices to make as its material power grows. I suspect that if India becomes more confident in its partnership with the United States, it will be less likely to pursue risky foreign policy positions. Karnad’s India, on the other hand, with growing power and ambition but deeply insecure about its relations with Washington and convinced of the China threat, would be far more likely to emerge as a dangerous new wild card in the international system.

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Audio record of Carnegie book event Nov 12

Posted on November 19, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

The Carnegie event in Washington to launch my book –‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ featured an introduction by Ashley Tellis, a presentation by me followed by a panel discussion featuring Lisa Curtis of the Heritage Foundation, Daniel Markey of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Richard Rossow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The audio recording is available (and sorry for the earlier misplaced URL) at:

http://carnegieendowment.org/2015/11/12/why-india-is-not-great-power-yet/ikva.

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“Indian Machiavelli”!!

Posted on November 19, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

‘Breaking Defense’ covered the US launch of my book — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ at Carnegie in Washington, DC, November 12. The story is accessible at http://breakingdefense.com/2015/11/indian-machiavelli-urges-confronting-china/ and is reproduced below.
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‘Indian Machiavelli’ Urges Confronting China
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.
on November 12, 2015 at 4:40 PM

WASHINGTON: Forget Gandhi and satyagraha. India needs to be more strategically assertive and take China on, a longtime national security advisor to New Delhi said today. And if the US doesn’t like it, then “screw you.”

But Washington should like a more aggressive India, said the American-educated Bharat Karnad, because it’s the only thing that can hold the line against a rising China.

“A very strong, pugnacious India is going to help you guys in some sense breathe easy, which you won’t be able to do otherwise,” Karnad told me after his remarks this morning at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“How are you going to manage China? You can’t without India’s help,” Karnad continued. “They’re rivaling you and very soon… they’re going to take you apart, [because] you don’t have the resources anymore to have even 12 carrier task groups.” (The US currently has 10 carriers, with an 11th being completed, leading to potential gaps in carrier presence in key regions).

India can be particularly helpful in the South China Sea, Karnad said, where Chinese territorial claims overlap almost every neighboring countries’ and where Beijing is building bomber-capable airstrips on artificial islands. In fact, the South China Sea is the one area Karnad thinks the Indian government is being almost assertive enough already.

“The Indian government has finally found a voice,” he told the Carnegie audience I asked about the South China Sea. Just months ago, India signed a security cooperation agreement with the Philippines — the biggest target of Chinese provocations — and Indian warships regularly visit Philippine ports. India is building ties with Australia, Singapore, and Thailand. In addition, “we have a burgeoning relationship with Taiwan,” he said. “The Chinese seem to be aware of it and they’re getting increasingly worked up.”

Overall, “we are beginning, I think, to appreciate that we need to be more vocal and more visible in our support of the Southeast Asian nations who have in the past looked to India and been frustrated,” Karnad said. “We’re a lot more active now. That doesn’t mean we’re going to go full pell-mell proactive — we should — but we’re getting there.”

But, I asked Karnad after the panel, aren’t there limits on what the Indian navy can really do in the South China Sea? “They’re essentially self-imposed,” he said. For example, the military’s old “Far Eastern Command” was renamed the “Andaman Command,” after islands in the Indian Ocean, a mental pull-back from the Pacific. The command needs its old name back, a new attitude, and, on top of that, bases in Vietnam.

What about the Chinese? “The Indian navy is very confident that the Chinese aren’t there yet and won’t be there any time soon, for the next 15 to 20 years,” Karnad told me, “but we have to look beyond 15, 20, 25 years.”

True, the Chinese navy already has an aircraft carrier, he said, “but you know having a boat is not enough. You have to be able to integrate a carrier into fleet operations. That takes a long time. It took the Indian navy about 30 years.”

“As far as I know, no combat aircraft has actually flown off a sailing carrier, a Chinese carrier,” Karnad said. To the contrary, he said, Chinese pilots are still crashing regularly when they try to land on a simulated carrier deck ashore — something much shorter than a conventional runway but still far more manageable than the rolling, pitching deck of a ship.

Nevertheless, Karnad considers China the No. 1 threat to India in the long-term. It’s not Pakistan, with which India has fought at multiple wars, declared and otherwise. Pakistan lacks the economic base to sustain a military that can threaten its much larger neighbor, he argued. India would do better reaching out to Pakistan and reopening trade along British-era rail lines and co-opting Islamabad instead of confronting it.

“We fixate on the wrong threat… looking in the wrong way at Pakistan when the real threat is China,” Karnad told the audience at Carnegie. As a result, “you really do not have the kind of capabilities to thwart and deter China from the larger design of containing India.” Karnad’s referring to China’s so-called “string of pearls,” a series of agreements and investments in countries from East Africa to Sri Lanka to Burma.

Yet Indian strategists still focus on Pakistan, “which is not a threat, cannot be a threat, was never a threat….despite having nuclear weapons,” he said. Pakistanis are smart enough to know that the “exchange ratios” come out badly for them in a nuclear war, Karnad told the Carnegie audience, which didn’t seem particularly reassured.

Overall, the gleefully provocative Karnad got a lot of nervous laughter at Carnegie, with his American fellow-panelists smiling and wincing by turns. It was a fascinating view inside the mind of a leading Indian hawk.

His new book, Why India Is Not A Great Power (Yet), contains plenty of suggestions that are sure to give official Washington heartburn. India, he argues, should resume nuclear testing and abandon its doctrine that it won’t use nuclear weapons first, allowing instead for preemptive strikes. It should put nuclear demolition charges in the Himalayan passes to close them in case of Chinese invasion (the two countries have a decades-long border dispute that led to war in 1962). It should base nuclear-missile submarines in Australia, if the Aussies could be trusted not to share too much intel on the subs with the United States. It should arm Vietnam and Tibetan rebels against China.

“It’s fascinating,” said Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Dan Markey. “[Would] an aggressive, even a pugnacious India….serve American strategic purposes?” he asked. “Right now I don’t have an answer. What I know is, it would make us profoundly uncomfortable.”

“A big part of why America has been so eager to partner with India… is because it sees none of that pugnacity or aggressiveness,” Markey continued. The idea of India as essentially peaceful made it possible for President George W. Bush to lift sanctions imposed on New Delhi for its 1998 nuclear tests and sign a deal on civil nuclear cooperation, for example. An India that stirred up trouble in its region, he said, could easily alienate Americans.

“It’s a complete rejection of a kinder, gentler India,” said Carnegie scholar Ashley Tellis, “the kind of India that seems to win praise, especially among Western audience.”

Western praise doesn’t count much for Karnad. “We hinder ourselves, hamper ourselves, trying to be a quote ‘responsible state.’… trying to gain brownie points from other states,” he told the Carnegie audience.

He was even blunter with me after the panel. “India should be disruptive in its policies. Screw the goddamn status quo in every way,” Karnad said. True, if India starts testing thermonuclear weapons, Washington will “go apocalyptic,” he acknowledged. “Who cares? We should say, ‘screw you buggers.’”

Karnad is writing as a kind of “Indian Machiavelli,” Markey said, “whispering in the ear of the Prince” with truths others don’t dare say. It’s “useful and provocative.”

That said, Markey went on, it’s unlikely the New Delhi establishment will take Karnad up on his suggestions. “Is it even remotely conceivable that the India that we actually live with could become the India you’re describing?” he asked Karnad. “My bet is no.”

But Indian policy is changing, even if not as radically as Karnad would like.

“Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi is moving in this direction,” said another panelist, former State Department and Hill staffer Lisa Curtis. “He’s pursuing a much more assertive foreign policy and a more courageous foreign policy than his predecessor, Manmohan Singh.” Modi has visited the US twice, hosted President Obama once, visited neighbors like Sri Lanka, Mauritius, and the Seychelles, and built up trilateral military cooperation among the US, India, and Japan.

The question is whether this movement will continue in a consistent fashion. “This is a book that I think in a sense reflects a lot of my frustration over the last 30-odd years in Delhi,” said Karnad, who’s advised the Indian prime minister’s office, foreign ministry, and armed forces over the decades. He notably served on India’s first-ever National Security Advisory Board, convened by the Indian National Security Council to draft a doctrine on nuclear weapons — which, Karnad grumbled, the politicians then threw out “for no reason I can fathom” in favor of a simplistic principle of massive retaliation.

“India has been lacking in strategic vision,” Karnad lamented. With constant turf wars among the 72 government departments and a deep-seated distrust of military professionals, he said, “all decisions are ad hoc….so we are shooting off in all directions without the kind of impact we should have had.” That is the fundamental reason, he said, that India has not realized its potential to be a great power — yet.

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London preparations for PM

Posted on November 11, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

In London for the ECFR book event, stayed in the St Jame’s Court Hotel not far from Buckingham Palace and a Tata Taj Hotel property. For the last few days prior to PM Modi’s visit this hotel had its top floors taken over by his security working with London Metroplitan Police. some 60 of them are in the hotel, roaming the place.

The main event seems less the pro forma meeting with David Cameron than the Wembley Stadium occasion where NRIs are expected to do the by now usual –throng Modi, cry themselves hoarse, with the huge Gujarati community in the vanguard and, in particular, celebrating one of their own.

The cribbing heard is mostly about the modus operandi employed by the Ram Madhav-led effort to drum up local support among Indians. The effort reportedly started with Indian companies with UK presence and leading Leaders in the community getting letters soliciting views about what the PM needs to do and to say. This letter promised that the best suggestions could result in these persons being allowed a meeting with Modi. This generated much interest. But it was followed up with letters asking for donations to fund the Wembley event! Many called this a sneaky sort of thing, and has turned off many.

Dispassionate observers note that unlike the Xi Jinping UK trip Modi’s tour is generating little “excitement”. After Bihar elections, moreover, the Indian PM’s political stock has so plummeted many say the Cameron govt is wondering about whether the BJP can deliver anything at all on any commitments hereafter.

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RUSI book event merged with ECFR event in London

Posted on November 8, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

For those in the London metro who were planning on attending the Nov 9, 6PM event to launch my book — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ at RUSI, please be advised that this event has been merged with the event ECFR is holding (at the King’s Building, 7th Floor, 16 John H, Smith Square) on Monday Nov 9 at 8:30AM. ECFR will accommodate all comers. Hope to see you there.

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Modi down if BJP fails in Bihar

Posted on November 7, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

The next 24 hrs until the Bihar election results stream in will be a pressured, stomach-churning, wait for Narendra Modi. On his party’s success ride the next three and half years of his remaining first term in office. There are many who feel the elevation of Nitish Kumar in Patna even if propped up by Lalu Yadav’s regressive casteist politics is a turn of events to be welcomed because it will compel Modi to rein in the wacko element in his own party, and even leaven the attitude of the RSS high command, who will see clearly that persisting with the unnecessary roiling of the social milieu will dim Modi’s prospects of a second term and lose the Sangh the prized political ground it now occupies and the attendant benefits. The danger and the greater likelihood, however, is that Modi’s loss will embolden the opposition parties to a point where sessions of Parliament until the general elections in 2019 will degenerate into virtual pitched battles and an interminable series of adjournment motions, etc. that will be so disruptive, it will affect the functioning of the government until it begins grinding to a stuttering halt. This is the worst possible denouement for an India which desperately needs the govt to get going on economic and administrative reforms and for the country generally to fire on all cylinders. The still worst fate is that, with the BJP regime sidelined by its failure to control the many Hindu fringe groups, single party government will acquire a bad name, and the next general elections onwards India will be saddled with gridlocked coalition governments that will be unable to work at all.

What that may mean for India’s future is nightmarish to contemplate, and will only spark rueful sentiments about what might have been had Modi trusted not the Establishment of babus — the permanent secretariat of civil servants and police officers, but his own ideological thrust of trusting in the genius of the individual and the Indian private sector instead of falling back, in effect, to save and sustain a decrepit apparatus of state habituated to corrupt practices and to spreading poverty in the guise of promoting socialist aims. And further, how very different India’s stature would have been in the world had he junked the usual retired babus he has surrounded himself with and brought in outside advisers and expertise to help him configure a more outward-looking, agile and purposeful foreign and defence policy that would take up the challenge posed by a bumptious China instead of staying with a policy set that is strategically myopic, deepened the differences with neighbouring states and, in real and substantive terms, has lost India ground (by needlessly alienating Russia, for instance), reducing the country to growing irrelevance. If Manmohan Singh’s time in office is seen in retrospsect as the “lost decade”, the one-term Modi will be dismissed as an aberration, and the responsible right-of-centre ideology –reflecting the conservatism of an Edmund Burke, say, which distrusts big government and values the liberties of the individual, that so needs to gain strength and put down roots in the Indian polity and which a few of us had seen, perhaps mistakenly, as encompassed in Modi’s ideas, will remain unmoored. And India will oscillate between Leftist populism and illiberal socialism of the Indira Gandhi variety the declining Congress Party has, post-Lal Bahadur Shastri, represented.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, domestic politics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Relations with Russia, Russia, SAARC, society, South Asia | 5 Comments

Live-streaming of the Carnegie book event Nov 12

Posted on November 7, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

For those interested, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC has informed me that the event associated with my new book — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ on Thursday, Nov 12, 1030-1230 hrs, US Eastern Time, will be live-streamed at http://carnegieendowment.org/2015/11/12/why-india-is-not-great-power-yet/ikva.

Posted in Indian Army | Leave a comment

A counter to the American “pink flamingo” nonsense

Posted on November 6, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

David Barno (a retired US Army Lieutenant General) & Nora Bensahel published an article on the influential ‘War on the Rocks’ website, on November 3, 2015. It purveyed the typically stock nonsense analysis about the South Asian, India-Pakistan security situation, that masquerades as expert analysis in Washington Beltway thinktanks — and must be read, to understand just how skewed US policies are. I submitted a brief historical analytical note in response which was published on that site Nov 5. Both the original piece and my response can be accessed at http://warontherocks.com/2015/11/the-pink-flamingo-on-the-subcontinent-nuclear-war-between-india-and-pakistan/.

My response is reproduced below:

Bharat Karnad says:
November 5, 2015 at 3:16 am
This is typical of the kind of articles that pass as deep analysis in Washington (and Western security enclaves, generally) when, actually, they are entirely bereft of the basic understanding of the socio-political reality in the Indian subcontinent. So, here’s a very brief historical analysis (elaborated at much greater length in my books – most recently ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ [Oxford University Press, 2015), ‘India’s Nuclear Policy’ [Praeger, 2008], and ‘Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security’, 2nd ed., [Macmillan India, 2005, 2002].

The partition of British India in 1947 resulted in an ethnically and religiously cleansed Pakistan (with the mass of Hindu population driven out) and an India that retained its composite character, including a large bloc of Muslims who today constitute the largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia. For Islamabad the “unfinished” business of partition revolves around the two-thirds of the erstwhile “princely state” of Jammu & Kashmir, whose future was legally decided by its Maharaja, per the “transfer of power” rules agreed upon by the departing colonial power, Britain, and the leaders of the freedom movement, who acceded to the Union of India rather than join his kingdom with the rump state of Pakistan. Pakistan then decided to force the issue by deploying a force of irregulars to overturn the accession resulting in a limited military conflict. The UN-imposed ceasefire that obtained the present territorial division of that state followed India’s taking the dispute to the world body. The referendum promised in the UN security council resolution that both parties accepted first required Pakistan to remove its military and police forces from the third of the state it had forcefully occupied, which didn’t happen thereby nullifying the UN resolution. Subsequent and regular elections in Indian Kashmir since then have validated the people’s support for the state’s legal union with India.

Pakistan, however, did not stop contesting India’s control of the larger part of Kashmir, initiating all the “so-called wars” to try and wrench it from India. It repeatedly failed until in 1971 it lost the eastern portion of the country, which Islamabad had hugely misruled resulting in irreversible alienation of the people, a violent freedom struggle and the emergence, with India’s military assistance, of independent Bangladesh. The leadership of the Pakistan Army – an army with a country of its own – seethed unable to do much about the conventional military superiority India enjoyed. The unique feature about India-Pakistan ties, however much these may now and again sour, is that the sharp end of the animus is blunted by vibrant kith and kinship relations of the divided Muslim community which politically dictate how far either side can militarily go in hurting the other. Hence, all the India-Pakistan wars without exception have resembled “riots” not real “wars”, with the militaries as per unwritten rules of road, engage occasionally in “wars of maneuver” not “wars of annihilation”. No India-Pak “war”, the 1999 Kargil border skirmish apart, has lasted more than a fortnight or so, or extended beyond a 30-mile-wide corridor on either side of the border (and then mostly in the desert areas where armor and mechanized units can rumble unhindered unlike in the Punjab where the network of canals hinder rapid movement by mobile forces), or been particularly comprehensive in the wherewithal used – both sides have desisted from counter-city bombardment, for example).

But Western analysts and commentators are not clued into this socio-political reality in which conflict is automatically curtailed, or simply won’t bring it into their analyses and assessments as that would undermine the interests of Western states keen for geostrategic reasons in sustaining a role for themselves as mediators and balancers.

The insertion of nuclear weapons into this milieu does not change the basic character and nature of India-Pakistan conflicts other than marginally. The military hostilities were always way short of total, but nuclear weapons have their political uses. An N-arsenal burnishes the image of the Pakistan Army managing the country’s nuclear weapons program as the guardian of the Pakistani state and society, and affords the Pakistan government the international political and diplomatic leverage that comes from periodically raising alarms about the nuclear flashpoint, which Western thinktanks peddle for self-serving reasons. (Indeed, the head of a Washington thinktank once refused to publish a paper by me explicating the above thesis – and later explicated in my books and other writings — to counter the flashpoint theme his outfit has been embroidering over the years, saying “it would close the doors in Islamabad”!) So, why have Indian and Pakistani analysts taken to iterating the flashpoint line and, thereby, legitimating Western concerns of a region on the nuclear boil? Plainly stated, because those among them in the academia and the thinktanks have to do so for reasons of brightening their professional prospects, and for India and Pakistan-based analysts because it gets them short-term attachments at American thinktanks and enables them to get on to the Western-funded seminar/conference circuit.

So, why is the N-flashpoint thesis nonsense? Innumerable nuclear war games over the years conducted by the Gaming & Simulation unit of the National Security Council in Delhi have proved that crossing the nuclear weapons threshold, in any rational sense, is almost impossible. To argue that Pakistan will wilfully ignore the uncertainty and definite escalatory risks attending on violating the nuclear taboo, and disregard the horrifically unbalanced “exchange ratio” in case of nuclear war that could quickly become total– the destruction of several Indian cities for the certain extinction of the Pakistan state and society, and trigger first use even if on its own territory against aggressing Indian armor and mechanized forces, is to believe one of three things: that the threat of “massive retaliation” (promised by the Indian nuclear doctrine) is incredible, or that the Pakistan Army is essentially irrational, will court the risk of a kind it has not done before, even going against its own record of pragmatic actions in past conflicts that have actually injected credibility into its deterrent stance and legitimated its possession of nuclear weapons as weapons of the very last resort. Or, that the Pakistani posture, apparently bolstered by the emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons, is an over-stated bluff.

The evidence suggests it is a bluff Pakistan will persist with owing, as explained above, to continuing politico-diplomatic payoffs in the external realm, and internally because it burnishes the Pakistan Army’s self-image – no small thing in a country widely perceived as a near “failed state”. If it is not a bluff then Pakistan stands to lose its all. “Pink flamingos” in terms of nuclear hostilities in South Asia are a mirage. The insider-assisted capture of Pakistani nuclear weapons is, however a “black swan”.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Culture, Defence Industry, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, society, South Asia, Strategic Forces Command, US. | 3 Comments