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.

Posted in arms exports, Asian geopolitics, Australia, China, China military, Culture, Cyber & Space, Defence Industry, disarmament, domestic politics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian democracy, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Indian Politics, Japan, Military Acquisitions, nonproliferation, Northeast Asia, nuclear industry, nuclear power, Nuclear Weapons, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, United States, US., Weapons | 6 Comments

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

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Defence Industry, domestic politics, DRDO, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, indian policy -- Israel, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Indian Politics, Internal Security, nonproliferation, Northeast Asia, nuclear industry, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Russia, russian assistance, SAARC, society, South Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US., Weapons, Western militaries | 3 Comments

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.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, civil-military relations, Culture, disarmament, domestic politics, Geopolitics, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, nonproliferation, Northeast Asia, nuclear industry, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, nuclear power, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, society, South Asia, Terrorism, United States, US., Weapons | 2 Comments

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

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.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, civil-military relations, Culture, Defence Industry, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Military Acquisitions, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, SAARC, society, South Asia, Strategic Forces Command, United States, US., Weapons | 4 Comments

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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The case for greatness

Posted on November 26, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

Review of my book by Manoj Joshi published in the Indian Express, Nov 21, 2015 at http://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/the-case-for-greatness/#sthash.qGMR7nOQ.dpuf, and is reproduced below.
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Karnad wants India to be number one, but as the title of the book suggests, we are some way from getting there.

Among Indians writing on strategic affairs, Bharat Karnad occupies a distinct position, one that he has carved out for himself, by being an offensive realist. In his scheme of things, the international system is an anarchic entity where each state relentlessly pursues its national interests and big powers are locked in a struggle to be number one.

Karnad wants India to be number one, but as the title of the book suggests, we are some way from getting there. The purpose of this book is to explore the reasons for India’s weaknesses and suggest ways it can become a truly great power. In the first stage, Karnad wants India to become the great disruptor of the international system, much in the way China has been in the last two decades. Whether his remedies will be worse than the disease, of course, only history will tell, but first I would advise you to read this important and cogently argued book.

India has never known Napoleons and Alexanders, though it has been the object of their desire. The reason is that the famous diversity of the Indian people has ensured that anyone who established his empire in this country had to constantly fight to preserve his gains, rather than export military power. The British, of course, were an exception, but don’t forget when they left, the country was divided into two. Consistent with his analysis, Karnad argues that India must follow a policy of trying to co-opt Pakistan into its subcontinental strategy and focus on the real adversary — China.

The book provides a pitiless analysis of how things have gone wrong with independent India. Karnad’s analysis of Nehru’s long era is more subtle than the crude critiques we are used to these days. But he is quite unforgiving of Indira Gandhi who hobbled the country through her economic policies and undermined Nehru’s clever non-alignment. His principal villains are bureaucrats and policymakers, several of whom he cites and has interviewed.
At the heart of the problem, and he states it repeatedly, is the lack of an Indian “great power” vision and the strategy to achieve it. I would argue that along with this, there is an acute lack of political leadership which can outline this vision, as contrasted with the fantastic ways it is being articulated by Narendra Modi and his acolytes. Hindutva politicians who have come to power with Modi are functionally literate, but uneducated and probably uneducatable.

Sure, they have views on the greatness of Bharatvarsha and its stupendous achievements, but their problem is that they cannot separate myth from reality. They have a steady eye on the half-mythical past which reduces their vision of the future to crude assertion rather than analytical fact.
Looking back is not the answer, looking ahead is. Many of Karnad’s nostrums such as a more focused strategic policy, a more expansive and intensive Indian Ocean posture, uniting the subcontinent under Indian economic leadership, are well taken, though trying to undo the failed thermonuclear test could be a costly distraction. Karnad has his point of view and he has articulated it with great vigour. He has for long swum against the tide in the Indian context and deserves credit for the intellectual rigour of his writings.

A checklist he provides seems to suggest that India’s path to being a great power will be overly militaristic — the assertion of an Indian Monroe doctrine, the resumption of thermonuclear testing, establishing military bases abroad, arming Vietnam, building a military-industrial complex, enhancing cooperation with the US and its allies and so on. He believes that India has the resources to be an outward thrusting power, but this is questionable. Whether it is Central or South-east Asia or Africa, India’s investment and trade volume is a fraction of that of China.

Then, there is the challenge in demanding the attention of all the resources we have. The 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) revealed the shocking extent of poverty in India. In nearly 75 per cent of the rural households, the main earning member earns less than Rs 5,000 a month; over half of the rural households’ main income is from casual manual labour and a third of rural India remains illiterate. Military power must always be a function of national economic power, not the other way around. Not for nothing was military modernisation the last of the “Four Modernisations” in China.

Before India becomes a great power, it must be a nation of Indians. Even now, the politics of the country revolves around religious, ethnic, caste and linguistic identities, which may be natural but are also dangerously divisive. It is not just communal or caste violence: states like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka war over water, and Telangana and Andhra over history. Without an emphatic national identity, asserting a greater Indian vision and strategy will not be easy.

The basic premise of Karnad’s book is that Modi is the leader who can lead the transformation. But some of Modi’s confused policy lines are no different from those of his predecessors whom Karnad so harshly criticises. Take China, Modi has led India into the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, even as he has articulated a common Asia Pacific and Indian Ocean vision with Japan and the US.

Karnad’s bottom line is that India’s policies are correctable and he is probably right. But they cannot be corrected by a set of bureaucrats. For that the country requires not just an inspired prime minister, but a dozen good ministers and chief ministers who will systematically transform their respective ministries and states. The first big weaknesses of the Modi system is its reliance on the bureaucracy, which is good for carrying out the tasks it has been set, but is not capable of leading a transformation. Besides, there is the question of national stamina. We need at least three decades of sustained transformative effort, and given our challenges, things do not look easy. But, at least, we could make a beginning.

The writer is a distinguished fellow, Observer Research Foundation

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Response to Shivshankar Menon’s review

Posted on November 26, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

My response to Shivshankar Menon’s review was published Nov 24 in ‘theWire.in’, is reproduced below and is at http://thewire.in/2015/11/22/india-will-not-become-a-great-power-by-loudly-proclaiming-its-intentions-16049/
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Shivshankar Menon, as I have long maintained, is the
“smoothest” most intellectually agile Foreign Secretary and National Security
Adviser the country has so far had, and, hence, able effortlessly to negotiate
himself out of corners he has painted himself into!

For starters, his belief – reflected in the title of his book review, that it is unnecessary for India to “loudly proclaim its intentions” is problematic. Surely, in the context of its historical reticence to assume a larger role and
responsibility (except when it was ruled by the British and its resources
marshaled by London to establish the Raj and expand their empire on which the
“sun never set”) it is better for the country to do so than leave it to friends and foes to guess what they are. This way there will be less misunderstanding; it will reassure friends without affecting our adversaries – all of whom being hard-headed will assume the worst anyway.

Then there’s the mystifying contention by Shankar (made at
the book launch event and again in this review) that he is unable to
“recognize” himself in his numerous utterances featured in the book. There’s no misquotation or “quoting out of context” here – because his statements are all taken from his speeches and addresses in various forums (texts of which he/his office kindly and regularly onpassed to me and are in the public realm), and from recorded interviews with me. His discontent then perhaps arises from the uses his views have been put to in order to buttress my arguments that he disagrees with. In retrospect, he may feel he has been shown up in less than stellar light. The risk of interpretation is, however, what public persons assume when they open their mouths!

The difference in our attitude and approach to the subject
of ‘India as great power’, however, is both clear and manifest. One of the
problems is we see the phenomenon from different ends of the historical
telescope. Menon views India’s rise from the perspective of slumping great
powers and is eager to ensure it doesn’t repeat the mistakes of a “Wilhelmine
Germany and a militarist Japan”. Keeping in mind the emergence of Elizabethan
England, Bismarckian Germany, Czarist Russia, Meiji Japan, and Mao’s China, I conclude that guns, in fact, pave the way for economic power and prosperity and, in any case, need not and should not be sought to be sequenced with the latter coming first as the Indian government has striven to do since 1947 with little effect.There may well be policy similarities in the trajectories of great powers in a certain phase of their rise as well as decline, but it makes no sense to confuse the two as Shankar seems to be doing. Indeed, I emphasize in the book that there was nothing inevitable about the ascending Germany and Japan, having become rich and acquired military prowess, spiraling to their doom as a result of hubris and mindless excesses. And that India can be assertive, forcefully stand its ground, extend its influence in widening circles, install an Indian Monroe Doctrine system of security, and support a stable and peaceful Asian and global order but on its terms (which Shankar depicts fairly in his rendition of the case I make in the book in his bullet points) without tipping over into a spiral of violence and causing tectonic disorder (as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan did).

Our deep differences notwithstanding Menon strives manfully to align himself with my views on the hard power as primary means for India to achieve great power, saying we differ only on “the timing and the route” and that the “prescriptions” in the book are fine “but not as declared policy”, in
other words, that but for the cosmetic aspects, he subscribes to my substantive recommendations for changing the country’s vision, strategy and policies. Speaking personally, this is a particularly satisfying note for the ex-NSA to strike, except he also reveals his cluelessness (and that of the Foreign Office, generally – the scale and extent of which is elaborated in chapters 4 & 7) about the instrumentalities of hard power. He elides over the main themes about the infirmities and deficiencies in India’s mainly tactically (not strategically)-oriented military capabilities, analyzed in some detail and at great length in (chapters 5 & 6), by saying a bit blandly, that “the best judges of the size and qualities” of the country’s military forces are the armed services themselves. Except, as the book shows the Indian armed services have time and again proved they are not up to job, pursuing their combat arm/service/sectional bureaucratic interests often at the expense of the national interest and, in the absence of political hands-on direction, in extremis.

This is evidenced in Menon’s claim that the Manmohan Singh government had, in fact, sought to “involve Pakistan in our regional integration”, and to majorly focus on China as the primary threat as proposed in the book. The trouble is it tried economically to integrate Pakistan by continuing to hold a gun – the army’s three strike corps – to that country’s head. If the political objective
supercedes the immediate military concerns then shouldn’t Menon, as NSA, have
overseen a radical restructuring of the massive armoured and mechanized forces
— way in excess of need, into a single composite strike corps, as I have been
pleading for years and also in the book, which along with the defensive “pivot corps”, would be sufficient for any Pakistan contingency, and diverted the excess manpower and materiel thus freed up to form two additional mountain offensive corps for a total of three such corps for the China front? This was not even contemplated possibly because of the fear that the BJP in opposition would make political hay out of any such move at reorganization and even more because of the certainty that the armour and mechanized forces constituting a powerful vested interest would oppose any such force rejigging. The result is the firming up of the status quo and an army order-of-battle that can neither
overwhelm Pakistan nor stare down China. The insistence by the IAF on inordinately expensive short-legged Western combat aircraft, such as the Rafale, is another recent instance of narrow service outlook making a hash of economic good sense even as the hapless government of India peopled by generalist civil servants fail to generate any good ideas of its own with respect to this or any other defence issue and perforce have to rely on the advice of the so-called “professionals”.

Shivshankar Menon is too much the establishment man to go against it. But he is also too intellectually honest not to admit that weaknesses in the political, systemic, and military set-ups and especially in the prevailing policy mindset combined with antipathy to hard power impede India’s rise.

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