Watershed Politics

Posted on May 17, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

The results of the most fiercely fought general elections will be known by the day’s end. If, as expected, the Bharatiya Janata Party on the back of Narendra Modi’s tireless campaigning makes it anywhere near the magic figure of 272 seats in the Lok Sabha, it’ll be assured a smooth run in office, whichever other parties the National Democratic Alliance may choose to partner.

If NDA falls short—in the 210-230 seat range, the more amenable regional majors—especially Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK in Tamil Nadu and Navin Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal in Odisha, will put the Modi-led coalition across the victory threshold, rather than trust to the vagaries of the Third Front (TF) with such confidence and morale-sapping leadership aspirants as Mulayam Singh, Mayawati, and Mamata Banerjee. Moreover, because a TF government stitched together as an expedient will have a predictably short life, Messrs Jayalalithaa & Patnaik will be conscious of taint by association and how this could weaken them in their home ground.

To avoid this denouement is why the regional parties will take their chances with the NDA. It is better, they’ll reckon, to have a central government in hock to them in small and big ways, and which could be squeezed for financial subventions and other special treatment than to be left out in the cold for next five years. Indeed, given Modi’s track record of performance in government they may also fear a much stronger BJP, more entrenched in power at the Centre by 2019 and consolidated in their states and, hence, a tougher customer to deal with. Prudence, in the event, would dictate that they seek and sustain an early entente with Modi.

In fact, no matter what kind of coalition surfaces with BJP in the mix, Modi will lead it, and have the freedom to realise his agenda because this election has, in a sense, been a referendum as much on Modi as his agenda of small government, good governance, development, and of “India First” foreign policy. Indeed, Indian politics has reached a watershed. Henceforth, clean government and development will be the metric ruling parties whether at the Centre and in the states will be judged by. It also marks the beginning of the end of dynastic politics at all levels.

If the BJP is on the upside of the curve, the Congress party is sliding. Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi in their attempts to shore up the family firm harked back to the freedom movement. Except this is Congress party (Indira) not the Congress party of yore and its history begins only in the mid-1960s after Indira Gandhi cleaved the original party. Worse, its time in government has been characterised by corruption and misrule and populist, deficit-rocketing, schemes. The latter day variant of Indira’s “Garibi Hatao” (Remove Poverty) slogan is the conferment of rights on the people Rahul Gandhi boasts of. The paradox is a welfare state can only be afforded by a country with strong economy. In Sonia Gandhi’s dispensation, however, the private sector—the engine of growth capable of generating jobs and resources—was throttled.

Why do the Nehru-Gandhis have antipathy towards the private sector? Because they have not experienced normal life having been maintained in style all along by the socialist state. For them, perceiving reality as other than Lutyens’ Delhi is difficult. And the world the Nehru-Gandhis inhabit is one where the conferment of rights by law automatically converts into goodies people can tap.

Indira Gandhi relied on her “kitchen cabinet” of Left-leaners to assist her. Predictably, just when India had built up a semblance of an industrial base and infrastructure in the Fifties, and she could have done a Deng Xiaoping by releasing the pent-up energies of the free market and the entrepreneurial genius of the people, Indira turned sharply Left in 1966 because the US denied New Delhi a promised financial grant. Her fashionable Bloomsbury ideology inherited from her father hardened into Soviet-style socialist attitude culminating inevitably in a stab at authoritarianism with the imposition of the Emergency in the mid-Seventies.

The point is that Rahul, Priyanka and Sonia Gandhi are products of that Sovietised mindset, where few prospered except the nomenklatura—the ruling family and people close to it, who lived high and well behind protective barricades. This unreal world was reflected in Rahul’s exasperatingly hollow and naive speeches during the election campaign and in Priyanka’s emergence as a thin-skinned politician even as old family retainers like M L Fotedar honed their sycophantic skills with hyberbole, labelling the 21st Century as “Priyanka’s Century”. Not so fast, Pedro!

The Congress faces a dim future because while a worshipful media spared her third degree interrogation about what Modi cleverly called the “RSVP—Rahul, Sonia, Vadra, Priyanka” model of economic growth, she’ll have to address the Robert Vadra issue—and how a lakh of rupees was transformed inside a few years into Rs 300 crore and ownership of a large land bank, which if monetised could rake in thousands of more crores of rupees for the Family. She cannot refute the root-charge that Vadra secured the generous deals because he is Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law and, as in Indira’s days, proximity to power was translated by the canny Saharanpur native into commercial profit even as Family members were indulgent. With Priyanka possibly stepping in to save the party as demanded by Congressmen clutching at straws, Vadra’s deals will take centre stage, too. And who knows what other secrets will tumble out under media glare?

Priyanka’s dilemma is this: If she owns up to Vadra’s deals, she’ll become a political liability for her party, and the dynasty will have to fold. She has the option of discarding her husband, as her grandmother did Feroze Gandhi. Touted as the new avatar of Indira Gandhi such ruthless action could burnish Priyanka’s reputation. She may survive even if she’ll never be free of the stigma of corruption. Where would his sister’s ascent, with the Vadra impediment removed, leave Rahul? Well, he never had the makings of a politician.

[Published in the New Indian Express on May 16, 2014 at http://www.newindianexpress.com/opinion/Watershed-Politics/2014/05/16/article2226919.ece

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Indian democracy, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Politics, Internal Security, society, South Asia | 1 Comment

Modi’s ‘India First’ Agenda

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

Various ministries in the government of India are reportedly preparing for transition to a Narendra Modi-led BJP regime by getting policy documents ready for the incoming ministers to sign off on. In a similar vein our ambassador in Beijing, Ashok Kantha, jumped the gun by declaring there’d be no change in India’s China policy.

Such transition activity is explained self-servingly as permitting the new dispensation to “hit the ground running”. Actually, it is a way to entrench hoary policies the generalist civil servants are accustomed to purveying. But their attempt at ensuring the so-called “continuity in policy” pre-empts the incoming government from rethinking policies, setting new goals and objectives, and ringing in wholesale policy changes in accordance with Modi’s “India first” schema. The potentially incoming National Democratic Alliance ministers, therefore, need to be careful not to endorse any papers pending a comprehensive policy review and “house cleaning”. Otherwise, a Modi government will get locked into Sonia Gandhi’s policies.

Power transition should be handled in the manner it is reportedly being done with regard to oil where the BJP’s energy cell is active, with the prospective changes in policy being sourced to the soon-to-be ruling party, not babus who have no political stake in the new government’s policies, and are not accountable to the people for their success or failure.

This is to say that civil servants should be disabused of the notion that they are any part of policy making, something that weak governments with feeble prime ministers, post-Indira Gandhi, have failed to do. They need to be told to confine themselves to implementing the political decisions and to hue strictly to new policy parameters.

While Modi has raised expectations with promise of small government, good governance, and development, it is in the foreign and military policy fields where his “India first” doctrine is especially relevant. The phrase “India first” was originally coined by this analyst in 2002 in a series of writings culminating in a longish piece in the serious periodical, Seminar, in November of that year (http://www.india-seminar.com/2002/519/519%20bharat%20karnad.htm). It was frustration with the tendency of the BJP government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee to bend over backwards to please the United States that prompted it. Vajpayee’s term begot the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership, which led to Manmohan Singh’s catastrophic nuclear deal. National interest was grievously hurt and the country’s strategic options were curtailed. The “India first” precept advocated an unbending and uncompromising attitude to national interest as replacement for the soft, malleable, concepts that have animated policies to India’s detriment.

It was with a bit of proprietary pride then that I heard Narendra Modi talk of “India first” as his guiding principle. What Modi has said on foreign policy issues to date is down-to-earth and encouraging. His core belief that he’ll do whatever needs to be done in the national interest is a pointer. His view that India has to produce its own armaments is reassuring; that our diplomats should primarily promote Indian economic interests abroad is the sort of practical instruction that’s likely to fetch rich dividend and a task the foreign office should gear up for. Modi’s muscular thinking has been taken to mean that Pakistan should expect more steel in the Indian fist when, as he subsequently made clear, he expects to win over the neighbouring states with the means of trade and commerce. It is, however, his approach to China that will be the litmus test.

In building up excessively against Pakistan, India is left vulnerable against China. Modi will have to decide if such vulnerability is to continue. Pakistan is a lowly threat but consumes a lot of the Indian defence effort and resources. What terrorist-asymmetric threat it poses can be reduced, as Modi hinted with regard to Dawood Ibrahim, by resort to targeted intelligence operations, what Kautilya called kutayuddha (covert warfare). India’s making goo-goo eyes at Beijing, which has got away with nuclear missile arming Pakistan without suffering a tit-for-tat response, is incomprehensible. Passivity and inaction in the face of grave Chinese provocation convey the impression of a country that can be trifled with. Modi needs to rectify it as a first step in raising the country’s stock in Asia and the world.

But to get the country’s foreign and military policies on the right track requires articulation of an expansive geostrategic vision and iron political will, and appropriate strategy and plans. Modi will have to create his own brain trust. The trouble is the BJP has a flawed record in husbanding congenial talent. The proof is in the formation of the first National Security Advisory Board in 1998. It was an omnibus collection of disparate-minded people trawled from the strategic enclave, with no thought given to whether the thinking of those selected resonated with that of the BJP. That it didn’t was evidenced by the fact that it had persons who starred in the successor Congress party regime’s set-up. Among them were M K Narayanan—a manifest disaster as national security adviser (NSA), Sanjaya Baru, as media adviser, and a prolific “strategic affairs” commentator close to Washington who propagated the Congress government’s view that India should be part of “the political West”, which policy lost India politico-military standing and diplomatic leverage. A stalwart minister and Vajpayee’s confidante now admits that the latter’s government erred in not tapping the talent they had relied on when out of power.

The slew of retired civil servants and diplomats who have jumped onto the BJP bandwagon are of limited utility in this regard; long years in government rendering them incapable of generating fresh ideas to realise Modi’s “India first” agenda. After becoming prime minister, Modi should constitute a Special Policy Unit (SPU) attached to the PMO of the kind that Thatcher did in Britain in the 1980s to assist her in dismantling the socialist state and making that country more assertive. Separate from the more institutionalised NSA system, the compact, freewheeling, and bureaucratically unconstrained SPU can develop policy ideas for the PM’s consideration. The selected options can be followed up by NSA.

[Published in the New Indian Express, May 2, 2014 at http://www.newindianexpress.com/opinion/Modis-India-First-Agenda/2014/05/02/article2200416.ece

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, Defence Industry, DRDO, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian democracy, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Politics, nonproliferation, nuclear industry, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, nuclear power, Pakistan, Pakistan military, society, South Asia, United States, US. | 8 Comments

Abdullah Fatfoola

Posted on April 30, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

It is remarkable that Farooq Abdullah, minister in Manmohan Singh’s cabinet, father of the Kashmir chief minister, Omar Abdullah, and son of the Sheikh of the same last name, is so full of himself and knows so little history, that he had the absolute gall to act the monarch of Kashmir — a sovereign who’ll take his state out of the Union, he declared, if the Indian republic fails to remain secular! Should we all tremble in our shoes, our hearts aflutter at the prospect of so losing Kashmir. OR, should he be shown his place, and told that the only thing that can get out of the Indian Union are those members of his family as would to chose to join him in exile — somewhere. Surely, there’s some place in the world who’ll take this quack (for indeed he is a medical doctor, unbeknownst to many, who hasn’t needed to earn a living when he was all along being kept by the Indian taxpayer to the style he’s now become accustomed?)! SO, this is what Article 370 has come to — an opportunity for every tinpot CM or his/her relative having the temerity to shake a fist at the Indian state.

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India is Moving Right

Posted on April 20, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

If it is coincidence then it is a remarkable one. Disparate democracies the world over seem to be making a right turn. Japan was in the van, electing the nationalistic-minded Shinzo Abe as prime minister for a second time. President Barack Obama’s somewhat loose, confused, direction of policy at home and abroad is paving the way for the Republican Party to retake the White House in 2016, in the manner Manmohan Singh is easing Narendra Modi into power. The French socialist president, Francoise Hollande, after the debacle of his party in recent elections, considered appointing Marine Le Pen of the right-wing Front National Party as prime minister before hoisting another politician of similar persuasion, Manuel Valls, into the post.

Elsewhere in Europe, in line with Norway’s lurch rightwards with the election of the Conservative (Hoyre) Party heading a coalition government, inclusive of the extremist Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet), Holland is seeing Geert Wilders, best known for his Islamophobia (“I don’t hate Muslims; I hate Islam)” and his Party for Freedom driving the Dutch polity to the right, Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party is beginning to make waves in Britain (after beating the Liberal Party chief Nicholas Clegg in a recent television debate), and the Golden Dawn party is rising fast in Greece. In each of these instances, the people seemed fed up with the excesses of socialist misgovernance.

What’s superficially common to these developments in Europe is that the conservative outfits are uniformly anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and reflective of the growing anger in the host societies with proliferating numbers of legal and illegal immigrants and their unwillingness, as Marine Le Pen put it, to “assimilate” into the local culture instead of merely seeking “integration”, a concept she dismisses as “Anglo-Saxon” which permits social groups to retain their separate ethnic/religious identities constituting, according to her, a permanent affront to domestic peace.

In India, too, there is a problem of Muslims, not because they are caught between and betwixt assimilation and integration, but because they seem unable to reconcile religion with secular education and economic opportunity, which explains their backwardness. A traditional madrassa certificate (the only formal learning most Indian Muslims undergo) does not, alas, prepare youngsters for jobs in a modernising economy.

The depths to which the system of secular education in the country has plunged means that even if Muslim youth were to get the usual abominably poor public sector schooling, they’d be only slightly better off than those among them from the madrassas and, in any case, find themselves in the same hopeless situation as the rest of the youthful horde in the country joining the ranks of the unemployed and unemployables. This is where the central and state governments have failed. Rather than instituting a meritocratic educational system, offering remedial courses to pull up those lagging behind to competition level, universalising English-medium education, and proliferating vocational schools to afford the young a passport to jobs in an industrialising economy and the global marketplace, they offer caste, religion, and ethnic identity-based quotas and reservation as palliative. But because public payrolls can be padded only so much, a growing army of malcontents and lumpens with little to do and enormous potential for mischief roam the city and the countryside relying on odd jobs, or taking to crime and Maoism/terrorism.

It is this signal failure of the “socialist” Indian state in harnessing human resources that is the deep reason for the political tumult motivating the people today to throw out the Congress party, which installed the overweening state and has presided over it for the last 60 years. The alternative, however, was withering in plain sight. The Swatantra Party was founded in 1959 by C Rajagopalachari, one of the four pillars along with Mahatma Gandhi, Vallabhbhai Patel, and Jawaharlal Nehru, of the freedom movement because he was disillusioned by socialist solutions that only grew the government, not advance opportunities or economic progress. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party, rather than stressing what the Swatantra Party did—free enterprise and free trade, which it was ideologically in sync with—fell into the Congress party’s policy rut.

Vajpayee’s BJP represented, as the Congress still does, the statist impulses of Clement Attlee’s Labour Party in post-War Britain. Except in the UK the squalid socialist state was torn down by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. The new BJP promises to do much the same thing in India because its unquestioned leader, Modi, refreshingly, is of an Burkeian bent of mind, his signature message of “Minimum government, Maximum governance” mirroring the conservative Burke’s basic suspicion of, and antipathy to, the nanny state. Modi’s emphasis on the primacy of individual effort and private sector industry, moreover, has led to the employment-generation issue being twinned, significantly, with entrepreneurship in the 2014 BJP manifesto.

Entrepreneurship is the acme of individual endeavour with the individual’s will to make it as the motor, and nobody manifests this better than Modi himself. His impoverished youth without formal education, early adult years as an itinerant preacher depending on bheeksha (alms) of food to survive, is a soul-stirring story. That these experiences enhanced the man rather than embitter him says something about Modi’s fortitude and character. That he, thereafter, rocketed from being a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh pracharak to run Gujarat as a model state, and is now bidding fair to rule the country, is an astonishing development in Indian politics. As an incorruptible and modernising visionary with clear views about fiscal restraint, India desperately needs him. Every other politician’s rags to power story pales before Modi’s. His ascent also reveals the BJP as a party where merit works.

Thus, to compare Modi with a callow Rahul Gandhi and the BJP with a clueless, congenitally corrupt, retro-rhetoric mouthing, and dynastic Sonia Gandhi-led Congress party is to reduce political analysis to a joke. Surprisingly, by harping on Modi’s supposed anti-minority-ism, that is precisely what some Western media and interfering US government organisations such as the Commission on International Religious Freedoms, hurrahing a Rahul-led Congress regime as the better choice have done. Do they really believe what they say counts?

[Published in New Indian Express, 18th April 2014, at http://www.newindianexpress.com/opinion/India-is-Moving-Right/2014/04/18/article2174275.ece ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Europe, Geopolitics, Indian democracy, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Japan, society, South Asia, Terrorism | 6 Comments

Obama’s Nuclear Joke

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

The latest of the so-called “nuclear security summits” happened at the Hague on March 24-25 and is a joke gone too far. The forum established as a means to, ex post facto, buff up US president Barack Obama’s non-existent Nobel Peace Prize winner credentials in the wake of his April 2009 address in Prague calling for a nuclear weapons-free world—his sole foray into nuclear peace-making that fetched him the prize—has gained an unseemly life of its own. Thus, an Obama vanity vehicle, lacking any real legitimacy, is emerging as an international body dealing with security of nuclear materials and measures to thwart nuclear terrorism in competition with the United Nations Disarmament Commission. Whatever their stated aims, these two forums are in place basically to perpetuate the unfair international nuclear order and the supremacy of the five nuclear weapons powers—a status they bestowed on themselves, courtesy the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

India should be thankful that the soon to be ex-prime minister, Manmohan Singh, who showed unusual and quite unnecessary enthusiasm when attending the two earlier biennial summits, did not betake himself to the Netherlands on this occasion as well, to do what he did in the past—spout banalities conforming to the Obama line as if Indian and US interests on nuclear issues are congruent. Fortunately, he chose a local forum, but not on April Fool’s Day, to expound on the unrealistic and unrealisable notion of a No First Use Treaty as lead-up to a fully nuclear disarmed world. Minister for external affairs Salman Khurshid, a replacement for the PM at the Hague summit, more pettily tried to tighten the noose of responsibility for potential nuclear terrorism around Pakistan’s neck saying the summit’s focus on non-state actors “should in no way diminish state accountability in combating terrorism, dismantling its support structures or its linkages with weapons of mass destruction”.

Meanwhile, Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif sat next to Obama in the plenary session, his speech demanding recognition and benefits due Pakistan as a responsible nuclear weapons state being made in the context of the just released 2014 Nuclear Materials Security Index which showed Pakistan to have actually improved its ranking to 21 on the list, two positions ahead of India, as judged on five criteria—quantity of fissile material, quality of their storage sites, security and control measures, security norms, domestic commitments and capacity, and the risk environment. No surprise then that Islamabad later claimed that Pakistan’s good nuclear standing had been implicitly acknowledged at the summit.

Khurshid’s taking a shy at Pakistan was all very well, except by once again voicing India’s strong commitment to “global efforts to prevent the proliferation” of nuclear weapons and “their means of delivery”, he weakened India’s option to pay China back in the same coin for nuclear missile arming Pakistan. Mindful, however, of the coming change of government in New Delhi he did not eliminate this option altogether. Thus, India joined Russia, China and Pakistan in not signing the “pledge” accepting intrusive “peer review” (verification by other means) of their nuclear security regimes that 35 countries out of the 53 attending acquiesced in. It leaves a strong nationalist-minded potential prime minister such as Narendra Modi free, among other things, to rethink the country’s position on this issue and to consider the politico-military utility of passing on strategic armaments covertly to the many countries on China’s periphery fearful of an ambitious and aggressive Beijing who desire powerful means of their own to deter it.

The curtain raiser to the summit was the surprising but largely symbolic act by Japan to surrender 500kg of its bomb grade fissile material—330kg of plutonium and 170kg of enriched uranium, enough for as many as 70 weapons—to the care of the US. This move was, perhaps, to win brownie points with Obama who at the first such summit in Washington in 2010 had hoped that all vulnerable fissile material in the world would be secured within four years—a laughably unrealistic goal. Tokyo, however, took care to retain over nine metric tons of reprocessed plutonium that it can transform into a very large nuclear arsenal in double quick time, a fact that keeps Beijing on tenterhooks.

Moreover, the small amount of surrendered Japanese fissile material, as Sharon Squassoni of the Washington think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies noted, still leaves some 1,390 tons of highly enriched uranium and 490 tons of separated plutonium, which can be turned into more than 100,000 nuclear weapons, available mostly with the five nuclear weapons states (N-5). It highlights the futility of such summits, which end up permitting the worst transgressors to get away by doing nothing beyond a bit of political theatre. So the N-5 pushed for all the other countries to divest themselves of the offending nuclear material and any and all means of converting them into armaments, pronto! The brazen hypocrisy of it is striking enough for former Pakistan foreign secretary Shamshad Ahmad to dismiss the Hague conference as a “junket” fulfilling a “global nonproliferation agenda…in an arbitrary and discriminatory manner”.

India ought not to be part of this circus. True, our politicians, like their ilk elsewhere, are fond of spouting high-sounding nonsense and striking poses in international forums. But while disarmament was useful as a morality stick to beat the great powers with in Jawaharlal Nehru’s time in the Fifties, in the second decade of the 21st century it is a shovel to dig our own grave.

Despite being victimised by it New Delhi has not caught on to the nuclear disarmament movement being yesterday’s preoccupation. At a time when the science of nuclear weapons is widely disseminated and the skills to engineer a bomb are within grasp of any country with even a small industrial base, national interest now requires India, rather than flogging the dead horse of nuclear weapons-free world, to spearhead a movement for a fair, more equitable, accord and system of nuclear management to replace the old order imposed by NPT.

[Published in the New Indian Express. Friday, April 4, 2014 at http://www.newindianexpress.com/opinion/Obama-Nuclears-Joke/2014/04/04/article2147851.ece#.Uz3-vaiSw7s ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, disarmament, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Japan, Missiles, nonproliferation, nuclear industry, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, nuclear power, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan nuclear forces, Russia, South Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, Terrorism, United States, US., Weapons | 2 Comments

India’s First Non-Prime Minister

Posted on April 2, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

New Delhi shrank on the world stage as he looked on [an appraisal of the Manmohan Singh-led UPA government’s foreign policy].
———
As Manmohan Singh demits office, many will be wondering if he could be any less active in retirement than he was in the ten years he resided at 7 Race Course Road! Going down in history as India’s first non-Prime Minister is opprobrium he sadly deserves, considering that his record is of such little distinction that the 2008 civilian nuclear deal with the United States—an unfolding disaster of epic proportions—is held up as its high point.

The fault is Sonia Gandhi’s for putting at the helm of affairs a consummate apparatchik (‘technocrat’ would be too grand and flattering an appellation) who pulled time at the World Bank, and later, after a stint as professor at Delhi School of Economics, in various capacities in the Government of India. Alas, the very attributes—political cipherdom, status as unelected PM, uninspiring and recessive personality, and a past as loyal servant of the Nehru-Gandhi Family—that made the octogenarian Dr Singh attractive to the Congress president, also rendered him eminently unsuitable for the job of leading a young, restless and ambitious nation with 60 per cent of its population below the age of 30. Manmohan Singh once truthfully called himself an ‘accidental prime minister’, which about sums up his worth. That he hung around for ten years living up to this tag defines the opportunities India has missed to make a mark in the new millennium.

A decade back, India showed some slight promise of finally rising to the occasion and occupying the great power position that has been there for the taking but for the diffidence and hesitant mindset of its rulers. After a decade of the Congress- headed United Progressive Alliance Government, however, that promise has been doused. The reason why this happened may be gleaned from the remarks National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon made to the Confederation of Indian Industry on 24 March in the waning days of this government. In dealing with the changes in the “global security environment”, he said, India has three options. It can do (1) what all countries do, “hedge”, which he termed “a safe low-risk strategy”, (2) “surf or ride the wave of change” holding out hope for “greater gains” but also taking on heightened risk, or (3) it could “shape the future”, an option, he says, that is “obviously the best… as it offers the most gain [but] requires the greatest investment of effort and involves the highest risk”. It means shaping the international system, something only great powers do, and is an option, he implied, India cannot afford and is incapable of realising because there are too many “variables” to master and no guarantee of “easy or certain outcomes”. In the event, he recommended a mix of the three strategies: shaping the environment “domestically” and in the “immediate neighbourhood”, and “hedging or riding the wave in other cases”. It turns out this is what the Manmohan Singh Government was doing all these years. It is important to note that the NSA is comfortable thinking of India as a piece on the global chessboard rather than a power able to move the pieces. This is evident from the fact that neither Menon nor his boss, Dr Singh, has ever spelt out a strategic vision for the country or displayed the will to realise it during their long years in office.

In any case, how does the UPA’s foreign policy measure up even against these low standards? Starting from inside out, the enabling domestic milieu simply did not materialise in the two terms of the UPA Government, what to speak of anything bigger. The supposed consensus for the nuclear deal with the United States, for instance, was a sham. It was proved by the shameful shenanigans in Parliament of multi-crore bribes on offer and Samajwadi Party doing a last-minute turnaround to support the Government that pushed the deal through on the basis of advocacy on its behalf by APJ Abdul Kalam, identified by Mulayam Singh as the “father of the [Indian] Bomb” (!); if Kalam parented anything, it was the satellite launch vehicle powering India’s Agni missiles. That the deal wasn’t the magic wand it was touted as by Manmohan Singh to obtain “20,000 megawatts by 2020” and gain international heft is evident in the fact that there’s not a single contract yet for an imported reactor, India’s entry to the Nuclear Suppliers Group remains barred, and it does not enjoy the “rights and privileges” of a nuclear weapon state promised in the 5 July 2008 Joint Statement of Manmohan Singh and US President George W Bush in Washington.

Showcasing its naivete, the Indian Government in this quid pro quo arrangement, instead of being in lockstep with benefits accruing to the country, speedily accepted international safeguards on the bulk of its dual-use Indian natural uranium fuelled reactors and thus curtailed the country’s surge capacity to produce weapon- grade plutonium and directly hurt India’s nuclear posture, and, with the ‘islanding’ of its weapons-related facilities, the integrity of its nuclear energy programme as well. Worse, it is diverting the country to the expensive enriched uranium- fuelled reactor regime that sustains the nuclear industries of France, America and Russia, while starving India’s indigenous programme for heavy-water moderated INDU reactors of much needed funds. To think that this deal is ballyhooed as a boon and bonanza by the departing Congress Government suggests it cannot differentiate gain from loss and liability. In line with this strategic nuclear myopia was Manmohan Singh’s undue enthusiasm for US President Barack Obama’s ‘nuclear summits’—the latest such event taking place at the Hague on 24- 25 March—that aim to disarm weak nuclear weapon states, among them India!

If the Congress government has dug a grave for homegrown nuclear reactor technology and potentially turned India towards nuclear energy dependency, its failure to get Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu to play ball has had adverse regional consequences. The issues of straightening of the border and signing of an accord for equitable sharing of the Teesta River waters with Bangladesh are hanging fire, frustrating the friendly Awami League regime of Sheikh Hasina. Likewise Jayalalithaa’s interventionist tilt towards Jaffna Tamils has alienated Colombo, pushing it into cultivating China as a counterweight. Meanwhile, with Kashmir a perennial irritant, good relations with Pakistan remain a dream only awaiting the next terror attack to turn into a nightmare. In each of these cases, Manmohan Singh showed no political foresight or will to ram the preferred solutions down resistant throats of the chief ministers of these border provinces. A string of unpacified countries on its periphery, as a result, has left India too preoccupied with its near abroad to think and act strategically against China elsewhere in Asia.

Whence the repeated missed opportunities to firm up a front of like-minded states that feel uneasy about an aggressive China in the latter’s soft underbelly— Southeast Asia and on its exposed flank in the Far East. In 2007, the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe articulated his concept of a ‘security diamond’ of Japan, India, United States and Australia to contain and ringfence China. Three years later, his speech to Indian Parliament entitled ‘Confluence of the Two Seas’, which pushed this security architecture, elicited little interest from a Manmohan Singh regime transfixed by the idea of peacefully resolving India’s border dispute with China. It was only after the Chinese People’s Liberation Army units made incursions into Ladakh’s Depsang Bulge in April 2013 that the Government woke up to the harsh reality that a powerful untrammelled China was more likely to resort to arms than a China tied down by countries on its rim militarily cooperating with one another to keep Beijing guessing, more so if it involved a bold and newly ‘militaristic’ Japan flexing its muscles and intent on fighting off Chinese bullying tactics on the disputed Senakaku Islands.

Belatedly, New Delhi picked up its game and responded to the Japanese overtures. The visits to India by Emperor Akihito in late 2013, followed closely by Abe’s as chief guest at the Republic Day celebrations this year, have given Beijing pause for thought. However, India’s deafness over the years to pleas by the governments of Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines to sell them Brahmos supersonic cruise missiles to keep the powerful Chinese South Sea Fleet home-ported in Hainan island quiet in the proximal seas has to various degrees soured these countries towards India. New Delhi has tried fleshing out an Indian ‘net security provider’ role in the Indian Ocean Region which the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had sketched out for India, without so far getting much traction. True, India did gird up its loins to deliberately retain a stake in an offshore oil block in the South China Sea claimed by China and Vietnam. But its unwillingness to commit more fully to the security of these small countries has led to Manila and Hanoi seeking a US role to dampen the Chinese ardour to use force, which ended in the past in the annexation of the Mischief Reef (in the Spratley Island chain) previously under Philippine control and of Vietnam’s Paracel Islands. And it prompted Jakarta to secure the all-Russian variant of the Brahmos, the Ramos, directly from Moscow.

Similarly, while Central Asian states such as Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan would have liked India to extend its presence in the region beyond the air base in Ainee (in Tajikistan) to afford them a modicum of security and enable them to resist both Russia and China, the Indian Government’s lack of interest in doing so has compelled them to accept Moscow’s more forceful attempts at re-establishing its sphere of influence even as they plug into the burgeoning Chinese economy to get the best deal.

In sum, the conservative economist in Manmohan Singh spawned an extremely risk-averse attitude in government that so affected Indian foreign policy that the world’s expectation of India as a player of consequence has taken a hit.

For a country with all the attributes of great power, this is an unacceptable diminution of stature.

[Published in Open magazine, date line: 5 April 2014, accessible at http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/india-s-first-non-prime-minister ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Australia, Bangladesh, Central Asia, China, China military, disarmament, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Army, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Japan, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, nonproliferation, Northeast Asia, nuclear industry, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, nuclear power, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, society, South Asia, South East Asia, Sri Lanka, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US., Weapons | 2 Comments

Hercules mystery deepens

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

An offline correspondent offered a more credible explanation for the C-130J’s going down the other day which is that the plane was practicing low-level — below radar coverage — ingress and egress runs for operations to drop Special Forces on missions, considering that low level drops is what the plane is specialized for. That makes sense, but only deepens the mystery. How come the lead pilot, trained in the US, made the elementary mistake of running into a high hill or high-voltage electricity transmission lines stretched across the flight path, or whatever other explanation is offered for this mishap? Was he unaware of these physical features and impediments when drawing up this training flight plan?

Posted in Indian Air Force, Military Acquisitions, South Asia, Special Forces | Leave a comment

Hercules down!

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

The going down of the Hercules 130J turboprop transport aircraft on the MP-Rajasthan border is yet another instance of drastic attrition of military platforms owing to an accident. While the probable cause for the plane catching fire in flight needs to be investigated, the fact is this was a virtually new plane — one of the first six of this typo inducted into IAF to beef up the service’s medium lift and, because of its STOL characteristics, expeditionary capability and for use in Special Forces’ missions.This is a plane from the 1950s with such a durable design that, other than undergoing periodic technological upgrades in engine, propeller design, and avionics its basics have been retained intact and, over the years the plane has proven itself a sturdy and versatile old warhorse. The newness of the IAF C-130J, moreover, rules out deficit in maintenance and servicing, with the Lockheed aircraft possibly still in its warranty period. Assuming then that the four engines were in good working order, how to account for the fire on-board? Did the engines catch fire and how did that happen? An alternative explanation may be that the plane was transporting some combustible or inflammable material without adequate safeguards and protection and fell prey midflight to an act of carelessness of some sort by a crew member or by one of the army troopers on the aircraft?

Whatever the reason for this accident, coming on top of the series of accidents of submarines and ships in the navy attributable to deficient ship handling skills, it suggests that IAF pilots cleared to operate expensive platforms, such as the Hercules, have not undergone sufficiently hard training regimes to remove even vestiges of incompetence, including ensuring that safety norms are observed by militarymen being ferried. This is bad news. The country simply cannot afford losing extraordinarily costly military hardware in peace time in this way, which slashes the force, hurting their availability in case, God forbid, there’s war.

Posted in Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Military Acquisitions, Special Forces, United States, Weapons | 4 Comments

Judge not Politicos by Policies

Posted on March 21, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

Even as campaigning for the general elections gets more and more hectic, prime ministerial candidates say less and less about policy specifics. This is, perhaps, good politics. No sense in upsetting people by saying something sharp on any issue in terms of policies meant to be pursued once in office when latitude in policy-making can be preserved by keeping the electorate riveted by attacks on the opposition.

With sledgehammer criticism becoming the message, informing the voters about the contents of promised policies is rarely attempted. The premium for parties is rather in homogenising their message, on reducing public statements to reassuring slogans, ambiguous catchwords, and invocation of iconic leaders (Atal Bihari Vajpayee by the BJP, Ram Manohar Lohia by a slew of paper socialists—Mulayam Singh, Lalu Yadav—and the trimurti of Jawaharlal Nehru-Indira Gandhi-Rajiv Gandhi by the Congress) to legitimise their standing.

Thus, even though there are very deep differences between the economic thinking of the Narendra Modi-led BJP and the Gandhi Family’s Congress party, there is no detailed articulation of Modi’s economic philosophy other than mention of the “Gujarat model” of growth. But such “Modinomics” as is bandied about seems only another version of a policy-set subscribed to by finance minister P Chidambaram. One knows instinctively that this is not the case because Modi trusts the private sector to produce growth that makes possible more resources for better delivery of social goods, including development, at the grassroots level. It is an approach that is anathema to the Congress stuck on Sonia Gandhi’s outdated entitlement economics stressing populist schemes of dole and freebies overseen by a creaky nanny state and predicated on perpetuating poverty for the masses the more easily to project the party as the messiah of the poor.

Sixty years of cretinous misgovernance has, however, not prevented liberal economists, such as Amartya Sen, who are safely offshore and do not have to put up with the daily aggravations of dealing with government from municipality all the way up to the central level, from singing its praises. But for Modi to aggressively push his “government has no business to be in business” philosophy may be to court disaffection. After all, the bulk of the aspiring sections of society are voters from the lower and lower-middle classes who may have benefitted just enough from the populist programmes to believe they are worth retaining as safety net but are increasingly mindful of its limitations, and convinced that Modi’s policy of unhindered economic growth offers greater opportunity and the next big step up. In this context, for the Gujarat chief minister to publicly espouse self-help as economic mantra would be to put voters in a quandary, the almost six decades of Gandhi Family rule having habituated the Indian people to the mai-baap sarkar. It has forced Modi to pussyfoot around the themes emphasising individual effort and enterprise, and the work ethic.

Modi’s reluctance to plainly articulate his basic economic beliefs frees Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Admi Party (AAP) to misrepresent him as a tool of a cabal of crony capitalists—the Ambanis, Adanis, and the Tatas. Crony capitalism is at once a stage all open economies pass through and a constant with excesses by the fat cats leading to the system’s correction and the obtaining of a more even economic playing field by legislative and regulatory means. Indeed, courtesy Kejriwal’s public skewering, Modi will be more careful than ever to avoid giving the impression he’s a puppet of the plutocrats. The truth is that the government has always played sugar daddy. The Congress in Mahatma Gandhi’s days had special relations with the G D Birlas and the Jamnalal Bajajs which, post-Independence, were parlayed by these businessmen into licences, government permits, and burgeoning empires. It was this essential aspect of operating in a state-dominated economic milieu that Dhirubhai Ambani and his ilk learned only too well. Thus the Ambani aircraft ferries both Sonia Gandhi and Modi. That’s the way it is; this is the nature of the beast.

The larger point is that in all democracies there is a tendency of plutocrats to shape state policy beneficial to their interests. In the United States the US Senate Majority leader from President Barack Obama’s Democratic party, Harry Reid, recently charged the phenomenally rich Koch Brothers of funding extreme right-wing parties and politicians, and undermining the country. In Britain, Conservative party prime minister David Cameron is accused of entertaining wealthy entrepreneurs “to line Tory pockets”. But in the more mature democracies the power of the plutocrats is balanced by the political awareness of the people and norms of accountability, which restricts the extent to which elected rulers can profit the moneyed sections.

The difference between the US and the UK on the one hand and India on the other hand is that the menace conjured up by a Reid has nothing like the negative impact on the bulk of the population in America, which is generally well off and socially and politically conscious, that the spectre of an Ambani or Adani can potentially have on most of the Indian people living in subsistence mode who now have villains to blame for their own misery and misfortune. And that’s the problem confronting Modi and the BJP should Kejriwal persist in his line of attack and succeed in creating a popular demonology.

The irony is that parties with socialist pretence —the Samajwadi Party of Mulayam Singh, Rashtriya Janata Dal of Lalu Yadav, Bahujan Samaj Party of Mayawati, et al, like the Congress party of the Gandhis they are modelled on, are family enterprises dressed up as political organisations, and even more compromised in terms of corruption and being in hock to corporate interests than the cadre-based BJP. Think Subrata Roy’s Sahara and Mulayam springs to mind, Jaypee cannot be dissociated from Mayawati, ponder the biggest scams in the history of the republic and the Gandhis emerge front and centre. Yet, Modi, a clean and strong leader and able administrator to boot, can more easily be painted as threat to the commonweal!

[Published New Indian Express, 21st March 2014, available at http://www.newindianexpress.com/opinion/Judge-not-Politicos-by-Policies/2014/03/21/article2120538.ece#.UyugbT-Sw7s ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Europe, Indian democracy, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Politics, United States, US. | 9 Comments

“Atomic Anne” in a tither

Posted on March 8, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

Did anyone watch the 14th India Today Conclave proceedings possibly broadcast on Headlines Today TV channel March 7? In the session featuring Anne Lauvergeon, chairperson of the French nuclear company Areva, who spoke on whether “India needs nuclear power”, she made the pitch again. In the interaction period I countered that India needs nuclear power, but not unaffordable imported nuclear power, and that having invested in the plutonium fuel cycle to capitalize on the country’s ample thorium reserves through the natural uranium fueled reactors in the first stage (breeder reactors in the 2nd stage and thorium reactors in the final stage articulated in the Bhabha Plan in the 1950s), there’s no justification whatsoever for India to go the enriched uranium route and into energy dependency. These are arguments I made in opposition to the lead-up to the nuclear deal, which centrally hurt the integrity of the Indian nuclear energy program and the surge capacity in the production of fissile material and, hence, of nuclear weapons. Other equally telling arguments were made by the late PK Iyengar, AN Prasad, A. Gopalakrishnan. All together, these were convincing enough to nearly sink the deal in 2008, but for the shenanigans in Parliament pulled by the Congress Party’s Manmohan Singh regime. (All these articles by all of us were collected in the compendium — ‘Strategic Sellout’ and published in 2009 by Pentagon Press. New Delhi.)

Response: Madame Lauvergeon Anne dissimulated — saying this and saying that and not much of anything at all, ending with the clincher — but “India signed the nuclear deal to go forward, so let’s go forward!” Forward into energy captivity!!

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Europe, Indian Politics, nuclear industry, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, nuclear power, Nuclear Weapons, society, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, Weapons | Tagged | 7 Comments