Growing evidence of US as unreliable partner

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

It is important to point out that the major theme related to security in President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address to the US Congress on January 28 evening was military retrenchment.

Highlighting the fact that he had reduced foreign deployment (mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan) from 180,000 when he took office to 60,000 troops today, he emphasized that the main threat was terrorism, not what Senator John McCain earlier in the day in the confirmation hearings for former Senator Max Baucus as Ambassador to Beijing said was “the rising threat from China”. And even as regards terrorists, Obama said “America must move off a permanent war footing” and that he “will not send our troops into harm’s way unless it’s truly necessary; nor will I allow [Americans] to be mired in open-ended conflicts. We must fight the battles that need to be fought, not those that terrorists prefer from us – large-scale deployments that drain our strength and may ultimately feed extremism.” Included in this reduced effort is imposing “prudent limits on the use of drones – for we will not be safer if people abroad believe we strike within their countries without regard for the consequence.” Rather, the US, he stated, would “aggressively pursue terrorist networks – through more targeted efforts and by building the capacity of our foreign partners” Further, the US president elaborated that “in a world of complex threats, our security and leadership depends on all elements of our power – including strong and principled diplomacy.” he attributed the supposed success the America has had in Syria, in moving Israel towards accepting an independent Palestine, and in halting “the progress of Iran’s nuclear program” to “American diplomacy backed by power”.

Mirroring his boss’ views, Sen. Baucus responded to McCain’s threat perception of China as “a rising threat or challenge to peace and security in Asia because of the profound belief in the Chinese leadership that China must, and will, regain the dominant role that they had for a couple of thousand years in Asia” by saying that “The overarching goal here is for us as a country…to engage China with eyes wide open to try to find common ground,” such as through improved military-to-military cooperation in a complicated relationship.

It provides more and growing evidence of a US that’s simply unwilling to risk a fight with China and a Washington bending over backwards to avoid it including, as mentioned in my piece — “America an unreliable partner”, any conflict between China and any Asian strategic partner in which American security interests are not directly engaged. In fact, military-to-military cooperation will only end up benefitting the Chinese military by exposing PLAN to new ways of fusing and using its forces, and new technologies and novel ways of utilizing them, etc.

It compels the governments of India and other countries of Asia on the Chinese periphery and with manifest security problems with China to think of joining in a collective hedging strategy to curtail Chinese ambitions and the use of its military muscle. This the Asian countries won’t be able to do if New Delhi, Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Hanoi and the ASEAN states continue to disregard the imperatives of strategic geography and believe that accommodating China will prevent and preempt conflict with it in the future.

Posted in Afghanistan, Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Politics, Japan, Northeast Asia, South Asia, South East Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, United States, US., West Asia, Western militaries | 1 Comment

Callow and confused Rahul

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

Arnab Goswami’s interview with Rahul Gandhi last night revealed the Congress Party Vice President as a callow and confused person. To every question posed he had the same stock nonsequiterish response — RTI, recruiting the aam janata into politics, etc. While he was cut short on occasion, he persisted. The main problem being his pitch that the Congress Party was in terms of power less centralized than BJP and had less power concentrated at the top — a near-nonsensical thesis the interviewer failed to challenge! Considering Narendra Modi is a proven Chief Minister who has on the basis of his performance come up from the ranks and established himself at the top in the BJP, either Rahul was being remarkably cheeky, or he genuinely believes what he says in contravention of the facts — which is even more worrying — that the Gandhi Family supremo of the moment since Indira’s time — Rajiv and Sonia, has always been the final authority, the main veto-er of government initiatives, and adjudicator of intra-party power tussles. In the face of this reality, Rahul perhaps meant that power in the Congress is presently divided between him and his mother, with Priyanka, the third member of this ruling triumvirate pulling the strings so far from the sidelines. As long as there’s a Gandhi Family member at the helm there’s no chance for anybody else to ascend to the apex level, with even the PM-ship being held by political non-entities such as Manmohan Singh at that Gandhi’s sufferance. So, there are limits to democracy that Rahul extolled within his party, which Goswami did not push him on. Apparently, he believes that more democracy within the party means more average people joining in to prop up the same old Family-led order.

Equally appalling was his claim that while the Gujarat state mechanism aided and abetted the 2002 Hindu rioters, the Delhi and Central govts had no hand in facilitating the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom. While conceding that high-ranking Congress Party leaders may have been involved, he differentiated them from the govt apparatus! And as regards the massive corruption and the involvement of Congressmen in rank thievery and worse, he only offered that old saw about the law taking its own course!

Rahul Gandhi was coached and primed to offer stock replies no matter what the question. He did so robotically. The only time he seemed unsettled was when he was asked about his academic degrees from Cambridge University and Harvard as per Subrahmanyham Swamy’s charge that he had degrees from neither place. He did not refute Swamy’s contention, merely countering that his name would be found on the muster of the said college at Cambridge U — not that he actually secured a degree from any such institution. In this he is much like his grandmother, Indira, who spent time at Sommerville College, Cambridge, and his father Rajiv who whiled away a term or two at Trinity without anything to show for it (except his courting of a certain Italian girl enrolled in some sideline school in town to learn English).

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Europe, Indian democracy, Indian Politics, South Asia | 2 Comments

Who was the President shooting at?

Posted on January 26, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

Most presidential addresses on Republic Day eves are a bore — usually a string of banalities, platitudes, and exhortations. The arch politician in President Pranab Mukherji appeared last night, and what he said was intriguing because he sharply targeted mostly the Congress Party and other constituent parties of the ruling UPA under cover of attacking the Aam Admi Party!

On the face of it, he was slamming Arvind Tejriwal and his Johnny come-lately AAP for reducing governance to media circus. W/o naming it, he held AAP (and Congress) responsible for what he said was “populist anarchy” which he stated couldn’t replace governance, and reminded the people that government is “not a charity shop”. But he also railed against the massive and unprecedented corruption of the Congress Party in power over the past decade saying it “is a cancer that erodes democracy and weakens the foundations of [the Indian] state” and predicted, in so many words, that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi’s Congress government will be removed in the forthcoming general elections. He decried hypocrisy that informs Indian politics but also sought a stable government free of the excesses of “capricious” provincial governments which he warned would result in a “fractured government, hostage to whimsical opportunists” — “än unhappy eventuality” that he said would be “catastrophic” in 2014.

He was remarkably disingenuous in ostensibly attacking AAP for populist anarchy, but then the Congress Party and he as Defence and Finance Minister for much its two terms wrote several budgets, and seeded a whole bunch of programs as dole and economic giveaways that also, if not fit, then skirt his description of populism gone berserk, something Kejriwal with far less effect on the financial health of the Delhi Union Territory has mounted with the 700 litres free water, etc. Surely, if any one party deserves the blame for irresponsible vote-buying schemes from Indira Gandhi’s days (remember “Garibi Hatao”!!), it is the Congress Party that, undeterred by the fiscal pit it was pushing the country into, initiated NREGS and, despite empirical data to suggest that instead of such giveaways that end up making every official — petty level up to the highest politician in the land — rich beyond measure, has assiduously rejected calls for straight forward cash transfers to correctly identified “poor people” all over India as a genuinely effective poverty-alleviation measure.

But President Mukherji also talked of “corruption” and “hypocrisy” and here he was more two-faced considering his personal reputation is not all that clean. His name features prominently, for instance, in the Mitrokhin Archives — the secret documents of the erstwhile Soviet state spirited away in the days when the Soviet govt was going the way of the Dodo bird. It details the payoffs to Indian state functionaries in the pay of Moscow during the Cold War era. He was then apparently the “bagman” for the Congress Party. So, it is a bit rich to hear him speak of hypocrisy.

Yes, corruption has eaten away at the Indian state, hollowing it out, much as the red ants gnaw away at the superstructure even as the house frame is left standing, only to give way at the first sign of anarchy. See how the Indian state almost came unstuck because of the relatively small incident such as Kejriwal’s dharna outside Rail Bhavan!

And yes government is not charity shop. But six decades of Congress party rule has reduced the Indian people to a horde of beggars desiring endless free lunches — something for nothing, tenderizing them so that they salivate at the thought of populist policies. It is this tendency Narendra Modi will find most difficult to reverse, and end up seeing as a major hindrance to realizing his aim of a proud and self-respecting people in a self-confident fiscally responsible India that depends only minimally on government for its progress.

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

America an Unreliable Partner

Posted on January 24, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

If there’s one attribute about the United States that makes partnering it risky, it is its unreliability. Washington initiates conflict as suits its momentary interest without caring about the possible ramifications for the countries, including allies, in the vicinity and effect on the prevailing order, which may not be to its liking but manifests stability. It is unscrupulous about the means it uses and, when the situation gets hot and body bags and fatigue take their toll, it thinks nothing about precipitously departing the scene leaving its regional partners holding the can. The absence of grit, stamina, and the will to absorb losses and to stay the course, is America’s major strategic failing that countries expecting the US to bail them out in strategic crises need to ponder.

Consider the recent record. The US intervened controversially in Iraq in 2001 to remove Saddam Hussein leading to a revival of the old Shia-Sunni schism, endless sectarian violence and consolidation of Islamist militancy in the beleaguered country. Thirteen years on, Washington decided to decamp with the “democracy” it has installed in Baghdad showing few signs of enduring. So infirm is its commitment that a few weeks ago it turned down prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s plea for help militarily to oust the militant Sunni group with known connections to the Al-Qaeda occupying the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi in the Anbar province.

Elsewhere, after a decade of hard fighting in Afghanistan the Americans, longtime experts in “cut and run” tactics, are allowing a condominium of Afghan and Pakistani Taliban—the latter headed by the enigmatic Mullah Fazlullah operating out of the North Waziristan mountains—to displace in slow stages the legally elected government in Kabul and, simultaneously, to create sustained turmoil and dissension inside Pakistan in a bid to take over an already fragile nuclear armed state—everyone’s worst nightmare. Of course, Washington originally seeded this problem which is turning out to be catastrophic for South Asia. It exploited religion to rile the Afghans into fighting the Soviet Union-supported communist regime in Kabul, armed and motivated the Afghan mujahideen who, post-Russian withdrawal, in their new avatar as the Taliban spawned extremist outfits drawing disgruntled Muslims from everywhere, especially Central Asia and as far away as Chechnya. They are creating havoc in Pakistan and Indian Kashmir, and spurring Sunni radicalism in the Islamic crescent from the Maghreb to Indonesia.

India was recently reminded that its concerns about terrorism emanating from Pakistan, for example, count for little in the American scheme of things. In the Consolidated Appropriations Bill 2014 approved by the US legislature the conditions attached to Pakistan getting the annual multi-billion dollar grant-in-aid broadly requires that Islamabad only ensure that the Afghan Taliban under its control do not harass the retreating US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and that the Pakistan Army don’t usurp power. Moreover, while Washington is anxious that any terrorist threat to America incubating in the proliferating Saudi-funded madrassas within Pakistan be nipped in the bud, it doesn’t much care and is unwilling to throttle the menace before it assumes demonic proportions by pressing Riyadh to halt financial flows to them and by prompting the Islamabad Establishment and Pakistan Army to sever their patronage ties to 65 “Taliban groups” and lashkars active in that country.

Tokyo was likewise presented with more evidence by Washington that while Japan is central to its “rebalancing” in Asia in America’s direct rivalry with China, it would rather sit out any military clash Japan may have with China over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. It seems to have even bought Beijing’s line that visits by the Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe to the Yasukuni Shrine, revered by the Japanese people as the repository of the souls of the dead in past military campaigns, was avoidable provocation. In the event, Tokyo finally appears determined to look out for itself, and is amending its “peace Constitution” to legitimate “collective self-defence”.

It is the wayward and “unreliable America” then that contextualises the discussion between Abe, who’ll be the chief guest at the Republic Day celebrations, and his retiring Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh, about how best and quickly to operationalise comprehensive military cooperation between the two nations. Collective self-defence is precisely what Singh should fruitfully discuss in detail with Abe and the Indian armed services and the Japanese Self Defence Force ought to begin implementing in earnest. It is preferable to New Delhi and Tokyo, ever mindful of Beijing’s sensitivities, holding back on joint Indo-Japanese military activity to cramp China’s strategic and maritime options in Asia.

India has a more immediate issue at hand vis-a-vis the US. Under pressure from the Manmohan Singh government, the ministry of external affairs is compromising on the strict reciprocity predicate ordinarily dictating equitable interstate relations. Indian ambassador S Jaishankar is concocting a deal with US deputy secretary of state William Burns whereby not only is there no hint of an US apology for the Devyani Khobragade incident, but in exchange for Khobragade and two previous Indian consul-generals in New York who had servant trouble being able to enter America freely in the future without fear of prosecution, the status quo ante favouring the US diplomats stationed in India is restored. They will once again enjoy immunities and privileges—unhindered access and exemption from body searches at airports, income tax-free status for family members working illegally, leniency in import of victuals, etc.—unavailable on a reciprocal basis to Indian diplomats posted in America. This is unacceptable.

New Delhi has buckled under the threat of prosecution of Indian diplomats and accepted the US minimum wage standard. The principle of sanctity of Indian embassies/consulates as sovereign territory and carryings-on within them as sovereign matter has thus been breached, mocking the foundational principle of sound bilateral ties. It will confirm the US view of India as a bully-able country. This will only weaken the frame of the strategic partnership the US is keen to forge with India, and doesn’t bode well for the “rebalancing” in Asia both countries are engaged in.

[Published 24th January 2014 in New Indian Express at http://www.newindianexpress.com/opinion/America-an-Unreliable-Partner/2014/01/24/article2016305.ece

Posted in Afghanistan, Asian geopolitics, Central Asia, China, China military, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, guerilla warfare, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Japan, Northeast Asia, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Terrorism, United States, US. | 10 Comments

Fizzling out?

Posted on January 22, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

The Aam Admi Party (AAP) is on a sharp parabolic curve — rising spectacularly, reaching its apogee with the assumption of power in Delhi Union Territory, and then going into a free-fall and apparently precipitous decline — all inside of three weeks! The crucial misjudgement by the AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal being his decision to adopt agitation as mode of governance. It was a novel approach but showed up the paucity of AAP’s political skills set. If taking to the streets is all AAP knows and running the government is taken by it to mean impromptu ministerial decisions on the run, then the results could have been predicted early — the loss of a major chunk of its support base — the middle class — in the population. Thank God, Kejriwal terminated his agitation at the moment he did because another day of the dharna and the army would have come willy-nilly into the picture. The army would have tried gently to push the agitators out of the central verge, failing which followed its instincts and forcibly removed them. Any resistance would have been absolutely disastrous, one can imagine how the situation would have gotten quickly out of hand. The country was spared that.

The Middle Class may be selfish and self-centered conflating its good with the government’s and the nation’s, but it rears back frightened when confronted by a near breakdown in law and order triggered by the AAP Chief Minister’s dharna tactics. Even the APP voters from the shanties and slums looking forward to the instant goodies promised them by Kejriwal — the daily wagers and those who rely on the rickety public transport as conveyance must have been dismayed by the turn the agitation outside Rail Bhavan was taking. Loss of earnings is serious matter for people living hand to mouth, and order matters more to the less well-off than the middle class that has the means to somehow manage when police mass to prevent AAP possible excesses, thereby living the city to the tender mercies of criminals and habitual law breakers.

Chaos is anathema to orderly society and the middle class especially is shaken by the evidence of AAP-instigated actions leading to the situation degenerating into chaos and the fear of this spreading and engulfing the city — which was a real possibility. This is a turning point as AAP takes stock of its support base and realizes it has lost the aam admi. Anarchy is not another novel means of governance as Kejriwal trumpeted.

A permanent revolution — as the Cultural Revolution piloted by Mao showed in China — makes for perennial disorder, not progress, and even less for meeting the needs of the people. Now that AAP, as expected, is plunging in the public’s estimation, national politics can get back on the rails. Congress Party has taken a collateral hit with cynical support to AAP to form a govt in Delhi. There’s a price to pay for micalculation and AAP an the Congress will pay it. Advantage Modi and the BJP.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, civil-military relations, Indian Army, Indian Politics, Internal Security, society, South Asia | 2 Comments

SAS in Blue Star

Posted on January 15, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

It is not clear what the controversy kicked up by the statutory declassification of a Whitehall document revealing a British Special Forces (SF) — Special Air Service — role in the prosecution of Op Blue Star is all about. True an NRI member of the House of Lords, Indarjit Singh, and a Labour MP Tom Watson, have asked prime minister David Cameron to inquire into this SAS role, but that may be more for domestic political reasons of winning Sikh votes in the next general elections in South Asian enclaves in London, Birmingham, and elsewhere than because they want the SAS role investigated and publicly fleshed out.

Lt Gen (ret) Kuldip Singh Brar, the GOC, 9 Div, who conducted the military operation against the Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale-led terrorists in the Golden Temple Complex in Amritsar is clear that there was “no question…we never saw anyone from UK coming in here and telling us how to plan the operation.” He was speaking to a TV news channel. But Brar couldn’t possibly have known of an SAS officer being deputed by Brit PM Margaret Thatcher at the express request of her Indian counterpart, Indira Gandhi, to advise the latter on the best course to follow.

The context for the SAS call-in was that the Vice Chief of the Army Staff and the person slated to become the next army chief, Lt Gen S.K. Sinha, had strongly advised the PM against any army action to forcefully vacate the Har Mandir Sahib of the provocative Khalistani presence. He was rewarded for his counsel, which turned out to be right, by being passed over for promotion and the spineless General Arun Vaidya installed as COAS instead. The more important political context, it must be recalled, was that the menace of the Khalistan Movement was sedulously nursed and fostered by Indira Gandhi to neutralize the growingly unpliable (as she saw it) Chief Minister Zail Singh in Punjab (whom she weaned away from the state with the offer of the President’s post). But by the time she realized the danger posed to the country, Bhindranwale and his cohort of converts to the Khalistan cause had grown into the proverbial uncontrollable Frankensteinian monster whom she had to physically eliminate and destroy.

With Sinha and the army brass wary about involving the Service in any such adventure, Indira looked to London — much as her father Jawaharlal Nehru had done after independence and right up to the Fifties when in a tight corner (such as accepting Mountbatten’s advice to take the Kashmir issue to the UN and about the best ways to spend the accumulated sterling balance in equipping the Indian military). In Thatcher, she discovered another “Iron Lady” and kindred soul who had successfully mounted a war to keep the Falklands Islands in the southern Atlantic as British territory. The Brit PM, in turn, would have instructed the SAS to go to New Delhi and suggest a plan of action to Indira.

The SAS is an SF that distinguished itself in World War II and in subsequent bush wars of the Cold War era by pulling off forceful interventions. Naturally, the designated SAS officer would have advised a commando military operation to flush out the militants from the Amritsar Temple, entirely innocent of the socio-cultural factors and its ramifications on not just the Indian society and state but also the Indian Army which, at that time, had Sikhs constituting as much as 10 percent of the fighting forces. The SAS couldn’t have been expected to be aware of these sensitivities that Sinha obviously was.

But Indira wanted a show of strength and she got it in terms of appropriate advice from the SAS and of two dissimilar commanders — one a flashy showoff Lt Gen K. Sundarji as the Western Army Commander, and the soft-touch, the new COAS Gen Vaidya, asked to plan and implement the operation. Brar, as may be seen, was nowhere in the picture and wasn’t in the loop of the carryings-on in Delhi or as regards the Indira-Thatcher-SAS connection.

Then came the most classical colonial ploy the British had time and again used during the Raj to quell insurgencies and local strife in the subcontinent by essentially distancing themselves from the action and shoving the responsibility for containing such eruptions on to the natives, to Indians of the specific community that had to be actioned against, who were asked to lead the charge. Thus, for instance, the police operation to finish off the Muslim militancy in the Punjab of the 1930s — the so-called “Khaksar rebellion” was headed by an Indian Muslim ICS officer, Badruddin Tyabji, leading a force of exclusively Muslim members of the Punjab Police. When it came to Op Blue Star, a similar template was followed. Sikh officers were at a premium and so carefully chosen (perhaps, with the help of RAW). In any event, Brar was brought in as the Divisional cmdr and head of the actual operation, the chief of staff of the Western Army was Lt Gen Ranjit Singh Dayal, and commanders of four of the six units — 10 Guards, 1 Para, 26 Madras, 9 Kumaon, 12 Bihar, and 9 Garhwal — tasked with the assault, were Sikh officers.

The question arises: Was there a less inflammatory option? What did the VCOAS Sinha actually have in mind? One of the things talked about at the time was cutting off food and water to the Complex and waiting out the militants until they surrendered. Certainly this has the merit of a peacable solution. Except, a call from Bhindranwale apprising the Sikh community of this development would have eventuated in large masses of Sikhs from the countryside congregating at the Temple, all determined to protect their holiest of holies with their lives, and thus defeated any attempt at compelling the militants to surrender.

A more surreptitious operation of infiltrating armed commandos to execute Bhindranwale and takeout the top Khalistan echelon was possibly mooted but given up, considering that among this cohort was Maj Gen (ret) Shahbeg Singh, hero of the Bangladesh War who had fashioned the Muktibahini into a top class guerilla force. He had espied Brar inconspicuously recceing the Complex and insured against any such move by posting eagle-eyed acolytes at the entrance to the Harmandir Sahib.

That brings us to Ground Zero and the extraordinarily cynical politics Indira Gandhi practiced which was the locus genesis. It brought her own end and the country to a dangerous pass with an entirely avoidable military and civil catastrophe.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Bangladesh, civil-military relations, guerilla warfare, India's Pakistan Policy, Indian Army, Indian para-military forces, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, society, South Asia, Special Forces, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Terrorism, Western militaries | 3 Comments

Reciprocity manifest?

Posted on January 11, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

In response to Devyani Khobragade’s ouster from the US, Govt of India (GOI) declared a counselor level officer in the US Embassy in Delhi persona non grata, and gave this officer 48 hours to be out of the country. On the surface this appears a strictly reciprocal gesture — the principle of reciprocity being recently discovered by the MEA only after one of its own was caught by the US Govt. in the legal wage trap. But was this strict reciprocity? It was not.

A truly reciprocal move would have been to legally charge this Counselor accused by GOI of aiding and abetting the illegal exfiltration of the Indian maid servant Sangeeta Richard’s family from India after a case had been registered in the Indian Courts against Sangeeta, making the US Counselor an accomplice in the breaking of Indian laws. Khobragade was charged in New York courts, the said Counselor should have been hauled up and a legal case of abetment of crime should have been registered against the American diplomat, and the US Embassy asked to waive immunity against her prosecution, which wouldn’t have been acceded to. That would have made for absolute equality of situation. But now an Indian diplomat has a legal case hanging on her, preventing her return to the United States, the American has no such legal barrier to surmount.

The difference and the complication is, of course, that while the American diplomat would happily never come to India again, Khobragade, has a US-born husband and kids to worry about. It’ll mean that once she leaves service, she’ll have to fight her own private battle with the US legal system or, alternatively, have her husband and children relocate to India.

The other interesting aspect of this entire affair is Devyani’s father — a provincial civil service officer, elevated to the Indian Administrative Service, whose career record is pockmarked by vigilance and corruption cases, including the Adarsh Housing Society scam. He has exploited to the fullest his position, which is evident. How else did his daughter enjoy special treatment, get foreign language of her choice — German, when a person senior to her in her batch was denied such latitude, filed a case, and was fired from the IFS? What isn’t clear is whether Devyani is a “22 and half-percenter” — an SC/ST quota-entry officer, which category is looked down upon by the merit listers. There’s a lot of sensitivity on this issue on both these issues. Why else would Khobragade pater bring up the “casteist charge”against media persons when they brought up the Adarsh scam angle?

Posted in Geopolitics, Indian Army, Indian Politics, society, South Asia, United States, US. | 6 Comments

AAP-brand anarchism

Posted on January 11, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

The debacle of the first janata durbar by Aam Admi Party (AAP) government was along expected lines. When public remedies are reduced to the street level and solutions become a matter of rendering instant satisfaction the processes of government, however viscousy and laborious, become moot and soon so will the administrative structures of govt as well. Was it feigned innocence the AAP Chief Minister Arving Kejriwal adopted when he said that his ministerial cohort was surprised by the crowds that had congregated seeking speedy resolution of their problems and a gratified public’s instant approbation? As a former Indian Revenue Service officer is he that much of an innocent? In which case, Delhi will have hell to pay.

The three main problems people came to him with are in the order he stated: conversion of temporary/contract workers and labourers to permanent govt service status, water and power. The first issue will be the most difficult to tackle. The nub of the problem is that those on permanent public rolls — all the class III and class IV workers — sign the musters in the morning, do sporadic work, before taking off for moonlighting jobs, thus having a double income, and the govt work of road and permanent structures upkeep falling by the wayside. It has led moreover to ghost musters where a whole bunch of people are ostensibly drawing pay from the treasury, which money is in fact being pocketed by the “thekedars” (work contractors) from within the ranks of the permanent staff. To fill the work shortage, contracted or temporary workers are hired — an army of which type of workers has grown over the years to a point when appointing them formally will at once empty the exchequer. But Kejriwal and Co. seem committed to it, and we will all witness the mess the Delhi govt will soon reduce itself to.

This is the anarchic system of mob-rule and arbitrary decisions AAP in embryo means to extend to the country? Well, good luck India!! We’ll all need it.

Posted in Indian Politics, Internal Security, society, South Asia | 6 Comments

Aam Aadmi or Mere Bust

Posted on January 10, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

In the throes of a political upheaval caused by the unexpected success of the Aam Aadmi (common man) Party (AAP), the country may soon begin to resemble, in its outline if not yet in substance, Nabokov’s Padukgrad ruled by the “Party of the Average Man”, its ideology of “Ekwilism” based on everybody being like everybody else, drawing the masses. In his 1947 novel, Bend Sinister, Nabokov sketched a political system in which the clever leader, Paduk, having installed the “average man” on a pedestal felt free to ignore him and pursue his own personal agenda.

The AAP has so far indulged in public relations fluff—invoking the average man as the all-purpose sanction, seeking street referendums (“mohalla sabhas”) on decisions its representatives have been elected to make, conceiving large tableau dramas regarding the prospective Lokpal Bill (to be enacted at the Ramlila grounds in Delhi), and newly installed ministers when not pulling off the Abbasid Caliph Haroun al-Rashid-type antics with surprise visits to public facilities and upbraiding, for the benefit of television cameras, petty officials for being on “picnic”—but done little to positively impact the aam aadmi’s life. For instance, the AAP has put the onus of fighting corruption on the citizen (with the helpline), decreed a 50 percent cut in power rates in anticipation of the audit of distribution companies showing unwarranted hikes in charges. What happens if the audit indicates only marginal price-gouging; who’ll make up for the lost revenues and the budgetary deficit, and will the subsidy then be terminated? It delivered on free water except it did so for customers well-off enough to afford houses, water connections and, therefore, water meters. This has left the bulk of the impoverished Delhi populace sheltering in shanties and slums who voted for it high and dry, and the AAP looking like any aam party–indulging in lofty rhetoric and low practice!

Quick to close the gap in the “visibles” separating them from the AAP, the established parties are divesting themselves of symbols of power—red beacons on cars, for instance, and in tactic—plastering autorickshaws with posters, doubling their mass-contact efforts, and rushing through anti-corruption legislation. They realise that the AAP, which they had seriously underestimated, has with considerable cunning capitalised on the opportunities it was afforded.

The Congress party’s support for the AAP to form government—to avoid another election and prevent the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from assuming power, has backfired. Its implied backing for the AAP’s 18-point plan has inoculated its supremo Arvind Kejriwal and Company against any failure in delivering on it by installing the Congress party as scapegoat.

The BJP is better off. Deciding to forsake power lest it be charged with luring independents and AAP representatives to obtain a majority, it can relentlessly attack the AAP-Congress combo, even as Rahul Gandhi’s brain trust apparently hopes that by stoking the AAP’s ambition and helping it win 20-30 especially urban seats in the general elections, Kejriwal’s gang will be instrumental once again in keeping the BJP out of power this time at the Centre, thus easing the Congress party’s task of cobbling together yet another corrupt and malfunctioning coalition government—UPA-III. The trick for the BJP will be to make the charges of amateurism and non-performance stick to the AAP and of cynical and moribund politics to the Congress.

Two basic sets of weaknesses of the AAP are now evident. The senior leaders of this ragtag outfit have already revealed a penchant for taking radical, when not whimsical, positions on issues, eroding the party’s goodwill and credibility. Prashant Bhushan’s ejaculation about Kashmiris having a veto over the army’s counter-insurgency deployment and his equally foolish opposition to nuclear power plants in general, which puts the future of indigenous technology and energy security in peril, has exposed the AAP to ridicule, which the BJP should remorselessly pillory hereafter to keep in public eye the dangers the AAP policy inclinations portend.

Then there are the differences in views of the rich lawyer, Bhushan, and Kejriwal, which will only grow with time, highlighting a related major weakness—the AAP’s complete lack of ideology. Well, yes, in the Ekwilist vein we are all “aam aadmi” now. The G R Gopinaths, the V Balakrishnans, and the Meera Sanyals, the well-heeled and the well-meaning from amongst the upper classes yearning for a corruption-free state and good governance are joining the AAP, but so is the much larger horde of political discards, opportunists, and malcontents from other parties, and crooks and carpetbaggers from all over.

How will the thinking of the “privilegentsia” (a word coined by Pakistani columnist Ayaz Amir)—the entrepreneurs, information technology bigwigs, and bankers, who afford the newly founded party glitz and gravitas, and who will expect their slant on public issues to be reflected in AAP’s policies, jell with Kejriwal’s archaic Leftist-populist mindset?

Will Kejriwal, as in Bhushan’s Kashmir episode, always have the last word on every issue at every turn? That is unlikely to be tolerated by the members for long. Kejriwal as final authority and adjudicator undermines the AAP’s self-definition as a collegium of average citizens and street democrats, which permitted the deep cleavages and fault-lines in the society to be papered over in the Delhi elections, but will not work elsewhere nor help a distinctive AAP ideology to emerge from a melange of disparate and dissimilar interests. With intra-party differences set to grow, more clashing pronouncements, frictions, and mistakes can be expected, providing Narendra Modi with ample opportunities and arguments to cut the AAP out of the picture.

The greater problem for the AAP is that while its recent heady victory has fired up its national ambitions, it has a ramshackle party structure that is manifestly incapable of coping with the business of sustained politicking and of running government. Nor has its extant leadership thought things through, leave alone alighted on solutions for perennial problems of the aam aadmi beyond announcing free this and free that, without a clue as to how to pay for such largesse without increasing public debt. Kejriwal’s trademark scheme of giveaways resonates with Sonia Gandhi’s populism-run-amuck. The AAP as Congress party’s “B Team” then surely has merit.

[Published in New Indian Express, Friday, 10th January 2014 at http://www.newindianexpress.com/opinion/Aam-Aadmi-or-Mere-Bust/2014/01/10/article1991729.ece ]

Posted in Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, society, South Asia | 8 Comments

“Flap Over Diplomat Complicates U.S.-India Relations”

Posted on January 4, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

Flap Over Diplomat Complicates U.S.-India Relations

By Eric Auner, on 31 Dec 2013,

Earlier this month, U.S. Marshals arrested Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade, who was serving as the deputy consul general at the Indian Consulate in New York City. She was accused of committing visa fraud to bring a domestic worker into the United States and of paying the worker less than the minimum wage.

The arrest led to a strong rebuke from the Indian government, which disputed the charges and objected to the way in which the arrest was carried out. Commentators in the Indian media have also reacted harshly. In addition to cancelling certain privileges for U.S. diplomats, the Indian government removed concrete security barriers in front of the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi in a move widely seen as retaliation for the arrest.

The Indian government continues to demand an apology from the United States, and has alleged that the U.S. government acted in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The United States maintains that in her position Khobragade was entitled only to consular immunity, which is limited to action taken in the course of consular duties. India has moved to change her diplomatic status in an attempt to secure full immunity for her.

According to Bharat Karnad of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, there are many reasons why this incident has generated such a strong reaction in India. These include the “extraordinarily harsh, outrageous and plainly over-the-top” public arrest as well as the “humiliation” of the body-cavity search she was reportedly subjected to, which “is the worst possible personal nightmare for a ‘respectable’ Hindu woman.” A spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service told the Washington Post that Khobragade was strip-searched but denied that a cavity search took place. Karnad says the “selective and arbitrary” decision to enforce U.S. labor rules is seen as violating a “tacit understanding” the United States has had with India and other countries regarding the compensation of domestic workers employed by foreign diplomats.

This “egregious treatment of one of its own” has, “for the first time, aligned the [Indian] foreign policy establishment against the United States,” Karnad adds.

U.S. officials seem to have been caught flat-footed by the harsh Indian response, and U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki downplayed the incident at a press briefing and stressed the importance of U.S.-India relations. She conceded that law enforcement officials from the U.S. and India “have somewhat different interpretations of the issues and allegations at play” but emphasized that the State Department had been “in close contact” with the government of India” and that “we want to move beyond this” given that “we all recognize the importance of our long-term relationship.”

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara pushed back against allegations of mistreatment in a statement on the U.S. Department of Justice website. Khobragade “clearly tried to evade U.S. law designed to protect from exploitation the domestic employees of diplomats and consular officers,” Bharara said. Furthermore, Khobragade “caused the victim and her spouse to attest to false documents and be a part of her scheme to lie to U.S. government officials.”

“Finally,” continued Bharara’s statement, the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s “sole motivation in this case, as in all cases, is to uphold the rule of law, protect victims and hold accountable anyone who breaks the law—no matter what their societal status and no matter how powerful, rich or connected they are.”

An Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman responded to Bharara’s statement with his own, which said: “There is only one victim in this case. That victim is Devyani Khobragade—a serving Indian diplomat on mission in the United States.”

He called Bharara’s remarks “a post facto rationalization for an action that should never have taken place in the first instance.”

Despite recent advances in U.S.-India relations, which raised hopes that the two countries would transcend tensions that go back to the Cold War period, building a new strategic partnership has proceeded more slowly than some U.S. officials had hoped. The 2008 nuclear cooperation agreement, for example, which stands as the most significant achievement in the new chapter of bilateral ties, barely passed through the Indian parliament.

Even now, U.S. nuclear trade with India is stalled because of an Indian law governing nuclear liability. U.S. nuclear suppliers have been seeking certain forms of legal immunity in case of an accident, which India is loath to grant due in part to political sensitivities about the conduct of U.S. corporations in India. These concerns go back at least to the 1984 Bhopal disaster, in which a facility owned primarily by a U.S. firm leaked chemicals that caused thousands of deaths and injuries to Indians.

Regardless of the outcome of this latest spat, the United States will continue to court India as a partner for its strategy in Asia and as a market for U.S. goods and military equipment. But Karnad warns that the incident will “definitely have some effect on the Indo-U.S. ‘strategic partnership.’” The magnitude of that effect will depend on “how deftly Washington extricates itself from a mess of its creation.”

Published in ‘Trend Lines’ at World Politics Review, accessible at http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trend-lines/13466/flap-over-diplomat-complicates-u-s-india-relations

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian democracy, Indian Politics, society, South Asia, United States, US. | 1 Comment