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

Navy Adrift

Posted on March 7, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

Admiral D K Joshi’s resigning and the succession crisis it triggered are ultimately minor issues. More basic problems afflict the navy.

For instance, the Indian Navy’s high reputation for seamanship and ship-handling has been sullied somewhat by the spate of accidents involving frigates and destroyers ramming into docks and passing vessels. In a recent conversation with this analyst, Joshi dismissed these mishaps as “tire punctures”. At a minimum, it indicates a decline in ship-handling skills.

I recall, in this respect, the late Admiral S M Nanda, the country’s eighth Naval Chief, telling me of an incident from the 1950s when the navy annually exercised with the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet. In one such exercise, as commander of the cruiser, Mysore, he was asked by the host, who was testing his mettle, to squeeze his large ship into a tight berth alongside British warships in the harbour in Malta. It required intricate docking manoeuvres the British fleet commander was certain Nanda could not pull off and, in trying to bring his ship in unaided crash it into the jetty. But Nanda deftly slid Mysore into the slot without a hitch. The surprised Briton didn’t know, the Admiral told me with a chuckle, that he had captained pilot boats in Karachi harbour in the pre-Second World War days.

The point is that ship-handling skills are learned and the “sea eye” acquired hands-on by subaltern officers (in the rank of sub-Lieutenant and Lieutenant) steering small craft on coastal security duties and skimming in and about crowded harbours, something naval stalwarts will vouch for. It is a hard job, they say, to bring in a 6,000 ton-plus missile destroyer coasting in at 4-6 knots to the quay, and ship commanders lacking sufficient small boat-derived experience often flub this test. Lack of such skills is also reflected in ships running aground, which too has happened lately. Diffident captains opting to have tug-boats escort their vessels in and out of harbours will lack the experience in crisis when ships have to get out to sea in a hurry under their own power.

The trouble is small ship command billets are in short supply because the navy has no more than 20 offshore patrol craft and coastal combatants in its inventory, smaller vessels being monopolised by the Coast Guard (CG) tasked with the coastal security mission. In this respect, the navy has failed to respond to a 10-year-old offer by the CG director-general to sequester six of his vessels exclusively for junior naval officers to command. The skills differential is thus set to widen considering the CG is growing faster with induction of new patrol boats every two-three weeks and, in time, its officers could potentially be better in handling bigger ships than their naval counterparts.

Familiarisation with ships comes, moreover, from pulling time in them. More and more naval officers, however, have ever shorter tenures in rotational posts at sea, affording them insufficient time to familiarise themselves with the ships. It has resulted in an echelon of mid-level officers not quite capable, when commanding ships, of manoeuvring them well or tackling on-board crises and contingencies involving machinery and equipment.

Huge bunches of the navy’s 10,000-strong officer cadre, the smallest of any armed service, moreover, are sucked up for duty in large ships. The first fleet aircraft carrier, Vikramaditya, has 200 officers assigned to it. Because the ministry of defence (MoD) sanctions crew strength virtually at the point of commissioning ships, increases in personnel cannot be schemed too much in advance, making nonsense of manpower planning and compounding the problem of inexperienced officers assuming command of battleships.

The depletion of the submarine arm is especially alarming. In the wake of the Sindhuratna accident, the turgid pace of decision-making in the ministry of defence (MoD) will quicken for a while and bureaucrats, who often wilfully retard military procurement and indigenous production programmes, will frantically clear everything to avoid blame. It is an opportune time for the naval brass to take the seriously big step of embarking on an all-nuclear submarine arm as advocated by the veteran submariner, retired Rear Admiral Raja Menon, and secure two additional Russian Akula nuclear hunter-killer submersibles (SSNs) on lease, including the Iribis already offered to India, to fill the immediate void in sea denial capability. The lesser option is to build a conventional hunter-killer submarine (SSK) from scratch.

To achieve this grand aim, Project 75i, a programme to buy yet another foreign conventional sub at a mind-boggling `55,000 crore, should be altered to obtain an SSK, or SSN, with a production line to complement the one manufacturing the Arihant-class nuclear-powered nuclear missile firing submarines (SSBNs). In either case, it will be a daunting project considering the navy’s design directorate still lacks basic competence. It hasn’t developed the tools and the metrics to validate its own designs. But rather than be deterred by the enormity of this enterprise, the government should sanction this SSK/SSN project in mission-mode, affording it priority and autonomy as was done in the case of the Agni missile and Arihant projects. After all, the country had no experience in producing missiles and SSBNs either.

The navy’s submarine design group has enough insights from the German HDW and French Scorpene projects and long acquaintance with the Russian design philosophy to shake off self-doubt. It is imperative the navy goes all out on this option, seeding a comprehensive submarine and ship-building industry in the process. To ensure its success, it should insist on a private sector combine of majors, such as Larsen & Toubro and Pipavav Shipyard involved in making the Arihant, as prime contractor. This being no time for ethical niceties, the combine should be incentivised to reverse-engineer to the maximum, to rely on indigenous sources and resources, and to obtain the really critical technology and technical assistance from wherever and however it can get it. Commercial-minded corporates, espying nationalism-laced profit, will find a way.

Committed to shrinking the government and the public sector, the likely new prime minister Narendra Modi will welcome such an ambitious and freewheeling initiative to render the country genuinely self-reliant in armaments.

[Published as “Indian Navy Cast Adrift” in New Indian Express, Friday, March 7, 2014; at http://www.newindianexpress.com/opinion/Indian-Navy-Cast-Adrift/2014/03/07/article2094542.ece#.UxkWXD-Sw7s ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, Defence Industry, DRDO, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Indian para-military forces, Internal Security, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Russia, russian assistance, South Asia, Technology transfer, Weapons, Western militaries | Leave a comment

Weak advocacy by BJP rep

Posted on February 22, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

Have just come off watching a shockingly poor show earlier this evening put up, unfortunately, by the BJP foreign policy rep, Harinder Puri, in the ‘Foreign Policy Debate’ on Times TV featuring Puri, Pavan Verma of JD(U), and Manish Tiwari of Congress.

Asked about whether a Narinder Modi-led BJP government would, after a Pakistan-supported terrorist attack such as 26/11, retaliate with a military strike on cross border terrorist camps, Puri hemmed and hawed — still too much the Indian Permanent Representative at the UN in New York (from which post he retired) to call a spade a shovel,stating weakly that he couldn’t speak about what such a govt would do, that it would depend on the prevailing “context”, but that such a strike “would be on the table”. Seeing an opportunity to show up his erstwhile ex-IFS colleague for his pusillanimity, Verma, now with Nitesh Kumar, stated forcefully that “appeasement” was intolerable and that while there’s every reason to “engage” with an adversary, the process of engagement “should not leave India defenceless”. It was a mightily clever interjection. It showed muscularity and made sense sans any element of Puri’s waffling and, more importantly, without in any way committing himself or his party to any specific course of action. Verma also deftly placed a (Hindu) cherry atop this cake by reminding Puri and the audience of “sama, dhan, bhed, dand” as the four essentials of Indian statecraft! Tiwari, on his part, stuck a knife into BJP and twisted it saying before coming into power in 1998 Advani had promised “hot pursuit” of the terrorists across the LoC in Kashmir, but as Home Minister failed to order such action. Verma and Tiwari went unchallenged.

On another occasion, Verma airily dismissed Puri’s reactions as “college [level] debating” techniques, even as the latter looked appropriately sheepish.

Puri also seemed unsure about how to respond when, apropos continuity in foreign policy, Tiwari pointed out that Congress had picked up where the Vajpayee govt had left off as regards relations with the United States in terms of fleshing out the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership and the framework of defence cooperation and following up with the nuclear deal the BJP was keen on. Again Puri fluffed it,spluttering about how while he supported the deal and the military links, the Congress had failed to “implement” the nuclear deal (by buying nuclear reactors from the West!!!). It left a disturbing thought in my mind. Has the Narinder Modi team settled on following through on the N-deal any which way, the 2010 Nuclear Liability Act passed by Parliament notwithstanding — the position the Manmohan Singh regime has been inclined towards? If no such Party line has been put down, shouldn’t Puri be asked to be less voluble along the lines he was and to back up a bit, lest he begin sounding like one of those who actually pushed this wretched, one-sided, hurtful to India’s nuclear weapons program and status-deal?

True, television is a strange thing with the digital speed being the medium. The pace is so fast there’s not a moment for honest reflection. All the things you really wanted to say, all the witty remarks you’d have liked to make, simply don’t come to the tongue with the TV cameras on your face, recording every twitch and bead of sweat. Like most people, Puri doesn’t look as if he is naturally made for TV. All the more reason then that he better pick up his game fast, lest he lose the foreign policy end of it to better prepared political opponents who can think well and speak better on their feet.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Army, Indian democracy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, nonproliferation, nuclear industry, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, society, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Terrorism, United States, US. | 2 Comments

Fire Up Defence Industry

Posted on February 21, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

The recent Singapore Air Show opened a week after the Indian Defence Expo (Defexpo 2014) ended in Delhi. What evoked interest in Singapore was the CN-235 turboprop maritime patrol aircraft that Indonesia displayed there. Considering the Indonesian defence industry was revived only in 1976 with the establishment of Indonesian Aerospace (IA), this is quite an accomplishment. With IA contemplating manufacture of the South Korean T-50i light fighter, Indonesia may soon have a cheap supersonic combat aircraft to sell to developing states hard up for cash.

Put this development in perspective. The prototype of the indigenous multi-role Marut HF-24 supersonic combat aircraft, the first ever produced outside the United States and Europe, took to the skies over Bangalore in 1961. That project should have led to the emergence of a comprehensively-capable Indian defence industry supplying the Indian military and the rest of the Third World, and as generator of high-technologies to drive the economy. Instead, between a foreign aircraft-fixated Indian Air Force and short-sighted Indian politicians (to wit, defence minister Krishna Menon who decided against sanctioning `5 crore for rejigging the Orpheus-12R engine with reheat the British firm Bristol-Siddeley had produced as power plant for a NATO fighter to fit the HF-24) the Marut was eliminated on the excuse of being “under-powered”. It aborted growth of the defence industry in general, habituated the Defence Public Sector Units (DPSUs) to an endless cycle of licensed manufacture, and turned the country into an arms dependency that can be jerked around at will by foreign suppliers.

Understandably, at the DefExpo the mood was morose in the stalls of the private sector majors, among them L&T, Tata, Pipapav, and Bharat Forge, as well as smaller private firms, all venturing into the high-value military market. The private sector defence industry has, time and again, proved itself in the most prestigious and sensitive indigenous high-technology projects, such as Agni missiles and Arihant-class ballistic missile firing nuclear-powered submarine. They have shown particular appetite for ingesting and innovating transferred technology and for complex designing and production engineering. It is talent the DPSUs seem bereft of in the main because profit-linked survivability is not their concern, even less motive. No matter how incompetent and wasteful, they keep getting showered with mega contracts by the Indian government, forcing the more productive, technologically capable, and cost-efficient private sector firms to make to do with meagre sub-contracts.

The representatives at the Indian DPSU stalls at the DefExpo were, however, all jaunt and puffed-up chests, because continued government patronage has resulted in over-full order-books they are in no position to deliver on. After some 60-odd years one thing is clear: DPSUs simply cannot absorb military technology, leave alone develop new products, and are content with their limited skill-sets of reproducing military hardware by screwing plate A onto plate B as per detailed design instruction sheets provided them. This is the stuff of Meccano sets, which in a bygone era helped young kids put together toy cranes and trucks—the very essence of licensed manufacture. The DPSUs have even ignored the transferred technology available in massive documentation with the ordnance factories (OFs) which, as in the case of the 155mm Bofors howitzer field gun, was collecting dust for 30 years.

Take the case of the follow-on to the Bofors gun. As the preferred option of buying a foreign 155mm/52 calibre towed artillery gun system was not materialising the army is considering a desi alternative. The OFs working with the transferred Bofors technologies have struggled to produce a gun which, alas, has featured many failures, including repeated barrel bursts in test firings, showing up the DPSU capability deficiencies. In the meantime, Bharat Forge bought technology from Elbit, an Israeli Company, fully digested it, introduced its own innovations into the design, and now has a ready artillery piece which it is willing to enter into competition against rival systems produced anywhere, including by the OFs and L&T. L&T, contrarily, decided against full transfer of technology from the French Company, Nester, on the ground that buying expensive foreign technology without a fair chance of selling it to the army makes no commercial sense. India would have long ago rolled out an advanced successor gun system had the Bofors technology been passed on to the private sector even as the OFs assembled this gun from completely knocked-down kits.

The department of defence production (DDP) in the ministry of defence (MoD) is the chief culprit. The DDP sees its remit as protecting the DPSUs, not as growing a national defence industry, which last requires acknowledging the private sector defence industrial assets as national resource. This means that a howitzer gun will not be purchased from the private sector, no matter how desperate the army’s need for it.

How hurtful to the national interest is the official procurement policy may be gauged from the fact that despite the entire fleet of some 1,000 Russian T-72S tanks being currently immobilised owing to suspect gun barrels that have burst with disturbing regularity, the DDP has not entertained an offer (made directly to defence minister A K Antony in 2013) by a big private company to fit the rifled gun barrels it has produced on two tanks on a “no cost, no commitment” basis for rigorous testing. A year later, the DDP is still dithering, willing to risk an army with defanged strike forces than approve testing of tank gun barrels sourced to this private firm lest successful tests lead to pressures to buy them, thereby setting a precedent.

Then again the entire government and military system tilts against the private sector defence industry. The Defence Procurement Procedure the MoD has laboured over is a joke. It is big on extolling “Make and Buy Indian” but in practice provides it cover for doing nothing, least of all actively encourage and incentivise the private sector companies, or enable fair competition between them and DPSUs that the department of defence production and the MoD know the latter will lose. The problem is too many politicians, bureaucrats, military officers, and DPSU personnel are milking this system to accept its radical overhaul.

[Published in New Indian Express, Friday, 21 February 2014 and available at http://www.newindianexpress.com/opinion/Fire-Up-Defence-Industry/2014/02/21/article2068288.ece#.UwahkmKSw7s ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, Defence Industry, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Military Acquisitions, Northeast Asia, South Asia, South East Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, United States, US., Weapons | 3 Comments

“Erstwhile foe”

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

The main presentation of interest on the first day of the 16th Asian Security Conference hosted by IDSA (Feb 19-21) was by Beijing’s designated hardline pitchman — Yan Xuetong of Tsinghua University. Yan made clear that the “new model for major power relations” that President Xi Jinping has articulated, tends in fact towards “competition” not “cooperation” as many in the West and the usual docile lot of China-pleasers in the Indian foreign policy establishment believe is the case. He, moreover, stressed that the world was moving towards bipolarity owing to the increase in China’s “material power” which, he claimed, is the sole reason for the “inevitable” rivalry with the United States. And, as regards Japan, Yan was almost vituperative. But he got as good as he gave from Vice Admiral (ret) Fuma Ota, former head of Japanese Military Intelligence, who responded with zest to Yan’s provocations — and on a projected map highlighted the growing incidents at sea and in the air, any of which could have escalated into military crisis. When asked how long the Chinese Navy would take to integrate their recently inducted aircraft carrier, Liaoning, into fleet operations — the litmus test of a carrier-centered navy, Ota estimated 20 years, and Andrew Scobell of RAND ventured that this eventuality “is long way off”.

In the first event of the morning, MK Narayanan, Governor of West Bengal, in his keynote address proved what I have publicly written and stated that he was, perhaps, the worst National Security Adviser India has had to-date. In the main because of his singularly risk-averse attitude and thinking. For instance, he went on and on about “the risk of unintended consequences” of the India-China naval race, and why “deft management” is necessary to avoid conflict — something, no doubt, he feels he provided as NSA. Worse, he yoked the country’s nuclear arsenal and policy not to its own national security interests or the emerging geostrategic situation in Asia and the world, but exclusively to Chinese aggressiveness and also to whether and how much America retrenched. It emphasized his way of thinking that had confirmed India’s status as a free-rider on security and is the sort of approach that helped Narayanan deliver the inequitable nuclear deal that enormously hurt India’s nuclear weapons program and strategic interests, to Condoleeza Rice in July 2005. He also confessed that in his time “We never worked very hard on an Asian security architecture” because of the divisions and differences between Asian states. He ended with a gratuitous dig at me saying MEA stalwarts such as — and he named — Rakesh Sood, who was in the audience, had stalled “our erstwhile foe, Bharat Karnad” in the foreign and security policy realms. While this mention was flattering, wonder what Yan Xuetong thought about it considering China is the foe Narayanan ought to have worked aggressively against as NSA, but did not.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, civil-military relations, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Politics, Japan, nonproliferation, Northeast Asia, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, South Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US., Weapons | 2 Comments

Lively encounters

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

The India Today-hosted “Panchayat”-sort of events (held all day Feb 13) with politicians debating, discussing, publicly quarreling with each other have three aspects. There is the plain entertainment value, say, of the recent entrant to Mulayam’s party, the commedian Raju Srivastav having a blast with AAP’s Kumar Vishwas and the more sober Bhojpuri film hero Manoj Tiwari displaying earthy cow-belt lingo and humour in skewering each other and the unfortunate Congress MP aspirant, the actress Nagma, who seemed like the proverbial witless ingenue winning a beauty title and claiming her aim in life is to work for “world peace”! There’s the high-octane verbal kinetics, with the Congress minister of state Manish Tiwari losing his cool when verbally prodded and deliberately provoked by the AAP member and fellow lawyer, Mehra (?) even as the former deputy chief minister of Bihar Modi on the panel enjoyed the show. And then there’s the seriously political. In the exchange featuring Amit Shah, Narendra Modi’s canny chief campaign strategist, and Jairam Ramesh, the resident intellectual in the Congress Party ranks, the latter was clearly bested with Shah being relentlessly on the offensive charging the Congress with politics of polarization and vigorously defending the Gujarat model of economic growth, which RFamesh had hard time refuting. What was more revealing than what was said and how it was said was the body language. The impression was conveyed by all Congress reps throughout the day that the party sees the writing on the wall, is reconciled to defeat in the coming general elections, and is already looking ahead to the 2019 polls, with Ramesh painting Rahul Gandhi as a political “marathoner”, not a 100 metre “sprinter”.

P.S. — The real stinger, I forgot to mention, was the quicksilver reaction by AAP’s Mehra to Manish Tiwari. The latter was reminded about Kapil Sibal’s comment that there was “zero loss” on the coalgate and 2-G issues in the context of the GOI yesterday realizing some Rs 61K crores for the spectrum recently in a transparently-conducted auction, which’d indicate the extent of loss to the public exchequer when the 2-G bandwidth was allotted to his cronies by the DMK minister K. Raju w/o any openness. Mehra’s stinger was that of course, the Congress “felt insulted” considering it was such a small amount compared to Rs 1 lakh74K crores the CAG said Congress had “eaten up” in the 2G scam!

Posted in Indian democracy, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Politics, Internal Security, society, South Asia | Leave a comment

S Menon to leave NSA post

Posted on February 9, 2014 by Bharat Karnad

The annual brunch held over the weekend at his residence for those involved in, and dealing with, foreign and defence policies — with DRDO and all armed Services (except the CAS, ACM Raha) and Intel chiefs in attendance, and all concerned Department secretaries too present, was as usual otherwise also well populated. It allowed talking of “business” with persons in the loop. The curtest of the lot was R Chidambaram who, understandably didn’t want to speak to me considering I have called him the greatest disaster to befall the Indian nuclear weapons program, of course, but more generally the nuclear energy programme as well.

Shivshankar Menon told me that he had informed the PM that he’d be leaving his post come May whatever the results of the forthcoming general elections and even if the UPA-III manages to materialize. I instinctively felt that underlying this decision of the NSA was a sentiment best expressed by Richard Nixon in a press interaction after losing the presidential elections in 1960 to John F Kennedy: “You won’t have me to kick around anymore”(!), which would more reasonably accord with Manmohan Singh’s relieved feelings, no doubt!

Posted in DRDO, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian democracy, Indian Navy, Indian Politics, society, South Asia, United States, US. | 3 Comments