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

Bring Washington to Its Senses

Posted on December 27, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

One wishes that in matters of terrorist strikes and diplomatic provocations of the kind that the Devyani Khobragade affair represents, the Indian government had the wit and long discovered the merit of reacting instantly and in tit-for-tat manner. Thus, the 26/11 and, earlier the attack on Parliament, should have been answered within 20 minutes of the onset of the attacks with Indian Air Force sorties out of Udhampur to decimate Lashkar-e-Taiba training sites, concentration areas, and supply depots in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, the co-ordinates for which targets are readily available. And once the atrocious treatment of the Indian deputy consul general (DCG) at the hands of the US Marshals became known, an immediate counter ought to have been the public arrest of one of the American DCGs posted in Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Kolkata and a proper “cavity search” by rough-hewn local cops. This option is unavailable to India now as it will appear calculated, not reflexive.

Instead, in each instance New Delhi’s seemingly incurable habit of inaction kicked in. 26/11 was responded to with mere threats, the attack on Parliament by time-consuming “mobilisation for general war” that achieved nothing, and the outrage against the Indian DCG by tarrying, with the urgency and value of immediate like-action being lost as the external affairs minister Salman Khurshid sought “dialogue” with Washington. Procrastination reduced India’s honour to a trifle-able commodity and the principle of parity of treatment of diplomats a joke.

The more the situation unfolded the clearer it became that this was a larger drama contrived between the self-promoting and ambitious Preet Bharara, the ex-Chandigarh NRI and US attorney for Manhattan (2nd District), and the Bureau for Diplomatic Security (BDS) within the US state department responsible for the security of foreign diplomats displaying sheer incompetence or, alternatively, seeking to stir up momentary excitement. Bharara knew perfectly well how this action would burnish his reputation in US circles and play out in India. The BDS apparently deliberately ignored the informal understanding Washington has with a bunch of European and Third World nations, including India, regarding domestic help brought into the US by diplomats on A-3 or G-5 visas who earn wages that are sub-par only by the US standard. This year, some 2,200 such visas were issued by the US state department. But it was Bharara’s call to home in only on Khobragade that BDS acquiesced in.

True to its nature, the slack-willed Manmohan Singh government stuck to its by now well-known script by doing little beyond ending the system of unilateral benefits the US embassy and consulates and US-origin staff have enjoyed from the ’60s onwards their Indian counterparts stationed in America can only dream of. Absent a reciprocal agreement relating to terms and conditions of work, and the slate of rights, privileges, exemptions, and immunities the diplomats of the two nations will henceforth enjoy, Washington should be warned that the US diplomats and US-origin consular staff, who are paid a handsome sum as “hardship-posting” allowance in India, will start earning it. Absolute parity of treatment down to the minutest detail will obtain decorum and balance so far missing in the bilateral relations.

Sadly, India subsided in the face of US secretary of state John Kerry’s merely expressing “regrets” and undersecretary Wendy Sherman “remorse” which, considering the perverse behaviour of the US Marshals against Khobragade, amounted to salting the wound. New Delhi is even wavering in its demand for an unambiguous apology combined with closure of the case against the DCG in New York—the minimum needed in the circumstances. How the US government manages that is its business. New Delhi need only insist it will be satisfied with nothing less.

This disruptive episode in India-US relations points to two very dissimilar trends—one regarding the conduct of Indian foreign policy, the other concerning subterranean forces busily at work to undermine India strategically, with the former assisting the latter. The fact is harsh actions at the ground or tactical level are in no way antithetical to strategically burgeoning bilateral ties as long as the two streams are not mixed up. Practising an almost amateurish brand of diplomacy, New Delhi seems unable to pull it off. The Indian government expects that mutually beneficial ties must result in benignity all-round and that, as in this case, a friendly US had no business dealing in an unfriendly manner with an Indian envoy. This is to ignore the bureaucratic politics constantly buffeting policies in large countries.

In Washington, there is a powerful lobby within the state department that is unconvinced that getting close to India will benefit the US much. An equally strong lobby in the US department of defence, motivated by emerging Asian geopolitics, a declining military budget and capacity for projecting power, is persuaded that without India drawing China’s attention away from the East Sea and the western Pacific, the US may have its hands fuller than it would wish. The reason for the outrage Khobragade experienced—attributed by some to the Obama administration’s supposedly growing “indifference” to India—doesn’t make sense, because from the US perspective too much is at stake for the “strategic partnership” to be so casually imperiled, particularly as strong Indo-US security links are deemed prudent and necessary by both countries.

What then is the best riposte, albeit belated, to the evidence of an unacceptable US attitude? India has just the leverage—an analog of the A-3 visa conundrum faced by the ministry of external affairs when posting diplomats to the US, where hiring native domestic help is unaffordable but taking Indian servants along risks Indian diplomats to arbitrary invocation by the US authorities of legally-enforceable standards of minimum wage. It can require that the large horde of Indians employed by the US embassy and consulates be paid salaries at the US-level, which will raise the wage-bill manifold. And, besides imposing curbs on US diplomats, several multi-billion dollar arms deals in the pipeline should be frozen. It will quickly bring Washington to its senses.

[Published in New Indian Express,27th December 2013 at http://www.newindianexpress.com/opinion/Bring-Washington-to-Its-Senses/2013/12/27/article1966731.ece

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, civil-military relations, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Military Acquisitions, Northeast Asia, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Terrorism, United States, US. | 6 Comments

Restoring parity with tit-for tat

Posted on December 19, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

The extraordinary mistreatment of the Indian Deputy Consul-General (DCG) in New York City, now transferred to the Indian Mission at the United Nations to get full-immunity cover, Devyani Khobragade, is at once more and less than it has been made out to be. More, because if a diplomat of a friendly country can be handled so roughly, what does it say about the “strategic partnership” India and the United States are supposed to have? And, less because the DCG’s underpayment of wages to Indian domestic help is part of the larger unresolved issue of Indian servants accompanying Indian diplomats on postings in the US but is covered by an informal understanding the US State Department has with a whole bunch of Third World and even European countries, including India. It is an acknowledgement that along with the free room and board and medical expenses, the salary the Indian domestic help earns is virtually pocket money or savings which are not insubstantial, amounting to a windfall in rupees and a tidy monthly sum in US$. So, the enslavement talk is silly. But it is a welcome development that things have come to a boil. Now New Delhi and Washington can negotiate and formalize an agreement on reciprocal treatment of envoys. For reasons unknown, American diplomats posted to India have privileges their Indian counterparts do not enjoy — like unlimited import of liquor, foodstuffs, and consumer items stacked in embassy commissary. The Indian government has been a little too attentive to US demands for spatial security — an exclusive no-parking secure zone around the embassy, etc when the Indian Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, DC — despite requesting an exclusive parking zone — has had the mortification of seeing such a car park it had previously sole access to now turned over for public use. And teachers in the American School don’t pay income tax for working here to the Indian exchequer. And most, ironically in the context of the Khobragade incident,Indian hired-help in the embassy and in the three consulates in Mumbai, Kolkatta and Hyderabad are paid meager salaries with few benefits. All this has come to an end and may be restored, hopefully, but only on a reciprocal basis. This equity was longtime coming.

The more significant thing is whether the Manmohan Singh regime will be satisfied with Secretary of State John Kerry expressing “regret” and Under-Secretary Wendy Sherman “remorse”. India should not accept anything less than an unconditional and open-ended apology from Washington. But going by the ambiguous response so far of Salman Khurshid, Minister for External Affairs, a closure on the basis of US regrets may happen. But it is unacceptable and the BJP will no doubt raise a ruckus should the Congress govt be satisfied with so little when the provocation has been so egregious and grave. May be an arrest of an American DCG — male or female — on the valid charge of underpaying Indian members of the consular staff, with attendant thorough “cavity searches” would be a better way to telegraph India’s intent and seriousness.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Politics, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US. | 7 Comments

Flesh Out Message, Mr Modi

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Like the enraged Iraqis who a decade ago pulled down the giant statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and agitating Ukrainians last week uprooted Lenin from his pedestal in central Kiev, the voters in three heartland states and in Delhi did a demolition job on the Congress party. It may be the opening act of a play ending in a shrivelled-up Nehru-Gandhi dynastic party.

While media commentators debated Narendra Modi’s role in the BJP’s poll sweep in abstruse terms (“Modi wave”, “Modi effect”, etc.), alarm bells should have begun clanging in Modi’s mind when Digvijaya Singh, the Congress party general secretary and agent provocateur non pareil, congratulated the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate for becoming politically more mainstream. A basic rule of thumb: When a “Diggy-raja” sees Modi as, in some sense, a political variant of himself, it spells trouble, reeking of an attempt to minimise the ideological differences separating the two parties, and portending Modi’s co-optation into the Establishment fold. This may reassure Modi about his own acceptability quotient, but it is aimed at lulling him, and blunting his message. Then again, what’s his message?

Beyond commending the “Gujarat model” of economic growth and development for the country, he hasn’t yet explained in simple language to his vast, growing and, importantly, youthful audiences the secret of its success. To most people in residually “socialist” India, “sarkari naukri” (government job) denotes lifelong economic security and better life, and an opportunity to step on the social escalator—to advance from the lowliest levels of society to the lower middle class, and for their children from the lower middle class to middle tiers of the middle class that comprise the bourgeoisie and bulwark of any democracy. How entrenched is this view? Chandra Bhan Prasad and Milind Kamble, the remarkably far-seeing Dalit leaders who have been touting entrepreneurship as antidote for caste discrimination and social backwardness, discovered to their chagrin that the Dalits they talked to preferred the job security of low-level government jobs to the risks of embarking on their own ventures even with offers of seed capital.

The bulk of the people thronging BJP election gatherings, apart from enjoying the entertainment provided by Modi slamming the Congress leadership with zest, mocking statements, and jibes, would reasonably assume that when Modi mentions industry and development, for example, what he is promising is a version of what most politicians they have known all their lives have always offered—yet another crowd-pleasing, dole-dispensing, treasury-busting, taxpayer-funded scheme of the kind the Congress has specialised in over the last six decades. Such schemes, if not outright giveaways, involve setting up public sector units—such as the railway coach factory, pilot training academy, and what not, in Sonia Gandhi’s Rai Bareilly constituency. It is the easiest way to buy votes and cement support at the state level at the public exchequer’s expense. But, whose money is it anyway?

Congress members behave as if the monies to finance the inordinately expensive and wasteful populist programmes the National Advisory Council dreams up come from their party coffers or party president Sonia Gandhi’s personal fortune estimated (by Huffington Post) at some $2 billion, which exceeds the worth of the British monarch, Queen Elizabeth-II! Whence, the oft-heard statements made by gesturing Congress party minions, ministers, and the like, to the effect that “we” have given money to the states which have been misused or remained unused.

Surely, this is not Modi’s message. But unless he articulates his own distinct “pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps” ideology—that he exemplifies—and a more energetic vision for the country, that is what the people limited by their experience will assume he represents. For starters, therefore, he needs to disabuse the masses of many of the myths propagated by the Congress over the years, among them, that poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, can be eliminated by legislative diktats. Congress slogans, such as Indira Gandhi’s “Garibi Hatao” (remove poverty) and Sonia’s variations of it, essentially turn development—a hard, difficult, and messy process—into a magical outcome. Modi needs to show these up for the airy confections they are. “Beggar the treasury” schemes, he ought to point out, only erodes the self-respect of the people, reinforcing their gimme habit and belief in government as mai-baap—a regressively feudal concept the British colonials expropriated to promote servility in Indians, which Congress subscribes to.

Modi has, moreover, to do the unthinkable for a politician—speak truth and common sense to the people, which is that the government cannot give them the good life that they themselves are unmotivated to secure by their own hard work. Further, he has to stress that the government is not and can never be the employer of the first or even the last resort, but that it could be an enabler. That the government will provide the youth with the remedial training and upskilling to international standards necessary to help them make good in the growing industrial sector and in the economy at large. That the national resources would be more effectively used by privatising public sector units based on his conviction that “government has no business to be in business”. That while well-funded and monitored social welfare programmes will guarantee a minimum level of benefits for all, and protect the indigent, the incapacitated and the elderly, a cradle-to-grave social welfare state is unaffordable, especially on a meagre tax base—less than two per cent of the working population, for instance, pays income tax. And finally, that if the freebie programmes are not reined in, the fiscal deficit and national debt will sink the nation.

Modi’s new national credo must exalt individual effort, initiative, and enterprise, and project unshackled entrepreneurship, private industry and capital as the prime drivers of prosperity and India’s rise. Gujarat’s progress, he needs to emphasise, owes much to the self-help can-do attitude of Gujaratis, which if widely adopted by the rest of us, would carry the country very far.

Published in New Indian Express, December 13, 2013 at http://www.newindianexpress.com/opinion/Flesh-Out-Message-Mr-Modi/2013/12/13/article1942395.ece

Posted in Europe, Indian Politics, society, South Asia, West Asia | 2 Comments

Tragedy of the Land Without a Strategy

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Book review (belatedly reproduced here):
Jaswant Singh, India at Risk: Mistakes, Misconceptions and Misadventures of Security Policy [New Delhi: Rainlight-Rupa, 2013], 292 pages
Published in ‘India Today’, November 11, 2013
—————
“What is history?”, asked Edward Hallet Carr, the English historian in 1961, triggering a debate that still resonates in academic circles between the relativists who believe that all history is virtually fabrication and the empiricists who think there are irrefutable facts to contend with. Siding with the latter, Carr held that there’s such a thing as “objective historical truth”, which view was charged with imposing a narrative. With competing histories, however, “narrational imposition” belongs to those who are first out with an authoritative take.

This bit of historiography came to mind as I read the latest offering by Jaswant Singh, undoubtedly the most cerebral of our political leaders, as did a conversation I had with him soon after the May 2004 elections. Jaswant told me then that he and Strobe Tâlbott, former US Deputy Secretary of State, would be collaborating on a book on the “strategic dialogue” they had conducted over several years. I urged him not to wait for Talbott, a professional writer who can turn out a book in a trice, but to publish his account as “first draft of history” as quickly as possible. That way, I said, his would be the dominant discourse that Talbott and anybody else would have to react and respond to. Jaswant put store by Talbott’s promise; Talbott meanwhile produced his book – Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy, And the Bomb by September of that year, in which account Jaswant comes out sounding smug and foppish.

As regards his interaction with Talbott, Jaswant says un-illuminatingly in the “Epilogue” that he was “disconcerted” by the American’s emphasis on non-proliferation rather than the mechanics of forging good relations. But Washington had made clear its intention to cap India’s weapons capability below the credible thermonuclear level in the immediate aftermath of the 1998 tests. Hence, Jaswant’s perplexity with the “altered order of … prioritization” suggests Washington had accepted New Delhi’s framework only to initiate the dialogue. In the absence of details, such as the discussions on the negotiation strategy and tactics within the Ministry for External Affairs (MEA) he headed and between him and the National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra, especially on the fallback positions, the question arises: Why was the dialogue persisted with when Talbott had upended the agreed agenda in the initial stages itself?

This book is less a memoir than rumination by Jaswant on the nature of wars, near-wars, and other national security crises faced by the country in the last sixty-five odd years, and why the Indian government acted in most of them with characteristic confusion about ways, means, and ends. He sets up the context stimulatingly by placing New Delhi’s search for strategic autonomy in a milieu in which India is at “the epicentre of four collapsed empires” – Qing, Ottoman, British and Soviet, and “trapped between four lines” – Durand, McMahon, Line of Control, and Line of Actual Control, leading to its “strategic confinement”. This is a stunningly original interpretation that his chapters on the 1947, 1962, 1965, and 1971 conflicts and, what Jaswant calls “the destructive decades” of Indira Gandhi’s rule — narratives stitched together from published sources, partially support.

Ironically, it is in his consideration of the BJP coalition government’s record that he founders. If Jaswant had disclosed what really transpired at the apex level of government with respect to the Kargil border war, hijacking of Flight IC 814 to Kandahar, attack on Parliament, and Operation Parakram, and had he deconstructed the eventual decisions in terms of bureaucratic politics and the storied clashes he had on policy content and choices with Mishra, who dominated the Prime Minister’s Office (and the rest of the government), it would have fleshed out history of that period and shone a light on the dark and personalized pathways by which India’s national security policies actually get made. May be he will dilate on these aspects in his next book.

For the reader, however, the mystery deepens on many counts. How and why was the Indian Airlines plane allowed to take-off from Amritsar when – and this Jaswant doesn’t mention — the previous year a multi-agency exercise (“Sour Grapes”) was practised to prevent such hijacking by simply moving a large truck in front of the plane with commando action to follow? Jaswant’s describing his telephonic order to not “let the f****g aircraft leave” doesn’t help, because it left anyway. Or why an immediate punitive retaliatory air strike on terrorist training camps and supply depots in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in response to the attack on Parliament was discarded in favour of the largely futile and wasteful “general mobilization” for war that relied on US pressure to have effect?

Jaswant seems inconsistent on some issues. For instance, he excoriates policy crafted under public pressure but justifies negotiations with the hijackers undertaken chiefly because of the hysterical demonstrations under television glare outside 7, Race Course Road; and pleads for “restraint as a strategic asset” (with respect to Pakistan-assisted terrorist actions) without defining the limits of restraint. He has surprising things to say on nuclear matters, among them, that the 1998 N-tests were “against nuclear apartheid” (rather than to beat the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty deadline and achieve deterrence with China), tactical nuclear weapons are “illogical”, and that “a formally adopted nuclear doctrine” is absent. His oft-used metaphor of the subcontinental states emerging from the “same womb” collides with his belief that nuclear weapons use between India and Pakistan is possible, when the fact is that owing precisely to the organic links between these societies a war of annihilation was not politically feasible in the past using conventional military means; so, how likely is it in the future with nuclear weapons? With his seemingly anti-nuclear slant, moreover, he courts danger of becoming a poster boy for the nuclear Never-Never Land!

Even so, this book delves into difficult issues of war and peace, and spawns a new geostrategic perspective on Indian policy imperatives, testifying to Jaswant Singh’s intellectual fecundity and capacity for high-value forays into the over-wrought world of national security.

Posted in Afghanistan, Asian geopolitics, Central Asia, China, China military, civil-military relations, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, Terrorism, United States, US. | Leave a comment

General Ballistics

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Book Review: General V.K. Singh with Kunal Verma, Courage and Conviction: An Autobiography [New Delhi: Aleph Book Co., 2013], 364 pages.
Published in ‘India Today’, December 18, 2013
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Jawaharlal Nehru with great perspicacity noted in 1948 that accepting the criterion of seniority-cum-merit in military promotions would quickly lead to seniority elbowing out merit. Alas, Nehru’s thinking didn’t take root. India, as a consequence, has suffered from its armed services being time and again hoist with Chiefs of Staff of indifferent quality.

It is seniority in service marked by the birthdate, and it’s manipulation by motivated seniors, which was at the heart of the “look down” policy initiated by the army chief General J.J. Singh in 2005, and pushed by his successor Deepak Kapoor, that led to the concept alien to the Indian Army of a “planned line of succession” victimizing General Vijay Kumar Singh. In his autobiography, one would have expected Singh to rant against those who did him in. Surprisingly, his memoir is free of bile and vituperation. He pleads his case, of course, but soberly about the age-issue ending up unfairly truncating his tenure as COAS. Singh doesn’t, however, explain why, after asking the Courts to decide whether the school-leaving certificate kept by the Adjutant-General’s Office is, as statutorily mandated, the decisive proof of an officer’s birthdate, and not some document in the Military Secretary’s keeping, he accepted a mere wordy salve for his honour as restitution, thereby upending his principled stand.

Many autobiographies are unreadable because much is sought to be made out of little. General Singh’s book, however, is a genuinely good read, perhaps because the bulk of it is an engaging account of army activity in peacetime, near-wars, and in war (Bangladesh, IPKF operations, ‘Blue Star’, Kargil, Op Parakram) as seen from a fighting unit (2 Rajput)’s unique perspective. Among other things, it details a series of snafus and fiascos of one kind or another, such as operations (IPKF, Blue Star) being mounted without updated maps; differentiates commanders who trusted their instincts, were respectful of the regimental tartib, earned the loyalty of the jawan, and gained success, and others who were sticklers for procedure and hindered operational outcomes. It also reveals the high cost imposed on the soldiery by blustery show-offs (K. Sundarji) and shrinking violets (Arun Vaidya), who as chiefs landed the army in heaps of trouble (IPKF & Blue Star, and Blue Star, respectively).

The writing, always easy, is informative about army life, often turning insightful and, because relayed with a straight face, even hilarious. Thus, a salt-of-the-earth jawan, for instance, after a briefing on “fear” and “panic”, explained the difference to Singh thus: the former is “dar” felt naturally by anyone going into action, and the latter is something senior officers feel in similar circumstances! Or, his exchange with officers of an armoured regiment whose use of flamboyant terms seem detached from their practical import. Requested by Singh, as Commander II Corps, to explain during a sand model exercise what the term “bouncing an obstacle” actually meant, the CO replied: “Err…sir, we’ll bounce them”. Asked to clarify this remark, a squadron commander added helpfully, “Umm, bounce, sir, means we’ll bounce them…”!

The General reserves his regrets for the widespread deterioration of morals leading to scams and scandals in the military, and his pith for the IAS (and Defence Finance) officials who, as in the rest of the government, routinely gum up the works in the Ministry of Defence (MOD). The Defence Minister, he charges, is worked over by the babus in the manner master puppeteers do the rag dolls they handle, exploiting the latter’s pet-peeves (in the case of A.K. Antony, corruption!) to stymie military demands and initiatives. More significantly, Singh rips the cover off “the greatest con” job perpetrated every year by the MOD officialdom on behalf of the government. It relates to the prevention by procedural means of the large capital defence budgets from being actually spent by the military because the unused monies are required to fund the wasteful, corruption-promoting, but vote-getting populist schemes (NREGS, food and energy subsidies).

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Bangladesh, civil-military relations, India's Pakistan Policy, Indian Army, Indian Politics, Military Acquisitions, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Sri Lanka | Leave a comment

AAP ka BJP!

Posted on December 9, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

The best thing would have been for BJP to win 36 seats in Delhi and for AAP to be a vigilant opposition. It would have compelled BJP to try and install a good e-governance system they have promised in double good time to showcase to the people of the country the things they would do once in power at the Center post 2014 general elections. It would have drawn voter support by the millions and entrenched BJP as the party of government for at least the first half of the 21st Century in the manner the Congress Party was in the latter half of the last Century.

It would be best for BJP not to be tempted into securing a split in the elected 8-member Congress MLA group — something Kejriwal & Company of AAP would devoutly wish to happen. Because then AAP will have a double-barreled gun at the heads of the two main national parties as being in cahoots when the general election campaign comes round soon enough.

Apparently, the Dr Harshvardhan-led BJP MLAs understand the pitfalls of such an approach and are simply not bidding for power, forcing the Lt Governor of Delhi, Jung, to run a hopefully politically neutral President’s rule regime for the next six months, by when a re-election would be called in the capital region to coincide with the national elections that cannot be held any later than May 2014 and save additional expenses to the state.

AAP is a political phenomenon alright — but its ambitions of doing in India at-large what it was able to pull off in Delhi may be to take on a near impossible task. Delhi is a territorially compact and, therefore, electorally manageable proposition. The vast expanse of country outside it may not be as readily amenable to AAP’s charms. In any case, there isn’t the time needed for AAP — even though they seem to have a skeletal active party structure at least in the large urban concentrations. The difference though is that the motivated middle class in the capital is a pampered lot with time and resources on its hands and keen to hang on to the goodies doled out by the state — like the significant cut in electricity rates Kejriwal has promised; whence the massive volunteer effort on Kejriwal’s behalf. The same situation doesn’t obtain elsewhere making the mounting and sustaining of a like country-wide operation very difficult. Even so, there’s little doubt the AAPis have spawned fear in the heart of the traditional politicians who until now were confident in their machinations to milk the system for all it was worth, to benefit disproportionately from it and, opportunity arising, to raid the public till by various means. Such politicians and politics would understandably be completely averse to the processes of transparency in government that Kejriwal extolls and AAP says it represents.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Indian Politics, Internal Security | Leave a comment

$2 Billion and counting…

Posted on December 3, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Documents by Agusta-Westland in an Italian court dealing with IAF’s scam deal for the AW 100 helicopter for VVIP use, mention “the Family” in political India which had to be paid off for the deal to go through. The talk of the head of the numero uno ruling dynasty raking in the monies — a big portion of nearly every deal GOI has been involved in since Manmohan Singh was hoisted into power in 2004, including all the scams starting with the Commonwealth Games scandals, is unabating. If there’s so much smoke surely there’s fire somewhere.

The Huffington Post’s compilation of a list of the world’s richest leaders on Monday, Dec 2, 2013 seemed to bolster this suspicion of unconstrained corruption, as featured in it was the President of the Congress Party Sonia Gandhi in the $2 Billion category — richer by some $600 Million than the Queen of England, Liz-II! It drew a tart comment that this denotes India’s “progress”! Interestingly, a day later (i.e., on Dec 3, 2013) the H-Post removed Sonia G’s name from that List, saying this info was taken from a third party source and was not verifiable. But then most of the other persons listed did not/have not publicly owned up to such wealth either. So, what’s different about Sonia G?

In any case, of the 203 comments on this story in the H-Post, see — http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/29/richest-world-leaders_n_4178514.html — many reacted to Sonia G’s name in the List with a “Hey, tell us something new”!-attitude, most of them speculating that the name removal was because of (1) GOI pressure, (2) H-Post being paid off to remove the name, and/or (3) a powerful lobby in New Delhi.

Posted in Indian Politics, Military Acquisitions, South Asia | 3 Comments

ADZ violations — Chinese and Indian reactions

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Most countries announce their Air Defence Zones (ADZs).The idea being to demarcate the air space as an early warning system. Constant surveillance over the zone pinpoints intruder aircraft on possibly suspicious missions. If well inside the ADZ, fighter aircraft are scrambled and the intruding aircraft intercepted and either politely escorted to outside the Zone or forced down for interrogation of its pilots and even examination of the aircraft and its on-board “spying” technologies.

On one such mission in April 2001, a US EP-3 elint aircraft off Hainan Island coast was engaged by two PLAAF J-8 IIs, with one of the latter trying perhaps to force the issue flew too close to the US plane had a glancing collision. The Chinese fighter went down with the pilot, the damaged US EP-3 was forced down on Hainan, the crew was held for several days, and the plane for many weeks during which time the Chinese scrutinized and perhaps even disassembled the communications eveasdropping technologies before the plane was returned AFTER the US had issued an aopology.

Fast forward some 12 years, PRC declares an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) Nov 23. Two days later, US B-52 bbrs make a deliberate run into the ADIZ, followed by Japanese and South Koreab airforce combat aircraft the next day. Whereupon Beijing now deploys combat aircraft for active patrolling and, instead of challenging PRC action, Obama Admin quietly advises American airlines to comply with the Chinese ADIZ requirements, to avoid untoward incidents. [See the NYT story at http://nyti.ms/1exqRJH ] So much for Washington sticking up for Asian security interests against China!

The more important thing is the Chinese reaction to the intruding surveillance aircraft in 2001 and its strong response to the wilful violation of its ADIZ by military aircraft of the US and its prime Asian allies. What a contrast to India and IAF’s passivity in the face of provocative and routine buzzing by elint and nuclear sensor-laden US aircraft close-buzzing the Kudankulum and the Kalpakkam complex. India and IAF have done nothing. But then Manmohan Singh regime has made it a habit to do nothing, lest an incident is precipitated. Why should anyone take India seriously?

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China military, civil-military relations, Cyber & Space, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, Indian Air Force, South Asia, United States, US., Western militaries | 4 Comments