Politicising an apolitical military

Posted on September 24, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

A day apart, there were two contrasting views about the “apolitical” Indian military. Yesterday Lt Col CR Sundar, President Tamil Nadu BJP ExServicemens’ (ESM) Cell, emailed me a note sent off to others well in which he said, that ex-Servicemen, to quote him “should shed the veneer of being apolitical and take to directly involving ourselves in politics” and that BJP is deserving of their consideration because “of their nationalistic outlook, candour, integrity of showing equal concern to all religions and their unfailing support for the Indian Armed Forces.” His comment was apropos ex-Army Chief General VK Singh sharing the dais with Narendra Modi at an ex-Servicemen’s rally in Rewari, Haryana, Sept 15 called to demand “one rank, one pension”.

Then Col Sundar said “Monetary benefit is not everything” and that ESM should get involved in grassroots politics and stand for elections panchayat-level up. “Lawmakers such as MLAs and MPs don’t just happen”, writes the colonel. “Today’s councilor is tomorrow’s MLA. Today’s MLA is tomorrow’s MP. Only if we cultivate the grass root today can we have enough lawmakers to be able to change the laws where required and better enforce those that are existing.” The senior retired officers, he concludes, are simply “not smart enough to comprehend the possibilities.”

This morning in a Times of India op/ed former CNS Admiral Arun Prakash (Retd) conceded the growing disrespect shown the Indian military as reflected in its “leadership [being] publicly excoriated and humiliated with regularity and snidely accused of disloyalty, by proxy, through media” for which he blamed the political class and especially the Defence Ministry bureaucracy. He, however, suggested that ESM keep off involvement in electoral politics because owing to their “umbilical” links to their respective services they may, he feared, end up politicizing the military “by osmosis”.

To better address ESM grievances and avoid these from being presumably parlayed into participation in active politics, the Admiral recommended that the Department of Ex-Servicemen’s welfare in MOD be headed by a retired senior officer and manned by ex-military personnel, which is an excellent solution.

But ADM Prakash avoided the basic theme underlying Colonel Sundar’s note and something that few people have seriously considered: Should ESM from a voluntary citizen army be content with merely voting for political parties of their choice and canvassing solely for additional monetary benefits in their retirement package, or should they as citizens get squarely into electoral politics and, hopefully, by a process of reverse-osmosis, clean up the stinking rat-hole that is Indian politics today? It is, of course, possible, even likely that former soldiers, sailors and airmen once in will succumb to the temptations and the lure of easy money available to persons in political posts. But, hearteningly, the record so far is of upright ESM being upright politicians! Consider the likes of Major General BK Khanduri, former Roads and Transport Minister in Vajpayee’s cabinet and later CM of Uttaranchal Pradesh. There was not remotely a taint of wrongdoing against his name, and did he not perform far better than cradle-to-death professional politicians? The upright and no-nonsense ADM Vishnu Bhagwat (Retd.) likewise got involved in Janata Party politics in his native Bihar.

The point to make is something larger. The ESM can no longer be on the sidelines and complain like everybody else that the current lot of corrupt and venal politicians is running India into the ground and ruining what remains of its prospects. They can choose to campaign for more than some extra rupees in their bank accounts at month-end by way of retirement dues; they can work to change the system from the inside rather than looking in and getting appalled by what they see by doing nothing about it.

An ‘apolitical’ military is a fine thing and so it should remain. But the pathological fear of the Indian military among the Indian political class and bureaucracy is unwarranted. This fear was institutionally seeded by Jawaharlal Nehru who apprehended the virus of army coups d’etat staged — the first time in Pakistan by General Ayub Khan in 1958, infecting the Indian military. Some fifty years later that apprehension ought to have been moderated by the political class, but it hasn’t been.

The fact is India could do with many more Khanduris and Bhagwats at the central level, and more ESM at the state, town, and village government levels, who by dint of character and inflexible values begin cleansing the system and righting the ship of state that is beginning to take a lot of water.

Posted in civil-military relations, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia | Leave a comment

Manmohan agenda to please USA

Posted on September 20, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Prime minister Manmohan Singh canvassed furiously for almost a year for another state visit and a meeting with the US president. It is revealing that the Barack Obama administration initially showed little interest, not convinced that it needed to expend political capital hosting a head of an Indian government on its way out. But Singh’s insistence on a valedictory trip was persuasive because of the gifts he promised Washington.

Singh’s first trip as PM to Washington in July 2005 rode on the George W Bush regime’s geostrategic assessment of India’s importance in the unfolding strategic scene in Asia and America’s geopolitical desire to cultivate India as part of a hedging strategy against China. This was a situation tailor-made for New Delhi to extract an equitable deal in terms of easing US-led restrictions on commerce in high-technology and nuclear goods. Instead, it was Washington, exploiting the pronounced Indian desire for a rapprochement at any cost with the US, which imposed conditions on a strategically dim-witted Manmohan Singh dispensation resulting in extraordinary concessions as part of the nuclear deal. The bulk of the dual-use natural uranium-fuelled civilian Indian reactors were thus pushed into the International Atomic Energy Agency nuclear safeguards net, and continuing with the test moratorium has ensured the flawed fusion weapon design cannot be rectified. India’s claim of high-yield thermonuclear weapons status in the event is a hoax. But it achieved for the US, temporarily at least, its long-standing non-proliferation goal of curbing India’s nuclear capability. However, the US hasn’t delivered on the quo for the Indian quid: India does not enjoy the “rights and privileges” of a “nuclear weapon state” promised in the July 8, 2005, Bush-Manmohan Singh Joint Statement, and has not gained entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group, but New Delhi hasn’t complained.

Faced, moreover, with high deficit and unemployment at home, Washington has turned the Indo-US “strategic partnership” into an essentially transactional relationship with the nuclear deal being used to bully and badger New Delhi into buying high-value American goods. Worse, Obama has encouraged punitive legislative initiatives at home against outsourcing by American companies to India — even coining the pejorative “Bangalored” for it — and to limit H-1B visas to Indian software engineers, which will hurt the Indian information technology sector — one of the few still bright spots in the country’s otherwise bleak exports picture. Even the terrorism-related intelligence sharing has been turned into a mostly one-way street, with India benefitting little from it.

Any other prime minister faced with such evidence of bad faith would have been wary of dealing with Washington.But not our Manmohan Singh! He seems happy to be in a play scripted by Obama. Among the gifts he will carry to the US are (1) a “commercial contract” to buy Toshiba-Westinghouse AP 1000 enriched uranium-fuelled reactors, with the Indian monies reviving a comatose US nuclear industry even as the indigenous advanced pressurised heavy water reactor programme is starved of funds, (2) an undertaking, contrary to a cabinet decision, to replace cheap refrigerants used by Indian industry and military with expensive eco-friendly refrigerants that while ensuring windfall profits for a few US companies holding the patents will undercut the consensus agreement reached at the climate summits that Western countries will subsidise green technology in developing states, and (3) contracts for another $5 billion worth of military hardware (15 Chinook heavy lift helicopters, six additional C-130J medium-lift transport planes, 22 Apache Longbow attack helicopters, and 145 M-777 light howitzers) on top of defence deals of over $8 billion already in the bag.

It isn’t clear just how any ruse to obtain American reactors, in whatever manner Section 17 of the Indian Nuclear Civil Liability Act 2010 is interpreted, can empower the Nuclear Power Corporation to limit the liability of the supplier in case of nuclear accidents owing to faulty technology, which the Indian law expressly bars. Surely, an executive order can’t overturn Indian law or legitimate, via the backdoor, adherence to the Convention on Supplemental Compensation limiting liability to $300 million, as demanded by Washington. Any such deal, therefore, is headed for the Indian courts where it will be voided. But Manmohan Singh cares less — he won’t be there to face the consequences of the mess he has created.

As regards the newfangled refrigerants, what’s galling is the PM took this decision and signed the G-20 summit communiqué containing the stratagem to undermine the Copenhagen Summit agreement despite MEA’s warning that, besides hurting the Indian military forces, such a move would lessen pressures on the US to reduce carbon emissions. Indeed, it mirrors the manner in which Singh signed the July 5, 2005, Joint Statement with Bush that was opposed by Dr Anil Kakodkar, then chairman, atomic energy commission. For Singh, his trips to the US seem to be occasions to sell India short.

The Prime Minister’s solicitousness towards America may have many reasons, but two spring to mind. Firstly, as he himself revealed in his statement on the coal scam in the Rajya Sabha, the recent G-20 summit in St Petersburg and the like is where he is accorded respect as an economist and leader which he doesn’t get at home. The US has endowed his participation in such prestigious forums, moreover, with value less because of Manmohan Singh’s eloquence or in expectation of any nuggets of economic wisdom he might let drop — after all president Bush only half-jokingly confessed he couldn’t understand a word the Indian PM said to him in all their meetings! — but because Singh has served the US interests well.

This brings us to the second, more salient reason: Because no Indian government since 1947 has bothered comprehensively to articulate and grade India’s national interests, Singh has treated it as a floating value, and felt free to adopt Washington’s metrics to define India’s interests on critical issues. This policy stance, accompanied by American flattery and high-gloss diplomatic frippery Washington excels in designed to turn any Third World leader’s head, is something Singh apparently finds irresistible.

(Published in the ‘New Indian Express’, Friday, Sept 20, 2013 at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/Manmohan-agenda-to-please-US/2013/09/20/article1792977.ece

Posted in Asian geopolitics, disarmament, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian ecobomic situation, Military Acquisitions, nonproliferation, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Terrorism, United States, US., Weapons | 4 Comments

A-5’s ballistic apogee

Posted on September 17, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

In the wake of the second Agni-5 launch, DRDO chief Avinash Chander confidently averred that India had an ICBM capability. On what basis did he assert this? Experts see it this way: the first stage fired for 90 seconds, getting the missile to 40 kms, the second stage separated at the 155 second stage, getting the A-5 to 110 kms altitude, and the third stage separated after firing for the next approx 135 seconds to reach the missile into space and outside of the earth’s pull, with the built-up momentum taking the A-5 to its ballistic apogee of around 600 kms, and achieving reentry speed of around 6-7 kms per second. Such an altitude was required to depress its 8,000 km lateral range to around 5,500 kms, and is commonly reached by ICBMs, such as the Russian Topol-M, flying depressed trajectories.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Cyber & Space, Defence Industry, DRDO, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Missiles, russian military, South Asia | 3 Comments

Great going A-5!

Posted on September 15, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Avinash Chander, DRDO chief and former head of ASL, Hyderabad, pronounced 2nd test firing of Agni-5 a success. He didn’t elaborate. But he must be particularly happy with several aspects. Firstly, with how well the second stage, 2 m dia composite motor functioned. Two, how nicely the GOC (guidance on chip) once again permitted the missile to attain 10 meter CEP. And most of all, as was pointed out by someone who noticed it in the first launch and which could possibly be seen when the video is released of the 2nd launch, the very rapid climb rate of the missile — characteristic of a submarine-launched missile or an anti-missile defence missile (!!!). It suggests a new propellant with higher specific impulse or, alternately, greater pressure generated in the chamber and, therefore, newer frame design. Going good, A-5!

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Defence Industry, DRDO, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, South Asia, Weapons | 2 Comments

Thumbs up for A-5

Posted on September 14, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Agni-5 IRBM is expected to be fired a second time tomorrow from Wheeler on a depressed trajectory into the Indian Ocean. There are some important issues to consider about this missile. While it’ll eventually be an all-composite (kevlar) system, the unit to be launched Sunday, Sept 15, retains an all-steel first stage including rocket motor, with the second stage, casing, motor and all being composite. While head of DRDO, Avinash Chander, has talked of canisterizing Agnis, including Agni-5, this second launch will be a straight-up launch to collect more data on various aspects of the missile system in flight and to be reassured that the very successful first launch in April-2012 was not a fluke! Moreover, while ASL, Hyderabad, has a lots of experience with the 1 metre dia missile system (on Agni-2 & 3), A-5 is 2 metre dia missile configured to reach 8,000 kms and carry 3-7 MIRVed warheads to extend its reach to ICBM range. Thumbs up for A-5!

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Defence Industry, DRDO, Great Power imperatives, Indian Ocean, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, South Asia | 10 Comments

Obama — saving face

Posted on September 10, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

After all the heightened drama,war noises, and threatening talk emanating for the last several weeks from Washington of mounting punitive attacks on Syria for Damascus’ alleged úse of chemical weapons (CWs), President Obama seems all set to accept a so-called compromise engineered by Moscow in cahoots with Bashar al-Assad whereby the Syrian govt will surrender its stock of CWs. This is about as plain a face-saving ruse as one can invent when finding oneself, as Obama did, in an impossible political situation. The American people by a decisive majority (59%) have said they do not accept even proven CW-use as provocation for war against Syria. Following the public’s mood, the White House discovered that the US Congress too had stiffened in opposition, and not all the political canvassing and badgering has moved both these sets of opinions an iota. Obama may have saved his face but he is, as a consequence, much reduced. Indeed, many American political pundits have even ventured that this political defeat means the beginning of the phase of Obama’s tenure in office as a lame duck president. And he still has another four years to go!

The fact is the success in hunting down and killing Osama bin Laden apparently filled the US President elected the first time around on an anti-war plank with visions of himself as a great commander-in-chief who relies on instinct to achieve military glory. Except, the American people have had enough of wars on the thinnest of pretexts and will not anymore countenance deployment of the US military to swat flies that turn out to be a nest of gnats. The failures in fighting the al-Qaida-Taliban in Afghanistan and assorted sunni and shia outfits in Iraq has, perhaps, cured the US of believing that there are any more such things as “small wars”. “Small wars” in the Philippines and in the Caribbean in early 20th Century made the reputations of presidents such as Teddy Roosevelt. In initiating similar adventures George W Bush departed a diminished president and Obama is on track for a similar denouement, if he doesn’t mend his ways.

Moreover, assuming there was a popular will for another war, this time in Syria, which could have gotten out of hand with Russian missile destroyers and Russian personnel manning the S-300/S-400 anti-aircraft batteries to blunt the first wave of the expected USAF attack sorties, and the Chinese flotilla of three missile destroyers also in the mix, apart from Britain and France, a reluctant set of NATO allies, and no great support elsewhere for any aggressive American action, where is the money to prosecute the operations? A minimum of a billion dollars a month for the Syrian theatre at a time of deep defence budgetary cuts makes for daunting circumstances. It persuaded Leaders from Obama’s own Democratic Party to counsel caution. Ironic isn’t it that in the event the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, showed Obama the way out?

So, in the wake of all this, it is status quo ante — Bashar Assad stays on in Damascus with renewed Russian military support. Israel which had hoped to ride on Obama’s desire for war by launching missile strikes on Syrian targets, has perforce to back down. And the Syrian rebel army is left, as they should have expected, to the tender mercies of Assad’s forces with tepid materiel assistance trickling in but not enough to upset the military equation. The rebels may still fight on but with progressively bleaker prospects.

Posted in Afghanistan, Asian geopolitics, China military, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, guerilla warfare, Missiles, Russia, russian assistance, russian military, United States, US., Weapons, West Asia, Western militaries | 4 Comments

Zubin and his Childish enthusiasms

Posted on September 8, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Zubin Mehta, conductor of perhaps the finest orchestra in the world, the Berlin Philharmonic, is happy he made music to bring solace to the people of Kashmir. Had he followed up with the kind of reserve he maintained in the run up to the Srinagar event, he’d have been lauded for his stress on the healing qualities of great Western music rendered by top grade musicians. But he had to open his mouth and spoil the effect. There’s something childishly silly about Mehta’s ventilating his thoughts, among which was the nugget that Article 370 has been a boon and ought to be retained in perpetuity because as he said “can you imagine” what all the settlers from elsewhere in India would have done to the beautiful surroundings of the Valley had 370 not been there to prevent just such a catastrophe?!

Obviously, Mehta, who has spent most of his life outside the country, mostly in salubrious climes, from his personal perspective, considers aesthetics more important than the national interest or the fact of this offending Article in the Constitution turning the Kashmir dispute into a suppurating wound that has become septic after 60-odd years of obvious non-treatment. What is desperately needed is ridding the Constitution off this bothersome provision. May be Zubin saw how his home city of Mumbai has been converted into a vast and expanding slum with shanties and lean-to colonies occupying every spare bit of space in that island city — populated by precisely the kind of outsiders all over, including from the Maharashtra countryside, he does not wish to see flooding into Kashmir — the “Switzerland of Asia”.

But what does Mehta care that Art 370 keeps the dispute with Pakistan simmering and the status of this province within the Union distinct and separate, providing legal license to certain natives of Kashmir to keep their agitation going, even as the people of the Valley survive on handouts from the rest of the Indian people who financially support their “separateness”. The largest quantum of subsidies transferred by the Centre to any Indian state is Kashmir.

The more troubling question is the Motivation of the German Govt to finance this little cultural do amidst the beauty of the Shalimar Gardens in Srinagar. Indeed, before approving of any such event, did the MEA at all wonder about the purpose of it? Did somebody in that Ministry not consider the fact that allowing such an affair would not so much put a stamp of international approval on the relative peace prevailing in Kashmir at the present time as confirm Kashmir’s disputed status and its standing as an issue that can spark conflict between India and Pakistan? Are none of the MEA officials aware of the interest and the effort of the West European “do gooder” states — UK, France, and Germany, to try and slyly push for international mediation on Kashmir?

What Kashmir needs is not just expeditious abrogation of Article 370 but grants of lands all along the LOC to ex-Indian Army soldiers on the condition that the title to these pieces of strategic real estate can only be sold and ownership transferred to other ex-military men. This will, as I have argued in my writings, create a defensible buffer zone preventing the crossovers by terrorists, so-called “azadi”-seekers, and Islamist extremists from POK. It will once and for all put closure on the Kashmir dispute with the Pakistanis having their slice of Kashmir. Remarkably, GOI/MEA these days does not even mention POK as being disputed territory, which only leads the International public to believe that what’s being contested is only Indian Kashmir. More evidence of MEA being on the ball!

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, guerilla warfare, India's Pakistan Policy, Indian Army, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Terrorism | 5 Comments

Obama’s potentially appalling mistake

Posted on September 6, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

The US learns nothing from its wars, not from all the military disasters it set in train in this millennium — Afghanistan and Iraq that did little else but prepare the ground for the Islamist radical take-over. Yes, Saddam Hussain was a bloodthirsty tyrant but Washington supplied him with the chemical weapons he used against Iran in the decade-long war in the 1980s, and against his own Kurdish population. But it was Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran Washington wanted to hurt then by any and all means, including CWs. In this context, Obama’s first charging Bashar al-Assad with CW use and then, on the basis of this charge mounting a punitive operation, is a bit rich, especially because the irrefutable evidence the US says it has collected, has not been disseminated to an international public, which action would have improved Obama’s creds. The only countries jumping onto the American war bandwagon are, predictably, France and the Britain, who are reduced to being hangers-on in the new century. So countries of West Asia will have to brace for another eruption of violence with the Syrian rebel army now leaning on direct help from the US. It is another matter, that this won’t be enough to displace Assad in Damascus. Worse, is the likelihood that the generally secular rebel forces, with the military situation tilted against them, will in time welcome all the armed and motivated Islamist goons from all over to enlarge their fighting ranks and, soon enough, the rebel army will distinguish itself from the Assad regime because of its al-Qaida precepts and philosophy. Lo and behold, actions against Damascus will spur al-Qaida revival. The denseness of the American policymakers is simply appalling. The irony is that, while the initial phase of drone and Tomahawk cruise missile attacks, and stealth aircraft recce runs is underway, the US armed forces, who are always up for a scuffle with a manifestly weaker foe, are wary of intervening in another scrap that could blow up in the American faces. So, it is Obama, twice elected on an anti-war agenda, then who will be driving the US into another conflict, with what consequences can only be speculated.

In this mess, Russia is weighing in militarily on the side of Assad. One of the warships deployed by Moscow in the Mediterranean is reportedly the Moskva helicopter carrier. Not to be left behind, China is doing its two yuans worth to muddy the waters by sending in a small flotilla offshore of the Levant. What these PLAN vessels will be doing mucking around those waters is hard to fathom, except perhaps to snoop around, pick up operational radar frequencies, stuff like that and generally act as a would-be great power poking its snout in other people’s business without the least chance of making an impact.

This analyst for one hopes Chinese ships get in harm’s way, get shot up, and the PLAN flotilla gets involved in an inadvertent firefight with the USAF and the US Mediterranean Fleet, and otherwise gets its tail in the wringer.

Posted in Afghanistan, Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Cyber & Space, Defence Industry, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, guerilla warfare, Russia, russian military, Terrorism, United States, US., West Asia, Western militaries | 6 Comments

Alternative to “default option”

Posted on September 6, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Rahul Gandhi, vice-president of the Congress party and its presumptive prime ministerial candidate should his mummy, Sonia, deem the situation ripe for his elevation (because Manmohan Singh is history — “a good man who turned out to be a good-for-nothing man” in Arun Shourie’s memorable words), called his party the voters’ “default option”. Default, by definition, implies failure of an alternative. In the context of the looming general elections, it means that if the Bharatiya Janata Party does not secure a “critical mass” of at least 185 seats in the Lok Sabha, smaller parties would choose once again to rally to the Congress party’s moth-eaten standard, and help it to continue with its policies that have left the country diminished and derelict.

Congress party’s optimism may not be warranted, however, because Prakash Karat has clarified that under no circumstances would the Left Front, still chafing from Manmohan Singh’s 2008 “betrayal” on the nuclear deal with the United States, side with Sonia Congress. It will stoke Mulayam Singh’s PM ambitions; after all his Yadav family party has all along sustained its samajwadi (socialist) pretensions by rubbing up against the Communist parties for a semblance of ideological respectability. But Mulayam has hurt his bonafides by enabling the Congress party to survive in office for nine long years. He cannot afford to botch up his record further by signalling in any way the likelihood of SP propping up a Sonia Congress-led future dispensation, and still expect the Left Front to help hoist him into 7, Race Course Road. In this competition for support of the Left parties in parliament, Mulayam and Sonia Congress are rivals.

With a reviving BJP in Uttar Pradesh, moreover, the coalition Mayawati had stitched together is falling apart with the Brahmin and Muslim voters she had attracted gravitating towards the BJP and Mulayam’s Samajwadi Party (SP) respectively. The underway “polarisation” of the electorate, precipitated principally by SP’s over-the-top strategy of wooing Muslim voters, is reflected in the SP member of parliament Kamal Farooqui’s astonishing charge that the recent arrest of the Indian Mujahideen founder Yasin Bhatkal was because he was Muslim and not a terrorist mastermind. A polarised electorate has, for the duration of the next general elections season, thus become irreversible. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Ayodhya yatra fiasco, in this context, was a minor distraction, successful only in terms of alerting the majority community to the over-tilt in the approaches of the SP and Congress. This leaves Mayawati with her backward caste (BC) support base, part of which may be drawn to Narendra Modi’s BC roots burnished by his proven administrative acumen and political success. For reasons of UP politics, moreover, Mayawati may be pushed, post-elections, towards tying up with BJP.

These political developments have brightened BJP’s prospects, except for the habit of some of the current party leaders to score self goals and to try and trip up the only worthwhile leader with the chance to make good, the Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi. Many of them may be experienced in the ways of parliament, but simply do not have the mass pull or reach and, more significantly, the ability and the rhetorical wherewithal to connect with the people in the elemental sort of way that Modi effortlessly does. The Congress party’s stratagem of using Gujarat Police DIG DG Vanzara’s resignation letter to implicate Modi in the “fake encounter” case is shoddier still, considering it has rendered the Intelligence Bureau’s modus operandi suspect and made fighting the terrorist menace hostage to its political objective of derailing Modi, whose candidature it fears.

The fact is BJP without Modi helming it seems bereft of new thoughts and policy ideas. Indeed, the parliamentary debates on the food security and land acquisition bills showed up BJP as Congress lite. If institutionalised access to food for the poor, for instance, was deemed a political imperative then it was incumbent on the parliamentary BJP leaders to have fleshed out the party’s own food security programme based on its Chhattisgarh model, worked out the financial liability aspects at least in skeletal terms, and mounted a sustained public campaign on its behalf in the months leading up to the monsoon session of parliament. It would have highlighted the hollowness of the Congress policy of merely bestowing the “right to food” without explaining just what quantum of financial resources would be necessary, how these would be mustered, and the manner in which the central government would help the states defray the massive expense. By forcing the ruling party to bend to the contours of its more practicable Chhattisgarh model-motivated programme, BJP could have legitimately claimed the laurels for the ensuing legislation, and enabled it to turn this issue into electoral gold, rather than reducing chief minister Raman Singh’s flagship Chhattisgarh scheme to a mere debating point.

Surely, it is the main opposition party’s duty to anticipate the agenda of the treasury benches and provide the people with alternative solutions on issues of national import and impact. This, unfortunately, BJP did not do. The irony of the absent right-wing policy alternative to the Congress’s usual unviable nanny-state populist spendthrift ideas is that a manifestly more thoughtful but politically far weaker Swatantra Party led by C R Rajagopalachari provided much richer fare by way of policy choices and political contestation to Nehru in the Fifties as did Piloo Mody to Indira Gandhi in the Sixties.

Narendra Modi’s outlining his “India First” philosophy predicated on economic growth and less government, less corruption but more efficient and effective administration to deliver good governance can be juxtaposed against Rahul Gandhi’s “celebrating” the “victory” offered by the land acquisitions bill to Odisha tribals opposing bauxite and iron ore mining. The contrast between Modi’s and Rahul’s visions, between prosperity spurred by opening up opportunities for economic growth, and meagre returns to a benighted people from a calculated policy of handouts to keep them dependent on mai-baap sarkar cannot be starker. Indians confront the clearest electoral choice since Independence.

[Published in the New Indian Express, Friday, September 6, 2013 at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/Alternative-to-default-option/2013/09/06/article1769817.ece

Posted in Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Politics, Internal Security, South Asia | 2 Comments

Naivete in extremis

Posted on September 5, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

The naivete of Indian diplomats never ceases to amaze! A one-time diplomat and now adviser to Nitish Kumar, Pavan Verma, on a TV panel discussion charged Amit Shah and, by extension, Narendra Modi, with “proactively” violating the Constitutional rights of suspected terrorists shot in so-called fake encounters in Gujarat with their “proactive counter-terrorism” actions! Left to the likes of Verma, Yasin Bhatkal would no doubt be let off after reading him an Indian version of the American “Miranda rights”! And this Verma fellow made a career of the cynical business of diplomacy? Good lord!

By this reckoning, Indira Gandhi, her cabinet ministers, and party appointees as chief minister, Punjab, should be held directly culpable for the sustained, ruthless, and bloodyminded extra-legal elimination with extreme prejudice of Khalistanis and would-be Khalistanis in the early 1980s, and the carte blanche given DG, KPS Gill, and his extraordinarily brave and courageous subordinates such as Ajit Singh Bhullar, SSP, Tarn Tarn District, who killed himself when having eased the border state from the grip of terrorists, he was hounded by motivated human rights activists after peace returned to the state, even as the Congress Party govts in Punjab and in New Delhi cravenly looked the other way. [All this is brought out by my good friend, NV Subramanian, in his latest piece “Dirty tricks” accessible at http://www.newsinsight.net/Dirtytricks.aspx#page-page-1. Do look it up.]

In any case, what does Verma think counter-terror ops are — a mild disagreement at a cocktail party in Thimpu (where he was ambassador)? With such naivete worn on their sleeves, it is little wonder Indian diplomats are unable to protect the country’s interests abroad, leave alone act sensibly, and make the right policy choices. With this kind of personnel in the GOI, can the country expect to in any way match up with China, whose preferred mode of dealing with even peacefully protesting Tibetans and Uighurs in Xinjiang is a bullet to the head, and no nonsense about it?

[Verma also lately discovered in an op/ed that Pakistan seems to be a far better practitioner of Kautilyan realpolitik with deft handling of the asymmetric instrument of ‘kutayuddha’ or covert war using terrorism, than is India. Per chance, he picked up this nugget from my 2002 book — ‘Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security’.]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, guerilla warfare, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, South Asia, South East Asia | Leave a comment