Muddle of succession politics

Posted on June 14, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Contextualizing L.K. Advani’s truculence and sulk-sodden antics that have prevented a smooth transfer of power to a new generation of leaders in the Bharatiya Janata Party is the perennial problem afflicting all politics in the subcontinent – the absence of orderly succession. Not only is there no thought given to succession planning, there is nary a hint of institutional mechanisms and procedures in political parties to engineer such periodically inevitable transitions. It is the old historical failing of Indians (and South Asians, generally) that they seem incapable of, and disinclined to countenance, other than messy power shifts. From the Mughul period on down if it was not Aurangzeb battling Dara Shikoh for the throne in Delhi than it is an Advani resisting Narendra Modi’s rise.

The way around the complexities, wrangling, and the heartaches attending on leadership changes is, of course, dynastic politics. It simplifies, clarifies, and injects predictability into succession norms by eliminating democratic selection of leaders in a milieu where dynastic succession enjoys cultural sanction. Congress party symbolizes the dynast-dominated politics. Ironically, the person who legitimated it in the country post independence was the very leader most committed to liberal values and democratic practices — Jawaharlal Nehru.

It is remarkable how many Nehrus, Kauls, Kouls, Dhars, Dars, Kaos, etc held high government positions when Jawaharlal was in his pomp in the Fifties, which state of affairs continued in the reign of Indira Gandhi. Indeed, the open nepotism involved in the Prime Minister placing his younger sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit who, insofar as one can tell, had no special foreign policy expertise or any other credentials, as India’s ambassador successively in the Soviet Union and the United States, would not be tolerated today. It is the distance the Indian democratic system has travelled since then.

With so many close and distant relatives, and clansmen on the public payroll, it was as nothing for Jawaharlal Nehru to appoint his daughter, Indira, as President of the Congress Party. It is another matter that, driven by her own ruthless brand of politics, she used that post to first sideline the party bosses once she became PM, and thereafter split the party and entrenched dynastic rule in the Indian polity. It encouraged the wild, fungal, growth of splinter parties as family concerns. It is a trend tending towards absurdity. Thus, we have Lalu Prasad Yadav claiming connections with Jayprakash Narayan and his movement against the authoritarianism of Indira Gandhi during the Emergency in the mid-1970s, who currently sides with the Congress party and is best known for swaddling 15 years of grossest misrule in Patna with buffoonery. That he seems intent, moreover, on inflicting his large brood on his long-suffering state in times to come, should make Biharis despair for their future. And yet this same Lalu is actually expected to give Nitish Kumar — as clean and un-nepotistic a provider of good government in Bihar as Narendra Modi is in Gujarat, a run for his money.

Cadre-based parties, such as the BJP, should by now have rooted succession measures that are at once judicious, practical, and fair, affording advancement to emerging leadership talent in the party of the kind existing in Britain. There prime ministerial candidates are voted to lead the party or deposed (as Margaret Thatcher was despite leading the Conservative Party to victory in three successive general elections) by members in party conventions. Backroom shenanigans and relying on the good sense of the top leader to manage the transition to gen-next leadership, doesn’t always work.

Alas, Advani adopted the attitude of Queen Elizabeth II of England – can’t be moved; the designated successor, the Prince of Wales be damned! Midway into his ninth decade of life, he is adamantly optimistic about his chances of making it as Prime Minister in a political milieu that he anticipates will turn murkier and more conducive in the wake of the coming general elections. A fractured vote and a patchwork coalition turning to him as a compromise prime ministerial candidate, a ‘la Deve Gowda or an Inder Gujral, is a scenario the political sage in Advani would instantly dismiss as rubbish. And yet he is convinced that the post he so ardently covets but couldn’t secure in his hey-day will be offered him on a platter in his dotage. But thwarted ambition has clouded his judgment and smashed his fine-tuned political antennae. Hence, a bitter old man plots his big-time return and, in the process, hurts his party. Despite the peace the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has imposed on him and the BJP, there’s no guarantee Advani won’t pursue his game-plan.

The RSS likes Modi, perhaps, even less than does Advani. After all, Narendra-bhai marginalized it and other Hindu outfits in Gujarat. But it acknowledges Modi’s salience in the evolving political situation in the country for many of the same reasons that it reconciled to Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s taking control of the BJP in the mid-1990s – it will win the party votes. Vajpayee’s shambling, easygoing, nature reassured the people, persuading them to give the National Democratic Alliance a chance in the face of advertisements of Hindu extremism by opposing political parties. The more purposeful Modi has the galloping prosperity and good record of governance in his home state to counter alarms and rabid propaganda by the Congress and others about the dangers of a supposed “polarizer” running the country.

In fact, it is Modi’s promise of extending the business-friendly economic model, successfully implemented in Gujarat, to the rest of the country that has enthused the electorate, handing BJP the early advantage. It was last afforded the opportunity by the people fed up with Congress party corruption (Bofors) and a series of ineffective small-party “Third Front” regimes stitched together on the run that followed. This time around it is years of paralyzed government and brazen Congress party corruption again but on an unimaginably vast scale that’s motivating voters to move to the BJP camp. Except now Modi’s economic philosophy and administrative acumen is the magnet.

http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/Muddle-of-succession-politics/2013/06/14/article1633470.ece

Posted in Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Politics, Internal Security | 4 Comments

A curdled old codger and BJP-NDA’s game-theoretic future

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Much of the contretemps in the BJP boils down to the thwarted ambition of the one-time “loh purush” who, with time, has rusted into a heap of scrap metal but entertains notions of himself as the central pillar of the party. It is a pitiable scene to see L.K. Advani so tragically reducing himself into a sullen, sulky, old man who will be remembered, if at all, for his turning a page-turning chapter in the country’s life into a personal melodrama. For the first time in independent India’s short history there is the possibility of Narendra Modi — the hard-charging, no-nonsense, right-of-centre ideologue firing up young and aspiring sections of society — the bulk of the electorate in 2014 and, perhaps, assuming helmsmanship of the country. And then Advani has to go play the rancid old codger without the political wit and wisdom to espy a polity on the cusp of radical change and economic betterment.

Advani has in a huff resigned from all party posts but not given up the chairmanship of the the National Democratic Alliance. Strange, but he is presumably the chairman on account of his leadership of the BJP so, to be consistent, should’t he surrender the NDA position as well? Maybe he sees his continuing occupation of this post as offering him the outside chance at PM-ship. It is a self-serving ruse then to keep alive his candidacy. But should BJP garner more Lok Sabha seats than in 2009 –thanks mainly to Narendra Modi’s galvanizing efforts, say, in the 180 range, and BJP require the help of allies and coalition partners to bid for power, would Advani at that moment in time have the political currency to be hoisted to head an NDA government by acclamation? Doubtful, in the main because a person who will have contributed nothing to the party’s electoral success cannot remotely hope to mobilize support behind himself — least of all among the elected BJP MPs and the party cadre, who will owe him nothing, and sentiments about his past role in founding BJP will count for even less. Politics is hard business not fueled by sentimentality but success.

The more likely prospect is Advani setting himself up as spoiler, fully cognizant of and canny enough to know what he is doing but determined to harm the chances of his own party at the hustings any way, whatever it takes. This will be sad denouement for a man who has lived by his political acumen but will be brought down by hubris. History will pass a curdled Advani by and very fast with whatever love, respect, and goodwill he has generated among the people over the years dissipating like a thin wisp of smoke.

Of course, the Congress party clutching at straws, will keep alive the Advani issue with snarky comments by Messrs Digvijay Singh and Co., in the hope that BJP partners like JD(U) will be sufficiently alarmed to desert the NDA in the next general elections. Except, if BJP needs Nitish Kumar, the JD(U) equally desperately needs the upper caste and urban votes in Bihar that Modi and BJP can attract. After nearly a decade of misrule, misgovernance, and rank bad and grossly corrupt government, it will be a wonder if the Congress Party will be able to fill the space vacated by BJP in Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s scheme of things. This is no small consideration because Lalu Yadav threatens to storm his bastion. (Lalu does not stand a chance, but damned if, together with Paswan, he doesn’t spice up life for Nitish!) The prospect staring Nitish in the face will be this: He has not a snowball’s chance in hell to be Prime Minister of any coalition; worse, he may not even have Bihar to lord over! He will be reduced, you guessed it, to being a JD(U) version of Manmohan Singh — no political support base, no constituency, no future.

In game theoretic terms, it is Nitish and JD(U) confronting enormous uncertainties. Narendra-bhai’s problem is a more straightforward one by comparison — to win as many seats for the BJP as possible, every additional Lok Sabha seat secured firming up his right to run the country. When it comes down to it, Nitish has no choice other than to blink!

Posted in Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Politics | 6 Comments

Dump the Gerontocratic Principle in BJP Meet in Goa

Posted on June 8, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

The meeting of the BJP top brass in Goa to settle on the party’s command structure and strategy for the next general elections must occasion the deepest apprehension in the minds of those who long for a conservative, right-of-centre government. Such a change is required not only to reverse the precipitous fall in the standard of public life during the past nine years of Congress party-led coalition rule characterized by horrendous levels of corruption in all strata of government, but to give new direction to the nation desperately seeking a way out of the economic morass the country finds itself in, stressing individual effort and initiative not dole and handouts in various guises. The fact is, as Edmund Burke emphasized long ago, government that does least is best. In India, that means the government being concerned mainly with evening out the playing field for everyone. It is an aim to be primarily achieved by remedial education to pull the poor and socially disadvantaged out of the dependency cycle they are caught in and bring them merit and competence-wise up to the more advantaged lot, rather than pull the top level down as is the instincts of the state and central governments in India. Narendra Modi promises this with his signature declaration that “Government has no business to be in business” and efficient and effective system of delivery of cash and other benefits to the deserving poor (rather than tolerating, as by this government, the siphoning off in plain sight of the bulk of development and social welfare funds by politicians and petty and not so functionaries of the state).

The proverbial “fly in the ointment” is LK Advani, who is long past his sell-by date but who persists in politicking in the hope that his ambition to don the mantle of PM will somehow fall on his elderly shoulders — which chance, he calculates, may come his way by denying Narendra Modi the anointment as the BJP standard-bearer. His retinue of supporters all of them leaders with small or no mass base or popular appeal — people like Sushma Swaraj and Ananth Kumar, independently nursing their own private ambitions. None of this augurs well for the country and shows up the extant BJP leadership as cut from the same whole cloth Congress leaders have been cut from — of serving self and family before nation.

The country has to be provided a real alternative and Advani isn’t it. But who can persuade the old man that his time is up in the context of Indian politics where the gerontocratic principle still reigns? Can one even imagine a country with average age of 25-plus in the year 2014 having Advani as PM aspirant already in the ninth decade of his life helming it, when elsewhere the leaders are going younger and have the drive and display the enthusiasms of youthfulness.

Posted in Indian Politics, South Asia | 1 Comment

Disengagement

Posted on June 8, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

As of June 2, the ‘Security Wise’column has disengaged from the Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle newspapers, owing to disagreement on its contents.

Posted in Indian Army | 4 Comments

Warlords, opium, & core calculus

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Amidst the expected wholesale turnovers in governments in South Asia, Pakistan has been first off the block, voting the opposition Muslim League (Nawaz) party to power. The ruling Congress-led coalition government here could topple next. But it is the future of Afghanistan after the 2014 elections that is the most intriguing.

If an independent-minded regime hewing generally to the Karzai-ian brand of representative government emerges with the so-called ‘1400 Movement’ taking wing, it will be evidence that the decade-long campaign by the United States to graft democracy on a traditional tribal polity has succeeded, albeit after a fashion. (‘1400’ is the Year 1984 in the Islamic calendar, and the Movement with this designation refers to the democratically-inclined tribal groups and parties who hope to win next year’s general elections.)

While the success of the Karzai regime may be judged by the fact of its survival, it provided nothing more than a veneer of representative government. The unchanged underlying reality since the 1960s when the demand for the locally-grown poppy rocketed with the surging market in Western societies for opiates, and the tribal leaders-qua-warlords turned to opium farming to increase their earnings manifold, is that Afghanistan is a full-blown narco-state. The monies from the trade in opium farmed in 12 of the 34 Afghan provinces led by Helmand, Farah, and Kandahar in the southwest is the life-blood of the national economy.

The size of the Afghan narcotics trade may be judged by a 2006 estimate of the total proceeds from it at British retail prices touching $124.4 billion; some seven years on that value may have at least doubled — to a staggering $250 billion. Authoritative data reveal that Afghan opium constitutes 80% of the world production and in 2012 increased by 18% over the previous year despite over 9,000 hectares being subjected to UN-supervised eradication measures, and as much forty-fold in the last decade.

With this scale of monies to be made, the Quetta shura headed by the deposed Afghan Taliban chief, the one-eyed Mullah Omar, has been fiercely protective of the opium economy, extracting hefty zakat from farmers, traders, and processors alike with sharply rising imposts (in percentage terms) depending on whether the end-product is morphine base or heroin crystal. The reason why Indian development projects have remained largely unmolested by the Taliban is because schemes such as the Delaram-Ziranj highway, for instance, help in transportation of the opium to the Iran border, where a chain of processing centres convert it to morphine and heroin for international consumption.

The shura, moreover, shrewdly employs the excess opium agricultural labour as Taliban fighters and, with a leavening of armed cadres from foreign outfits, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, conducts effective guerrilla operations. Except there is no religious bent to the Taliban that periodic delivery of satchels of money cannot overcome. This is the Afghan way, an has always been. In the event, Mullah Omar and the patchwork of tribes he leads are each jointly and singly susceptible to the lucre. What’s in play is an old extortion game — if you pay your interests are safe. In the context, the Taliban’s fight against the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) is typical blood sport. With drone attacks on the Taliban command nodules, which compensated for the weaknesses in the fighting power of the ANSF that’ll surface with the revised drone usage policy announced by US President Barack Obama on May 23. The ANSF situation is bound to worsen.

Karzai has turned to India to balance Pakistan and fill the vacuum created by a departing America. Hence, he asked for howitzers, 105mm guns, Mi-16 helicopters with spares and service support as mark of Indian military engagement and interest. But, as is usual, New Delhi is hesitating, unsure whether such arms aid will spur Pakistan’s fears of a consolidating Indian military presence in Afghanistan and imperil the rapprochement promised by the in-coming Nawaz Sharif government. But not responding to Kabul’s request will rob India of the opportunity to increase leverage with the Afghan government, and broad-base its support with amenable Pashtun tribes beyond the traditionally strong links with the “Northern Alliance” of Tajiks and Uzbeks under General Abdul Rashid Dostum. It will help India carve out a role for itself in the larger game afoot in Afghanistan with China entering the fray in strength.

New Delhi’s calculation that restraint in arming the ANSF may cut Nawaz some slack with the Pakistan army can be countered by the fact that GHQ, Rawalpindi, is unlikely to be mollified by such Indian gestures considering it has keyed all along on the supposed intelligence activity out of the Indian consulates in Jalalabad, Kandahar, and Herat ringing outer Afghanistan that Pakistanis allege involves cultivating even the Afghan Taliban and making life difficult for the Pakistan army fighting them in Waziristan, besides firing up the Baluch insurgency with monetary and material help. In this respect, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, a confidante of Mullah Omar, said revealingly on an Indian TV channel that as far as the Afghan Taliban are concerned “There’s no difference between India and Pakistan”.

Because the Pakistan army’s main concern is with the RAW role on the Durand Line separating Pakistan and Afghanistan, and considering that New Delhi is unlikely to close down its 40-year old consulates to please the ISI, the possibility that India’s holding back arms supplies to Karzai will influence Islamabad is slight. If Karzai’s demand for arms is not met, India could end up with less traction in Kabul, fewer options in the region, and little goodwill in Pakistan.

The politics of Afghanistan revolves around the tribal chiefs – the balance of power between them deciding the way Kabul tilts. India’s core interests are to protect its traditional presence, mining concessions in the resources-rich Hajigak region, and physical access to Central Asia from Iran’s Chahbahar port through Afghanistan. To achieve these aims will require keeping the ruling cabal-of-the-day (even if it’s the Taliban) happy, and buying off the warlords in the opium business, and of fighting each other, the Afghan government, and foreign forces.

[Published in the New Indian Express May 31, 2013 at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/Warlords-opium-core-calculus/2013/05/31/article1612945.ece ]

Posted in Afghanistan, Asian geopolitics, Central Asia, China, Geopolitics, guerilla warfare, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Terrorism, United States, West Asia | 2 Comments

Strategic pincer & Trojan Horses

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Consider the simplified timeline: on May 4, when the armed intrusion by Chinese People’s Liberation Army in the Depsang Bulge is on-going, the Indian government in an inspired fit announces the extension of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Japan scheduled in May-end by a day. Literally a day later Beijing, after treating India’s military capability with near contempt – otherwise it wouldn’t have dared risk the intrusion in the first place — agrees to a pullback. It was China’s calculations of a prospective Indo-Japanese strategic pincer, not India’s “nuanced diplomacy”, that persuaded Beijing to retract its claws.

China, always fearful of a remilitarised Japan, is unsettled by what it means to have its nemesis take a nationalistic turn and for India to make common cause with it. Potentially, that can distend the Chinese security system at the two ends of its imperium — bounded in the west by Tibet and Xinjiang — and verily be a nightmare for the PLA which still feels queasy about the last time it ventured into an adjoining country – not India, silly! – Vietnam, in 1979. The PLA invasion force (of some 28 infantry divisions) escaped with huge casualties and its dignity in shreds. The Indian minister for external affairs Salman Khurshid perversely blamed the delay in the Chinese vacating their aggression to the Indian media getting wind of the intrusion!

And a week after benefiting from the merest hint of India and Japan (and the US) engaging in a military exercise, the pusillanimous gang in-charge of our China policy orders the Indian Navy out of a full-fledged joint war game with the US and Japanese navies off Okinawa that was in the works for seven-eight months, lest it upset Beijing. No country is more solicitous of its natural adversary than India.

Instead of enhancing Chinese apprehensions, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s regime has foresworn playing the many strategic cards India has been dealt over the years. In return for Chinese assistance to the India’s rebel movements in the Northeast, India should have played the Tibet card; as payback for Beijing arming Pakistan with nuclear missiles, India could have armed Vietnam with strategic missiles, and India should have shoved China on the defensive by putting security cooperation with Japan and America into over-drive.

While Dr Singh, mercifully, predicated good relations with China on peace on the border and did not gratuitously reaffirm that old saw about “One China” – a formulation encompassing countries and territories whose status as part of China is questionable — New Delhi’s traditional feeble-mindedness led to Premier Li Keqiang placing more Trojan Horses at the Indian gate — larger contracts for the Chinese telecommunications and power production and transmission companies at a time when the PLA-owned Huwaei Company, for instance, has been barred for security reasons from most Western markets. India apparently has no fear of remotely-controlled disruptions of high-speed communications networks or insertion of logic bombs into Indian information systems.

Even as New Delhi was accommodating Beijing – the armed intrusion in Ladakh was accepted as only an “incident” — Japan under the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) dispensation of Shinzo Abe warned China to keep its submarines from the exclusive zone around the disputed Senkaku Islands and issued notice of its intent to amend the country’s “Peace Constitution”, enabling Tokyo to arm itself to the extent necessary and to sell arms and military technologies to friendly states. It is an opportunity the Indian Navy should capitalize on, exploring with the Kawasaki shipyard the transfer of the Soryu-class diesel submarine technologies for its Project 75i and firm up the deal with the Shin-Meiwa corporation for the private sector manufacture here of its PS-1 flying boat for maritime operations. It is precisely the cross-stakes in each other’s security that Prime Minister Abe has been pleading for.

Japan, moreover, is a “para-nuclear state” — quite literally a screw-driver’s turn away from nuclear weapons status. Its vast holdings of spent fuel can be converted, the LDP President Ichiro Ozawa had said in 2002, into “thousands of nuclear warheads”. “If we get serious,” he warned, “we will never be beaten in terms of military power”. Beijing is one major incident in the East Sea away from a nuclearised Japan, its most disturbing nightmare. No better Asian power, in the event, for India to get close to than a reviving Japan.

India, Japan and America, actively cooperating with each other, will keep Chinese adventurism leashed. New Delhi better begin to appreciate just how much of a leverage security ties with Tokyo affords India and why Dr Singh should consider elevating it as a key issue in bilateral relations.

Actually, India should emulate the hard-driving, multi-layered, diplomacy Beijing conducts so effortlessly, which New Delhi can only goggle at. Often great adversaries are good exemplars in the policy field. And policy urges spawned by ingrained outlooks and habit that lead MEA to disregard military instruments of foreign policy have to be resisted. Hence, last-minute withdrawals from scheduled air-sea war-games with Japan and the US that can grow in complexity, and cancellation of strategic “trialogues” with these countries send the wrong message to friend and foe alike, and should be avoided at all cost.

Then again, one cannot under-estimate the myopia and complacency of the present lot of India’s security minders. Asked if the government shouldn’t be worried about critical sectors (telecommunications, power) of the economy becoming dependent on Chinese spares supplies and service support, Mr Khurshid airily dismissed the concern. “We have not heard of such an issue”, he declared, with a trace of asperity. “If someone brings it to our notice, we will certainly look into it.” It is evident that the Congress Party government is keener to pull in the Chinese Trojan Horses than to strategically stretch China with a powerful India-Japan pincer.

[Published May 23, 2013 in the Asian Age at http://www.asianage.com/columnists/strategic-pincer-trojan-horses-484 and in the Deccan Chronicle at http://www.deccanchronicle.com/130523/commentary-columnists/article/strategic-pincer-trojan-horses ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Japan, Military Acquisitions, Nuclear Weapons, South Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Technology transfer | 12 Comments

Ripe for the picking by Li Keqiang?

Posted on May 18, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

One quails at the thought of the Indian government desperately angling for resolution of the border dispute as a “strategic objective”. This incomprehensible desperation — what is it about and WHY? Could it be that the Manmohan Singh-Sonia Gandhi’s Congress party regime means to give the national security edifice it has weakened over the last decade one last dhakka (push) to topple it? — signals Beijing that New Delhi may be ripe for the picking. A peace accord may ensue that will be at the expense of India’s security as has been the case with all the agreements signed with China that the Chinese PLA has just as routinely violated with impunity over the years. The Depsang Bulge incident being only the latest such outrage.

Any compromising of the principle of ‘mutual and equal security’ clearly enunciated and established by the 1993 Agreement on “confidence building measures in the military field” cannot be tolerated. Li Kegiang should be asked to tell the PLA to show good faith before China can expect some movement on an accord promising enduring peace between the two Asian giants.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Army, Indian Politics, South Asia | 4 Comments

Can a caged parrot sing?

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Ranjit Sinha, director of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), is going around town good-naturedly telling people that he is called a “parrot” (apropos the Supreme Court’s cruel but apt observation that his agency is a “caged parrot” that “speaks in its master’s voice”).

There is something movingly honest about Sinha’s rueful public admission that this description fits. But, equally evident is the new-found determination of CBI to live down this insult. CBI duly pointed out to the court the significant changes erstwhile law minister Ashwani Kumar had made in the agency’s report on coal block allocations and added, for good measure, that it will track down every last beneficiary in the Family Bansal railways scandal. Gaining in confidence, he slammed those who maintain that the CBI is independent as “blatant liars”, and declared that the government wouldn’t have agreed to “insulate” the agency but for the judicial prompting. After all, why would the Congress minority government, which has survived in office by blackmailing Mulayam Singh and Mayawati with CBI corruption cases, want to give up control of this agency? The worm has turned.

No one is more surprised, one reckons, than the Manmohan Singh regime that hand-picked Sinha, a police officer expected to do its bidding, but goaded by the judiciary, is suddenly turned into an avenging angel. It reminds one of how time and again in history persons hoisted into positions of authority for ulterior motives have surprised their political masters, and one way or another discovered the public responsibility inherent in the exalted posts they occupy.

Before this season of scams is over, the Congress party will feel like Henry II (the early 12th century king of England) — who felt done in by his friend, Thomas Becket, appointed by him as Archbishop of Canterbury to help control the church, only to see the ersatz priest end up powerfully opposing the crown instead. It could collectively mutter (to paraphrase Jean Anouihl’s famous words in his play “Becket’’) — “Will no one rid us of this meddlesome policeman?” or exasperated words to that effect!

Fortunately for Sinha, far from meeting the end Becket did — murdered in the cathedral, he will have the opportunity to put a genuinely independent CBI on its feet and, if he manages the transformation correctly, imbue its staff with a sense of both integrity and purpose, and push it into becoming a strong deterrent against wrongdoing by politicians, civil servants, and other functionaries of the state sworn to do right by the nation.

The Supreme Court has asked the government to provide it with a blueprint to render CBI autonomous. A GOM (group of ministers) — the usual tactic of the Congress-led UPA government to tarry and do little — has been formed to draft a law. Many ministries have jurisdiction over the CBI, which V Narayanasamy, minister of state in the PMO, said should be cut to just two ministries.

But functional autonomy is not going to be much enhanced by such cosmetic means, but by making the agency accountable to no one in any government. The CBI should especially be freed from the onerous requirement of getting the approval of the central ministry or state government concerned to investigate senior civil servants, which makes nonsense of the very idea of an investigative agency that is supposed to weed out the corrupt, considering bureaucrats are the facilitators of corruption by venal politicians.

There is something ludicrous and fundamentally wrong with the potential targets of investigation being the ones (as a body) to decide whether to allow the investigation to proceed against any of them in the first place. So no ministry or state government should ever come into the control loop, otherwise this basic conflict of interest, as in the prevailing system, will hollow it out. It is the main reason why so few corrupt political leaders and babus are investigated and prosecuted, and fewer still see jail-time.

What is the optimal solution for control and oversight?

Obviously, the CBI should be made a statutory body as recommended by honest stalwart policemen, such as Prakash Singh, former director-general, Assam Police, except with a slight tweaking to take care of the issue of monitoring the agency’s activity to ensure it keeps to the straight and narrow. It cannot be the central government but a select committee of Parliament headed by, and this is important, a Member of Parliament from the main opposition party (in the manner of the accounts committee). That will solve most of the problems, leaving the CBI to range free and to haul up law-breakers wherever they may be found within and without the system, while being accountable to the people through Parliament, not any ruling party.

The whole point is to fight the natural urge of those in power to deal punitively with their political opponents by misusing coercive means of the state to harass them and bring them politically to heel. Even governments in the more mature Western democracies are not exempt from such tendencies. Thus, just last week the US Internal Revenue Service was revealed as investigating conservative groups opposed to the Obama administration.

A Washington Post editorial of May 11 said, “A bedrock principle of US democracy is that the coercive powers of government are never used for partisan purpose. The law is blind to political viewpoint, and so are its enforcers, most especially the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. Any violation of this principle threatens the trust and the voluntary cooperation of citizens upon which this democracy depends.”

What applies to FBI in America should do so for CBI in India.

The trouble is to be in politics in India is to indulge to a less or greater degree in corrupt practices (for instance, campaign financing), and to be in power is verily to misuse one’s privileges. In this context, it is the arbitrariness in the use of agencies such as CBI and the Enforcement Directorate that is subversive of the Constitution and has to be eliminated.

Published in the ‘New Indian Express May 17, 2013 at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/can-a-caged-parrot-sing/2013/05/17/article1593117.ece1

Posted in Indian Politics, Internal Security | 2 Comments

VS Arunachalam. ex-boss DRDO, on “Zero for DRDO”; Karnad’s response

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Former head of DRDO, Dr VS Arunachalam’s reaction to my article “Zero for DRDO” — “In Season of blame, a defence” published in the Asian Age, May 09, 2013, below:
———-
This, I fear, is the season of bashing the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), because it’s a time when our defence services project their wishlists for the latest in weapon systems and arms merchants from all over the globe flock to Delhi peddling their wares. Some of their products may still be on the drawing board and some may have grown old awaiting a buyer, readying for a graceful retirement.

No matter, blame the DRDO for delays, poor performance in trials and lack of manufacturing base and opt for imports.

From 2005 to 2013, the total value of items approved for induction by the Defence Acquisition Council is Rs`1,16,293 crore. These were products, systems and equipment based on technologies developed by the DRDO. Add to this another Rs 40,939 crore — the value of items for which orders have been placed by the services in these eight years — and the total comes to Rs`1,57,232.crore.

In a recent Edit page piece in The Asian Age, Bharat Karnad gave a “zero” to the DRDO (Zero for DRDO, April 26). However, if we go by the statistics, the grand total works out to 10 zeroes preceded by 150! Zero is too basic an Indian construct to be so casually used.
How good are our systems? One has only to talk to our Air Force pilots to assess the performance of Tejas. They are enthusiastic about its handling qualities and the glass cockpit that is yet to appear in any other operational fighter. Many years ago, Mr Karnad wrote a piece along with Stephen Cohen — not a friend of Indian R&D — in the Illustrated Weekly of India, mocking our indigenous aircraft programme, calling it “unsafe at any speed”.

They should be relieved to know that Tejas has done over 2,000 flights without any incident and flies like a gazelle even at supersonic speed! I can cite similar stories on other systems — Brahmos, radars, and armour — that have all become technical successes. These successes have also led to two challenges. From the West it is difficult to acquire the know-how for strategic and other state-of-the-art systems. Sometimes we get a black box with no options to study their designs, and often not even that. We have to develop these indigenously, and this takes time, often beyond initial projections. This is true not only of DRDO but other scientific organisations in India and abroad. Inspite of these difficulties we have to persevere. India’s security is not only dependent on military but also on our proven capabilities in science and technology. Often our leaders return from foreign trips pleased by the recognition India gets for its scientific progress. The late Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao told me with pride that some foreign leaders were more conscious of our growing prowess in science and technology than the size of our military hardware.

It’s often forgotten that the DRDO is just one component of a large supply chain extending from design to large manufacturing. Reported failure in manufacturing — to meet the numbers and/or quality — can often be attributed to many weak links in the supply chain. For instance, we have not invested in building a large manufacturing base either in the public or the private sector. Our manufacturing base is built for the Seventies when there were a few large R&D projects or indigenous designs to produce, and not for the present decade when there are so many missiles, radar and battle tanks competing for production.

Another component that’s missing in this supply chain is a translator. Manufacturers do not speak R&D language, and this leads to difficulty in transforming research designs into manufacturing protocols. The Russians overcome this problem by setting up design bureaus in manufacturing centres, while Americans have dynamic pilot production facilities before embarking on large-scale production. They also nurture large number of small boutique facilities manufacturing components and systems. India should adopt a similar interface and avoid tasking R&D straight into production. This will reduce the delay one experiences when a design goes for manufacturing.

Also the nation’s economy has grown to a level that we should not distinguish between private and public sectors. All this will, of course, depend on our services opting for more indigenous systems and doing away with our self-inflicted ban on exports. If properly planned and structured, defence manufacturing along with infrastructure building can become the driver for India’s next Industrial Revolution. McKinsey estimates that even one per cent increase in GDP from these sectors can generate over three million new jobs and create unprecedented demands for better education and job-relevant training.

Whenever there is a review of DRDO, there is a temptation to recommend splitting the job of scientific adviser to the defence minister from the secretary of the department of defence research and development (DR&D) and separating director-general research and development (DGR&D) from the other two. We should resist this. The scientific adviser is the only person with access to higher echelons in the political structure and is thus able to brief them on the challenges and opportunities in the field of science. I can cite a list of strategic projects that came into being because of the access and recognition that the scientific adviser enjoys in the government.

The writer is a former head of DRDO and also scientific adviser to the defence minister
http://www.asianage.com/columnists/season-blame-defence-600
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Bharat Karnad’s response, published in the Asian Age, May 11, 2013:

In the 2-part 1985-86 piece I had written alone , not with Steve Cohen as Mr. Arunachalam mis-remembers, I had said the following: Because of the time-gap between the terminated Marut Mk-II project and the LCA startup, India would have to begin from scratch; that by the time the LCA entered squadron service it would become obsolete, technology-wise and in terms of vulnerability to advanced anti-aircraft missiles; and, if ADA-HAL had to begin from a zero baseline that they skip the combat aircraft stage altogether — the technological trends were clear even then that the era of manned aircraft was ending — and initiate a project for a family of versatile remotely-controlled pilotless vehicles for strike and surveillance missions instead, which would be a future-oriented programme, involving more cost-effective use of scarce manpower and financial resources. I feel particularly proud of my take on RPVs/UAVs/drones 26 years ago.
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Word-limitations compelled excision of what I also said, namely, that I have been one of the most vocal propoenents of the Tejas LCA and indigenous military products generally in my writings — just look up the categories in this blog — and even pleaded that Rafale be scrapped, and the Mk-II version of Tejas be pushed in mission mode (Scrap Rafale, Viva Tejas!”). It is therefore a strange, even laughable, charge Mr Arunachalam lays against me that I’m prompted by foreign vendors. Obviously, the ex-boss, DRDO, has not been following my writings as avidly as he’d like his readers to believe. The real villain in the LCA case as I have pointed out is HAL, not ADA (within the DRDO ambit) as much.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, Defence Industry, DRDO, Europe, Great Power imperatives, Indian Air Force, Military Acquisitions, South Asia, Technology transfer | 2 Comments

The price of inaction

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

The little Chinese misadventure is over but only because India agreed to raze the fortified observation post at Chumar well inside its territory. The restoration of status quo based on such surrender provides China with a ready excuse to march into Indian territory again, with an undefined Line of Actual Control (LAC) legitimating armed intrusions. Peace bought by concessions cannot last.

Even so, the Indian Army is lucky because, like in 1962, it was being set up as scapegoat. Last week, a former “media adviser to the Prime Minister”, Sanjaya Baru, blamed the Army for “intelligence failure” resulting, he implied, in the Manmohan Singh government being caught unawares by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) advance 19 kms inside India. Every kilometre deep intrusion means potential loss on average of some 75 square kilometre of territory. The former Army Chief, Gen. Ved Malik, also on the same TV programme, was so flabbergasted by Mr Baru’s charge that he couldn’t collect his wits in time to explain that the management of the border with China is policed by the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) under the supervision of the benighted home ministry. On another TV show, he had described this border management system as “laughable”. While the Army conducts its own field intelligence, it is the ITBP’s responsibility to keep the government apprised of developments on the border as well as the denizens of North Block in charge. How Sardar Patel, the first and last great home minister, who early apprehended the threat posed by the Chinese occupation of Tibet must be, proverbially speaking, turning in his grave!

Of course, the anomaly of why a paramilitary force is tasked with protection of a live border with China, when the Border Security Force on the side with Pakistan — an adversary of lesser consequence — is entirely under Army command, has to be explained by the Indian government, especially since there is evidence that this fundamentally flawed arrangement isn’t working. Such a system of border control is apparently in place because it fits in with the thinking of the China Study Group (CSG) and its Mandarin-speaking members, mostly former diplomats, who are convinced that the paramilitary forces headed by police officers, even though sub-professional and boasting of no fighting qualities worth the name, are controllable, take dictation better than the Army, and hence can be relied on in situations on the LAC, where inertness and lack of initiative are prized.

Between the CSG and the ministry for external affairs combine and its inapt tool, the ITBP, the country’s interests are in peril. The fear of escalation has become a psychosis, leading New Delhi to raise non-reaction to Chinese provocation to high principle. Situations are allowed to drift in the hope that by not responding and, therefore, not offering the Chinese “provocation” in return, Beijing will eventually pull out its troops. This is what happened in the Rokah Nullah area this time around — it was a bigger probing action than anything the PLA has mounted recently. More such incidents can be expected, any of which, in the face of predictably meagre response, may lead to permanent realignment of LAC and cutting off of access to the Siachen Glacier.

This leaves the Army up a creek because without accessible roads it is left with no sustainable proactive strategy at all in the face of the Chinese allowing themselves the leeway to intrude at will anywhere along the LAC. Remarkably, it is the Indian government itself that is the villain — delaying the building of an extensive network of metalled, all-weather roads up to the LAC, especially in the extended area designated “sub-sector North” radiating northwest-wards and northeast-wards from Daulat Beg Oldi that the Third Infantry Division of the Leh-based 14 Corps is responsible for. It is a sobering thought that where road connectivity is concerned the conditions have not much improved from 1958 when Jawaharlal Nehru’s “forward strategy” began to be implemented.

There may be no border roads but a number of advanced landing grounds have been spruced up in the last decade at Daulat Beg Oldi, Fukche and Nyoma in the Ladakh sector to operate frontline combat aircraft. This is all very well except that the availability of airborne ground attack capability in no way helps 14 Corps to respond fast and in kind to Chinese actions, which requires a quick marshalling of units whenever and wherever the LAC is breached. The Indian Air Force is unlikely, in any case, to be ordered into action short of a fairly major conflict as its use is inherently escalatory. In the event, air power cannot substitute or compensate for the lack of land power options, and can no more deter aggressive Chinese moves across the LAC than the appeasement-laced diplomatic fidgeting that passes for India’s China policy.

Even as the PLA is able to muster a rapidly deployable, airborne, Division-sized force at any point on the LAC within a couple of days, amassing a similar formation on the Indian side is beyond the Indian Army’s ken in the main because of the absence of motorable roads. The Indian government’s lack of will to put national security ahead of lesser concerns is incomprehensible. Letters from Army headquarters to the Prime Minister and other pooh-bahs in government pleading for roads and other infrastructure are routinely ignored. Such criminal negligence by the Indian government has led to border projects worth some Rs 30,000 crore hanging fire because of environmental clearances and land acquisition problems. That has allowed China to whittle away Indian territory. Such laxness and complacency on the part of the government can no longer be tolerated because it permits brazen land-grabs and aggressive acts by China.

It is imperative that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh takes two immediate decisions — of handing over the charge of the China border to the Army and getting the Cabinet Committee on Security to override all objections from ministries and departments of government obstructing infrastructure development, and order construction of border roads on a war-footing.

[Published in the ‘Ásian Age’ May 9, 2013, at http://www.asianage.com/opinion/columnists/price-inaction-604 and in Deccan Chronicle at http://www.deccanchronicle.com/130509/commentary/commentary-columnists/commentary/price-inaction

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 Air Force, Indian Army, Indian para-military forces, Indian Politics, Pakistan, South Asia | 10 Comments