China hand behind growls of NoKo paper tiger

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

The Kim Jong Eun regime in North Korea is the proverbial paper tiger — all sound and fury, and near farcical capabilities when matched up against any of its adversaries in the Far East. It’s another matter that the US has fallen for this by deploying strategic bombers over SoKo, etc. NoKo’s blustery posture, heightened by the “ënhanced” Fusion-boosted fission device tested early February of Pakistani design and provenance and Chinese technical vetting and oversight, is not maintainable, however. (See previous blogs on the NoKo test, etc.) The important thing that’s predictably and wilfully being missed by the international and especially Western-American stratgeic communities is the fact of Pyongyang’s confidence being bolstered by Chinese steel. (Wilful neglect of this factor because otherwise the US would have to confront China head-on, a fight for which it has no stomach.) It is the assurance of Beijing’s military might that propels Eun’s almost clownish escalatory moves. It is China then that’s encouraging NoKo show of bellicosity. To wit this note in the ‘Powerful Nation Forum’ — revealing, eh???! — of ‘People’s Daily’, Feb 19, 2013, which referred to any crisis instigated by NoKo as beneficial to China because it diverts US pressure from China, distracts Japan from the Senkaku dispute theatre, and permits Beijing to step in as mediator-peace-maker. Very, very clever strategy.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, Japan, Northeast Asia, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, United States, US. | 4 Comments

Frog in hot water

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

John Garver, a leading American expert on Sino-Indian relations, has likened Beijing’s strategy towards India to the traditional Chinese way of cooking a frog. Plonk the frog in a vessel and turn up the heat slowly. If the water was hot to begin with or the temperature were to rise much too quickly, the frog would simply jump out and escape.But if the heat is turned up gradually, the frog luxuriates in the warming water, unmindful of the fate awaiting it until it is too late for it to do anything.

Having contained India strategically to the subcontinent by nuclear arming Pakistan and, with the urgings of military assistance and economic aid, encouraged its landward neighbours (Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal) to stand up to India, Beijing is even tempting Bhutan to look east and away from New Delhi for its needs. Such developments are forcing the Indian government to be preoccupied with its immediate periphery
rather than to focus on strategic issues.

With the idea of further confining the frog to the vessel, Beijing has worked hard to alienate the adjoining maritime states from India as well, turning the once welcoming waters of the Indian Ocean into a cauldron that, should New Delhi continue with its wayward policies, may soon boil over. Here again the means used are tried and tested — a spate of high-value infrastructure projects are but a thinly veiled wedge to mine the mother lode of Sri Lankan and Maldivan resentment against “big brother” India.

The modern container port complex in Hambantota, Sri Lanka, a container port and another airport upcoming in the Maldives, and armaments by the shipload to Bangladesh are real gains for these countries and could be the precursor of more such projects to draw these island and littoral states into the Chinese security orbit as a means of neutralizing India’s dominant position astride the busiest, most strategic of oceanic highways.
Combined with Beijing consolidating its political hold on Nepal through the Maoist cadres and making deep inroads into Burma by constructing the north-south road and rail transportation and energy grids, it is also tying up Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia in oil and gas pipeline network to deliver energy resources to China’s western provinces of Xinjiang and Chinese-occupied Tibet (CoT). Beijing’s plan is grand and audacious both in its conception and implementation. The increasingly marginalised New Delhi, meanwhile, morosely chews the cud, limiting India’s options at every turn, such as by not getting in on the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline. Colombo, Male, Kathmandu and Yangbon, meanwhile, play up the virtues of a “friendly” China, and preen themselves, being finally in a position to command New Delhi’s attention and respect.

The Chinese strategy of alienating the neighbours from India and consolidating its own presence in the region is deftly prosecuted with soft words issuing in tandem with hard, well-thought-out actions, with the Indian government, predisposed to doing nothing, lulled into inaction. Despite all the evidence of the warming water, the Indian frog seems determined to not feel the heat.

National security adviser Shivshankar Menon, apparently oblivious to the developments adversely affecting India’s vital national interests in the Indian Ocean Region, declared the other day that “maritime rivalry with China is not inevitable.” Such pronouncements do nothing, of course, to prevent New Delhi appearing foolish, confirming the Chinese estimation of this country as a“pushover state”.

The Chinese have concluded that it pays to talk peace and trade, but with an overlay of the hardline. Thus, even as the visiting People’s Liberation Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Qi Jianguo, signed an agreement renewing joint military exercises and service-to-service exchanges, Chinese President Xi Jinping made clear that a resolution of the India-China border dispute is not on the cards because it “won’t be easy”.
This raises the question whether New Delhi’s eagerness to resolve the dispute isn’t misplaced, and whether it would not be more prudent to formally shelve the special track dialogue rather than try and revive it as Mr Menon seems intent on doing during his planned Beijing trip in the second week of April. With the Chinese voicing the futility of such dialogue, his insistence on it reveals desperation— from the Chinese perspective, it is a sign of weakness.

Mr Xi met with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the sidelines of the Brics Summit in Durban to discuss terrorism emanating from the Afghanistan-Pakistan area. It is an issue that is to be followed up with official talks in Beijing. The Chinese, it is obvious, will use the terrorism issue to zero in on Tibetan unrest and the alleged Indian hand stoking it. The Indian representatives would do well to remind the Chinese that India accepted China’s suzeraingty on the premise of a genuinely “autonomous” Tibet, which cannot be taken to mean Indian quiescence in the face of sustained state violence against the Tibetan people, and that it is time Beijing respected the inherent rights of Tibetans in their own homeland. This will hint at the hard options open to India of aiding the Tibetan freedom movement in the future.

Such plain talking should be followed up by arming, on a priority basis, Vietnam with nuclear missiles and distributing the supersonic Brahmos cruise missile to any Southeast Asian country that wants it. Those who suggest that New Delhi should try and co-manage Asia with a fast-ascending China should consider where that would get India, already seen to be lacking in the essentials that constitute great power. It is a reputation that will repel countries from rallying to the Indian standard and seeking security in a milieu roiled by Chinese aggressiveness. New Delhi being over-mindful of Beijing’s concerns has only worsened India’s relative position.

It is time India joined Japan, Asean and Taiwan to impose on Beijing the costs of living dangerously. The process of reversing the heat to cook the Chinese frog in the South China Sea waters is long overdue.

[Published March 29, 2013 in the ‘Ásian Agé’ at http://aggwww.asianage.com/columnists/frog-hot-water-759, and the ‘Deccan Chronicle’ at http://www.deccanchronicle.com/130328/commentary-columnists/commentary/frog-hot-water

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Central Asia, China, China military, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Japan, Missiles, Northeast Asia, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, South Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, West Asia | 11 Comments

MIRV-testing by stealth — II

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Sorry, original blog on the issue of MIRV testing by stealth inadvertently deleted. This augmented replacement blog on the same topic.

The PSLV-C 20 launched February 25 carried a payload of seven satellites, which were injected into their separate precise orbits using the embedded System-on-Chip (SOC). The SOC, it may be recalled, was used on Agni-5 for guidance and terminal accuracy. The SOC on C-20 is the testing of MIRV capacity by stealth. And while India has had this capability to disperse payloads from PSLV — MIRV tech in situ since 2004-05, this is the first near military application of it. Hopefully, GOI will greensignal a proper MIRV-ed Agni-5 test soon. The only problem with the MIRVed military payloads will be that such miniaturisation of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons as has been obtained to fit the nose cone geometries of Agni missiles cannot be reliable, unless the level of miniaturisation achieved in the 1998 tests is deemed adequate. Because that’s the level at which the weapons designs have got frozen, and absent further testing, will be a liability. To iterate, assuming warheads miniaturised to a certain extent were actually tested in 1998, then that’s all the level of miniaturisation the country will have to be content with. No testing means that the 20 KT weapon has been sufficiently miniaturised to fit several of these in the nose cones of Agni IRBMs. The bigger, older, problem remains however: The fizzled S-1 means the thermonuclear weapon too is suspect. Marry the suspect miniaturised warhead with the suspect thermonuclear warheads and we get a suspect hydrogen deterrent assuming again there’s such a thing. In the event, the 20 KT fission warhead seems the standard weapon for all delivery sytems. So, why pretend to having fusion weapons in the 125-175 KT scale in the arsenal? After all, there’s only so much traction missile accuracy will get India against equally accurate Chinese missiles carrying the 1.1-3-3 megaton standard issue warhead on its IRBMS.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Cyber & Space, Defence Industry, DRDO, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, satellites, South Asia | 16 Comments

Narendra Bhai vs. Rahul Baba

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Democracies are renowned for hoisting kooks and incompetents into power. The Indian democratic system is additionally notorious for electing musclemen, criminals, and worse. So if the choice in the 2014 general elections is between Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi, it may just prompt the people to vote for one or the other major party and candidate because the alternative of a “third front” leader, such as Mulayam Singh, as Prime Minister in a hung Parliament is too horrific to contemplate — the UP-ization of India!

Comparing the Bharatiya Janata Party’s front-runner, Narendra Modi, and the ruling Congress Party’s presumptive PM, Rahul Gandhi, is an exercise in weighing the merits of the persons in question and the party politics they have negotiated. Modi, is a small town (Vadnagar) aam aadmi with incomparable political management and administrative skills and, a vision for his state and nation that is at once reality-grounded and aspirational. Having honed his talents as a pracharak in the local Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) shaka, Modi made his name as party mobiliser and, in the process, apparently outgrew the Hindutva ideology. So much so, that soon after becoming chief minister of Gujarat he began alienating the RSS, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, in the state, starting with demolishing small temples and the like that routinely come up illegally overnight in cramped Indian urban spaces, the land-grabbers capturing valuable real estate in this manner were secure in the belief that the government would do nothing.

Inside of a decade, Gujarat was turned into the best-run state in the Indian Union with 24/7 water and electricity emerging as the leitmotif of Modi’s good governance model. Despite the step-motherly treatment, Modi claims, his state was meted out by the Congress coalition at the centre in terms of undeveloped port infrastructure that would otherwise have increased international connectivity, Gujarat is among the most vibrant in terms of attracting industry and investors, and generating employment.

His Spartan lifestyle combined with maintenance of absolute propriety (the Modi family being asked to stay put in Vadnagar) means he is entirely free of the taint of corruption in a setting where politics has become a shortcut to wealth and ruling families freeload. With the top man not on the take and unwilling to countenance corruption, the state government and administrators run clean, enthusing party cadres and rocketing his political stock upwards among the masses fed up with “politics as usual”.

With his record, his rise on the national stage was inevitable. Just how open his mind is to new ideas was evidenced at the recent India Today Conclave, where he offered novel solutions. Consider his policy of erecting solar panels over irrigation canals — minimising water loss through evaporation and, at the same time, producing electricity. Or, the proposal he conveyed to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh about turning the arid belt dividing India and Pakistan stretching from Gujarat to Rajasthan into an extended solar park. Besides producing power for the grid, it would be a physical barrier to infiltrators, and provide the means for vastly improving the living quarters of the Border Security Force, motivating the BSF troopers to greater vigilance and efficiency. This is in refreshing contrast to the identity-based politics, which’s the norm.

In contrast to Modi, a hardy product of rough and tumble grassroots politics, for Rahul Gandhi the top job is an entitlement. A habitué of Lutyen’s Delhi — where his family has resided since independence, he has grown up insulated from the rigours of everyday life. With the dynastic principle early established by Jawaharlal Nehru when he installed Indira Gandhi as the Congress party president, Nehru-Gandhi dynasts have controlled the party and ruled the country.

This is democracy after a fashion with the top post reserved for “the Family” and competition permitted for lesser positions within party and government. It has promoted dynastic culture down to the village-panchayat level.

Congress party scions like himself and with whom Rahul is at ease with, figure prominently in his plans for rejuvenating the party. Many of them occupy junior ministerial posts —Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasad, Milind Deora, Sachin Pilot, Deepender Hooda, et al, on down. Dynastic politics as khandani pesha (family business) is so infectious, other parties have emulated the Congress, producing the Yadav parivar of the Samajwadi party, Supriya Sule of the Nationalist Congress party headed by Sharad Pawar, Raj Thackeray of Shiv Sena, Sukhbir Badal of the Shiromani Akali Dal, and the numerous Karunanidhi progeny of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. Taking their cue from the Nehru-Gandhi’s, these clans indulge in corruption varying in brazenness, and spawn second-order beneficiaries. Every Kunal Bhadoo (Congress Haryana CM Bhupinder Hooda’s son-in-law who has cornered land in Haryana) takes inspiration from the ersatz real estate tycoon-ship of a certain Robert Vadra.

With Ottavio Quattrochi-managed Bofors and Snamprogretti deals during the Rajiv Gandhi regime as background, and Milan court documents indicating monies being funnelled to “the Family” in the latest defence scam involving Agusta-Westland helicopters, Rahul’s fulminating against corruption — “People who are corrupt stand up and talk about eradicating corruption”, or his campaign to rid the party of the high command and culture of suchphancy, for example, smacks of sheer chutzpah.

While constituting the high command and benefitting however indirectly from the scams his family is linked to, he reckons that not being implicated himself gives him sanction to moralise on the issue. Alas, it is a thin reed to hang his clean image on.

Worse, Rahul seems devoid of original ideas. His recent utterances have been traced to his father’s pronouncements in the mid-’80s. A party man explained that every new Congress dynast seeks “inspiration” from the speeches of his predecessors, revealing the standard Congress strategy of recycling old slogans, reissuing stale promises, followed by populist measures that bankrupt the country when in government. It highlights the difference between talkers and doers, status quoists and change inducers, pretenders and leaders, and Rahul-baba and Narendra-bhai.

[Published in the ‘New Indian Express’ March 22, 2013 at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/article1511457.ece

Posted in Asian geopolitics, India's Pakistan Policy, Indian para-military forces, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia | 28 Comments

A can-do helmsman

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Nations on the march, or those in the dumps, have sometimes found great leaders to lift their spirits, offer a guiding vision, fuel ambition and help them leap forward. A down and out China found Deng Xiaoping, a fast-declining Britain got Margaret Thatcher, and a de-spirited America had Ronald Reagan.

They brightened the material prospects of the countries they led, of course. But, more vitally, they imbued the people with a sense of national mission and pride that transcended the circumstances their countries found themselves in. India has yet to find such a helmsman to set it on the course of self-belief and glory in the 21st century.
How much leadership matters, just how critical a difference one inspiring leader can make in changing the destiny of a country, is relevantly evidenced for India, in the phenomenon of Deng Xiaoping and the rocketing rise of China he triggered. A man of uncommon common sense, Deng, who was once paraded with a dunce cap during the Cultural Revolution in the Sixties, waded through the shallows in the still ideologically treacherous Maoist China by “feeling the stones with his feet” (as he put it).

No high-sounding ideals or straitjacketing ideology animated him. But his overwhelming desire to realise the aspirations of downtrodden masses for a better life while ensuring the country packed big guns — in line with Mao’s dictum that power flowed from the barrel of a gun — did the trick. Free enterprise and state capitalism were given free rein and, as part of the 1979 “Four Modernisations” programme, the Chinese military was frogmarched into self-reliant modernisation. This two-pronged policy has restored to China its lost greatness.

Milton Friedman, the laissez faire economics guru, touring India in the late 1950s to
assess Indian economic trends, concluded that Jawaharlal Nehru with his emphasis on a gigantic public sector was doing little right, but at the grassroots level, sans government interference, little was going wrong. He was particularly impressed by the small industry-driven Ludhiana, which he suggested was the free-market model of raw muscularity which, if followed, would fast-track India into the industrial age. Nehru paid no heed. Indira Gandhi had her moment in 1966 when, with the economy plummeting, she contemplated freeing it from its socialist thrall, but ultimately chose to remain within her comfort zone and tighten the state’s grip on it, instead. The economic reforms P.V. Narasimha Rao began in the 1990s, while not comprehensive, were irreversible. Atal Behari Vajpayee could have but didn’t push the pedal, and the economic liberalisation that Manmohan Singh has overseen assumed a pedestrian pace, even as an unending series of scams using the vestigial socialist state machinery, unspooled.

It cannot be that the Deng-kind of common sense is missing in the Indian establishment. It is just drowned by the self-interest of the vast hordes of politicians and apparatchiks (the armies of babus, from peons to beat constables to secretaries to the Indian government) manning the rusted colonial-era administrative structure geared primarily to revenue-collection and maintaining law and order. Post-1947, this system at the Central, state and local levels has evolved into a mechanism to exempt its handlers from accountability, leading to politicians and those on the public payroll milking it for all it’s worth while not being answerable for anything they did. Why would these beneficiaries want anything to change? This is the challenge facing the country. But which leader is best placed to tackle it?

The choice is stark. There’s Rahul Gandhi heading the Congress Party and Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi leading the Bharatiya Janata Party. As the ablest chief minister in the Indian Union of states and the only one to run a provincial dispensation providing water and electricity 24/7, Mr Modi has no peers. He has relied on the same bureaucratic structure that proved hopeless elsewhere and, with his can-do attitude, problem-solving mindset, no-nonsense managerial methods, and fixing of responsibility, transformed it into a well-oiled machine. Corruption and waste have been trimmed, and Gujarat is at the top using any development metric. The Gram Jyoti programme epitomises his innovative thinking. With Mr Modi decreeing a binary feeder mode, the state electricity board now has power coursing to villages through a 24-hour line, and for agricultural use at nights and non-peak periods. This has revolutionised farming and brought prosperity to the hinterland. So confident is Mr Modi of his outcomes-based policies and programmes that, not too long ago in a closed forum, after articulating his own he asked the Prime Minister point-blank: “What’s your vision?” and received the usual blank Dr Singh stare. Importantly, Mr Modi is the first leader to trash public sector enterprises — the biggest drain on the treasury, saying “government has no business to be in business”.

The 2002 Gujarat riots are seen by many as too big an obstacle for Mr Modi. Except that elections over the years at all levels in Gujarat have shown that his record of good governance — a hafta-free life and hassle-free delivery of services and benefits to all the people — has trumped bad memories and can, in significant measure, win over Muslim voters. Otherwise, they have to rely on the empty promises, symbolic gestures, and Modi-bashing fulminations by run-of-the-mill politicians and token Muslim leaders — the stock-in-trade of “secular” parties ranging from the Congress to the Samajwadi Party of the Mulayam Singh parivar. In response, Mr Modi has enunciated his “Índia First” theme as a secularist credo. Moreover, the blunting of the Hindutva spearhead, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, in Gujarat has not gone unnoticed.

The Congress is relying on the untested and unproven Rahul Gandhi in the hope that, like his father Rajiv, he’ll bring fresh thinking to government. But lacking hands-on experience of managing under-performing institutions, Rajiv was consumed by the system; his tenure is remembered for the iconic Bofors corruption case (the model, incidentally, for defence scandals in the current Congress rule). Finally, like other politicians Rahul has only talked change; Modi has actually implemented it. Who should the people trust to deliver the goods?

Published in the Ásian Age’, March 14, 2013 at http://www.beta.asianage.com/columnists/can-do-helmsman-912

Posted in China, China military, Europe, Indian Army, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Military Acquisitions, South Asia, Technology transfer, United States, US. | 8 Comments

Impact of Kerry-Hagel duo

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

What can India expect with Senator John Kerry replacing Hillary Clinton at the State Department and former Senator Charles Hagel Leon Panetta at the Pentagon? Do these changes herald change in the US foreign and military policies that’ll hurt India?

Uniquely for a country aspiring to great power, the Indian government displays the sensibility of a marginal state surviving on small mercies shown by big powers. Lacking self-confidence, strategic vision, and the will to be assertive, New Delhi accepts that Indian national interests will be defined by others. So, if Iran is deemed a rogue state by Washington, New Delhi rushes to create distance with Tehran.

If President Obama champions a nuclear weapons-free world, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh jumps on to the disarmament bandwagon without realising that this’ll require India to first sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), leaving the Indian thermonuclear deterrent — with no prospect of further fusion weapons testing — the equivalent of a short, blunt, sword. Worse, New Delhi assesses new appointees in the US government in the light of their attitude to Pakistan. That doing so pulls India down to Pakistan’s level apparently concerns nobody, even though every lowly Under-Secretary in MEA is alert to the possibility of re-hyphenation by stealth! Consider the recent brouhaha over an exhumed Hagel statement that India “financed troubles” for Pakistan.

If New Delhi had any real sense of the Indian stake in Afghanistan, our Washington embassy would not have been instructed to react strongly, or even at all. Silence on Hagel’s 2011 videographed talk would at once have signalled that Indian interests are not necessarily convergent with America’s, and that India will do whatever is necessary to protect them.

With Hagel hinting at Indian Intelligence activity out of the consulates in southern Afghanistan, this was no bad message to remind GHQ, Rawalpindi, that two can play at covert warfare, and meddling in Jammu & Kashmir will exact a price that a slowly imploding Pakistan can ill-afford. There was nothing there to get worked up about in the first place anyway, and so the reaction confirmed Indian diplomacy in recent years as being sometimes flecked with unnerving naivete. Surely, it is in the national interest for everyone to believe that India is not helpless and RAW is very much a player on the Afghan scene. In any case, as an ex-member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Hagel was no doubt merely repeating something he heard in an intelligence briefing on the subject, and is not evidence of a bad-mouthing anti-India insider in the Obama Administration.

He has far graver issues to tackle such as managing a declining defence spend and lower readiness levels for the US forces. The American defence budget, frozen at the 2011-level, will combine with the sequestration of funds, resulting in expenditure reductions this year of $85 billion across the board, half of it coming from the Pentagon allocations, and $500 billion less available to it over the next decade. As a consequence, the US naval presence in the Indian Ocean, for instance, will be halved from two deployed carrier task groups to just one. A smaller American military profile in Asia is likely, moreover, owing to Hagel’s experience as an infantry drudge — a sergeant twice wounded, in the Vietnam War and scarred by that military defeat. It led to his opposing US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is bad news for the Manmohan Singh regime, which implicitly relies on the American strategic security cover in any future dustup with China.

It’s a scenario the Indian government and military better wake up to. America’s security coattails are not long enough anymore for a strategic partner such as India to ride on, alongside America’s treaty allies in Asia.

India’s strategic discomfiture may be exacerbated by Kerry. A polished diplomat in the classical mould, who dazzled his audiences in his first trip as Secretary of State to France, Germany, and Italy with flawless French, German, and Italian, Kerry indicated at his confirmation hearings that getting up China’s nose with forceful displays of military strength is counterproductive. “I am not convinced that increased military ramp-up is critical yet….That’s something I’d want to look at very carefully”, he told the senators, who approved his appointment. “But we have a lot more bases out there than any other nation in the world, including China today. We have a lot more forces out there than any other nation in the world, including China today. And we’ve just augmented the president’s announcement in Australia with additional Marines. You know, the Chinese take a look at that and say, what’s the United States doing? They are trying to circle us? What’s going on? And so, you know, every action has its reaction. It’s the old — you know, it’s not just the law of physics; it’s the law of politics and diplomacy. I think we have to be thoughtful about…how we go forward.” With both the Departments of State and Defence headed by persons who are wary of alienating Beijing, conciliators in the Indian government, such as the National Security Adviser, Shivshankar Menon, are no doubt pleased. Just the other day, Menon repeated his stock wisdom that enmity with China is “not inevitable”. The corollary of such thinking is that, capabilities-wise, the Indian military packing a keg or two less of powder will not hurt the country’s security interests much.

But in the world of hard knocks, India may soon discover that a purely defensive posture coupled to virtually zero capacity for sustained offensive warfare in the mountains and a strategic deterrent that’s more “let’s pretend to be thermonuclear”, will beget coercive escalation by the massively ensconced People’s Liberation Army and the Second Artillery Strategic Forces on the Tibetan Plateau.

There’ll be no American help even of the kind available to India in 1962, lest China get upset. Indeed, there’s a growing sentiment in America to pull back altogether from a forward deployed military stance in Asia. That will leave a terminally complacent and security-dependent India, up a creek.

[Published in the ‘New Indian Express’ March 8, 2013 at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/article1492458.ece

Posted in Afghanistan, Asian geopolitics, Australia, China, China military, disarmament, Europe, Geopolitics, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, Indian Ocean, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Missiles, nonproliferation, Northeast Asia, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan military, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States | 15 Comments

Arbitrary priorities

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

The military variant of that old saw about India being a rich country with poor people owing to god-awful governance is that there is no real dearth of monies allotted defence but every reason to doubt these are always spent wisely, or even well.

The sustained downturn of the economy has compelled the Finance Ministry to warn the Ministry of Defence (MOD) of a budgetary cut of almost Rs. 10,000 crores in 2013-14. Finance Minister C. Chidambaram’s forthright statement that “If the [budget] is cut for this year, it is cut; you cannot do anything about it”, was in the context of Defence Minister A.K. Antony demanding Rs 45,000 crores in addition to the Rs 1.93 lakh crore budget in the last fiscal, and his more recent attempt, besides Pakistan, to talk-up the direness of the threat from China, now militarily ensconced in nearby Gwadar as well. The fact that this is unlikely to impress the North Block into loosening the purse-strings, notwithstanding, the three armed services will push their separate expenditure priorities.

The air force will emphasize, in the main, the Rafale medium-range, multi-role combat aircraft acquisition, four squadrons of the “super” Su-30 for the China front, airborne warning and control systems, and tankers, roughly in that order, the army will push for a mountain strike corps, a combat helicopter fleet to fill its newly-formed aviation arm, and 155 mm artillery, and the navy will want the ongoing warship induction schedule to be on track and the import of yet another conventional submarine. This is where things get appalling. The limited resources will ensure the three services remain dissatisfied. But how is inter se prioritisation achieved with the Indian government lacking a mechanism for it?

In the absence of a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) who, keeping in mind the security threats and challenges, would rank-order the individual service expenditure programmes in a scheme of genuinely integrated procurements, the Chiefs of Staff Committee (COSC) is the only available forum for this task. Ideally, COSC is where the competing demands and requirements would be professionally debated and discussed threadbare with the three service chiefs at the end of this arduous process agreeing amicably on a single tri-service list of acquisition priorities in descending level of importance. In practice, however, every member of the COSC insists on his service’s needs requiring immediate sanction which, if conceded, would leave the fighting abilities of the other two services in the ditch.

Being equal in rank and there being no protocol and rank-wise superior CDS in the chain of command, the services chiefs feel no need to reconcile their differing priorities. The traditional Monday morning meetings of the COSC during the budgeting period, therefore, continue to be what they are in the rest of the year – pleasant meetings of military brass engaged in banter and the business of consuming tea and samosas. According to a former service chief who was Chairman, COSC, he could devote only 15 percent of his working hours to considering the demands of the other services, with most of the time being taken up by his own service-related interests and issues. He conceded that as chairman he favoured his own service, aware that the chiefs of the other services would do the same when occupying this largely ceremonial post held in rotation. The COSC, in other words doesn’t help in untangling issues, or leaving the civilians in the MOD bureaucracy less befuddled.

In the event, the job of slicing a bigger piece of the defence budgetary pie falls to the senior staffs in the services headquarters. This they do by pitching their demands to the Joint Secretary dealing with the concerned service, before the chiefs do much the same thing with the Defence Secretary and, more directly, to the Defence Minister. Because most generalist IAS officers in the defence ministry have no technical competence, nor any feel for the subject, in order to judge which Service deserves to get what, leave alone why it should be prioritised, the difficult decisions are usually kicked up to the Defence Minister. As a workaday politician, the average Defence Minister, his skill-set limited to spouting platitudes about patriotism and self-reliance in defence, and reassuring all and sundry that the armed forces are prepared to meet all threats, is even more clueless. This prompts each of the services chiefs to try and personally hard-sell his service’s needs to him in extreme terms. A seasoned politician may be intimidated by this tactic the first time around. But with each passing year he becomes inured to the fearful scenarios being painted if this or that acquisition doesn’t come through. In the event, he arbitrarily alights on the procurement priorities, allowing all manner of extraneous factors to come into play, including constituency-servicing imperatives and political pressures from the top reaches of his own party to buy this or that piece of hardware. Bureaucrats then generate ex-post facto rationales for the decisions so taken.

Obviously, there is something drastically wrong with this system, starting with the missing role of the political institutions in articulating the primary, secondary, and tertiary threats; laying down clear guidelines for strategies to deal with each of them; outlining the force structures in the short, medium and long term; and tackling meta-strategic issues, such as establishing a programme for sharply reduced dependence on foreign-sourced weapons platforms and making the armed services responsible for the time-bound indigenization programmes. Doing all this is the responsibility of the cabinet in the more advanced democracies, with the legislature exercising severe oversight. In the Indian set-up, however, the first three roles are, for all intents and purposes, expropriated by the military services, which adhere only lightly to conventional security directives from government because the bulk of the politicians are disinterested in national security and foreign policy issues. The government-of-the-day, in the event, mans the financial spigot, MOD bureaucrats concern themselves with the processes of decisionmaking, traffic in files, and act as facilitators of corruption (and should a scam surface, the Central Bureau of Investigation is there to provide comic relief as the dim-witted desi Keystone cops), and Parliament is a rubber stamp.

[Published as “Ä game of monopoly” Feb 28, 2013 in the ‘Ásian Age’at http://www.asianage.com/columnists/game-monopoly-606 and in the ‘Deccan Chronicle’ at http://www.deccanchronicle.com/130228/commentary-columnists/article/game-monopoly ]

Posted in China, China military, civil-military relations, Defence Industry, DRDO, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Politics, Military Acquisitions, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia | 1 Comment

Why retraction on NoKo test?

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Very strange things are happening in the aftermath of the fusion-boosted fission (FBF) device tested at the North Korean N-test site in the Hamgyeong mountains. Readers may care to peruse in sequence the stories here ID-ed. There was the story in ‘Nature’ immediately after the test mentioning both the Russian monitoring station at Petropovlovsk and the Japanese centre at Takasaki having data-reads of, by implication, a sophisticated explosive device. See:
http://news.discovery.com/human/radiation-north-korea-nuclear-test-130219.htm.
The next story features a retraction by ‘Nature’, which ‘talks of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) advising the weekly to retract its story because it says the detection by the Takasaki-sensors of the noble gas Xenon-133 — evidence of tritium used in the FBF device tested, was no big thing as the Japanese station routinely picks up traces of Xenon-133 owing to nearby nuclear facilities, and should not be attributed to the NoKo test. In these stories there’s no mention whatsoever of the Russian radionuclide facility. See:
http://www.nature.com/news/correction-sensors-pick-up-north-korean-radioactivity-1.12464.
The third story in ‘Nature’mentions preparation of the next N-test by NoKo (mentioned by my sources in my original blog a few days back on the NoKo test):
http://www.nature.com/news/correction-sensors-pick-up-north-korean-radioactivity-1.12464.
And finally, there’s this curious turn to the story of the US Air Force deploying the WC-135 “sniffer” aircraft over northwestern NoKo but finding absolutely no evidence whatsover of nuclear particles and concluding without actually concluding that there was no test at all!!! But the Richter scale jumped registering an earthquake-sized event, and therefore it is a bit of mystery! Here:
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/02/21/spy-agencies-scrounge-for-details-on-north-korean-nuclear-test-as-no-traces-of-nuclear-particles-found/

Possible explanation:
The giveaway here is the role of the CTBTO. As stated in my earlier articles/blogs pertaining to Obama’s foreign policy agenda for his 2nd term, written before and after the US presidential elections in Nov 2012, in which disarmament and nonproliferation top the list. The NoKo test has the potential of upsetting this agenda — and robbing Obama of the chance retrospectively to justify his Nobel Peace Prize — of coaxing India into signing this treaty, and this was prospect was enfangered. It could get India all worked up, because as I had stated this would put Pakistan — which had designed the FBF device, aided and assisted by China, which had thereafter refined and vetted the design — way ahead of India. Any national interest and national security-minded Indian government would have issued the demarche to Washington as I had suggested, and ordered preparations for resumption of N-testing to get underway, pronto. That hasn’t happened. To preempt the slim chance of an informed audience and, through them, the Indian people pressuring the politically weak and weak-willed Manmohan Singh regime to get on with the job of open-ended thermonuclear weapons testing in order to produce warheads that work to the satisfaction — as I have always maintained of the military primarily, rather than just Dr R Chidambaram, one-time Chairman, AEC, and as S&T adviser to PM since the early 2000s, all-time retardant against making the Indian arsenal effective, reliable, and safe and at least on par with Pakistan’s weapons inventory — forget the Chinese Second Artillery Strategic Forces. There is no other explanation for the retraction and the deliberate playing down of the NoKo tests results. Hey, but the truth is out.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, civil-military relations, disarmament, Europe, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Army, Indian Politics, Japan, nonproliferation, Northeast Asia, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, Russia, South Asia, United States, US. | 27 Comments

Pelf & procurement politics

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Treasury-milking schemes are of two kinds. Those where national assets and natural resources are sold or contracted out, resulting in monies that should rightfully fill the state coffers being diverted instead into private bank accounts of, and property purchases by, ministers, lackeys, and officials entrusted with responsibility to administer the public good (2G, Coalgate, etc). The other kind of financial boondoggle relates to pay-offs by foreign companies and other entities bagging huge contracts for capital systems and construction (Commonwealth Games, turn-key projects). Most such high-value deals fly in under the radar of public scrutiny, quietly ripping off the exchequer. Then there are central ministries, such as power and industry, where corruption is reportedly so entrenched and institutionalised, and the system of pay-offs works with such clockwork precision, there is not a whiff of controversy anywhere, with the vendors allowed seamlessly to pad the contracts.

Owing to their ramifications for national security, big defence deals are more in the public eye, and the sensitivity of even the most corrupt governments to perceptions of wrongdoing is high, but so is the brazenness with which monies are siphoned off. The temptation is so great and the opportunity for making a quick buck so easy, it was only a matter of time before a serving armed service chief was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Rather than be palmed off with pennies Air Chief Marshal S P ‘Bundle’ Tyagi, apparently decided during his term as chief of the air staff (CAS) to play ball with a view ultimately to raking in the pounds. As the Ministry of Defence ‘White Paper’ states, Tyagi re-wrote the specifications in 2005 enabling the Italian firm, Finmeccanica, to sell a dozen AugustaWestland AW-101 helicopters valued at some Rs 3,600 crore, for the VVIP fleet. ‘Bundle’ Tyagi’s strangely named cousins — ‘Julie’ and ‘Dosca’ among them, with Julie, by his own admission, already in the business of middlemaning deals with the power ministry, came in handy. Once retired, the ex-CAS, Tyagi, formally commodified his potential reach into the military by setting himself up as ‘consultant’ for foreign arms suppliers.

Documents from scams, scandals, and loot-minded contracts for foreign sourced-military hardware during Congress rule late 1980s onwards, reveal certain distinguishing features common to all of them, which were first evidenced in the deals for the German HDW-209 diesel submarines, the Italian AugustaWestland WG utility helicopters for the public sector Pawan Hans company and, of course, the Swedish Bofors FH-77B 155mm howitzers, the last-named rendered iconic in the annals of Indian corruption. ‘The family’, Milan, complicated play-making replete with a string of shadow and dummy companies facilitating payoffs, Indian middlemen (with Abhishek Verma’s Bermuda-based Atlas group of companies, having close Congress connections, always in the picture), shady European agents working for vendor firms (Ottavio Quattrocchi who is persona non grata, but not his son who, reportedly, is in Delhi often enough to maintain old contacts and operates out of Le Meridean Hotel when in town; the Britisher Christian Michel, and the Swiss duo Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa) are the constants.

It is not hard to speculate what happened. Haschke, who had previously dealt with Julie Tyagi for power systems, must have firmed up the Tyagi-cousin route to the IAF chief, while Verma, worked to bring in ‘The family’ into the loop as guarantor of the deal. ‘Bundle’ Tyagi (ironically, his last name means someone who sacrifices!) must have reckoned that the role of the ruling party bigwigs provided him political cover. ‘The family’ and the minders of its monies, in turn, must have calculated that with the CAS in the game, they had an insurance against the deal being faulted on technical/military grounds. Central to the deal going through was Finmeccanica meeting the demand of ‘The family’ for Rs. 200 crore. This pay-off was obviously an after-thought requiring the agents to do something unheard of in the business — reduce their own commissions to enable the deal to go through. Knowing how the marbles are stacked in New Delhi, the Europeans would do this for ‘The family’, but surely not for the inconsequential Family Tyagi.

Since the HDW-Bofors deals the modus operandi of Congress governments is clear. The pick is made at the highest level from the shortlisted hardware, which choice, the government approves and the concerned armed service then swallows. The deputy chiefs of staffs of the three armed services, with responsibility for procurement, can prove a hurdle. Here’s the point about the AW-101 deal: Not all deputy chiefs become service chiefs, but seniority decreed that Air Marshal N A K Browne, DCAS at the time of these shenanigans, was in line for the top post. By protesting or making an adverse noting, Browne could have nixed the deal. This he didn’t do, perhaps, fearing that an angry Tyagi and an upset Congress government might contrive to spoil his chances (as has occurred in other cases).

As the administrative head of any armed service, the chief of the staff can ruin promotion prospects of senior officers by moving them to relatively unimportant posts and diluting service records. Browne could have voiced his apprehensions directly to the defence minister. The problem with this option, according to a former army vice chief is that in such a situation the rest of the principal staff officers, as usually happens, side with the chief, whence the deputy chief’s motivation for questioning the purchase of the selected piece of hardware becomes an issue. Deputy chiefs, therefore, prefer to not upset the applecart. Outside the military, the entire defence ministry bureaucracy is a pliant instrument in the hands of the political masters. In the event, per the vice chief I talked to, “It is not possible for any corruption to happen without the defence ministry and the military services knowing about it.” This is to say that the military and the civilian bureaucracy are equally complicit in all defence scams and scandals. That is defence procurement politics in India.

[Published in the ‘New Indian Express’, Friday, February 22, 2013, at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/article1473739.ece ]

Posted in civil-military relations, Europe, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Military Acquisitions | 4 Comments

Tritium in NoKo test

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Sources, citing Russian Petropovlovsk reads, say the Russians have detected traces of tritium at the Hamgyeong mountain test site. It confirms the very real fact of the so-called “third” NoKo test being an FBF device of Pakistani design refined and approved by Chinese nuclear weaponeers. There still seems to be a reluctance, especially in Western circles, to admit this aspect or the conclusion. They’d rather not contemplate a future where fusion weapons are wilfully proliferated by a China that cannot be controlled and is loath to restrain itself because it serves to enhance its position, as I have argued elsewhere, as being simultaneously the root-cause of the problem and part of the solution.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, disarmament, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, nonproliferation, Northeast Asia, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, Russia, South Asia | 4 Comments