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

Root of trouble: Article 370

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Dipping political fortunes amidst an economic downturn in the run-up to the 2014 general election and the fear of Narendra Modi galvanising the majority community with charges against the Congress Party coalition government of softness towards terrorists led to the jettisoning of considerations of votebank politics and the hanging of Afzal Guru.

Sixty-six years after Partition there’s still little recognition in the country that the problem of Kashmir is actually sustained by Article 370 of the Constitution, which accorded the erstwhile “princely state” of Kashmir a special status within the Indian Union. This article was based on the faulty premise of retaining for the state its territorial and demographic exclusivity, contravening all principles of federalism. It has kept the militancy oxygenated.

Getting rid of this mischievous provision in the Constitution — there’s nothing sacrosanct about it — will, once and for all, change the entire discourse about Kashmir. The mollycoddled Yasin Maliks and Ahmed Shah Geelanis will have the choice of abiding by the fait accompli, or availing of a one-way bus ticket to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), where they can cry hoarse about Indian perfidy for all the good it will do to them. The complication is the wilful conflation of Article 370 with the interests generally of the Muslim community in India by political parties to milk electoral profit even though it drags out the Kashmir issue and hurts the nation.

It must be recalled that the offending article was only a transient political contrivance, an expedient device conjured up by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru during the Constituent Assembly debates to bring the potentially dissonant politics of Sheikh Abdullah’s National Conference within the nation’s fold. It is not some holy covenant to keep Kashmir forever separate and should have been discarded as soon as its utility had ended, certainly by the time the second province-wide elections were held in 1956. Nation states adhere to undertakings only so long as their interests are served. All that Article 370 does is afford the permanently disaffected minority among the Kashmiri population legal and constitutional cover for their violent dissidence.

It is ironic that the ruling Congress Party, which did not flinch from violating the fundamental rights of citizens guaranteed by the Constitution during the Emergency in the 1970s, is in the forefront of preserving this article that offends the basic principles of federalism cementing the Indian Union for sentimental reasons — because Article 370 was a sort of a compact Nehru made with the land of his forebears. The lack of political and strategic foresight is such that the main Opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, instead of campaigning for the abrogation of this article, has been shouting about the delay in carrying out the death sentence, and now that Afzal Guru has been hanged, finds itself outflanked.

Courtesy Article 370, the belief that Kashmir is not like other states and is not a part of the Indian whole has grown apace with rising discontent, convincing the separatists about the righteousness of their cause. The special status of the state has prevented the social and economic integration of Jammu and Kashmir, with Indians from other states barred from legally purchasing property, establishing businesses, settling down there and obtaining voting rights. Cocooned in this way, many Kashmiris have a heightened sense of grievance against the Indian state, mistakenly believing they are sovereign. The sooner they are disabused of this foolish notion the better for everybody, and for peace in the region.

While New Delhi’s approach to Kashmir is trapped in a mush of minutiae regarding the United Nations resolutions, and confused ideas of legal and moral obligations — factors that are completely extraneous and irrelevant to assimilating Jammu and Kashmir into India — the Pakistan government has from the start exercised common sense. As early as 1953, when the issue of the status of the “Azad Kashmir Forces” came up, the then Army Chief, Gen. Ayub Khan, ordered these to be merged into the Pakistan Army. Other measures followed — reducing the government in Muzaffarabad to a paper Assembly, permitted to do no more than make appropriate noises propping up the fiction of “Azad Kashmir”.

There’s never going to be a plebiscite, so why persist with Article 370, which basically amounts to a standstill policy that only India hews to pending a UN-adjudicated process of self-determination? Indeed, there’s as much chance of Jammu and Kashmir being allowed to go to Pakistan as there is of Pakistan voluntarily merging their nation into the Indian motherland. That both New Delhi and Islamabad are reconciled to the division of Kashmir is evident from the Indian government’s astonishing reluctance to make claims on PoK and the Northern Areas. Islamabad, lately, has sought formalisation of the partition of Kashmir along the present lines, to wit President Pervez Musharraf’s 2006 plan for resolving the Kashmir dispute. The trouble is as long as there is a constitutional impediment such as Article 370, the cementing of the Line of Control (LoC) as an international border cannot proceed, nor normalisation of relations with Pakistan.

Voiding Article 370 should be the first order of business of the Indian state, a necessary step to bring closure to this dispute. It has to be followed up with a comprehensive resettlement policy that prioritises land grants to communities of retired soldiers in order to firm up continuous habitations in depth on the Indian side of the LoC. These armed communities, like the kibbutzes on Israel’s borders, meshed into the Army’s defence grid, will have vested interests in safeguarding their properties, consolidating the border and minimising cross-border infiltration. It should be part of an unapologetic national policy aimed at changing the demographic of the state in the manner Pakistan is changing the demographic profile of Gilgit-Baltistan in the Northern Areas, for instance, by encouraging Sunni settlers from the plains. Those opposing such a policy ought to recall world history — “self determination” has never been a factor in building a composite nation, and Kashmir is no exception.
[Published Feb 14, 2013 as “Article 370 must go” in the ‘Ásian Age’ at http://www.asianage.com/columnists/article-370-must-go-855%5D

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Central Asia, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's Pakistan Policy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Terrorism | 13 Comments

NoKo/Pak H-bomb test superior to Indian S-1

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Several conclusions in my previous blog (“Rogue Triad and H-Bomb Tests”) have been borne out. According to a source, it is confirmed that what was exploded was a fusion-boosted fission device of Pakistani design that was vetted/refined by Chinese weapons scientists. Officially, South Korean siesmic sensors read 4.7+ on the Richter scale, the US 4.9+, Japanese 5.2+, but the most reliable read is from the Russian station at Petropovlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula nearest to the test site with 5.3-5.5+ Richter. Petropovlovsk also has, according to this source, a radionuclide detection facility. While the Granite stratum of the Hamygeong test site dampened/suppressed the shock waves, the 5.5 on Richter translates into a certifiably estimated 20-30 Kiloton explosion. This, on the face of it, is a better performing design than the S-1 device tested in Pokhran on May 11, 1998. This should worry GOI enough for it to order resumption of N-testing, because now there’s no doubt whatsoever about Pakistan obtaining, centrally with Chinese help and assistance, thermonuclear armaments.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, disarmament, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Japan, nonproliferation, Northeast Asia, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, Relations with Russia, Russia, South Asia, Technology transfer, United States | 27 Comments

Rogue Triad and H-Bomb Tests

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported on February 3 that a third nuclear test by North Korea was imminent at its Punggye test site in the Hamgyong Mountain range in the northeastern part of that country adjoining the Chinese Jiangsu province. According to another news story, this specific site has three unevenly horizontal L-shaped tunnels bored into the 7,000-feet high granite mountain, Mount Mantap, each with nine bulkheads to absorb the shock waves from nuclear tests. The granite prevents venting of noble gases, such as xenon, that can help outside experts divine the nature of the device.

The Washington think-tank, Institute for Science and International Security, is of the view that the Punggye complex, inclusive of the instrumentation bunker to record the test data, closely resembles the Pakistani Ras Koh nuclear testing facility in the Chagai Hills. The Yonhap account revealed that North Korea’s National Defence Committee decided on a ‘high level’ test to be carried out in the western-most shaft as early as mid-February 2013. That the phrase ‘high level’ referred to a thermonuclear test was confirmed by the Japanese newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, on January 25 mentioning that a fusion-boosted fission (FBF) device using plutonium as ‘primary’ in a staged thermonuclear weapon — which by itself is a ‘mini thermonuclear’, would be triggered by North Korea. A second near-simultaneous test of a uranium device is possible both to test the explosive cladding of the ‘secondary’ in the thermonuclear package, and to mask the results of the FBF. Indeed, the weekly science journal, Nature, on February 3 contends that scientists re-examining isotopic data have concluded that the North Koreans conducted two low-yield tests in 2010, one of which may have been an FBF.

In the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Siegfried Hecker, a former US nuclear weapons designer, revised his earlier conclusion that the first North Korean nuclear test was a failure with just 1-2 kiloton (KT) yield, to suggest that it was actually a successful test of a small, light warhead/weapon packing over 8 KT of destructive power. Hecker, who has been allowed to access sensitive North Korean nuclear facilities, reported that during a visit three years ago he saw an installation with 2,000 centrifuges, presumably of the P-1 type of Pakistani origin. This number, however, indicates that North Korea doesn’t have enough of them. A minimum 10,000 uranium centrifuges are required to output a reasonable amount of weapon-grade uranium enriched to 92 percent plus level. Also, a new centrifuge plant takes five years to tune up and another five years to output the 14 kg of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) required for the ‘secondary’.

The situation raises the question: Which country transferred the thermonuclear fuel, tritium, for the FBF and the large stock of HEU to North Korea? The answer, by connecting the dots, points to China and Pakistan.

China has been the most egregious proliferator of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) technology to Pakistan, North Korea, Libya and, per Western sources, to Iran. North Korea, as a pariah state is a pliable instrument for Beijing and Islamabad to exploit. As Pyongyang doesn’t give a damn, it is utilised as a proxy to, in one case, stir up trouble and, in the other case, possibly to test a Pakistani FBF design vetted by Chinese scientists. With great strategic forethought, Beijing spawned these proliferation dangers and, thereafter, positioned itself as part of the solution to, for instance, keep the unpredictable North Koreans in check, and Iran from reaching the nuclear weapons threshold. Beijing bolsters its ‘mediator’ credentials by occasionally feigning anger at Pyongyang’s brinksmanship and at Islamabad for the Sunni mullahs radicalising the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang. Elsewhere, there is evidence showing Beijing has clandestinely transferred thermonuclear materials along with technical expertise to a Pakistan craving fusion weapons to match India’s arsenal. Islamabad, however, cannot afford to test its own hydrogen bomb but can use the Punggye site to do so. North Korea is happy to oblige as long as it shares in the data, notoriety, and fusion weapons skills, combining these to extort food aid and development assistance from the international community.

Some experts maintain that Pakistan sourced the HEU for the North Korean FBF, except it is under close observation. In view of the state-of-the-art nuclear forensics available with the US, Islamabad cannot risk moving HEU to North Korea for fear of punitive actions and sanctions, which it cannot survive. However, there is no reason for Pakistan to attempt such a foolhardy venture considering China can easily transport the HEU, along with the tritium, undetected across the mountainous land border.

Beijing prizes its mediatory role between the West and particularly North Korea called a ‘weak and crazy’ state by George Friedman of Stratfor. It is a description that fits Pakistan as well. Controlling both these states equipped with thermonuclear capabilities constitutes a powerful negative leverage — something that Beijing has used effectively over the years to keep the proliferation issues simmering, but not boiling over, in the process winning the gratitude of the West. Besides, a hydrogen bomb armed-Pakistan will have India obsessing even more about its smaller neighbour, thereby at once reducing itself and taking itself out of the big power game afoot in Asia, which serves China’s purpose just fine.

Whether or not North Korea explodes a thermonuclear device anytime soon, this is the direction in which the rogue triad of China, Pakistan and North Korea is moving or manoeuvring to move. It is imperative that New Delhi issue an immediate demarche to Washington, stating unequivocally that nuclear testing by North Korea and its acting as proxy for China and Pakistan is pushing India towards resumption of nuclear testing. Open-ended fusion tests, desperately needed since the failure of the hydrogen device in 1998, will render the country’s thermonuclear stance credible. Tragically, the feeble-minded Manmohan Singh government has not stood up for the national interest all these years, and is unlikely to muster the gumption to issue this demarche in its last months in office.

[Published as “China hand in N-proliferation””in the ‘New Indian Express’ February 8, 2013 as http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/article1454134.ece ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, disarmament, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Missiles, nonproliferation, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, Terrorism, United States, US., West Asia | 10 Comments