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FINALLY, the Multiple Independently-targetable Re-entry Vehicle (MIRV) system-armed Agni-5 intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) — the Divyastra was successfully test-fired yesterday. Nearly twenty years late.
The MIRV tech has been collecting dust at the Advanced Systems Laboratory (ASL), Hyderabad, for the last 19 years. It was a project lovingly shepherded to near completion by RN Agarwal, the then Director, ASL. He wanted to complete it by the time he retired in 2004. But the project missed the deadline by a year. In part because Dr Agarwal’s approaches since 2002 to the first BJP government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee for approval of a test launch of a MIRVed Agni did not elicit the response he had hoped for. The Vajpayee PMO, with Brajesh Mishra, the National Security Adviser-cum-Principal Private Secretary to the PM, heading it, repeatedly said NO! But Agarwal’s spirited campaign for the Indian MIRV project cost him a promotion. He was passed over for the post of DRDO chief and Secretary to the Govt of India (GOI), because Mishra feared Agarwal would use the DRDO pulpit to push MIRV, which Mishra did not want. The head of the Arjun Main Battle Tank Project, Dr M Natarajan, was appointed to lead DRDO instead.
The Manmohan Singh regime wouldn’t OK the MIRV test, and Narendra Modi didn’t either until sometime in late 2022 when he greenflagged the Divyastra test launch.
I had long ago called for the militarisation of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), specially its satellite package injection into designated orbit-technology, which is MIRV in embryo. But there is no reason to doubt Agarwal’s contention that ASL developed the more demanding MIRV tech by itself. Because, MIRV cannot tolerate deviation in “injection velocity” exceding 0.1 metre per second; in comparison for satellite placement, 5 to 8 metre deviation is permissible.
The nose cone geometry of the MIRVed Agni-5 (Prime) — Divyastra IRBM, can carry multiple N-warheads. But, like Agni-1 medium range ballistic missile, Agni-2, and Agni-3 — in fact all Agni’s, the Divyastra is configured to carry either a single megaton weapon, or as many as eight smaller yield nuclear warheads and decoys. For the test launch, the three MIRVed warhead variant was, perhaps, used, with each of the warheads releaseable at one second intervals during which time the missile travels 4.4-5 kms. Its elliptical target zone is calculated as roughly 50 kms by 150 kms.
[By the way, all this information and more on the Indian MIRV tech and Agni missiles was featured in my 2008 book — India’s Nuclear Policy published by Praeger in the US and, the South Asian edition, by the local Pentagon Press.]
But, PLEASE NO TALK anywhere and ever OF THE DIVYASTRA USE AGAINST PAKISTAN by any GOI officials and military officers. India’s reputation has suffered irreparable harm as it is over the years by the government’s and armed forces’ fixation with Pakistan as threat. Think of an elephant frightened by a mouse.
MIRV is a strategic attack and nuclear deterrence multiplier — because more nuclear weapons can be carried on a smaller number of missiles. So, why wasn’t MIRV tested before now?
Brajesh Mishra feared that a successful MIRV test would imperil the Vajpayee government’s policy of rapprochement with the United States, which was upset already, firstly, because Washington had no inkling of the 1998 tests, and secondly, because the S-1 test intimated India’s thermonuclear weapon interest. But the George W Bush Administration ensured during Manmohan Singh’s tenure via the 2008 nuclear civilian cooperation deal negotiated — need I repeat again — by the current foreign minister, S Jaishankar, who was then Joint Secretary (Americas) in MEA. It guaranteed that India would not become a thermonuclear power.
This happened because Jaishankar agreed, in essence, to put a lid on Indian nuclear testing as demanded by his lead American counterpart and, in the bargain, strategically sold India out. The political cover for this concession was Vajpayee’s “voluntary” test moratorium announced in Parliament on May 28, 1998. The deal carries the explicit threat of termination of the deal, if India resumed nuclear testing. It achieved America’s express arms control goal of “capping and freezing” India’s strategic weapons at the sub-thermonuclear level.
‘Strategic Sellout’ is, in fact, the title of a book of essays published in 2009 — a compilation of op’eds and such by the late Dr PK Iyengar, former Chairman, atomic energy commission, and Drs AN Prasad, former Director, BARC, Trombay, and the late A Gopalakrishnan, former chair, atomic energy regulatory commission, and myself, written realtime even as this deal was being negotiated, vehemently opposing each and every deleterious provision in it, as it became known. It was prophetic in how things have turned out, nuclear policy-wise for India, since. India has gained little by way of advanced nuclear technology because the really critical stuff like the plutonium reprocessing tech is, in any case, unavailable to India — deal or no deal! And because no Indian PM — not Manmohan and until now not Modi either, has had the guts to ram resumed nuclear testing down the US throat — even when it clearly is in the national interest to do so. Absent new ThN-tests, India is fated to remain in China’s strategic shadow.
The great villains here are R Chidambaram and Anil Kakodkar. Chidambaram, a crystalographer of middling merit, who did some good work early and for the rest of his career coasted on it, who was installed as successor to Iyengar by Dr Raja Ramanna mainly because of his pedigree, IISc, Bangalore, — Ramanna’s alma mater, when Prasad, BARC director, had better credentials because of his hands-on weapons experience. In this respect, Chidambaram’s calculation of the ‘equation of state’ for plutonium wasn’t as great a thing as it is made out to be. A graduate student of Freeman Dyson’s at Princeton University, calculated it correctly, for God’s sake! Chidambaram was unenthusiastic about the Shakti tests in 1998, and thereafter was the main opposer of nuclear test resumption in government circles as Science & Technology Adviser to Manmohan Singh, from which position he was pushed out by Modi.
Chidambaram is the last man standing to still believe that (1) the 1998 fusion test was a success, and (2) computer simulation with the existing limited computing capability is good enough replacement for actual physical explosive testing to rectify any weapon design weaknesses identified by the 1998 tests! And he’s ensconced as Tata Chair in BARC, still ruling the roost, and preventing any movement in official quarters towards a new nuclear testing regime. Shouldn’t Modi eject him from BARC? Hasn’t he done enough harm?
Kakodkar was a weak-willed engineer who replaced Chidambaram and advised Jaishankar during the civil nuclear deal negotiations. At a crucial moment in Washington, when the deal hung in balance, and a befuddled Manmohan Singh on a state visit to the US, asked him for final advice on whether to proceed with it or not, he gave the thumbs up, dooming India’s thermonuclear prospects. Kakodkar was never able to face the likes of Iyengar again.
Indian strategic weapons programmes have all displayed the same disurbing pattern — they all went into government-induced hibernation just when they needed to be most active. India achieved the N-weapons threshold with the plutonium reprocessing plant in the Spring of 1964 — seven months before the first Chinese atomic test. But it went to sleep until the 1974 test when, rather than weaponise, Indira Gandhi sent it back to snoozing, and yet again after the 1998 tests the same thing again, and that winter of hibernation for the thermonuclear weapons projects has still to end.
In the meantime, the programme weathered Shastri’s interegnum when India came closest to accepting the offer of a Western nuclear umbrella — Ukraine’s present conditions as a war-wrecked country is a stark reminder of taking American promises of nuclear security seriously! And the foolish Gandhian idealist, Morarji Desai, who as PM and prodded by the US, all but ordered closure of the nuclear weapons work in Trombay. [Read my 2002 book, with 2nd ed in 2005 — Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security for all the alarming details!]
One of the main reasons the Indian weapons programme is in the dokldrums is because of a lack of quality leadership. By February 1966, the great visionary and driver of the dual-use N-programme, Homi Bhabha, was assassinated by a CIA timed explosive on board an Air India flight he was taking to Geneva, according to a published confession by a former assistant director of clandestine ops of the agency, Robert Crowley. And, to the country’s great ill-luck, the Indian nuclear weapons programme had no strategic-minded scientists appointed to lead the AEC after Iyengar — only Chidambram, who was afflicted with serious strategic myopia and deserves to be in a purgatory, and a lot of engineers without familiarity of nuclear weapons science and technologies who, if they have distinguished themselves at all have done so as slotted functionaries, not leaders.
For Your Information, R Chidambaram is Jaishankar’s uncle (a cousin of the late K Subrahmanyam).
[Defence Secretary Aramane and CINC, PACOM, Admiral Aquilino at INDUS-X]
If one mulled the statement by Defence Secretary Giridhar Aramane at the INDUS-X (India-U.S. Defense Acceleration Ecosystem) summit held February 21, and knows a bit of history of the 1962 War, it was hard to escape the sense of deja vu! Aramane’s spoutings reminded one, in a way, of Jawaharlal Nehru’s abjectly pleading letters to US President John F Kennedy of November 19, 1962, begging for American military help.
Of the two letters — the first is considered — 60 years later, to be so humiliating and self-debasing, the Indian government insists still that Washington not declassify it! The shaming quality of this letter may, however, be deduced from the bit more measured second letter — available in the public realm — that Nehru had Ambassador BK Nehru hand over to the White House the same day after the fall of Se La and Bomdi La. In this latter, equally infamous, missive he pleaded — and this is by way of information for readers of this blog — among other kinds of military assistance, for 12 squadrons of “all-weather fighters” manned by American pilots plus an additional two squadrons of B-47s to “neutralise” PLA bases in Tibet.
This is Nehru (2nd letter): “The Chinese threat as it has developed involves not merely the survival of India, but the survival of free and independent Governments in the whole of…Asia…We are confident that your great country will…help us in our fight”.
This is Aramane speaking: “We are standing against a bully [China] in a very determined fashion. And we expect that our friend, the US, will be there with us in case we need their support. It is a must for [India], we have to [stand up to China] whether we can or we can’t…We have to [have] the strong resolve that we will support each other in the face of a common threat, [this] is going to be of critical importance to us”.
So, where’s the resonance? It is in the basic and fundamental presumption and belief underlying both that the United States will come readily to India’s help. This is usually the attitude of those who take Washington’s rhetoric at face value, have not deeply studied US history leave alone that country’s alliance dynamics, and to the extent they are familiar with the US it is only as tourists. As Narendra Modi was during his numerous visits to that country as an RSS pracharak and, now PM, as state guest, and short-term residents — diplomats/civil servants, such as Jaishankar, who have pulled career stints in Washington/New York/Chicago/Houston/San Francisco — the last four cities being the locations for Indian consulates, and come away duly impressed (as most foreign visitors from the Third World naturally are).
One of the themes I have repeatedly iterated in my books and writings, and in interactions with government officials and military officers over the past four decades, is just how infirm, unpredictable, and unreliable the US really is as an ally or strategic partner, or even just as a friendly state. And why it is downright foolhardy and extraordinarily risky to lean on Washington for assistance in a crisis, and factor this into India’s plans and policies for prospective hostilities with China. There is ample historical evidence for such a conclusion that I have adduced, and is the sort of thing one would expect a professionally-run government to bear in mind.
But this concern has apparently has not been paid heed by successive Prime Ministers and their Offices (PM/PMOs), or any of the line ministries — the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), even less the Ministry of Defence (MOD). So, with Manmohan Singh shaking his head, as Joint Secretary (Americas) Jaishankar negotiated that ignoble civilian nuclear cooperation deal with the George W Bush Administration which, because it bars India from nuclear testing, prevents the country from ever becoming a bonafide thermonuclear weapons power, in other words, this deal has fated India to remain permanently in China’s strategic shadow. And, here is Jaishankar, 15 years later, as minister for EA doing what his tilt US-wards from his time in the Washington embassy has inclined him to do — not advise caution to the PM when dealing with the US.
If proof were needed of America’s inconstancy as friend, ally or strategic partner, look no farther than Ukraine. President Zelensky began the fight with Russia on the basis of promises of sustained US military aid. So, how’s that going Volodomyr? Is there anything for New Delhi to learn from Kyiv’s predicament, Shri Jaishankarji?! No, nothing? OK, so much for diplomatic experience and persipience.
That makes Aramane — for no fault of his own — important in the scheme of things. What does Aramane, who as Defence Secretary is actually the PERSON responsible for the defence and security of the country — NOT the the military Chiefs of Staff, as armed services officers are only too fond of reminding anyone who will listen about the prevailing anamalous system of authority and responsibility in the Government of India, bring to the table?
Well, let’s see. An IAS officer of the Andhra Pradesh cadre, Aramane has never been within sniffing distance in his career of a posting in MOD. Naturally, that qualifies him to be Defence Secretary. But before getting to South Block he was Secretary, Roads & Highways. So, perhaps, he was brought in and has obtained an extension in service in MOD to oversee the programme of construction of roads and other infrastructure on the Line of Actual Control. He is a civil engineer by calling and road building is in his line of professional work (assuming he remembers anything from his engineering college days),. Even if can’t, he is nevertheless better off than the generalist counterparts gumming up the works in the rest of the government. As an engineer with, hopefully, a problem-solving mindset — the thing that distinguishes him from his civil service brethren, he ought to better comprehend defence issues (as the late Manohar Parrikar was able to do as a former mechanical engineer and defence minister). At a minimum, that’d require him to do his homework before mouthing off. This he did not do.
Did he know what he was talking about when he was extolling “interoperability” at INDUS-X? One could sense the satisfaction in the CINC, US Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral John Aquilino, also sitting on the stage, putting away his own talking points, to let Aramane do the talking for him! Because, interoperability is the code word US officials and military officers have interminably used to flog their view since the American Defence Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, first visited Delhi in the mid-1980s that India should buy more US capital weapons platforms — more aircraft, more Apache attack helos, more Chinooks, more ships, more artillery, more this, more that, and rest of the obsolete or fast obsolescing hardware — production of Apaches, Chinooks, C-17s, etc., for example has ended. These are all staple Indian buys that help unclog the US military inventories even as Delhi forks over hundreds of billions of dollars for them — but uhnn uhnn.. no submarines! — monies that could have been invested in indigenous design and development projects in the private sector for any chance of success!
Then agaion, may be Aramane did not get Jaishankar’s Memo because isn’t the EAM broadcasting — even if it is only for form sake, that Indian foreign policy aims at achieving “equilibrium”? And how pray is this equilibrium to be realised with the Defence Secretary, in effect, endorsing more capital arms purchases from the US — something the Kremlin has always preceived as forever a part of the Russian field?
Hasn’t Aramane thus given away the core secret of Modi’s disequilibrated foreign policy?
There are good reasons for redoubled skepticism about Narendra Modi’s policy of atmnirbharta (self-sufficiency) in armaments. My books and writings over the past decade have detailed why it seems to be more a political slogan than a serious substantive programme the Indian government, Defence Ministry, and the Indian military are committed to.
While the services’ chiefs of staff ceaselessly talk of atmnirbharta, in actual practice indigenous weapons programmes aren’t afforded half a chance to survive an imports-tilted military procurement process. There are many villains to blame for this state of affairs, for the country’s still being an abject arms dependency — a shameful status annually broadcast by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In March 2023, SIPRI reminded the world that India had once again topped the list of countries with the highest arms imports, accounting for 11% of global arms sales (followed by Saudi Arabia at 9.6%), a position it has held, incidentally, since 1993, i.e., in a time span covering both Congress Party and BJP governments. This factual record pretty much hollows out the current claims for ‘atmnirbhar Bharat’ in defence.
There are many culprits, in the main — Defence Research & Development Organisation and the armed services. DRDO has grown fat on promises it has made to the nation and the military without consistently delivering on them. No DRDO project has EVER produced a piece of military hardware within the original time and cost parameters. Indeed, it has perfected a modus operandi detailed in my 2015 book — Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet), that perpetually feathers its own nest whilst shrugging off responsibility. This is how it works: the initial financial outlays on any major programme are used, not to invest in technology creation, installation of production wherewithal or related activity, but in building staff quarters for the prospective project personnel complete with officers’ clubs amd swimming pools! After a few thousand crores are first spent on this extraneous construction and passage of several years of colonising some new parcel of hundreds of acres of defence land usually in and around Bangalore or Hyderabad, DRDO goes back to the government asking for funds to actually get the project going! By then the original weapon system the project was tasked to produce is, technology-wise, already approaching obsolescence, and the concerned armed service wants to have nothing to do with it. Worse, more often than not, the weapons system finally produced is the result of DRDO cobbling together something out of imported components and assemblies and pasting DRDO labels on the finished product! Thus, whole projects are rendered a gigantic waste of national wealth and resources whilst generally creating no worthwhile assets in-country.
On the more critical high tech projects such as, say, the nuclear-powered submarine and the Tejas light combat aircraft, the programmes shuffled along for years and years without any sense of urgency or accountability. Criticism of such DRDO projects is rarely voiced by services’ chiefs seeing what happened to the naval chief, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, when he did so in the mid-90s. The CNS had asked for a formal audit of the N-sub (Advanced Technology Vehicle) prgramme, and instead got an earful of high sounding nationalist sentiment — precursor to the Modi-era atmanirbharta rhetoric — from the then DRDO head, the late Dr APJ Abdul Kalam in a cabinet meeting that silenced all doubters — political and military alike. It was a tactic Kalam often employed to dissuade anybody from questioning or criticising DRDO.
The armed services discovered that the non-performing DRDO was a perfect foil and platform for them to secure imported fighting machines, preferably of Western origin, failing which from the Russian source, that their hearts desired. (Why the preference for Western? Which Indian Service minds repeated pleasurable trips for relays of senior officers to Paris, London, Stockholm, Washington, etc with all the frills, generously hosted by the governments/arms companies standing to make billions of dollars from Indian sales?) Further, the military alighted on four procedural hurdles to ensure DRDO projects never get delivered on time.
Firstly, the armed services refuse to become full stake holders or take ownership of any project that would, in effect, yoke their operational futures to speedy and successful completion of the projects and the rollout of the promised weapons system. Secondly, the military services demand that the very first tested and proven prototype meet all operational specifications — otherwise, it is thumbs down at the first instance! Thirdly, they change the QRs (Qualitative requirements) at will after the design is already consensually frozen, necessitating redesign, thereby inducing unconscionable time and cost overruns on the project, with the delays thus caused being used to pressure the government into allowing import of the desired foreign hardware the Services had their eyes on from the beginning! And finally, they refuse to follow the protocol all advanced militaries working in conjuncrtion with their defence industries do of “parallel development and induction”. This is how it works: Induct into service small numbers of the first prototype Mark 1 version that’s undergone initial certification. It enables continuous technical feedback on performance and design features so the system can be expeditiously improved ergonomically, and certain design kinks ironed out and features tweaked — flaws that become evident only with operational use by experienced users. The changes from the initial and subsequent feedback from frontline users (pilots, tank commanders, gunners, etc) are quickly inputted to ready on an accelerated schedule the finished product for final certification, and okayed for massive serial production.
Time and again, DRDO programmes have been thus hindered. The most egregious example is the Tejas LCA project that suffered from all the above hurdles and was forced to limp along, being reduced by the IAF to a plaything, using the resulting slow pace of the project to create a dire situation only to pressure the government into accepting the import solution!! It is a miracle Tejas somehow survived, avoiding the fate of the Dr Raj Mahindra-designed Marut HF-71 (the much improved variant of the Dr Kurt Tank-designed HF-24) that the IAF mercilessly killed off just so it could, in the early 1980s, buy the British Jaguar low level strike aircraft. Tejas emerged nevertheless as a great showcase of Indian talent and technological ingenuity inspite of the IAF’s dogged and stealthy attempts to undermine it at every turn until now, when under political pressure, the Service has grudgingly accepted it without, however, giving it and its successor twin-engined advanced medium combat aircraft project its full hearted support. Whence the buys of the prohibitively expensive Rafale fighter from France, etc. Hardly to be wondered why President Macron (like Francoise Hollande before him) is giddy with relief to keep the French aviation industry afloat by selling more such high value cost-ineffective combat aircraft to the premier Third World arms buying sucker in the marketplace –India!
The problem is the Indian military’s love for everything Western — colonial hangover anyone? It shapes the armed services’ contempt for any military goods of indigenous design and manufacture. In such a milieu, one would expect the politician in the defence minister’s post to step in, apply his mind, and order the armed services to stop their obstacle-erecting shenanigans, and to prove that the government means business where atmnirbharta is concerned, terminate the services of a couple of service chiefs — the only way to guarantee the message gets home to the military.
This, of course, won’t happen because since 1947, the late Manohar Parrikar apart, defence ministers have been overcautious headscratchers or provincial dolts. Expecting them to challenge the services’ chiefs is to expect far too much from them. After all, do you expect Rajnath Singh, who is routinely referred in senior military circles as a “duffer”, to act in the nation’s interest? No hope there.
What about responsible defence ministry bureaucrats applying the brakes on such excess, bearing in mind the government’s overarching goal of atmbirbharta? No luck there, either, because most civil servants Defence Secretary on down are generalists who are all at sea, learning on the job, for most of their tenures, and/or because they believe it is their remit to keep the underperforming DRDO and the horribly wasteful defence public sector units, such as HAL, Mazgaon, et al, from sinking. So, with an illiterate media as handmaid, what we have is propagation of the atmanirbharta myth with the usual periodic hooplas. Thus, everytime Garden Reach or Mazgaon Shipyard produces a warship, a missile destroyer, say INS Imphal, the boat is hailed as a tech marvel, the ultimate in local effort and technological development with “80% indigenous content”. Nowhere is revealed the god awful truth that the 80 percent indigenous is by weight, not value. And that this has been the case from the time the first Leander-class frigates were put together in the 1960s!
What happened to retard genuine indigenous design and development of industral age weapons systems such as warships, Tejas LCA and the Arjuna main battle tank, is now being faced by new age systems, like unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Consider the Tapas BH-201 medium altitude, long endurance (MALE) UAV optimised for ISTAR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, Tracking, and Reconnaissance) roles for the three services. Equipped with electro-optical and synthetic aperture radar packages to enable surveillance even in cloudy weather, it was designed to fly at 30,000 feet altitude for 24 hours. Initiated in 2016, the Tapas UAV by July last year had logged its 200th successful test flight and was handed over to the military for user trials, with the navy first up.
By Autumn 2023, however, with the joint trials underway, doubts began to be raised about Tapas UAV falling short by a few thousand feet on its cruising altitude and on its inability to carry weapons, which was strange because an attack capability was NOT in the original specifications! It is a drone meant for surveillane, for God’s sake! So how come the army and air force are getting away by rejecting the locally designed and produced Tapas because it cannot also carry ordnance which it was never meant to do? Anyway, these were the excuses the three armed Services trotted out for drastically cutting their offtake that had originally been pegged at 76 UAVs. Tapas, mind you, is a flying surveillance platform ready for use that is being ditched because the military suddenly woke up to the fact that they needed an armed drone! The army and IAF say they’d rather wait another 3-4 years for DRDO to develop the Archer NG (new generation) UAV with all of Tapas’ ISTAR prowess plus weapon carrying capacity.
Couldn’t the Tapas UAV, by way of an interim immediate solution, have been jerry-rigged by BEL/HAL to carry a weapon even if this reduced the drone’s cruising altitude and endurance? It is an obvious solution, but who wants that?
[the MQ-9B]
In the event, what does the Indian military propose to do in the meantime? Why, pay up $3 billion (!!!!) for 31 US-built MQ-9A/Bs UAVs, of course! The Sea and Sky Guardian American drones can fly for 27 hours at speeds reaching 240 knots and at 50,000 feet altitude, and 1,746 kilograms of payload capacity, inclusive of 1,361 kilos of external stores (per brochure info). The MQ-9A sale was in a limbo because the Biden Administration was holding it up for many months in order to armtwist the Modi regime into a “meaningful investigation” into the alleged Indian government role in the plot to assassinate a Khalistani terrorist enjoying safe haven in the US. Perhaps, Modi succumbed to American pressure, or told Washington where to get off, it isn’t clear which, but the US government has just cleared the transfer of the MQ-9A/Bs.
What this means is the Sea/Sky Guardians India has fully paid for will remain hostage to US policy dictates, even as the Tapas UAV languishes. And, more worryingly, that atmanirbharta in defence still remains what it has always been — a receding horizon.
As a labour-intensive force dealing with disputed borders in Jammu & Kashmir with Pakistan and the fungible Line of Actual Control in the Himalayan Range with China, the Indian Army has always been saddled with an unmanageable problem: How to have a substantial battle-ready force able to hold ground on two fronts and, at the same time, to curtail the mounting manpower-related payroll and pension expenses to ensure the latter does not crowd out the allocations for the former. This is, of course, as much an army problem as a Government of India problem and, in the larger context, a burning political issue.
It became a political issue once the political classes perceived the army as employment generator rather than seeing the Service as having a singular function — national defence. Once that line was breached, the follow-on troubles followed in its wake. Soon enough because of grassroots pressure for longer term, pensionable, army jobs the seven year colour service for the average jawan got extended to 15 years of active duty with a cushion of pension to fall back on at the end of it. The great thing about the original 7-year colour service was that the army boasted of young fighting men in the ranks who were fit and eager for use in aggressive actions. After all, the younger the jawans the more they’d be infused with the natural bellicosity of youth, which properly channeled with tough training, could transform collectively into formidable fighting units.
Once the service tenure got stretched to 15 years, however, the troopers aged and their fighting edge got blunted, and the army had to make-do with what they had. Except, the pension bill to the exchequer became a growing concern, and one can readily see why. Once a jawan is demobilised after 15 years of service, at 35 years of age or younger, he can look forward to the second half of his life on army pension indexed to the inflation rate, enjoying perpetual access for himself and family to good quality health care and to the canteen stores for everyday consumer items, including a ration of liqour, at wholesale rates. It is a financial drain on resources the country simply cannot afford. And because, wars have become rarer — even if death in military action has not, given the many insurgencies the army over the years has been called upon to put down in the northeast and in J&K. Still, an army career in the ranks became an attractive proposition for a goodly portion of the youth population in various parts of the country that were traditionally catchment areas for single-class regiments founded on the farcical notion of “martial races” the British sedulously promoted, but also in the rest of the country.
But single class units relied on a certain cultural homogeneity to bond members of a fighting unit together and to create the esprit de corps that, frankly, was a wonder for many advanced militaries of the world. On more than one occasion, I recall US military officers ruing the fact their army lacked such spirit, or could muster the elan that is a natural attribute of Indian Army regiments. I mean, a battalion of Virginia Volunteers does not exactly have the same ring or promise the fortitude in battle of a 3 Jat, 2 Maratha Light Infantry, Madras Regiment, 2 Kumaon, 1st Gurkhas, or any of a host of other storied units of the Indian Army. It is precisely this socio-cultural cohesion invaluable in operations that the Agniveer programme is blowing up with the Indian army becoming classless. Such, in any case, is the lament of the old timers.
Agniveers do solve the growing problem of the galloping spend on pensions. But they are not the solution of a return to the 7-year colour service norm. In Bipin Rawat’s time as army chief and then as first chief of the defence staff (CDS), it resulted in an unsatisfactory compromise that tried also to cling to the nativist tilt in the thinking of the Bharatiya Janata Party government of India as a martial nation. Commentators have noted that the Agniveer programme was, as Rawat had conceived it, only a pilot project to test the waters and to see if shorter active service norm could be reintroduced. But, as General MM Naravane, Rawat’s successor, reportedly claims in his memoirs, it was imposed on the three armed services by government fiat with no room for discussion or dissent by the services chiefs of the day. It is clear Naravane was unenthusiastic about the Agniveer concept but it isn’t clear he forsesaw the fatal problems now becoming evident, problems that because of the nature of the other two services, are less severe for the air force and navy.
The second batch of Agniveers has recently joined forward units without the army having the time to weigh the experience gained from their first year in service, and permitting it to tweak the programme accordingly. This did not happen. From its initiation, commanders in the field have been mindful of the political sensitivities attending on putting these short-termers in harm’s way — the fallout from the death of the first Agniveer in action with a Rashtriya Rifles unit in J&K in late October this year was salutary for Modi & his PMO, who had fast-tracked the Agniveer programme in the face of the army’s advising caution. The corrective measure the army adopted — with prompting from PMO — was to avoid further casualties in Agniveer ranks at all cost by tasking them with soft, time pass, missions — guarding depots, etc. in the rear areas. If the Modi government does not back down from its commitment and the Agniveers actually become the sole recruitment source, the endstate for the army will be the progressive thinning of a well trained bulk soldiery until it becomes incapable of undertaking any military action against China (and Pakistan), or even fighting insurgents. An army populated solely by Agniveers will then be good enough only to march down Rajpath in Republic day parades.
In other words, the Agniveer programme promises a younger force all right. But the army will soon find itself toothless — unable aggressively to field its all-Agniveer units. This will be its deathknell as a fighting force. From what I am given to understand, the army has decided to throttle back stealthily on the whole programme as prelude to — the political situation permitting — ending it altogether, but how it is going to achieve this with the Modi regime at the wheel, is unclear. With two years of the Agniveer experience, the army would prefer, it’d seem, a large pensions bill to a ceremonial force of mollycoddled short-termers.
The cruelest cut of the Agniveer programme is this: the Tenth Finance Commisssion in 1995 first proposed (incidentally in my report as adviser, defence expenditure, to the Commission), and accepted in toto by the Narasimha Rao government, that armymen retiring after 15 years colour service be the sole source of recruitment for all the paramilitaries – the Central Reserve Police Force, National Security Guard, Indo-Tibetan Border Police, Industrial Security Force, and the rest of that wasteful and ineffective caboodle. The army veterans channeled into these organisations would sharpen the operational quality of these outfits, require minimal re-training to enable them to operate in civilian settings, and result in huge savings with the dismantling of elaborate and expensive training establishments of the paramils, with each trying to emulate army training infrastructure and procedures of the army but because officered by the Indian Police Service members, ending up being neither fish nor fowl kind of agencies.
The army as source of trained manpower for paramils would have rationalised human resources usage, and greatly reduced the army’s pension payouts by deferring them by some 25 years. It would have also annually made more capital available to the three armed services for modernisation and to fill the “voids” in the war wastage reserve and the war stock whose depleted condition have long prevented the Indian military from fighting long duration wars to a conclusion.
This recommendation was never implemented because the Home Ministry then and since did not want to surrender any control over its in-house armed forces by ceding the recruitment turf to the army. But with Modi intent on making the Agniveer programme a success, his chief lieutenant, Home Minister Amit Shah, has jumped on the PM’s bandwagon. The Agniveers will thus be rewarded for their painless army service with cushy lifelong careers in the paramils! This even as army jawans after 15 years’ hard service and, age wise, still in their prime will continue to be forced into the pension mode!
[the British Army’s Brigade of Gurkhas]
Talk of the 1st Regiment of the Gurkhas (Malaun)! From what a former Gurkha officer, retired Major General Ashok Mehta, has revealed, the Indian government is considering ending the hoary scheme of recruiting by the Indian Army of Gurkhas from mostly the Pokhara region of Nepal, with the strategic-minded Chinese People’s Liberation Army, who else!, likely picking up the slack, and replacing India as prime recruiter!
A more ridiculously shortsighted self-goal decision by the Indian government is hard to imagine. But trust our leaders to dig holes for the country to fall into! This has happened so often in the past, the surprise is that this decision, if true, is not a surprise!
The Gurkhas carved out a unique military reputation for themselves as doughty fighters and fearsome khukri-wielders, first by fighting the British (Anglo-Nepalese War, 1814-1816), winning their respect, and then fighting for them as the vanguard in many wars of the empire, including subdueing the 1857 “Mutiny”. The image of the Gurkha was so pumped up by then that on many occasions, such as in the trench warfare of World War One, a lot of Germans unwilling to experience the business end of a khukri surrendered once they espied Gurkhas closing in with their “Ayo Gorkahli” war cry. A long line of British commanders attested to the Gurkhas’ fighting prowess, includng the greatest Allied field commander of the Second World War — William Slim heading XIV Army in Burma, who fought alongside the 1/6 Gurkhas in the Gallipolli campaign (1915), and was so impressed he sought transfer from a Warwickshire regiment he was a subaltern in to the Gurkhas and the Indian Army.
Since 1947 per a tripartite arrangement, Nepali Gurkhas have served in the Indian Army (current strength — 42,000) and in the Brigade of Gurkhas (strength: 4,000) of the British Army for ongoing deployments in Asia — in Brunei, Singapore and until 1999, in Hong Kong, and with a Gurkha unit in the lead in the 1982 Falklands War.
The short point: Gurkhas are the most heralded readily marketable bunch of mercenaries that Nepal has long cashed in on. Given an opportunity, every country would want to hire them to fight its wars.
In Nepal, according to the latest available statistics, in 2020 20.93% of its male population was in the youth bracket of 15-24 years of age, military service age. Or 3,276,431 young men in all. (Index Mundi, https://www.indexmundi.com/nepal/age_structure.html#google_vignette ). It is a country with little else by way of job creation assets. There’s no industry to speak of, and the small mountainside and valley plots can barely sustain subsistence agriculture. The youth roughly constitutes the labour market and prime source of income and remittance revenue for that country. Most Nepali youth choose to find livelihood across the unpoliced order in India — something they are legally allowed to do. The annual intake of Gurkha youth in the Indian and British armies ameliorated the problem somewhat. In mid-2023, the pensions-remittances from Nepali Gurkhas in Indian Army amounted to some 4.5 billion Nepali rupees — a substantial sum in the Nepalese context. But with the Indian Army potentially out of bounds, the Gurkhas, will happily find military employment elsewhere. The Australian army, for instance, is contemplating a Gurkha unit along the British lines. But the real danger is from China.
At the core, the cosy mutually beneficial order of Nepali Gurkhas in the Indian Army is being disrupted by — you guessed it — the Agniveer programme of the Indian Army! Prachanda, the head Communist in Nepali politics, is ideologically driven to get Nepal to siddle upto China under the rubric of “parity”, but is prevented from doing so by the people’s sentiment for India. But he has offered China the service of Gurkhas in PLA! Who is to say Beijing won’t capitalise on the situation New Delhi has deliberately seeded for itself?
Consider what will happen should the Gurkhas enter PLA in sizeable numbers. Nepal will gain from remittances and pensions, of course. But Indian formations on the LAC may have to deal with PLA Gurkha troops! If that isn’t a mind bender, large numbers of Gurkhas processed over time through service with PLA will likely congeal into a vested anti-India front in Nepal and veer the country more and more China-ward. Further, Nepalese as Chinese hire could cross over freely into India and embed themselves in the societies of Indian border states. Acting as subversive element, they could roil the already volatile politics of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. It is not hard to speculate how these in-India Gurkhas in Chinese pay could create cyber mayhem for starters, pose a real military danger by being spotters of Indian targets, for instance, for long-range Chinese guided munitions fired from Chinese aircraft, and for Chinese missiles, and even battlefield tactical weapons, and emerge as a joint internal and external security threat.
Such scenarios can get hair-raising, but is not something that apparently concerns the Modi regime. But then geostrategic catastrophes often happen unannounced, but not this time! And the combination of the Agniveer-populated Indian army and Gurkhas forced into PLA is a humdinger!
On December 8 at an unrelated event in Moscow, the Russian President Vladimir Putin, out of the blue, praised Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying he “cannot be intimidated, threatened or forced to take any action or decision against the national interest of India. I know there is pressure on them.” And added, “To be honest, sometimes I am surprised by his tough stance on protecting the national interests of the Indian people.” Putin may well have been referring to New Delhi’s creative diplomacy linking Russian oil imports and non-support for Ukraine. But he may also have been sending a message to Modi to stand firm in rejecting the US’ incessant demands to hold the Indian official(s) responsible for planning to kill the Khalistani terrorist, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, and otherwise tweaking this issue with the potential to undermine Indo-US relations.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation chief Christopher Wray will be in Delhi this week with a docket of documents to impress his counterparts in the Indian intelligence agencies, and senior officals in government with “evidence” FBI, alongwith other American electronic and other spy units, collected about the involvement the Biden Administration alleged of RAW to assassinate Khalistani terrorists in the US, with Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, topping the list. After the killing of another Khalistani, Gurmeet Singh Nijjar, in western Canada, Washington, feared Pannnun was in line to be bumped off, and took preemptive action. The Biden Admin went public with “evidence” of this prospective hit — a hit a dope runner of Indian origin, it claimed, sought to arrange by hiring a minor drug trafficking gang member who, to be in the good books of US DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), happily agreed to play the stool pigeon to implicate the Indian drug trafficker, and connect him to RAW. And how did the US ELINT units pick this info up, pray? Because these desi cloak & dagger guys, apparently used Whatsapp for communicating with each other! This suggests rank amateurs operating outside the RAW ambit, and for the Indian government rightly to claim distance from these nefarious goings-on.
Now, RAW may not be all that sophisticated in its methods, but surely it is not so doltish as to have one of its own — “CC1” use a very public platform — Whatsapp, for god’s sake!! Because if they were foolish enough to do this then they might as well have hung a placard round their necks saying “RAW” and marched around the embassies in question!
Obviously, this is bare-faced nonsense and invention springing out of Langley and the fertile CIA minds specialising in disinformation ops. That should have been the Indian government’s stand from the moment Washington went public with its accusation, rather than, as is normally the case when dealing with a friendly country with which it has some differences, bringing the issue up through official channels and far from public gaze.
But the Biden government went ballistic, but why? Possibly to embarrass the Modi regime and, who knows, per chance, to swing the Indian people’s votes in Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, and Rajasthan against the Bharatiya Janata Party angling to displace the Congress party regimes in these states, because it deems Modi as getting too politically big for their convenience.
This is actually a more convincing explanation for the US blowing this thing up despite the risks of alienating the Modi government. But instead of taking a firm stand dismissing any and all American accusations as absolute fiction and then sticking by this position through thick and thin and no matter what, and refusing to entertain any evidence to the contrary manufactured by the disinformation factories of the US intel complex and propagated by the Western thinktanks and media (and their outlets in India and in the West-influenced Indian media) with record of being so used (Iraq), and rubbishing the proffered evidence as so much obvious cyber/electronic/imagery (the dope runner handing over $100,000 in currency notes in a car — oh, pleeez….!) fakery, the Indian government hoisted itself on to a hook by agreeing to investigate.
What’s there to investigate is the question I asked in my previous three posts, considering that the American case is hokey! And I had wondered whether the Indian government had rendered itself vulnerable by relying on Chinese and American communications hardware and software for even the most secret intra-govt communications. And that such dependence is at the heart of the country’s vulnerability. And in the event that it is a snap for any Western agency to tap into, keep tabs on, whatever is going on in the darkest recesses of the Indian government.
That the Indian official communications system is entirely penetrated, was not admitted, even if the Khalistan issue was alluded to in Rajya Sabha by foreign minister S Jaishankar on December 8. Repeating what the MEA spokesman had said in reaction to the first reports, Jaishankar referred to how “the nexus of organised crime, trafficking and other matters” had a “bearing on our own national security”, and why the Modi regime, he stated, had agreed to a scrutiny by a committee it is constituting for the purpose.
If what is generally known, by way of a rough division of labour in the foreign policy field is true, then National Security Adviser Ajit Doval is in-charge of all matters relating to Pakistan, Punjab, J&K, Islamic extremism and the residual Khalistan problem, and China, and Jaishankar deals with the US, Europe and the rest, and both compete for the Prime Minister’s ear. This competition is reportedly fairly intense, and for the Pannun affair to have unraveled in the way it has, has hurt Doval, and any investigation into this plot will, as is common knowledge, lead to Doval. But because Doval is far closer to Modi than Jaishankar, there’s NO way he will be fingered. That about limits the conclusions the Indian investigators will reach. Whether some subordinate officer is scapegoated remains to be seen. But should that happen RAW morale will plunge. The Modi government, in other words, is faced with bad choices all round and finds itself in an awful situation of its own making because it gave into its impulse of pacifying and placating America.
Can this Committee afford, therefore, to conclude other than that there was a crime-trafficking nexus active in the US which was plotting against Pannun? Will such conclusion be any more credible and, therefore, acceptable to Washington, than consistent denial byIndia of any role? Plainly, it will not be — but this could have been foreseen, no? So, why did Jaishankar and the government formally agree to such investigation? Because it was arm-twisted into doing so? OK. But then if this investigators can only conclude the obvious that there was no Indian involvement whatsoever, then the best solution would have been to adopt the standard response all countries who find themselves in such sticky situations do –deny, deny, and deny some more until everybody is sick and tired of Indian denials and choose to get on with the business of doing business with India! It is an option the Modi government cannot, unfortunately go back to. Instead, India is getting itself entangled in a web Washington is spinning.
[Modi & Biden]
With the Indian government duty-bound, as it were, to absolve itself and its intel agencies of any wrongdoing, and the US government just as serious about making its accusations stick in order to cow down New Delhi, there really is no way out. Had Delhi from the start said and maintained vociferously, as advised in my previous posts, that it had nothing to do with it, and dismissed all evidence the US presented as out and out fake, Washington would have had to reconcile to the fact that India was not going to own up to anything — no matter how much of “hard” evidence the Biden Admin presented to Modi.
If an Indian mea culpa was perceived as not remotely on the cards, and had the Modi regime succeeded in convincing Washington that there was absolutely no give in that respect, the US would have had to either lump it and let the matter slide into a void where other unresolved/irresolvable issues reside. Or, to take recourse to punitive actions and imperil the prospects of dealing jointly with China in the Indo-Pacific. This latter option is what the US too would have ended up preferring because for Biden or any other Administration Pannun’s wellbeing is of zero concern other than as virtue-signalling, and as a political stick to beat India with, compared to needing India to ringfence China. More importantly, it would have sent out a strong message to Pannun and Company in the West that they are in the crosshairs and nobody and no country can save them.
[Modi with US Secretaries of State and Defence, Anthony Blinken and Lloyd Austin]
In international affairs, relationships with friendly states are in greater need of guardrails than ties with adversaries because the worst can be assumed about the latter and protective measures taken. It is a hard fact apparently for the Indian government, MEA and defence ministry to digest that the friendlies require to be defenced against more diligently because the basis and assumptions of convergence of interests on which the edifice of national security cooperation and collaboration is built may be all wrong and wonky. Particularly when the other side has a quite different take on how everything should pan out. Hence, even as the US Federal Bureau of Investigation is moving the Gurpatwant Singh Pannun case in court, the US State Department is blithely assuring India that nothing has changed re: America’s partnering India in the Indo-Pacific, confident that New Delhi will happily overlook India’s own national security interests! Come again! Really?
Containing China is in the interest of both India and the US, of course. But, get this, the US has decided to go punitive on India over some intended harm it alleges would have been done to its citizen. That the US acts according to its momentary interests is well known. including targeting of its closest allies. Thus, in Israel’s case Washington is weighing travel bans on the extremist Yeretz Israel settlers in the West Bank area of Palestine — a US shot across Benjamin Netanyahu government’s bow to mind Blinken’s advice to cease and desist in Gaza, or else. Tel Aviv responded today by cocking a snook at Washington and resuming its aerial and long range bombardment of Gaza as it had promised to do! The right response that shut Washington up.
India, is dubbed a “strategic partner”. But the Biden Administration superceded shared security concerns with talk of India violating the human rights of a Pannun. Plainly, the Narendra Modi regime had not expected such adverse reaction, nor factored it into its calculations. Just how persnickety Washington can get on the human rights score was known to the PM who as the Gujarat chief minister suffered the personal indignity for years of being barred entry into the US owing to his alleged role in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots — the only Indian politician to-date so treated by the US. It was an ostensibly principle-based ban, and was lifted the moment Modi became prime minister!
Meaning, it is at the discretion of the US President of the day to react or not to react and how, to intended and unintended “human rights provocations” by allies and strategic partners. Skating on thin political ice at home, President Biden in this instance decided he did not want to upset the “progressive Left” in his own Democratic Party by being inattentive to alleged Indian silencing of a US citizen, not with a tight presidential race looming once again with Donald J Trump. The White House then upped the ante by approving a US Congressional Hearing on this supposed Indin plot in which GOI, RAW & IB officers will be named, a lot of dirty laundry will be washed, and the Modi government will be hung out publicly to dry. Modi’s NSA, Ajit Doval, can expect to have his name bandied about a lot at these Hearings.
The question is: Why did Biden think there would be no negative consequences for the bilateral ties by proceeding as he has done on the Pannun affair? Well, because he knows that Modi and his foreign policy implementer, S Jaishankar, are too fully into pacifying the US to suddenly grow a spine and stand up to Washington and, even less, aggressivley to take him on as, say, a Xi would.
Given India’s supplicatory attitude of long standing, the Modi dispensation hopes to catch a break because of the shared meta-strategic concerns re: China. Except, the very NRI community in the US that Modi dotes on and whose interests his government has bent over backwards to promote by making the issual of more and more H1B visas and of renewing them with ease, etc his foreign policy priority, ironically, is in the forefront demanding action against this country. The likes of US Congresswoman Premala Jayapala, for instance, are usually the first to dump on India for the flimsiest of reasons because it is an easy way to prove their allegiance to America at the expense of their country of origin. So much for NRIs being our foreign policy assets!
What’s the Modi government to do? Well, the wrongest thing for it to have done is what it proceeded to do — promise an investigation into the US charges, thereby admitting some level of culpability, rather than simply stonewalling, saying nothing other than sticking with the line that the Indian government has nothing whatsoever to do with the alleged plot, to point to violent intra-Sikh community weangles, and otherwise vigorously and volubly discounting all the supposed evidence FBI has collected by charging it was created out of thin air and imaginative cyber fakery that the US agencies are well rquipped to produce, and that too involving a stool pigeon of the US Drug Enforcement Agency. How storybook silly, is this? About tracing any communications to Indian officials — bah! This is so much electronic spoofing and voice replication — technically easy to do!
Has any Modi government representative adopted this position? NO. Then again, has the US ever admitted responsibility for any of the acts of violence, including assassination, it has committed abroad over the decades? No! Against Indian citizens (Shastri, Bhaba, et al)? No! (See the blog post previous the last one) Does any major country ever acknowledge any of its “black” operations? No! So, why is the Modi regime being so lily-livered, putting itself in a position from which it cannot escape responsibility? Why did it buckle under at the first sign of pressure?
Well because like the previous Manmohan Singh regime, and the Vajpayee government before that, and the Narasimha Rao regime prior to that, the Modi government too believes mistakenly that India has more to gain strategically and economically from good ties with the US than vice versa, until now when such thinking has calcified into a policy mindset and become a real huge impediment to this country pursuing its own strategic interests in its own way rather than as a camp follower and a strategic appendage of the US. Scan Indian newspapers, other media, even retired Indian officials speaking to foreign reporters, or any Indian commentators, especially including ex-diplomats and militarymen, and what you find is their advice for India to, in effect, turn tail as Washington approaches.
What requires stressing is that we need to put up guardrails mandating blunt talk with the US government about what the Indian government will not tolerate, and to draw some redlines for the US State Department. Among a host of guardrails should be a clear understanding that any campaign of the Khalistan-type with secessionist rhetoric advocating violence, will not fall within the pail of free speech because it will be viewed by New Delhi as infringing on India’s sovereignty, and will be dealt with as the US government deals with foreigners it consideres “enemies of the state” — not nicely. And that the Indian government is prepared to stand its ground even if it means trashing the four “foundational accords” and rolling back the convivial strategic relations achieved so far by India and the US. Plain talking is a curative for a lot of the coercive nonsense Washington tries ceaselessly to pull on India.
It may be interesting to consider the Dec 1 Washington Post editorial reflecting the US establishment’s view: It harrumphed thusly [with my reactions within square brackets]: The Pannun case, it said “has crossed a red line for the United States, a grave affront to sovereignty that demands an honest ,and complete investigation, with the perpetrators brought to justice and all the facts made known. Any foot-dragging or coverup will weigh upon all the other worthy efforts to build a strategic partnership. [It is as if India gains more from China’s strategic discomfiture than the US!].[Pannun’s group. it said] advocates that some or all of Punjab province in northern India secede and form an independent Sikh state. [Note: inference — a Sikh state carved out of India may be no bad thing, which amounts to condoning, even promoting, Khalistan!] ….The United States has good reason to forge closer ties with India, a democracy and rising economic power that is a valuable counterweight to China. But much depends on how India responds to the indictment. A string of Biden officials have signaled this to India in recent months.” [So India is warned. Now what? Oh, right! Washington — Try and keep China down without India holding up the northern end of southern Asia on the Tibet line and the Indian Ocean end. Good luck!].”
Besides drawing the redlines for Washington on what India will not countenance by way of the remotest hint at balkanisation and danger to internal security, the Modi government should publicly demand also — as the Biden Administration has done vis a vis the supposed plot against Pannun — that the US government investigate to India’s satisfaction the assassinations by the US Central Intelligence Agency of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and the nuclear stalwart Dr Homi J Bhabha — killings claimed by no less than the CIA’s then head of clandestine operations, Robert Crowley, in order to bring to international notice the US government’s ongoing policy and programme of physically eliminating inconvenient foreign personages. Remember the late President of Chile, Salvador Allende — his assassination ordered by the late and little lamented Henry Kissinger, and engineered by CIA in September 1973?
Instead, of installing guardrails, given the GOI’s institutional tendency, the PMO/MEA will likely listen quietly to official US complaints and threats of punitive action if Delhi doesn’t do this, that or the other. India and Indians desperately want a government to show self-respect, some back bone, and not to dance to whatever tune the US rings up. The trouble is a pliable New Delhi — terminally bent and coerced, invariably gives in and responds as Washington expects it to.
The critical and most worrying aspect of the Gurmeet Singh Nijjar and Gurpatwant Singh Pannun episodes that no one is paying attention to is just how deeply and extensively the US has penetrated the Indian government’s communications network and thoroughly compromised it. It is doubtful if even the most secret discussions in Cabinet meetings and in the Prime Minister’s Office are safe from the prying eyes and ears of the US National Security Agency (NSA), leave alone Indian embassies in North America and, perhaps, elsewhere.
NSA operates the largest constellation of satellites in low and high earth orbits, and maintains continuous worldwide electronic surveillance generating tons of elecronic intelligence daily. Only Russia and China have erected formidable electronic/cyber barriers to protect at least the communications networks carrying their most highly classified information and data. The NSA, incidentally, has the highest funding priority of any American intelligence agencies, its budget in hundreds of billions of dollars. The bulk of the analysing is done by CIA, among other intelligence receipients, of the raw NSA data. Incidentally, the largest CIA spend is on analysing incoming NSA and other data and information.
Pressed by the US not to reveal the electronic channels or to compromise the NSA means through which the intercepts were received is, in fact, the reason why the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has not onpassed “evidence” that New Delhi has demanded about the alleged Indian official complicity in the killing of Nijjar. This bit of intelligence was given by the US to Ottawa under the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing arrangement. If disclosed it would disclose to the Indian government the weaknesses in the Indian communications system or, much worse, pinpoint the mole inside the Indian High Commission as the source. Canada does not have the technical capability to monitor such communications traffic by itself. The US does, and cued the Trudeau dispensation to the contents of telephone calls the RAW station chief supposedly had with whosoever was on the outside.
It is curious the Modi regime has not denied an Indian government role in the conspiracy that Washington claims to have foiled to do in America a Nijjar to the Khalistani troublemaker Pannun who conveniently enjoys dual citizenship of the US and Canada, leaving him free to do mischief in both countries, and in the UK. Why hasn’t Delhi demanded details from the US government as it did from Trudeau? Doesn’t GOI want to know just how the US became aware of this supposed plot, and through which channels, and why the Americans are so confident about their accusation? Where’s the evidence? And was it generated by NSA/CIA/DIA or some other agency, or is it, as likely as not, another American mole at work in the Indian embassy on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington?
It is important for Indians to know. After all, it was not very long ago that the Head of RAW’s Counter-Intelligence Operations (!!!) — a Rabinder Singh (if I recall the name right), was identified as being on CIA’s payroll. Before he could be nabbed, he was spirited away by the Americans — with not a little help from Indian insiders — to Kathmandu, and flown to New York city, where last heard he was reportedly living safe and sound, presumably on the CIA’s dime.
In the context of a thoroughly exposed and vulnerable Indian official system, PMO was apprised by the US of what it had by way of irrefutable evidence. It may explain New Delhi’s cagey response, promising investigation and punitive action regarding the Pannun affair, something Trudeau was unable to draw from Delhi in the Nijjar case.
The more serious issue New Delhi and the Indian public ought to worry about is whether the Indian government has any secrets at all worth leaking? Or, is it taken for granted by Indian agencies that Washington is privy to any and all communications within the government between PMO, RAW and other intelligence units, MEA, Home Ministry, are tapped 24/7/365 (366 in leap years!)? Is this an uncomfortable reality the Indian government has to live with?
Such communications surveillance and monitoring, moreover, is facilitated also by the fact that the entire Indian official network, like the commercial mobile telephony infrastructure, is based fully on imported hardware and, run by foreign software.
This last is a problem a few of us have been futilely squawking about for years, and which SITARA (Science, Indigenous Technology and Advanced Research Accelerator) — a pioneering organisation founded and run by retired ambassador Smita Purshottam and engaged in yeoman service to the nation, has majorly flagged. It has repeatedly warned the PMO and other departments of the government at the highest levels, of the national security perils of relying on foreign communications gear with frame embedded bugs and on malware infested imported software.
SITARA has had the occasional success. But, by and large, the various departments and ministries of the government seem unconcerned about the perils of purchasing whole European, Chinese and American systems and associated hardware, and usually Western software driving them, because the inherent dangers are not fully appreciated by those in authority. And this, mind you, despite the availability of safe, protected, indigenous counterpart tech of high quality. This is so eggregiously wrong an attitude and policy it boggles the mind, making one wonder if the government willfully makes itself vulnerable, its atmnirbharta rhetoric so much farce!
The fact is the Indian government and its myriad agencies, including the Indian military, despite all the evidence, continue to trust Indian technology, talent and industry IMMENSELY LESS than they do foreign tech, countries and suppliers. This despite Indian firms, mostly MSMEs, having developed fantastically advanced communications technologies and algorithms. And this despite being aware of the trouble such procurement policies can cause with all government communications being open secrets to the US and the West, and to China.
Now try conducting a half-way effective foreign policy when the parties you deal with are all in the know of the nuts and bolts of it!
Despite some little awareness of this fatal weakness in some sections of some ministries, the Indian government has NOT holistically addressed it, nor sought comprehensive solutions to zero out the risk . The problem has to be tackled on a warfooting. The government needs to invest massively in the private sector MSMEs and other tech innovators, producers and manufacturers in the country such that the necessary communictions wherewithal is entirely, completely and certifiably of Indian origin.
India, right now, has standout Indian startups that have already invented, patented and produced elements for a potential 6G photonic communications system using light quanta to carry voice, information, and data. They are pleading for investment, and custom from the government, but find themselves beating their heads against a stone wall. And then there are Indian companies, like Reliance Communications, which imported Nokia hardware from Finland in crates for their Jio mobile telephony service and labeled it indigenous, who enjoy the Indian government’s largesse!
SITARA has been informing and canvassing with the PMO, Department of telecommunications, et al, for funds for these small tech innovation companies to integrate their various technologies into a prototype system for the GOI departments to test. But the government appears disinterested, apparently stuck in the global-free trade stream of thinking — that more advanced countries long ago trashed.
It has compelled many brilliant but frustrated Indian talents to shift their small ventures (that I know of) to Singapore and Silicon Valley, with US firms, like Qualcom, running after them, offering technology development facilities, a de-bureaucratised business ecosystem, investment capital, and undertakings to buy their cutting edge technologies.
In this dismal scene we can be certain of one thing though: Once these technologies are fully developed and mature, they will be offered for worldwide sale in a few short years, and come back to India with the California cachet and the Silicon Valley stamp, whence the Indian government and the Indian military and hundreds of official agencies and units will scamper after them, ready to fork out thousands of billions of Indian taxpayers’ dollars in hard currency!
Such are the contours of the latest saga of technology development unfolding as tragedy in India.
Washington Post carried a story Nov 23 about a supposed attempted assasination of the Khalistani activist in North America, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, that apparently was foiled by US agencies. And how a disturbed President Joe Biden brought up this matter with the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi when the latter was on a state visit to the US in June this year, and demanded of Modi that those responsible for planning the hit be hauled up. This episode has come to public notice only now — meaning it was leaked to the press by some one in the Biden Administration at this time almost as as if in support of the Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s charge made a few months back that there was an official Indian hand in the killing of the Khalistani extremist Gurpreet Singh Nijjar in Surrey, in the western province of British Columbia.
More to the point, US National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson huffed to the Post that “We are treating this issue with utmost seriousness, and it has been raised by the U.S. government with New Delhi. And added that “Indian counterparts expressed surprise and concern,” and “stated that activity of this nature was not their policy.” And that the Modi regime would look into it.
MEA spokesman Arindam Bagchi reacted by confirming that Washington had, in fact, “shared some inputs” regarding the “nexus between organized criminals, gun runners, terrorists and others” that he suggested as the probable cause of the failed assasination, but asserted that “India takes such inputs seriously” and that the “necessary follow-up action” would be taken. This official Indian reaction was labeled “oblique” by the Post.
Firstly, Bagchi may care to educate the Washington Post correspondent in New Delhi, George Shih, that ‘Shri’ is an honorific like ‘Mr’, and not part of the name his parents gave him — which mistake was doubtless part of Shih’s eye-catching contribution to the Post story!
But seriously, God knows, go anywhere in the world, find two Sikhs or two Indians for that matter, and you’ll discover three political and social factions, and because all intra-Punjabi NRI interactions tend to be heated, or get heated soon enough, an exchange of choicest abuses followed by someone pulling a gun or a knife is not unheard of. This being the Indian diasporic reality, why did Bagchi in a sense recant his original and entirely plausible explanation of the purported assassination attempt against Pannun, by promising that the Indian government would look into into US allegations? What’s there to look into? Canadian newspapers in areas of large Sikh presence are full of local news stories of turbaned/mona sardars presiding over crime syndicates and running around killing each other right and left in gang wars as occurred during the heyday of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale’s “reign of terror” in Punjab.
Without speculating about the reasons why Washington sought to publicise this episode at this time, let’s consider what the Indian government’s correct response should have been. On the topic of political assasinations isn’t the complaint by the US a bit rich? Or, are we all inhabiting Pollyanna-land? Why are Americans, like the Canadians earlier, getting hot under their collars about Pannun — the object of a likely Sikh dissenter who wanted to bump him off?
Assassination is a staple of all intelligence agencies throughout history. Arthashastra and Suntzu’s writings, in fact, discuss in detail when and where to carry them out, and how. In the modern day, US Central Intelligence Agency, UK’s MI6, France’s Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, Russia’s KGB ( Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti) and its external succesor agency — Foreign Intelligence Srvice (SVR), China’s Ministry of State Security and, of course most notably, Israel’s Mossad, are leaders in the field.
Hence, Bagchi should have been instructed to shut the Washington Post reporter up by recalling for him the CIA assasination in September 1973 of the leftist Chilean President Salvador Allende. And Modi should have followed up privately with Biden, and Jaishankar publicly, by demanding of the White House, even if very belatedly, investigations into the CIA’s killings of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in January 1965 and, a mere 16 days later, of the Indian nuclear visionary and chairman of the atomic energy commission, Dr Homi J Bhabha alongwith with a whole bunch of innocent passengers on board the January 24, 1965, Air India flight AI 101, Bombay-Geneva, that crashed on Mount Blanc courtesy a timed explosive put in the plane’s cargo hold by a CIA agent.
That CIA agent was Robert Trumbull Crowley, who retired as Assistant Director of Clandestine Operations in CIA and was second in command of the Agency’s Directorate of Operations (Wikipedia). Crowley admitted these heinous killings.
Known as the “Crow” in the Agency, Crowley confessed to journalist Gregory Douglas about these hits a little before his death in 1993, confessing perhaps because of feelings of remorse, or to salve his conscience, or whatever. These confessions, by the way are in Douglas’ 2013 book — Conversations with the Crow, published by Basilisk Press (which can be downloaded at https://ia601409.us.archive.org/12/items/conversations-with-the-crow-pdf/conversations-with-the-crow-pdf.pdf ).
But let the Crow do the talking on these targeted assassinations.
By way of context, the Crow avers: “We had trouble, you know, with India back in the ’60s when they got uppity and started work on an atomic bomb…the thing is, they were getting into bed with the Russians.” Referring to Homi Bhabha, he says: “That one was dangerous. He had an unfortunate accident. He was flying to Vienna to stir up more trouble when his Boeing 707 had a bomb go off in the cargo hold, And they all fell on a high mountain in the Alps. After that, no real evidence left, and the world became much safer….”.
Referring to Shastri, Crowley said, revealing his pathological racism: “Well, I call it as I see it. At the time, it was our best shot. And we nailed Shastri as well. Another cow-loving raghead. Gregory, you say you don’t know about these people. Theywere close to getting a bomb, so what if they nuked their deadly Paki enemies? So what? Too many people in both countries. Breed like rabbits and full of snake-worshipping twits. I don’t see what the Brits wanted in India for the life of me. And then threaten us? They were in the sack with the Russians, I told you. Maybe they could nuke the Panama Canal or Los Angeles. We don’t know that, but it is not impossible.”
And he added, mistakenly, about Shastri that he was: “A political type who started the program in the first place. Babha was a genius,and he could get things done, so we aced both of them. And we let certain people know there was more where that came from. We should have hit the chinks, too, while we were at it, but they were a tougher target.”
By publicly asking for an investigation by the US government now, New Delhi will achieve several things. Firstly, it will publicize assasssinations as a part of the espionage business, one in which the CIA and intelligence agencies of other Western powers have excelled, and for whom it has been routine activity. Secondly, it will signal Washington to not act holier than thou. And, lastly, it will send an unalloyed warning to Pannun and others desiring Khalistan that they are safer demanding a sovereign Sikh state carved out of Canada, the US and UK where the bulk of them presently reside and there is ample land (in the first two countries mentioned) to accommodate their ambitions, than ever again even thinking of Punjab.
Just so no one thinks that the programme of assasinations is passe, in recent years, according to the indian government, 9 — count nine! — Bhabha Atomic Research Centre nuclear scientists, including two very promising young radiochemists, have died mysteriously. Refer “The Strange Disappearance of India’s Nuclear Scientists”, an October 12, 2021 published in the online magazine ‘Unrevealed Files’ at https://www.unrevealedfiles.com/the-strange-disappearance-of-indias-nuclear-scientists/ . Connect these killings with the 1994 espionage case lodged against Nambi Narayanan heading ISRO’s cryogenic rocket engine project, that delayed India’s getting the cryogenic rocket engine by a decade, and one espies a pattern of strategic sabotage mostly by the in-system Indian collaborators of foreign powers.
The CBI found the case against Dr Narayanan to be absolutely false/ The two main culprits pushing it were, curiously, the Directors General of Police of Gujarat and Kerala, no less, R.B. Sreekumar and Siby Mathew, respectively! Sreekumar and Mathew instead of being drawn and quartered, or executed, or rotting in jail, faced no real punishment and are presumably living out their lives on their ill-gotten gains.
Shouldn’t the National Security Adviser Ajit Doval of the Indian Police Service, whose parent cadre is Kerala Police, do something about incarcerating for life these two treasonous crooks and service mates of his — Mathew and Sreekumar, to make an example of them for the horde of 5th columnists active within the Indian system?
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The still larger point to highlight is this: Why does GOI/MEA go weak in the knees and rush into a defensive pose when dealing with the US Government, when they have every right and duty to go on the offensive? After all, as I keep reminding everyone, it is the US that needs India more in the emerging China threat-centric world order in the Indo-Pacific, NOT the other way around, The Indian government’s getting so basic a geostrategic appreciation wrong is really troubling.
The Indian government has been hoisted on to the horns of a dilemma. The rightwing coalition government in Israel of Benjamin Netanyahu, not unreasonably, seeks universal branding of the Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya — Islamic Resistance Movement) as a terrorist organisation in order to justify its all-out military campaign launched in the Gaza Strip. It was in response to the surprise combined arms attack October 7 on the nearby Israeli kibbutz (farming cooperative) and small towns across the “iron wall” the Israelis built along the border with Gaza to keep themselves safe. Had this Iron Wall worked as advertised, there would have been no Israel-Hamas war.
The so-called “Iron Wall” is a high advanced-tech steel wire fence interspersed with towers mounting machine guns slaved to banks of surveillance sensors, including aerostats (large ground-tethered balloons with radars and thermal sensors, cameras, and other devices that maintain a 24/7 vigil). The machine guns automatically fire in “kill zones” that cover the length of the wall on the Israel-Gaza border the instant sensors at any time detect breaches of the wall.
It is a solution, incidentally, the Indian government considered buying into to prevent infiltration across the Line of Control in J&K by Pakistan-based jihadi groups. But it was deterred by the high price. Just as well, because while it cost Israel a billion dollars to install this protective border complex, it took the lead Hamas elements only a few seconds to “blind” the thermal and imagery sensors, and a few precision drone bomblets dropped on the towers, to render the wall useless, and allow the Hamas fighters to flow unimpeded into Israel. The Israeli “iron dome” air defence system, was likewise defeated by a too large barrage of rockets fired from within Gaza.
So far so conventional military-wise innovative. Combined with the motorised gliders and high-quality coordinated actions by air, land and seaborne units conducted in “radio silence”, ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ marked the Hamas out as a force that had transited from hit and run actions to planning and carrying out a genuinely imaginative military breaching operation, and a uniquely effective proto-military in embryo of a future independent state of Palestine, whatever its current relationship with the civilian Palestinian Authority running the show in Gaza.
After the initial successes in nullifying the Israeli wall, the combined arms units began moving inland. And that’s when things began going very wrong. The Hamas fighters went rogue. Rigged up in proper battle uniforms and gear, they reverted to being terrorists — indiscriminately shooting up unsuspecting Israelis on the streets, lobbing grenades into basements filled with terrified defenceless people seeking shelter, surging into the Kibbutz Be’eri and killing everyone they saw on sight as they roamed the gated compound, and taking hundreds of men, women and children hostage. It lost Hamas its hard won status as a conventional military force deserving of respect.
In other words, Hamas proved to be a terrorist group after all, like the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba in Kashmir — a fact the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu reminded his good friend Narendra Modi about, by declaring the LeT a terrorist outfit in the runup to the 15th anniversary of the heinous 26/11 seaborne strike by the Lashkar on Mumbai in 2008. (Of course, the then Congress party government of Manmohan Singh, memorably, did nothing by way of retaliation.) It has put the Indian Prime Minister in a bind, especially because the Modi government has come out in favour of a “two-state solution” for Palestine that the Israelis are skeptical about. This is a compromise the Indian government has pushed and is a later development. Because, with the partition of India in mind, New Delhi in 1948 opposed the partitioning also of Palestine.
Netanyahu’s gambit is not only to blunt the political effects in West Asia of New Delhi’s advocacy for Palestine and Israel coexisting together, but also of the Mission of Arab foreign ministers making the rounds of various capitals presently in India seeking Modi’s support for, in effect, ending the Israeli military operations against Hamas, an option Netanyahu rejected out of hand when mooted by the US.
The Modi government cannot but revel in Israel’s coming down on India’s side where LeT and other Pakistan-sponsored jihadi outfits are concerned. But equally, it has to be mindful of the consequences of its adopting a too-pro Israel stance on Modi’s wildly successful policy of cultivating the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia.
Had Hamas’ initial military actions not degenerated into rank terrorism, Modi’s problem might have been trickier to deal with. But now New Delhi cannot but side with Tel Aviv because Hamas’ deplorable behaviour is akin to the LeT’s targeting mainland Indians and Indian troops in Kashmir. And if a harsh Indian response to LeT terror is appropriate in J&K, so is Israeli belligerance in Gaza.
The specific issue of India reciprocating by labelling Hamas a terrorist gang and thus legitimating the Israeli conduct of war in Gaza can be put off for the nonce, but cannot be avoided for long. Not if the conflict in West Asia festers and undoes the lasting rapprochement between Israel and UAE and Bahrain, with Saudi Arabia to follow, promised by the September 2020 Abrahamic Accord. Because then both the sides will be calling in their IOUs.
Like the one-time ruling Bourbons in France, the Indian government and military remember nothing, learn nothing!
Another India-US summit/2×2 or whatever meeting, yet another multi-billion dollar arms deal benefiting, this time General Dynamics Ltd and the US defence industry generally. This is in line with the Indian government’s consistent policy in the Narendra Modi era of buying American military hardware everytime US notables pass through Delhi, or come a-calling, of signing some large arms deal or the other, supposedly to ensure India is in good nick with the Administration of the day in Washington, DC.
The recent visit by US Secretaries of State and Defence, Anthony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, respectively, fetched for America a deal for the General Dynamics product — the Stryker infantry combat vehicle (ICV) ostensibly to replace the roughly 2,000 Russian lightly armoured and armed BMP-2 personnel carriers in service with the Indian army. A more ridiculous and redundant arms buy is hard to imagine if the ‘atmanirbhar Bharat’ principle is kept in mind. Of course, by now atmnirbharta or the arms self-sufficiency notion is so attenuated, it means whatever anybody wants it to mean!
The operating principle seems to be — and this has been so articlulated, if in not so many words, by defence minister Rajnath Singh, which is that because the strategic concerns of India and the US converge re: China, anything the US offers by way of a weapon/weapon system/weapon platform is ipso facto good for the Indian military. So, the Stryker deal may be the precursor for more such transactions to keep the US government happy with Indian monies upkeeping the US defence industry in return for all kinds of rubbishy hardware whose need is not immediately evident.
The US army has the Bradley fighting vehicle and the Stryker infantry carrier in its inventory — two different platforms for differently nuanced battlefield roles. The Bradley is supposed to carry some 6-odd fully outfitted troops right into the battle area, for them to dismount and fight. The Stryker with lighter armour and a weapon — a machinegun, is also meant to carry troops but to an area proximal to the main battlefield — but not the site of actual battle, to allow troops to get out and to manoeuvre in larger space.
In fact, it is precisely the similarity in missions/roles that has led to the questioning of the Stryker in US army circles. And to the move not so much to discard it — because no armed service will ever admit it made a mistake in conceiving of the platform in the first place and expended a lot of funds in securing it, as to upgun it (to 30mm) and fit a mutipurpose turret able to take different weapons ranging from 30mm to 100mm guns, which actually compounds the confusion about its operational utility.
In this context, how does the Stryker fit into the Indian army’s plans? What is absolutely unclear is the rationale for the Stryker in Indian conditions, considering it is turning out to be something of a lemon with the US army. If the Stryker is thought of only as an interim solution to when a genuine light tank can be fielded by XIV Corps formations in Ladakh and in the upland plains of Depsang or in northern Sikkim, then it is an awfully expensive one. The all-up unit cost with full ordnance load of a Stryker could be anything between US$ 15-30 million depending on what version/variant the Pentagon is willing to part with.
Procuring it makes no sense when Tata has a tracked Futuristic ICV in the works. Were Tata to be assured that their product would be inducted (after prototype testing) if it were fast-tracked — this FICV would be available in about the same time frame the Stryker joint production program would get underway here. Then again, if the Stryker is for the Indian army’s consumption alone, why the qualifier ‘joint’ for its production? That’s a mystery as there’s no other potential buyer for it anywhere on the horizon. Indeed, were an assurance on an FICV to be offered all comers in the local defence industry, Bharat Forge and Mahindra too would enter the competition. These companies have already sold lightly armed & armoured wheeled vehicles (light special purpose anti-mine vehicles) to the security forces involved in counterinsurgency antiterrorism operations, as Tata has done with its Kestrel. They would all up their game and develop tracked/wheeled ICVs from new designs in next to no time. Each of these special vehicles has been produced with European help and tech transfer — important for the GOI-MOD-armed services brass who go into brain freeze contemplating wholly indigenous military hardware.
With oodles of prospective profit as effective motivator and driver of defence industries everywhere, why persist in a regressive policy of outsourcing a weapons platform based on automotive/vehicular technologies in a realm in which India has attained the necessary takeoff threshold? The reasonable premise here is that to assign such a high value, high priority, project to the public sector DRDO-Avadi tank factory combine, would be to court the usual disaster.
Why not instead challenge Indian private sector firms to produce in record time something better than Stryker, a challenge they would happily take up, even as other or the same Indian companies are incentivised to design, develop and manufacture, in parallel, on an accelerated schedule a 30-35 tonne genuine light tank to counter the Chinese ‘Black Panther’ ZTQ-15 light tank (with 105mm gun with auto-loader) equipping the PLA? Such an Indian light tank would also be a definite bestseller in the Third World arms bazaar and progressively reduce the unit cost to the Indian army.
The Indian army needs to bear in mind, however, that to field the Stryker or a Tata/Mahindra/Bharat Forge variant against the ZTQ 15 at the Himalayan heights would be to take a knife to a gunfight. The army, like its sister armed services, has over the years made no end of mistakes when it comes to arming itself, usually wastefully at the Indian taxpayer’s expense while reinforcing the country’s dubious status as a prime arms dependency. Unless the contract for it is stalled or sidetracked, which can easily be done, the Stryker in Indian army’s employ will only continue with this Service’s dismal capital acquisitions record.
The apparent success of the G20 summit in New Delhi in September this year no doubt spurred Prime Minister Narendra Modi into envisioning India as host of the 2036 quadrennial summer Olympic Games, which timeline is a bare 13 years away. If India does actually bid for the Games it will be commendable only as a show of the BJP government’s confidence that it can pull off such a gigantic global event. In reality, however, India has not a spitball’s chance in hell to be accorded such privilege.
In the main because the International Olympics Committee (IOC) is ever so picky about where these Games are staged and values the optics of a first class, First World site, perhaps, more than it does the actual competitive physical exertions on the fields of play (as long as they pass off without controversy!). Countries aspiring and eager to host the Games have to meet — and this is an unspoken condition — First World standards not just in the necessary infrastructure — massive modern stadia, large sized swimming pools, a world class velodrome, etc., but for the society to reach that level as well. Even if India is able to afford the price tag — just the sports infrastructure cost China $20 billion 15 years ago, the First World Western public social standards (of cleanliness, of law and order, etc) is a hurdle India cannot cross. It is not as if all that’s required is for the Central and Delhi governments to do what they did for the G20 conference — potemkinise parts of the city the foreign dignitaries would transit for the duration by clearing the underpasses of beggars and destitutes, filling some potholes, giving a new coat of paint to road dividers, placing flower pots at every turn, etc.
Speaking of flower pots — the lack of any basic civic sense or respect for public property in the population, which the IOC puts much store by — remember they prize Western social sensibilities, was evidenced on the day after the summit when whole families — and these did not appear really impoverished, descended on the roads and traffic roundabouts and simply ransacked whatever was not bolted down. The flower pots gracing the roads in Lutyen’s Delhi, for instance, were emptied by these scavengers of the mud and the flowering plants right where they were placed, who then happily decamped with the plastic pots they plan to put to better use. All this activity was, mind you, in full view of the media and no police anywhere in sight! The Times of India next day carried a page one picture of a smiling mother and son carrying away their loot. That photo and the accompanying story would by itself be a disqualification for an appalled IOC, if everything else was on the up and up, which it isn’t.
This might hurt Modi’s amor propre, but the hints of First World prosperity — the metro railways, ‘cyber hubs’ in many cities, notwithstanding India does not remotely meet the eye test of a coming power. Motor past the new airports in the country and one is plunged into the trademark Indian over-populated urban chaos with no urban planning worth the name, decrepitude, filth, and traffic jams everywhere, with lane driving an entirely alien concept to most Indians taking to the road. Whence, two lanes are converted to five with every bit of space occupied by every sort of wheeled vehicle imaginable jostling to get ahead, even as people nonchalantly breathe air so foul IOC board members would baulk at overflying the country let alone landing to take in the scenery.
India is nowhere near a developed state — the absolute prerequisite for any winning Olympics bid. It is still only a slightly improved version of the socialist Third World country it has been since 1947. Little substantive change has occurred because, despite Modi’s election promises of thinning the government and minimizing the government’s role, the sarkari hand is still heavy with everyone who somehow manages to get on the public payroll being guaranteed a life of relative ease and a career doing little except further gumming up the works. As cogs in an over-large brain-frozen bureaucratic state not much more is expected of him. Hardly surprising then, as many have argued, that every caste and sub-caste is agitating for ‘sarkari naukri’ for their youth, and a reservation quota for the purpose. This hankering for government jobs (to wit, Maratha protests) may be reducing even a once vigorous and economically vibrant free enterprise-minded Maharashtra state to a coastal variant of benighted Bihar. “It is all very well to speak of a market-led society”, writes Sanjay Srivastava in the Indian Express of Nov 2, 2023, with Modi’s electoral plank in mind, “but if this happens in a context of an overweening state presence in everyday life, no one is silly enough to actually believe it.”
An overweening government is why India will forever remain under-developed, its people used to government doles wanting more and more freebies until the productive portion of the economy sinks under the weight of the cost of government and the monies it ladles out in the form of unending subsidies and synthetic job creation by padding its rolls. And why the country’s bid for Olympics will continue to be dismissed with barely concealed contempt.
In Asia, Japan had its coming out party as a phoenix rising from the ashes of abject military defeat in World War Two in 1964 with the Olympics and marked the occasion as a technological power by inaugurating the Shinkansen (Series 0, Hikari) ‘bullet train’ speeding at 130 mph — then the fastest in the world . When Seoul had its Olympics in 1988, it marked South Korea’s similarly accelerated ascent from absolute penury and the devastation of war to economic powerhouse and First World state — the first of the ‘little dragons’ to come to the fore. Ten years later, China at the 2008 Beijing Olympics (and with the Winter Olympics last year) spectacularly showcased its all round prowess and new found status as the peer-rival to the United States. The Games also were a salute in kind to the foresight of the ‘Great Helmsman’ — Dengxiaoping who exchanged Maozedong’s ‘Red Book’ for good sense and unleashed the private sector and individual enterprise.
For India’s bid not to be perfunctorily rejected therefore necessitates India’s first making the steep climb to become a genuine developed country in all respects. The rate at which India is actually progressing, however, and realistically speaking, even a bid for the 2060 Olympics — when the population is expected to stabilise around 1.6 billion people — appears a bit optimistic.
This is a wide-ranging interview conducted via video a little over a month ago by Dr. Stephen Hsu, Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science & Engineering at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA, for his ‘Manifold ‘ podcast No. 46.
[Hamas rockets from Gaza streaking towards Israeli settlements]
The Hamas operation staged out of the Gaza Strip against the adjoining settlements in southern Israel yesterday was astonishing in its complexity and effectiveness. It was not terrorist action, but an extraordinary full-fledged military operation, carried out in complete radio silence, combining absolute surprise with precision coordinated moves involving fighting assets in air, sea and land.
To conceive of such a plan was mindboggling enough. To actually carry it out with such success without Mossad or any other Israeli intellignce unit getting a whiff of it is unthinkable. I mean, where did the Hamas units practice these actions? In Iran? Perhaps. Because this operation couldn’t have been carried out without repeated and intense exercises and live gaming anywhere else. Because it certainly would have been noticed if done in Gaza, or in Jordan, or even in the Sinai Peninsula. Think of it — a coordinated attack by powered gliders, seaborne commando, and bulldozers as infantry-carriers ploughing through the walls Israel had erected to protect its border towns. The operation got underway under the cover of a rocket barrage that overwhelmed the ‘Iron Dome’ — the vaunted Israeli tactical air defence system! What chutzpah (a Yiddish word derived from Hebrew denoting audacity, and pronounced ‘hutspah’)!
Of course, the Hamas aim was to kill Israelis indiscriminately and also to take a large number of them as hostages for eventual exchange of prisoners because the only thing the Israeli state values more than its territory are its people. The casualty-death rate of some 1,250 Israelis in a population of some 10 million may not seem large in absolute numbers. But it becomes earthshaking when one realizes — just to get a perspective — the potential proportionate effect on India if 87,000 Indian citizens were killed in a surprise terrorist attack in a population of 1.3 billion. It is a readymade setting for a ferocious blood-fevered response, and Palestinian Gaza would by now have been decimated but for the fact that the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) does not know where the Israeli hostages are hidden by Hamas, and they cannot take a chance of hurting any of them. So, of course, known Hamas facilities will be bombed as has already been done. But a full Israeli retribution will have to await the hostage return, which fact has bought Hamas a bit of time and even leverage with Jerusalem. But agencies or persons in nearby Islamic countries if they are fingered as having the remotest role in the Hamas operation, will get it in the neck.
And then there is Iran — Israel’s Number One sworn enemy with a prime role in the Hamas op, and against whom IDF would very much like to move soonest. Except, there’s a little political complication. Leading Israeli strategists doubt if US President Joe Biden’s statement issued in support of Israel, tolerates precipitate Israeli reaction. “It is not clear”, writes Eldad Shavit, a former Mossad agent and colonel in Israeli Defence Intelligence, now with the Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv, “whether [the US] would support an Israeli response against Hezbollah (or other actors) or would act independently to fulfill its warning.”
The reason Israelis are right is that US security promises are one thing. But quite another thing for IDF to attack Iran frontally and endanger a likely reworked Iranian nonproliferation agreement junked by Trump that’s on the anvil and which, Washington has long argued will address the Israeli government’s fears of Tehran covertly crossing the nuclear weapons threshold. The US fear is also that it may ignite yet another theatre of war with Russia and China jumping in on Iran’s side. But the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu faces a dilemma. He cannot not react violently and order punitive strikes, or something visibly lethal and still keep his government in power, as he has only a slim margin of safety relying as his Likud Party does in the knesset (Parliament) on other rightwing parties, some more extreme than his own. It will be interesting to see how Netanyahu resolves this problem — do something in Gaza and possibly hurt the hostages, take action against Iran and face American wrath, or do neither of these things and see his regime fall.
But to get back to the Hamas action — the uniqueness of this multi-medium, multi-pronged, Hamas operation and the success it fetched is all the more stunning compared to Russia’s failed but ambitious curtain raiser-action to take Kyiv and end the hostilities on the very first day of the war against Ukraine that has gone on for over a year and pretty much dragged the Russian military’s reputation through the mud. On that first day (February 24, 2022), Russia’s plan involved simultaneous paradropped Spetznaz (Special Forces), row upon row of low-flying Su-25 ground attack aircraft, and armoured columns converging on the Ukrainian capital. All this came to nought when the paracommando got shot up when descending, and those who landed were hunted and killed, the Su-25s lost their punch owing to intense and accurate Ukrainian Igla (manpads) strikes and ack-ack, and Russian tanks got bogged down in their advance for a host of reasons.
So, the unexpectedly imaginative Palestinian actions will have several effects: It will pump up the military reputation of, and legitimate, Hamas as Arab Palestine’s premier fighting arm and, proportionately, take down Israel’s well-earnd reputation for a proactive military stance, preparedness and precocity, and especially Mossad’s preternatural situation awareness. It is, moreover, the first notable Islamic military success in, what, a millenniumm?! Islamic military successes have been so few and far between, Muslim peoples everywhere will bask in Hamas’ reflected glory for a while. Politically, it will compel all Islamic countries to fall behind Hamas and the Palestinian cause — blighting certainly in the medium term future the prospects of the Abrahamic accords that the supposed leader of the sunni Islamic world, Saudi Arabia, was all set to join in order to forge an ostensibly permanent Israel-Arab peace. That’s gone for a toss. The calls for jihad against Israel in the Islamic bloc will revive, gain new adherents, new strength, new financing, and Hamas’ future has suddenly brightened beyond its wildest dreams.
But militarily, it is shia Islamic bloc leader, Iran, which will have the most to crow about, and whose image will be burnished because the low level powered-glider descent of the aerial attacking force– the great military innovation in these hostilities, was something Tehran’s shia armed militia in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah, tried out first in 2007 against Israel, and tips and lessons from which action were doubtless onpassed to the Hamas command. It will also be seen as avenging Israeli assassinations over the years of Iranian nuclear/missile scientists and, in January 2020, of the head of the Quds Force — the lead offensive element of the Pasdaran (Iranian Revolutionary Guard), Major General Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad.
What’s the fallout, if any, for India? Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon staffer presently with the conservative think tank — American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, for one fears that the Hamas action will resonate in terrorist (ISI-aided Laskar-e-Tayyaba, Harkat ul-mujahideen, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Tehreeq-i-Taliban Pakistan) circles in Pakistan and extremist outfits in J&K, arrayed against India, and that some of these groups would be tempted to try and execute a still bigger bang operation. In the event, if there’s again a Mumbai-type attack or strike on Parliament or worse, India should be prepared to pull out terrorist gangs root and branch from Pakistan, or where ever else they may be found. This is a plausible case for a very hard Indian reaction. May be this is what Prime Minister Narendra Modi is thinking, whence his whole hearted support for Israel even at the cost potentially of harming relations with the Gulf countries with whose leaders he has developed a special warmth.
But should the Indian government not ponder more sustained, harsher, response targeting the violent Khalistani groups residing in safe havens in the US, Canada, and Australia? Ah, there’s the rub!
A Sept 23 Washington Post story (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/23/targeted-killing-canada-india-nijjar/) regarding the killing in Canada of the Khalistani terrorist Harmeet Singh Nijjar quotes a “former senior U.S. intelligence official” as saying “This is Modi looking at the world and saying to himself, ‘The United States conducts targeted killings outside of war zones. The Israelis do it. The Saudis do it. The Russians do it. Why not us?’ And none of the [nations] we just mentioned pay much of a price.”
The above-quoted American intel officer was honest. But India’s case for extra-judical, extra-territorial killing of Nijjar, the terrorist — assuming it is at all true — is far beefier than the instance of an Indian PM ordering the elimination of an outlaw. If Indian government is proven to have a hand, then it is in good company because India will merely have emulated these other countries, with the United States in the lead, who quite routinely bump off not only terrorists in their safe havens — think Osama bin Laden — but foreign individuals they deem a threat or an obstacle to achieving their foreign policy goals. Recall in this respect the cold-blooded assassination of Dr Homi J Bhabha because Washington apprehended he was getting India the A-bomb. A timed explosive placed in the cargo hold of the Air India Mumbai-Geneva flight AI 101 carrying Bhabha blew up in January 1966 on the slopes of Mount Blanc.
An US Central Intelligence Agency operative, Robert Crowley, who later headed clandestine ops for the agency confessed to carrying out this “kill” that along with Bhabha took the lives of hundreds of innocent passengers. But the Indian government made no fuss about this act of assassination-sabotage, nor was anyone held responsible, even though America’s hand in the death of their chief has ever since been the talk in Trombay circles. It became a precedent-setter for other countries. Israel, for instance, has regularly done away by various means numerous Iraqi and Iranian nuclear scientists.
Assassination as a diplomatic tool is of ancient origin and in the policy toolkit of most leading countries. “Holier than thou” states, such as Nehruvian India, refrained from deploying it, and were victimised. Things may have changed in the Modi era, by how much is not clear. There is still institutional reluctance to go after terrorists who do the nation serious harm while living abroad.
The good thing is not only has New Delhi not been apologetic about its stance on the Nijjar issue, it has taken the offensive in painting Canada as a facilitator of terrorism, which it is, in that it indiscriminately lets in Khalistani terrorists-criminals-gangsters and compounds the problem for everybody by letting them openly pursue terrorist aims of reviving an extinguished secessionist movement in Punjab from their refuge in Canada, UK and the US.
The Indian external affairs minister S Jaishankar is in the US for the next 8-odd days. He will hopefully take the natural step of declaring Canada an epicentre of international terrorism. If Pakistan harbouring a variety of Islamic extremists has been hauled up in the UN, FATF, etc why should Canada get a free pass just because it justifies terrorism promoted in Indian Punjab by Khalistanis it has welcomed as something protected by free speech? India has all the evidence it needs for crucifying Ottawa’s complicity as aider and facilitator of terrorism.
How fertile a ground is Canada for these Khalistani terrorists? Whole swaths of Canadian territory are today overrun by these militant Sikhs — as has been reported in the Canadian Press and media — engaged in illegal enterprises from running drug and crime syndicates, suspicious nightclubs, to murdering each other for any of a host of reasons — which is the likely cause of Nijjar’s mafia style execution, for the control of the lucrative gurdwara businesses dotting the Canadian landscape on that country’s eastern and western seaboards.
As regards the Canadian government’s complicity: How about Nijjar being allowed entry into Canada on a passport saying ‘Ravi Sharma’ and, who instead of being returned by the first available flight, was offered refugee status by the Canadian immigration authorities obviously under Ottawa’s instruction to admit into the country any and all Sikhs claiming political persecution irrespective of their criminal/terrorist background, or even a red alert Interpol notice as was the case with Nijjar. If Canada is politically unwilling to act on an Interpol red alert because the Liberal Party ruling with a slim majority can ill aford to upset its coalition partner — the Khalistan-leaning New Democratic Party of Jugmeet Singh, can it be relied on to respect any other international law? In the event, how is Canada different than, say, Pakistan, where too state agencies provide anti-India Islamic terrorists succour, residence, and legal and physical protection?
Nijjar was no workaday plumber peacefully propagating the Khalistan cause on weekends at his gurdwara as Ottawa would like the world to believe, but the head of the dreaded Khalistan Tiger Force committing atrocities, and charged with several murders and bombing of a cinema house in Punjab — information long ago transmitted to the Canadian government. Col. Amarinder Singh, then chief minister of Punjab reveals he gave a list of 16 Canada-based Khalistani terrorists to Justin Trudeau when he visited India in 2018, which fetched only Canadian inaction.
It is important in terms of what I flagged in the previous post about the US and the West using Khalistan as leverage against India that, it is now reported by New York Times, Trudeau based his allegation of India’s role in Nijjar’s death on signals intelligence onpassed by the US. So the Biden Administration is here playing a bit of double game — encouraging Ottawa to stick with its accusatory stance while informing Delhi that India enjoys no “exemption” from whatever punitive action Washington may decide on at an opportune time when the Modi regime does not jump when the White House asks it to.
Then again there are different yardsticks to gauge violation of law. If an assassination is carried out by the US, UK, Australia, it presumably is okay; not so much if it is done by other countries. The Washington Post story referred earlier, picked up this point. “U.S. officials have long argued”, it notes, ” that these and other operations bear little resemblance to the actions of states like Russia, noting that U.S. operations involve extensive legal review, assessments of an imminent threat and determinations that a capture or arrest of the suspect in question are not possible.” These rationales, the story concludes, “often ring hollow overseas.” And for good reason because the US and the West fail to acknowledge that other countries who may decide on assassinating a terrorist, say, may do so after they have exhausted all the available legal remedies and their patience has run out, and that such extra-judicial kills are not ordered for fun, or for the heck of it but because the host nation that is supposed to apprehend the terrorist, does not. The dossier given Ottawa was full of evidence to nail Nijjar, and yet the Trudeau regime deliberately did nothing. And now it is squawking because Nijjar got his just deserts, and the US, the most brazen perpetrator of extra-territorial mayhem, is harrumphing about it?
Risbly, Trudeau in New York brought up rules-based order. “We’re not looking to provoke or cause problems” he explained. “We’re standing up for the rules-based order.” So, India is expected to follow the rules while Canada is free to ignore them? This is the attitude that has spurred Delhi’s contempt for Canada, which Modi tried hard not to show on his face but failed, when he perfunctorily shook hands with Trudeau at the G20 summit.
Still, however Nijjar was got rid off, it will send a salutary message to other would be Khalistani terrorists that there’s nowhere to hide. Combined with the measures to expropriate their properties in Punjab, it should have the desired chilling impact. Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the so-called “General Counsel” of the Sikhs for Justice — a thinly veiled peaceful front for the terrorist Khalistan movement, for instance, is the first one to thus lose his properties. He is supposed to be a “sleeping” partner in several commercial enterprises, which also should be on the radar of the NSA Court.
It will help to snuff out the Khalistan issue for good if combined with property expropriation, Artificial Intelligence and face-recognition technologies are used, as has been suggested by many, to identify Sikhs in Canada indulging in violent protests targeting Indian diplomats, consular offices and the High Commission in Ottawa, and to revoke their PIO (persons of Indian origin) card and permanently ban their entry into India. These moves should be well publicised by Indian diplomats in Canada and the effect of all these actions is bound to deflate the publicity-seeking Khalistanis, and thin out the crowds supporting their cause. And finally, the entry of Sikh Canadians into Punjab during state or general elections should also be prohibited because, if the previous elections are a guide, they are the source of much violence and corruption, as they used strongarm methods to try and get elected their slate of sympathizers, which is something India cannot afford to see happen.
But officially condoned or sponsored assasination is a sovereign imperative of a state to protect itself. Like the US, India too needs a law to legitimize such kill operations, a law that the Indian government then makes the world aware of both as a deterrent and by way of providing legal cover and protection to RAW agents and their affiliates. It is precisely the absence of such a law that led to KPS Gill’s special Punjab Police commando who stifled the Khalistan movement in Punjab with exemplary ruthlessness being targeted by Human Rights advocates and social do-gooders in the post-insurrection phase that led to many among these anti-Khalistan fighters facing the ignominy of prison sentences committing suicide — a denouement Gill to the very last never forgave the Indian government for.
So, a priority is for the Modi Government to draft and pass such a law legalizing the dispatching of terrorists with “extreme prejudice”. It can be subsumed under the “Self defence” Chapter VII, Article 51 of the UN Charter. So that extra-judicial and extra-territorial punishments carried out to quell terrorism and in the furtherance of state objectives are openly and legally permissible. China has passed its sovereignty law that legitimates Beijing’s decisions, policies and practices. India needs such a law to provide the legal undergirding to shrug off the pressure from the overly legalistic US government.
[After first uploading this post, someone sent me a notice about a 2004 book referencing Canada’s emergence as spawner of international terror that makes the point I have been making about Canada as epicentre of international terrorism: The book is by Stephen Bell — ‘Cold Terror: How Canada Nurtures and Exports Terrorism Around the World’ (John Wiley & Sons Canada Ltd., 2004, 2007)]
“Khali stan”, I recall the late Khushwant Singh guffawing, “is the vacant space between the ears of some Jat Sikhs safely settled in Canada, America and Britain!” He had in his hand a map he had secured from somewhere showing a supposed sovereign Sikh state carved out of the Indian Union in what is Indian Punjab but with a corridor to the sea, mirroring the equally ridiculous “corridor” Mohammad Ali Jinah sought in 1947 to connect the two wings of Pakistan!
With or without this corridor, ‘Khalistan’ is a quixotic concept first mooted by Master Tara Singh-led Shiromani Gurdwara Prabhandak Committee in the heyday of Partition politics leading upto independence in 1947. It has even less to do with recovering Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s realm that mostly stretched west and northwestwards from Lahore to the gates of Kabul and was amalgamated in British India after the two Anglo-Sikh wars of the mid-19th century had reduced that kingdom. The British cleverly coopted the youth of Sikh yeomanry into the British enterprise by claiming for them as for other similarly placed ‘Kulak’ communities of the Indian subcontinent (such as Punjabi mussulmans) “martial race” status and recruiting them in droves into the colonial army.
The departing British played a whole lot of mischief but even they saw just how ridiculous and geographically impracticable this Sikh nation concept was and, certain sections within Whitehall apart, urged the Sikh leadership to unite with India. In the main, because Jinnah’s claim for separate nationhood for India’s Muslims was at least based on the religio-cultural cleavage between Islam and Hindusim. Whence the Qaid’s famous remark in 1946-47 to the visiting Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery, Chief of the Imperial Defence Staff, to the effect that you expect the Hindu and the Muslim to live together when “one venerates the cow and the other eats it”? The link between Hindus and Sikhs, however, is as it is said between teeth and gum, and how it was the social norm until not too long ago for Hindu families to have at least one son take “amrit” and adopt Sikhism — a religion the founding gurus, especially Guru Gobind Singh, conceived as the protector arm of Hinduism to deal with Mughal excesses. Inter-marriage between Hindus and Sikhs, therefore, was commonplace in Punjabi society. It is the aggressive attitude Jat Sikhs in particular took as their calling card and which animates the Khalistan promoters today.
It may be recalled that the renewed calls for Khalistan in Punjab began to be heard once again in the 1970s when the Indian government, in order to make the army more representative, decided on halving the Sikh component from 10-12 % to around 5%. 10-12% of the Sikh male youth population constituted a fairly large percentage of the potential military labour market and made for the relative prosperity of the landed peasantry in Punjab. It is the 5-6% of the Jat Sikh sections, who could not anymore be accommodated within the army, that took to the Khalistan movement as essentially an employment generation scheme, just as many in the Muslim middleclass saw Pakistan and moved there.
The DG, Punjab Police, the late legendary KPS Gill, in fact, put to work precisely the militant Jat Sikh mentality to counter Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his motivated horde that ran amok in the 1980s. Bhindranwale was the political monster the Dr Frankenstein in Indira Gandhi had created in Punjab to undercut former Punjab chief minister Zail Singh and his cronies! All this is what Gill, whose daughter married a Hindu, recounted to me about how he had contained the extremist Khalistanis. He did this over an extended evening in his Z-security covered house in Lodi Estate while polishing off an entire bottle of Black Label without any slurring of speech at the end of it, displaying an amazing level of tolerance for liqour. I asked him to write it all down, which he did in an eye-popping chapter — “The Dangers Within: The Internal Security Threats” in a seminal collection of essays I edited — ‘Future Imperilled: India’s Security in the 1990s and Beyond’ published by Penguin in 1994. Among the essayists was also General Khalid Arif who ran the Pakistan Army even as fellow Ariani and Jullundar native, General Zia ul Haq, ran Pakistan.
Gill narrated his use of an attribute of Jat Sikh mentality of feeling easily aggrieved against the Bhindranwale crowd, who had let loose a reign of terror against the nationalist Sikhs in the Punjab countryside. He told me in that evening of reminiscences — a sanitised version formed the essay in the book — how he visited each family of nationalist Jat Sikhs who were terrorised by the Khalistanis, and asked them to offer up recruits for a special commando force to be formed within Punjab Police. He promised the youngmen who saw their fathers and mothers killed, and sisters raped and killed, “before their eyes” by the Bhindranwale Khalistani extremists, that they would be appropriately trained and would have the opportunity and the official license to hunt down and kill those who had visted attrocities on their families “like dogs”. Nothing is so central to Jat Sikh mentality, Gill told me, than to avenge a personal wrong. These Punjab Police commando had absolute freedom and they used it ruthlessly and bloodily to eliminate the Khalistanis — literally “one by one” until the relatively few who remained ran, hid and survived, finding refuge in Canada and the US. It broke the back of the Khalistan movement in the country. But prophetically, Gill warned that the Khalistani element had NOT been pulled out “root and branch” from Punjab because he was prevented by Delhi from doing so. And, that there were enough sympathizers who had gone “deep underground” or were being nursed by ISI in Pakistan, with a small, vocal group in Canada and Britain where their numbers provided the Khalistan movement visibility and the electoral and political clout to keep it going in foreign lands.
I remember visiting Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto dubbed the “the capital of Khalistan” in Canada in the mid-1980s. By 2011, Canadian census indicated, there were 23,995 Sikh residents, some 25% of the population of that township. Some estimate that the Sikh population figure today has gone up to 50,000! Notable Sikh communities have since grown in other suburbs in the Greater Toronto region — Stockdale, Rexdale, Malton, etc.. There are equally large Sikh enclaves, such as Surrey, in the western Canadian province of British Columbia, where the Canadian government alleges a Gurdwara head and well known Khalistani — Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was “assasinated” by Indian agents, and in response kicked out Pawan Kumar Rai identified by Ottawa as “head of Intelligence” in the Indian High Commission. Nijjar is an extremist who entered Canada on fake visa and papers! How was he allowed into Canada? Then again, how did the Indian immigration permit him to get out of India in the first place? The Modi regime reacting in double quick time declared Rai’s opposite number here non grata and asked him to to leave the country immediately.
It is this issue that reportedly led to a very frosty meeting of Modi with the Canadian PM Justin Trudeau on the sidelines of the recent G20 summit. Trudeau is a dynastic politician, whose father Pierre Trudeau was the fashionable “new age” leader who was prime minister in two stints (1968-1979, 1980-1984) for over 15 years and in a sense bequeathed the Liberal Party leadership to his son — a phenomenon not unknown in Indian politics! Justin Trudeau understands the electoral logic of courting Canadian Sikh votes and has always been solicitous of Khalistanis within the Canadian fold. The Canadian government’s attitude to Sikh terrorists in their midst is a farce. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police took forever to find the Sikh extremists hiding in plain sight responsible for blowing up over the Atlantic Air India flight AI 182 enroute Mumbai via London in June 1985, and then they were let go with light prison sentences. And this for the cold-blooded murder of 329 passengers on-board. But how this Anglosaxon quartet (US, UK, Canada, Australia) moaned, groaned, swore vengeance against Moamar Gaddafi and eliminated him in 2011 for, among other things, the supposed bombing of the New York-bound Panam Flight 203 with only 270 passengers over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988! And these are the governments hyperventilating about the shooting down of Nijjar?
The trouble Justin Trudeau has created for the Modi regime is this: He revealed that he had initiated an investigation into the potential Indian government role in Nijjar’s elimination after consulting with the US and British governments. The fact is it won’t be long before Ottawa squarely and formally blames New Delhi for the killing. And then what? The Biden Administration will be as “principle”-bound as the Conservative party government of Rishi Sunak to support Trudeau. Economic sanctions may not follow, but Washington will dangle it over Modi’s head like a Damocles’s sword — a pressure point to get Modi to do what Washington wants. Sure enough the British and Australian governments too followed in wagging their fingers at India, and reminding India to make good on its liberal professions! And Canadian pension funds who have made a pretty penny out of investing in Indian banks (like Kotak Mahindra) and companies will be ordered or feel compelled to withdraw the billions of dollars they have in equity, and lose out big time.
This is the downside I have been warning about with regard to Modi’s policy of cultivating the US and the West. It can at any time come back and bite India. The shortfalls in a still maturing Indian democracy will always be held against this country and used as leverage. In the instant case, the West-based Khalistanis are a venomous lot and some opponent faction likely killed Nijjar — a pattern long established in intra-Sikh politics of Punjab. These terrorist outlaws will do everything in their power to provoke and have their governments act punitively vis a vis India by mobilising public opinion — which is easily done everytime a local, state, or federal election rolls around, which is all the time in Canada, UK and the US. It is unlikely Ottawa will investigate the often violent gurdwara politics in Canada for Nijjar’s demise when it is much easier and politically beneficial for Trudeau to cast aspesions on India.
The Indian government has to not only strongly refute and rebuff Western governments but also make it absolutely clear to Ottawa, London and Washington that Khalistani Sikhs can happily shout and scream all they want, but if they cross the line in attacking Indian diplomats and diplomatic premises and agitate violently for a sovereign state of Khalistan, they do so at their own risk. But that Delhi will happily help anybody — if Ottawa wishes — to carve out a Khalistan in Canada where there’s lot of space available for such venture. And, moreover, that India will brook no Khalistan activity in Punjab or anywhere in India and, like it or not, the more rabid and risk-acceptant among the Khalistanis should prepare to pay a heavy price. Expropriation by the state of their valuable agricultural land and other wealth in Punjab presently held as “benami” properties, etc being only one such measure.
To end on a joke, because for some Sikhs in the “gurdwara business” in North America, “Khalistan” has always been a shrug and wink away from being a full-fledged money-making racket. I remember writing in 1983-84 about Ganga Singh Dhillon and his separatist cause in the US being funded by American intel agencies, which report was publicly picked up and commented by Prime Minister Indira G (few months before her assassination). The jovial looking Ganga Singh, who was banned in 1981 by the Indian government from travelling to India, got in touch with me and, on our meeting, reduced me to helpless laughter. “Arrey, Paji”, I vividly recall him saying in his thait Punjabi English, “You are blaming CIA, DIA, next you’ll blame PIA!”
The Narendra Modi government apparently does not know when it is ahead, and why not to retard the country’s rise by a self-inflicted wound that may appear trivial — such as changing the name of the country — but is not.
The Modi government is reportedly threatening to do something recklessly foolish that will leave everyone befuddled, scratching their heads in incomprehension. In the instant case, it is the Modi regime’s prospective re-branding of India as Bharat. Of course, I was quite happy that the country was being named after me, but disappointed to learn from the official spoilsports — S Jaishankar and Co., who rather warily explained to the Press that it is the alternative moniker for the country mentioned in the very first line of the Constitution — “India, that is Bharat…”, etc. Then Sanjeev Sanyal, economic adviser to the PM, educated us TV newswatchers on history stretching back to God knows when and the birth of the “Bharati empire” originating in present day Haryana, and whatnot. All this was informative and enlightening, but I still felt a little uneasy, my immediate concerns being practical.
My unease was with the name Bharat, my name and touted as possibly the country’s as well. Years of my early adult life spent in California had accustomed me to Westerners, even well meaning ones, routinely mangling my name. Scouring my memory, I cannot recall a single American from among my friends, fellow students, girl friends, class mates, project colleagues, and professors in all my years as an undergrad and grad student at the University of California and, later in life, professional acquaintances and, generally, lay people I met over the decades in Western countries, getting my name right. Despite extended personal tutorials from me the most the best among them could manage was a variation of “Baharat” (with empasis on RAT pronounced as in rat, the rodent). My friends, showing less patience, just called me “Brat” (with the snarky among them suggesting this abbreviated form fit my personality better)!
The trouble Westerners have with this word is because the aspirated “bh” is missing from the English language — look up the Oxford Dictionary (and, as far as I know, from any known European language)! Therefore, try as hard as they might, Westerners invariably will mispronounce it. Beyond a point, I discovered, it was futile to correct them, and even less to badger them to get it right. Asians — Arabs, who also can only say Baharat, but Chinese, otherAsians in the Sinic sphere, are in many respects worse, and I could never, and still cannot, make out whatever they call(ed) me (in seminars, conferences, etc) and short of being directly addressed or tapped on the shoulder, I always fail(ed) to respond.
This post is a cautionary one for the “President of BAHARAT” — whatever that is, who is set to dine with G20 dignitaries and fated hereafter — if the name sticks — to hear Western pooh-bahs standing up to give a toast and tripping right away on the word and, amidst much embarrassment among natives of this land present on the occasion, generally making a mess of the intended goodwill, as well!
It is obvious that prompted by the RSS, the change of name for the country from the G-20 platform was a trial balloon sent up by Modi. Many foreign delegates getting an invitation from the Rashtrapati Bhavan to the high dinner may have done a double take, wondering if by mischance their planes had landed in the wrong, but for some reason dressed up, country and they were missing out on the G-20 confab happening in India. If it was a balloon, it has fallen flat. Best to keep Bharat for domestic consumption where it belongs and makes sense, and then only in domestic political discourse. Because commercially some have taken this name changing move seriously enough for wags to twitter that Indigo airline, for instance, would be rebranding itself as ‘Bhago’! In other words, ‘Bharat’ will be the butt of unending jokes. Not to mention the enormous cost — as in literally tens of billions of dollars to advertise the change worldwide, and on all mastheads, crests, on government stationery, etc., only for non-South Asians to mutilate it any way.
INDIA is an extraordinarily evocative historical name derived from the word Sindhu that was persianised to ‘Hindu’ as Sanyal mentioned. Recall why the legendary leader of the XIV Army, Field Marshal William Slim, considered the greatest field commander in the Allied ranks in the Second World War, when offered the post by Nehru of Commander-in-Chief, India, declined saying that Pakistan was no more a part of the India his army would have to protect. But that’s a historical piffle compared to the fact that over several millennia literally millions of peoples everywhere, and especially in the modern era, have been familiar with ‘India’ and relatively few with ‘Bharat’. Reviving an ancient name for the country for the heck of it, or to get back to cultural roots, is all very well as an RSS-BJP hobbyhorse until it runs up against reality, and then it will be an incalculable diplomatic and all-round disaster.
A Bloomberg story mentions the economic cost to the country that Modi did not factor into his decision to overnight demonetise high denomination currency notes. The political, diplomatic, and economic costs of the name change will be unimaginably higher. For one, as has been pointed out, Pakistan, presently in the depths of despond, could rightly claim India as its name, as a co-successor state to British India, and make a new and fresh start, at our nomenclatural expense, ride on the goodwill and visibility India has generated over time even as we curdle in our own reduction to ‘Bharat’, and this when the country is set to make an economic leap. American and Japanese companies and Saudi and UAE sovereign funds are keen on investing massive amounts of monies in India. Will they be as enthused to do so in Bharat?
There is universal goodwill and name recognition attached to ‘India’ that Indians have benefitted immensely from. Think IT. India is an incomparable and unmatched supernumerary brand. Pettily then, does Modi really want to cut off the I.N.D.I.A political opposition’s nose to spite India’s face by promoting ‘Bharat’? Wouldn’t it be better if he approaches the Election Commission to reject the INDIA name for the opposing coalition gunning for him in the 2024 general electionsr?
The Harvard development economist Lant Pritchett has called India a “flailing state”. A key attribute of such a state is that it often does not know why it is doing what it is does (or, why else would it flail?). In any case, such a state often ends up hurting itself, its cause. In this context, what’s worse than a deep, irreparable and self-inflicted wound than changing the name of the country just when it is finally taking off? It is nothing like changing the Indian Navy’s flag — removing the St George’s cross from its ensign. No one has quite explained why such a formal name change is necessary or even right other than as an RSS-Modi brainwave of the moment that the country can well do without.
Let Bharat remain the common currency in the realm of internal politics and in the language of cultural discourse. But, otherwise, let India be India. “India” carries heft, has a full history behind it, and the name resonates expansively worldwide. It is ludicrous to give up so much for relatively so little. Let it be. Let India just be.
New Delhi is all decked up in Indian calender art aesthetic — an eyesore to many. The G-20 summit will crown the many ministerial meetings on numerous subjects (energy, terrorism, etc) held in the past few months, imaginatively, in different cities all over the country to showcase regional cultures and artifacts. These meets were well received. The summit hosted by India scheduled for next weekend (September 9-10) follows Narendra Modi’s chairing the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (virtual) summit in July this year, and is expected to be the highpoint of the Prime Minister’s “be everywhere” diplomacy. To be seen is to be recognised, and the G-20 Meet has been targeted by Modi as the event that elevates him to the pantheon of the ‘Big 4’ (the other three being Biden, Putin, Xi).
So, trust the Chinese President-for-life, Xi Jinping, to rain on Modi’s parade. And then pour odium on it.
At the Johannesburg BRICS (15th) summit, Modi and Xi met on the sidelines and vowed speedily to disengage forces on the disputed border. However, the military level talks at the Lieutenant General and Major General fora, predictably, got nowhere with the PLA unwilling to move from its blocking position on the Depsang Plains and permit Indian forces to patrol Indian areas. Half a week later, Beijing issued its “standard map” that showed all of Arunachal and Aksai Chin within China. The release of the map on the eve of the G-20 summit was less because it said anything new by way of China’s expansionist revisionist territorial claims than as an “in your face” insult to Modi guaranteed, Zhongnanhai hoped, to provoke a lot of negativity in the host nation, roil the atmosphere, and pitch Modi’s big moment into the ditch.
The Chinese map has upset countries across the board. The Southeast Asian nations on the South China Sea littoral protested the sea expanse covered by the 9-dash line as an abomination, as Delhi had done the Chinese notions of the Line of Actual Control. Beijing did not spare its quasi-ally Russia either. Notwithstanding an accord signed around 2002-2003 to share control of the disputed Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island at the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri rivers, the map shows the entire island as Chinese territory. 1969 witnessed armed contestation for this island.
Xi followed up this show of his regime’s tactless intemperance by first hinting and then confirming he would not be attending the Meet. With Russian President Vladamir Putin too pulling out as he had done from the BRICS summit, Xi’s decision was a gut punch to Modi’s plans for showcasing this big bash with all the world leaders in attendance, as curtain raiser to next year’s general elections. India has not used Modi’s participation in various summits as leverage, as Xi and Putin have routinely done. Our PM seems happy to go to anyplace he is invited for anything.
Not satisfied with dumping on India, Xi’s minions presently meeting in a resort in Manesar (outside Delhi) with other G-20 counterparts to stitch together a consensus document by September 6 for release as Joint Communique at the end of the confab on September 10, the Chinese reps prevented common views form emerging on other contentious issues. The Ukraine war is the principal issue widening the rift within the G-20. Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister standing in for Putin at the summit, has demanded that his country’s viewpoint be reflected in the document if there’s any mention of the Ukraine conflict. The US and the West are just as adamant in desiring that Moscow and Putin be held accountable for the supposed human rights excesses perpetrated by the Russian military. Having earlier wagged a finger at Putin — “This is not an era for war”, Modi finds what he considered a fairly innocuous remark to have snowballed into Russian suspicions of Delhi increasingly doing things to please Washington. It has motivated Moscow to stick by its demand even more. Xi backs Putin and between them will highlight by their absence, that China and Russia may be outnumbered at this forum, but that Modi is a prevaricator and unreliable as partner — the very conclusion, ironically, the US and the West have been urging Delhi to avoid giving the impression of because of its noncommital stance on Ukraine!
The condition of no give by either side on Ukraine has been compounded by a similar chasm growing between the two sides on the “carbon peaking” matter. Except here India, China and the Global South are nagging the US and the West for bigger investments in technologies, schemes, and financial outlays to “green” the environment. Absent a consensus, the final document will have no definite financial commitments by Western countries nor timelines to achieve carbon emission minimization standards, with China, more eager than India, to hold the West’s feet to the fire on these Climate matters.
But Xi did more, stabbed Modi deep in his back. Beijing has taken umbrage — and this is particularly hurtful to Modi because he planned to make “Vasudaiva Kutumbakam” — all the world is one family, that he has evoked time and again all over the world, at the Indian government’s making this the underlying theme of this G-20 summit. The Chinese have rejected this sanskrit phrase-concept whole, and asked that it not be mentioned anywhere in any Summit document! Of course, Modi has repeated it endlessly to emphasize the core of his approach to inter-state relations, stressing a uniquely benign view of the international system, and of India’s role in it. Beijing, however, wants none of it, because it sees in this construct a competitor to China’s own Tianxia system of “order under the heaven” and, being strategic minded, fears that universalising and legitmating this idea would diplomatically advantage India. Modi may reiterate the phrase in his G-20 address but, if Beijing succeeds, it will have no G-20 agency.
Combine this with the possibility that the G20 “sherpas” in Manesar will fail to paper over the division on a host of issues, and we have the very real possibility that there will be no Joint Communique — which hasn’t happened in G20 summits in recent memory, and will be perceived as something of a debacle for Modi who has so far adroitly straddled the divides.
However the summit turns out, India’s non-reaction to China’s cartographic aggression which will be seen as symbolizing India and Modi’s timidity will be the subject of hushed talk between visiting heads of government and their retinues. China is the common concern of great many countries, and especially Asian states on the frontlines facing an inordinately assertive proto-hegemon.
So, what should Modi and the Indian government do to recover for the country a bit of its elan and to repair its reputation that China has tarnished?
Firstly, treat Xi’s stand-in — Premier Li Qiang with the barest protocol and no red carpert, and absoultely no ceremony, with, perhaps, an Under-Secretary at the China Desk in MEA if not someone even lower in the ranks, to greet a disembarking Li, and his plane parked in some remote part of Palam airport. Secondly, Modi should avoid any contact with Li and barely recognise his presence at the summit, and in the inevitable photograph of the summiteers, place him in the last row at one end!
Thirdly, and this is the big deal — something the Indian government has apparently not learned after dealing with Beijing going on 70 years — fight cartographic fire with like fire. Having issued the map, Beijing proceeded to goad Modi and India. The map, Beijing claimed, was no big deal and advised India not to “over-interpret” it, in other words, not to get worked up about it. Whether this injunction against over-interpreting referred to the map itself or to the fact of its release, insultingly, on the eve of the G-20 summit, was not clear. In either case, it was a resounding public slap to Modi’s face — after all it is the Indian PM who has been solicitous, doing the running after Xi gig (and not the other way around). The Ministry of External Affairs reacted in the worst possible way — its spokesman called such map changing shenanigans an “old [Chinese] habit”, thereby derating the significance of the event. After all, if something is called an “old habit”, the person or entity charged with it is painted as a cantankerous sort of acquaintance bent on mischief whose bad behaviour is tolerated because, well, he can’t help himself! It is thusly that Xi has staged his repudiation of the Modi regime and its desire for an amicable border solution.
With the offending Chinese standard map showing Arunachal and Aksai Chin as constituent regions of China, India should during the two days of the summit upload a map of Asia showing Tibet in a colour different than the one for mainland China. And likewise depict Taiwan as an independent country, keeping in mind that Beijing vehemently protested the visit August 8 by three Indian retired Armed Services Chiefs of Staff to Taipei. It is Xi’s Taiwan sensitivity that Delhi needs to trample on. Hereafter, the ‘One China’ concept, moreover, should be no part of Indian foreign policy at least not until Beijing hews to the ‘One India’ concept inclusive of all Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir and Northern Areas, which idea Modi should articulate, perhaps, at the plenary session of the G20 summit
Whether anybody in the PMO/MEA/GOI likes it or not, the tension Xi has deliberately stirred in Sino-Indian relations will be Banquo’s ghost at the G-20 grand dinner.
Actually, the map is only the latest show of China’s contempt for India, and Modi in particular. Recall how Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Morarji Desai’s foreign minister, visiting Beijing in February 1979 was greeted — the PLA pointedly launched its military operation against India’s friend — Vietnam. But the Vietnamese being Vietnamese the irregulars that first came into contact with the advancing PLA Group Army were actually quite enough to teach the Chinese a lesson — they so bloodied the lead PLA formations, the great helmsman, Dengxiaoping, who recognized the drubbing for what it was, simply declared victory and got the PLA the hell out of Vietnam! It is a solution the Indian military can’t even dream of.
Trust the ridiculous public sector Doordarshan to screw it up. Just as the lander got to within metres of the moon’s surface, instead of focussing the cameras on the approaching lunar surface captured by the onboard cameras, you had the DD idiots focussing their cameras on a simulated picture! Is there no end to Doordarshan’s lack of professionalism?
This massive coverage/visual snafu by the Doordarshan fools was compounded by having Prime Minister Modi speaking from — and going on and on a bit, from Johannesbrg, rather than having the cameras staying and relooping the Vikram camera sequence with the puffs of moondust as the lander’s qaudrupod feet settled on the moon. The PM could always have spoken a little later after the people had seen again and again the camera capturing the actual lunar touch down. It is time that in future Space missions private sector TV companies are allowed to report live from the control room than leave history in the making to be visually botched by the still amateurish Doordarshan.
That said, the mission was spectacularly successful also because it highlighted ISRO’s penny-wise, pound-wise approach of getting the most from the monies invested in the Chandrayan mission. What NASA does for billions of dollars, ISRO achieves for tens of millions — that is the cost differential that can’t be beat. The Chandrayan success also stands out even more in the context of the failure of the Japanese Hakuto-R moonlander in April this year, and because of the Russian Luna 25 mission, in a hurry to beat Chandrayan-3 to the lunar South Pole, that was victimised by the short cut it opted for. Instead of transitioning through a succession of progressively lower elliptical orbits before detaching the lunar module, it tried hardbraking from a height and crashlanded to Moscow’s embarrassment.
India has signed the Artemis accords (initiated in October 2020) when Modi recently visited Washington — the country becoming the 27th signatory of an agreement that has established “rules of the road” for Space ventures. With Russia and China forming their own group for cooperating in, and coordinating, their Space activities (that Pakistan, for instance, wants to join), there is now a democracy versus autocracy schism in Space exploration. This competition doesn’t augur well for anyone. Because remember, India’s geosynchronous orbit satellite injecting/deep Space launch rocket system is based on the Russian cryogenic engine design whose transfer the US did everything in its power to derail, even pressuring Moscow to desist from handing over ready rockets and associated technologies to ISRO.
The most consequential decision Modi made, which has brightened the prospects of India emerging as a truly substantial Space power, is to privatise much of the Space sector. Considering the quite extraordinary leap by young high-tech companies that have come up in the field in the last ten years — Agnikul Cosmos, Spaceroot (which won an international NASA competition for moon rover), Bellatrix, Pixxel, Satellize, Dhruva Space, et al, setting up their own launch and satellite design and production facilities, and augmenting the big corporates already in the business of helping out ISRO — L&T, Godrej Aerospace, etc., the public sector giant will soon be given a run for its money. And India will gain massively. In the ISRO-led Space ecosystem, some 500 small and medium companies are producing stellar technologies economically.
Once India acquires economies of scale in all aspects of Space technology, it will be unbeatable in that no country, least of all those from the West, will be able to compete on cost-proven quality terms. It is an edge the country needs to preserve (for launching low earth orbiting satellites, in particular) and a capability that needs continuous enhancement — a job private capital can help throttle up by investing hugely in Space tech companies and startups.
The two-day 15th BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) Summit will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa starting tomorrow (Aug 23) and is a featured event in the busy international calender for many reasons. One of its members, Russia, has been embroiled in a conflict with Ukraine over territory habited by Russian-speaking people who have been fighting a secessionist insurgency with Kyiv for a couple of decades now and which fact, Moscow asserts, strengthens its claims on the said Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. Russia has territorially gained what it wanted and is now sitting tight, letting the Ukrainian forces bash their heads against the 20 km-wide mined and otherwise fortified defensive barrier Russia has consolidated since late 2022. But President Vladimir Putin will be absent because there is a warrant out for his arrest for crimes against humanity (in Ukraine) that South Africa, as host and a signatory to the law, can in theory enforce. The Russian leader apparently doesn’t care to risk an incident and will send his usually imperturbable foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in his stead.
The Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Lula in short, is an anomaly in that he is an avowed socialist at a time when Leftist leaders the world over are becoming extinct! He replaced the rightwing Jair Bolsonaro, being re-elected but this time because of his more tempered socialist rhetoric. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi remains ensconced in India for the same reasons that other conservative politicians have found traction elsewhere in the world — there being a general disbelief among voters that the state is the solution to country’s problems. (It is also the reason why the I.N.D.I.A bloc in Indian domestic politics is facing so much skepticism. Just curious, but can a political party call itself INDIA under the law, because commercial entities are barred from using ‘India’ in their company or product names? Strangely, the BJP-led NDA government has not sought a ruling from the Election Commission on this inappropriate name-issue by a gaggle of opposition parties because it is clear the name is a political ploy at confusing the voter — Can voting for INDIA be against India? Someone in Rahul Gandhi’s coterie apparently first thought of using India as acronym and then came up with the convoluted words to fit it! Clever but is it legal?)
Other than the BRICS Five, 50 other leaders, are expected to attend the events “as friends of BRICS”, with discussion being directed by the host country towards considering the subject — “BRICS and Africa”, and how the organization can help African countries in their economic betterment and development programmes.
The main issue for the summiteers to sort out is whether to expand BRICS into, what many conceive it — with China in the van, as a counterweight to the Western bloc of nations led by the United States with its own First World views of reality. Many countries — 40 so far, have shown an interest in joining, with 23 of them even submitting formal applications. The sudden spurt in BRICS’s popularity may be because there’s the potential of its emerging as a major economic and trading bloc, and who wants to be left out of that? Already, BRICS accounts for 42% of the world’s population and 23% of the global wealth (GDP). Anil Sooklal, South Africa’s ambassador-at-large for Asia and the BRICS, speculated that one of the chief reasons for the popular demand to join is because “countries are being forced to take sides” on the Russo-Ukrainian war. “Countries in the South don’t want to be told who to support, how to behave and how to conduct their sovereign affairs”, said Sooklal. “They are strong enough now to assert their respective positions.”
In other words, BRICS and BRICS enthusiasts in the Global South and the non-West international community at large, are coming round formally to adopting India’s attitude to the ongoing conflict best expressed by the external affairs minister, S Jaishankar, in 2022 at the Globsec Forum in Bratislava. ‘Europe has to grow out of the mindset’, he declared, ‘that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.’ This is, perhaps, the statement with the greatest clarity that Jaishankar has issued during his tenure so far as foreign minister. Such plain speaking, as I have always advocated, is exactly what is needed when dealing with the US and the European states. Because there’s no ambiguity, there’s no likelihood of wrong interpretation and misunderstanding, and so India for the first time won respect and diplomatic leverage, and the more obvious ways of pressuring New Delhi ceased. It has left the country free to pursue its interests as it sees fit whether in purchasing energy or armaments from Russia and, in the bargain, winning Moscow’s appreciation. The global village saw what happened and decided what’s good for India is good for them as well!
This is the first instance actually of India showing leadership and staking a substantive position other countries have come to rally around.
Regarding the expansion of BRICS, which China is pushing for, India has every reason to be suspicious. New Delhi has not opposed an expanded BRICS but is insisting on fleshing out in detail the admission rules and conditions, and the metrics to decide an aspirant member’s observer status and, in time, full membership. For instance, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and UAE all want to join BRICS. Having Riyadh and UAE, with whom India has established warm relations, in the outfit may be no bad thing. Except, these two Arab states are getting close to China, and also subsidising Pakistan’s financial profligacy and propping Islamabad up, perhaps, to ensure their supposed access to its ‘Islamic bomb’. Prospectively, a Saudi-UAE-China group would be a major headache for India and even pose a strategic problem. As would an Islamic bloc, should relations turn sour, of Turkey-Saudi-UAE supported expediently by China. India has to be mindful of such possibilities and propose a semi-permanent cadre of ‘observer status’ countries for consideration to full membership in, say, ten years time — a sufficient period to judge how these states behave and, more importantly, how and what BRICS issues they side with China on.
It always makes sense to be apprehensive of Beijing. China has time and again used bilateral and multilateral fora to talk around Indian interests, reduce them, and make monkeys out of Indian leaders, starting with Jawaharlal Nehru. Modi too burned his fingers by trusting President Xi Jinping and imbibing a little too much of the Wuhan and the Mahabalipuram spirits than was safe.
The other major issue that will be bandied about is the de-dollarisation of the global economy, which is a strategically sensible thing to realize. Freeing the Indian economy from the grasp of the US dollar would endow Indian foreign policy with more latitude than it has enjoyed to-date, and help to conserve the country’s hard currency reserves. New Delhi is already setting up channels for trade in local currencies, such as the rupee-dirham transactions for trading in energy with the UAE, and hoping that de-dollarised trade can be regularised with other friendly countries in the neighbourhood as well. Intra-BRICS trade in local currencies or in currency other than dollars would give this alternative trading scheme a huge kick-start. And the recently established New Bank — a BRICS institution, would be the facilitator. But again the proverbial ‘fly in the ointment’ is China. The Asian Devevelopment Bank with majority Chinese equity is an economic creature of Beijing. One would hate to see this happen with the New Bank. Here the monied Arab states would offer a real alternative to China’s capitalisation of this bank. May be ‘observer’ status, with promise of conversion to full BRICS membership, for Saudi Arabia and UAE can be bartered for seed funding of this bank.
More strategically, Modi should hold private and personal discussions with Lavrov, Lula, and Cyril Ramaphosa with securitising BRIS (Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa) with a view to blunting China’s hegemomic agenda. In my 2015 book — Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet), I made the case for such an informal military cooperation arrangement that will create a quite extraordinary air-naval security net covering the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans (Indian peninsula-Simonstown-Rio de Janeiro) entirely free of Western involvement, expectations and encumbrance. Time to push, this more potent, ‘secret’ agenda! Because Modi has to bear in mind that China is India’s main and only credible threat. This is the real value add-on.
Whatever happens in Johannesburg, Modi and his team better prepare to play hardball and not allow Beijing to roll over Indian interests. Again.
Until yesterday, the Western media reported how the Ukrainian counter offensive was galloping along, steadily pushing the Russian troops eastwards, and how it was just a matter of time before the lead Ukrainian elements would break through the three-tiered defensive barrier the Russian began putting up in the autumn of 2022, and head for Melitopol and Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov. How having thus affected a disjunction between the Russian forces holding the northeastern and eastern ends and the others the south, the Ukrainian army would exploit the tactical successes to widen the breach and, also imperil Russian-held Crimean Peninsula and the upper part of the Russian-controlled Donbas region, and pose a danger to the Russian ports and bases on the Azov coast.
And then, all of a sudden, everyone in the West — governments, thinktanks, media, seem to have run smack into the reality wall. For the first time today the leading propagators — New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, AP, CNN, et al, of this American line of the Ukrainians winning that was always more wishful thinking than hard facts, began singing a different tune. They reported glumly that the Ukrainians had in fact made little or no progress in their counteroffensive, that their advance is, for all intents and purposes, over what with the Fall rains approaching that would turn much of the countryside into slush.
Sure, Ukrainians may still create a sensation here and there by having drones strike Moscow buildings, or missiles sink Russian warships in the Black Sea. But on the ground, the Ukrainians are essentially stuck where they are presently, failing to make even a dent in the Russian barrier of mines, trenches, tank traps, anti-tank munition pits, and drone-launching posts along what’s now the new 1,000 km long eastern border of Ukraine.
Except, this virtually impenetrable barrier erected roughly on the line Kupiansk-Bakhmut-Donetsk-Vuhledar-Kherson was firmed up by the summer of 2022, that is within 4-5 months of Putin initiating the “special military operation” that began in the Donbas region with a lax and liesurely advance by Russian armour which stalled because of the fight in the Ukrainians the Russians did not expect. It nevertheless achieved Putin’s war aim of annexing the eastern Ukrainian “oblasts” with Russian-speaking people — Donetsk and Luhansk, which provided a land bridge linking Crimea and the Russian mainland, and will help Russia to consolidate its absorption of these parts of Ukraine claimed by Moscow.
True, this was Putin’s Plan B. Plan A went spectacularly wrong on the very first day of the war on February 24, 2022. The Russian combined arms operation featuring fighter-bomber aircraft, parachuted Spetsnaz Special Forces, and a fleet of assault and transport helicopters were supposed to quickly capture the Antonov airport on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital, take Kyiv, install a friendly government there, like the one in neighbouring Belarus, which would then cede the Donbas belt to Russia. Except, the Ukrainian National Guard unit posted at the airport hunted down the Russian paracommando, shot up a whole bunch of the incoming assault helos with Igla manpads, and deterred Russian Su-25 close air support aircraft from making low-level bombing/strafing runs by accurate anti-aircraft fire.
In fact, by end-March 2022, Moscow having gained most of what it wanted offered a peace deal to Ukraine in negotiations held in Minsk and in Istanbul which Kyiv initially accepted, but later rejected under American pressure. As far as the US is concerned, Ukraine offered an opportunity to mire the Russian military in an unwinnable war, isolate it in the international community, weaken it economically, and hurt its image and military reputation (as it did by helping the Afghan mujaideen — with Pakistan’s assistance — run the Russian occupation troops out of Afghanistan in the 1980s). Whence the US-NATO policy of arming Ukraine to the teeth such that it would become a “porcupine” — hard for Russia to swallow. The trouble is a porcupine is more suited to defence than offence!
But considering what the Russian objective was, all this massive arming of Ukraine — some $47 billion worth of arms transfers in the past one year alone with more to come, even F-16s by this year end, will make not a whit of a difference, because of one singular Ukrainian deficiency that Kyiv cannot speedily rectify, namely, disparity in the military manpower strengths.
Russia’s population is 144 million versus Ukraine’s 44 million; the former has 900,000 men under arms and two million in reserve, the latter 209,000 serving and 900,000 reservists. As of April 2023, Ukraine’s war toll was 15,500-17,500 killed in action and 109,000-113,500 wounded. Moreover, 23.8 million Ukrainians sought refuge in neighbouring countries, a good portion of this lot being youth avoiding military service. With Russia imposing attrition warfare, Ukraine has so depleted its manpower resources, it is anybody’s guess how much longer it can hold out. And no, there’s no question of US-NATO landing troops to fight Ukraine’s war. This was clear from the beginning, but US-NATO’s cynical policy of fighting to the last Ukrainian is literally coming true! There’ll soon be no Ukrainians to fight the war!
The absence in Ukraine of a sizable military age manpower pool is so elementary, but fatal, a weakness, Washington, in its eagerness to stick it to Russia, predictably missed it.
Ukraine’s war woes apart, its President Volodomyr Zelensky’s extraordinary wartime leadership is awe inspiring. What he has excelled in is in consistently besting the Kremlin on the public relations front. His exploitation of the international, especially US media, is exemplary in that it created this phantom prospect of a victoriuos Ukraine out of thin air and then sustained it with his government’s adroit image and influence management.
But, as I mentioned in my first post on this blog at the outset of this conflict, nothing but nothing was going to prevent Russia from achieving its geostrategic objective of annexing the Donbas corridor. This the Russians did last year. They have been in a holding pattern ever since. There’s good reason why the US, NATO (and China) have quailed at the possibility of tangling with the Russian army. It is slow to get going, but once it does there’s a relentlessness to its efforts that no military can match. That’s why America would rather Ukrainians do the fighting. After all, what does Washington have to lose except more Ukrainians?
The mystery of the draft joint communique featuring mention of the deal for three “Scorpene” submarines and 26 navalised Rafale aircraft, which mention went missing from the final document issued at the end of the state visit to France by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is now solved. The reason was that there were too many submarine technology-related points that needed additional technical-level talks to sort out.
Still, President Emmanuel Macron will be exceedingly happy with the sweetheart deal he managed to secure from Modi, and the French ‘Naval Group’ overjoyed. Naval Group is successor to DCNS (Direction des Constructions Navales S).
The French Company on its website welcomed the “announcement regarding the extension of the Indo-French partnership and the objective to explore more ambitious projects to develop the Indian fleet and its performance. Mazagon Dock Shipbuliders (sic) Limited (MDL) remains our natural partner.” “This decision is a testimony”, it continued, “of the Indian Navy’s trust in the industrial cooperation we have established, and”, without flinching at the irony of it, reaffirmed “the success of the transfer of technology achieved under the P75 programme for six submarines, which were built entirely in India by MDL. The ‘Make in India’ policy in the service of Indian sovereignty (“AatmaNirbhar”) has been at the heart of the P75 programme, as well as other activities developed by Naval Group and its Indian industrial partners to provide the Indian Navy with the most modern naval defence technologies.” The CEO of the Naval Group Pierre Eric Pommellet, on his part, added that the deal would “further strengthen our 15-year submarine building cooperation, which is a major element of the Indo-French strategic partnership developed over the past decades. Naval Group and its partners will be fully mobilised to meet the expectations of Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders Limited and the Indian industry to fulfil the needs of the Indian Navy”. ( https://www.naval-group.com/en/naval-group-welcomes-announcement-made-indian-and-french-authorities-regarding-extension-indo )
Let’s consider why Paris is elated, Naval Group exultant, and the success claimed for the “transfer of technology” entirely bogus.
At the time of commissioning in January this year of INS Vagir — the fifth and penultimate conventional sub of the Scorpene-class license-produced at the Mazgaon Dockyards Ltd (MDL), the Chief of the Naval Staff , Admiral Hari Kumar, praised the fast paced sub production — Vagir being the third such vessel inducted in the last two years, and referred to this achievement as “the coming of age of India’s shipbuilding industry, and the maturing of our defence ecosystem.” “It is also a shining testimony”, he added “to the expertise and experience of our shipyards to construct complex and complicated platforms.”
Not sure what the naval chief was talking about when he brought up the country’s shipbuilding industry and the maturing ecosystem because the Scorpene programme has added mighty little to the industrial capacity — unless the MDL DPSU’s penchant for screwdrivering things together is considered a great advance, and not an iota to the country’s atmanirbharta capability.
One wishes our armed services chiefs were more candid; if that’s not possible, at least not make misleading statements.
Facts:
1) Project 75 Scorpene project has suffered huge time and cost over-runs. It has taken ten more years than planned and cost nearly twice as much.
2) Project 75i — a supposedly indigenous project featuring a creative melding of the best design and operational attributes of Western (German HDW 209, French Scorpene) and Eastern (Russian — Foxtrot, Kilo) submarines the Indian Navy has experience of, is delayed by 10-15 years. The delay is due to the navy’s inability to setttle on specifications — single or double hull, diving depths, etc.
3) With the Scorpene project ending and 75i yet to get going, the navy needed a bridging solution and decided an additional three units of the Scorpene would do.
4) Except, the French Company DCNS it had originally contracted with, now Naval Group, has terminated the Scorpene line, and professed itself unable to provide the SKD/CKD kits for MDL to assemble — NOT MANUFACTURE, the three additional Scorpenes.
5) Instead, the French firm offered, and navy quickly accepted, an adapted, conventional, version of its Barracuda nuclear powered attack submarine (SSN). And the Defence Ministry nominated MDL to assemble the three boats. This despite Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s public commitment that there will be no production contractors by “nomination”. Meaning, for any production contract there will be competition. That’s how much Rajnath Singh’s words matter.
6) The Barracuda design could, however, be shrunk only so much. Compared to the Scorpene’s hull diameter of 6.3 metres and displacment of 1,650 tons, the adapted Barracuda’s is 7.2-7.5 metres, and 2,500-2,800 tons respectively. Barracuda SSN displaces some 5,300 tons. In other words, the three new ‘Scorpenes’ contracted for are NOT Scorpenes, only better.
7) That’s fine! Except, this upgrade also means rocketing unit cost. The navy acquired the six original Scorpenes at roughly Rs 6,000 crores each. The new “Scorpene” — adapted Barracuda, will cost Rs 11,000 crores per boat. That is almost double the cost — and this, mind you, is just the ‘base price’. There’s no hint anywhere of progressively lesser cost as would be expected for subsequent submarines after the first one!
7) Because it is a new submarine, the old Scorpene manufacturing jigs and wherewithal at MDL will have to be discarded for far more expensive replacements for conventional Barracuda sub assembly.
8) The French don’t have an operational AIP (Air Independent propulsion) system for increasing the range of submarines. So these conventional Barracudas will have to be equipped with the DRDO-designed and developed AIP which, incidentally, is good to go — what a relief! It will necessitate structural changes and, prospectively, yea, additional tens of millions of Euros in French pockets. (The first of the Scorpene subs, INS Kalvari, is coming in for refit in 2025, and will be equipped with the Indian AIP system.)
9) And, a shocker, really?! There has been NEAR ZERO transfer of submarine technologies over the years by DCNS (Naval Group) to MDL. The sixth and last of the Scorpenes to roll out from MDL assembly line by 2024 will have LESS THAN 3%, yes, THREE PERCENT by value of indigenous technology– relatively trivial stuff like cables, mounting lugs, hatches, and minor electrical equipment.
And all along the Government of India, the Ministry of Defence, and the Indian Navy have been trumpeting the Scorpene programme as furthering the country’s indigenous submarine design and production capability. Who is responsible for drafting such one-sided contracts? Will anybody in the navy and defence procurement loops in the Indian government be held accountable for this fiasco? Of course not. But wait…
10) The deal for three new mislabelled Scorpenes — derated Barracudas, will likewise have ZERO transfer of technology. But worse, why the doubled cost?
11) Well, because, Naval Group has to amortize their costs for developing the Barracuda SSN — absolute imperative now, especially after the Australian navy abruptly cancelled the contract worth 50 billion euros for six of this SSN in September 2021, and ruptured relations with France, an ally. The Aussie navy apparently belatedly realised it preferred the US/UK offer of an AUKUS nuclear sub. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called it “A stab in the back”. Macron recalled the French ambassador from Canberra. The French feathers were unruffled only after the government of Anthony Albanese agreed in June 2022 on a “fair and and equitable settlement” of 555 million euros (US$ 584 million) with Naval Group, that ended the decade-old Australian deal for the Barracuda SSN. That still left much of the invested costs unrecouped because the French Navy indented for only six, with the first joining service in 2022. But there came India to the rescue of foreign defence industries once again!
12) May be, there is some secret understanding that Modi reached with Macron for the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission ( Commissariat a’ l’energie atomique et aux energie alternatives) and Naval Group to part with the technology for the 150MW miniature nuclear reactor powering the Barracuda SSN for our own indigenous SSN project. Is there such a deal? This is something many retired naval persons have been bandying about for a while. Should it actually materialize, then all this expensive farce about submarine tech transfer, etc may be worth it. But knowing the French and how they have dealt with India over the past 65 years from when IAF bought the Fuga-Mysteres in the Fifties, don’t hold your breath! There may be, to mangle metaphors, dross at the end of the tunnel, not gold!
13) But August 1st is when Defence Ministry will open the bids for Project 75i — and there are two parties in the contest: MDL partnering Naval Group, and the Indian private sector Larsen & Toubro (L&T) partnering Navantia, the Spanish ship building firm. And one can predict that MDL will likely bag the contract. Why? Because of its lower bid. But why will MDL’s bid be lower? Because MDL as a defence public sector unit has had periodic “capacity enhancements” worth thousands of crores of rupees over the years, courtesy Defence Ministry, most recently, for Rs 300 crores. These, as far MDL is concerned, are part of the sunk costs it need not factor into working its bid. MDL-Naval Group, will, in effect, produce the same Barracuda in additional numbers, three already contracted for in Paris by Modi, with six more as Project 75i! Neat, nah?
And because MDL will cross-subsidize, particularly the labour costs which make up 17% of the submarine production cost, and come up with the lower bid to win the Project 75i contract. After all, MDL and Defence Ministry do not have to answer for such investments — it is the people’s, Indian tax payer’s, money. And who gives a damn how it is spent?
On the other hand, a private sector firm’s investment in design and production infrastructure has to be profitable because the management is accountable to its share holders, and it has to be factored into the contract costing before making the bid. Money borrowed by the government on sovereign terms is for MDL free money. For a private sector company credit comes at hefty interest rates. Even so, notwithstanding the institutional hurdles, L&T has made a success of manufacturing the strategic Arihant-class nuclear powered ballistic missile firing submarine. But it may lose a patently unfair contest for Project 75i sub rigged by the government for MDL to win. It is the same MDL, by the way, that has been run by retired Vice Admirals and produced many conventional submarines — German HDW 209s and French Scorpenes, with absolutely nothing to show by way of cumulative capability for design and technology innovation.
How can India become self-sufficient in military hardware if the far more productive and technology-wise innovative private sector is thus deliberately hobbled and frozen out of the competition?
But, why reform the existing procurement system? Carry on as usual, let foreign defence companies — poor rich things! — make money at India’s expense. India is rich and can upkeep a dozen foreign defence industries, as it has been doing over the past 40 years. And, Hey! DPSUs — MDL, et al — carry on screwdrivering and delaying the prospects of an “atmnirbhar Bharat”! And GOI, do continue making the same mistakes!
[Prime Minister Modi and US President Biden in a deep clinch in Washington]
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Munnabhai-type “jaddoo ki jhappi” is what, in my 2018 book (Staggering Forward), I called a “diplomatic innovation”. It has succeeded beyond measure. After close encounters of this kind with the Indian PM, no Western leader has failed to show warmth in return, which gets reflected in the diplomatic successes Modi has enjoyed. For foreign leaders, moreover, what’s not to like about Modi especially if his visits bring in their wake huge defence and technology sales? It is like a rich visiting uncle leaving behind goodies. So, Western leaders have learned heartily to reciprocate with personalised touchy-feely treatments of their own.
The good vibes between India and the US and France is reflected in the windfall deals for the Boeing Company of Seattle and the French Airbus corporation that have led to their order books being filled by private airlines in India. The Tata Company’s Air India’s order of 220 planes worth some $34 billion –10 wide-body B777X planes, 20 wide-body B787 planes, and 190 narrow-body B737MAX planes, with an option for an additional 20 B787s and 50 B737MAXs, and for another 250 aircraft from Airbus — 34 A350-1000s and six A350-900s, and 140 Airbus A320neo, 70 Airbus A321neo for $36 billion. These contracts will keep Boeing and Airbus afloat for the next 40 years at least. Not to be outdone, Indigo, the private sector company accounting for over 30% of the Indian air travel market, placed the single largest order in history — 500 single aisle A320s from Airbus costing $50 billion. This is atop a previous equally humungous order according to which 480 Airbus planes are still to be delivered to Indigo! Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia justified these deals by saying “India’s flag has to fly in international space”. (https://www.business-standard.com/industry/news/air-india-does-pre-delivery-payment-to-boeing-for-aircraft-cfo-hejmadi-123060900782_1.html).
No one told this poor sap of a minister that almost all the aircraft thus procured by Air India and Indigo will mostly ply the Indian skies. So, for jhanda ooncha rahen hamara in international space, he will have to look elsewhere.
But emphasis on the wrong angle is characteristic of the Indian government, Indian political and industry leaders, government officials, and military officers alike. They all seem incapable of seeing beyond their noses. I have been making this point for some 30 years now that, like China, we should only strike deals for high-worth passenger aircraft as a means to acquire not just select aviation technologies but manufactiring jigs, CAD/CAM, and production skills and competences like process engineering instead of periodically doling out $40 billion here, $50 billion there, and leaving it to the aircraft vendors to throw crumbs at us in exchange — a unit in Hyderabad for MRO (maintenance, repair, overhaul) operations, promises to offtake minor aircraft assemblies (doors, etc.) from Tata factories in India, etc. Instead of acquiring the capacity to produce whole passenger aircraft, New Delhi is satisfied with fractional returns on very large buys abroad.
China instinctively went big from the start, even as the Indian government has not learned the basics of negotiations of getting something very substantial for buying something big. Having taken 10 years to negotiate the first deal, the always strategic-minded China secured in 1985 from the California-based McConnell Douglas aircraft company, a co-production deal for 26 medium haul MD-80 passenger aircraft for around $800 million. Of this order, 25 were to be assembled in China by the Shanghai Aviation Corporation (SAC) and only ONE aircraft was to be bought off the shelf! As part of this transaction, American engineers and technicians were required to be on the SAC factory floor training and skilling Chinese project managers and workers who thus learned on the job from experts. This contract had provisions for the Chinese Company buying out the entire MD-80 production line and wherewithal if increased domestic air travel required it. Soon enough, McConnell Douglas sold off its entire passenger aircraft business to China until now when it produces its own modern, single aisle, passenger aircraft — the Comac C919 to outfit its many domestic airlines.
In contrast India — apna watan — forked over billions upon billions of dollars — as if money was going out of style — for aircraft wholly produced in the US and France that will generate employment and upkeep the aerospace industries in these countries, and there’s no one to ask if Indian private sector airlines should be permitted to cut such deals with hard currency from the national reserves that produce zero returns to the country in terms of aircraft tech and manufacturing technologies.
Hardly to be wondered then that Biden was all solicitous and smiles and laid it on thick when Modi went to the White House a fortnight back. Elated for Boeing, Biden crowed to the press that the Indian order would create a million additional jobs in America. Eager for even more custom this time in the military aviation field and also to tie India’s security to America’s national interests, the US President approved the sale of the GE 414 jet aircraft engine along with the transfer of 80% of its technologies. The 20% non-transferrable constitute critical tech apparently not covered by the iCET (Intiative for Critical & Emerging Technologies) recently inaugurated with much fanfare.
So which GE jet engine is actually on offer? Is it the vanilla 414 model with 98 kiloNewtons of thrust with afterburners that originally equipped the F-18E/F Super Hornet for the US Navy, or the new EDE (Enhanced Durability Engine) variant which can produce 15% more thrust but at the expense of lesser engine life? The EDE’s augmented thrust with afterburner would be 108.7kN, near enough to the 110 kN mark Indian designers have mandated for the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft and for the naval 2-engined Tejas for aircraft carrier operations. The increased thrust of EDE is due to the second low pressure turbine within the engine made from ceramic composites, which reduces the weight by a third and results in a more robust jet engine with the capacity to operate without the need for cooling air. This last quality, in turn, results in aerodynamics and fuel consumption-wise a more efficient power plant for combat aircraft. Tradeoffs-wise, the EDE makes more sense. Can India wheedle the EDE out of Washington even with the nontransferrable 20% in tact?
[Modi embracing French President Emanuel Macron in Paris]
France is an old hand at this game. No sooner was the GE 414 promised by the US, the ever nimble Quai d’Orsay immediately upped the ante. It promised that its jet engine maker, Safran (the old SNECMA — Société nationale d’études et de construction de moteurs d’aviation) would assist India to design and produce a completely new 110 kN engine in the centre of excellence it intends to establish in India for the purpose. The engine is expected to be ready inside of 10 years and, project wise, be time- and cost-competitive with the GE 414 programme. The bonus is that the Safran deal will be minus the Damocles’ sword hanging over any defence deal with the US — the threat of activation by Washington of the US International Trade in Arms Regulations (ITAR) law, because Paris is not so legally constrained. This is of crucial importance, and was cleverly hinted at by French ambassador Emmanuel Lenain in a recent press interview (Times of India, Junly 1) when he mentioned “sustainability and autonomy” as the prime attributes India seeks to ensure with its foreign defence contracts and which aims, Paris claims, its deal furthers.
The reality is between US legislative activism and White House’s momentary interests, no defence contract is safe from countermanding by the US Congress. There’s no legal sanctity to any contract signed with any US Company or even a G2G (government-to-government) deal for militry goods. India suffered in the past because of it. President Ronald Reagan was compelled to rescind, for example, the deal for US supply of low enriched fuel for the lifetime of the light water reactors at the Tarapur nuclear power station because US nonproliferation laws subsequently promulgated by the US Congress required him to do so. Because the Reagan Administration felt losing India’s confidence would irreparably harm bilateral relations, it persuaded the French government to replace it as fuel supplier. A different administration with a different take on the US national interest could just as easily have shrugged its shoulders and pointed to its inability to do other than implement US law. This might happen again, at any time in the future with the GE 414 contract.
There’s no elasticity in the US system if the White House or the US Congress wants to be punitive even when third parties are involved. Thus in the wake of the 1998 nuclear tests, President Bill Clinton sanctioned India, instantly grounding the Indian Navy’s Sea King anti-submarine warfare helicopter fleet, for instance, because its engine had US-made components! It is this uncertainty that will always dog every US-sourced military equipment in Indian employ and which Ambassador Lenain not so obliquely referred to. The Modi regime should have these facts in mind.
What would happen if the US Congress decides post-414 deal to punish India for, say, not supporting this or that US policy line? The fact that India may have forked over billions of dollars for the GE 414 engine and for its transfer of technology would mean nothing. This is something Pakistan, ostensibly America’s then closest regional partner, for example, learned to its utter consternation. In the 1980s, the Benazir Bhutto government paid up some $370-odd million for additional F-16 strike aircraft only to see new American legislative action negate that contract, resulting in the contracted aircraft — parked for years at a Nevada base and rotting in the sun — remaining undelivered to the Pakistan Air Force, and the money not returned to Islamabad until 30 years later when, given the inflation rate, the value of $370 million had shrunk to low three figures!
What in theory also commends the Safran proposal is that it will be an entirely new design possibly involving materials, such as ceramic composites, and AMCA/Tejas in mind, that it will comply with the stealth features in their designs. The project, moreover, will come with its full supply chain and scheme to manufacture all ancillaries in India. Safran is embarked on producing a jet engine for France’s 6th generation fighter aircraft with afterburner thrust of 125 kN, so it has the design and production nous to help India meet its 110kN engine milspecs. And, most significantly, Paris is offering the 20% of critical tech not included in Washington’s GE 414 tech-transfer deal — the single crystal turbine blades for the jet engine, and other tech.
But, and there is a big but here. GTRE had a consultancy contract with Snecma to help the Kaveri engine get over the hump. When it came to the crunch, according to Indian sources, the Safran-parent, Snecma simply backed away from helping in any meaningful way. And Snecma took a very long time doing it puting the Kaveri in a freeze for the duration until Modi’s 2015 decision to buy Rafale powered by the Safran M-88 engine when the issue of whether Kaveri would work became moot.
To prevent France and Safran/Snecma from again playing us for fools, the contract the Indian government signs should be so tightly drafted by the Indian Ministry of Defence (MOD) — something it is actually incapable of doing if previous contracts with foreign vendors are any guide that have favoured foreign vendors at every turn when it came to realising full ToT (Transfer of Technology) — that it will list, in the minutest technical detail, every technology ranging from every small component to big assemblies, inclusive of critical tech, such as single crystal turbine blades, etc.. The contract should also be framed in an iron-clad time table for tech transfer that’s to be followed, detailing when and to which Indian agency each technology will be transferred to the fullest extent, and by which date. There should be no let, leave, latitude or flexibility in any provision or clause that could permit Safran to wriggle out of contractual commitments. And that each clause and provision of the TOT agreement, running possibly into thousands of pages. has to be legally enforceable under international law which Safran will have to agree to, with imposition of severe financial penalties in case the French Company defaults on any TOT clause/provision for any reason at any time, or causes the engine project time and cost overruns.
It may be safely said that no agency in the Indian government has the requisite contract writing expertise. And hence how to make up for this institutional deficit of the Defence Ministry should seriously worry Modi, defence minister Rajnath Singh, and the country. Because the lack of technical and domain knowledge, familiarity with legal minutiae and drafting skills not only in MOD but in all of the Government of India, has resulted in defence TOT deals in the past costing India very, very dear. But that’s another topic altogether. Suffice it to say, GOI will have to get drafting experts from somewhere, but from where, is the big Question. Absent this, will India not again be fleeced, and get stuck with awful vendor-favouring TOT contract that reinforces India’s reputation as a sucker?
The desperate need is, therefore, for an agency of government that monitors and polices all contracts any ministry or department of government has with any foreign vendor/Company for anything that involves an outgo of hard currency. The Pentagon, for instance, has a College to train military officials in the procurement loops in the nuances of drafting country-specific, interest-specific, contracts and commercial agreements and methods of monitoring the delivery of contracted for items. When the skill-deficient MOD officials go up against professionally trained US and French civilian and military officials in negotiating the actual TOT deals which side, do you reckon, will have the upper hand?
President Emmanuel Macron will no doubt be smarmy, and try and trump Biden’s welcome in Washington for Modi with an even better show befitting the chief guest at the Bastille Day celebrations on July 13. Macron is lucky the Sans-coulottes — the underclass that initiated the French Revolution in 1789, and until three days ago virtually closed down Paris to protest the police shooting of an Arab youth, have stopped rioting, because cancelling the festivities would have been a bad start, considering how much Modi loves colour and spectacle combined with personal gestures of intimacy, and how much is at stake for the French defence industry.
That is because Macron means to push government-to-government deals not only for the Safran engine, but also for the Barracuda conventional submarine tech for the Indian Navy’s Project 75i boat, and for more IAF purchases of the Rafale combat aircraft to fill the Service’s 126 MMRCA (medium multi-role combat aircraft) requirement by whatever name it is called these days. So, Macron will try his damndest best to make and keep Modi happy! He will be conscious of the fact that the last time the Indian PM visited Paris in 2015, one of his predecessors, President Francois Hollande, came away with the foot-in-the-door deal for 36 Rafale aircraft.
——
But, what are the larger politico-strategic considerations of the three parties — India, the US and France, which will come into play when New Delhi decides specifically which aero-engine offer to accept?
The US government has finally come around to accepting, forty years after Reagan’s Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s trip to New Delhi to convince the Indian government to buy American military hardware in a bid to displace Russia as India’s main arms supplier, that New Delhi will not budge if advanced tech was not transferred. And even then, the US hesitation in parting with, what it deems, its military high technology crown jewels is evidenced in the GE 414 jet engine deal excluding the single crystal turbine blade tech, etc. As far as, the Biden Administration is concerned the time is now to finally get India in its corner, and the situation with an America-friendly Modi needs to be taken advantage of. A deal like this, even with its shortcomings, many Indian experts contend, will cement mutual trust, and be the proverbial ‘Open Sesame’ for accessing more cutting edge American technologies. It is the means, many believe, to equalize the security situation with a tech-wise rampaging China. They apparently are unaware, however, that even NATO allies get to use only derated US equipment, so India cannot realistically expect to be favoured more than NATO member states.
Still, a fuller military supply relationship with the US can be expected more comprehensively to deepen the bilateral relationship and fetch India collateral benefits– bigger US investments in the Indian economy and infrastructure buildup, trade preferences, a leg-up in the fab and semiconductor design and production business, etc. Moreover, with AUKUS limping along and the military aspects of the India-US-Japan-Australia Quadrilateral stalled by India’s slow stepping on the issue, the security prospects of containing China in the Indo-Pcific look bleak. Washington hopes the real benefit to the US, following on the opening in the defence tech field, will accrue from New Delhi playing ball. The calculation is that substantive cooperation particularly in Space and semiconductor only nominally flagshipped by the 414 deal, will hand Washington what it has long craved — a hard lever to influence Indian foreign and security policies, a means it believes Moscow with its arms pipeline to India used to shape Indian actions, especially during the Cold War.
France is desperate for India to buy into the French defence industry for two reasons. One, that it will help France remain strategically relevant in the Indo-Pacific. And secondly, because of the hope that increased miltech closeness may lead, in the future, to more extensive use by the Indian military of its bases in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, and in its Indian Ocean island territories at St Pierre on Reunion Island which, in turn, will help defray Paris’ high costs of maintaining a military presence east of Suez.
France has the technology and ergonomically crafted weapons platforms to offer which Indian armed services appreciate and are partial to. Paris is rumoured to be ready to also pass on submarine nuclear power plant technology, etc. — the sort of tech that will simply not be available from the US for love or money. It is this tech Modi should extract from Macron. Force “sustainability and autonomy”, moreover, will be less of a concern with French-sourced armaments. But, to be fair, the C-17s, C-130s and the P-8I armed maritime recon aircraft have not so far faced difficulties with respect to servicing and spares support. But, frontline fighter aircraft are a different proposition altogether. And, in any case, India needs the assurance, which no US Administration of the day in Washington can provide, that the military goods India buys will not be subjected to ITAR. So that’s an insurmountable problem.
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A truly nationalist Indian government, however, would take a different tack. Instead of the binary choice his government is facing, Modi should remember why India’s uninvolved stance on the Ukraine conflict has raised India’s political standing and stock, secured it leverage with the US and the West and Russia, and why every major country wants to court and cultivate it. Not rushing into any one technology paddock is the way to go. The purchase of S-400 air defence system and the contract to buy 2 Grigoryvich-class stealth frigates and to produce two more in the Goa shipyard, has reassured Moscow. So the Russia end is holding up.
Hopefully, Modi will exploit to the fullest India’s being in a unique position to call the shots and carefully pick and choose as between US and French technologies and their direct and spillover industrial benefits just so the technology deficiencies of the country are rapidly filled — these being the missing elements that are required to build on capabilities already in the country that, in turn, will ensure progress towards achieving atmnirbharta. Signing up for prohibitively expensive deals for whole systems, as I have iterated over the years, is wasteful and makes neither economic nor national security sense.
India should instead show interest in just the Barracuda submarine design from France and then play off the French DCNS Company producing it against the German ThyseenKruppMarine firm peddling its HDW 214 submarine, and select tech not available in India, like optronic mast, say, from the leading US company, L3Harris. Biden could be asked to help out here by removing restrictions on the level of tech issues, which he will do to retain Indian goodwill. With tech deficits filled in this way, there won’t be tech voids, and the existing submarine production capability, starting with converting a basic design into engineering drawings, can take over. If Larsen & Toubro can manufacture strategic platforms like nuclear powered ballistic missile-firing submarines, building the techwise less demanding conventional subs shouldn’t be difficult. Likewise, specifically the French single crystal turbine blade tech can be bought for full and complete indigenisation to advance the indigenous Kaveri jet engine because GTRE (Gas Turbine Research Establishment), Bangaluru, it should be noted by Modi/PMO, has already successfully tested and developed single crystal blades for helicopters. The Kaveri jet engine is the future of Indian combat aviation, not a new Safran engine for Indian use.
This is the way to proceed. But this methodology of buying bits and pieces of technology and integrating them with the in-country design, development and industrial capability and process will, of course, be opposed by the three Services. They will come up with hundreds of reasons why such an approach is risky and produce unreliable armament systems, and why buying the Barracuda submarine whole, the Rafale whole, the F-18/Rafale-M carrier aircraft whole, and this whole and that whole will be in the country’s national interest. 60 years of such thinking has reduced India to a pitiable technology and arms dependency. The crux of the issue is the Indian military’s unwillingness to trust indigenous technology and wholly homegrown weapons systems. There’s a simple solution for removing any such resistance: Fire the top echelons of the military leadership that doesn’t accept this new method of procuring armaments and military technology. The rest of the cadres will get the message and fall in line.
One wishes the Modi sarkar will show guts and wisdom and, keeping atmnirbharta firmly in mind, make the right choices. That will mean going against the imports-driven thinking of the myopic Indian policy establishment and military. There’s a price to pay for atmnirbharta, of course, and the nation is prepared to pay it. It needs Indian leaders to put rhetoric into practice and implement atmnirbharta on a warfooting, and not just yap about it.
India’s not accepting the 414 deal will not be a killer and will not affect the US fab/semiconductor deal, nor will not buying whatever Macron has to offer in an aggregated form, if the Modi government simulataneously ups its game on the economic front: Stops talking about administrative reforms and speedily simplifies the regulatory mess relating to land acquisition and labour laws that continues to discourage and deter Foreign Direct Investment and Western and Asian Companies from relocating their manufacturing units en masse from China to India. Such an Indian reform will end up freeing India, the US, Europe and the rest of the world from the Chinese supply chain stranglehold and even win Modi the world’s gratitude.
On the arms front, it should be made clear to the US and France, that India proposes to go in this new direction by buying specific technologies, and never again whole systems or weapons platforms, and that the sooner they accept this new way of India conducting its procurement business, the better their prospects of selling what India wants. India succeeded with this approach — “the technology mission mode” — in Space systems, Missiles, nuclear weapons — when no foreign technology could be secured from anywhere. No further evidence is needed to prove this approach will work just as well with respect to every conventional military-use system.
[General Anil S. Chauhan at his ceremonial investiture as CDS]
At the United Service Institution of India yesterday, General Anil Singh Chauhan, Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) delivered the Major General Samir Sinha Memorial Lecture. Tasked with integrating and theaterising the 19-odd military commands, he pretty much confessed that the job was beyond him. He talked of integrating logistics, communications, intel and everything else under the sun, but not about theaterizing the operational commands. Apparently, he thinks this task unachievable at least in the foreseeable future.
As senior officers and military veterans in the audience rolled their eyes knowingly at what General Chauhan did not say, the message got through with a bang. Does it come as a great big surprise to anyone? No. But one did not expect Chauhan to give up so publicly, so easily, on an initiative the Narendra Modi government has put much store by.
As a fairly low key type, Chauhan simply cannot replicate his predecessor the late General Bipin Rawat’s modus operandi of bullheadedly propelling the theaterisation programme, trampling on long nursed sensibilities without giving it much thought. Like, for instance, his dismissing the air force as a “support arm” and. collaterally, its longtime opposition to changing the status quo. It instantly steeled the IAF’s negative attitude to what Rawat was trying to do.
Then again, Rawat never made any bones about his Gurkha officer’s (5/11 GR) attitude to solving a problem — beat it down! Reflecting this attitude of pushing on regardless, he had by August 2021 readied the first of the theatre commands for operations. The Maritime Integrated Command, headquartered in Karwar, controlling the fighting assets administratively with the Western Naval Command, the Eastern Naval Command and the Andaman & Nicobar Command, was all set to go. A Vice Admiral was even selected to be its first Commander-in-Chief (CINC). And then the roof caved in.
IAF was not responsible for it. The senior babudom — the civil servants, was. The bureaucrats’ concern, as always when dealing with the military, was with protecting their positions in the pecking order, the ‘Warrant of Precedence’. To be fair, there was and is a problem with it that neither Rawat nor any agency of the government or military had bothered to address until then. A CINC of a new Integrated Command would be 4-star rank. How and where would he fit in? On the same rank-level, would he be senior, equal or junior to the Services’ Chiefs of Staff? That could possibly be resolved by jigging the seniority issue into an inter se seniority metric, even though the officers in the three services are in differently sized cadres, and get promoted and rise in different timeframes. Still, there may be a way to resolve it.
The problem is knottier when civil servants come into the picture. In the prevailing system, the Defence Secretary, the head babu in the Ministry of Defence, is junior to and below the three Services chiefs in the Warrant. Would the newly appointed integrated theatre commanders — enjoying the same 4-star rank status as the services’ chiefs, also outrank the Defence Secretary? Could they be placed at the Additional Secretary level but senior to the AdSec in the warrant? The Indian Administrative Service, allergic to any hint of demotion, raised hell and stopped the theaterisation initiative in its tracks. Since August 2021 there’s no advance on that front.
The question is how did General Rawat get as far as he did in realising the Maritime Integrated Command without resolving the Warrant-related issues? Did he subsume a special dispensation, courtesy his fellow Pauri Garhwali, Ajit Doval — the National Security Adviser? If so, why can’t Chauhan — a Gurkha officer (6/11 GR) and another native of Pauri Garhwal, revive it?
Whatever the way out of this mess, one thing is clear. The diminutive General Chauhan’s nice, aggreeable, soft talking, dull and discursive method, is not working. But, at least, he is not consigned to the basement of South Block as General Rawat initially was, when appointed as the first CDS. That, I suppose, is progress.
One thing is certain: As Washington prepares to welcome Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a State Visit June 21, the Joe Biden Administration is intent on succeeding where previous administrations have failed, namely, in making India, a willing technology captive.
The Modi government, on the other hand, hopes that strung out between the Russian annexation of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s forthrightly confrontationist stance over Taiwan, and the fast growing Russia-China nexus, the US can be persuaded to part with military technology it had hitherto dithered in transferring to India, especially because India is neither an ally nor even a time-tested friend but is a ‘strategic partner’ with whom relations are, with the consent of both parties, transactional.
Modi and his advisers believe this is a ‘Dengxioaping moment’ for India when the international situation and correlation of forces favour it, and despite New Delhi’s not supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia. the US and the West are inclined to help it to emerge economically and industrially as an economic and strategic counterweight to China. And with comparative labour cost advantage, perhaps, even replace the latter with India in the global supply chain currently dominated by Chinese manufacturers. The twin aim being to reduce dependence on China for crucial materials and components by carving out a supply role for India and, by the by, draw India more fully into the US and Western economic fold and, importantly, strategic arrangements in Asia geared to stalling China’s rise.
India, in fact, has already made itself an irreplacable part of the global supply chain by supplying the US and the West with an endless stream of skilled technical manpower. Indeed, it is estimated that as much as 40% of the US-originating IT software is produced by the Indian diaspora in America and Europe. In fact, the Modi government has long since decided to double down on the manpower supply role as central to its US policy. Whence, the Indian ambassador in Washington, Taran Singh Sandhu who in a June 18 TV interview reminded the audience that some 200,000 Indian students presently in the US are in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) category, who could provide the US with the “competitive edge” in the world and how this was central to what he called the “escalating” bilateral relationship. It was another way of pleading for increasing the H1-B visa quota for India!
That all this manpower carted to the US sets India back in its plans to emerge as a global tech power in its own right and comes at enormous economic cost (think of the extent of subsidies via education funded by the poor Indian taxpayer to prepare the potential tech immigrant to America) is apparently not of concern to Modi. This is the great difference between Modi and Deng, and between the Indian and the Chinese systems, that China and its leadership have always been oriented toward maximizing the gains from leveraging their advantageous position vis a vis the US by simultaneously building up the technology creation/innovation eco-system within the country with a view to becoming a global power independent of America. This last is something the Modi regime has not really attempted because it requires the maximal withdrawal of the government from the economic life of the country and to unshackle the technological and entrepreneurial genius of the people from bureaucratic control.
Deng, it may be recalled, visited Washington in end-January 1979 at a time when the Nixon-Kissinger game of balancing power by distancing China from the Leonid Brezhnev-led Soviet Union, had cleared a path for China. It resulted in American market access to Chinese goods and turning on of the technology spigot that enabled the Chinese military to get on par with the Soviet forces. It is these twin opportunities that Deng masterfully exploited to his country’s immense benefit until now when the Chinese economy has reached the $17 trillion level (compared to US’ $23 trillion), PLA poses the biggest, most potent, threat to the US, and China rivals the US in creating and innovating high technology.
Ram Madhav, an RSS leader, in a fit of hyperbole relating to the situation on the eve of Modi’s visit juxtaposed “expectant ecstacy” supposedly prevailing on the US side with “cautious realism” on the India side. Not sure what Madhav is reading, but the ecstasy seems to be entirely on the Indian side with the media, retired militarymen, and the commentariat going into raptures about India’s new dawn with American high tech! There is wide-eyed scepticism on the US side though. Two highly regarded India experts — Ashley Tellis at Carnegie and Daniel Markey, a former State Department Policy Planning official, at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, have doubted whether the red carpet rolled out for Modi and the easing of the tech trade will fetch Washington much. They are reluctant to believe that India will end up supporting Ukraine, disavow its neutral stance as between Russia and US and NATO on the Russo-Ukrainian war, or decide to cutoff of its historically strong Russian military and oil supply links.
Tellis argued India is “a bad bet” because, in effect, it marches to the beat of its own different drum and won’t always follow the US lead, and Markey made the point that while the “shared values have grown weaker with India [owing to Modi’s growingly autocratic rule], their shared interests [such as containing terrorism and China] have gotten stronger”. While advocating targeted assistance programmes specifically to counter China, he warns against transferring GE 414 jet engine tech to India which, because it will strengthen India’s indigenous defence industry “might not serve US interests in the long term.” And he hints that the US may not want to help create another China with massive commercial investments in the Indian economy, etc. The analog of the 414 jet engine from Deng’s time was the 1982 ‘Orient Pearl’ programme initiated during the Reagan presidency that transferred advanced avionics technology. It upgraded China’s bulk fleet of F-7 fighter aircraft, of course, but along with the Chinese buy of the Israeli Lavi fighter design and materials, it kickstarted China’s wildly successful military electronics and combat aviation sector.
So, in this India’s alleged “Deng moment’, what’s the score card? iCET (Initiative for Critical and Emerging Technologies) is the new buzzword. It’s come about because an earlier programme — the 2012 Defence Trade and Technology Initiative and the 2016 action by President Barack Obama to raise India’s status to ‘Major Defence Partner” produced more hot air than transfer of technology. iCET is different because the National Security Advisers — Jake Sullvan and Ajit Doval are helming this effort. They have cut redtape and, and cleared logjams and bureaucratic resistance at both ends. Consequently, it has been agreed that Modi and Biden will sign several flagship accords in the hi-tech field. It is proposed, for instance, that General Electric Company will assist HAL in doing the only thing it is good at — “assembling” this time the GE 414 jet engine to outfit the Tejas Mk-2 and the 2-engined advanced medium combat aircraft on the design board.
The more significant understanding concerns cooperation in designing and manufacturing high-value semiconductor chips in highly complex and inordinately expensive fabrication (fab) facilities, in space exploration and ventures, and in quantum computing.
However, the reason why this won’t be a Deng moment for India is that the Indian government doesn’t seem as motivated as the Chinese state was to use US technology as base for rapid growth of indigenous technology. Possibly, keeping Markey’s warning in mind, the Pentagon is preparing to transfer all but 20% of the tech involved in the 414 engine. That 20%, however, is critical tech relating, as a former IAF officer suggested, to design and production of single crystal turbine blades, the very thing GTRE (Gas Turbine Research Establishment), try as it might, has failed to produce and why the indigenous Kaveri engine project has so far not reached fruition. It is a tech void the GE 414 deal won’t fill.
So, is the core of the tech deal on the anvil with the US still great shakes considering India might become permanently dependent on the US for combat aircraft engines?
[Aswini Vaishnav, Minister for Telecommunications, and the Prime Minister]
On Feb 15, I posted ” Obdurate defence finance bureaucrats sinking atmnirbharta projects”. It had revealed how the Integrated Financial Adviser (IFA), Ministry of Defence had ousted two Indian defence MSMEs (Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises) — Lekha Wireless Solutions Pvt Ltd and Signaltron, both of which possess 5G patents for radiotelephony from the competition to provide the army with a mobile tactical communications (TACCOM) network, how this was done by relying on an outdated turnover criterion these firms could not meet because, well, they are small and not because they lacked the tech or couldn’t execute the contract, which fact these two companies had made known to the IFA before the bids for the TACCOM tender were opened, how this was done at the crucial tech testing stage so Lekha and Signaltron couldn’t prove their tech, and why this sort of deleterious rule-based regime is what the babus follow when it serves their purpose of furthering foreign tech purchases. The foreign technology involved is Israeli and the Indian front company — Alpha Design, is only a system integrator buying components/technologies from here and there and putting them together, it is not a technology creator or innovator. Worse, because Israel sells its advanced technologies to the Chinese military, who is to say the PLA is not conversant with this Israeli technology and this TACCOM the army is set to use on the disputed border is not fully compromised?
Disappointingly, despite my urging General Manoj Pande in the post — the first combat engineering officer to be COAS, to stop the tender process from advancing, he did nothing. However, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, I understand, took note of my post. But instead of cancelling the trial contract and ordering the tender for TACCOM to be reissued, which is something MOD/Govt of India is entirely within its sovereign right to do at any time, for any reason, with regard to any defence or other capital acquisition deal, MOD chose the limited option of changing the revenue turnover criteria without scrapping the Alpha Design-Israeli contract. So Lekha and Signaltron are still out of the TACCOM contract, notwithstanding their superior INDIGENOUS technology!
But the ministries and bureaucrats within them not taking Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s atmanirbharta goals seriously seems to be the norm rather than an exception. Consider the Department of Telecommunications (DOT) — supposedly a sphere of special concern and interest to the PM. The minister heading it is the media savvy Ashwini Vaishnav, who pops up every other day to extol just how far and fast India is rising in the field and spews statistics about the growingly large mobile telephony coverage that facilitates the digitalisation of the economy. But, it would appear he is more interested in impressing Modi with such self-publicity shenanigans than actually doing something substantive rapidly to increase the telecommunications and related services footprint in the country, and help the economy progress by leaps and bounds.
The means for India’s potentially rocketing rise in the telecom sector are Captive Private Networks (CPNs). Without getting too technical, CPNs involve a very small part of the spectrum being directly allotted, rather than auctioned, to big companies, industrial and commercial ventures, hotel chains, and similar large economic entities, and even remote village collectives, enabling them to operate their own closed communications networks to improve their intra-company/unit communications, improve functional efficiency, resource management, labour productivity and the bottomline, rather than rely on the unreliable large telecom companies — Telcos (Jio, Airtel, Idea, Vodafone, et al) who run their businesses for profit and are not interested in investing in communications infrastructure, to meet specific, localised, needs and providing the kind of services such entities need to beat foreign competition, win contracts at home and abroad, and otherwise survive in the market. And for remote areas to be connected and escape remaining hostage to telco decisions motivated by commercial reasons.
The analogy here is the freeing of Wi-fi, which was resolutely opposed by the Telcos. But after GOI over-rode objections and freed Wi-fi, Telcos discovered how they could piggyback on it to extend applications based on it, to increase their business manifold and make lots of money. Germany, Canada are leaders in CPNs. An expert likened a CPN to an EPABX (electronic private automatic branch exchange). Any hotel can just go and pick up various components — all manufactured by MSMEs — of an EPABX that connects the reception desk to the rooms in the hotel, and each of the rooms to all the hotel services, etc., and hire an MSME specialising in integration to put the communications system together. Voila! you have an efficient all-in communications network for the unit. A CPN can be set up exactly in the same way as EPABX for any industry, financial institution, or economic entity. It will spectacularly boost the MSME sector and assist significantly in addressing the problem of millions of “educated” illiterates mass produced by hundreds of universities. Because MSMEs will be the main source of CPN technologies, components and integration services.
In India, 230,000 factories would benefit from CPNs, as would 3,000 mines, 130 plus airports, 13 major ports and 200 minor and intermediate ports along the coastline, the central highway construction and maintenance authorities overseeing 151,000 National Highways, nearly 160 million hectares of arable land, $227 billion software industry, and over 10,000 startups. The economic multiplier impact of CPNs using “millimetre bands for dense applications and especially for manufacturing in BRIC Countries is estimated for the period 2025-2050 by GSMA, the global association of representing the mobile telephony “ecosystem” as $84 Billion for Brazil, $102 Billion for Russia, $150 Billion for India, and a colossal $1.114 Trillion for China. How will India ever catch up with China, if DOT continues to place administrative and procedural obstacles in the way of CPNs?
In any case, even DOT which has been a tech laggard and until recently a big promoter of Chinese Huawei 4G and 5G telecom hardware and is only now trying to catch-up with the more advanced countries such as Germany and Canada, realised and formally decided in 2018 that the entire spectrum is not auctionable, that small portions of the bandwidth ranging from sub-gigahertz to high millimetre wave bands, can by “administrative assignment” be given to economic entities to run their CPNs for annual royalty/fee, and that CPNs are both necessary and make economic sense. Accordingly, 20 applications for CPNs were forwarded by major corporates, including Infosys, L&T, Tata Power, etc to lease a bandwidth. The Modi government consequently made a cabinet decision in 2019 to implement CPNs. Here the regressive-minded DOT bureaucrats rather than going ahead and implementing the cabinet decision, played spoiler. DOT formally sought an opinion about so allotting or “leasing”, not auctioning, the bandwidth for CPNs to the Law Ministry and, predictably, brought the proceedings to a shuddering halt.
Here the ghost of the 2007-2008 2G scam, involving the Congress government minister A. Raja stalking the DPT corridors ever since, intervened. Verily like the Bofors scam that has skewed defence procurement decisions for over 40 years, the 2G scam, in which Raja was charged with selling 122 2G spectrum licenses cheap resulting in revenue loss to the Exchequer, but in 2017 was exonerated by the Courts of any wrongdoing, means no DOT official wants to be involved in leasing spectrum short of a clear verdict by the Courts. The Deputy Attorney General, as clueless about the technical nuances of CPNs, took the safe and easy route and responding to DOT’s seeking legal opinion, advised the auctioning of the spectrum.
This legal view has come as a boon to the Telcos who, dog in the manger-like, neither provide the services nor are willing to let economic entities fend for themselves by establishing CPNs. Telcos moreover wield a mighty political clout. There’s Mukesh Ambani with his Jio, Sunil Mittal with his Airtel, etc. And it is rumoured the Telecom minister, Vaishnav, is “in their pocket”. But acting on a cabinet decision is a difficult spot for Vaishnav to be in. The only way he is likely to be persuaded is if PM/PMO instructs him not to waste time and to forthwith allow CPNs. Considering the scale of economic gain India needs to obtain to match China just in the CPN area, what option does Modi have? Unless he too thinks that pandering to the Ambanis and the Mittals of the world will get the country where he wants India economically to be.
[Imran Khan being hauled off by the paramil Rangers]
Niazi’s are fatal for Pakistan. Lt General AAK ‘Tiger’ Niazi, the Military Governor of East Pakistan, presided over the dissolution of the unitary, if geograpgically ridiculous, state of Pakistan (with two wings a thousand miles apart). “Kaptaan” Imran Khan Niazi, who led Pakistan to cricket 1992 World Cup victory could end up ensuring martial law governments in all but name for the forseeable future with some coalition of non-Pakistan Tehreeq-i-Insaaf (PTI) parties acting as a jamhoori (democratic) front. The army would prefer, however, that Imran Khan retire hurt, accept a comfortable exile in London he knows only too well, and where all politically unwanted and inconvenient Pakistani politicians and ex-dictators find themselves in (to wit, Altaf Hussain of MQM, General Pervez Muharraf, Nawaz Sharif), free to dream, conspire, prepare and plot their political comebacks.
The trouble for Imran was that he had gnawed at the hand that had eased him onto the gaddi and his PTI into government with the enrollment of “electibles” from other parties induced/coerced to join his group, and otherwise propped up his rule. It didn’t expect that Imran’s ambitions transcended their support as he sought to emerge as a node of power independent of the army — drawing the people in millions to him personally and his cause. This was something new for the army because no political creature of theirs had, until Imran came along, shown the gumption to openly turn on his benefactors, collaring GHQ, Rawalpindi, as enemy of state and skewering the army as “fascist” and worse.
The shock and awe in the ranks of Pakistan army Generals was all the more sharp because they had so grossly misassessed Imran despite careful vetting by ISI, and because he seemed to play along for the first couple of years in the manner the army desired. Indeed, when COAS General Qamar Javed Bajwa formally alighted on Imran Niazi as the army’s choice, GHQ had hoped the army’s future and its role as the political puppet master had been secured for at least a decade, if not more.
Their Man in Islamabad looked the part — tall, handsome, of sporting renown with a raffish past as an Oxford Blue, playing cricket for Sussex and, more sensationally, as a tabloid celebrity with an active night life and record of endless squiring and partying with London lovelies, where such things as sniffing cocaine is a minor but cultivated vice. It was a social whirlygig that eventuated in a child (Sita) out of wedlock and a marriage to a Jewish heiress, Jemima Goldsmith. Speaking the King’s English as it should be spoke, looking as dapper in a Blazer as in a Shalwar, Awami shirt and jacket, Imran ticked off all the boxes for GHQ as the person who would be a great showpiece for Pakistan and get the country and the army back into the good books of the US and the West.
After all, the country had had enough with the public blundering and embarrassments inflicted by his predecessor Nawaz Sharif who, when in the White House, by way of an interaction with an amused President Barack Obama, read falteringly from a small piece of paper, a scene repeated in Beijing where he tried to speak what he had memorized and still needed assistance from a lackey to recall the words he had uttered many times before about bilateral relations being “shahad se meetha, Himalaya as ooncha, samandar se gehra” etc. — flowery stuff that flowed past a visibly uncomprehending and uncomfortable Chinese Premier!
But then ISI and GHQ had not reckoned with Imran’s plans for making himself the centre of Pakistani polity and nation, a more enduring fixture in Islamabad than the army thought prudent. He uncorked his idea of a “naya Pakistan” in the general elections and then stirred in the vision of a new “Medina” — an Islamic welfare state of the Prophet’s time solicitous of women, the old and the poor. All this was heady rhetoric, but in real life and in his Banigala estate in the Margalla Hills ringing Islamabad, he couldn’t escape what he was. Imran took himself out of London but couldn’t prevent channeling the natural inner playboy in him. It also didn’t help Imran’s cause with GHQ that he went out of his way to rile Washington with an attitude that suggested a more even Pakistani policy as between the US and Russia-China. All these factors nailed him in his “do or die” struggle with the army.
It was fascinating to see from this side of the Radcliff Line, Imran Niazi in the last months of his upended tenure in office and in the year since poking, provoking prodding, and goading the former Chief of the Army Staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, and the army establishment, and wondering when the PM would cross the redline and get his comeuppance. The rift finally occurred in 2018 when COAS General Asif Munir, then a Lieutenant General heading ISI, took a transcript of telephone conversations his agency had recorded — damning stuff indicating the involvement of Imran’s wife, Bushra Bibi, a rich divorcee and his 3rd wife (serially, not in a collective!) to the PM. Usually seen in a full head to toe religious camouflage, the begum was neck deep in major financial hanky panky (possibly relating to the shady real estate tycoon Malik Riaz and the “al Qadir Trust”).
This Bibi is not to be taken lightly though, being credited with turning a husband with a roving eye into apparently a chaste one woman man. That is until ISI, again, leaked to the press some salacious conversations it had electronically evesdropped on — fairly graphic “guftgu” it turned out, with a nubile lass from a well connected family who obviously provided the PM with diversion on careworn days from the presumably strict marital rigamarole of the Bushra. Who knows, it may have encouraged the Bibi to take even more liberties in exploiting her husband’s position and go after the filthy lucre, confident her spouse had lost the moral pretence to wag a finger at her. So, naturally, the prime minister asked for Munir’s removal from ISI, only to have Bajwa turn him down in a nice way, telling him that Munir needed to complete his tenure in that post. That was the turning point in their relations, and culminated in the replacement a year back of the PTI regime with the uneasy coalition of the Muslim League (Nawaz) and Asif Ali Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party.
Actually, in a way, the Shahbaz interregnum has proved an electoral boon for Imran because the PTI regime’s economic policies had aggravated the economic conditions to such an extent they had begun spiralling into the ditch by the time Shahbaz Sharif took over, and he was stuck carrying the can for the economic downslide and faced the people’s ire. True, this spiral was reinforced with puzzling policies that Finance minister Ishaq Dar pursued, all the while huffing and puffing about how IMF dare not deny Pakistan the dollars, etc and this way made IMF’s recovery program a non-starter. Pressed by IMF, popular subsidies were periodically reduced, the price of petrol/diesel raised, and the cost of grain and other foodstuffs to the common man got on a fast escalator. It accelerated the erosion of the people’s support for the coalition government.
Still IMF was not satisfied. It asked for a longterm plan of action, still bigger cuts in subsidies and imposition of taxes on the wealthy which no government, including Imran’s, had considered doing. So even as the Pakistani economy was plunging with inflation at 30% plus rate, the Pakistani rupee crossing the 300 mark for a US dollar, a provision in the supposed economic recovery plan allowed the rich to continue importing super-expensive cars and monster SUV cruisers at a time when the hard currency reserves had dwinded to less than $3 billion! Skyrocketing prices, industrial shutdowns, jobless youth and no IMF credit nor investment from friendly sources resulted in near zero rate of economic growth and vaulting mass discontent. The scene was set for the May 9 conflagration. And Imran Khan supplied the spark — the incendiary charges and rhetorical jabs against Bajwa, the army, and the “imported government”.
The wild-eyed Pakistani youth who crowded the streets of Lahore, attacked army facilities, may not know who Janice Joplin is, or why that Sixties rock star’s lyrics — “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose” that became an anthem for a generation, so resonates with their calls for “azadi”. But Pak GHQ understood rightaway the danger to their corporate interest lurking in PTI’s campaign for change and freedom and how Imran’s rhetoric had fueled it. The army pulled the curtains down, or tried to, on this their latest experiment with PTI. Imran was shown scant respect as he was pummelled into an armoured police van and dumped in a jail until a Court ordered his release. Other PTI leaders were picked up and deliberately mistreated in jails and pressured into resigning from PTI and even politics. A big bunch of them complied. Army then began appying the tourniquet. A medical examination ostensibly revealed traces of cocaine in Imran Niazi’s urine, suggesting the ex-PM had not quite given up on snorting the white stuff. This was done, and his telephonic and other indiscretions leaked to the public with a view to tarring his reputation, to alienating him from his youthful followers. It didn’t work. Far from being disappointed and disgusted with Imran and his begum’s corruptions and other antics, the whole exercise boomeranged. Imran’s manifest mistreatment strengthened instead the popular revulsion against the army and the coalition regime. His trial under Army Act with harsh penalties that the Shahbaz cabinet is pushing but GHQ is dithering over, could exacerbate the situation allround.
The army does not fear Imran as much as it does the masses roused by him and ready to offer battle to the military. This has never happened before but it is what Imran promised. He has become too big a political phenomenon and force, and the danger of a popular blowup/backlash against the army is too real for General Munir and his cohort to ignore. Despite his open threats, he can’t be silenced, and he cannot be herded out of the country or done away with in the manner Zulfiqar Ali Bhtto was in 1979 by his then military nemesis — the Delhi St. Stephens College alum, General Zia ul-Haq — by hanging him. Because a martyred Imran could prove far more dangerous and likely produce a permanent fissure in the society between the army and the people, and that will not bode well for the army. In fact, the Pakistan army is reportedly a house divided — a large officer faction enthused by Imran and upset with Bajwa and now Munir, no longer trusts the top brass to safeguard the army’s interests and, by the by, the country’s.
Imran has powerful leverage — the support of the people which the army will not want to again test on the street. He knows his best card and so does GHQ, and so do the people. All the more reason for the army to ensure that elections are announced but only after Imran is first taken off the stage, disqualified from contesting elections on some charge or the other. This solution suits the trifecta of the army, Shahbaz and PPP.
In fact, General Munir speaking two days ago at the Command & Staff College, Quetta, touched on the army’s basic fear of Imran Niazi’s demagogic leadership. “Those who are making futile efforts to drive a wedge and weaken the unbreakable bond between the people of Pakistan and its armed forces”, the COAS blustered, “will never be able to succeed …Pak Army, being one of the strongest armies of the world, with the blessings of Allah and undaunted support of proud people of Pak, can neither be deterred nor coerced by anyone.” He wasn’t here referring to coercion by India!
Not one to be easily intimidated, Imran mocked the army in return. When is “having a political opposition, holding public meetings, creating awareness among the people and mobilising them for the elections [become] obstacles in the way of democracy?”, he asked before reminding the people that “Democracy ends when there is no opposition.” In a more aggressive vein, one of PTI’s younger leaders referring to the continuing harrassment of party members twittered: “This tyranny will not endure.” With this kind of exchanges, one thing is certain: The political water in the rhetorical kettle will keep boiling, but to what effect?
The curious thing is the army and the three main political parties — PTI, PML(N) and PPP, all desire elections. But other than PTI, the other two parties want Imran Niazi out of the fray because otherwise they stand no chance. There’s a possibility that in return for the easing of pressure on himself and Bushra Bibi, and other concessions, Imran may agree to sit out the elections. But he may insist on nominating someone else from his party and go to the people to get his candidate elected. His choice will doubtless be someone who takes dictation from the newly acclaimed eminence grise in Banigala, but this situation will once again make for a stormy relationship with the army, and the situation would have come a full circle. In the dynastic parties, Nawaz Sharif and Zardari will be pushing their respective progeny, Maryam and Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, to curry favour with GHQ and lead the charge. Except GHQ with these choices may be happier with the known devil — the weak and pliable Shahbaz than the unknown devils but may still side with Maryam, even Bilawal, than with Imran’s select leader of PTI.
Whichever party is permitted to win and whosoever becomes PM, it will be, as in previous elections, with the army’s help. It will mean the GHQ will still be in-charge and yet again operate from behind civilian democratic cover. The next elections in Pakistan will thus reaffirm the settled political system of army rule with a civilian democratic face. This is so because the option of a coup d’etat is now infeasible. Moreover, trying to manage an inherently unmanageable Pakistani state is a risky and cumbersome enterprise and something GHQ would ideally want nothing to do with. Why get saddled with the responsibility for everything going wrong — which is the likely outcome — when a “democratically-elected” government, doing the army’s bidding, can take the flak, face the music?
I have no patience anymore for uninformed commentaries on nuclear deterrence penned by people who wear their unfamiliarity with the broad swath of deterrence literature and with the empirical evidence of nearly 80 years of the nuclear age, on their sleeve. Missing the nuclear woods for the trees is one thing. Quite another for these worthies to convert the analects of minimal deterrence into articles of faith. With logic, reason and experience thus rested, who can argue with faith?
What particularly gets my goat are former flag rank military officers who are tigers when growling for more and more conventional weaponry but kittens mewing contentedly with just a small nuclear arsenal. This last because anything nuclear-related is the proverbial “black box” technology that they know nothing about, have never handled, and is a subject they don’t care to delve into. This doesn’t however prevent them from mouthing off on TV and writing op-eds and such that hew safely to the government line of the day. Like the infrequent official pronouncements, their views betray ignorance of the broad field and amount to little more than minimalist drivel that has acquired a smidgeon of legitimacy simply by its repitition! Like how nuclear weapons are for deterrence, not warfighting, how a responsible India is committed to credible minimum deterrence on the principle first voiced by General K. Sundarji in the 1980s when less was known about the utility of nuclear weapons than is the case now, that when a few will do why have more, etc., indicating a laid-back attitude to the country’s strategic security that, because it echoes opinions one hears in military circles, is truly worrisome.
The provocation for this post is a particularly senseless and grating piece of dross published in ThePrint– ‘India should declare that AI will not be used to autonomously launch nuclear weapons’, dated 16 May, penned by retired Lt. General Prakash Menon (at https://theprint.in/opinion/india-should-declare-that-ai-will-not-be-used-to-autonomously-launch-nuclear-weapons/1575693/ ). He repeats the usual half-digested nuclear minimum deterrence themes that none of the great powers follow because they are so much impractical nonsense.
However, what ‘s notably risible, and at once foolish and dangerous in this article is General Menon’s urging India to foreswear the use of Artificial Intelligence in nuclear forces and deterrence infrastructure. AI is a dawning technology that’s still in its formative development stage, meaning the universe of its uses is yet to be discerned, especially so its potentially wide-ranging military ramifications. The militaries and governments of the more advanced states are all struggling with this obviously revolutionary technology they have in its basic form, whence their utmost caution in rushing to judgement about AI. But Menon, apparently unaffected by any doubt or uncertainty, and confident he has grasped its various applications and functional significance sees clearly its downside even as such understanding has so far escaped the putative leaders in the field — China and the US.
The trouble is if the General actually has any technical knowledge of, and insights, into AI then these are not readily evident in this article. Rather, he seems to have conjoined, on the fly, nuclear weapons to AI, and because they are both pretty scary technologies, concluded that AI should play no part in India’s nuclear deterrence systems and posture! And further, that this gesture by India of preempting itself from such use of AI, will set an example to all countries, be a beacon of hope in the militarised global milieu, confirm the country’s supposed high moral stature and standing, and its leadership in a new area of arms control. Such a view exaggerates India’s international influence, and is unmindful of how India’s moral pretensions have seminally hurt national interest and security in the past.
May be Lt. General Menon and his ilk need a bit of reminding about the record of Indian moralising and airy-fairy thinking that, in converting nuclear security into a morality play, dumped the country into a deep strategic hole.
In an excess of idealism, Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1950s campaigned for a ban on nuclear testing in the atmosphere and under the sea. It led to the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty that India promptly signed, thereby immeasurably raising the costs of India’s weaponisation. Underground tests are far more expensive to conduct than nuclear tests in the atmosphere or in the extended seas around India. So, while Nehru played a wondrously successful double-game of secretly securing a weapons capability with the civilian uses of the atom and his campaign for disarmament as cover, he dithered fatally on moral-pacifist grounds when it came to testing and weaponizing once the capability threshold was reached with the commissioning in March 1964 of the plutonium reprocessing plant. Had the production of weapon grade plutonium been ratcheted up at this point and the government proceeded with testing and producing weapons when there were no international constraints, India would have automatically been, like China, one of the six 1968 nuclear nonproliferation treaty-recognized nuclear weapons states, and on a very different and rocketing power trajectory. Instead, by remaining sub-nuclear, India found itself in the NPT doghouse.
If Nehru’s terminal prevaricating wasn’t bad enough, Morarji Desai, PM during the Janata Party interregnum (1976-1979), who swore by “Gandhian values”, was determined on abolishing the country’s nuclear weapon-making capability altogether. Only an inspired rearguard action by a senior MEA official (M.A.Vellodi) thwarted Desai’s plan that, incidentally, had his foreign minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s support. Not surprisingly, the same inapt moralistic-pacific impulses mixed with the political desire to placate the US led to Vajpayee, now prime minister, to announce in 1998 the “voluntary moratorium” on testing in the wake of the Shakti series of tests despite being officially warned that the thermonuclear device (S-1) tested was a dud and more tests were necessary to obtain a certified and proven 2-stage Hydrogen Bomb. As a consequence, the country is presently stuck between and betwixt, with a flawed high-yield, simulation-jigged, fusion weapon packing zero credibility, and an Indian government, first under Manmohan Singh and, since 2014, under Narendra Modi, lacking the political guts and the will to act in paramount national interest and quite literally blow up the moratorium and the NPT-driven international system with an open-ended series of thermonuclear blasts.
That will help India obtain a versatile and potent nuclear inventory of simple fission weapons, of course, but also thermonuclear weapons of various weight-to-yield ratios as the bulk force, including megaton range warheads, complimented by rapidly tested and operationalised MIRV-ed (Multiple independently-targetable re-entry vehicle-ed) Agni Iintermediate Range Ballistic Missiles and genuine Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles of 12,000-mile range. Having thus displayed the resolve, if need be, to undermine the current global nuclear order combined with India’s economic muscle will, willy-nilly, gain the country entry into the councils of great powers.
This, I have long argued, is India’s gateway to great power, and not the flim-flamming diplomcy — G-20, SCO, Quad summits, and Modi flying hither and yon. Not that such diplomacy cannot be the window dressing for an Indian policy backed by real, not fictional, thermonuclear heft. But until then India will remain what it has always been — a supplicant, except these days it begs for military high tech, jet turbine powerplant design and engineering, H1B visas and, in return, is treated indulgently at least for the nonce by the US and the West, as something of a magnified nuisance, as the dog that’s taken into the tent, as US President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s advised in another context, just so it pisses out than be kept out only for it to piss into the great power tent.
Prakash Menon’s whimsical advice to forego AI when the country is still at the starting block of capability development epitomises the sort of self-abnegatory mindset that was more prevalent in the policy establishment in the past — of giving up leverage before acquiring it, and if and when acquired, negotiating it away (as in the case of the 2008 Indo-US civilian nuclear cooperation deal that sent a whole bunch of indigenous natural uranium-fueled reactors into the international safeguards regime, thereby reducing the fissile material available for reprocessing to weapon grade)! It reflects still the traces of that thinking in government and in vast sections of the Indian intelligentsia and thinktank/academic community, who seem to be in thrall to the Hiroshima syndrome and believe that there are no good arms that can’t be done away with, failing which, controlled. Such sentiments resonate with powerful policy lobbies in the US and the West that have long sought a world where, as the late K.C. Pant memorably put it, the unarmed or the nominally armed are disarmed! But there are payoffs for such writing — offers of short term attachment in the flourishing thinktank industry in Washington/Europe and its extension, in Singapore, invitations to international seminars and conferences, etc..
That among this lot are former senior military officers, such as Prakash Menon, ought to be a matter of concern. Because, owing to their background, they are assumed by their foreign hosts to enjoy more access in government circles than they actually do, and to be privy to official thinking, which they are not and, hence, what they say and write is paid heed. They could, in the event, end up sending the wrong message about what the Indian government may be inclined to accept or may be induced/pressured into accepting bilaterally or in multilateral forums. Which is another way of saying that General Menon, et al, are, perhaps, taken seriously for no fault of their own.
Still, it doesn’t take away from the shallowness of their writings. Consider another recent, equally baffling, article by Menon (Should India make tactical nukes to counter China? Delhi’s no first-use rule has no room for it”, dated 4 April. at https://theprint.in/opinion/should-india-make-tactical-nukes-to-counter-china-delhis-no-first-use-rule has-no-room-for-it/1494421/ ) In it, the General, having swallowed whole that antique, entirely discredited, massive retaliation notion, contends, in effect, that India can do without tacnukes given that there’s no situation the threat of massive retaliation cannot solve, and hence that they are extraneous to need! Conceived as a knee-jerk reaction by the US early in the Cold War when the Soviet Union enjoyed massive conventional military superiority but had no atom bomb, the massive retalition idea was quickly discarded once Moscow tested a fission weapon in 1949. Then again, Menon is a votary of massive retaliation, not because he has given it thought, but likely because he does not want to stray far from the safety of the gazetted nuclear doctrine of January 3, 2004 featuring this concept and the No First Use principle.
By way of negativing tacnukes for the country, for instance, he dismisses the promised early use of tacnukes in a losing conventional war by Pakistan by saying India prepares to only fight limited wars and, in any case, that the mere presence of nuclear weapons on both sides dampens their nuclear ardour. As regards China, he accepts at face value its claim that it doesn’t possess tactical nuclear weapons and, moreover, that because a “big fight” is not what, he thinks, the PLA has in in mind to wage against India, that nuclear weapons use won’t come into the picture. Voila! why tacnukes? Such naivete and gullibility is excusable in an undergrad student, but in a Lieutenant General, albeit retired, it is positively alarming if such attitude is assumed to permeate the officer corps in the armed services. It certainly explains why Beijing finds it so easy, time and again, to get the better of India.
It turns out though that General Menon’s take on the country’s nuclear deterrent stance does not even fit reality! National Security Adviser to Manmohan Singh, his namesake, Shivshankar Menon, has written and spoken on numerous occasions about the fact that there may be military situations in which India could opt for nuclear first use and that, for all intent and purposes, the government and the Strategic Forces Command, unbenownst to Prakash Menon, long ago reverted, for practical reasons, to punitive retaliation/flexible response strategy touted by the 1998 draft doctrine produced by the first National Security Advisory Board, which posture, ipso facto, requires a large stock of tacnukes.
This doctrinal reversion has not been publicly ballyhooed; perhaps it should be so the likes of the Lt. General don’t consistently go off on the wrong track. It indicates there is more flexibility in the country’s response calculus than the former Military Adviser (MA) to the National Security Council (NSC) is in the know of. His advice that punitive response strategy replace massive retaliation is his contribution to the country’s debate on nuclear deterrence! But he apparently has no idea why punitive response mandates more tacnukes in the Indian arsenal which, in turn, undercuts his advocacy for ‘No Tacnukes’! (He may care to read my 2002 tome Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security for the deterrence literature-cum-Cold War experience underpinnings for why a punitive response strategy to be credible requires a big stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons of 2, 5,10 kiloton yields.)
There is, however, a curious aspect to the doctrinal rectification that Menon seeks. Such a modified doctrine, per conclusions drawn from Shivshankar Menon’s statements, has been in place since 2011-2014 when the General was, as mentioned, MA to NSC. That he knew nothing about this change confirms what is common knowledge that the Military Adviser is no part, and has never been, of any nuclear decisionmaking loop in government or the military. Indeed, as far as I know, no one holding that post has been allowed anywhere near Trombay. But it is still hard to account for Menon’s ignorance of a basic doctrinal change as realised in the field, and calls for more situtional awareness on his part. Absent that, Menon seems quite as much at sea as most everybody else in government and the military insofar as the nuts and bolts of nuclear deterrence are concerned, which is what AI and tacnukes are about.
[PTI Attack on Lahore Corps Commander’s residence]
The televised attacks by a crowd loyal to Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreeq-e-Insaaf (PTI) party, of Imran’s followers running amuck, torching the residence of IV Corps Commander (Lahore) are simply astonishing. General Headquarters (GHQ) Rawalpindi too came under attack, as did the compound of the Peshawar Corps commander. What is unfolding across the border has the feel of a popular uprising — a revolution even. Pakistan looks to be in the throes of what Imran desired: A “jihad for freedom”.
It is the first time in the seven decades of its existence that Pakistan is witnessing the army — the self-professed guardian of the Pakistan Ideology and the Pakistani State which has grown fat feasting on the country’s meagre resources, under direct and immense pressure from the masses, who until yesterday thought the army could do no wrong. The World Bank imposed austerity regime on an imports-fixated Pakistan economy has squeezed the common man with 30% plus inflation rate and a value-depleted Pakistani ruppee (300 P-ruppees today buy one US dollar). Notwithstanding, the Pakistan army still lives high on the hog. Fed up with the military’s long standing puppet master’s role in the politics of the country, the Pakistani people have turned on it.
The immediate provocation was the arrest of Imran Khan by the paramilitary Rangers operating under the direction of the army’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). He was shanghied from the High Court premises, pummelled into an armoured police vehicle, and simply made to disappear. No one knows where he is. The former prime minister is charged with corruption, in the main, for the double-tripping of monies worth Rs 50 billion (190 million pounds) siphoned from the exchequer via UK banks and returned to Pakistan, a transaction facilitated by the real estate tycoon of ill-repute, Malik Riaz. Riaz is known for having army generals in his ample pocket, courtesy gifts of houses and plots in colonies he has developed on land his uniformed friends have helped him secure by fair, but mostly foul, means.
In any case, the 140-odd official charges against Imran announced by the Home Minister Rana Sanaullah, are not important.
What is significant is that the Game of Dare that Pakistan army and Imran have been engaged in, in the last 4-5 months has finally come to a head. Ironically, it is the army’s one-time pet and political creation who has turned on the army, confident now that he has successfully mobilised much of the population, especially in Punjab, and freed himself and PTI of the army’s control, that he can ride the people’s support into power and owe GHQ, Rawalpindi nothing. For this goal to be realized, however, requires the current government of Shabaz Sharif to call elections which it won’t do because it is sure to lose. Army can of course force Shabaz’s hand, which it is disinclined to do because it shares with him bad feelings for Imran and PTI.
Post-retirement the former army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa was time and again goaded by Imran Khan who publicly blamed him for unseating him as PM and installing the Shabaz Sharif regime run remotely by the London-based Mian Nawaz, the current prime minister’s older sibling and ruling party founder. It highlighted a fact of political life in Pakistan that no one is hoisted into power in Islamabad without the Pakistan army assisting in his elevation. It was, therefore, mortifying to GHQ, Rawalpindi, to find Imran biting the hand that had fed him.
It didn’t take long for the army to retaliate. ISI revealed in drips personal telephone conversations involving Imran’s third wife, Bushra Bibi. One such had the Bibi loudly upbraiding a servant for his handling of items taken from the toshakhana! Upping the ante, Imran responded by arranging leaks of Bajwa’s imcome tax returns that showed a phenomenal increase in the General’s wealth over his six-year term, apart from numerous prized plots all over the country, their title deeds magically materializing in the names of family members, including a suddenly rich daughter-in-law. Ouch! That hurt because Bajwa was considered a relative straight arrow, among the cleaner corps commnders, when he was picked by Nawaz to be COAS! Unrelenting, Imran then shoved army into a corner with friendly reporters encouraged to share with the public confidential conversations Bajwa had with them in early 2022 in which he candidly talked about the army being in dire straits and, for want of spares and POL (petroleum, oil, lubricants) unable to fight a war — the implied reason for his arranging with New Delhi in 2019 a ceasefire on the Line of Control in J&K.
What the Pakistan army is not used to is a political leader it propped up and then deposed fighting back by getting the people on his side. This is what Imran has done. Indeed, the army brass was given fair warning about violent mass response in case it tried to take him out. The Director-General, Inter-Services Public Relations, two days ago reacted by threatening Imran with consequences if he crossed the redline of continuing with his public campaign against Bajwa and the army.
This has always been the pattern: The Pakistan army chooses the man/party to be the “mukhota” for its rule and conducts elections to give their selected regime legitimacy. Invariably, that person/party fails to deliver on promises, or he becomes a nuisance or so unpopular because of corruption or unpopular policies that he becomes a political liability. Thereupon the army brass ditch him lest the sparks of the people’s discontent conflagrate into a wild-spreading fire that engulfs them. Then GHQ, Rawalpindi, acts — orchestrates street protests, makes life uncomfortable, giving it the excuse to replace the incumbent with someone new or, as in Shabaz’s case, someone known and old, using elections for the purpose of such installation.
With the people all riled and roused by Imran’s fiery rhetoric, it is a tricky situation Pakistan army finds itself in. It cannot hold a show trial and bung Imran into jail let alone hang him on trumped up charges as General Zia ul-Haq did Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, or force him into comfortable exile in Britain ostensibly on health grounds as Bajwa managed with Nawaz Sharif, but which like effort was rebuffed by the Pakistan People’s Party chief Asif Ali Zardari.
If nothing drastic is possible as regards Imran Niazi and the coalition headed by the Pakistan Muslim League led by the Nawaz-Shabaz duo cannot be relied on to win the next general elections, then what is the army under General Asim Muneer and his cohort to do without losing for it the privileged position it has enjoyed since 1958? It was in that year that tiring of a new PM every other month, Ayub Khan simply kicked all the politicians out and introduced to the people of Pakistan the downside of martial law government.
In far more testing social, economic and political circumstances roiled by terrorist actions of Tehreeq-e-Taliban Pakistan intent on establishing sharia in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province and the Baloch liberation groups, running the country, what to talk of governing it, has become virtually impossible. GHQ, Rawalpindi, may decide to cut its losses, withdraw into cantonments and let the politicians fight it out on the streets, which will trigger anarchy and who knows what the outcome might be for the army? Alternatively, it can exercise its tried and tested option — impose martial law. Such a move will have the backing for sure of the Shabaz government. which viscerally hates Imran and his PTI and, most importantly, of the higher bureaucracy, which has always preferred military rule to the uncertainties of electoral politics and civilian Raj.
[At SCO meeting of Defence Ministers — Rajnath Sigh and General Li Shangfu]
In a separate bilateral April 27 on the occasion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting of defence ministers, Rajnath Singh and People’s Liberation Army General Li Shangfu began and ended their session with the Indian leader refusing to shake hands with his Chinese counterpart to show host country India’s disquiet about China’s continued unwillingness to disengage from forward positions in the Demchok area and in the Depsang Plains where PLA is in commanding position. The Narendra Modi government’s expectation was that the first step involving the pullback especially by the Indian Special Frontier Force unit entrenched on the Kailash Range heights and, therefore, directly threatening the sub-sectior-wise important PLA garrison in Moldo, would be quickly followed up by the Chinese withdrawing from the Y-Junction on the Depsang Plains and the Demchok area. The perennial sap that it is, India found its expectation belied as the Chinese failed to deliver on the promise. Instead was witnessed the predictable spectacle of Shangfu acting as if nothing whatever is amiss in Ladakh and pleading for New Delhi to end the military standoff and normalise relations, entirely ignoring Rajnath’s assertion that the Chinese need to restore the status quo ante as existed in Spring 2019 before the PLA got into blocking positions, annexed that belt of Indian territory and, by way of reminder of who is boss, precipitated the bloody encounter on the Galwan River.
Not that Rajnath’s snub is going to resonate with Shangfu in the manner, say, US President Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ pointedly ignoring Chinese Premier Zhouenlai’s proffered hand did in Geneva at the 1953 Indo-China peace conference. It was so resounding a public insult and hurt Beijing’s amour propre so deeply US President Richard Nixon, to salve the Chinese ego, made amends 20 years later when seeking an “opening to China”. He approached Chairman Maozedong with a big ingratiating smile and hands outsretched well before he got to anywhere near the aging supremo. America was forgiven but the incident has never been forgotton by Beijing which insists that Chinese diplomats still affect a certain hauteur when interacting with US officials at all levels and in every instance.
A weak-willed India and its government historically lacking strategic vision and thinking, tactial military nous and, despite six decades of experience of Chinese behaviour, has willfully suspended its disbelief and, by way of a default policy, accepted new sets of promises and commitments to maintain peace and harmony on the border. The result of the Indian government and its negotiators being so easily suckered is that Chinese leaders, PLA generals and government officials alike in meetings with their Indian counterparts can barely conceal their contempt (reflected in the above pic: a tense Rajnath facing an amused Shangfu!)
Beijing plays for time and tests India’s patience, straight facedly repeating the stock phrases about India, in effect, needing to move on and, by the by, to help the Chinese economy get back on its feet by accepting increased Chinese exports even if it means exacerbating the current trade deficit of some $70 billion!
But if Rajnath’s disdainful gesture is not a one-off thing but, rather, a calculated turn in the country’s strategy — a harbinger of a hard-nosed attitude and more stringent China policy, then the following logical follow-up steps are necessary:
For starters, instead of tippy-toeing around the option, New Delhi has to begin actually applying the tourniquet on bilateral trade, gradually closing off market access, firstly, to Chinese light manufactures and capital consumer goods (mobile telephones of every description, MG cars, Haier household goods — airconditioners, washing machines, etc.) and, secondly, shutting the door on the Chinese teleecom giants — Huawei, ZTE, etc,
The trouble is the government does not seem to be very resolute about a more confrontationist policy. The Indian government ruled that no telecom company, public sector or private sector, can go in for any 5G Chinese telecom gear for system modernization or conversion. Does this ban not uniformly apply? If it does then why has Vodafone Idea, for example, not got the message? Because recently Vodafone chose the Chinese company ZTE’s 5-G transmission gear worth Rs 220 crore to upgrade its network. Vodafone did so, it confessed, because of the competitive price on offer. But low priced bids, everybody knows by now, is made possible solely because of institutionalised subsidies provided such firms by the Chinese government. Except, such subsidies can be the reason, under World Trade Organization rules, to kick Chinese companies out of the Indian market for good by imposing punitive tariffs on them to make their products uncompetitive price-wise. It is a legal remedy the Indian government has so far not availed of regarding any commodity or goods when, in fact, no Chinese manufacture is not state subsidised in some manner or the other.
More worryingly, how did the ZTE-Vodafone transaction manage to escape the attention of various agencies of government tasked with putting an end to such deals? Surely, the National Security Council Secretariat has not approved of this contract as is required to be done. But if this deal is proceeding regardless, is it an indication — and it is the best spin on this development — that the Modi regime is leaving a little negotiating slack for itself, trying to see if the abeyance of a ban on residual deals involving Chinese telecom tech can be used to lever more give on Beijing’s part in border negotiations? This reading seems right considering the Coordinator for National Cybersecurity, retired army Major General Rajesh Pant, did not respond to a press query regarding the ZTE hardware sale in question.
If such deals are perceived as genuine leverage against China, then the Indian government is wrong on two counts. Firstly, the Xi Jinping dispensation has showed time and again it would rather the export revenues of Huawei/ZTE plummet than cede contested territory. Secondly, even if any concessions are made by the Xi Jinping government it will be to a United States it considers its peer rival and whose market it cannot do without, not to India. For instance, Huawei tried to offset Washington’s security concerns by offering American telecom companies source codes and operating algorithms for its 5G gear. No such offer has been made to India.
That is why vis a vis China, India, policy-wise, is in a zero sum context and has to blunt with the severest measures Beijing’s attitude that it can extract territorial, economic, trade, and political benefits by pressuring New Delhi and running diplomatic circles around the Indian government.
It is best to know that any Chinese 5G gear integrated into private sector telecom networks will instantly compromise the national tcommunications grid, by providing Chinese official hackers the pathways to penetrate only minimally protected central and state government communications networks. In fact, a Chinese telecom customer in Europe such as Germany, for instance, which has otherwise been reluctant to follow Washington’s lead, has become mindful of potential security breaches that could undermine its domestic and NATO communications systems. It has ordered its entire communications grid to be purged of all Chinese-origin components. German agencies have concluded — and this is of particular relevanve to India — that even if such gear is inspected and checked, and Chinese source codes are made available, not all embedded bugs can be detected or neutralised, and hence it is best to keep Chinese telecom equipment out.
(2) Treat all active negotiation channels with China, standoffishly including the apex Joint Working Group involving NSA level talks to resolve border issues, in the same pro forma way with designated Indian reps attending the meetings, marking their presence, and repeating the Indian position of no normalcy without restoration of the status quo ante on the LAC (as of Spring 2019), and showing no impatience whatsoever. It will signal to China that two can play at this game and that India is there for the long haul, that bilateral ties will continue to be in a political limbo for as long as it takes Beijing to restore the old LAC and, in line with the new, hopefully, strictly reciprocal policy, that this stance will now be backed by a slow but definite closing of the trade window and of market access.
Let’s see how Beijing reacts if such a course were followed..
Council for Strategic Affairs Distinguished Lecture: India’s Nuclear Doctrine: Need for Change Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 10:00 AM available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vR-a6iddrA
Something of interest: In the interactive part of my above virtual talk, you’ll find Ambassador William Burns partaking of the discussion and suggesting as an aside that he hadn’t heard about the planned joint Indo-Israeli aerial attack on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons complex at Kahuta (outside Islamabad) in the 1982-1983 period — with Israel providing all the hard power and India the use of its air force bases and other military infrastructure in support of this operation. Israel the year before on 7 June, 1981, had taken out the Iraqi reactor complex, it may be recalled, with precisely this mix of F-16s to strike and F-15s flying combat air patrols to neutralise any resistance by Iraqi interceptors.
Coming from the current Director, US Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns, his professed ignorance of any such Kahuta strike operation is unbelievable. Then again, the fact that CIA was deliberately kept in the dark by the Israelis is, well, believable. The Israelis may have calculated, or had an inkling, that any forewarning would lead to Washington pressuring Tel Aviv to cease and desist from such preemptive action that would have killed off a potential nuclear threat in the bud. Israel’s doubts about US intentions may have found echoes on the Indian side considering Indian intel agencies began tracking 1979 onwards Chinese moves to transfer fully worked nuclear weapon and missile designs, materials and manufacturing expertise to Pakistan.
Dengxiaoping on his January 29, 1979, state visit to the US had intimated — in a sense, sought permission from, President Jimmy Carter, to carry out such transfer. He got an OK, whence US’s complicity in China’s nuclear missile arming of Pakistan. By 1978, the Soviet-leaning and India-friendly People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan regime of Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin was well ensconced in Kabul, and was seen by Carter’s NSA Zbigniew Brzenzinski as both tilting the power balance in South Asia against the US and posing a threat to Pakistan. its pliable ally in the region. With a Soviet-friendly government of Indira Gandhi in India as well, it may have convinced the Carter Administration to let China onpass nuclear weapons and missile technologies to Pakistan. Indeed, General Zia ul-Haq building on Washington’s antipathy towards India dating from the Kissinger era used precisely the emerging great power situation post-1987 Saur Revolution in Afghanistan to justify Washington’s turning a blind eye to, and therefore, encouraging China’s nuclear assistance.
In my talk I erred twice (because I misremembered dates). I said the Kahuta strike operation was slated for “1986”, when it was actually 1982-83. And, I said Deng sought permission for nuclear weapons aid to Pakistan from George W Bush when, clearly, it was from President Jimmy Carter. This is to set the record straight.
China’s unexpected diplomatic success in finessing a deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran — the poles, respectively, of sunni and shi’ia Islam between which the Muslim world is ostensibly strung, has sparked a little peace-making race.
Because all international negotiations are for geopolitical gain, it may be reasonably assumed that Beijing’s planting itself so conspicuously in Riyadh and in Tehran, has ensured for China virtually limitless sources of oil and gas to meet its burgeoning energy needs. With Gwadar on the Baloch coast too in its grasp, the prospect of its energy traffic through Malacca and Sunda Straits being disrupted at will by India, US and any hard-headed littoral and offshore state in Southeast Asia, singly or in groups, is now less of a strategic concern. With this combination of energy source and Gwadar, the Malacca-Sunda bottleneck stands outflanked, making possible an apparently uninterrupted and uninterruptible energy lifeline to serve both its “all-weather friend”, Pakistan, and its Far-western provinces (Chinese-occupied Tibet and Xinjiang, in the main) that are otherwise cutoff from the sea and, therefore, the world.
Encouraged by its negotiating success in West Asia, China may be preparing to reprise its role in Ukraine. It has had the immediate effect of blunting the effects of bad press its military coercion against Taiwan is attracting. With Emannuel Macron, the peripatetic President of France who, perhaps to escape the labour unrest he uncorked in his country has taken to foreign travel to calm the political jitters, is in the forefront of European leaders asking Chinese President Xi Jinping to capitalise on his close relations with the Russian bossman,Vladimir Putin, and end the conflict in Ukraine. Realizing he may have gone out on a limb in courting Xi Macron, post-Beijing visit, urged all countries to eschew following either US or China!
These developments find the Narendra Modi government in something of a pickle. China’s Saudi-Iranian success has transcended in diplomatic and strategic value India’s policy in the Gulf of courting Saudi Arabia and UAE while tippy-toeing hand-in-hand with Iran — to-date its stellar diplomatic achievement. Now there’s an opportunity offered by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s appeal to New Delhi to use its good offices to get Kremlin to accept a peace deal, an appeal the visiting Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister, Emine Dzhaparova, formally reiterated yesterday in MEA while also trying to cadge an invitation from Modi for Zelenskyy to attend the G-20 September summit in India. G-20 working group meetings in Arunachal Pradesh on March 25-26 went off without a hitch with China boycotting it, and the one scheduled in Srinagar (Jammu & Kashmir) on May 22-23 may not be attended by China (to win brownie points with Islamabad). The proof of success of Modi’s Gulf policy will be Saudi Arabia’s participation in it, and will clue us to the attitude of the Organization of Islamic Countries on the Kashmir issue.
A lot of successful diplomacy being one upmanship, Modi can hardly resist the chance of outshining Xi by bringing peace to Ukraine. So, let’s set the context before considering the pros and cons of India’s foraying into high value peacemaking and the likely results.
The bulk upload to the net of secret US intelligence files, presumably by a Pentagon insider, relating to Kyiv’s current military strategy and plans reveals Ukraine’s military limitations in waging an unending war. Russia is far better placed particularly with regard to military manpower. Putin has been reluctant to mobilize his country’s resources to the fullest because, well, he doesn’t need to. He has other means available to him to bring Ukraine to its knees. For one thing, the Wagner Group of fighters comprising prisoners and criminals trawled from Russian jails and penal colonies who are incentivised not to fail, has fetched Moscow unheralded success in the crucial battles on the Bakhmuth-Soledar Front. It has made nonsense of Kyiv’s plans for an offensive southwards and eastwards to cut off Russia’s early established Donbas landbridge to the Crimean Peninsula, which last was bloodlessly annexed by Putin in 2014.
In fact, the leaked American documents paint a frightfully grim picture of Ukrainian forces suffering hugely from attrition, from sheer physical exhaustion and, worse, fast-depleting ammunition and artillery shell stocks requiring ammo, for instance, to be rationed to its frontline troops. Nothing is better guaranteed to break the Ukrainian fighting spirit. Rapid NATO re-supply cannot correct the emerging disparities. While Abrams and Leopard tanks, armoured combat vehicles, lethal drones, and long range guns firing precision-guided munitions pulled from NATO reserves can be hauled to forward Ukrainian battlefields, and operational support from US cyber wherewithal and satellite-borne realtime intel feeds can be upped at any time, soon there may be no Ukrainians to man these weapons systems, crowning the cynical US strategy of fighting to the last Ukrainian. Given Ukraine’s smaller population base, the conditions are going to tilt more and more against its military, . This is why Zelenskyy is calling for peaceful foreign interventions to secure an end to the fighting. A desperate Kyiv is happy to accept such help from any quarter, and especially China and India.
We know what China’s “skin in the game” is; what is India’s?
In his recent meetings with Indian foreign minister S Jaishankar, the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken encouraged India to get in on Kyiv’s side, if not by openly supporting the Ukranian cause than by utilizing New Delhi’s long standing ties with Moscow and Prime Minister Modi’s personal rapport with Putin to get Kremlin to negotiate. The Indian government has not so far reacted positively to Washington’s prompting or Kyiv’s repeated appeals because, being terminally risk-averse, its instinct and impulse in most such situations is to plonk for discretion as the better part of venturesomeness. The fear of an adverse turn of events such that an Indian peace initiative turns into a political and diplomatic liability is the looming spectre influencing official thinking. Because, absent the sort of economic and strategic cushion that China can fall back on, New Delhi could end up alienating Russia for pushing too hard, and earning Washington’s ire for not pushing hard enough. And this is where matters stand.
The problem is this: New Delhi’s obvious priority as mediator will be to obtain a ceasefire. But why would Putin agree to one when he sees the Donbas corridor connecting the mainland to the Crimean Peninsula and the Black Sea secured, Russian forces entrenched roughly on the line Kharkov-Kherson, Ukrainian forces wilting across the entire front, and US and NATO unwilling to follow up their arms supply measures by putting their own boots on the ground? And, if Ukraine is left to fend for itself, how long can it last? Any which way one sees it, Ukraine will be compelled to accept peace on Russian terms, except the longer the war lasts the greater the possiblility of that country quite literally being ground to dust. But, why would Putin agree to India pulling Ukraine’s chestnuts out of the fire?
For two reasons. The best way for Putin to keep India engaged but distanced from the US-NATO led security coalition towards which it is gravitating, is to enhance Modi’s global stature by crowning his efforts at mediating the Ukraine conflict with success. Kremlin has nothing to lose by allowing such a peace because the solution will not stray far from the prevailing staus quo on the ground. It will involve terminating the carnage, formalising the territorial bifurcation with much of the Donbas absorbed into Russia and with provision for rationalizing the new border along straighter lines to enable consolidation of Moscow’s control of Crimea and command of most of the Black Sea coast — the original objective of its “special operation”. Ukraine can return to normalcy and to rebuilding and economically reviving the country with the help of a mini-“Marshall Fund” programme for Ukrainian reconstruction, to which Russia could be persuaded to contribute notionally, and thereby indirectly to accept some responsibility. This combined with a formal undertaking from the US and the West to not pursue Putin in the International Court at the Hague for human rights abuses, will put a closure to a trying experience for the world at-large. Modi will forever be beholden to Putin and Russia for burnishing his reputation, and will be Moscow’s friend for life.
The other reason for Putin to drop such a massive diplomatic success into Modi’s lap is metastrategic. It will raise India’s stock and, by the by, cut Xi Jinping, who is wallowing in his recent diplomatic triumphs, and China down to size. Historical Russian wariness of China coupled to the reality of an overweaning Beijing regime is actually a hurdle in Russia’s realising its strategic designs in Eurasia. Moreover, the longer the resource-draining war in Ukraine continues, the more Russia is weakened and China grows more powerful in relative terms. The all-round disparity between the two countries will widen until soon enough Putin will be reduced to a supplicant in Xi’s court. It is a denouement Putin will devoutly wish to avoid at all cost.
The incentive for Modi and India to midwife peace in Ukraine is, at a minimum, to deny Xi and China diplomatic and political edge in the internationaal arena. Building up India is in the strategic interest of both the US and Russia and curiously for the same reason — India as a credible economic, political, and military counterweight to China in Asia and the Indo-Pacific will ease the strategic burden and uncertainties for the two great powers who are rivals but are finding it equally difficult to get a handle on China.
These are the fortuitous circumstances India finds itself in. Modiji, don’t miss this opportunity — take a dive into big tme peacemaking. Who knows, there might be a Nobel Prize for Peace awaiting you as reward for your endeavours! After all Barrack Obama won one for doing nothing unless you call making that one high-sounding speech in Prague in April 2009 promising a nuclear disarmed world, something.
[Explosion of the Russian “too big to use” 60 megaton — “Czar Bomba” over the test site at Semipalatinsk on 30th October 1961]
A bit of serious reading is required by Indian decisonmakers and lay public alike on the issue of the missing thermonuclear security of the country in a milieu in which, even in government and the military, “opinions”, not informed views and perspectives, generally prevail. Hence, I am reprodcing below an article that the Indian army’s thinktank — Centre for Land Warfare Studies, New Delhi, requested me to write for the winter 2022 edition of its professional publication — CLAWS Journal. It is featured in pages numbered 25-43 of the recently released Journal issue.
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Getting Serious About Thermonuclear Security:
Need for New Tests, Augmented Capability and First Use Doctrine & Posture
By BHARAT KARNAD
Abstract: India has been an economic and military punching bag for China. This is India’s fault because it has done less than nothing to counter the pummeling except occasionally reacting (as on the Galwan) and then only defensively. It is time India, a nuclear laggard, adopted the strategy conventionally weak nuclear weapons states (Pakistan against India, North Korea against the US) have successfully wielded against stronger adversaries by threatening nuclear first use, and by substantiating such threat by laying down short fuse, forward nuclear tripwires. For an India that has historically quailed before China, making this new more assertive stance credible will require significant measures — resumption of thermonuclear testing, emplacing a differentiated two-tiered doctrine that replaces the impractical “massive retaliation” strategy with flexible and proportional response notions pivoting on nuclear first use but only versus China while retaining the “retaliation only” concept for everyone else, and alighting on a tiered posture supported by the buildup of ‘soft’ strategic infrastructure (a separate strategic budget, specialist nuclear officer cadres in the three services, and a mechanism for oversight of nuclear weapons designing activity). It is a doable strategy the Indian government should not shy away from.
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India from the get-go did little right, nuclear military-wise, and has paid the price for it. Strung out between moral pretensions, ideals of a peaceful world, strategic myopia, and foreign pressure, Indian governments have not pursued a straightforward policy the nuclear visionary, Homi J. Bhabha, urged 1962 War onwards — a series of open-ended underground tests of progressively higher yields culminating in a thermonuclear arsenal.[1] It was a practicable policy once the weapons threshold was attained in March 1964.[2] Instead, in the following decades there were sporadic nuclear tests aimed at scoring political points or making short term political capital, not securing a credible strategic deterrent. Bhabha’s strategic vision, moreover, got directed by the Trombay leadership of the 1970s and 1980s into the small arsenal-minimum deterrence channel that conformed with government views.[3] It led to the testing “moratorium” in the wake of the 1998 Shakti series despite the government being informed of the thermonuclear/boosted fission device (S-1) “fizzling”, and to the 2005 civil nuclear cooperation deal with the United States conditioned on India not testing again. More alarming still, the nuclear weapons programme was nearly terminated by Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1965 in return for joint US-UK security assurances.[4] And but for some inspired bureaucratic shuffling by an MEA official (M.A. Vellodi), the Bomb project would have been axed by Prime Minister Morarji Desai, ten years later, on the altar of Gandhian values.[5] It would seem Indian nuclear weapons face greater peril from the country’s leadership than from external adversaries.
Whereas Pakistan had a clear idea why it wanted nuclear weapons — to prevent India from doing a Bangladesh in what remained of that country post-1971 War, there was no such clarity on the Indian side.[6] Nuclear weapons were considered a moral abomination and danger to world peace and, after the 1974 test, as variously an antidote for chemical and biological weapons and even for terrorism. Even a humiliating military defeat in 1962 did not result in the hard-earned capability being converted into nuclear weapons. It is not clear why getting to the nuclear well but not drinking from it was thought to serve the national interest. It set the precedent for dealing the same way with other advanced technologies as well. The multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle (MIRV) technology, for instance, has been on the DRDO shelf since 2001-2002, but permission for prototype testing is still awaited.[7]
It is not clear why getting to the nuclearwell but not drinking from it was thought to serve the national interest.
The country is in an extended strategic rut, but this is not recognized because of a sense of complacency – the Indian Establishment’s besetting sin where national security is concerned. Three sets of corrective decisions need to be taken fast: to (1) resume open-ended nuclear tests to obtain a panoply of proven nuclear and high-yield thermonuclear weapons and, in parallel, rapid test-launches and induction into service of long range MIRV-ed missiles; it will instantly endow the Indian strategic deterrent with clout, credibility and reach; (2) revise the “massive retaliation” doctrine with ‘credible minimum deterrence’ undertones into a two-tiered set of guidelines centered on nuclear First Use to tackle China, and retention of retaliation only principle for Pakistan, and configuring a deterrent posture accordingly; and (3) install the ‘soft’ but vital infrastructure supportive of the strategic forces. This article briefly discusses why these decisions are necessary.
Resumed thermonuclear testing is key
Commonsense is a precious commodity in short supply in the Indian milieu when it comes to nuclear weapons. Unless a new weapon technology is iteratively tested, its performance proved in all conditions to the satisfaction of the end-user, it is not deemed a reliable battle-ready system. It is a metric the armed services use for conventional military hardware. So, it is curious the Indian military accepts the performance of the more consequential thermonuclear armaments on the say-so of the government/Defence Research & Development Organization (DRDO)/Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). This is, perhaps, because the uniformed brass does not want to make a fuss over something it knows little about. Naturally, the judgment of experts is trusted. Except, the experts in this case are the very BARC-DRDO scientists and technologists who design and produce these weapons, and have a vested interest in proclaiming them first rate and, in the past, have rendered advice the government wanted to hear. For example, regarding the 1998 thermonuclear test.
Despite K. Santhanam, Director, Field Testing, Pokhran, writing to the government immediately after the S-1 test on May 11, 1998, that the hydrogen bomb had “fizzled” and advising more tests, the Vajpayee regime declared it a roaring success, and announced on May 28 a testing moratorium.[8] R. Chidambaram, then chairman of the atomic energy commission (AEC), and his BARC cohort did two things to provide scientific cover for furthering the government’s political agenda of improving relations with the US but at the expense of the national interest. They claimed success for the hydrogen bomb on the basis of unconvincing seismic data, and despite nuclear veterans such as P.K. Iyengar, former chairman of the atomic energy commission and initiator of thermonulear weapons project, and A.N. Prasad, former director, BARC, strongly contesting such claims and offering technical assessments of the failure. [9] Chidambaram further asserted that India need never test again because between computer simulation and component testing the country would always have dependable thermonuclear weapons.[10] Chidambaram and his successor at AEC, Anil Kakodkar, have been charged with “dereliction” for “obscuring the failures of their thermonuclear device design”, which Ashley J. Tellis suggests, getting the sequence wrong, “spurred Vajpayee’s decision to end nuclear testing prematurely before the performance of India’s highest yield warhead – which even at its maximum delivers just about 20 percent of the explosive power of China’s largest weapon – could be credibly demonstrated.”[11] In any case, it enabled Vajpayee to forge the ‘Next Steps in Strategic Partnership’ with Washington, and his successor Manmohan Singh to sign the civil nuclear deal with the US conditioned on India not testing again.[12] The nuclear deal and Chidambaram’s stance did lasting damage to the weapons programme.
Computer simulation can replace physical nuclear weapon tests only if a country has “exascale” computational capability (i.e.,“one billion billion” – 18 zeroes — operations per second) that only the US, Russia, and China have. Place the fastest Indian supercomputer, Pratyush, with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology capable of 20 petaflops (15 zeroes) capacity alongside, and the problem becomes evident.[13] Assuming optimistically that BARC has a 150 petaflop supercomputer (a level Pratyush expects to reach, finances permitting), it is still dwarfed by the US ‘Summit’ and the Chinese ‘Sunway TaihuLight’ exascale supercomputers. More daunting still, in October 2021 China claimed revolutionary technological breakthroughs with its ‘Zuchongzhi 2.1’ supercomputer featuring superconducting quantum computing and photonics quantum computing that is “10 million times faster” than ‘Summit’![14]
India has to conduct open ended tests to secure a modicum of such data, which will be infinitely more accurate than information derived from ICF and computer simulation.
Next, consider the scale of resources required. What China spends is unknown. But US, for example, spends upwards of $5 billion annually on simulating thermonuclear explosions at its many weapons labs, and has as many as 700 highly rated scientists and engineers at each of these locations. These simulations are driven, moreover, by realtime injection of data from actual miniature thermonuclear explosions produced at an inertial confinement fusion facility (ICF), where plutonium pellets are bombarded by high intensity lasers to create fusion phenomena.[15] Because India lacks the financial, technological and skilled manpower resources to replicate such experimental and computational capability in scale, resumption of underground thermonuclear tests is imperative. Vast explosion physics and material science data collected from actual weapon tests create a body of information about how temperature, pressure, density and other factors affect plutonium during a thermonuclear explosion and assist in designing better weapons. India has to conduct open ended tests to secure a modicum of such data, which will be infinitely more accurate than information derived from ICF and computer simulation.
The US has carried out 1,032 nuclear tests and fired 1,132 devices/weapons prototypes with total actual yield of 196,514 kilotons; USSR/Russia 727 tests, 981 devices fired yielded 296,837 KT; China 47 tests, 48 fired, produced 24,409 KT; North Korea six tests, six fired, yield of 197.8 KT; and Pakistan two tests, six fired yielded 51 KT. In the thermonuclear category, China has carried out nine tests, one 300KT boosted fission shot in 1965 and eight megaton (MT) weapons tests in the 3 MT-4 MT range.[16] China’s weapons programme, besides design and material help, also benefitted from Russian thermonuclear test data (as did the UK, French and Israeli fission and fusion weapons projects from American test data) and Pakistan and North Korea from Chinese test data transferred to them as part of the “rogue nuclear triad”.[17] As sensitive information sharing is ongoing within this triad, Islamabad and Pyongyang may not have to test again to enhance their strategic weapons profiles. With this triad in mind, any of the six nuclear tests, two of them thermonuclear, North Korea conducted in the last two decades offered reasonable cause to India to resume testing but New Delhi did not avail of it.
India is apparently satisfied with its three tests, six devices fired yielding a total of 70 KT, including the failed thermonuclear.[18] According to Richard Garwin, one of the premier US thermonuclear weapons designers, some 2,000 things have to go right for a fusion device to explode to full yield. How are his Indian counterparts to discern which and how many of the two thousand things went wrong with the S-1 device, without a host of new tests, leave alone design new and upgraded thermonuclear weapons based on flawed data from one fizzled test? He also added that “without nuclear tests of substantial yield, it is …impossible to have any confidence in a large-yield two-stage thermonuclear weapon”.[19] Chidambaram’s view, therefore, that a little tinkering with the basic design and some computer simulation is sufficient to validate Indian hydrogen bomb designs and upgrades, is absurd. Yet the government-BARC act as if Indian fusion weapons are the equal of thermonuclear armaments in other inventories.
In any case, if the Indian government had made up its mind not to test again, and knew it lacked ICF and the computational wherewithal, it should have at least extracted from the US its thermonuclear test data in return, the first time for the 1998 moratorium decision and, the second time, for the 2005 nuclear deal. This, incidentally, is what France did for ceasing nuclear testing after its last series of N-tests in 1996.[20] It makes one wonder why the Indian government rarely acts in the country’s best interests.
To begin doing strategically correct and impactful things for a change, the Indian government should immediately order frequent test launches of MIRV-equipped long range missiles on a speedy induction schedule to provide targeting versatility and, more urgently, full-bore thermonuclear tests of yields in the 300KT-low megaton range, and get the deep excavation work underway soonest to prepare L-shaped tunnels at depths around 2,000 metres.
The US was never in a position to prevent India from testing and weaponizing had it been determined to do so, but it offered an excuse for Indian leaders to escape making difficult decisions. Jawaharlal Nehru in the early Sixties declined to proceed with weaponization, and in 1974 Indira Gandhi got cold feet after just one test. Had either of them proceeded with nuclear weaponization Washington could have done little about it. In the emerging international “correlation of forces”, US is unlikely to impose sanctions for restarting nuclear testing because it needs India more than India needs the US, and would prefer a proven Indian thermonuclear arsenal discomfiting the PLA at the southern Asia end of the Indo-Pacific.[21]
A Two-tiered Nuclear Doctrine and Posture
The Indian establishment’s and the Indian military’s ambiguous attitude to nuclear weapons is reflected in the stock view of all and sundry that “nuclear weapons are for deterrence, not warfighting”. It undergirds the disturbing belief that possessing dread-inspiring bombs is good enough as symbols that their quality and quantity don’t matter, i.e, a 20KT Indian bomb has the same psychological and deterrent effect as a Chinese standard-issue 3.3MT warhead. This is the pixilated take on nuclear weapons and deterrence the Indian government has internalized and reflects a minimalization of nuclear weapons by political consensus. It eventuated in Prime Minister Vajpayee’s defining in Parliament on May 28, 1998, the two basic parameters of Indian nuclear doctrine and strategy — No First Use (NFU) and minimum deterrence.
A military doctrine is a guideline for action, not a straitjacket to squeeze strategy and operations into. The draft-nuclear doctrine produced by the First National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) in end-1998 encompassed Vajpayee’s parameters but, under the elastic rubric of “credible minimum nuclear deterrence” — credible relative to which adversary, minimum compared to what enemy force, and provisioned for strategic forces to grow and improve qualitatively. Inherent in NFU is the retaliation only principle, which the draft finessed to say “rapid punitive response”. It then passed into the hands of the National Security Adviser (NSA), Brajesh Mishra, a generalist civil servant of a type Dr. Santhanam dismissed as “a babe in the woods on nuclear matters.”[22]
Amateurism surfaced in several aspects. Unprecedented for any country’s nuclear doctrine, the draft document was made public supposedly to generate debate. It led, as some NSAB members had warned, to foreign public and official pressure (mainly from the US and Western Europe) to define the size and quality of the “minimum deterrent” India proposed to have. It is not known what assurances were conveyed to these countries. But the slow-paced growth of the Indian nuclear arsenal in the new millennium is, perhaps, a consequence. India could have produced 175-200 additional weapons/warheads by now using its stock of separated reactor grade plutonium to obtain an arsenal the size of China’s.[23] In any case, as of mid-2022, India had 160 weapons/warheads – the smallest nuclear weapons stock of any state, lagging behind Pakistan’s stockpile (of 165 weapons/warheads), and China’s (with 350 weapons/warheads expected to grow to 1,000-weapons by 2030).[24] Ignoring the draft doctrine, the government in 2003 formalized a “massive retaliation” strategy, and stepped into an existential muddle.[25]
Obviously, this strategy won’t work at any level against China – a comprehensively superior thermonuclear weapons-armed adversary. Mercifully, no Indian official has claimed otherwise. The infirmities in the massive retaliation strategy against Pakistan are many, and best illustrated by outlining certain contingent scenarios. The threat of the “massiveness” of response is supposed to so unnerve Islamabad as to dissuade it from initiating nuclear first use.[26] The scenario is for the Pakistani nuclearized 60mm Nasr rocket hitting the lead armoured units of an aggressing Indian formation that has broken through the forward defences, penetrated into Pakistani territory, and is poised for a “break out”, providing the Pakistan army with plausible cause for going nuclear. Needing to make good on its threat, India will have to decide how massive its “massive retaliation” has to be? Clearly, destroying several Pakistani tanks in return won’t do, but an enemy defensive formation? Or, by way of jumping a step in the escalation ladder and pursuing the Russian “escalate to de-escalate”-strategy, attacking Pakistan’s II Strike Corps headquarters in Multan with a bigger tacnuke?[27] The problem with escalation inherent in the intended Indian practice of massive retaliation is that it will deplete the weapons stockpile faster than Pakistanis can fire their weapons singly or in salvo, because the logic of such response requires more weapons to be expended in retaliation to achieve a greater level of destruction than is suffered by India from Pakistani first strike and follow-on attacks. Soon enough in this action-larger reaction sequence, Indian weapons will be exhausted even as Pakistan retains a residual force. In short, minimum deterrence is not compatible with “massive retaliation” strategy.
There’s another aspect to consider. Should Pakistan breach the nuclear taboo, the nature of subsequent action could be taken out of New Delhi’s hands by forces of nature. The winds in the winter campaign season blow west to east and could turn a Pakistani tactical nuclear strike inside Pakistan into a strategic war. How? Clouds bearing the resulting radioactivity could be carried by the prevailing winds into India where populations in border town and cities would be contaminated by radioactive rain, compelling the Indian government to skip the tactical response option and hit Pakistani cities.[28] Any which way massive retaliation is gamed it leads to unedifying outcomes — why it was jettisoned by both US and USSR early in the nuclear age.[29] It makes sense for India to revert to a flexible and proportional retaliation nuclear strategy implied in the “punitive response” notion featured in the NSAB draft doctrine. It provides a longer fuse, more political-military offramps for de-escalation, and dovetails with a small-sized nuclear force.[30]
Actually, Pakistan is not a serious threat and does not merit nuclear attention for two reasons. One, because the exchange ratio in a nuclear war so lopsidedly favours India – two Indian metro cities for the extinction of Pakistan as a social organism, in the Spenglerian sense. Pakistan army will do nothing to facilitate such a denouement.[31] And secondly, total war is inconceivable because India-Pakistan conflicts have historically been encounters of manoeuvre restricted in time, space and intensity and with little collateral damage. Nuclear sabre-rattling apart, shared culture, history, ethnicity, language, religion and social norms are, apparently, powerful inhibitors of wars of annihilation.[32]
China, on the other hand, is a different proposition and demands a more aggressive approach. Its policy driver is its vision of its centrality in the world with policies geared to subduing neighbouring states/regions into acknowledging this. Disrupting Beijing’s “tianxia” geopolitical design and policies and blunting the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s military edge should, therefore, be the chief purpose of Indian policy.[33] Except, the chasm between China’s nuclear and conventional militaries and India’s is real and widening. India has no choice other than to opt for an asymmetric strategy successfully adopted by weak nuclear weapons states against conventionally stronger foes — Pakistan against India, North Korea against the US, and Russia trapped in a losing war in NATO-assisted Ukraine. These countries have laid down short-fuse forward tripwires and threatened nuclear first use.
In theory, India has a triadic deterrent. The air vector is the weakest because, absent a genuine strategic bomber, medium-range strike aircraft (Su-30 MKIs) are tasked with this role. However, the chances of mission success are bleak owing to the circuitous routing over sea of this aircraft and of aerial tankers for mid-course refueling, and complicated tactical routing over densely air defenced mainland China. Leasing six of the advanced ‘White Swan’ variant of the Tu-160 Blackjack strategic bomber from Russia is an obvious solution.[34] The sea vector has a different problem as the Arihant-class SSBNs are to be deployed in a protected “bastion” with restricted patrolling area in the Bay of Bengal.[35] But their protection will consume a large fraction of the navy’s submarine and surface combatant fleets, thereby reducing the availability of ships and submarines for other duties, such as sea presence. In this respect, the SSBNs so disposed will become as much an operational liability in crisis as aircraft carriers requiring equally extensive protection.[36]
The principle of not dividing a military force, mandates consolidating the nuclear fighting assets against China and involves, for a start, unilaterally moving nuclearized short range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) Prithvi and medium range (700 km) Agni-1 ballistic missiles (MRBMs) from the Pakistan border to the LAC in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh, and grouping them with, say, nuclearized Prahar/Nirbhay-type area weapons. (Longer-range Agni-5 Prime missiles from hinterland launch points can hit targets in Pakistan as well as in China.) This collection of weapons forming the second tier of a forward deterrent posture on the LAC will balance the Chinese SRBM/MRBM forces in Tibet, the largest such concentration outside the Fujian coast opposite Taiwan. These missiles can be converted to canisterisation on LAC sites for ready use in launch-on-launch (LOL) and launch-on-warning (LOW) modes.[37] China should be publicly warned, moreover, that firing of any missile southwards from the Tibetan Plateau would lead to LOL/LOW action because there’s no technology to distinguish nuclear from conventional warheads on incoming missiles, and prudence dictates that the worst be assumed.
Atomic demolition munitions (ADMs) – simple, compact, low-yield fission devices that can be easily designed and produced in bulk for placement in mountain sides of passes the PLA will likely negotiate, would constitute the tripwire and first tier. When triggered, the ADMs will bring down mountains on Chinese forces that have penetrated into Indian territory. The reason ADMs are ultra-credible weapons is because of their usability in that (1) they are activated only by enemy action, (2) there is no venting of radioactivity because the toppled mountains of earth/dirt will effectively absorb and entomb the gamma rays, and (3) they fit India’s passive-reactive-defensive military outlook and ideology vis a vis China.[38] Optics-wise, moreover, the biggest virtue of this first nuclear use (FNU) policy is that ADMs will act as guillotine with the rope-tug releasing the falling blade handed to the Chinese theatre commander. The only thing about the revised doctrine that should be made public is this new wrinkle — first nuclear use solely against China. It will end the era of silk-glove handling of China and may even earn for India a smidgeon of respect from Beijing.
Filling the soft strategic infrastructure void
By their very nature, nuclear armaments are hard, high-end, but minus the soft supportive infrastructure their political and military value gets diminished. In the years since India became a declared nuclear weapons state in 1998, the government has not addressed three critical voids facing the country’s strategic forces. The first is the absence of an Indian version of the JASON Committee in the US. Reputed scientists including stalwart weapons designers are appointed as its members with a brief to check and professionally evaluate the scientific and technical viability of new nuclear weapons designs conceived by the weapons laboratories, recommend solutions for glitches they may discover, and even suggest novel design improvements to increase performance. India desperately needs such a committee in light of the experience with R Chidambaram, who stifled the weapons programme, is accused by BARC insiders of letting the experimental ICF at the Centre for Advance Technology, Indore, go to ruin, and for opposing the renewal of testing.[39] Though essential, the BARC leadership is unsympathetic to having such oversight because they believe it questions their competence.[40] This is where the government, for the sake of national interest, will have to over-rule the nuclear establishment and constitute a JASON Committee-type mechanism to curb the excesses of another Chidambaram.
The second void in fact refers to a budgetary innovation. It is time there was a separate budgetary stream for nuclear forces and infrastructure (including the development of military bases in friendly island-nations and countries on the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean littoral).[41] A systemic solution was attempted during the Vajpayee government. It tried to implement a 1999 plan by Defence Research & Development Laboratory that mooted a “separate strategic weapons directorate” to indigenously design and develop long range, long endurance, weapons systems to ensure “strategic security” for the country. Such consolidation of the existing design, development, testing and production agencies under one roof would also have resulted in a singular funding stream. But despite Prime Minister Vajpayee and Defence Minister Jaswant Singh’s support this plan died because of bureaucratic politics.[42] Too often programmes relating to strategic systems and infrastructure — nuclear weapons development and acquisition, MIRV, nuclear powered ballistic and cruise missile firing submarines, N-powered attack submarines, intercontinental range and intermediate range ballistic and cruise missiles, lease of Tu-160s, hardening of nuclear command, control, communications (NC3) net, excavation of L-tunnels for tests, and of mountain tunnel complexes for long range missile storage and launch sites, etc., are sidelined because they compete with conventional military priorities. The defence budget should rise to the 3% of GDP level recommended by the 15th Finance Commission and the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence. A third of this enlarged defence allocation – 0.75%-1% of GDP, should be sequestered for the proposed Strategic Forces budget. Otherwise, the country’s meagre nuclear arsenal will continue languishing in the basement to carry on without political direction, until faced with Chinese nuclear coercion by when it will be too late.
The third element is the missing specialist nuclear officer cadre in the three armed services. “Without a specialist cadre that is fully versed and immersed in all aspects of nuclear deterrence — from designs of nuclear weapons and missiles to conceiving and designing command and control networks, from nuances in deterrence theory to practical problems of mobility, and from nuclear forensics to technology for secure command links”, I wrote in August 2012, “the country will be stuck with what we have: a Strategic Forces Command with military officers on its rolls who are professionals in conventional warfare but rank amateurs in the nuclear field. They have to perforce learn on the job, only for such learning to go waste once their three-year term ends, and they are posted elsewhere.”[43] With the navy running SSBNs, it is the first military service to appreciate the benefits of a dedicated band of specialist nuclear officers. But its efforts have run into the problem of reconciling too few nuclear platforms and too small an officer cadre generally to carve up a separate nuclear stream. The army feels no need to have one because it is not concerned with what the artillery units are asked to fire as long as they control the missile launch units, and the air force has no strategic bomber fleet to make such an officer branch worth its while. The consequences of the missing military nuclear specialists are two-fold. The knowledge of nuclear issues within the SFC being shallow, the commander and his team cannot write up the QSRs for anything relating to nuclear armaments and strategic forces and infrastructure, and have to be satisfied with whatever DRDO-BARC dish out. And such advice as they are now and then called on by government to give is usually ignored, leaving it to the equally clueless generalists clogging up the system of stove-piped decision making to come up with what passes for strategic counsel in government.
Typically, strategic nuclear capacity, capability and infrastructure deficiencies take 25-30 years to makeup. The Indian government and military cannot afford to stick to their habitual tardiness in implementing the corrective measures. Smaller, weaker, nuclear weapon states with, survival-wise, smaller margins of error (Pakistan, North Korea, Israel) are naturally more serious and proactive where their nuclear security is concerned. Large and powerful countries (US, Russia, China) are not any less driven because they compete with each other for primacy in the strategic realm. India, uniquely, is the only big state which manifests a stunning level of nuclear complacency and incompetence.[44] Sandwiched between two purposeful nuclear adversaries, for the Indian government to continue to do nothing to alleviate the situation would be to do something definitely wrong.
[1] Why thermonuclear weapons? Because, according to Richard Garwin, who first engineered the theoretical ‘Teller-Ulam’ configuration into a thermonuclear weapon, for a fission weapon to produce 200 kiloton yield would require 60 kg of plutonium or U-235, which amount of fissile material would suffice for 10 thermonuclear weapons in the megaton class, each weighing less than 1,000 lbs. See Bharat Karnad, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security: The Realist Foundations of Strategy, Second edition [New Delhi: Macmillan India, 2005, 2002], p. 628.
[8] Karnad, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security, pp. 400-420; Karnad, India’s Nuclear Policy, pp. 65-71; P.K. Iyengar, A.N. Prasad, A. Gopalakrishnan, Bharat Karnad, Strategic Sell-out: Indian-US Nuclear Deal [New Delhi: Pentagon Press, 2009].
[9] S.K. Sikka, G.J. Nair, Falguni Roy, Anil Kakodkar, “The Recent Indian nuclear tests – A seismic review”, Current Science, Vol 79, Issue 9, November 2000, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237222667_The_recent_Indian_nuclear_tests_-_A_seismic_overview . Iyengar’s view based on various indices, such as large traces of the thermonuclear fuel — lithium deuteride, evidenced in the rock morphology in Pokhran, was that there was “partial thermonuclear burn”, not full combustion, and that’s a far cry from a workable weapon. See Karnad, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security, pp. 412-413.
[10] Karnad, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security, pp. 415-419.
[11] See his Striking Asymmetries: Nuclear Transitions in Southern Asia, [Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2022], pp. 200-201. As special adviser to US ambassador Robert Blackwill, Tellis helped shepherd the 2005 Indian-US nuclear deal at both the Washington and New Delhi ends.
[12] It is revealing that Tellis describes the moratorium on testing as a self-imposed “constraint” derived from “the political failures of the BJP leadership”. Ibid.
[21] “We want to be India’s defence partner of choice for India: US Official”, The Hindu, November 3, 2022. Also refer Ashley Tellis’ statement to an Indian daily, see “Idea Exchange: India may be compelled to test again and when it does, it’s in the US interest to avoid penalising it”, Indian Express, October 31, 2022.
[22] Santhanam said this specifically about Manmohan Singh’s NSA, M.K. Narayanan, a policeman, but it applies to most generalist diplomats/civil servants/policemen who have so far been appointed NSA. See “NSA a babe in the woods on nuclear matters: Santhanam”, PTI, The Hindu, September 25, 2009
[23] The reasons and the logic for an Indian thermonuclear force of some 470 weapons/warheads is detailed in Karnad, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security, pp. 614-646. A 2015 ISIS study estimated India’s then stock of separated reactor grade plutonium at 2.9 metric tons – good enough for as many as 125 weapons/warheads. This stock of plutonium has grown since then. See Elizabeth Whitfield, “Fuzzy math on Indian nuclear weapons”, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, April 19, 2016, https://thebulletin.org/2016/04/fuzzy-math-on-indian-nuclear-weapons/
[26] Shyam Saran, ex-Foreign Secretary and then Convenor of NSAB, was reported as saying this: “India will not be the first to use nuclear weapons, but if it is attacked with such weapons, it would engage in nuclear retaliation which will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage on its adversary.” See Indrani Bagchi. “Even a midget nuke strike will lead to massive retaliation, India warns Pak”, Times of India, April 30, 2013. For a response, see Bharat Karnad, “India’s nuclear amateurism”, New Indian Express, 28 June 2013.
[27] For a case arguing why tactical nuclear warfare between India and Pakistan is impracticable, unrealistic and extremely unlikely, see Bharat Karnad, “Scaring-up Scenarios: An Introduction” in Gurmeet Kanwal & Monika Chansoria, eds., Pakistan’s Tactical Nuclear Weapons: Conflict Redux [New Delhi: CLAWS and KW Publishers, 2014]. On the “escalate to de-escalate” strategy, see Joshua Bell, “Escalate to De-escalate: Russia’s Nuclear Deterrence Strategy”, Global Security Review, March 7, 2022, https://globalsecurityreview.com/nuclear-de-escalation-russias-deterrence-strategy/
[28] Bharat Karnad, Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and India’s Global Ambition [Gurugram: Penguin-Viking, 2018], pp. 326-330.
[31] Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military [Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005], pp. 199-260.
[32]Bharat Karnad, “Key to Peace in South Asia: Fostering ‘Social’ Links between the Armies of India and Pakistan”, The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, April 1996.
[33] Karnad, Staggering Forward, pp. 154-220.
[34] Karnad, Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet) [New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015], pp. 335-336; Karnad, Staggering Forward, pp. 364-365.
[35] Admiral Arun Prakash, “Why the Arihant missile test was critical for India”, Hindustan Times, 18 October 2022
[36] On large aircraft carriers as operational liability, see Karnad, Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet), pp. 373-376.
[37] Tellis claims the Agni missiles are canisterised only to keep nuclear warheads stable in an airconditioned container, and are not ready for instant use. See his Striking Asymmetries, pp. 127-129.
[40] Karnad, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security, pp. 328, 417.
[41] On the urgent need to build up the North and South Agalega island base in Mauritius, the Gan island base in Maldives, Trincomalee in Sri Lanka and Na Thrang in Vietnam, see Karnad, Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet), pp. 346-351.
A recent Sansad TV programme — ‘The Defenders’ featured a discussio on “China’s naval expansion” with Vice Admiral Satish Soni (Retd), former FOC-in-C, Southern Naval Command (Kochi) and, later, Eastern Naval Ciommand (Vizag) and myself, and may be of interset. It is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WBThhZpWVQ
[Russia foreign minister Sergey Lavrov making a point at the Raisina Dialogue]
The first anniversary of Russia’s unfinished “special operation” in Ukraine coincided this year with the G-20 Foreign Ministers Meet, which last made available foreign dignitaries for the annual gabfest grandly dubbed the “Rasina Dialogue” that the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) funds and sponsors. In other words, this is an out-and-out MEA affair that some Joint Secretary or the other should have orchestrated more carefully considering the session with the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov on Febeuary 4 almost blew up into a diplomatic incident.
In a session dealing with the Ukraine conflict, the host Sunjoy Joshi, ex-IAS, took on himself the role, embarrassingly, of an uninformed Inquisitor, grilling Lavrov with deliberately provocative questions entirely blaming Russia for the military intervention in Ukraine that revealed astonishing ignorance of the post-Cold War history of great power politics, Ukraine and NATO expansion. Indeed, Lavrov, a consumate diplomat, was pushed into losing his cool. He publicly upbraided Joshi for not doing his “homework” before the session. Any workaday TV news reporter would have done a better job of reading up on material and asking thoughtful questions, rather than leading ones designed to rouse and rile the Russian minister, who reminded the audience that India’s “specially privileged strategic partnership” with Russia is unlike any relationship New Delhi has with any other country. [See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nihwViCcUW4 ].
It raises an important Question: If MEA is paying the piper, Joshi ought to have been singing a tune more in line with India’s policy of artful equivocation on this issue. MEA failed properly to brief this out-of-his-depth host or even vet his list of questions. In the event, shouldn’t the Ministry’s superintendence of this annual event have been more direct and effective, rather than leaving the proceedings to the mercies of an ignoramus or, worse, a motivated ex-babu, who all but skewed Russian perceptions of India and its interests? The Indian government cannot afford these sorts of diplomatic snafus.
——-e
[Destroyed Russian tanks and armoured combat vehicles in the town of Bucha, Ulraine]
Now to tackle the great mystery of why the mighty Russian army is making such heavy weather of its annexationist intervention in Ukraine.
Given the flood of Western media reporting of developments in Ukraine over the past year that the Indian media gobbled up whole, an average Indian would be forgiven for thinking that Russia is backpedalling on the battlefield against the hard-charging Ukrainians amply supplied with all manner of military hardware, tactical and strategic intelligence, and unflagging political support from the US and the West. Let’s first be clear about where the Russian army is on the ground and how much of eastern Ukraine is in Russia’s possession. Russians now fully control much of the Donbas corridor — roughly the line Kherson-Kharkiv, habited by Russian-speaking people on the eastern periphery of Ukraine, which is the bridge connecting mainland Russia with the Crimean Peninsula captured by Moscow after a fast, uneventful, campaign in 2014.
As mentioned in my very first post on the topic in February 2022, the need for Russia to command the approaches to the Black Sea and its coastline, is a strategic imperative Moscow had to achieve at all cost. The first part of that objective was realized with the absorption of the Crimean Peninsula. With the Donbas corridor too captured with heavy loss of life and destruction of most of the large towns in it, Russia, for the first time is potentially more secure now than it has ever been since the unravelling of the old Soviet Union in 1992. It is not exposed anymore and vulnerable to possible US/NATO military interventions from the Dardanelles, with Turkey, a NATO member, as the staging area for a from-the-sea push against Russia’s relatively weak underbelly.
Fine. So, how come the ingressing Russian armoured columns lost over 500 tanks and the advance by the Russian army, generally, seems so tardy?
Plainly, the Russian army expected it to be cake walk. Rolling in leisurely as the tanks did over highways without a thought about being ambushed, they were sitting ducks for the Ukrainian anti-tank units firing off their Kornet portable anti-tank munitions from the old stock before being replaced by the newer NATO Javelins. The resulting disarray was as much among the forward troops as the command ranks, and manifested the absolute unpreparedness of the Russian army to fight an actual war. The turgid Russian military bureaucracy only compounded the problem of incomprehension up all the way to the Kremlin and down do the trooper who was promised a picnic but got lethal firefights instead. Kyiv’s resistance and President Volodomyr Zelenskyy’s emergence as a resolute wartime leader came as a rude shock to President Vladimir Putin, who was also surprised by the sheer volume of arms supply worth a stupendous $28 billion that the US funnelled into Ukraine emptying, in the process, the NATO stocks of shells and ammunition of all types, long range precision artillery, and even Leopard-2 tanks from the Polish and German inventories with American Abrams tanks awaiting transhipment. The American strategy to fight to the last Ukrainian is being well executed because, realistically, Ukraine has not a spitball’s chance in hell.
Still, why the Russian army’s lackadaisical approach in this conflict that Putin described as a “special operation”? Two reasons. Firstly, Ukraine has always been a problem for Russia, resisting assimilation to the maximum. And secondly, the Russian army always takes time to get up to battle speed. Let’s briefly examine each of these reasons.
There is Ukraine’slong history with Russia. And there’s Russia’s military troubles in Ukraine. Notwithstanding Putin’s claim of Ukraine being the “cradle of Russian civilization”, the largely Roman Catholic country has always nursed a separate and distinct cultural and political Tatar identity different from that of a Slavic Russia wedded to the Russian Orthodox Church. To go no further back than the civil war, the Bolsheviks and the Red Army had the most difficult time of it on the “south-western front”, meaning Ukraine. The revolutionary council of state for war presided over by Lenin and featuring, among others, Stalin and the founder and the first Political Commissar of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, wrestled interminably with issues such as how much force to use against the rebellious Ukrainians without doing permanent political damage, how ruthlessly to fight the “White” Russian army massed around Kyiv and other major cities, and how to fight all out without alienating the Ukrainian masses — Lenin’s overarching concern, and with what consequences for the eventual Ukrainian Soviet in the nascent USSR. Perhaps, it is the kind of debate that preoccupies Putin and his advisers in the Kremlin today. Indeed, the indecision from the top got so militarily frustrating for the Red Army commander on that front — the redoubtable Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevski — inarguably the greatest military mind of the 20th Century who, for instance, first conceptualized “deep operations”, and whom Trotsky called “The reorganizer of the Red Army”, that he petitioned Trotsky to be allowed to prosecute a decisive war against the Ukrainian nationalists, or to be relieved of his command. (Tukhachevski and the cream of the Red Army General Staff were executed by a paranoid Stalin in the “great purges” and show trials of the 1930s.)
During the Second World War, Stalin’s Red Army had not only to face Hitler’s armies advancing on several fronts — Operation Barbarossa, June 1941, to occupy the European part of the Soviet Union, i.e., the line Archangel-Astrakhan, but had to deal with the rear area troubles in Ukraine (with its industry, grain, and oil fields) that Berlin had prioritised for capture, instigated by the Nazi-aligned nationalist armed groups under Stephen Bandera, and which forces also constituted the Ukrainian arm of the Gestapo. This to say that there’s an awful lot of bad blood between Russians and Ukrainians. Something akin to, yea, the Hindu-Muslim rift in the subcontinent!
The Russian army, historically, has been strategically surprised, taken time to react, to mobilize, and to get its forces up for a fight, before turning the corner and wiping out the adversary. It started in the modern era with Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia, his march stalling on the outskirts of Moscow not little because of the withdrawal eastwards by the Czarist armies committed to a “scorched earth” policy of destroying any and everything the French army could possibly use, a situation aggravated by the onset of icy weather and not improved by its pyrrhic victory at the Battle of Borodino. It was exactly the pattern repeated some 129 years later by “General Winter” and the Red Army under Marshal Georgy Zhukov decimating the German land forces and winning the war in Europe for the Allies.
It is this history of the Russian army’s pattern of success the US and NATO do not want to be victimised by — the reason why US and NATO will absolutely avoid having their “boots on the ground” even if Ukraine becomes extinct — which is not on the cards. Russia will have its Donbas bridge to Crimea, and that’s it.
To most Indians and Indian policymakers unschooled in military history, perhaps, an analogy may drive home the point — India’s grab of Goa in Winter 1961. The Indian military prepared for it as if it was some major operation. The 17th Infantry Division and 50th Para Brigade were fielded along with three Indian warships, and all the air resources the Western air command required. This array of forces was pitted against a skeletal Portuguese military group comprising some 8,000-10,000 troops, one sloop. one patrol boat, and two passenger transports at Dabolim, the sole air base. The size of the Portuguese army units can be explained by their having to put down guerilla actions carried out by the Azad Gomantak force, and the Goa Congress materially supported by India. Nehru had given sufficient warning of forcefully taking Goa — as Putin had made known his plans to annex the Donbas corridor. It prompted US President John F Kennedy to plead for some time to convince the Portuguese dictator, Antonio Salazar, to decamp gracefully. Nehru decided to force the issue but his regime’s instructions to the military were to achieve the goal with minimum damage and loss of life. Just how worried Nehru was about not harming the Goan people may be guaged by the order to the Western Air Command to damage the Dabolim runway but not the terminal building. In the event, on December 18, IAF Canberra sorties dropped 63,000 pounds of explosives with partial effect because that night a Portuguese Constellation aircraft with military and civilian families took off safely for a low level escape to Karachi, outwitting Indian radar!
[Portuguese POWs in Goa — do they look as if they were fighting?]
Now consider what would have happened had NATO heeded Salazar’s calls for Western military intervention to thwart Nehru’s designs. No disrespect to the Indian armed services, but they’d have been up against it had NATO cleared and then secured sea and air supply corridors channeling armaments, troops and air and naval platforms and generally military reinforcements to Goa. Would the Indian army, navy and air force, realistically, have managed to even put up a fight, considering they didn’t against the more primitive Chinese PLA less than a year later?
It puts the Russian intervention in Ukraine in perspective, does it not?
Modifying Tata’s Boeing-Airbus deal with co-production at its core is an opportunity for institutional course correction.
In a podcast the other day, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar boasted that the Bharatiya Janata Party government of Narendra Modi is the most “strategic” of any the country has had. One may have expected then that, in the context of India’s requirement in the years ahead of 1,500-1,700 commercial aircraft, according to the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, and keeping the Aatmanirbharata (self-sufficiency) objective, the massive outgo of foreign exchange, and inherent economies of scale in mind, New Delhi would have helped configure the Tata deal for 400 single aisle and wide-body aircraft differently, premising it principally on co-production.
It would have laid down the principle of private sector companies consulting with the government while negotiating for capital acquisitions, and a template for aviation purchases generally, starting with the $115 billion contract Tata & Sons have signed with Boeing Company of the United States and the European Airbus consortium based in France. This deal is so big President Joe Biden crowed about it creating one million new jobs in America.
India’s belated insistence on co-production may upset Boeing and Airbus calculations. But they will concede the economic logic of making India a second production hub with converging global supply chains for their popular Boeing 737 and Airbus A-320 medium haulers as a cost-effective means of satisfying the burgeoning Indian and international demand for them, which Seattle and Toulouse by themselves will be hard-pressed to meet. Also, Washington and Paris can be expected to appreciate the strategic logic of thus firming up a partnership with India as a pillar for their Indo-Pacific policies.
In any case, New Delhi’s attitude should be clear and firm: co-production—that’s the deal, take it or leave it. What choice does either company have other than to take it? The customer is, after all, king.
Moreover, while Tata may sign the cheque, it is the country’s wealth being shipped out and the government has to have a say. Tata have so far only communicated an intent to buy aircraft; detailed contracts are still to be finalized. The Modi government ought to now ensure that clauses for co-production and system integration of these aircraft in India are central to the deal.
All these years, like the rest of the technology and common sense-challenged agencies of the Indian government when it comes to capital acquisitions, the Civil Aviation Ministry too acted as a “middleman” facilitating commercial deals with Boeing and Airbus and permitted politicians and babus to pocket millions of dollars in pelf. The Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate are currently investigating decisions by the Congress regime of Manmohan Singh regarding the Air India-Indian Airlines merger and the subsequent order for 111 Airbus aircraft for Rs 70,000 crores.
Corruption apart, the Indian government had habitually played fast and loose with the country’s monies by letting airlines buy civilian planes that get the country little else in terms of substantial technological and manufacturing benefits. In return for the tens of billions in hard currency expended on buying planes of all kinds, a Boeing official revealed his company annually buys aviation goods and services from India worth a billion dollars. Is that a joke?
Now consider India’s main adversary—China, and how it has managed over the years to build up its civil aviation industry such that today most of its civil and military aviation needs are met by Chinese companies, such as the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC). It still buys long haul aircraft from Boeing and Airbus but that’s expected to end soon. The first of the COMAC models was the 100-seater ARJ-21, a flawed product Beijing peddles in Africa for half the cost of Boeing/Airbus aircraft. Its second model, the 170-seat C-919, however, is a medium range plane in the same class as Boeing 737 MAX and Airbus A-320 Neo that Air India is buying.
The first thing the strategic-minded Chinese leadership did was exploit the opening to the US via the Richard Nixon-era “ping pong diplomacy”. It prioritized procurement of aviation technologies by fair means and foul. The very year (1972) Nixon met with Mao Zedong in Beijing, the Chinese Aviation Company of Shanghai bought a single Boeing 707 and promptly reverse-engineered it into the passenger aircraft, Y-10. Helped by President Ronald Reagan’s “Orient Pearl” tech-transfer programme, the Chinese air force likewise rapidly modernized its frontline F-7 (MiG-21) fighter aircraft fleet with advanced US avionics.
Simultaneously, Beijing began a decade-long negotiations with McDonnell-Douglas that fetched in 1985 a deal to co-produce the MD-80 passenger aircraft for both the Chinese and international markets. In time, the American company’s entire assembly line and production wherewithal, including computer-assisted design, etc. were bought out. Despite assurances to Washington, the metal-bending machines meant for the MD-80, for instance, were immediately employed in Chinese combat aircraft production. China paid $1.2 billion for the whole transaction. It was, perhaps, big money at the time but it obtained for China the technological know-how, know-why, and the latest aircraft manufacturing and management techniques that it has since utilized to produce modern civilian and military aircraft, assisted by a sustained programme of electronically filching US designs, technological secrets, and proprietory information.
It is the sort of strategic singlemindedness the Indian government and military need to be capable of. Indeed, the Indian government on the one hand takes pride in sticking by agreements at any cost, as Jaishankar affirmed in that podcast and, on the other, despite the PM’s efforts stifles indigenously-developed technology just so foreign hardware can continue to be purchased by all and sundry, especially the armed services. Aatmanirbharata can go suck.
Modifying Tata’s Boeing-Airbus deal with co-production at its core is an opportunity for institutional course correction. If Prime Minister Modi grabs it, besides generating literally millions of high paying jobs and raising the quality of skilled manpower, he will establish India as a production centre for high value Boeing and Airbus aircraft with gains spilling over into the military aviation sector, and a magnet for other high-tech global industries. Lose it, and India remains a technology plodder and client state.
Striving to make India a technology power self-reliant in armaments in the 21st Century and aware that the public sector never was, is not now, and never will be in a position to realize this grand objective by itself, Prime Minister Narendra Modi at AeroIndia 2023 in Bangaluru urged the burgeoning private sector companies in the country “to invest in India’s defence sector as much as possible”. He reminded them that their investment “will create new avenues for …business in many countries …apart from India [and that] there are new possibilities and opportunities” they “should not let go”.
Fine words from Modi laden with sentiment that over the last several years has fueled his atmnirbharta policy. If defence self-sufficiency could be obtained by rousing rhetoric and public exhortations alone, India would long ago have attained it. The problem is the eco-system for technology creation and innovation is being methodically stifled by officials of the over-bureaucratized Indian state. Despite the Prime Minister’s harangues, and PMO’s pressure and pushing and pulling, the Government of India system is such that the various agencies in it have neither uniformly followed the PM’s atmanirbharta directives nor, more importantly, internalized them. It has left the bureaucratic/technocratic nabobs ruling their small fiefs in innumerable ministries and departments of government free to impede at will the atmnirbharta initiatives. They selectively use old rules and regulations still on the books to justify decisions even when these have been superceded by new instructions! In other words, they cherry pick the rule and regulation to torpedo projects and programmes promoting atmnirbharta.
Take the case of a critical Tactical Communications (T-Com) project the Indian army has embarked on to obtain a secure, mobile, battlefield telecommunications net with system integrity for deployment along the borders, especially useful on the overlong Line of Actual Control in the mountains. System integrity is assured by having at its core technology that both hardware- and software-wise is ABSOLUTELY free of embedded bugs and malware — something that can only be guaranteed if it is wholly of Indian origin. Otherwise, the frontline army formations equipped with foreign tech will be as exposed and vulnerable to enemy cyber atacks and foreign penetration and manipulation as the rest of the country is by China’s Ministry of State Security.
This is so because the Indian Government did not display — surprise! surprise! — the strategic nous and foresight to prevent Huawei and other Chinese companies from freely selling at cut rate prices 4G gear developed by them with massive Chinese state subsidies, to public sector communications companies — BSNL and VSNL, and also to numerous private sector firms who entered the business some 20-odd years ago. As a result, the nationwide mobile telephone system, parceled out among several private sector firms and majorly based on Chinese telecommunications tech, serves as remotely activated intelligence sensors/platforms in situ for Beijing to exploit. China can monitor communications within India, subvert the Indian and state government decision processes, shut down power grids and industry, disrupt the economy by throwing the market and financial institutions into turmoil, and otherwise ruin this country at any time. This is Suntzu’s basic principle of strategy of winning without war at work!
The communications technology in question is radio telephony and involves voice/information modulated on to radio waves at radio frequencies meshing with internet protocol, etc. The technology to convert voice and data and to propagate this package via radio waves, is at the centre of it. It is used by all advanced militaries. The Indian armed forces are only now seeking it. Civilian mobile telephony is facilitated by static towers dotting the urban terrain and the countryside to which are attached “networking boxes” for voice/data conversion and radio propagation The military, however, has to have masts with antennae connected to these boxes that are latched on to mobile platforms to enable forwardly placed military units within range to access, via mobile telephones, a ready, all-weather, 2-way encrypted channel of communications with the unit commander/command centre. A collection of such mobile platforms can effectively cover an extended border to subserve tactical military operations.
The Indian army has woken up to the need for such a T-Com system. A ‘Project Management Office’ in the Signals Directorate, Army HQrs, a couple of years back drew up the military specifications (milspecs) for such a battlefield communications system, and companies were invited to tender initially for a “sample” system of 200 “networking boxes” connected to 10,000 mobile phones worth Rs 200 crores. The incentive was that on approval of technology, the winning bidder can expect to get the much larger contract for 5,000 of these boxes, each costing rupees one crore, for a deal valued at Rs 5,000 crores.
Some 22 companies entered the competition, 20 of them system integrators — meaning they have purchased various commercially available tech and components mostly from abroad and cobbled together a T-Com system that meets the milspecs, and involves no original, proprietory, technology of their own. Only two companies in the competition are Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) with their own patented technology, inclusive of hardware, software and the necessary algorithms. These firms — Lekha Wireless Solutions Pvt. Ltd and Signaltron, are both Bangaluru-based and in the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) category — the sort of companies Prime Minister Modi has publicly heralded as the cutting edge of the nation’s efforts to become a technology power. Signaltron even designed its own chip for its tech system!
In pre-bid meetings held last year, the two MSMEs informed the army Signals’ project management office and the Integrated Financial Adviser (IFA), Ministry of Defence — the nodal person approving this contract, that they were not in a position to meet one of the three “eligibility criteria” as per old corpus of rules that companies bidding for this contract were required to meet, namely, the one relating to the value of turnover which had to be greater than 30% of the project cost of Rs. 200 crores. This financial requirement has been superceded by a newer rule that mandates exceptions be made for MSMEs, which the IFA studiously ignored in this case. The other two criteria concerning evaluation of technology and ability to manufacture were easily met by both firms. Lekha and Signaltron were pointedly advised at these meetings to proceed regardless, and to prepare their technology for technical evaluation in February 2023.
Then, out of the blue, in end January this year, the two Indian MSMEs got a formal letter from the IFA rejecting their bids, thereby removing their technologies from even the technical evaluation stage. Incidentally, the army signals officers interfacing with these two companies had already become familiar with the technology of at least one of them, and were generally impressed by its quality and performance. In the wake of this sudden jolt, the MSMEs sought an explanation from the IFA, pleaded for meetings and, at a minimum, technical evaluation of their technologies. They received no response to repeated entreaties. Meanwhile, the formal evaluation of T-Com technologies, all of them foreign sourced, offered by the 20 other ‘system integrator’ companies, which began on February 8 ended on February 14, leaving Lekha and Signaltron the only bidders with patented and proven tech with a Valentine Day’s gift of being summarily kicked out of the technical evaluation phase and hence the bidding process as well!
In this tragic chain of events, hearteningly, the Department of Telecommunications (DOT), that was once a steadfast pusher of Huawei products, has turned the corner and is now one of the strongest supporters of indigenously-developed telecom technology. Senior DOT officials helped the two MSMEs negotiate the Byzantine maze that is the Government of India bureaucracy, opened doors for them in the Defence Ministry, and even wrote supportive letters, presumably, to the IFA. It made not the slightest difference. Indeed, it was DOT that helped Lekha to launch a pilot project for its radio-connected communications system in 100 villages in two Karnataka Districts (Tumkur and Mandya) to demonstrate its technology. More disquieting still, Lekha, a winner of the Innovation for Defence Excellence (IDEX) award in 2019, whose technology was cleared for field trials in 2021, and by next year expects to field original 5G technology, is presently outfitting 5 warships of the Indian Navy with a maritime variant of its T-Com technology in a deal worth some Rs 6 crores. If the army needed any military validation of Lekha’s technology, all the army project office had to do was inspect the underway naval project Lekha is successfully prosecuting. This was not done. Many industry-wallahs suspect the reason is lack of any real appreciation in the army of the new technology concerned with radio telephony as many in the Signals branch regard it as another version of Wi-Fi and, hence, do not want to challenge the civilian IFA’s decision!
Then again, because every department of the Indian government works in silos, and each armed service likewise functions in silos with different combat arms within each of these services functioning in their own mini-silos, no one person, no one organisation, in the entire MOD has any holistic idea of what technology is being employed where and being tested by whom, and with what results. So, every service and the IFA, under the slogan of atmnirbharta, goes off on its own in the technology arena, does its own thing! Atmnirbharta is the last thing this whole frightfully wasteful mess of a technology acquisition system has on its mind, and it doesn’t matter that it is sans vision, a long term road map, and accountability. It is also apparently beyond corrective measures, and does not give a damn for the Prime Minister’s defence self-reliance directives, dismissing it as so much political hot air, reducing Modi and his PMO, in the process, to passive spectators of this continuing boondoggle!
So, which are the companies likely to win the army’s T-Com contract? Why, two public sector units (PSUs) of course! — ECIL (Electronics Corporation of India) and BEL (Bharat Electronics Ltd). These two PSUs, not known for technology creation and innovation, have survived by doing the usual defence PSU stuff — screwdriver imported technologies, or tinker with them. In the present army’s T-Com case, ECIL and BEL are Trojan Horses for technologies from Ericsson of Sweden and Nokia of Finland, respectively. And Sweden and Finland recently joined NATO. So, if it is not China doing the damage, it will be NATO countries holding the Indian army’s battlefield-related operational command and control communications at risk. It seems the army is prepared to court such risk. Shouldn’t the Chief of the Army Staff, General Manoj Pande do something about this?
And, why, pray has the Integrated Financial Adviser, MOD, made this manifestly anti-national, anti-atmnirbharta decision? People in the know speculate that permitting Lekha and Signaltron to prove their technology and secure the T-Com deal would “open up a can of worms” because the present IFA and past incumbents in the post have over the years consistently and regularly disqualified Indian MSMEs from winning such technology contracts on the basis of the financial eligibility criterion that for obvious reasons they cannot meet (or they would not be counted among small and medium enterprises!). That there are considerations on the side offered by foreign OEMs to incentivise such decision-making cannot be ruled out, considering just how infused with corruption the entire defence procurement system is.
Disappointed and despirited, Lekha and Signaltron are being told by their contacts in MOD that the decision of the Integrated Financial Adviser, can only be reversed by “higher ups”, meaning by the PM and by Rajnath Singh who, alas, is a know-nothing, do even less cow belt politician who in technical defence matters has no clue about anything (but, if it is any consolation to anyone, is markedly better than one of his predecessors in office also from Uttar Pradesh, the late Mulayam Singh, who spent his entire tenure as Raksha Mantri kvetching about files not being translated into Hindi!).
It will require Modi and his PMO to wield the whip to bring this obdurate IFA to heel, and afford Lekha and Signaltron an opportunity to get their patented tech evaluated and approved, and to win the T-Com contract. It will help the winning MSME to scale up its capabilities for bigger, more challenging, national security tasks ahead, and send a message of hope to a down-in-the-dumps defence MSME sector. Either Modi pulls up the IFA and makes an example of him by punishing him with a posting to some far corner of the Lakshwadweep Islands where he can do little harm, or alternately hands him his retirement papers. Or, by doing nothing, prompts hordes of babus to make mincemeat of his atmanirbharta policy and programmes, leaving India exactly where it always was — a perennial arms dependency.
[Biden’s NSA, Jake Sullivan, & Ajit Doval in Washington, DC]
The US government and the Washington policy establishment has been aware for some time now of the brewing Indian dissatisfaction with America promising but not delivering advanced military and other technology. The Biden Administration has been wondering how best to try and mitigate the situation without altogether dismantling the present South Asia policy structure. It is an issue, many in Washington believe, was beginning to colour Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s evolving attitude to strategic cooperation with the United States in the Indo-Pacific.
This American take on the state of bilateral relations became clear in a seminar arranged not too long ago by a former senior Trump regime official at a Washington thinktank to facilitate my interaction with policy experts and the like. The topic was the state of Indo-US strategic linkages. Discussing the reasons for the halting progress in Indo-US strategic cooperation between the two countries, which has puzzled and dismayed many Americans, I elaborated why, in my view, this was so — essential lack of trust. Well into the discussion, my host asked me, point-blank to name the technologies the Indian military would like to get its hands on. I responded with indirection.
I mentioned assistance in developing a jet turbine engine for combat aircraft because it was an underderway collaborative venture that was abruptly terminated by President Donald Trump. Next I suggested silencing technology for diesel submarines that the US Navy has completely discarded in favour of an all nuclear fleet. And, in the context, moreover, of the Indian government’s unwillingness remotely to risk doing anything, take any action, however much it might be in the national interest, for fear of triggering an adverse US reaction, the need for Washington to signal New Delhi that sanctions won’t happen should India resume thermonuclear testing — something that is necessary for the country to obtain, for the first time, credible strategic forces featuring high-yield staged hydrogen weapons and, more importantly, deterrence-wise, psychological, parity with China.
These were deliberately hard asks and elicited mostly knowing smiles, because I had stepped into ‘no go’ territory and picked to see if there was any change or movement in the generally punitive-minded US’ India policy. For the most part, the US in the past 60 years obsessed about preventing India from securing an N-Bomb, failing which, sought to curtail, to the extent possible, its credibility. This America has succeeded in doing, thanks to the so-called “civilian nuclear cooperation deal” of 2008 negotiated by the present external affairs minister in his then avatar as Joint Secretary (Americas) in the Foreign Office. It has left this country with only the pretence of being a thermonuclear weapons state and the slimmest of chances of ever realizing Bhabha’s 3-stage plan to exploit the country’s vast thorium reserves for energy self-sufficiency. Among the many conditions accepted by Jaishankar were (1) nonresumption of underground nuclear tests that has left the thermonuclear weapons programme half-baked with a basic design that went phut in Pokhran in 1998, (2) a severe reduction in the number of the indigenous CANDU power reactors whose spent fuel was reprocessable into weapons grade plutonium, meaning both the sources and the quantity of weapons usable fissile material available to the weapons unit atTrombay were reduced, and (3) purchase by India of exorbitantly-priced light water power reactors from the US, France [and Russia] run on imported low-enriched uranium fuel which made India an energy dependency (like the arms dependency India already is), provided outside powers a stranglehold on power generation, putting Indian industry running on this electricity at their mercy, and starved the follow-on 2nd stage fast breeder reactor- and 3rd-stage thorium reactor-programmes of funds now diverted to buying imported reactors and fuel.
Moreover, even as the US policy of punishing India for not joining the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty was on over-drive, successive Administrations after Richard Nixon-Henry Kissinger’s breakthrough with Beijing, helped China modernize its economy and its military and satellite sensor and launch capabilities with dollops of techological aid starting with the ‘Orient Pearl’ programme during the Reagan era to upgrade the avionics suite on the Chinese MiG — F-7 and, in order to counterbalance India in South Asia and as inducement for Pakistan to participate in defeating the Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan approved in 1979-1980 — and this was President Jimmy Carter’s NSA Zbigniew Brzezinski’s most damaging diplomatic move, Dengxiaoping’s transferring nuclear weapons and missile technologies to Pakistan. So much for the US as the foundational pillar of the global nonproliferation order.
As regards, the conventional submarine technology I brought up: Nobody expects the US to part with submarine tech of any kind for any reason — it hasn’t done so to its closest ally, Britain. The idea was simply to guage the reaction of Americans who have served in the US government and been longtime part of the policy circles.
In this context, the new Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies (ICET), enunciated in Modi’s meeting with Biden last year, and fleshed out by the two National Security Advisers, Jake Sullivan and Ajit Doval, on Feb 1, like the 2012 DTTI (Defence Trade and Technology Initiative) may end up being more a bandied about acronym than a policy vehicle actually delivering anything of note.
Parallel to the Doval-Sullivan meeting, the visiting US Under-Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, and Indian external affairs minister Jaishankar engaged in the usual persiflage that high officials of the two countries indulge in, occasion permitting. There was talk of, what else?, “policy convergences” presumably in dealing with China — the common threat, and of Washington’s supposed desire to help India become less dependent on Russian armaments — she called it “60 years of entanglement”, by doing what exactly? Why, relying on American arms instead, of course. This, incidentally, has been the strategic aim of US policy mid-1980s onwards when Reagan’s Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger visited Delhi with “an open order book” for India to access any piece of US military hardware and technology, or so I was told then by Weinberger’s adviser in the Pentagon at the time, Michael Pillsbury.
India’s relations with Russia and meeting its military (and energy) requirements are two separate and distinct policy streams, as Jaishankar no doubt made clear to Nuland. But the US apparently wants to see them merged. Whence, ICET, notwithstanding the DTTI already on the anvil producing nothing. While it it is all very well to dangle a carrot before a mule with blinkers, it is necesary now and then to replace the old carrot with a shinier, plumper, carrot for which the animal can keep lunging, and in the process pull a heavier load. Thus, going beyond DTTI , ICET promises cooperation in semi-conductor chip design and fabrication, artificial intelligence, and cyber warfare which, Washington hopes, will increase the motivation for the Narendra Modi regime to become more overtly active in militarily hemming China, especially in the maritime sphere and, on the side, help out the US economy by finalising a Free Trade Agreement (which negotiations are stuck on disagreements in numerous product/industry areas) and the US defence industry by making the by now customary deals worth billions of dollars for transport and maritime surveillance planes (C-17s, C-130s, P-8Is).
While collaborating on Fabs, AI and cyber is for the future, the immediate lure is the proposed production in India of General Electric’s 414 jet turbine engine for fighter aircraft. Like the nuclear deal that drove a stake through the heart of the Indian nuclear energy programme, accepting licensed manufaacture of this jet power plant that Jaishankar, Doval and the air force are pushing to meet immediate needs violate Modi’s ‘atm nirbharta‘ policy and principle. The need was for Doval and Jaishankar to stand firm on technical assistance on a timebound contract to get the indigenous Kaveri jet engine developed at the DRDO-GTRE (Gas Turbine Research Establishment) flying. Absent such a programmatic thrust, the nascent aviation industry in the country will have a hollow core. No aviation industry anywhere without a servicable homegrown and designed combat jet aircraft engine to work with, has amounted to much.
Worse, there is no guarantee that proposals for collaborative ventures in the Fab, AI and cyber fields, or even for the GE 414 engine, will sail through at the Washington end, considering the US government’s approval process will require them to run the gauntlet of export controls and other procedural restrictions in the Pentagon and, even more onerously, in the US Department of Commerce — the final clearing agency. Indeed, it is such bureacratic hurdles that were, incidentally, hinted at by a senior US official who is reported as saying: “I think on both sides we were quite candid about the challenges that we pose to each other from a regulatory standpoint. In many cases that gets in the way of the vision of deeper and broader technology cooperation.” [The Hindu, Feb 2, 2023] The “regulatory” muddle will always provide the US with an out, an excuse to not deliver on high-tech on time, or even at all. But it will also enable Washington to string the Indian government along for as long as it serves the US purposes by promising just the regulatory reform needed as being round the corner to keep Delhi hooked.
It is a warning to the Modi government to heed the past and the record, and to consume all US promises of advanced technology with tons of salt. The trouble is the Indian government and the Indian military find it hard to resist the easy option — buy the proven GE 414 jet engine, than commit to, and invest in, and otherwise forcefully drive the Kaveri engine project to completion with or without external help, and whatever it takes, including involving private sector talents and capabilities in a project accorded national priority and realised in “technology mission” mode (that got us the Agni series of ballistic missiles).
Or, the country and government should prepare to see the Tejas 1A, the navalised Tejas, and the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft, and the future of the aviation industry, in fact, held hostage by the GE 414 engine and, by extension, the US government. It will write finis to the nascent Indian aviation industry central to which is a homegrown design and development of a jet powerplant for combat aircraft — something to build around.
It is passing strange that, despite their questionable understanding of the national interest and, based on it, their negotiating records, Jaishankar and Company are allowed by ideologically differing governments repeatedly to cut crucial deals with the US that have amounted to putting a noose around the Indian strategic deterrent, and now will do the same with the defence, specifically aviation, industry and handing the rope to Washington with a hope and prayer that the Americans will desist from pulling it at a time of their choosing, for policy reasons of their own. .
KAL, the ascerbic cartoonist for the Economist weekly lauded for its perceptive take on current leaders, developments and issues, in a year-ender, created a satirical aviary of political birds (reproduced above). Among the fowls of varied provenance, he identifies, the centrally featured, “Jingo-headed zealot Modi Hindi Dominatus”!
KAL’s take on Narendra Modi — while not flattering — suggests the Indian Prime Minister is registering on the international public consciousness. No small achievement this in an age of instant sensations and celebrities when the premium is on being noticed, even if with alarm, than to be not noticed at all.
Scanning the Indian political horizon, there seems no rival in vaulting distance of Modi, who has taken a firm hold of the people’s imagination in a way that only Jawaharlal Nehru did in the Fifties but for very different reasons. While Nehru effortlessly projected the image of a patrician-aristocrat who had found his calling as a leader of the masses, Modi, just as easily, conveys the message to them that as one of them, he has risen through dint of hard work and with a bit of luck that often attends on political success, to now be at the helm of affairs in the country, with no danger from family and hordes of hangers-on to besmirch his reputation and pull him down. Indeed, the death of PM’s mother living with another son of hers some 700 miles from New Delhi evidenced just how scrupulous Modi has been in distancing his family from his post. It has given him a peerless reputation that no other Indian leader can ever hope to match.
Into his eighth year in office, it is his aura of incorruptibility that, more than any other factor, is his political strength and strongest selling point. It has settled Modi in the hearts of the electorate, winning him and his Bharatiya Janata Party their unstinting support. He provides hope for a people who have for too long experienced the Indian government as a system of spoils where the winner bends the rules for personal gain and his local minions and party bigwigs milk the teats of expenditure on public works, social welfare programmes, and almost all capital acquisition schemes of the government, especially in high value areas of defence, industry, and telecommunications. The severance of service recently of several senior officials in the Telecom Ministry, including a Joint Secretary — which level of officers in all ministries and departments/agencies constitute the executive arm of government, suggests just how deep rooted the rot is.
The scale of corruption reached an apogee during Manmohan Singh’s tenure — a trend the PM would do nothing to stop because as a front for Sonia Gandhi (sporting the halo of one who had renounced the kingly crown when it was first offered her in 2008, but happy to work the remote control) couldn’t, as the “Congressiyas” at all levels, long accustomed to raiding the public till under party and government cover, did just that.
Modi, in this respect, has run an exemplary regime with almost no hint of personal financial malfeasance from any quarter. Because Modi’s PMO rides herd on all large expenditure programmes and contracts in all ministries, it has left little or no scope for the minor and major officials in the procurement loops to make whooppee in the manner they were used to doing. Far from doing away with corruption, however, the officials determined on having the channel of under-table earnings stay intact, have learned to tradeoff the higher risk of exposure and punishment with demands for bigger payoffs. Hence, the paradox of corruption at the Joint Secretary secretary-level on up being down even as the volume of commissions, bribes, and other illegal gratification has increased (or, so say the bribe givers of the foreign and Indian corporate worlds required to do business with the Indian government)! The computerisation and digitalising of government business and other reforms, notwithstanding, the discretionary power of civilian officials/unifomed officers, particularly in the acquisitions loops, has been retained. This means this power, traditionally used for harrassment and weighting choices, remains the preferred means of extorting bribes in money and kind from foreign and in-country vendors, original equipment manufacturers, and anyone seeking government custom. Alas, this is how the machinery of government functions and is kept lubricated even in the Modi era.
Until Modi quite literally tears down the extant apparatus of government and rebuilds it as a much smaller, more effective, version of its previous self minus the impedimenta of laws and rules of business from British times, India will limp along — the system prodding “the best and the brightest” among the youth to seek avenues of self-betterment abroad, even as Asia to the east of us gallops along with China into modernity and a happy future. Such radical makeover of the government is unfortunately not what Modi, a statist and hierarchy-minded leader, has in mind to do. He believes, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the system as-is will deliver with a bit of exhortaion from him here, a bit of tinkering by him there. It is a delusion, I concluded in my 2018 book — Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and India’s Global Ambition, the PM will persist with to the country’s detriment. This is a pity because, having captured the people’s heart and mind, he is in a position to do, as only Nehru before him was capable of doing — completely alter the government and the way its works. Instead, he seems content with doing little in that respect.
But, none of this will harm his political prospects. Not little because the BJP cadre, mostly affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), provides the party with a socio-cultural anchor that resonates with the traditional ways of thinking in the majoritarian Hindu society. It is hard, moreover, not to be impressed by RSS’ norms of high ideals, clean living, and its nationalist ideology, which can be faulted in its details, not in its basic thrust. Even more impressive is the fact that members of the RSS and, by extension, the BJP, actually live by these norms. As a high office-holder in RSS, Modi reflects the discipline of mind and of behaviour the organization inculcates in its followers. There is nevertheless dynasticism in his close circle of advisers and in BJP. But it is kept in tight check. His National Security Adviser Ajit Doval sought parliamentary seats for his sons from Uttarakhand but they were denied party tickets to fight elections. The PM’s confidante and Home Minister Amit Shah, likewise, was dissuaded from getting his son into politics in Gujarat. Jay Shah chose to head the state’s cricket board, a position he parlayed into running the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).
Historically, corruption has been the hallmark of all governments everywhere. Chanakya devoted many sections of his 3rd Century BC codicil, Arthshastra, to keeping tabs particularly on revenue collectors whom he did not trust to do right by the State. He recommended measures, including active intelligence, to police their activity. Mindful of the native proclivity to bribe giving and taking, and considering it indigenous to native systems of rule (Mughal and previous), the British expressly designed their system of colonial government to minimize it by restricting the role of Indians in government in purchases and service delivery, by installing financial advisers and the like for oversight at every turn. However well or ill it worked pre-1947, in independent India that system of government quickly turned into a bureaucratic nightmare — a viscousy mess of conflicting laws, rules and regulations that can delay decisions and implementation of decisions and ensure that what is implemented is not done well, leave alone wisely, with ambiguous file notings and paper-pushing as the default option for babus to fall back on.
So, the PM in his 2014 campaign talked of “Getting government out of business”, of creating a milieu where punitive rules are dispensed with and Indian entrepreneurs enouraged to be wealth producers and job-givers, to prosper in new tech and to generate, in the bargain, employment for the masses of aspiring youth, even as a helpful government with underway skilling programmes provides the necessary labour to drive industry. Eight years on, the government remains the main obstacle to the country’s rapid advancement in the economic sphere and on the atmnirbharta front in defence. Finance Minister Nirmala Seetharaman is still talking of investing in youth and in upskilling them, much as Modi did 8 years ago! For all his rousing rhetoric, the PM is surprisingly unwilling to rely on private industry as the vehicle for the country’s economic rise, and has been busy streamlining the dowdy, lossmaking, public sector enterprises rather than privatizing them. If his talk of reducing the footprint of government is just that — talk, where’s progress?
But a slate of unfulfilled promises will apparently not matter all that much when the general elections roll around in 2024. In fact, Modi’s re-election is now almost a certainty. His record of personal probity and upright behaviour is his ticket to victory, and will remain so as long as he contests elections. In comparison, there is Rahul Gandhi — the dynast flagbearer of the Congress party who, in a more congenial setting, would only need to nod his head for him to have the crown placed on it. In one way or another, the Congress party has shrunk into a cabal of fawning and calculating Gandhi family acolytes. So when Rahul G refers to the need for the opposition to come together and to propagate a rival ideology to compete with and defeat Modi, the question to ask is whether he is serious!
Consider how alive he is to the current reality and the social forces Modi has let loose. His “Bharat jodo” yatra may have earned Rahul a modicum of respect he didn’t earlier command. After all a man who “walks” the length of the country, albeit half of it in the airconditioned comfort of his travelling van, deserves some admiration. But then he got two things spectacularly wrong. First, the optics. Over the duration of the yatra, he sprouted a full greying beard and his looks, as a consequence, began acquiring a certain gravitas. He seemed by the time he entered the northern states to look more mature, more seasoned, less a “pappu”, which was good. But then the imagery got spoiled when he had his ex-scrap dealer of a brother-in-law, Robert Vadra, striding alongside him, reminding everybody that voting for Rahul and Congress meant possibly enabling the tainted Gandhis to return to feasting on the economic entrails of the nation. Who wants a return to that past?
More importantly, what is the ideology Rahul G hopes will upset Modi’s apple cart, come 2024? He hasn’t articulated any. But it is unlikely to be other than a return to the patronage socialism pushed by a strong central government — Indira Gandhi’s oeuvre. A revisiting of that economic disaster has to be avoided at all cost, because it will mean a return to having the public sector as the engine of economic recovery and rise, and we know how that went the last time. It realized, what became known derisively the world over as, “the Hindu rate of growth” of 2%-3% annually. Should Rahul skip to Manmohanomics the prospects would not be much better, because that’d involve tethering the Indian economy to that of the US. This’d be a recipe for India’s formally accepting a secondary power status tied to a receding power. Rahul’s and the Congress party’s vilification of the private sector leads to precisely these endpoints if their rule materializes. This is, in one sense, an ironic development because the Congress party boasts of more genuinely fecund intellects — Shashi Tharoor, Jairam Ramesh, to name two, than the BJP. Were they to be instructed by the party to rethink the Indian system of government and the role of the private sector in national life, they’d no doubt come up with a host of good ideas. But because Congress is wedded to some strain of socialism or the other, and Rahul has no bright ideas of his own to suggest as guideline, Messrs Jairam, Tharoor and Co. wallow in dated economic notions they believe will resonate with the Gandhi Family’s interests.
There’s, however, a Modi weakness that the opposition is in no position to exploit — his partiality to “crony capitalism”. Modi’s vulnerability is obvious, but Rahul’s line of political attack — “suited booted sarkar” won’t work, as the 2018 elections proved. That is because the masses too, it turns out, want to be suited and booted as Modi is in his “rags to riches” avatar as Prime Minister. It is an aspiration Modi long ago worked into the message he pitched to the public when subliminally shaping its expectations of his government in Gujarat and later at the Centre, namely, that there won’t be doles/freebies or “revadi” but there will be government assistance for people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It is another matter that despite his trying, the government hasn’t become more amenable to servicing people’s aspirations. So, when Govind Adani, with a straight face, claimed in a recent TV interview to India Today, that his proximity to Modi had nothing whatsoever to do with his rocketing rise from smalltime trader to multibillionaire tycoon, but implied that the Gujarati identity he shared with the PM may have led some people to reach that conclusion, it highlighted his implicit belief that whatever part proximity to Modi may have played, his success owes more to his own ambition, business acumen, and propensity to take risks that have fetched him big rewards. And who can dispute such a reading?
Modi is set to dominate the Indian and South Asian scene and, perhaps, to feature prominently in international politics in the years to come because an honest politician — however ruthlessly he may practise politics on home turf, is a rarity as most leading politicians and heads of government in the world at-large (barring the Scandinavian countries and, perhaps, Japan) are variants of Donald Trump in their venality.
‘Unless India ups the ante, Beijing will continue to believe its transgressions are cost free and will feel encouraged to do more of the same.’
IMAGE: A Bofors gun at the Tawang sector near the Line of Actual Control in Arunachal Pradesh. Photograph: ANI Photo
“Beijing has never wavered in its conviction that the only Asian power that matters is China. India’s stance never challenged this assumption of Chinese supremacy, but rather sought to buy peace with Beijing…It is only when the viciousness of the Galwan incident surfaced in 2020 that some sense began to dawn on New Delhi,” Dr Bharat Karnad, the national security expert at the Centre for Policy Research, the New Delhi-based think-tank, tells Rediff.com‘s Senior Contributor Rashme Sehgal.
We are once again witnessing China in a very aggressive mood sending 300 Chinese soldiers to attack and take over an Indian post in the Tawang sector on December 9. What do you believe precipitated this face off given that it has taken place in such freezing cold conditions?
There doesn’t seem to be any specific trigger for PLA skirmishes on, and intrusions across, the Line of Actual Control, such as the latest one last Friday in Yangtse in Tawang district.
It is apparently a strategy for the local commander to prosecute hostile actions as and when he is in a position to do so because the objective is to keep the disputed border unsettled.
It is a condition, Beijing hopes, will soften up the Indian government into a more territorial give-mode at the negotiating table.
This seems to be a reoccurring phenomenon with Indian troops facing a similar attack in the same sector on October 8, 2021. In all, I understand 31 such attacks have taken place in this sector over the years with a prolonged attack having taken place during the Kargil war in 1999 which lasted 60 days. How has India responded to these frequent and unprovoked aggressive actions?
XXXIII Corps — the largest formation in the Indian Army, responsible for defending India’s territorial claims on the LAC in the north east, is postured to react, which it is experienced and in a position to do.
But it is incapable of being proactive, or taking the fight to the enemy which, in fact, encourages the PLA to continue taking liberties and being provocative on the LAC.
IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi and Xi Jinping, general secretary of China’s Communist party about to shake hands at the G20 summit at the Garuda Wisnu Kencana cultural park in Badung, Bali, Indonesia. Photograph: PTI Photo
China has been steadily developing its infrastructure in the north east and is known to have built 128 villages on its side of the border with each of these villages known to be housing 100 families each. How much does our infrastructure match these development activities and does India’s military upgradation match that of China?
The Indian government woke up late to the value of infrastructure in the regions on the Indian side of LAC, and then only because the build-up of high quality roads and telecommunications network so tactically advantaged the PLA it could no longer be ignored.
Still, India is at least 15 years behind China in the density and quality of infrastructure, even if the buildup were to be put on a war-footing.
The territory on our side of the border is said to be much more difficult to negotiate than that of the Chinese side making this infrastructure development for India much more difficult.
That may be so. But engineering techniques to, say, construct roads in difficult terrain while much advanced elsewhere in the world are still to be fully adopted by the Border Roads Organisation.
Maybe it is time to speed up the underway infrastructure buildup by bringing in private sector engineering majors, such as Larsen & Toubro, to build roads and bridges, excavate tunnels, and set up dual-use telecommunications systems.
I understand the Chinese side has been using drones in this sector on a regular basis and did so in substantial numbers on November 9 while the Indian response was to bring in the Sukhoi fighter jets.
Remote-controlled Chinese drones have been active in eastern Ladakh for over a year now. But no Indian action was taken to counter them in kind for two reasons. One, India did not have drones with the range or the capacity to loiter over Chinese encampments for sustained surveillance.
And two, because such Chinese drone incursions may have been perceived as doing some good in that they informed the PLA sector commander of the concentration of Indian forces in the contested areas and their robust preparations for at least a short duration war. It may have dissuaded him from pursuing a more aggressive approach.
The flights by Chandigarh-based Su-30MKIs confirmed to the Chinese command the IAF’s operational readiness, just in case.
This latest transgression shows that China will continue to change the goal posts on this border issue in order to achieve tactical advantage over us.
So, what’s new? This is what the Chinese have been doing since the mid-1950s when they first laid down the highway connecting the mainland to Xinjiang through Indian Aksai Chin, which activity the Indian government was blissfully unaware of!
Is this being done by Xi Jinping in order to divert attention of the Chinese people from the internal issues troubling the country? These include unprecedented and widespread protests over the zero Covid policy as also the fact that its economy is not doing well.
Maybe. But as explained in my response to Question 1, these incidents are more likely part and parcel of a policy to keep the disputed border on the boil.
IMAGE: Then Eastern Air Commander and now retired Air Marshal Dilip Kumar Patnaik visits the Vijaynagar Advanced Landing Ground in Arunchal Pradesh to review operational preparedness and interacted with Indian Army troops deployed there. Photograph: ANI Photo
The objective for Xi is to promote hyper nationalistic tendencies within the Chinese public and this objective seems to match the efforts of our own prime minister with his aim to create hyper nationalistic Hindutva to suit his political objectives.
Nationalism is useful to drive nation-building and to pursue policies for socio-economic uplift.
Both Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping are leaders who would like to restore to India and China respectively, their past glories — some of them imagined!
IMAGE: Troops of the Indian Army at the International Border. Photograph: ANI Photo
How should India match this belligerence given that China does not want to solve the border dispute? China has said repeatedly that the whole of Arunachal is its territory and they consider it to be part of southern Tibet.
India has to aggresively counter the Chinese moves by not just reciprocating in kind, but going one better.
It is high time New Delhi played hardball. India should begin, for instance, to refer to ‘Chinese occupied Tibet’ and champion the cause of ‘Free Tibet’, recognise Taiwan as a separate sovereign entity, campaign for the rights of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, and severely restrict the access Chinese goods and manufacturers enjoy to the Indian market.
Unless India ups the ante, Beijing will continue to believe its transgressions are cost free, and will feel encouraged to do more of the same.
The message from the recent 20th Chinese Communist party congress in Beijing was that the Chinese leadership will not soften its position either in eastern Ladakh or in Arunachal Pradesh.
Again, this is not a surprise. Chinese Communist party congresses haven’t varied in stating their country’s intention to realise territorially the China of yore, which includes, by Beijing’s reckoning, all the countries on the Himalayan watershed — Nepal, Bhutan and southern Xizang (that it calls especially the Tawang sector of Arunachal Pradesh).
Beijing needs to be disabused of its notion that this can ever be achieved.
IMAGE: Indo-Tibetan Border Police women personnel patrol the area near the border with China in Arunachal Pradesh. Photograph: ANI Photo
China needs to dominate this area and the only power that can stand against it is India. Is this over-assertiveness on China’s part an attempt to cut us down to size, but for how long will we continue to find ourselves in this difficult situation?
Beijing has never wavered in its conviction that the only Asian power that matters is China, and the world better adjust to that reality.
India’s stance never challenged this assumption of Chinese supremacy, but rather sought to buy peace with Beijing by opening its market to its burgeoning industrial and manufacturing sector, and was reluctant to use the leverages it had (Chinese occupied Tibet, Free Tibet, Taiwan, Uyghur rights, market access).
It is only when the viciousness of the Galwan incident surfaced in 2020 that some sense began to dawn on New Delhi.
US and Western Europe likewise indulged China’s fantasies about an Asian order overseen by Beijing until the matter of the ‘nine dash line’ claims in the South China Sea and the security of Taiwan in the face of Chinese bellicosity melded with other issues — intellectual property rights, technology thievery, cyber warfare, and unbalanced trade, to revive concerns about the threat China posed to Western interests and to global peace and stability generally.
The result is a convergence of geopolitical, strategic and economic interests between India, Japan and other Asian States, the US and western Europe, and the beginnings of a collective effort to contain China.
China is giving US repeated warnings not to get close to the US.
Our response should be to tell Beijing to take a hike. And to warn Xi against getting close to Pakistan and proceeding with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
The Indian and Chinese armies engaged in major clashes along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in 2020. Since, relations between the two neighbors have remained tense.
Ex-Indian NSC Member Reflects on Arunachal Clash With Chinese Army
Defense Minister Rajnath Singh on Tuesday said PLA troops had tried to transgress the de-facto border between India and China, with troops from both countries being injured.
Reacting to the clash in Arunachal Pradesh, the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Tuesday said the situation is “stable” on its border with India.
“As far as we understand, the China-India border situation is stable overall,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said, adding that the two sides had “maintained unobstructed dialogue on the border issue through diplomatic and military channels.”
Prof. Bharat Karnad, a former member of India’s National Security Council (NSC) and security analyst, shared with Sputnik his views on the latest incident on the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
Sputnik: The Indian Army and China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) clashed in Yangtse in Tawang on December 9. The two neighbors are currently engaged in both military and diplomatic talks in order to resolve the border deadlock in Ladakh. Is it possible that the face-off in the Arunachal sector was not an accident?
Bharat Karnad: The Chinese government never does anything that’s not preplanned. The clash in Yangtse, in the Tawang District of Arunachal Pradesh, fits the bill.
This is also indicated by the fact that the PLA troops came armed for a fight minus small arms, but with wooden clubs with embedded nails, etc. — weapons of a kind that they previously used in the deadly Galwan encounter two-and-a-half years ago.
Sputnik: Do you regard this as part of a Chinese design to preempt the possibility of a future Dalai Lama being identified at the birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama?
Bharat Karnad: China is intent on zeroing out Lamaist Buddhism in Chinese-occupied Tibet (COT) — that’s always been the long-term goal.
This objective has acquired urgency because of the current Dalai Lama’s age, which Beijing fears may prompt His Holiness to name a Tibetan child from the Tibetan exile community in India as his successor. It will mean that China’s attempts to subdue Tibet by integrating it into the mainland’s Han-Communist culture will continue to be complicated.
Sputnik: What kind of preparation — both military and infrastructure-wise — does India have in the Arunachal region? Does it lack capabilities in this particular sector?
Bharat Karnad: The XXXIII Corps — the largest corps in the Indian Army — is responsible for defending the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the northeast.
It is postured to take on the PLA, and is adequately equipped with sufficient stock of prepositioned stores to conduct operations even in the dead of winter, should Beijing choose to initiate hostilities.
Sputnik: Do you consider border tensions along the LAC as a persistent issue?
Bharat Karnad: Keeping the LAC unsettled with minor skirmishes and armed intrusions and otherwise to maintain a high level of tension is the Chinese strategy to keep the Indian army on its toes and tire it out. It’s because maintaining constant vigil at high altitudes is a damnably difficult business.
Such a military strategy is what Beijing employs as a means of pressuring the Indian government into making concessions at the negotiating table.
The Indian armed services, as I have long maintained, are really not serious about making the country self-reliant in arms, all their swearing by ‘atmnirbhar Bharat’ notwithstanding. The indenting by army under the “emergency financial powers” provision for 15,000 foreign-sourced Level-4 light body armour capable of stopping steel-core bullets at 10 meters for use by counter-insurgency troops in Kashmir, and the imminent decision by navy to go in for Rafale-Marine aircraft under its TEDBF (Twin Engine Deck Based Fighter) programme, are only the latest manifestations of the military’s reluctance to give home-made products even a fighting chance.
Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay, as far back as 2018 had readied for production tested technology for bullet-proof jackets weighing 6.6 kg using boron carbide ceramics that met milspecs. Indian companies — Tata Advanced Materials Ltd and MKU of Kanpur, have been exporting body armour for years. And yet, here’s the army misusing its emergency powers to secure “phoren maal”.
Death likewise awaits the indigenous navalised Tejas Light Combat Aircraft (NLCA) at the navy’s hands. The original air force variant of the Tejas LCA somehow survived IAF’s sustained efforts at killing it off, something the service had succeeded in doing with the home-grown Marut HF-24 fighter aircraft and its Mark-II version in the 1970s. The NLCA first performed a ski-jump takeoff demonstration at INS Hansa, Goa in 2017 and has since passed every performance metric from ‘sink rate’, angle-of-attack, to folding wing-tip, including perfectly executed take-offs and landings on Vikramaditya’s deck. (For technical details on the progress made in the NLCA programme and how it is being thwarted at every turn, see my 2018 book — ‘Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and India’s Global Ambition’, pages 289-305.) But it was nevertheless declared overweight and unfit for aircraft carrier duty — the protestations by the navy officered project that weight reduction was eminently doable and once outfitted with the more powerful GE 414 jet turbine engine, would meet reasonable requirements of range and payload capacity for single engined aircraft, making no headway with the Service brass.
Why? Because, well, the navy is well and truly embarked on the TEDBF — a cover, yeah, you guessed it, for importing the phoren Boeing F-18 Super Hornet, or the French Dassault Rafale-Marine, come naval Tejas or high water! And no, no atmnirbharta programme, or defence minister Rajnath Singh’s ‘No imports’ lists is going to stop them. However, the Rafale decision was made more palatable by justifying this imported TEDBF as an interim measure, a “stop gap” solution, until the heavier two-engined variant of Tejas became available in 2032 — or a decade from now. DRDO has promised the larger naval Tejas by then, which promise will be easier to keep considering just how adaptable the basic design is to a little upscaling for a twin-engined configuration, and because of the extraordinary progress in design and other avaiation technologies already made in the NLCA programme.
But the problem is this: Once the Rafale-M or the Super Hornet enter the Indian Naval carrier service and into the IAF as a 112-strong aircraft MMRCA fleet, the sheer inertia and the procurement logic (of reducing unit cost by buying larger numbers) will ensure follow-on buys of the Rafale or the F-18, and investments and interest in the Indian NLCA and successor carrier aircraft for the navy, and in the AMCA for the air force, will peter out.
This is, perhaps, what the Indian Navy and IAF want to see happen.
[The “customised” F-18 Super Hornet, with folded wing tips to fit the Vikrant lifts]
Assuming the Modi regime weathers the American pressure to buy F-18 and 26 Rafale-M are bought, 2032 is almost the timeline by which the sale formalities are likely to be completed and Rafale-M, if it is indeed chosen, is inducted in adequate numbers. Navy further decided that the always controversial pill of importing arms, this time the Rafale-M, would go down the government’s throat better if this TEDBF acquisition piggybacked on IAF’s Rafale deal. The case, was therefore, made that because IAF’s Rafale servicing and maintenance infrastructure was already in place, the cost-saving on this side-deal would be sizeable. Naval HQrs were confident the generalist babu-manned defence ministry would be unable to discern the spuriousness of this argument considering naval and air force fighting assets are rarely co-located.
Whatever the other ill-effects of the supposedly stop gap Rafale-M/F-18 acquisition, it will definitely write finis to the NLCA and hence also to the development of the twin engined naval Tejas, and possibly also the follow-on aircraft to IAF’s Tejas Mk-1A — the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft programme. The country then can kiss a royal good bye to genuine atmnirbharta and settle down in its long nursed arms dependency status. The fact is there’s just too much temptation offered by foreign firms for militarymen and civilians in the defence procurement loops that few apparently can resist. Senior uniformed officers, serving or retired, will never allude to it, but younger, more idealistic, officers in the Group Captain and equivalent grade, not yet compromised, readily point to the filthy lucre at work, all the hoo-ha about corruption-free G2G deals being so much pretense.
If the Modi government is serious about an “atmnirbhar Bharat” and wants to prevent the doing away by indirect means of the still infant indigenous defence industrial and aerospace capabilities, it can have a TEDBF, give the indigenous programmes much needed boost, and save tens of billions in hard currency — what it has to do is have Rajnath Singh immediately announce that the government has reconsidered its decision and the single engined NLCA programme will be put on a warfooting, and be the precursor to the wholly India made TEDBF– the 2-engine medium weight navalised Tejas — to fly off the Vikramaditya and Vikrant decks ten years from now. He should also announce that the government will look askance at all procurement proposals hereon from any military service for importing weapons systems and platforms that, intended or not, undermine the government’s atmnirbharta policy. And that the government will ensure by diplomatic means to not put the navy in harm’s way by asking it to pull distant missions beyond their ken. After all, it is diplomacy army generals, and flagrank military officers generally suggest, do they not, as the means to fend off for the nonce a conventionally superior China in Ladakh and elsewhere on the Line of Actual Control?
What are the chances the Modi government will do as recommended above?
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Now let’s turn to Rafale-M and how India has been a boon to France, the French defence industry, and to foreign arms suppliers generally.
France invested some $50 billion in developing the Rafale combat aircraft and found no buyers, earning for this warplane the sobriquet of a “cursed” aircraft after a bunch of countries — Brazil, Libya, Morocco, and Switzerland serially rejected it.
Then in April 2015, India galloped on to the scene replaying its familiar role of upkeeping Western defence programmes — the proverbial knight coming to the aid of fair maidens in distress, this even as the enormously capable Indian private sector defence industry is in a permanent state of funk, pleading for custom to survive! The Indian beneficence in this case came in April 2015 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visiting Paris decided to short circuit the MMRCA (medium multi-role combat aircraft) process and take Rafale in a government-to-government (G2G) deal ostensibly to cut the middleman, commissions, etc. out of the procurement circus. New Delhi plonked down $6.9 billion in hard currency for 36 “customized” Rafales for the Indian Air Force.
“Customized” usually means hanging a lot of bells and jangles on the hardware to make a duffer of a Third World customer feel he’s getting something extra for his hard earned and scarce money! (Even so, many people in the know claim the costs were padded to the extent of Rs 1,000 crore for each of the 36 Rafales IAF has acquired via the G2G transaction!)
By way of contrast, the same year — 2015, Egypt too jumped on board, agreeing to consider this warplane for its air force. But a cleverer Cairo signed up only in May 2021 for 24 of this aircraft with promise to purchase 30 more in due time for a total of 50 Rafales, to be paid for — wait for it! — with France’s own money! Paris agreed to finance the entire deal with a 10 year loan for the package worth $4.5 billion. With the euro’s annual inflation rate of nearly 11% (10.61% actually) in October 2022 as baseline, it means Egypt will secure at least 24 Rafales for virtually nothing! (Like the masses of military hardware India got in the “good old days” from the USSR at 2% interest, i.e, virtually free.)
France has cannily played on two aspects, that (1) unlike the US, and UK and Sweden (whose Gripen combat aircraft are powered by US engines and hence sanctionable), Rafale customers can be worry free — the supply of spares and service support being outside the numbra of potential US sanctions. After all, the Indian Navy remembers how its Westland Sea King anti-submarine warfare helicopter fleet was instantly grounded once US imposed sanctions in the wake of the Indian nuclear tests in 1998, because the Sea King — a British licensed version of the Sikorsky S-61, had US components. And (2) that there are no ‘black box” technologies — an inducement for India to license manufacture the Rafale to meet IAF’s MMRCA need for another 112 aircraft, all technologies, including avionics, will be transferred. It is a tech transfer deal that does not include the high-value munitions (Meteor, Hammer, etc), of course!!
The revenues in billions of dollars generated from the sale of the 4.5 gen Rafale — exactly the same generation as the Tejas, will be poured into the 6th gen fighter aircraft France and Germany have just decided jointly to design, develop and produce by 2050. The sum of $3.8 billion for the first phase (labeled ‘1B’) for feasibility study has already been authorized.
Meanwhile, the indigenous Indian combat aircraft programmes will die a slow death from lack of service interest in them and consequent starvation of funds.
The Chanakya Dialogues were conducted by the Chanakya Foundation on Nov 12, 2022. In this particular session the discussion ranged from Chinese perceptions of India, Xi’s 2-track India policy, ways to tackle the China threat, to the sort of half-cocked atmnirbharta programme now underway. At https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Lq_Id6WHBQ
Just returned from a trip to Singapore and, especially, Cambodia which I had longed to visit and where I beheld the largest religious monuments of any kind in the world — the magnificence of Angkor Wat, built in early 12th Century by the Khmer emperor Suryavarman II in his capital of Yasodapura, and was immediately reminded of AL Basham’s book — The Wonder That Was India [note the past tense] I read as an undergrad at the University of California that tracked the rise of the Chola and Srivijaya empires in littoral Southeast Asia, and the still earlier Indic influences in that part of the world.
There it was hundreds of acres of temple complexes of at once enormous size and delicacy, celebrating the pantheon of Hindu gods and their many avatars — Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma (the temple dedicated to the last named being restored with the help and technical assistance of the Archaelogical Survey of India) but now with Buddha figures installed in them, and unending temple walls filled with friezes and engravings depicting the Ramayana, with one of the panels showing, as our mischief-minded but well informed guide, who identified himself as a “Hindu-Buddhist-animist”, slyly pointed out Sita sitting on Ravana’s lap having apparently succumbed to the irresistible charms of the Sri Lankan king! There was even Hanuman beer to quaff down with our meals.
Even as one ruminated over the lost glory, a conclusion I had reached in my book — Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security, was strengthened, that India’s decline began when it stopped expanding territorially, and that it was territorial expansion that sourced the rapid spread of Hinduism and Hindu culture and values in maritime Asia, including China and Japan, and is why ‘Greater India’ happened. Juxtapose such history with statements by present day Indian leaders claiming India never coveted or occupied foreign lands, and you see the problem! Defence minister Rajnath Singh being only the latest neta to mouth such inanities.
Anyway back to the quoutidian concerns of South Asia!
Every few years when an army chief in Pakistan deigns to vacate his post, the country lapses into a succession crisis. There’s another such catharsis afoot in Pakistan today with the imminent announcement of the name of an officer to replace the current chief General Javed Qamar Bajwa who demits office by end-November. In the order of seniority — which means little, the list of possible successors features Lt General Syed Asim Munir Ahmed Shah — the army’s Quarter Master General and former head of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Lt General Sahir Shamshad Mirza — GOC, X Corps (Rawalpindi) and ex-Chief of the General Staff (CGS), Lt General Azhar Abbas, current CGS and former commander X Corps, Lt General Numan Mahmud, President of the National Defence University and ex-GOC, XI Corps (Peshawar), and Lt General Faiz Hameed, GOC, XXXI Corps (Bahawalpur) and ex-chief, ISI.
If one is a betting man, the odds line up particularly against Faiz Hameed. It is unlikely Hameed will make it for several reasons. He loudly owned up to helping the Taliban defeat the US in Afghanistan and finds himself in the doghouse vis a vis Washington, and those whom the Americans detest have their prospects automatically dimmed in Islamabad. Worse, Hameed publicly tagged his future to the deposed Pakistan Tehreeq-i-Insaaf party PM — Imran Khan Niazi, himself hoisted into the kursi with ISI help, whom Bajwa has accused of propagating a “false narrative” about the Pakistan army (that it interferes in domestic politics and, surprise! surprise! plays favourites!!). For these reasons Bajwa unceremoniously removed Hameed from ISI and dumped him in Bahawalpur. As a consequence, the latter has, as the saying goes, a spitball’s chance in hell!
The recent pattern of elevations would suggest the seniormost officer who is to be passed over is given an extra pip and appointed Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee — a post presently held by General Nadeem Raza. So the 18th Chairman, JCSC, will likely be Asim Munir Shah. With Hameed out of the picture, the race is then between Mirza, Abbas and Mahmud. Abbas as CGS has the insider’s odds on his side. But my intuition says it will be Mahmud who gets the nod because he is in a relatively innocuous post where it is difficult to make enemies and, therefore, seems politically to be the safest. This is no small metric considering Nawaz Sharif in 2016 chose Bajwa, who was Inspector General, Training and Evaluation, as army chief over corps commanders senior to him. Bajwa’s antipathy to Imran notwithstanding, the PTI head has raised such a stink over the next COAS’s selection that while picking Imran’s choice, Hameed, is out of question, Prime Minister Shabaz Sharif, in consultation with Bajwa, may alight on Mahmud as the least objectionable candidate. This last is important because COAS’s appointment has to have President Arif Alvi’s consent, and Alvi is Imran Khan’s acolyte.
Unfortunately for Pakistan, its prime ministers have often chosen their memesis as army chiefs. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto picked Zia ul-Haq, so down on the seniority list, he wasn’t even in the original “summary” the defence ministry drew up. And then at Bhutto’s insistence, Zia was included in the seniority list with reluctance by the departing COAS General Tikka Khan. As Tikka Khan told me when I visited him at his Rawalpindi home in December 1982 when he was under “house arrest” — Bhutto’s weakness was he was partial to flattery and loved flatterers. Aware of this, Zia as GOC II Strike Corps, Multan, laid it on thick when Bhutto visited his command headquarters. There, per Tikka, Zia quite literally kowtowed to Bhutto, even swearing personal loyalty to him with his hand on a copy of the Quran! Tikka recalled, with choicest Punjabi abuses, how hard he tried to dissuade Bhutto from choosing Zia, warning him of “qayamat”! Some years later Nawaz Sharif like wise selected Parvez Musharraf who, after his coup d’etat rather than hang him, as Zia did Bhutto, exiled him to Saudi Arabia.
So, it is hard to tell which officer on the short list catches Shabaz’s fancy and why, and with what ultimate result.
But let’s be clear just how extraordinarily high the personal stakes are. It means instant power and riches to the officer who is selected. Bajwa and his family members, for instance, have for no apparent fault of theirs (!) become billionaires in the 6 years of his tenure with proliferating property and prized land acquisitions in choicest locations in the West, in Dubai and, of course, in cantonment towns within Pakistan! The surprise is Bajwa’s tax returns, leaked to the media, reveal this!
[The departing Chinese ambassador, Sun Weidong, and Jaishankar]
Sun Weidong, China’s ambassador who is returning to Bejing, surely did not expect the Indian External Affairs Minister, S. Jaishankar, to crown his stint in New Delhi with an Indian policy turn that the Xi Jinping regime had long hoped for but could not in its wildest dreams have imagined would be gifted to it on a platter, on an unmemorable occasion, and without China having to pay a price for it. As far as the Chinese government is concerned, what Jaishankar did not say — which in this case is far more significant than what he, in fact, said, removes all the hurdles to normalization of bilateral relations that were stuck in the glitch created by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) surreptitious takeover in recent years of over 1,000 sq kms of Indian territory in eastern Ladakh, mostly in the Depsang Plains. In an otherwise protocol dictated meeting October 25 in which a departing foreign envoy is bid farewell by the host foreign minister, the sort of event in which nothing of import usually ever happens, Jaishankar made Sun’s and Beijing’s day!
So, what did Jaishankar not say that may have bad consequences? According to media reports, the Indian foreign minister emphasized that normalcy would return to bilateral relations on the basis of “peace and tranquility” being re-established in the disputed border regions. There was no hint anywhere of Jaishankar forcefully iterating the specific condition India has so far insisted on — restoration of the status quo ante! And even if he did mention it in passing, not making a hoo-ha about it is just as revealing. It is very likely the absence of this phrase or its emphatic repetition, will be interpreted by Beijing to mean that New Delhi has accepted China’s grabbing of vast tracts of Ladakhi real estate as a fait accompli. One can expect Sun to have sent a note to Zhongnanhai mentioning this Indian concession, something Chinese interlocuters in the future will bring up as a principle-setting precedent to dismiss the notion of restoring to India its territory, and to make the point that the two countries should put the unpleasantness of PLA-initiated hostilites in eastern Ladakh behind them, and get on with the business of the Indian consumer doing what he is good at, namely, buying plenty of Chinese goods and manufactures to keep Chinese industries humming and making an already prosperous China wealthier.
Even as Sino-Indian tensions were asimmer, Chinese exports to India of capital machinery and intermediate goods (such as pharmaceutical ingredients) this year surged to a record high of nearly $90 billion even as Indian exports to China shrank by 36.4% and the balance of payments got further skewed. In the current two-way trade of some $125 billion, India’s take was a little more than $25 billion. It is a one-sided wealth-transfer trend the Modi government has done next to nothing to reverse.
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh the other day talked of completing what he called the “Kashmir mission” in the foreseeable future of taking back Pakistan-occupied Gilgit and Baltistan. He justified it in terms of a Parliamentary Resolution. Curiously, Parliament’s 1962 Resolution, still standing, that requires the Indian government to fight and to do whatever else is necessary to recover “every inch of Indian territory” lost to China since before the 1962 War, is conveniently forgotten by the Modi regime.
Annexation of Indian territory began, it may be recalled, with parts of Aksai Chin through which the Chinese built the Xinjiang Highway amalgamated into Chinese-occupied Tibet that the Indian government became aware of only in 1958! Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had rationalised India’s ignorance of such offensive Chinese carryings-on by saying it involved land “on which not even a blade of grass grew”. A similar appeasement-minded outlook appears to be congealing around the need to cut deals with Xi’s China that will, unfortunately, allow the Indian government formally to accept a China that is territorially expanding at India’s expense, but free up strategic policy space and resources to, presumably, belabour Pakistan!
One is not sure what to make of the Modi government’s obsession with reducing an already much reduced Pakistan. No country is more seriously tanking financially, politically and socially than Pakistan. Any dim-witted politician would take to heart Napoleon Bonaparte’s advice to not interfere when an adversary is making mistake after mistake, seemingly intent on taking himself down. With General Qamar Javed Bajwa apparently serious about detaching the Pakistan army from the snakepit that is Pakistani politics, but Imran Khan, disqualified from fighting elections on corruption grounds, just as focussed on bringing matters to a head with his underway “long march” on Islamabad with its potential for exacerbating domestic fissures and faultlines to the point of endangering the Pakistani state, that country is in for a rough ride. It is a situation, Imran expects, will compel the Pakistan army to either takeover the reins of power for another round of martial law rule, or comply with his demand to dislodge the Muslim League (Nawaz) government of Shahbaz Sharif and order elections which, he expects, his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf party to win. Any which way this mess gets sorted out, Imran is confident he won’t lose.
The only thing guaranteed to get the warring elements within the Pakistani nation to forget their differences are revelations of actions by the Modi-Doval-Jaishankar trio to weaken Pakistan. (In this respect, India’s squeak-by win in the T-20 World Cup opener in Melbourne hasn’t helped!). So, stand down!
Bharat Karnad, emeritus professor in national security studies at the Centre for Policy Research, the think-tank in New Delhi, discusses the implications of Xi Jinping being re-elected for a third term as China’s leader for India and the rest of the world.
“The Chinese leadership considers the Galwan surprise a great tactical military success, and wants to wallow in it,” Dr Karnad tells Rediff.com Senior Contributor Rashme Sehgal about the screening of the Galwan Valley footage where Indian and Chinese troops fought in June 2020 at the Chinese Communist party’s 20th party congress in Beijing on Sunday.
With Xi Jinping in all certainty getting a third term as general secretary of China’s Communist party this weekend and a likely third term as president of the People’s Republic of China in March, what does this mean for India and for the world?
More of the same. Meaning, that he will wait for the Modi government to make the reconciliation moves, which will not happen. Because Foreign Minister S Jaishankar has expressly refuted Beijing’s statement that normalcy was returning to Sino-Indian relations. He reminded the Xi regime that the territorial status quo ante had to be first restored before normalcy can have a chance.
For the world, Xi’s third term means aggravation of the Sino-US rivalry. With Washington and European countries rolling out a number of punitive anti-China laws to deny Chinese goods easy access to their markets, prevent it from stealing/hacking advanced technologies and disrespecting Intellectual Property Rights, and to reduce dependence on China for critical stuff, like semi-conductors, and on Chinese supply chains supporting their industries, and with (United States) President Joe Biden promising militarily to curtail Chinese moves at forcible Taiwan reunification, the military competition in the Indo-Pacific is set to become sharper.
Some weeks ago it was suggested that a palace coup had taken place and Xi had been sidelined. But obviously, this news was incorrect.
The politics of Zhongnanhai (the government complex in Beijing where the major leaders of the Chinese Communist party live and work) has always been difficult to read. But it is usually safe to disregard rumours of dire events happening behind its walls.
IMAGE: Xi at the opening ceremony of the 20th party congress on Sunday, October 16, 2022. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters
Xi has harnessed an aggressive nationalism which he claims will see the cultural and military rejuvenation of China. How far will he succeed in this objective?
With the Chinese armed forces afforded large budgets and a relatively free hand, Xi Jinping in his first two terms had already gone some ways towards turning China into a garrison State. His statements at the Communist Party Congress suggest he is doubling down on firming up the China ‘fortress’. In other foreign policy areas, like in the programmes of strategic outreach, for example, he has had mixed results. While many of the projects in his Belt Road Initiative (such as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor) have stalled, the Chinese presence in the western Pacific centering on the Solomon Islands has met with considerable success.
Xi’s goals can be achieved by creating a fighting military machine. Its force, albeit, was tested two years against India in Ladakh in which the Chinese more or less have achieved their objectives.
As usually happens with the Indian military and government, they had no clue about the stealthy Chinese advance onto the Indian side of the Line of Actual Control and generally about the forward area buildup in eastern Ladakh. So when the PLA went overt with their tactical offensive on the Galwan river, they caught the Indian army and MEA with their pants down. It has forced India on the defensive.
IMAGE: Communist leaders applaud Xi at the party congress on Sunday, October 16, 2022. Photograph: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
The Galwan Valley footage was shown at the opening of the party congress in Beijing on Sunday. What does that indicate?
The Chinese leadership considers the Galwan surprise a great tactical military success, and wants to wallow in it.
India put up a challenge to the Chinese army in Doklam in 2017, but ever since the Chinese have built up a vast infrastructure of roads and helipads claiming this entire area as their own. Do you see them blockading Indian forces in this area?
Tackling the PLA in the contested trijunction Doklam area has always been problematic because it also involves Bhutan. Powerful sections within Bhutanese ruling circles that Beijing has cultivated over the years want a rapprochement even if that riles New Delhi. That particular Bhutanese view seems to be that if ceding a bit of territory here and there to China generates goodwill, it may be no bad thing.
With Russia involved in the Ukraine war and with the US focus shifted to this conflict, the Quad no longer enjoys the kind of primacy in its mental bandwidth as was the case earlier. This is bound to benefit the Chinese who are free to carry out aggressive actions in South Asia.
It isn’t as if the Quad was ever operationalised or was militarily active. India, the US, Japan and Australia have all seen it as more of a loose political-military arrangement to discomfit China. Besides, the Ukraine imbroglio is a land-based contingency while the Indo-Pacific is a maritime theatre of conflict. The two require quite different sets of wherewithal and capabilities. So the US/NATO focus on the Donbas region that Russia wants to annex will only marginally affect its efforts in the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea or the East Sea.
IMAGE: A telecast of the deliberations at the Communist party congress for journalists covering the event at a hotel in Beijing, October 19, 2022. Photograph: Tingshu Wang/Reuters
Will Xi continue to issue periodic warnings against Taiwan or do you see any likelihood of a future attack?
A Chinese invasion of Taiwan is far from imminent. After all, Russia’s setbacks in Ukraine have got Xi and the PLA thinking that, maybe, attacking Taiwan is not such a great idea! However, attempts at reunification are possible in the middle to distant future (20-50 years). But by then Taipei will likely have secured nuclear weapons for itself, making it immune to any Chinese adventure.
Why has there been such complete capitulation in China. Did Xi not face any opposition at all?
What capitulation? Xi always controlled the PLA and the other levers of power. So there was never any serious contender for power on the scene.
Is Xi going to see any breaks at all in his quest for Chinese supremacy as the number one power in the globe?
All trends and indices suggest that while it will be a hard slog for China to ascend to the numero uno status, it will always be a force to reckon with in Asia and the world.
How do you see the US response to these developments?
Well, the US and the West are taking all the measures necessary to prevent China from having an easy run to the top. Washington realiSes it made a mistake by helping China become a powerful trading nation and industrial power — the manufacturing hub of the world. In the future, it will try with its European allies and Japan and Australia to retard China’s relentless progress.
After a long hiatus and endless speculation, the country finally has a Chief of Defence Staff and successor to the late General Bipin Rawat — General Anil Chauhan. Like his predecessor in this post, he is a Gurkha officer and, more importantly, a native of Pauri Garhwal — an origin they fortuitously share with the National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval. The Pauri Garhwali fellowship aside, Chauhan’s time as Director-General, Military Operations during the Balakot strike operation that was, in reality, more a “political” and “public relations” stunt than a military success, may have earned him plus points at the PMO and appointments, after retiring as the Eastern Army commander, as Military Adviser to the National Security Council that Doval oversees and now as CDS and, concurrently, Secretary, Department of Military Affairs (DMA), and Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee. (The DGMO’s brief during the Balakot op would have been to keep the army primed for hostilities in case Pakistan followed up the chase by its F-16s of the Indian strike aircraft in scoot mode with army action.)
Chauhan seems a run-of-the-mill careerist type who got lucky (in terms of political connections). He has no paper trail in terms of writings, public speeches, etc. that would clue us to the views he holds on military and national security matters and, even less, about what he means to do. It is obvious that when Rawat was anointed CDS, Modi-Doval had no road map on armed forces’ integation and theaterisation of commands, and Rawat felt free to voice some very definite but wrong-headed views. Such as the air force as a support service, expeditionary forces as unnecessary and, not for the right reasons, aircraft carriers as unaffordable luxuries. They ended up stiffening the resistance to his initiatives from the get-go. Chauhan while publicly more circumspect is reported by “government officials” as saying that there have been enough “discussions” already and “it is now time to move forward” on implementing theaterisation of commands, his priority.
But realization of theatre commands assumes that all three armed services are on the same page and, moreover, that a certain level of integration of the services has already been achieved — neither of which is true! Indeed, the air force chief, Air Chief Marshal VR Chaudhari preempted the constitution of the ‘Air Defence Command’ by announcing on October 4 the establishment of a new and separate operational stream within his service — the so-called Weapons Systems Branch headed by an Air Marshal-rank officer to control all of IAF’s surface-to-air missile and surface-to-surface missile squadrons and fleet of surveillance and attack drones! And, doubling down, he stated plainly that his service’s air power doctrine cannot be compromised, and added that theaterised commands would only complicate operational and other decisionmaking by adding another layer to it! So, whatever Chauhan has in mind to do, the IAF is not on-board.
But what’s the thinking in his parent service — the army. Consider the views of two retired officers, Lieutenant Generals Raj Shukla, whose last two postings as Commandant, Army War College, and head of the Army Training Command in Shimla, presumably afforded him the time to mull over issues in some depth, and Satish Dua, a former Chief of the Integrated Defence Staff and GOC, XV Corps in J&K.
While conceding that “integrated theatre commands are an important structural correction”, Shukla in a somewhat confused and confusing Hindustan Times op-ed of Sept 30, considered them remnants of the “industrial era”, and hinted at “parallel pathways” to jointness courtesy “digital integration, tri-service clouds, Artificial Intelligence-enabled combat frameworks” which, he claimed, would produce “superior” “military autonomy” than theatre commands (but is military autonomy the objective of military integration?), before lurching sideways to urge General Chauhan to make “an immediate, accelerated and ambitious turn to the seas, even as we fortify our combat posture” on the disputed land border with China.
Delving into the challenges facing Chauhan, Dua’s op-ed on the same day in the Times of India was less futuristic and more hopeful that the new CDS will “carry forward” Rawat’s “endeavour”, further the cause of “civil-military fusion”, and prepare the system for “multi-domain warfare” by utilizing the DMA. He regards theaterisation as a means of using “existing resources for an optimised combat effectiveness”, which he admits will be no easy task to realize. But he advises Chauhan to take “strong decisions” if he finds “unanimity” among services chiefs missing meaning, apparently, that he should hold Air Chief Marshal Chaudhuri’s feet to the fire, ride roughshod over the IAF’s objections to the air defence command, while ensuring that this “transition” is “smooth”. How the CDS is to do all this, Dua doesn’t say.
Shukla’s and Dua’s writings — and one can refer to a bunch of other similar articles by serving and retired military personnel on the subject of jointness-integration-theaterisation, are symptomatic of the problem. It is all airy-fairy stuff. Everybody knows where to go but no clear-cut ideas of how to get there.
Some 20 years ago at an army symposium in Bangalore I presented a paper that envisaged four stages leading to forces integration — cooperation, coordination, jointness, integration. I said then that the Indian armed services are stuck in the first stage of cooperating, willy-nilly, during crisis and war, and that coordination some time happens if, say, NDA coursemates from different services decide to work closely outside usual channels in an emergency, and that the last two stages of jointness and integration are thresholds realistically so far beyond realization as to be mere abstractions! Into the third decade of the new millennium, little substantively has changed.
A major restructuring of armed forces is not a joke, or indulged in on a political whim. It requires a singularity of vision and, ideally, years of serious and sustained study and inter-services discussions, and interactions at the services HQ-level, in-depth reports from in-house and diverse external sources — informed analysts, academics, thinktanks and management consultants that explore the technology trends and management imperatives, different models of military manpower usage, systems of procurements and budgetary allocations, experiences of military integration in other countries, and involves fleshing out of alternative schemes of jointness and the costs of such transformation, and finally wargaming and practical exercises to test and validate the alternative schemata of operational wartime and peacetime decisionmaking to see what works best. That’s how the most effective mix of military and nonmilitary elements and the meshing of different decisionmaking. command and control designs, can be discovered and armed services restructured in the most effective way. As far as I know, none of this has happened and yet the country is embarked on a major reordering of its armed forces.
Surely, the Modi government can’t be very serious about military integration and theaterisation of commands, because as things stand now the underway efforts seem like passing political fancy. But two moves would still make a difference even if the ground is inadequately prepared for such overhaul. Because more time cannot be wasted on the preparatory work; it will have to be the trial and error method. The Prime Minister has, firstly, to be the principal stakeholder in this exercise and use the whip against the military pooh-bahs and laggards undermining/delaying the process. This may involve firing reluctant services chiefs of staff and retiring principal staff officers in Services headquarters. And secondly, and more importantly, he has to invest Chauhan with the necessary authority — the CDS cannot be the first among equals; in a military milieu that won’t work. He has to be a five star officer — a Field Marshal/Admiral of the Fleet/Marshal of the Air Force, who outranks everybody and whose orders and instructions the services chiefs can ignore or resist at their peril. Absent these steps, Modi may as well whistle for theaterisation.
The Prime Minister may care to learn a lesson or two from the American experience. In the US, President Harry Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson took ownership of the unification plan and were the political piledrivers, who pulverzied the objections of the military, especially the senior service — the US Navy, and brusquely dismissed the parochial fears of the Admirals of renown — the Chester Nimitz’s and the Arleigh Burke’s, who had gained fame in the Second World War and opposed military unification. There was also no great body of studies and reports leading to the military integration and the emergence of the Pentagon in Washington, DC. There was but a single design for unification outlined in a short paper authored by a single person, not a committee — Stimson’s adviser and confidante, a man named Ferdinand. The trial and error method here led to an exercise in rectification and a second defence system overhaul in the 1980s — the Goldwater-Nichols Act.
This TEDx talk, recorded in July 2022, on the above subject of “Technology & War” may be of interest
Two more recent (Aug 23 and Sept 13) talks on DEF TALKS regarding ‘Understanding strategic threats to India’ and on ‘Chinese influence operations in India’ below
‘When the war against Ukraine that Putin started is not going the way he was expecting it to and his military options are getting onerous, a bit of nuclear sabre rattling is what he hopes will turn things around for him and Russia.’
IMAGE: Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during an event marking the 1160th anniversary of Russian statehood in the city of Veliky Novgorod, Russia, September 21, 2022. Photograph: Sputnik/Ilya Pitalev/Pool via Reuters
Is President Putin’s frequent sabre rattling on the use of nuclear weapons a sombre warning to Western countries? A genuine threat? Or is he simply bluffing.
Dr Bharat Karnad, emeritus professor in national security studies at the Centre for Policy Research, the Delhi think-tank, and a national security expert explains the chain of developments taking place following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“No one in Moscow expected Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people to react the way they did nor anticipated that the US/NATO would set up an arms supply line enabling Ukrainian forces,” Dr Karnad tells Rediff.com Senior Contributor Rashme Sehgal.
Why is President Putin resorting to frequent nuclear sabre rattling? Are these threats creating the desired fear in the West as Putin would like to believe?
When the war against Ukraine that Putin started is not going the way he was expecting it to and his military options are getting onerous, a bit of nuclear sabre rattling is what he hopes will turn things around for him and Russia.
But it is not having the effect he expected in the main because a 75-year-old nuclear use taboo is hard to overcome, particularly because conventional military setbacks in Ukraine and that too of Russia’s making, don’t seem serious enough provocation.
IMAGE: A view of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant outside the Russian-controlled city of Enerhodar in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region. Photograph: Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters
How is Nato indulging in ‘nuclear blackmail’ of Russia? Is the territorial integrity of Russia being threatened as Putin claims?
Well, the context is this. The informal understanding of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that promised joint US-Russian-UK security guarantees for Ukraine in return for Kyiv giving up its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal, was that Ukraine would remain outside NATO. Moscow believes this was violated by the moves underway to fast-track Ukraine’s membership in NATO.
And that once inside the NATO fold, Ukraine could invoke nuclear protection clauses of the alliance — which Moscow interprets as ‘nuclear blackmail’, to prevent Russia from achieving its objective of annexing the Donbas-Crimean flank to the Black Sea.
Crimea was forcibly absorbed by Russia in 2014.
According to Putin, this flank, with an ethnic Russian majority, that connects Crimea and Donbas to Russia, but outside Moscow’s control would imperil its access to, and render it vulnerable from, the sea and therefore constitutes a security threat.
Are these warnings being issued by President Putin so that Western countries stop their escalation of weapon supply to Ukraine?
Certainly, the US/NATO supply of armaments, especially precision-guided munitions (PGMs), to Ukrainian forces have frustrated Russian plans for rapid armoured thrusts to take the Donbas region.
Whether threats of use ‘of all available means’ will prompt the US to terminate the military supply pipeline is doubtful — the strategic gains from keeping Russia thus militarily engaged in Ukraine and progressively weakening are too substantial to forego.
IMAGE: Ukrainian soldiers repair a Russian tank captured during a counteroffensive operation near the Russian border in the Kharkiv region. Photograph: Sofiia Gatilova/Reuters
During the recent Modi-Putin interaction in Samarkand, President Putin told Prime Minister Modi that while Russia was keen to end the fighting, the Ukrainian leadership did not want to negotiate a peace settlement. How far is that perception correct?
Hard to know what the truth is when faced with conflicting Russian and Ukrainian accounts.
The facts are these: Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 without much Ukrainian resistance.
Moscow believed that for the same reasons Kyiv would not hugely oppose the Russian takeover of the Donbas.
Except, Ukrainian President Vlodoymyr Zelenskyy was unwilling to cede this territory as well to Russia with or without a fight. So both in a sense are right!
With the kind of reverses the Russian army has faced recently in Kharkiv and with there being no cessation of weapon supplies to Ukraine so far, do you see Russian reverses on the battlefield on the rise and if that is indeed the case, will there be a likelihood of Putin resorting to the use of nuclear tactical weapons in the future?
The use of tacnukes is not likely for reasons of the nuclear taboo already mentioned. But Putin is, perhaps, using such threat of use by way of a Russian doctrinal innovation, namely, the principle of ‘escalate to de-escalate’.
Meaning, make the threat of tacnuke use real and imminent enough to raise fears in Washington about the situation spiraling into a strategic exchange, and thus compel it to pressure Kyiv into halting hostilities and into some kind of accommodation with Moscow.
IMAGE: Destroyed Russian tanks in Ukraine. Photograph: Irina Rybakova/Press service of the Ukrainian Ground Forces/Handout via Reuters
The world is also interested in getting a clearer picture of what is happening at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, with its six reactors, making it the largest nuclear power station in Europe which is being operated with the help of Ukrainian workers. Each of Zaporizhzhia’s reactors would cost $7 billion to replace, and with fighting going on around the plant experts do not to rule out a Chernobyl-like disaster.
Zaporizhzhia could be another Chernobyl. Then again not.
Putin, perhaps, has in mind to use the threat to strike this massive nuclear power station as a hostage to ‘good’ behaviour by Washington and Kyiv. But such tactics are risky because any radioactivity leakage as a consequence of a hit on it could affect the Russian hinterland too because radioactive clouds could easily float across and drop down as rain and infect the Russian countryside or urban areas.
But the reported missile attack on a hydroelectric plant just 300 metres from the nuclear reactors at another Ukrainian nuclear power station in Yuznoukrainsk in southern Ukraine could be a signal to the US and NATO that Moscow’s nuclear use threat is ‘not a bluff’.
IMAGE: Russian grenade launchers captured by the Ukrainian armed forces during a counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region. Photograph: Press service of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine/Handout/Reuters
The holding of a referendum set to take place in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia over the weekend provides an interesting subtext to the ongoing developments. Why is this referendum being held in the first place?
The referendum ordered by Putin in these areas is retroactively to endow the Russian actions to annex the Donbas region of Ukraine with a veneer of legitimacy and as a means of showing popular support for the Russian campaign of ‘reunification’. And also, just may be, as a means of blunting Western calls for Russian reparations for the destruction visited upon Ukraine by the war.
IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Modi meets Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Samarkand, September 16, 2022. Photograph: Kind courtesy @narendramodi/Twitter
Has the Ukrainian invasion proved to be a major miscalculation on the part of Russia?
Yes, because no one in Moscow expected Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people to react the way they did, nor anticipated that US/NATO would set up an arms supply line enabling Ukrainian forces to fight without worrying over much about whether their stocks of guns, ammo, artillery and PGMs to sustain such a fight, would last and for how long.
Moscow also miscalculated about just how much of a public relations disaster this war has been.
While Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people are seen as heroic in resisting aggression, Russia and its military are seen as bumblers, with much of the world perceiving the conflict as an avoidable misadventure.
It is bad news when even friendly states, such as India and China that Moscow had hoped would sit on the fence, think it best to distance themselves from Russia.
Security Wise 