Holding New Delhi's Hand

United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has finished a workmanlike visit to New Delhi. The purpose of the exercise was to show an always nervous New Delhi that Washington still cared. All the things she said and did here were aimed at soothing India which is incensed at the attention being showered on Pakistan and Afghanistan. India does not really need the kind of attention that AfPak is receiving. They are like patients in an ICU with doctors crowding around. New Delhi, on the other hand, is as normal as you can be. But the American relationship is an important component of New Delhi’s world view and, indeed, self-esteem, and therefore there is need for their frequent endorsement on the part of the US.

Normalisation

Three major issues formed the basic content of the visit. First, the need to get over Cold War mindset, second, the need to add economic content to the relationship and third, to move on the people-to-people content of the relationship. US-Indian relations have had their ups and downs for the past sixty years. But since the end of the Cold War, it has been mainly the ups. There are remnants of Cold Warriors in the US, who still feel that Pakistan should have the primacy in India-Pakistan relations. Getting beyond the Cold War rhetoric was the important element in proposing the Indo-US nuclear deal, which has, in turn, led to the new set of agreements on technology safeguards and an end user verification agreement on acquisition of high-tech military equipment. With the nuclear pill that poisoned relations between the two countries having been safely digested, the game has shifted to a higher level.
The agreements arrived at during the visit have the potential of adding that vital economic content which has been slipping. Unlike the case of China, the two countries cannot build up volume and value by trade in natural resources like iron ore or consumer products. America is about Information Technology and high tech and the Clinton visit has gone some way in clearing the decks for high-tech exports to India ranging from aerospace components and products, to nuclear reactors and their control systems. There is, in any case, a limit to how much content governments of two largely market economies can add to their relationship. A major factor now, in any case, is the US economic situation. It will take another year or so before we can get a better idea of the new, post-crisis contours of the Indo-US economic relationship.
What happens now is a bit like what happened in the 1950s. Besides opening up military sales, the US will engage us deeply in a range of non-military areas even while enhancing their military cooperation with Pakistan. In this case the military cooperation is not so much to fight any third-party, but to pull Pakistan of out of a quagmire. It is quite clear that Islamabad will no longer get a blank check in that relationship to build up its military forces to fight India, as it did in the past.
The new non-military elements of the Indo-US relationship are spelt out in four of the give pillars of the strategic dialogue outlined-- energy, climate change, education, agriculture, and health and science and technology. The first “pillar” speaks of addressing nonproliferation, counterterrorism and military cooperation, the emphasis will be mainly in relation to terrorism.
This is the kind of a relationship took place in the 1950s and 1960s as well, and it led to the creation of the Indian diaspora in the US which has played such an important role in providing the content to the people-to-people relationship at present. It also led to an important modernization of the Indian industry and academe through the IITs and educational system and above all, it led to the Green Revolution. Revisiting these areas seems to be the premise of the new relationship and they are likely to yield a bountiful harvest. This will also add the strategically important people-to-people content from the practical exchanges of Indian and American students and scholars, engineers and architects, businessmen and bankers.
This will lead to a kind of “normalization” of Indo-US ties which will ensure that a large regional power like India will be factored into the South-west Asian regional calculus of the US, but be excluded from the larger picture. Which is all for the good because it will enable New Delhi to find its feet after the heady ride of the Bush years.

Envy

During the eight years of the Bush Administration, India was made to bat well above its league. This resulted in bad blood with China and a shade of exasperation in Europe. Beijing was suspicious that India was becoming part of the quadrilateral with Australia, US and Japan to “check” the rise of China and one result of this has been its Tawang tract googly which has blocked the Sino-Indian normalization process. The Indo-US subsurface cooperation reached a point where India was almost persuaded to assist the United States military occupation of Iraq by sending its own forces. The Indo-US nuclear deal was the capstone which ensured that India did get the most-favoured nation treatment, literally, from the United States much to the chagrin of its allies and our adversaries like Pakistan and China.

Broadening

Notwithstanding all this, India has to realise that there are finite limits to its ties with the US. Adding the tag “strategic” does little justice to the relationship between the world’s richest country and biggest military power and a third world country which is also the host of the largest number of poor and unhealthy.
Ties between the two can only work on an asymmetrical dynamic and it is useful for New Delhi to keep that in mind. In the coming months this will be important as we battle the United States effort to re-establish its hegemony through assuming the leadership of the climate change and non-proliferation agendas. In both these areas the two countries are likely to see themselves pitted against each other.
This said, it needs to be emphasized that the friendship of the United States is important for India and never more important than now. We are at the cusp of transformation and a good understanding with the US can be of great assistance in not only enhancing our security, but also improving the lives of the average Indian. If the retrospect tells us how important the Green Revolution has been, the prospect offers even more challenging opportunities in the development of energy technologies and biosciences. In that sense the more important aspect of the Clinton visit has been to broaden the agenda of our ties with the US from their usual obsession with terrorism and Pakistan.

India is short of effective managers

Last Saturday’s accident on New Delhi’s metro site is not remarkable. Such accidents will occur, and have occurred, in infrastructure projects with lamentable regularity all over the world. What is remarkable, however, is the amount of hand-wringing over whether the 71-year-old E Sridharan, the director of the metro project, should resign or stay. Sridharan has had a wonderful innings as a manager of mega-projects and received some of the highest honours the state can bestow him.



He, perhaps, may actually want to retire and grow roses or whatever. But the overwhelming, almost hysterical, opinion that he should stay, points at the extreme paucity of managerial talent in the country, if not real live role models like him. Actually given India’s state of development, there ought to be no shortage of Sridharans. But there is. And that’s the rub.
Nowhere is the shortage of talent and experience more obvious than in the power sector. Every year, the sector falls short of its target for capacity addition. The 11th Plan target is 78,700 MW but, so far in two years of the plan, only 15,000 MW have been added. Contrast this with the 50 or so power plants of 2,000MW each that China adds every year — roughly one 2,000 MW plant a week. Indian power projects are perpetually stuck in some kind of a maze.

Power
Some years ago, 1997, to be exact, a person who is a top economic bureaucrat today, told me that lack of experience was the main reason why most of the eight power-plants, that were okayed with a sovereign counter-guarantee in the 1990s by the reform-minded federal government, failed to come up.
“We simply did not understand the complexity of funding and constructing large power plants,” the official lamely acknowledged. The worst example of official incompetence, and perhaps venality, turned out to be the prized Dabhol power project in Maharashtra. Everyone messed up everything in the project, from the original choice of LNG as the fuel for the power plant to the ridiculously high interest rates of the rupee and dollar loans for the project. It would seem that we have learnt some of the lessons, but simply not fast enough to meet the needs of a growing economy.
For the present, however, the government seems to be placing all its bets on the private sector. In UPA-I the government launched four ultra mega power projects (UMPPs) of which Reliance Power has bagged three and the Tatas one. UPA II is so far talking about another seven projects which would require investments of roughly Rs 20,000 crore each. The UMPPs are a giant step ahead of the counter-guarantee phase. They are based on competitive bidding and there are no sweet-heart deals that poisoned the Dabhol project. However, there are reports that the country may have saturated its ability to process these private-sector power plants. In the recent bidding, there has been a marked reluctance of the big global players to participate. As for the Indian bidders, they are obviously limited to Reliance and Tata and one or two other players who are yet to show their hand.
In these circumstances how can we meet the demand for power, especially the projections that have the country’s GDP growing at 8 or 9 per cent per annum ? Well, as of now, India is still lacking something, a fact that is becoming painfully manifest every summer. Indeed, with the demand for infrastructure projects increasing the shortage of skills — from the very top managers, to the lowly skilled workers — the ones who mix the concrete and set up the scaffoldings — is becoming apparent.
The answer is not the caricature response that “privatisation is the best”. Indeed, so severe is the problem that we need the best of all — private sector managers, as well as the technocrat-bureaucrat of the Sridharan or Mantosh Sondhi variety. Given the sheer size of power projects it is not surprising that some of the top private sector managers are those who have retired from the public sector. These are people who understand the ethos of government, but can also make it work for them and their projects. Indeed, this is yet another reason why deep reform is required in the country’s civil service, notably the premier Indian Administrative Service.

Security
Power and infrastructure are not the only sectors that are starved of truly skilled administrative cadre. There is, for example, the need for a national security cadre.
National security management — from managing the borders, to the intelligence services, paramilitary, armed forces — all require skilled administrators, ones who have ground-up experience and are skilled in getting things done. As of now the government simply does not recognise this as a skilled job.
Take the job of the Defence Secretary who has to manage India’s vast defence apparatus. The current incumbent, Vijay Singh is no doubt a seasoned and skilled administrator, but he had little or no experience in the massive job he was given. Prior to his appointment as Defence Secretary, he headed the department of Road Transport and Highways in the Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport and Highways. And before that he was, Secretary, Department of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy in the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare. His fleeting brush with security was a brief stint as Home Secretary to the Madhya Pradesh government. The Defence Secretary’s job was recognition for his long years in the service, but was it fair on him, or on the country?
The lack of a specialised security cadre affects the functioning of virtually every department of the government. It poisons the relations between the specialised cadre — doctors in AIIMS, engineers of the NTPC, police and intelligence officers, the army, navy and air force, scientists of the various government establishments — and the IAS officers who almost invariably head the departments these specialists are involved with.
The irony is that with its varied intake which ranges from humanities graduates to IIT-trained engineers, medical professionals and others, the IAS has a ready-made pool of top-class people who can be channeled into specialised cadres.
Instead, as the government reluctantly realises its shortcomings in critical areas, some departments, mainly the scientific ones, are often being reclaimed by specialists. But in other cases we see a relentless expansion of the IAS into other domains — aviation management, vice-chancellors, broadcasters, and seven store managers.

Specialisation
The task of creating specialised cadres within the larger civil service cadres cannot be done by anyone other than the political class. The civil servants are simply too powerful to be handled in any other way.
The Prime Minister has often spoken of the need for civil service reform. But the steps the government has taken so far are a bit of a joke. By the time he ends his second term, by 2014, Manmohan Singh will have been in office for 10 years.
No one will accept the excuse that he did not have the time or mandate to deliver what he had promised. Aware of this, he has set up a new Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure to monitor all projects above Rs 150 crore in value.
But monitoring is not the same thing as doing. And for that the government has to come up with answers to the basic problem — the lack of good managers.
It needs people who can direct massive projects to meet India’s vast infrastructure requirements, deal with the challenging national security needs of the country, and to run the ambitious social welfare programmes with the levels of efficiency that our situation demands.
This article appeared in Mail Today July 15, 2009

The Curious Silence on Defence Reform

In these past weeks, we have witnessed the happy sight of ministers falling over each other to come up with a “100 day” action plan for their respective ministries. Kapil Sibal and Veerappa Moily have come up with their versions of how they will reform education, law respectively. Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram has already been on an overdrive ever since he was appointed to office and has, by all accounts, shaken the Union Home Ministry out of its slumber, and continues to do so.
But there has been a deathly silence from one ministry, the one which is by far the biggest in the country. Little or nothing has been heard from the Union defence ministry, either by way of a “100 day plan” or for that matter a 1,000-day one. Everyone is agreed that in A.K. Antony, the ministry has got an exceptionally honest minister. But that is saying little about his capabilities of doing what he was presumably supposed to do —make sure that the country’s armed forces are capable of meeting all possible combination of challenges within the constraints of available resources.
The silence of the Ministry and its “attached departments”— the Army, Navy and the Air Force — is baffling for two reasons. First, the fact that they are by far the biggest recipients of the country’s budget largesse — Rs 1,66,663 crore in Monday’s Union Budget for 2009-2010. (In contrast, the total allotted to education, health, roads and highways and rural development amounted to Rs 1,61,049 crore.) Second, that despite the vast expenditure (last year the armed forces received Rs 1,37,222 crore) the armed forces were not quite ready for war in the wake of the Mumbai terror attack. I don’t mean that individual components of the system could not have launched an attack on targets in Pakistan, but that India lacked the wider military capacity to obtain even a localised outcome.

Threats
On paper the increase of 34 per cent over last year’s allocation appears to be a dramatic answer to the challenges we face. But a closer look will tell us that it does not. The bulk of the money, 62 per cent, will be taken up in maintaining our 1.2 million armed forces, their pay and allowances and the increases promised by the Sixth Pay Commission. The money for modernisation, Rs 54,824 crore, is just 38 per cent of the total defence budget, and is below the 40 per cent figure for the first time in recent years.
But all this does not really matter. Whether we have this aircraft or gun, or this ammunition or not, matters little. To cite V.P. Malik’s unhappy remark, the armed forces would “fight with whatever we have.” But the issue is not the bravery or grit — our soldiers have repeatedly shown that they have both — but of the ability of the armed forces to extract a favourable outcome from an adversary.
The fundamental threats to India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity come from terrorism; insurgencies in the North East, Kashmir and “Naxal-land”; conventional armies of China and Pakistan; and from cyberspace to cripple India’s communications and commerce.
It would be a brave person, indeed, who would argue that our armed forces are ready to meet this hybrid threat. Take insurgency. Though our armed forces have been fighting them for an entire generation, we remain inadequately prepared — either in terms of training, doctrine or equipment to handle them.

India's defence Minister A.K. (Saint) Antony

We are probably better prepared to meet the Pakistani challenge, because that is all we seem to care about. Even so, as the post-Mumbai dynamics revealed, even that preparation is somewhat shaky. We seem to have dropped out of the China competition, and as for the more futuristic issues such as cyberspace, we are not there.
In recent years, New Delhi has sought to spend itself out of its military dilemmas. The international situation and our world standing is such that we do, more or less, buy the best that there is on offer. But the huge expenditure has not created the kind of military we need to deter our adversaries. In recent decades we have not really confronted a Chinese military threat, and as of now, we are unable to even deter Pakistan. Clearly, the problems lie less with the size and equipment of the Indian armed forces, but with their organisation and doctrine, and indeed, their mindset.

Organisation
Most observers will agree that in all these areas, the military, particularly the air force and the army, are stuck in World War II. Part of the blame for this lies with the armed forces leadership. But the primary responsibility for this state of affairs lies with the political class which has kept the armed forces in a mental reservation of sort, away from the hurly-burly of policy-making and the real world. The forces are periodically trotted out to do their thing — flood relief, aid-to-civil authority in maintaining law and order or to fight some
minor wars.
Because the whole effort is disjointed and poorly thought through, the outcomes range from poor to disastrous — the 1962 defeat, the lack of any significant outcome in the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan, Kargil, the inability to provide significant intervention in the 2002 and 2008 crises. (India did win a famous victory against the Pakistan army in Bangladesh, but it performed indifferently against the bulk of the Pakistan forces in West Pakistan.)
Since the Kargil war there have been efforts to do something about it. There are many good thinkers in the army, navy and air force, and there are many excellent leaders. But their individual capabilities have been blunted by the obtuseness of the system as a whole. In today’s world, the name of the game is integration.

Leaders
The Group of Ministers report on the defence management of the country, would have broken the thralldom of the past. It would have created two top advisers — one civilian and the other military — to advise the defence minister. These two, the authors of the defence component of the GoM report expected, would lead the complete overhaul of the way our defence system is managed.
One, the Chief of Defence Staff, would lead the process of integration and overhaul of the three wings of the armed forces to provide an enhanced punch for the military. The other would integrate the armed forces with not just the civilian ministry of defence, but the entire government of India and create a system that would synergise the way in which we confront national security threats.
India desperately needs to modernise the way its armed forces think and operate. Advances in weapons and information technology have brought about changes that cannot be effectively exploited through a single-service mind-set. Indeed, war and its outcome go beyond things exclusively military. There are aspects — political, diplomatic and commercial — that require other actions and inputs.
Nothing has happened and the UPA is to blame, because this is not the task of the military and the civilian bureaucracy alone, but also the political leadership. Having done nothing for one term, all the indications are that in its second term, too, the UPA will ignore the imperative to reform and modernise the armed forces.
Does that mean that we must await another military disaster before something will be done? It probably does.
This appeared first in Mail Today July 10, 2009

China is India's Most Important Challenge

There has been a blithe assumption, based on the official dialogue and sharp increase in trade turnover, that the rise of India and China will be peaceful and will not destabilise either the region, or the world. But there has been increasing evidence of truculence in the ties between the two Asian giants.


Exhibit A is Beijing’s March effort — unsuccessful as it turned out to be — to block a $2.9 billion loan to India at the Asian Development Bank because part of the loan would be used for flood development projects in Arunachal Pradesh, a province claimed in entirety by China.
Exhibit B is India’s June 8 announcement that it would deploy two additional mountain divisions in the region and the publicised stationing of advanced Sukhoi 30 MKI fighters at Tezpur. Exhibit C is somewhat more difficult to pin down. It is China’s efforts to use the civil wars in Nepal and Sri Lanka to develop relationships that are aimed at displacing New Delhi as the most influential South Asian power.

Taunts
On June 11, Global Times, the world affairs daily of the Communist Party of China, editorialised against what it said were “unwise military moves” in Arunachal and described India’s alleged military build-up there as “dangerous.” It said that India should consider whether or not it could afford “the consequences of a potential confrontation with China.” The editorial had an unpleasant taunting tone and spoke of Beijing’s friends in the South Asian region —Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal — implying their less than friendly attitude towards India.
The editorial also frontally confronted the issue of India’s friendship with the US as based on a desire to “balance” China’s rise. It declared, “Indian politicians these days seem to think their country would be doing China a huge favour simply by not joining the ‘ring around China’ established by the US and Japan”.
Not many Indians know that Indian military activity in Arunachal — leave aside for the moment the issue of the Chinese claim — is based on the fact that we are playing catch up. Indian military construction plans are decades behind schedule. More important, most of the forces that are supposed to be facing China, are actually involved in counter-insurgency duties in the plains of Assam.




In 1993, India and China signed a path-breaking agreement on maintaining tranquility along the Line of Actual Control (LAC). The key portion of the agreement was a decision to define the location of the LAC precisely on maps. The LAC as it exists is a notional line which both sides observe. Since it overlaps in some areas, there was need to define it to prevent inadvertent confrontation. The idea was that once a mutually acceptable line was created, the two sides could thin out their forces on the border on the basis of “mutual and equal security”. Mind you, this was without prejudice to their respective claims on the border. The aim of the exercise was precisely what it stated — to maintain peace and tranquility on the LAC.
The agreement was never quite implemented. The two sides have exchanged maps of the least disputed central sector with a view to arriving at a commonly acceptable LAC, but they have not yet done so for the other two “difficult” sectors. Worse, as is often its wont, New Delhi took the agreement at face value. Caught up with insurgencies and rebellions in Jammu & Kashmir and Assam, it began thinning its forces in Arunachal. The thinning was supposed to be part of a carefully worked out protocol, but New Delhi decided it could live with the risk.
In the years thereafter, Beijing put in a vast infrastructural development effort in Tibet and constructed a network of highways, railways, airbases and military cantonments. By 2004 New Delhi realised it had to respond to these capabilities, even if there was no imminent threat. So, in the recent years, India is trying to shore up its defences by raising additional forces (actually it is not clear whether these would be additional, or they would be scavenged back from the bloated divisions in Jammu & Kashmir) and deploying some effective air power in the region. The announcement that 2 divisions would be raised was actually made first in 2006 and the June 2009 announcement was just a
restatement.

Settlement
The military confidence building process between India and China, manifested in the 1993 agreement and its companion 1996 agreement, led to an even more path-breaking 2005 agreement that actually set down the political parameters and guidelines that should underlie the boundary settlement. At the time, it appeared that the two countries would settle their vexed boundary dispute within a matter of a year
or two.
But strangely, that did not happen. And we are none the wiser as to why, except that we know that the block has been applied in Beijing and not New Delhi. Some officials say that the Chinese were miffed by what they saw as India’s efforts to “encircle” China by tying up with Japan, Australia and the United States. Others say that inner party dissension in Beijing has led to a progressive hardening of Beijing’s attitude towards New Delhi. Because the two countries had advanced so far down the road towards resolving their more complex border problem, the hiatus appears greater than it probably is. But as of now there is no answer as to what should be done.
There should be no doubt that China is India’s greatest single challenge. The Global Times editorial may have reflected the views of only some top Chinese officials, but even so, it does tell us something of how an important segment of Chinese officialdom is thinking.

Response
The Chinese challenge is not just military, though we must not neglect its military aspects. The challenge, as the Global Times editorial put it, is basically developmental because the Chinese “miracle” makes it appear so much more attractive than us. There are many who say that China’s economic might rests on shaky foundations. But that is little comfort. The persistence of deep pockets of poverty, the poor health-care and educational system in India makes us appear weaker than we probably are as compared to China.
This matters to our neighbourhood and gives rise to the Chinese geopolitical challenge in our own neighbourhood with Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar and, of course, Pakistan. Despite our geographical advantages, China is able to unbalance us in our own region.
In today’s world, meeting a challenge should not give rise to a confrontation, though there is no need to shy away from one, if it is forced on you. India should compete with China, in the development field, as well as for diplomatic influence, even while retaining an effective military deterrent capability, both nuclear and conventional.
But we can also cooperate in many areas — peacekeeping, controlling the prices of commodities and natural resources, ensuring a level playing field in the world trading system, etc.
We must think through our relations with China in a coherent and calm manner. A strong and confident India is the best response to Beijing’s bluster. India has its inherent strengths, some of which are becoming apparent by the day.
The article appeared in Mail Today July 1, 2009