On China, trust is all right, but keep your powder dry

 

CHINESE ambassador to India, Zhang Yan had it about right: “ I am of the view that China- India relation is very fragile and easy to be damaged and difficult to repair,” he noted, just four days ago, on Monday.

Don’t let the hoopla and exaggerated expression of good feelings that accompany the visit of a foreign dignitary mislead you into believing that Sino- Indian relations are hunky dory, because they are not. Indeed, it is taking all the effort of the two leaders who are deeply committed to promoting good relations— Premier Wen Jiabao and his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh— to just keep things on an even keel.

Other forces, India, and, more importantly, in China, have created the conditions which make relations, which were good during 1993- 2005 period, “ fragile”. In China’s view, India’s was the hidden hand responsible for the storm of protest relating to Tibet on the eve of China’s coming out party— the Beijing Olympics of 2008. Indian officials subsequently and systematically leaked stories about alleged Chinese incursions and whipped up a climate of distrust against China. And then there was the Indo- US nuclear deal.

Border

Viewed from New Delhi, China’s issuance of stapled visas in Kashmir signaled a shift in its long- term policy of studied neutrality on the dispute. This was compounded by the denial of a visa to Lt Gen B. S. Jaswal because he commanded the Northern Army which is headquartered in Jammu & Kashmir. The support and sustenance of Pakistan is not a new issue, neither are Beijing’s activities in our neighbouring countries like Burma, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal.

What was new and really marked the shift was the decision in 2009 by China to block any movement in the Special Representatives process which had made considerable strides in resolving the Sino- Indian border dispute.

On Thursday, in an editorial, Global Times , Beijijng’s informal voice to the world put it this way “ Compared to promoting prosperity, the border disputes are not the most urgent item on either country’s agenda.” This is simply not true. When, in 2003, the Special Representatives were created, there was expectations that the border dispute would be resolved quickly, perhaps within 18 months or so. Unfortunately, the principal architect of that visit— prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was forced to retire after the BJP lost the elections of 2004, and the momentum was lost. Even so, during Wen’s last visit in 2005, the two countries signed a path- breaking accord on the political parameters and guiding principles for a border settlement. But in the past two years, the Chinese are making it known that India completely misinterpreted the agreement and there was need for more discussions before the succeeding framework agreement to delineate a new border was worked out. Indeed, China has begun speaking of Arunachal Pradesh as “ southern Tibet” a formulation it had never used before.

Behaviour

The Indian experience has not been unique. Beijing set the cat among the pigeons by declaring, in the context of China’s extensive claims in the South China Sea, that the region was a “ core interest”, in the same category as Taiwan and Tibet.

In response, the entire region— since the Chinese claims involve the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam— has lined up behind the US to fend off Beijing. More dramatic was the standoff with Japan over a Chinese fishing trawler ramming a Japanese coast guard vessel in an area where the two countries dispute the ownership of some islands. The Japanese arrested the Chinese captain, but Beijing’s hardball— suspending critical rare earth exports and arresting four Japanese nationals in China on trumped up charges— compelled Tokyo to yield.

What has spooked the Chinese? It is difficult to know. But it had something to do with its internal politics. This has made them take the angular, if not outright provocative, stands that they have on Kashmir and towards the ASEAN and the South China Sea. There is a certain hubris in China’s behaviour. But the world wonders whether this is the initial gawkishness of a newly risen power, or a forewarning of how the Chinese will behave when they become the truly dominant.

Critics charge that such talk, including the repeated propaganda on Beijing’s socalled “ string of pearls” strategy is paranoid.

It may well be so. But in international politics it pays to be suspicious, especially if you’re the weaker party.

There is a blithe assumption among some commentators that China’s system and government works in much the same way as ours. The system of the party- government diarchy, may not be as complicated as the one run by the mullahs in Iran, but it does not resemble the one that open societies like India or the UK or the US run.

Future

It is a closed system and one in an important phase of leadership transition.

2012 is the year in which there will be a turnover of the top party and government leadership in China. Party General Secretary and President Hu Jintao and government head Premier Wen Jiabao will give way to new leaders who remain unknown entities. Most of the all- powerful Politburo will also retire along with hundreds of other top functionaries. In that sense Beijing is in a phase when there is an in- built tendency to kick the can of difficult problems down the road.

Of greater significance, perhaps, is the fact that many of the problem areas relating to India, Japan and the ASEAN outlined above are dealt with by the powerful People’s Liberation Army. The PLA has a unique role in the Chinese system and modern history. A position in the Central Military Commission, that runs the PLA, is even more coveted than a politburo membership.

Today, the only civilian in the CMC is its chairman, Hu Jintao.

It is difficult to forecast the direction in which China is headed. It would be wrong to outguess history. China has changed enormously in the last four decades. It is entirely possible that the China of 2025 will be a more open society with a transparent government system that will put its neighbours at ease. On the other hand, there is nothing to guarantee that this will happen. China could remain the same prickly authoritarian country that it is, or become even more overbearing and difficult, and, worse, more powerful.

Indian policy must ensure that we do not foreclose any options by being perceived as being part of some anti- Chinese alliance.

The perception that India was growing close to the US may have been the trigger for the Chinese to change the tenor of the relationship in 2007- 2009 period.

Our approach needs to be informed by the key characteristic of the Chinese themselves— pragmatism. India should use the enormous dynamism of the Chinese economy as an aid to its own development. It needs to have a flexible policy where accommodation is met with accommodation, and assertiveness with assertiveness.

But at the same time, prudence demands that we also build up our sadly run- down deterrent capabilities and coordinate our diplomacy with like minded countries to ensure that we are not left hanging alone, as we were in 1962.

In dealing with Beijing, there is need to build up trust, but at the same time, we must keep our powder dry.

This appeared in Mail Today December 17, 2010

Distracted New Delhi teeters on the global highwire

Nicholas Sarkozy’s departure, officials are already burning the midnight oil to receive, in quick succession, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao (15-17 December) and Russian President Dimtry Medvedev (December 21-22). This caps a year in which India has already received two other members of the Permanent Five members of the UN Security Council—British Prime Minister David Cameron and US President Barack Obama.
On December 10, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will attend the Indo-EU summit and meet the leader of the world’s economic powerhouse, Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel. In a period of six months, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would have had summit meetings with the leaders of all the countries that really run the world.
The face of India put before these leaders is the enigmatic visage of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. It reveals little, truth to tell; animation is visible only when he meets the US President. It is a calm, confident and assured face. We all wish that the polity that it represents were also the same. But it is not. Belying the expectations that were aroused after its unexpectedly strong performance in the General Elections of 2009, the United Progressive Alliance began a steady downward drift in terms of keeping control of the agenda of governance.

Stasis
A year later that drift has turned into a noisy stasis. The faultlines in the polity have been exposed by revelations of an unending series of high misdemeanours and scams. It began with an innocuous tweet that launched IPLgate. Then came the damning 2G scam which has paralysed Parliament. Parallel to this have been the goings-on in Karnataka and the Adarsh Society scam, and, as the year reaches a close, we have been told of the great food robbery in Uttar Pradesh and reminded of the big rice scam of UPA-I.
So we are in a peculiar bind. The world has woken up to our geopolitical importance, but our polity is too distracted to do anything about it. It is one thing to put out platitudes, as the PM did at the HT Leadership summit, when he spoke of “the great adventure” that India had entered into with its economic rise, one that would banish poverty, ignorance and disease, poor infrastructure, corruption and misgovernance.
It is quite another, to respond to the challenges that an ascendant China, a failing Pakistan and an uncertain political and economic climate in the world places on India whose record in removing illiteracy, chronic hunger and maternal mortality remains abysmal as it is.
What the world leaders will learn—and it is important enough for them— is that if the political part of the Indian system remains paralysed, the economy is running along at a handsome clip. Having weathered the recession with a growth rate of 7.9 per cent in 2009, the economy is headed for 9-plus per cent growth rate in the coming years. As the scams reveal, the growth is no thanks to the government system. Far from facilitating growth, the principal aim of government policy has been to ensure that a substantial portion of its revenues comes into the coffers of the political parties and their henchmen—the bureaucrats, policemen, middle-men and fixers.
As growth picks up, bottlenecks are becoming evident. A recent visit to western UP and Uttarakhand showed that the roads, some of them just recently widened, were clogged with goods vehicles. Minor accidents, police checkpoints (to make money), shoddy construction and unfinished portions led to traffic jams extending to kilometres. Even today it takes as much time to travel from New Delhi to Nainital by road, as it did when I was in school in the 1960s. The government claims that investment in infrastructure is increasing exponentially.
That may well be so, but who is managing it? Who runs the small towns and kasbas en route, who is it that can ensure smooth traffic, effective policing, sewage, and planned growth there? The basic (mal)administrator is still the colonial era District Magistrate and the Superintendent of Police, with the panchayats and municipalities being a misnomer.

Questions
But the P-5 leaders are not merely in India to promote trade or to indulge in rhetoric. The global situation is in such a state that they are looking for concrete ways in which they can associate India to  promote the stability and prosperity of their regions and the world. The US, for example, wants to know the tangible terms in which India will act to check Chinese power, or stabilise the situation in the AfPak region. The Chinese and the Russians, on the other hand, want to ensure that India does not enhance its alignment with the western powers.
At present, however, New Delhi lacks the institutions and, more important, the inclination to think through these issues. Policy making is left largely to the bureaucracy, or a small community of strategic experts, mainly former officials. But babus can execute policy, they cannot quite make it. That remains in the realm of political leaders and, in India’s case, it still remains a work in progress.
The lack of political leadership impinges on another vital area as well— the integration of the armed forces of the union with the civilian leadership. Politicians are willing enough to appropriate funds for the armed forces modernisation, but they are unable to provide even a modicum of leadership to them in terms of directing the effort towards more effectively securing the country, leave alone furthering the country’s interests.

Answers
If the UPA government itself was the problem, it would not be so bad; someone else would replace them, even if the prospect of a wounded government limping along till 2014 does appall. But the Opposition can barely look after itself, what to talk of the country. Start with the Left which has suffered what amounts to a virtual meltdown ever since it suffered reverses in the Lok Sabha poll last year. The BJP may revel in its victory in Bihar, but it would be fooling itself if it sees a meaning there for its larger role in the country. While the BJP satraps in the states (barring Uttarakhand) are doing  well, and even managing, like B.S. Yeddyurappa, to survive scams, the central leadership remains diffuse and divided, and somewhat incoherent.
So when the P-5 leaders come visiting in New Delhi, they are met with all the formal pomp that a former colony can gather, they get a heavy dose of rhetoric, and a generous amount of business. But they cannot get the answers they are seeking: What does— or will India— as a power, stand for? Can they depend on it to promote democracy in Burma, combat Teheran’s proliferation? Will Indian heft bring Pakistan to heel, and check Beijing?
If the answer to all the questions is a yes, there is the bigger and more practical question—how? By acting in concert in the diplomatic corridors of the world? Stepping up its military-to-military relationships to underline its sense of purpose? What really does a “strategic partnership” that India has with all, including Beijing, mean? As of today we only have questions, no answers.
New Delhi will be delusional if it thinks that the world powers are knocking on its doors to kowtow to a rising (risen?) power. That kind of thinking only works for Beijing. What does seem to be happening is that, for the want of any application of mind, and a lack of political leadership, New Delhi is still trying to cling on to an equidistant, non-aligned posture on issues.
But when there is great disorder under the heavens, and there is quite a bit of it right now, maintaining equipoise no longer looks possible.
This appeared in Mail Today December 9, 2010

The uses and abuse of secrecy

Anyone even mildly familiar with the world of contemporary foreign and security policy making will realise just how banal the WikiLeaks leaks are. Sure, they have the ability to titillate us, give us some mordant quote by an ambassador or some sordid detail of a transaction, but there are really no true secrets. Did we not know that General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and the Pakistan Army are the real powers in Pakistan, or that Islamabad’s psychotic obsession with India is so intense that it will not fully cooperate in the war against the Taliban and that Cold Start could be a dangerously escalatory doctrine? It did not take leaked cables to tell us that China was not for the expansion of the UN Security Council and that Saudi Arabia was paranoid about Iran.
Information technology has begun rewriting the rules of what constitutes a secret. It did not take Anne Patterson’s leaked cable to her bosses to tell us that Pakistan was expanding its nuclear arsenal rapidly. This had been detailed in a report by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) using satellite imagery in May 2009.
 
WikiLeaks
Yet, the imprimatur of a government gives the information a confirmatory context. There was a time when documents would be selectively made available to a newspaper, today we have a “bit-torrent” of information. The Supreme Court may get the authenticated versions of some 5,000 conversations, but all of them are floating around in hundreds of CDs for all those who care to seek them. 
The WikiLeaks project is, of course, difficult to classify. Its aim is not to create a revolution, expose corruption or promote pacifism. It has taken an unthinkingly naïve approach towards attacking the very concept of secrecy and, in the process, not only exposed wrongdoing and chicanery, but also endangered people by revealing their names as agents of the US, and invaded the privacy of many others unconnected to US policy goals or its own motivations.
In that sense it represents the chaotic edge of a movement that seeks to enhance the transparency of government functioning in the developed democracies of the western world. This is an acknowledgement that the people have the right to control their governments’ policies by having the right information at their command. As the Federation of American Scientists has pointed out, in May the government for the first time revealed the current size of the US nuclear weapons arsenal (5113 weapons). Later in September, again for the first time, the US government gave out figures for its intelligence budget— $80.1 billion for 2010. In the years before, intelligence bosses insisted that the figures had to be secret, because giving away the numbers would compromise intelligence gathering methods.
There are, of course, other uses of secrecy. These are more familiar to us here in India. They are to protect the reputation of individuals or to shield the corrupt. Both have been in evidence recently. Last month, the veteran journalist Inder Malhotra published two letters from Jawaharlal Nehru to the US President, pleading for an air umbrella of US combat aircraft to prosecute the war against China in 1962. The existence of the letters was known and its summary was available. But the letters themselves were not declassified. Most of the documents of the Kennedy era relating to South Asia were declassified and published in Volume IX of the Foreign Relations of the United States back in the mid-1990s. But the entry relating to the letters stated that these two letters were being withheld from declassification because even the government of India had not declassified them.
 
India
Of course, the government of India does not declassify anything. But in the case of Nehru or Indira Gandhi, they are extra-careful. The only explanation is that they want to ensure that the iconic image of these two leaders is not in any way besmirched. Obviously a letter from the arch-priest of non-alignment begging the US President for not just military aid, but a military alliance, would not play well for a generation of officials who have a possessive thing about the concept.
As for secrecy to shield the corrupt, we see it almost every day. Virtually no information relating to a controversial deal is put in the public domain. Veteran parliament watchers will tell you that the bureaucracy has honed the practice of revealing nothing in response to questions posed in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha.  India has taken a giant step to end the cult of official secrecy by adopting the Right to Information Act, but the efforts of the Babu Empire to strike back and undermine the Act are evident. We had the case of a Chief Justice of India who resisted the idea of making public the assets of the judiciary and who felt that his office had to be outside the purview of the RTI.
Among the bigger limitations of the RTI is the wholesale exemption it provides to  the national security establishment from its ambit. Talk to any intelligence official or bureaucrat, and they will tell you why certain information must be kept away from the people of the country. The armed forces, for example, claim that information about charges of human rights violations or corruption will “lower the morale”, never quite wanting to respond to the  question as to whether morale gets lowered or raised if wrong-doing is exposed.
But as the WikiLeaks documents on Iran, Afghanistan and now the State Department reveal, there is nothing in the practice of good governance that needs the kind of blanket secrecy that the government of India insists on.
 
Secrets
At the heart of secrecy is the issue as to what is a secret? For obvious reasons, this is easier to define in the military/national security context, rather than the civilian one. Of course, private companies will say that their R&D, production plans and marketing strategies must also be seen as secrets. Governments will argue that information on import and acquisition plans must be secret as well since access to privileged information can be profitable. But while both have a case, the government must be judged on a different scale, since it represents all the people, and information that it has in a sense belongs to them. So far, unfortunately, the aim has been to provide public information selectively to a few who are then able to turn handsome profits from it.
In the national security context, too, it is clear that we need much sharper focus on defining what is secret and otherwise. In the era of Google Earth, banning photography of airports on grounds of secrecy is patently stupid. Capabilities are easy to figure out, but intentions are the real secret. And even here, there is a time frame. We all know that both India and Pakistan have plans to attack each other in the event of war. Given the geography, you can determine with a fair degree of accuracy the places where attacks can be launched and the capabilities the other side can bring to bear. The plans have been there since the 1950s, but what would be a great secret is, say, a plan for an attack in the next month or week.
Even while accepting that the link between capabilities and intention is a complex one, it is clear that all secrets are time-bound. The capabilities of a particular piece of equipment or a plan, or an assessment, has a particular shelf-life; there are no eternal secrets. If the concept of secrets is dynamic, there is a greater likelihood that they will remain truly secret. But those who sit on information and see it as something static, will find that it is soon devalued, or snatched away from them by the high-tech nihilists of the internet world.
Mail Today December 2, 2010
--

No closure as yet on Mumbai

Parliament has been brought to a halt because of the 2G spectrum scam. The Opposition thinks it is justified in demanding a joint parliamentary committee (JPC), considering the magnitude of the corruption and the seemingly extraordinary measures— including having a friendly CVC appointed—that have been taken, by those who do not want the culprits to be exposed. You may say that the Indian parliament is like that only, but consider, on the other hand, the US Congress. In January 2009, it held two-day hearings on the Mumbai terrorist attack and its implications. In March this year another subcommittee held hearings on the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. In contrast, none of our Parliament’s committees have seen it fit to conduct hearings on a matter which you will agree is every bit as important, if not more, than the 2G spectrum scam. 




These thoughts come to mind because we are just days away from the 2nd anniversary of the terror attack that took so many lives and destroyed so many families, not just in India, but across the world. In these two years, there has been a lull of sorts in terror strikes in India. Barring the Pune Bakery attack, there has been no major strike attributed to the Islamist terrorists, homegrown, or otherwise.
 
Revelations
Yet, it would be hazardous to argue that counter-measures taken in the wake of the Mumbai attack, which coincided with the exposure of the so-called Indian Mujahideen group that had carried out a series of bombings in cities across the country, have acted as a deterrent against fresh attacks. Neither would it be prudent to claim that the arrest of David Coleman Headley and Pakistan’s domestic preoccupations with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan have led to this lull.
What is remarkable is that though it has been two years since 26/11, we are still learning new things about the manner in which the attack was planned and launched. In October 2009, we learnt about the role of Daood Gilani aka David Coleman Headley in providing reconnaissance for the attackers. Unfortunately, the extent of Headley’s role in the conspiracy became apparent only after he had plea bargained with the US authorities to avoid a death sentence.
This year, courtesy ProPublica and Washington Post, we have come to learn of the role played by Sajid Mir, Headley’s handler, in the attack. Mir was the voice which was providing to the rampaging gunmen minute-by-minute directions, including those that led to the execution of several hostages. Mir’s name figured in the dossier that India gave to Pakistan in February 2010. He was described as a top Lashkar-e-Tayyeba commander. But the ProPublica report implies that Mir is a serving officer of the Pakistan Army. Indeed, it cites the French anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguière to say that Mir “was a high-ranking officer in the Pakistani Army and apparently also was in the ISI.”
The Indian dossier of February also lists a Major Iqbal  who also acted as Headley’s handler. He was the person who provided money to Headley for his expenses in India. Bob Woodward noted in his Obama’s Wars, that initially the CIA claimed that the Pakistan Army was not involved in the Mumbai attack, but then, in a footnote he disclosed that “The CIA later received reliable intelligence that the ISI was directly involved in the training for Mumbai.” In fact, the CIA had within a month of the attacks got direct confirmation from Lt Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the ISI chief, that at least two retired Pakistani Army officers with ISI links were involved in the attacks, though the General had denied tht this was “an authorised ISI operation.”
So our current dilemma, as well as that of the United States is: how do we deal with the Pakistan Army which is complicit in this monstrous event? There are no easy answers. For the US, maintaining good relations with Pakistan is the key to its Afghan commitment.
 
Quandaries
And that engagement is crucially dependent on the attitude and role of the Pakistan Army. So, even though by law, the US Administration must bring to book the Mumbai killers who were responsible for the deaths of, among others, six American nationals, they remain helpless on the issue.
For India, too, the predicament is acute. New Delhi would like to continue the process of reconciliation and resolution of all disputes that had gained great momentum in the presidency of Pervez Musharraf. But since then, things have gone steadily downhill, despite the efforts of the civilian leadership in Pakistan and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The single factor militating against this has been the actions of the Pakistan Army. It may be recalled that it was Army chief  Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who was the ISI boss when the conspiracy was launched, who prevented the civilian government from sending Gen Shuja Pasha to India.
 It was the same Kayani who torpedoed the July 2010 Foreign Ministers meeting by getting Shah Mehmood Qureshi to take a hostile line against his visiting counterpart S.M. Krishna at the joint press conference. We should not forget, either, that it was the Pakistan Army under Musharraf which had undermined the far-reaching Lahore Agreement of 1999 by organising the Kargil incursion.  
With the US virtually hors de combat because of the Afghan quagmire, India has little additional diplomatic leverage against Pakistan on the Mumbai attack issue; New Delhi lacks the military leverage to pressure Islamabad in any case. The case against Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, and a few others, moves on desultorily in the Pakistani courts, and the Pakistan Army conspirators, retired or otherwise, are not even on the radar of the authorities.
The international scene is not too good either. We may have got David Cameron’s ringing endorsement and Obama’s nuanced one, but Pakistan has powerful and amoral China in its corner. The discussions of the Counter-Terrorism Committee of the United Nations this September, do not give any hope that the international community is determined to rid the world of the scourge of terrorism. The UN counter-terrorism edifice rests on three resolutions. The first, 1373, adopted in response to Nine Eleven requires all states to criminalise terrorist acts and penalise financing and other support for terrorism.
 
Alone
Resolution 1267 of October 1999 imposes an air embargo and an assets freeze on the Taliban. Resolution 1540 of April 2004 is aimed at preventing weapons of mass destruction from falling into the hands of non-state actors. As the September 2010 meeting noted, states were ready to unequivocally condemn terrorism, but there is still no UN definition of terrorism, a lacuna that leaves a huge loophole for member states like Pakistan to slip through.
So, the key take away from the two years of counter-terrorism is that international cooperation remains, at best, limited. Notwithstanding American commitments and agreements, the US has its own self-imposed limits which it cannot exceed. As for the UN, it remains a talking shop. The fight against terrorism for us thus remains a lonely road. We can, and must, take what help we can when it is offered. But we must be clear that in terms of planning, organising and execution of counter-terrorist strategy, we are on our own.
Unfortunately for the country, we have a set of Parliamentarians who will do anything other than focus on this continuing and important threat to the country. And so, we must suffer the consequences.
Mail Today November 24, 2010

The worst day of our times Noveber 20, 1962

There have been bad days in independent India’s history—the day Mahatma Gandhi was shot, Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the massacres that rocked the capital, and 26/11. The Mahatma’s death was one with the paroxysm of freedom that took hundreds of thousands of lives, mainly in northern India. The assassination of Indira Gandhi and the Mumbai attack were shocking no doubt, but they do not have compare to the national collapse of 20/11 — to use the modern parlance — of 1962, almost exactly 58 years ago, down to the day.

  
Abandoned Indian vehicles, perhaps below Bomdila

 “The dawn of 20 November 1962 was the blackest in the military history of independent India,” says the unpublished official history of the 1962 war. “Yesterday (November 20) was the day of ultimate panic in Delhi,” wrote the then US Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith in his India memoir.  According to Galbraith, the “wildest rumours” went around — that 500 Chinese paratroopers were about to land in Delhi, that Tezpur was about to fall to the Chinese. Of the rumour that Lt Gen B.M. Kaul, the hapless Corps Commander of the now disintegrated Indian army in the Northeast Frontier Agency was taken prisoner, Galbraith cited President S. Radhakrishnan’s tart retort, “It is, unfortunately, untrue.”

In Delhi it was only rumour but on the eastern front actual disaster loomed. At 3 am on November 20, the last fighting formation of the 4th Division, the 48th brigade, disintegrated under Chinese fire at Chaku. In Tezpur, 100 kms south, panic and chaos were the order of the day. Gen Kaul ordered abandonment of all positions on the northern bank of the Brahmaputra and moved his headquarters to Guwahati. The administration emptied hospitals, prisons and asylums then burned currency in the Treasury and official documents. “By nightfall,” the official history recounts, “Tezpur was a ghost city.”

That evening Prime Minister Nehru addressed the country saying, “huge Chinese armies” had inflicted serious reverses by capturing Walong, Se La, Bomdila . He declared that India would not rest till the invader had been pushed out of India and wanted the message to be heard by all, especially our “countrymen in Assam to whom our heart goes out at this moment.” Not surprisingly, in Assam it appeared that India planned to abandon them to the advancing Chinese.

Nehru's humourous pose has become farcical now. In the era of Google Earth, his heirs still disallow photography in airports.

India had suffered reverses in the war that began on October 20, 1962. Though it had lost Tawang, its forces were giving the Chinese a tough time in Chushul in Ladakh and in Walong in the north-eastern tip of the country. At Se La and Bomdila, east of Tawang, India had built up the 4th Division comprising of 12,000 men with 36 guns, light tanks and sufficient rations and ammunition, commanded by a decorated hero of World War II.
But in four short days, beginning November 17, this force had been taken apart, as much by the force of the Chinese attack as the incompetence of the commanders going all the way up from the division commander Maj Gen A.S. Pathania, to Corps Commander Kaul, and the Chief of the Army Staff P.N. Thapar who had been monitoring the battle from the Tezpur headquarters of Kaul’s division. More than anything else, this collapse seared national memory and defined the outcome of the 1962 war in the minds of most Indians.
Prime Minister Nehru did not learn of the disaster till late on November 19, the day Army Chief Thapar was relieved of his responsibilities.  Panditji had earlier written a letter to President Kennedy of the United States detailing events since October 20 and noted that the Chinese now controlled most of NEFA and were poised to overrun Chushul in Ladakh. He said that India wanted air transport and jet fighters as part of the US aid package if India was to “stem the Chinese tide of aggression.”
A few hours later he heard of the disaster of Bomdila and Se La, and said that the Chinese advance now threatened all of India’s Northeast, and that an invasion through the Chumbi Valley between Bhutan and Sikkim looked inevitable. He said that till now India had wanted essential equipment and not comprehensive assistance because, as he delicately put it, “of the wider implications of such assistance in the global context” viz India’s public non-alignment posture.
But he said the situation had now changed and that unless India was given massive assistance, there will be “nothing short of catastrophe for our country.” To this end he declared that India wanted assistance of 12 squadrons (roughly 200-240) of supersonic fighters, 2 squadrons of B-47 bombers and modern radar cover. Indian personnel would man the aircraft for missions over Chinese territory, while he wanted American personnel to “protect our cities and installations from Chinese air attacks.”

US Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith in Leh

According to Nehru’s biographer S. Gopal, Nehru took this decision to seek a military alliance with the United States without consulting any of his Cabinet colleagues or officials except foreign secretary M.J. Desai. The US was not entirely enthusiastic about this proposal. Dean Rusk, Secretary of State, noted in a telegram to Galbraith on November 20, Nehru not only proposed “a military alliance between India and the United States but complete commitment by us to fighting a war.” The US which was aware of the Sino-Soviet split, was worried that an open commitment to India “might force Moscow to support Peiping.”
But on the morning of November 21, these considerations seemed to vanish into thin air. As Galbraith put it, “like a thief in the night, peace arrived.”
According to B.N. Mullik, the powerful Intelligence Bureau chief, he learnt of the Chinese ceasefire offer at 3 am from the monitoring station run by the agency which had recorded an announcement of Peking radio saying that the Chinese would ceasefire from the midnight of November 21. According to Neville Maxwell, Home Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri learnt of the ceasefire from the newspapers at the Delhi airport at 6 am, where he was waiting for a flight to take him to Guwahati.

The US aid, too, vanished. According to Mullik, the total aid promised to India by the end of December 1962 was $120 million, and later another $50 million in 1964, a total of some Rs 105 crore in the prevailing exchange rates. But by the time the programme ended, after a US embargo following the 1965 Indo-Pak war, the US provided a total Rs 40 crore worth of aid, mainly trucks, radars and communications equipment. A year later, British and American aircraft came to India and carried out a joint air exercise with the Indian Air Force. That was all that remained of the request for American air cover.
  The war’s principal outcome was to wake the nation from its pacifist slumber. The outpouring of patriotism was evident from the enormous donations that people made for the Defence of India Fund. Gold ornaments and jewellery donated then still lies forgotten in the vaults of the Reserve Bank of India. On November 13, the DMK supremo, C.N. Annadurai announced that the party was abandoning its secessionist platform and was pledged to support the government to push the Chinese out of India. Leaders of another proto-secessionist group, the Akali party, too, pledged support.
Mail Today November 21, 2010

Why the government needs to heed their anger

The issue us not just of pay and pensions, the main problem is the troubled relationship between our armed forces and the government

The Supreme Court order directing the Union government to constitute an Armed Forces Grievances Redressal Commission would have been an outrageous encroachment on the part of the judiciary into the sphere of the executive, were it not for the gross failure of our governmental system to do justice to the armed forces. Swamped with the corruption issue, there has been no comment from the government, but the Supreme Court “direction” sounds remarkably like an executive order.  It marks a new and somewhat unexpected turn in the shoddy history of the higher management of the armed forces of the union by our political and bureaucratic class.
The order states that there will be a commission headed by retired Supreme Court justice Kuldeep Singh, with retired high court judge S.S. Sodhi, former army chief V.P. Malik and former vice-chief Lt Gen Vijay Oberoi as members. The Union government has been asked to nominate its representative— a retired or serving civil servant as a fifth member. The panel will look at grievances like one-rank, one pension but also “other disparities and anomalies, without limiting the scope of reference.” In other words the entire gamut of military-civil relations. 
 
Step-children
In a recent address at the National Defence College, former Army chief Ved Malik detailed how the committee system for higher management of defence degenerated to an hierarchical system where the civilians established themselves as a tier above the armed forces. “On the pretext of establishing civilian political supremacy over the military, the... system gave civilian bureaucracy stifling control over the armed forces, the like of which does not exist in any other country of the world.”
In the process, the military has been isolated from the national security policy, planning and decision-making process. This in turn has led to the present stand-off and the bitterness with which the Indian officer class views the civilians.
In my view, the enormous anger and frustration and sense of injustice of the armed forces officer class against the government is not so much in terms of salaries and pensions and the like—though that is not unimportant—  but more in the treatment that is meted out to the armed forces of the union in terms of their relationship to the Mother Government. The armed forces are treated like a step-child, while the biological or favoured children are the civil servants who constitute the ministry of defence. Actually, the problem resides in the very structure of the government, where —in government language— the biological progeny of the government is the ministry, and the armed forces have an adopted or attached status.
The sense of injustice felt by military personnel emerges from certain facts on the ground. A letter of a senior army officer to   Sonia Gandhi in 2007 pointed out that at that time, a Brigadier with 29 years’ service stood equated in terms of pay and precedence, with a police DIG and an IAS officer of Director rank with just 14 years of service. In terms of pay, at 17 years service an IAS officer gained an edge of 12.9 percent in terms of higher emoluments over an army officer with the same length of service, and at 25 the gap increased to 17.3 percent, and at 31 years, it was near 25 per cent.

 


In India reform comes after a military shock, and so it came after the Kargil war when after the report of the Kargil Review Committee, the government constituted a Group of Ministers which suggested a slew of far ranging reforms in the defence management of the country and in that of its police and intelligence services. The GOM has recommended that the step-child status of the Service Headquarters be changed and that they should be “integrated” with the ministry and the key Transaction of Business rules be modified to reflect this. But the empire struck back subtly. The babus decreed that the service headquarters would henceforth be called “Integrated  Headquarters of the Ministry of Defence” and tweaked the TB rules a bit, but everything else remained the same. In the words of one retired army chief, the officials went along with the letter of the GOM decision, but have resolutely defied it in spirit. 
 
Reform 
The political class has been even more lackadaisical; it refused to make the key appointment of a Chief of Defence Staff who would integrate the strategic planning of the services and serve as the single-point military adviser to the government. Instead of creating modern institutions to cope with the politico-military challenges of the new era, the politicians have allowed the babu raj to continue. The result is that the country’s higher defence management system is, to put it simply, dysfunctional, awaiting the next military fiasco to trigger the reform.
Individual service headquarters remain aloof from government and run on the two file system. So files with the services plans and policies are given to the ministry which then creates its own files and moves it to the Cabinet for approval. The armed forces are not shown the file and its key notings; decisions are merely conveyed to them for execution.
The system that India needs is evident enough. It is being practised in UK and Australia. Essentially it has brought about a reform that ensures that higher defence management is a partnership between the civilians and the military. The highest defence decision-making body in the UK is the Defence Council, which is the legal body to think about defence issues in the UK where all the ministers of the Ministry of Defence, its top civilian bureaucrat, finance adviser, science adviser, the three service chiefs, the chief and vice-chief of defence staff and the chief of materials meet about thrice a year. But the practical work is done by the Defence Board, which is non-ministerial and meets once a month.
In India, there is no institutional set up. Yes, the Defence Minister has his seemingly impressive weekly meetings with the Secretaries of his ministry, the chiefs of staff and scientific adviser, Cabinet Secretary, Foreign Secretary and the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister and a monthly one with his own ministry officers. But neither of these meetings has the legal powers and status that their British counterparts enjoy. The rigour of the British process is apparent from the fact that the agenda of the meetings of the Defence Council between 2000 and 2007 are posted on the internet, available for you and me, and, obviously for the average British citizen, to see.  
 
Partnership
But partnership cannot be created through institutional structures alone. It can only come through mutual respect between partners— a genuine acknowledgment of each other’s abilities and functional responsibilities. Anyone who deals with the armed forces and the bureaucracy knows that they view each other with thinly veiled contempt. In great measure this is because of the babus’ efforts to keep the armed forces in a subordinate status.  And unfortunately, the politicians have acquiesced in the process of mutating the Constitutional requirement of civilian supremacy over the armed forces into the supremacy of the bureaucracy.
The people returning their medals and burning their prosthetics are not cranks and trouble makers. They have had a history of dedicated and disciplined service. They do have their faults—they tend to privilege their patriotism over that of others. That’s irritating at times, but it is also part of the elan which makes them charge up the hill in the face of certain death.
They feel they have been short-changed, hence they are angry and frustrated. This is not a good state of affairs, it promotes cynicism, undermines the morale of the services and encourages a climate of corruption. This is bad for the country because of the functional role the armed forces play in the life of a nation state—they are the ultimate guarantor of its security.
It’s the government’s job to fix the problem, and it hasn’t being doing so; the Supreme Court’s intervention is another warning of the gravity of the situation.
This appeared in Mail Today November 18, 2010