Build an air force for the real world

The reported request to the government by the  Indian Air Force to nominate Air Vice Marshal M Matheswaran as the Chairman and Managing Director of Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) is not as revolutionary a proposal as it appears at first, though it is an eminently sensible one. Actually, barring the last couple of heads of the HAL, it was the IAF that provided the talent for the top job. A measure of the importance of the position is that at least four of them— Aspy Engineer, P.C. Lal, OP Mehra and AM Katre subsequently went on to head the Indian Air Force itself. Matheswaran may not reach there, but he has rarer commodities—brains and an uncommon go-getting touch. He is highly regarded in the service as a person who has the ability to stem the stagnation in HAL and make it a genuinely excellent aerospace company, something that has been overdue for decades.
 
Company
There is a very important spinoff from any decision to hand the HAL to the IAF—it will free the country’s aviation industry from its military thralldom and help the emergence of a genuine civil aviation industry in the country. As of now HAL is the only aviation design and manufacturing set-up in India and since its focus is overwhelmingly towards servicing the IAF, it has not developed its civilian divisions. Given the enormous expansion of the aviation sector in the country, and the huge offsets that will come with the current multi-billion dollar IAF purchases, there is a good opportunity for us to establish a broader aviation industry. All these years this process has remained stunted; the result is that we buy hundreds of civil aviation jets, and the only payback we get are trivial—making doors or seats of some of them.

The biggest malaise of the HAL has been its failure on the score of production engineering. It is one thing to get someone to design the HF-24 Marut or the Tejas LCA and make a few full-scale engineering models, but quite another to have them on an assembly-line basis to make hundreds. HAL has been spoilt from the very outset when it received the production lines of the Mig-21, the Jaguar and the Sukhoi 30 MKI from abroad, and has basically gone on to make aircraft whose indigenous content is casually  fudged, because it is well known that all important assemblies and sub-assemblies are imported.
This is a particularly opportune moment for the government to push for an IAF man to head the outfit. There is no internal candidate of the calibre of Krishnadas Nair or Ashok Baweja. Indeed, the government short-list, mostly of civil servants, points to the lack of talent—S.N. Mishra, a former Joint Secretary looking after HAL, Pawan Hans chief R.K. Tyagi and MSTC chairman S.K. Tripathi. They’re hardly the kind who could be asked to oversee an aerospace giant that is so vital for our country.
The most telling compulsion for the government to go the air force way is the experience of the Indian Navy. Most of the naval shipyards in the country are run by serving or retired naval personnel. The Indian Navy is also the one service which, through effective coordination between its warship design centres and the dockyard, has indigenised India’s surface warship production. All the stealth frigates, the aircraft carrier and the smaller craft with the Navy are Indian designed and manufactured. If there is a lacuna somewhere it is in the area of making weapons systems and submarines, and for this there have been different factors at play.
 
IAF
In terms of military aviation, the air forces of the world are on the threshold of a revolution, even though, sadly, the Indian Air Force leaders have not quite recognised this. But there are younger elements in the air force who cannot but see that they are headed for a big crash if they go the way things are going. In a recent interview, Air Chief Marshal P.V. Naik boasted that with its 126 Eurofighter or Rafales (the MMRCA), the 214 fifth generation fighters (the FGFA) and some 310 SU30 MKI the IAF will become one of the most modern forces in the coming years. But it will also be a top heavy force. Even while claiming to have effective radar coverage of the medium to high levels, he acknowledged that there were gaps at the lower levels. There are also serious gaps in the missile-based air defence that he did not quite dwell on.
This is important because of the threat  posed by short-range nuclear-tipped missiles like the HATF 9 and the Babur cruise missile. Expensive long-range aircraft such as the ones the IAF will have, will not be suitable for the quick reaction—perhaps of the duration of ten to fifteen minutes—required to deal with these threats. Indeed, what we need is a large number of cheaper high performance aircraft based forward to deal with this. Because of a surface-to-surface missile threat it would be folly to base our $100 million plus per copy of MMRCA or FGFA closer to the border. At the cost of one Eurofighter or Rafale, India can acquire two or three cheaper, but very modern fighters like the Jas 39 Gripen, or the Mig-35.
 
Challenge
The IAF also needs to seriously think about the challenge from unmanned combat aircraft. More than any other force in the world, the IAF still lives in the era of the Battle of Britain and the image of swaggering men in the fighting machines bringing down the mighty Luftwaffe. Actually the nature of air power has become much more complex as indicated by the combination of drones and manned fighters the United States is using in conflicts like Afghanistan. The US Congress mandated report Aircraft Procurement Plan 2012-2041, notes that while in all other categories—fighters, transports, electronic support aircraft, the United States military will retain roughly similar numbers in the future, in the category of medium and large drones, the numbers will double within the next nine years—they will go up from the current 340 to 650 in 2021.
The limits of conventional air power of the type Air Chief Marshal Naik is thinking about have become apparent from the fate of the NATO campaign in Libya where complete air superiority and bombardment of the Libyan forces by NATO has not been able to clinch the war in favour of the rebels. Note there was not a word on robotics in Naik’s interview.
This is the challenge which the Indian defence design and development industry must confront in the coming decades. As it is the HAL record in meeting the conventional requirements of design, development and production engineering has been poor. Considering the fortune we are expending in buying expensive and heavy fighters from abroad, there is need for not just introspection, but a  restructuring of our defence industry, led by the military aviation complex. The industry must come up with products which will meet the demands of real air power, one that is effective and useful, rather than the one that is displayed on Air Force or Republic Day.
Mail Today June 30, 2011

Time to leash India's spy agencies

There is an old Greek saying: Those whom the gods wish to destroy,  they first make mad. I wonder whether it applies to nations as well. If that is so, it would lend the crazy events that have been happening in the country in 2011 with a much more dangerous edge.
It all began quietly with the Lokepal-Jokepal drama where a bunch of civil society activists hijacked the legislative functions of the country’s parliament by getting an old political hustler to go on an alleged fast-unto-death at Jantar Mantar.
Then came the bizarre episode where a  popular yoga teacher and ayurveda entrepreneur was invited to discuss the issue of corruption with senior cabinet ministers of the government and permitted to establish a somewhat dubious yoga camp at Ram Lila grounds.
Then, late one night, it occurred to the government that this could well be a coup à la Tahrir Square in the making and so it pulled the plug. The police was asked to clear the camp, which it did with its customary politeness, and the yoga man was arrested, dressed in a natty salwar kameez.
And now, to top the silly season, we have L’Affaire Pranab—the bugging of the offices of the Finance Minister of
the country.
 
Spooky
Make no mistake, that was not chewing gum found at sixteen different locations in the Finance Minister’s offices. In Mail Today here there are a lot of young people, but you are unlikely to find gum adhering to the undersides of our desks; that is strictly for the high schools and cinema halls frequented by the young. If you accept the chewing gum thesis, you are akin to P G Wodehouse’s Madeline Basset who believed that every time a fairy sneezed, a baby was born and that the stars were God’s daisy chain.
Dour babus and corporate heads who haunt the offices and conference rooms of the Ministry are not the kind who would chew gum, and most certainly not those who would surreptitiously stick it on the underside of the desk of the Finance Minister of the country at three different places.




It was most certainly an adhesive which held listening devices which transmitted voice signals to a listening centre nearby. Pranab Mukherjee is not known for levity and would not have written a missive to the Prime Minister complaining of the bad hygiene of his visitors or staff.
Many TV channels, quick to bite a planted story, started putting out that  the bugging operation was an outcome of corporate rivalry. It would boggle the mind to think that corporate spies would be able to penetrate the security of North Block and plant listening devices in rooms which were a stone’s throw away from the office of the Director, Intelligence Bureau.
Ministers’ offices are carefully locked and the key placed in seal. Any breakage would immediately arouse suspicion. The bugs were no doubt planted during working hours, and some of the staff must have been involved. Anyone who has covered North and South Block knows that a certain government agency has a lot of the peons and drivers on their regular pay-roll.
In fact the primary suspect in the operation must be a government agency, or some rogue elements of that agency. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Recall the episode, just last year, when the government acknowledged that some conversations of politicians were “inadvertently” intercepted by a passive listening device of the NTRO. That again was not possible since the device was a portable one and would not simply record thousands of conversations in an area, but only those of targeted numbers. The government’s excuse that some conversations were “inadvertently” recorded stinks as much as the claim that the adhesive in Pranab Mukherjee’s office was chewing gum.   
 
IB
What would point the needle of suspicion towards the IB is the circumstantial evidence. They have the technical skills, the ability to access ministerial and governmental offices and, above all, they have a record of malfeasance on the score of listening into conversations of citizens since they are not bound by any law. Maloy Krishna Dhar’s Open Secrets: India’s Intelligence Unveiled has listed some of these activities in sickening detail and none of them have been denied or contradicted. The pièce de résistance of his book is the story of how the device to catch telephone taps from the Rashtrapati Bhavan was actually affixed in the Prime Minister’s Office during the period in which Rajiv Gandhi was locked in a conflict with President Zail Singh.
There is a facile assumption, spread by officialdom, that the government only taps phones through a systematic legal process in which permission is granted only by the Union Home Secretary, or his state counterparts, that the process is tightly controlled and conversations recorded are eventually destroyed. Actually, this holds good only for the legal wire-taps which could, serve as evidence, though usually courts are leery of accepting such proof.
The rules don’t apply to intelligence agencies listening to conversations, since there is a presumption that they are doing it for national security, and in that case, specific taps cannot be always requested, and often the aim is to scan the spectrum in the hope of picking up transmissions. There is no statute involved, as is the case in the US, where tapping phones of American nationals, is strictly prohibited, and can be permitted only by special courts, which are the equivalent of our High Courts.
 
Oversight
Indeed, there is no statutory guidance to our intelligence agencies on what they can do and what they cannot. Their acts are outside the limited checks and balances that are imposed by Parliament and bodies like the Comptroller & Auditor General. The Executive has no system for systematic oversight of the agencies, and how they behave depends on their supervisory minister and the moral compass of their own leader. It is no secret that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh does not like intelligence chiefs reporting to him, while his predecessor’s principal secretary Brajesh Mishra kept all the agencies under his control. The present situation is somewhat ambiguous, with the IB firmly under the control of the Union Home Minister, the R&AW reporting nominally to the prime minister through the Cabinet Secretary and the NTRO reporting to the NSA.
The problem in India is that even the Opposition never raises the issue of the systematic political intelligence that the IB gathers, in the main through phone taps. This is because when they are in government they use the same machinery to spy on their rivals. L.K. Advani as Home Minister was well known for badgering intelligence chiefs for the latest on his political rivals.
There is now some movement in the demand for parliamentary oversight over the intelligence services. In January 2010,  the Vice-President, Hamid Ansari, made an eloquent and important plea for imposing parliamentary oversight over our intelligence agencies while delivering the R.N.Kao Memorial lecture. India is perhaps the only democracy where no such oversight exists. Constitutional lawyer, Menaka Guruswamy and some others have been active in pushing for legislation to create a legal framework for intelligence services.
Even while the mid-summer madness continues, we must think of these serious subjects. Indians feel a lot of schadenfreude about the state of Pakistan, perhaps they should begin to feel some pain for their own country which is becoming the butt of ridicule around the world.
Mail Today June 23, 2011

The populist road to perdition

The passing away of MF Husain has brought forth a national angst about the not-so-secret fact that we have become an increasingly intolerant people. It has also provided a terrible mirror for us to face ourselves as we are, rather than as we think we are. Indians pride themselves on their tolerance, but the truth is  somewhat more complicated. The harassment of Husain, the vandalising of cinema halls, the activities of the Shiv Sena in Mumbai and the Ram Sene in Karnataka, the viciousness of the pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat, the almost routine killing of couples who marry out of their castes, is very much part of contemporary India.

Tolerance
Quite recently a study by Science magazine sought to quantify the level of intolerance prevailing in the country, and the outcome shows that we are not too distant on that score from the country we love to revile—Pakistan. The study ranked 33 countries for their level of ‘tightness’—where tight societies have strong norms and low tolerance of what is perceived as deviant behaviour, while loose ones have weak social norms and  high tolerance.




 Not surprisingly, the tightness scores were the highest for Pakistan (12.3), but India was not far behind with 11 points, with Malaysia in between at 12.8. Another surprise is that authoritarian China does rather well with a tightness score of 7.9, better than South Korea (10) and Japan (8.6). Tolerance and intolerance are affected by ideologies, but also have deeper roots in history, religions, social systems and even social anthropology.
In some ways perceptions of India’s tolerance are based on the peace that came with the British conquest. With a colonial master strictly ensuring that violence remained its monopoly, society functioned in a stable political arrangement where communities persisted with their respective social customs without much interference by the British, especially after the 1857 rebellion.
In fact, in contrast to its self-image, Hindu society was deeply intolerant. It insisted on people maintaining a rigid social code and any violation of it could invite immediate retribution, even death. As long as those codes were observed, there was tolerance. Within the bounds of the varna system, however, there was a great deal of tolerance for diversity and so you have Vaishnavites, Shaivites, Arya Samajis, Aghoris, and even atheists in the fold of Hinduism. And you had a variety of practices—animal sacrifice, strict vegetarianism, even gods and goddesses depicted in copulation—without anyone being killed for it.
Though we know historically of the conflict between the Hindus and the Jains and Buddhists, the Saivites and Vaishnavites, and Hindus and Muslims, the linchpin of the India that was founded in 1947 was tolerance. For this, one man alone was responsible—Mahatma Gandhi—and his beliefs did not come from the well-springs of his faith, but his real life experiences, especially his  sojourns in UK and South Africa. He strove mightily to break down the barriers of caste and community, and indeed religions. Even his contemporaries like Tagore, Patel, and Jinnah were way behind him on this issue. The result was the Republic of 1950 based on the compact that India would be sovereign and democratic, of course, but above all secular and tolerant. We were lucky once again with the first prime minister of the country, Jawaharlal Nehru who was, if one may put it this way, an atheist.

Sangh
Modernising India has thereafter seen  many social and religious upheavals, particularly those relating to the assertion of ethnic and caste identities, often targeting what was seen as the establishment dominated by the upper castes. The result has been that the establishment has kicked back, using the fear of change to suppress what it sees as a life threatening event. It is the second kind of intolerance that has caught the attention of the people and drove Husain out of the country. An interesting feature of this intolerance is that it is not as much of a spontaneous affair as is often made out. A lot of this has been associated with organisations that cluster around the Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh, which is, not surprisingly, an outfit dominated by the upper castes.
But it would be wrong to blame the Sangh Parivar alone for the wave of intolerance we witness in our country. And neither, we must acknowledge, is all intolerance bad. Intolerance of caste and gender oppression has motivated people to organise, protest and fight the established order. Currently we are going through a stage where people who reluctantly acquiesced with every-day corruption are declaring that they are unable to tolerate the situation anymore.
 The more disturbing aspect of the current mood in the country is the association of intolerance with the advance of democracy. Groups and communities who were out of the political system and low on the social scale are now asserting themselves. There is a democratisation of intolerance with these various groups expressing their views about what they feel offended by—a local hero or deity allegedly insulted, a violation of their social mores, and so on. They are also assertive with regards to what they consider their social views, and theseoften clash with those of others who are equally forceful.

Democracy
In our democratic and socio-cultural mélange some of this is understandable, though not always condonable. But it is here that the threat of majoritarianism is manifest, hence the danger of the Parivar type activity. Normally, in a democratic society there is supposed to be sufficient space for everyone’s self expression. But in the current climate, this is precisely what is being sought to be challenged.
Democracy should have been the means through which this incredibly diverse country would mediate the claims and counter-claims of different communities. It hasn’t quite worked that way, yet.
What we have seen, instead, is democracy itself being hijacked by a group which is able to cobble together an electoral majority and uses its position in government to push its narrow agenda to the detriment of other groups. The khaps of Haryana are a case in point where their electoral clout has led to mainstream politicians of all parties refusing to condemn their method of exercising social control through murder.
Countering intolerance is not easy. It took Europe centuries of warfare between Protestants and Catholics to arrive at a concept of religious tolerance. The saying attributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, would itself be two centuries before the France of today. Even so, it needs to be pointed out that the European attitudes towards racial tolerance remain a work in progress. 
Yet, as the example of Gandhi and Nehru has shown, it is possible for a charismatic and skilful leader to make huge transformations. The big weakness today is that we have leaders who shuffle half a step behind public opinion. They look right and then left, and first determine what the mob wants, and then give political voice to their demands.
You can call such craven behaviour “populist”, but some would suggest that it is suicidal and self-destructive.
Mail Today June 15, 2011

Saviours robed in saffron

Other countries have a man on the horseback, who comes at the crucial hour to save the nation, India has had the man in saffron. The men on horseback are worldly wise, but our Indian saviours are different. Unlike their counterparts in the other parts of the world—the reborn Bolivar, the imagined Lenin and the Mahdi—  the Indian is usually a person who  shuns the material world and insists that the answer lies, not in seizing power and consolidating the boundaries of a nation or movement, but in rediscovering the power within, call it spirituality or “national character” if you will.
In the contemporary era the man who has spooked many putative saviours of our times is Mohandas Gandhi. He is the gold standard— an ascetic, who had unparalleled command over matters temporal. Not many people could have stopped a communal riot by the sheer application of moral power. We have had many “swamis”, ” sants”, “babas”, even some self-styled bhagwans and avatars. But that no one has sought to set himself up as a “mahatma” is a tribute to Gandhi’s enduring and benign relevance to this country.
 
RSS
But one thing the Mahatma was not, is a man of saffron, that most beguiling colour for Indians. It is the colour of war and sacrifice, of things sacred. It has been for long the colour of renunciation and piety, donned by sadhus through history. Faced with certain defeat, Rajputs donned saffron as a sign that their battle would be to the death.  But over time, charlatans and crooks have realised just how easy it was to fool people by donning this colour. Ravana clad himself in saffron when he lured Sita across the Lakshman rekha.


One of the biggest hijacks occurred when the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a proto-fascist organisation, took over the colour and, it has since poisoned our entire approach towards this colour that has meant so much to the people of this country. Over the years it has sought to yoke the mesmeric power of the colour to its political agenda of creating a country whose flag will be saffron in colour—the bhagwa dhwaj. The RSS’s strategy has been to appropriate the Hindu spiritual tradition and harness it for its political goals, so along with the colour, it has also “taken over” sadhus and sants of yore like Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, Dayanand Saraswati and even Mahatma Gandhi.
In the post-independence era, the Sangh Parivar sought to use Swami Karpatriji, a learned asetic who had formed the Dharma Sangh to protect orthodox Hinduism in 1940, and later founded the Ram Rajya Parishad, a proto-religious political party. Encouraged by the RSS and its political wing, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, this body took up an agitation against the Hindu Code Bill, a major exercise to codify Hindu marriage and succession law, initiated by nationalists like B.R. Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru. However, the agitation failed to gain much traction with the masses, and despite opposition in Parliament, mainly from within the Congress party itself, the bills were passed.
The next stage in the RSS strategy was to found the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in 1964 which would act as an umbrella outfit where the various factious sects and swamis could meet in one organisation to follow a single agenda. The issue that was now taken up was the need to ban cow-slaughter, a seeming no-brainer in a country where the pre-dominant population was Hindu.
 
Ramdev
The movement peaked in November 1966 when some one lakh sadhus, some branding their trishuls, met outside the Parliament house where they were addressed by Swami Karpatriji and Swami Rameshwaranand, a Jana Sangh MP who had been suspended from the Lok Sabha because of unruly behaviour. Caught up in his own rhetoric, Rameshwaranand called for an assault on Parliament, even while another MP, Atal Bihari Vajpayee beseeched him to retract his call. The rally degenerated into chaos, hundreds of cars and scooters were set ablaze and the police had to open fire to quell the mob which threatened to physically overwhelm the Parliament House.
The next turn of the RSS was in the Ram Janambhoomi movement, which after initial success, has also petered out. Over time, the quality of the sadhus and sants associated with the VHP, too, has declined. Many of the leaders of the principal sects, such as the Shankaracharyas have become wary of associating with the VHP because they know that it is following the political agenda of the RSS. So, it is not surprising that they have had to create their own sadhu, and Ramdev was ideal for this. Principally a yoga teacher and a yoga-Ayurveda entrepreneur, Ramdev is in some ways a kind of empty slate on which the RSS can write its megalomaniacal schemes to transform India into a Hindu Rashtra.
Over the decades, as people have become more educated and the country more modern, they have learnt to discriminate between secular achievement and Nirvana. That is why Baba Ramdev’s message on the advocacy of Hindi or organic farming has had little resonance. It is significant that Ramdev had to bring his own crowd with him. In Delhi all he got, even from the RSS and others, were event tourists who are wont to pop up anywhere, whether to see the destruction wrought by a fire or a flood.
The RSS’s experiment with trying to foist their man of saffron on the Indian populace is bound to fail. Indeed, in each succeeding cycle it loses that much traction. In fact, most of the causes they have taken up are now defunct. The cow-slaughter issue is kept alive through various BJP state governments. As for the Ram Mandir movement, it has become a weak echo of what it was.
 
Civics
The appeal of the messiah or the guru comes partly from the lack of education and partly from the belief that there are short cuts in life. Salvation, power, money can be had through a mantra. The really powerful are those that dish all of this out. Men in white khadi, or those in saffron. For others it is a desperate belief. This is, in part, the consequence of the challenge of modernisation that we confront. To go through the lengthy process of building institutions and social mores is not for us—the short cut that a man in saffron offers us is so much more simpler.
The Ramdev movement has predictably raised the issue of “civil society.” We have had Anna Hazare and his crew demanding that their role be recognised because they are “civil society.” But what does that mean?
It is a self-declaratory claim of secular sainthood—white outside saffron inside, if you will. Actually by the narrowest definition, civil society relates to institutions and organisations outside government, legislatures and the judiciary.
They are watchdog groups involved with human rights, doctors without frontiers, certain types of professional bodies like the federations of journalists, legal aid institutions, and small NGOs such as the society for prevention of cruelty to animals and so on. For fighting corruption, as indeed crime or lawlessness, the constitutionally mandated body is the state and its organs. There can’t be any short cuts here.
This work cannot, by any definition, be done by groups that aim to displace or bypass our constitutionally mandated system, defined by the elected legislature and the executive and judiciary it creates.
Mail Today June 7, 2011

A bigger threat from Pakistan

In all the tumult and alarums of the last three months in Pakistan, a grave and threatening development seems to have slipped under our radar screens. Ordinarily, the ballistic missile called Nasr, with a range of 60 kilometres, would not be particularly threatening considering Pakistan’s multi-layered missile arsenal that covers most of India and beyond. Indeed, in terms of range it is much like our own Russian-supplied Smerch.
But that is where the comparisons end. As the Pakistani Inter-Services Public Relations press release put it: “NASR, with a range of 60 km, carries nuclear warheads of appropriate yield with high accuracy, shoot and scoot attributes. This quick response system addresses the need to deter evolving threats.”
In strategic literature, short-range tactical nuclear weapons have been considered particularly destabilising. “A quick response system” is not something you talk about when you discuss nuclear weapons which ought never be used, and if they are, should be employed only in the gravest of national emergencies.
 
Doctrine
Weapons of such range are held at the level of a Corps which is a large battlefield formation. Many situations can arise at a Corps level battle which may appear to be dire emergencies, but are not so when viewed at a higher level. No doubt the Nasr’s employment will be controlled by Pakistan’s national command authority, but given their range, they would have to be deployed in the forward edge of battle where the fog of war is thick and the chance of miscalculation high.
Whatever be the case India must confront the issue because it poses a major challenge to how it views nuclear deterrence.




India conducted five nuclear tests between May 11 and 13th 1999. On the first day it tested a thermonuclear device, a boosted fission bomb and a 0.2 kiloton device. The thermo-nuclear test seems to have failed and this leaves India with a successful fission bomb design which can, perhaps, be scaled up to 200 kilotons. Though it does appear that India may have tested a tactical nuclear warhead, subsequently, the official doctrine has decried the idea of tactical nukes.
The Indian doctrine, adumbrated through a Cabinet Committee on Security decision on January 4, 2003 noted that India would build and maintain “a credible minimum deterrent” and adopt a “no first use” posture where nuclear weapons would be “used only in retaliation against a nuclear attack on Indian territory or on Indian forces anywhere. This retaliation would be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage.” Clearly, what India is talking about is what is called a counter-value strike to hit at industrial and transportation hubs and possibly population centres.
This is why the Nasr is such a grave development. Islamabad has categorically rejected the idea of “no first use” of nuclear weapons because of its concerns over Indian conventional superiority. There has been considerable debate as to its “red lines”— the point beyond which it would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons. Needless to say, Islamabad has carefully avoided spelling them out.
Many have assumed that the red lines would be the threat of our Strike Corps— each with three to four divisions—striking deep into Pakistan cutting its north-south communications links, or endangering a major city.  To avoid this, as well as to deal with the kind of challenge the country
confronted with the attack on the Parliament House in 2001 and on Mumbai in 2008, the army began talking of a Cold Start doctrine.
In analysing this doctrine, Gurmeet Kanwal has argued that shallow division-sized attacks across the international boundary, with the aim of luring the Pakistan Army and degrading it with massive “ground based aerially delivered” fire power would not cross any red line. However, if Pakistan fields tactical nuclear weapons to counter this, the very definition of red lines would change and, by threatening their use, it would ensure that the Indian army does not mass its firepower for the purpose intended.
The Pakistani determination to field tactical nuclear weapons imposes a huge burden on the Indian nuclear strategy, especially since the country has adopted an ostrich-like approach towards meshing  nuclear weapons into our national security strategy. Our nuclear doctrine and posture seems to be more of a PR statement, rather than a strategic position. Its key principle—“no first use” was announced by Prime Minister Vajpayee within weeks of the nuclear tests in 1998. The rest of it, the idea of massive retaliation, development of a triad of forces and so on, was virtually scissored and pasted into a draft doctrine for the benefit of the world community  .
 
Restraint
Just how inadequate it was became apparent in the post Parliament attack confrontation between India and Pakistan, now called Op Parakram. The doctrine had not catered for the simple contingency—Indian forces being struck by nuclear weapons in Pakistani territory. It was for this reason that after the Op Parakaram was called off, the Cabinet Committee on Security met, and the press release issued thereafter constitutes the public statement of our doctrine as of now: that an attack on India or Indian forces anywhere by chemical, nuclear or biological weapons would involve a massive nuclear retaliation.
In 1993, Mumbai was struck by a series of devastating bomb blasts and, more recently, in 2008, the city faced a murderous commando raid. Not only were these some of the deadliest terrorist strikes anywhere in the world, but in both cases India quickly had detailed evidence of official Pakistani involvement, and yet it chose to do nothing.
Flowing from this, then, is the obvious question. Would India really destroy Lahore and Karachi if two of its divisions that had invaded Pakistan were subjected to tactical nuclear weapon strikes?  Something tells me that we would not. Restraint is a much more enduring feature of the Indian strategic culture than our nuclear doctrine assumes.
 
Instability
Till now there was an assumption that Pakistan would be a nuclear weapons state like India, China, Russia or the United States had been—seeking stability at the strategic level, even while allowing some instability at a lower level. But, as Professor Shaun Gregory pointed out in an important article this March, Pakistan is not your usual nuclear state.
He noted that it differed from other nuclear weapons states in three key ways—first, it is the military and not the civilians who control its nuclear weapons. Second, it is the only such state that backs sub-national terrorists and insurgents as a matter of state policy. And third, and most important, Pakistan was “a revisionist and irredentist state”.
So, while other states sought nuclear weapons to maintain stability, Pakistan wanted to use them as a tool to generate instability which went against the status quo. So while states have gone out of their way to promote stability after achieving nuclear parity, Pakistan seems to be accumulating nuclear weapons at a rate which bears no relation to the programme of its sole adversary, India. Its weapons holdings have already outpaced India’s and will soon approach the level of France and UK.
This, then is the challenge India faces.  Islamabad’s motive in deploying tactical nuclear weapons is not so much the strategic defence of the country, but a means of preventing India from punishing Pakistan for carrying out acts of terrorism. It already has the weapons and the reach to deter any putative use of nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately, New Delhi has been strangely negligent in responding to the  rapidly changing nuclear dynamics relating to Pakistan. We have been focusing on terrorism and have ignored the steadily increasing danger of Pakistani nuclear adventurism. Terrorism can kill people by the hundreds, but a nuclear strike’s consequences are something else altogether.
Mail Today June 2, 2011

Flawed Security

It has now been two and a half years since the horrific terrorist attack in Mumbai that took the lives of 166 people and shook the country to its core. The attack also coincided with the last of the bomb blasts triggered by the so-called Indian Mujahideen, a set of radicalised Indian Muslim young men who have since been killed, or are in jail facing terrorism charges. Since then, barring one or two relatively small attacks, things have been peaceful on the terror front.

 



No doubt our secretive guardians will claim that they have foiled numerous strikes by various terror modules, but their claim can be credited only if they put up would-be terrorists for trial like their counterparts in the UK. Otherwise, it would be safe to assume that the post-Mumbai disruption of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba is responsible for the current lull.
 
Confusion
In the wake of the attack, P. Chidambaram’s appointment as the Union Home Minister evoked a great deal of expectations and a lot of hype. But two and a half years later, things are back to what they were in the days of the unlamented Shivraj Patil. Leave aside the “most wanted” list fiasco, the Ministry’s handling of the Maoist insurgency has gone from bluster to whimper. Its handling of the Telangana issue has created a permanent sore on the country’s polity, one which threatens to undermine the well-being of the Congress party itself.
Indeed, a look at the record would suggest that the Ministry is simultaneously suffering from myopia and hyperopia—short-sightedness as well as long-sightedness— leading to a great deal of chaos and confusion in the internal security policy of the country.
Long-sightedness had the ministry think of institutions and organisations like the National Intelligence Grid (Natgrid) and the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) that could overcome the traditional problem of the lack of coordination between the various security agencies of the country. There was also talk of converting the ministry into a full-fledged “internal security” ministry. The short-sightedness, however, has led to poor conception of many of the grand ideas and initiatives taken by the Ministry.
To go by a recent interview of Mr Chidambaram to a national daily, it would seem that the only solution to India’s security problems is the Natgrid and the NCTC. The rationale for the Natgrid—  the integration of 21 existing Central and State databases with banks, insurance companies, stock exchanges, airlines, railways, telecom service providers, chemical vendors etc— is that the current information is not adequately shared and available at the right time to the right person. But what is the guarantee that things will change in the future?
You may be able to access passive information relating to banking transactions, airline ticket purchases, credit card usage. But the chances that disparate agencies will actually feed their human intelligence inputs into the system are bleak. Besides the lack of training, is the  culture of secret agencies which hoard information, sometimes for the best of motives, such as the desire not to expose a good informant.
 
Threats
The NCTC which seeks to merge the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS), the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), and the Intelligence Bureau (IB) into a super ministry of security is so obviously flawed, that Mr Chidambaram’s colleagues are having a hard time giving the proposal a decent burial. The key flaw, as is obvious, is the assumption that terrorism is the only threat to the country.
In fact, terrorism, though vicious and deadly, is a small portion of the national security spectrum. It has the capacity of creating great harm and generating huge headlines, but it cannot destroy a nation, the way the NATO intervention and civil war are doing in, say, Libya, or the US did in Iraq. The main threat to national security comes from other states, either individually or in coalitions. That must be the focus of our national security system, and the counter-terror efforts can only be their subset, notwithstanding their current salience.
The job of the NSCS and JIC, for example, is to provide analytical inputs to the government on not just current threats, but future developments as well. Indeed, the NSCS looks into issues like climate change, food security, terms of trade and so on as a part of its job and the JIC into the Chinese and Pakistani orders of battle, the developments in Burma, and so on. As for the NTRO, it is meant to be a high-tech intelligence gathering body that looks at threats in cyberspace, ballistic missiles threats and challenges of space-based weapons etc.
In any case, pre-empting terrorist attacks requires uncommon sophistication. It is not just a matter of stringing together a scenario based on vast amounts of data at the command of the government, but of actually being able to join the dots which have not quite clearly emerged and are in no data base.
This is best exemplified by a case which brought out the limits of the US National Counter Terrorism Centre. In mid-2009, the US National Security Agency picked up phone conversations in Yemen suggesting a terrorist plot against the US involving a Nigerian. A well known businessman in Nigeria walked into the US embassy expressing concerns about his son’s radicalisation and information regarding his fears was sent to the NCTC; separately, the CIA also made a file and with biographical information on the son, Umar Farooq Abdulmuttalab, sent it to headquarters.
 Yet Umar was not put on any no-fly list; he took a flight from Lagos to Amsterdam and then boarded a flight to Detroit and midway, he attempted to ignite a bomb hidden in his underwear. A US Congressional investigation found fourteen specific points of failure ranging from human error to technical problems, systemic obstacles, analytical misjudgments and competing priorities.
 
Redundancy
As outlined by media reports in India, the concepts of both the Natgrid and NCTC are ill conceived and deeply flawed. Security in a federal polity like ours, with far flung provinces which are constitutionally empowered to handle law and order, cannot be a simplistic centralised affair. It has to be a sophisticated structure which takes into account constitutional law, as well as the historical experience and ground reality in each state.
The resulting system must be interactive and multi-layered, instead of the top-down monstrosity that is being conceived. There is another danger—that of hacking and leakage. Wikileaks which have given so much agony to the US and entertainment to us, are the product of a leak of the Siprnet, a database of secret US diplomatic cables.
 What is the guarantee that sensitive information in Natgrid will not leak all over the place, or be hacked by the formidable Chinese hackers? There is nothing in the statements of the minister or the ministry regarding the need to protect the privacy and rights of the ordinary people. There has been no action against those who leaked the legally intercepted conversations of corporate lobbyist Niira Radia. The government has little compunction in curtailing our liberty, as it has done in the case of the internet recently, using terrorism as a pretext.
Any solution of our internal security scenario must be based on a people-centric approach, rather than bureaucrat-centric proposals. The end product of the work of the Ministry of Home Affairs is to make the lives of individual Indians safer and more secure and our liberties more meaningful.
The idea of a Natgrid and NCTC are fine by themselves, provided they are situated in a wider and more realistic national security architecture, and they are concieved in a more modest framework. They cannot be some super organisations, but must operate as additional work-horse institutions like the R&AW, IB, NTRO, Defence Intelligence Agency etc.
The one thing the recent economic crisis should have taught us is why we must not  rely on institutions that are “too big to fail.” Failure should be built into any organisation where humans are involved. So, smaller organisations, and ones whose functions are deliberately designed to overlap, are a far better idea. If one fails, the other can make up for it. In security, as in banking, there is nothing better than  a healthy degree of redundancy.
Mail Today May 26, 2011