"Victors" can become victims of the endgame

The breakdown in the US relations with Pakistan could well have a positive outcome. It could have the effect of tearing the veil of hypocrisy in the AfPak situation, and focus the attention of the world on the real problem—Pakistan. The danger from the US walking away from Afghanistan would be the civil war it could unleash in that hapless country, and, the certainty that its territory would be used for training jihadi terrorists from across the world, at least for some time.
But if the US disengages from Pakistan, the situation would be qualitatively worse—a country armed with nuclear weapons, as well as a self-created grievance against the United States (as well as India), would be a clear and present danger, not only to those two countries, but the many others whose nationals gravitate to the AfPak border for terror training.

Sovereignty   
One explanation for the Pakistani decision to ratchet up tensions, because of the incident in which 24 Frontier Corps (FC) soldiers were killed in a NATO airstrike, is that the establishment—the Army and the politicians—want to keep on the right side of public opinion which is deeply hostile to the US. Another is that it is the Army leadership’s way of keeping on the right side of its increasingly radicalised middle-rung officer cadre. A third explanation is that it is Pakistan’s hysterical response to the recent India-Afghanistan strategic partnership deal.




The death of the Pakistani soldiers in the region is not unusual. After all, by its own reckoning, the Pakistan Army has lost over 3,000 soldiers in combating the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Over seventy of these have been killed on account of firing from the Afghan side in the recent past.
There seems to be a fundamental variance between the versions of the two sides. And, significantly, Islamabad has refused to participate in any joint investigation of the incident.
Islamabad has been inconsistent with regard to hostilities in the area anyway. It has signed more than a dozen peace deals, but then even carried out massive offensives using fighter bombers and artillery against the TTP. Now it is once again believed to be negotiating with them. Its attitude towards the militants is inconsistent in another way. It treats some as enemies and others as friends, even when they reside in the same area—North Waziristan.
Pakistani sovereignty has been breached more than once, and not by the US alone. Columnist Nasim Zehra pointed out in an article recently that 17 Pakistani soldiers were killed in an incident by the Taliban near the area of the NATO strike recently. So the area is not exactly under the control of Pakistan  which, in any case, allows the Taliban of Afghanistan to shelter in its territory  and move back and forth unhindered. Their breach of Pakistan’s sovereignty seems to be condoned, while efforts by the US and Afghanistan which, by the way, could have sanction under international law under the doctrine of hot pursuit, have been thwarted.

Deals
The US is vitally dependent on Pakistan to execute its withdrawal strategy which involves fighting and negotiating a deal with the Taliban. In the short run,  it needs Islamabad’s cooperation in supplying its forces in Afghanistan, and, it also needs Pakistan to work out a peace deal with the Taliban.
Islamabad clearly has different ideas. The way it sees it, is that it is winning and that is why it is taking the risk of continuing to ride the jihadi tiger. They hope that they will be soon able to create an Afghanistan which is totally purged of American and, of course, Indian influence. That is why it has now upped the ante by boycotting the Bonn meet on the future of Afghanistan. Its attitude seems to signal that the NATO and US must concede it an upper hand in any post-pullout situation. In other words, it is laying out clearly the price it would charge for permitting them to use its territory to resume their military supplies to Afghanistan.
As usual, Pakistan is gambling in the short run, hoping things will work out in the long run by themselves. But it may be miscalculating. Ever since 2008, the US has been working on what it calls the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) that brings supplies through various Central Asian republics, from Baltic ports via Russia, and Black Sea ports via Turkey. According to one estimate, as much as 75 per cent of the US supplies are now coming through the NDN. By the end of next year, NATO and US dependence on Pakistan for their logistics could end. Pakistan would still be important for the US/NATO role in Afghanistan, but it would have lost a huge leverage.
The Pakistani military which is clearly playing the dominant role in making policy in Islamabad needs to carefully think through its options. The chances are that the US will remain engaged in Afghanistan, albeit in a different way—through Special Forces and air support. So it is not as though Islamabad will be working on a clean slate minus the US after 2014. No doubt the generals think they can manage the situation, but most countries would think carefully about buying the enmity of the United States, even, or especially, in its present weakened condition.
For the rest of the world, the concern should be as much about Afghanistan, as Pakistan. A Taliban takeover of a ruined country like Afghanistan, as we have noted, would be a threat, but a containable one. But should the TTP and the mullahs take over Pakistan, the situation would be very different. They would inherit a country with nuclear weapons, a flourishing nuclear industry infrastructure, universities and laboratories which could churn out bioweapons and other horrors.

Contingency
Analyst B Raman has also pointed out that while there was little danger of a traditional coup in Pakistan—one led by the chief of army staff and endorsed by the doctrine of necessity by its Supreme Court—there is no gainsaying the possibility of a coup at the lower level of officers who are less cynical and more ideological and, as the bin Laden incident revealed, vociferous and angry.
In another context, in 1999, General Mohammed Aziz Khan told his boss, the then army chief Pervez Musharraf, that we have them (the militants) by the scruff of their necks. The moot question today is who has whom by the neck.
India remains a sideshow for Islamabad for the present. Those who say that Pakistan’s current benign attitude towards India is tactical, born out of its compulsion to handle the US and Afghanistan, are right. If that policy comes apart, we could see a resumption of business as usual with Pakistan.
Many analysts say that notwithstanding everything, the Pakistani core establishment remains strong, and the chances of a jihadi takeover of Pakistan are slim. But the brinksmanship that this “core” is undertaking could lead to disaster. They may think that they can control the aroused passions of the people with regard to the West and continue to ride the jihadi tiger to victory in Kabul. But they could well end up inside it.
As the decade unfolds, regardless of the outcome in Afghanistan, the world could be compelled to confront a radical Pakistan which is armed with nuclear weapons. It would be a good idea to begin planning for that contingency now.
Mail Today November 8, 2011

My review of Martin Van Creveld's The Age of Airpower

  
At a time when India is on a major drive to develop one of the most powerful air forces by the year 2020, this study questions the utility and the logic of air power in modern warfare

 

WITHIN a matter of weeks India is expected to take a decision to buy 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA). The original approval was for aircraft worth $8.52 billion, the current estimate, for the aircraft will be either the Eurofighter or the Rafale, could be twice that sum. And if the rupee behaves the way it does, the figure could be even higher.
 The MMRCA will be India’s frontline fighter only for two years and then it is expected to be supplanted by the Russian fifth-generation fighter, which, too, India plans to acquire in numbers. Whether or not the country can afford what will easily be one of the most powerful air forces in the world by 2020 is another matter.
 And if we go by what Martin Van Creveld, one of the world’s leading military historians, has to say, we may be simply throwing good money away. Air power, argues this original and authoritative study, has never lived up to the billing given to it by its proponents who have been carried away by the image of the men who fly the superb aerial fighting machines.
 Instead of being carried away with the technological wonder of aerial machines, Van Creveld has measured air power in terms of military effectiveness in relation to the other services, as well as where it eventually counts — against the enemy.

Ironically, the principal object of air power hubris is the United States, whose air force is by far the most powerful in the world. In 2002 it overwhelmed Iraq with the “shock and awe” of its air force. It did wipe out Saddam Hussein’s forces, but it unleashed another adversary — the guerrilla — who has never quite been vulnerable to air power.
The problem, as Van Creveld demonstrates in a survey that begins with Italians throwing hand grenades at Libyan guerrillas in 1911, and ends with the ongoing war in Afghanistan, is that air power either delivers too little, or too much.
It is too little when it fails to interdict the North Vietnamese supply lines to the South in the 1960s, or to check the Taliban with drones and round-the-clock surveillance in Afghanistan. And it is clearly too much when it wipes out entire cities, as in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that fateful August of 1945.
His claim is not that airpower was never effective. But that in the historical perspective, it has already peaked in World War II, when, as he points out, “no large-scale military operation that did not enjoy adequate air cover stood any chance of success.” With the spread of nuclear weapons, the ultimate threat of total destruction that air power could bring, itself became absurd, because it created a situation where both the attacker and the attacked would be obliterated.
 The problem in fighting the wars of today is of a different kind. The rise of the global media has made strikes against cities and civilians a taboo. Despite the super-accuracy of UAV-borne missiles, there are civilian casualties.
 According to US figures, 2,157 Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders and cadre have been killed in drone strikes in the tribal regions of Pakistan, as against just 138 civilians since 2006. But as anyone familiar with the issue knows, the propaganda value that the Taliban have got from these “collateral” deaths has been enormous. The fact is that there is no such thing as a surgical strike, especially not in crowded Asian environments.
 The IAF may be still growing and buying top-of-the-line fighters as though the country’s treasury is bottomless, but other air forces are, as Van Creveld points out, in decline. Take America’s F-22, the world’s best fighter (though grounded at present because of an embarrassing little glitch). The original plan was for the US to acquire 750 aircraft, but the number was first lowered to 648 and then successively to 442, 339 and 277, till the previous US Secretary of Defence decided to terminate the programme at 187. The Eurofighter, too, is going that way, especially now that the European economies must retrench.
The issue is not that the aircrafts are not good — they are first-rate — but whether or not the expense involved in buying and maintaining them is commensurate with the kind of missions they will be involved in.
At the end of the day, there is a genuine need for leaders to balance their needs with their budgets, as well as stay focused on the outcomes. Armies, as Van Creveld points out, are still needed to conquer and pacify enemy territory, and navies remain the best means of carrying heavy loads across long distances and projecting power abroad.
Mail Today November 27, 2011

Punish the murderers in uniform

  
A Special Investigation Team set up by the Gujarat High Court has confirmed what has long been known: That 19-year old Ishrat Jehan, her employer, Javed Shaikh, and two others were murdered on June 15, 2004 by the Gujarat police, rather than being gunned down in an encounter as the police claimed. A magisterial inquiry in 2009 conducted by S.P. Tamang, too, came to the conclusion that the four were killed in cold blood. So shoddy was the effort to pass off the murder as an encounter with terrorists that the police party left a trail of evidence.

Sleepers
Besides the fact that the four had been killed by weapons of a calibre that the police did not possess, not one of the 70 rounds fired by the police in the alleged encounter was recovered. Worse, the police claimed that they shot out the left tyre of the car in which the four were travelling and it thereafter hit a divider on the right; actually, had they done so, it ought to have swerved left.




Mr Tamang has determined that the four had actually been kidnapped on June 12 from Mumbai by a Gujarat police squad and brought to Ahmedabad and murdered, and their bodies were later taken to the spot of the alleged encounter. Even now, there is need for a more detailed inquiry as to how the Gujarat police was able to abduct people from another state and get away with it. Further, we need to know how Jehan and Shaikh were linked up to two possibly Pakistani nationals about whom not much seems to be known, except the police charge that they were Lashkar-e-Tayyeba militants from Jammu & Kashmir.
Former Home Secretary GK Pillai insists Jehan and Shaikh were working for the LeT, and were being used to provide cover to the militants whose mission was to kill Narendra Modi. The police also cite the fact that Jehan and Shaikh were initially hailed as martyrs on the LeT website and then the post was hastily taken off. It is difficult to take them at their word because of their many lies, not only in this, but other Modi and Gujarat linked cases.
Even assuming that Jehan and Shaikh were LeT sleepers, they were, by no means, outside the pale of the Indian law. They were not even, as is alleged in the case of Sohrabuddin,  well-known dangerous criminals who had to be shot at sight, rather than arrested.
There are many, including Modi in the Gujarat State Assembly elections of 2007, who have argued that Sohrabuddin was a criminal and ‘deserved to die’. They conveniently overlook the murder of his wife, Kausar Bi. Needless to say, they see no irony in the fact that arrogating to yourself the right to kill, allegedly for a higher cause, is exactly the argument that terrorists give.
It goes without saying that in any civilised country, the right to kill is one that is exclusively reserved for the state. While in war time, and through special legislation like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, it is delegated to its armed forces, in normal circumstances it is only exercised through the judiciary and that, too, through judicial due process. Here, as we have seen in India, it is exercised in the “rarest of rare” circumstances.
Unfortunately, the Indian political system has tolerated extra-judicial killings and fake encounters for too long. They have seen it, as the Mumbai police have, as a means of getting rid of dangerous underworld figures who, notwithstanding draconian laws like the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) of 1999, are difficult to keep behind bars. Police personnel in insurgency-ridden states have seen it as a way of getting rid of dreaded terrorists who if left in jail would pose a threat to the police personnel and their family.

Establishment
But this argument is not quite accurate and the problem is much worse. The Asian Centre for Human Rights has, on the basis of reports to the National Human Rights Commission, pointed out that there have been 14,231 custodial deaths in police and judicial custody in India in the 2001-2010 period.
Of these the highest number, 250, is in Maharashtra, then comes Uttar Pradesh, 174, Gujarat, 134, Andhra Pradesh, 109, West Bengal, 98, Tamil Nadu, 95. As can be seen, a number of these states are neither afflicted by gangsterism or terrorism. Most of the deaths, the ACHR points out, are a result of torture. More than anything else, it reflects not the anger of people against terrorism or crime, but the casual way in which we treat human life in this country.
The reason for this state of affairs is the cover given to these murderers in uniform by the establishment. They are hailed as “encounter specialists” who put their lives on the line. Awards are showered on cops who have done nothing more than shot unarmed men. It is not surprising that virtually no policeman ever loses his life, or even gets a scratch, in the many alleged encounters that they have participated in.
The motive of the political class is to ride the “tough on terrorism” plank. No one has been more adept at this than Narendra Modi. Not surprisingly, the maximum number of fake encounters are related to people killed in the process of plotting Modi’s killing.   Besides Sohrabuddin, Ishrat, Javed and the two alleged Lashkar men, we also have Sadiq Jamal who was shot dead, allegedly while plotting to kill L.K. Advani in Gujarat and Samir Khan Pathan who was killed while trying to escape, again after his arrest for a plot to kill Modi in 2002.

Dharma
Modi could not but have known that many of these alleged conspiracies were not really authentic. But he has chosen to ride the communal tiger. It began with his cynical decision to exploit the post-Godhra killing of Muslims to win the 2002 State Assembly elections, and was continued till the 2007 arrest of
D G Vanzara, the deputy commissioner of police in Ahmedabad for the Sohrabuddin and Kausar Bi murder. It is perhaps too late to expect Modi to uphold the ideals of ethical conduct expected of the chief minister of a state. His failure to observe Raj Dharma was manifest even in 2002.
But India can and must rid itself of the shame of being a country where the rule of law is only selectively employed, and where people can be deprived of their life and liberty at the whim of the police. For this reason, the state must make an example of the people involved in the Ishrat murder and use the opportunity to take Indian policing to the 21st century from its rather barbaric past.
The Indian police system must develop the moral outrage needed to root out any sympathy for those who carry out fake encounters. The policemen involved must be seen for what they are—murderers. And being in uniform, they deserve much more severe punishment than is meted out to your run-of-the-mill killers.
Whether or not the judicial system takes a long time to convict and execute criminals or not, is not the concern of the police, and neither have they been appointed the official executioners of the Indian state.
India is at the cusp of a moral revolution. Across the country, the people are showing that they are tired of political corruption. This is the time when we need to draw up new norms of police conduct as well, with tough rules that outlaw torture and extra-judicial killing.
Mail Today November 24, 2011

The State of the Matter

So far the honours for the Uttar Pradesh sweepstakes are even. If Rahul Gandhi has pitched himself to show that the Congress is the  Bahujan Samaj Party’s main opponent by his “angry young man” act, Mayawati has come back with a googly— the proposal to  split the state into four—stumping the Congress. The game is far from over, but you are at least sure that you will get some high quality, high voltage politics in the run-up to the UP state assembly elections.
Ever since it was created, there have been moves to divide the state of Uttar Pradesh. The state’s origin lies in the exigencies of the British conquest of India and at some point it was christened the United Provinces of Agra and Awadh, being shortened in 1937 to United Provinces. After Independence, this was conveniently changed to Uttar Pradesh. Around the size of the United Kingdom, and three times as populous, this gigantic state was the fulcrum of national politics. At its peak, it returned as many as 85 members of the Lok Sabha.

Breakthrough
The party which controlled its politics decided who would be prime minister in New Delhi. But with the rise of identity politics the clout of the state was fragmented. Even so, as Mayawati revealed in the 2007 elections, it is still possible for a single party to dominate the state, even if not as completely as the Congress had in the 1950s.
There is little to be said for the claims that Ms Mayawati’s move is an election stunt. All politics are ultimately geared towards winning elections in a democracy, and the call to divide the state into four is a political move, plain and simple, so there is not much to complain about.  You have to hand it to Mayawati; she has the instincts of a gambler. She has staked the state which her party dominates and is offering to divide it into four, an act which is fraught with electoral consequences for her BSP.
She undoubtedly hopes that it could provide the breakthrough she has been looking for at the national level since 2007.  But the bigger questions are, first, whether her move will succeed, and second, whether it will benefit her and, finally and equally importantly, the inhabitants of the new states.
Under the Constitution, the eventual call on the creation of a new state rests with the Union government. The Congress history shows its disinclination to create new states. It did so with Maharashtra-Gujarat, Haryana-Punjab and Uttaranchal-UP only after agitations. Even now, as Telangana is virtually a fact, and burning, the party continues to waffle. Faced with the googly the party has limply suggested a new states reorganisation commission.



The Congress has its own imperatives. Being an all-India party, it doesn’t have the instincts or cunning of Mayawati who is looking for that big win. So, for the present Mayawati will, by default, be allowed to set up a straw man and beat him in the coming months. And in this way, she will ensure that some of the heat she would have faced for the corruption and criminalisation of the BSP-led government is deflected.
The second issue, too, is complicated. From being the top dog in UP, the BSP will have to rewrite the electoral equations in the new states. The Paschim Pradesh, for example, is the natural home of the Jat-dominated Rashtriya Lok Dal. It also has a significant proportion of Muslim voters, a fact that has been noted by the Muslim-baiting BJP. Bundelkhand could well be a natural outpost for the Samajwadi Party.
Whether the division will benefit the inhabitants of the new states is indeed a moot question. The record in India is mixed. One of the aspects of Mayawati’s proposal is that there is really no demand for UP’s division. When Uttarakhand separated, it was as much the result of geography and culture, as of an intense agitation for a separate hill state and Mulayam Singh Yadav’s mishandling of it.

Failures
While there has been a demand for a separate “Harit Pradesh” to incorporate regions of western UP, these have been more in terms of declarative statements of leaders of the RLD, rather than through any mass agitation. Likewise, Ms Mayawati’s claim that she had championed the division in the past, too, rests on the fact that she wrote three letters to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the issue in the past three years.
Compare this with the storm that is raging in Telangana where there is support for a separate state, as  well as vehement opposition to it. In the past, too, states like Maharashtra, Punjab, and Haryana emerged through an intense struggle. Himachal, the most successful of the small states, was a collateral effect of the reorganisation of Punjab. Jharkhand, too, was the result of a long struggle spanning half a century.
The experience of the creation of new states shows two trends. On the one hand you have successful states like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Himachal, and Mizoram and on the other you have those like Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Uttarakhand which are failing, if not failed, states. Maybe it is unfair to call them failing or failed. But the outcomes for the inhabitants have not been particularly good and in many cases, these states are barely solvent, and depend on central largesse for survival. Their inept governments have not generated any economic growth and have, instead, depended on expanding government jobs for their inhabitants.

Gambler
Take Uttarakhand. Instead of taking the trajectory of neighbouring Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand has been marked by rampant corruption. The same seems to have happened in Jharkhand. The takeaway could well be that the winning political party has the means to corrupt the entire political class. N.D. Tiwari patented the idea of providing some kind of sinecure to each and every member of the legislative assembly belonging to his party. He was probably outdone by Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank whose largesse extended to party bosses in New Delhi as well. Though Jharkhand had a strong identity and vast resources, it has been cursed by political instability which has probably been aided and promoted by venal politicians like Shibu Soren and Madhu Koda. In just two years of his chief ministership, the latter allegedly acquired assets worth Rs 4,000 crore.
The experience of Himachal Pradesh shows that a decent, capable and far-sighted leader can make a major difference in the fortunes of a state. Unfortunately, none of the new entities created after 2000 has had that luck. In the case of the four states that Mayawati wants to create out of UP, we are not even sure as to who could lead these states. We know, of course, that Ajit Singh could get himself or his son to become the CM of the Paschim Pradesh. But as for the others there are few obvious names. No doubt they will emerge, especially after Mayawati has precipitated the issue.
The bigger question is about Ms Mayawati’s own future. As a politician, she has been peripatetic. She has contested polls from places like Haridwar (now in Uttarakhand), Kairana and Bijnor in West UP, Akbarpur in East UP, Harora assembly seat from West UP, Bisli from Central UP and Jahangirpur near Noida. But West UP aka Harit Pradesh is the one place where she would face the most coherent opposition. Perhaps there is a hidden message in the Dalit memorial park in Noida facing Delhi.
This leaves you wondering whether it is guile or gamble that guides her deeper strategy.
Mail Today November 18, 2011

Is it possible to have a secure cyber universe ?

Last week, in a hotel in a Washington DC suburb, the US Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) hosted a symposium. The goal was to reach out to the geek community to find a solution to a problem that seems to be on the top of many minds—cyber security. It was clear from the remarks of the leaders of the Pentagon’s far-out research agency, that as of now they have run out of ideas for ways to protect the US military, and by extension, other American computer networks, from attacks by hackers.
There is an irony here: Darpa helped create the internet yet it finds itself unable to cope with the dark side of what it has helped create. Besides the government, many American companies including some prime defence contractors have had their computers hacked and some of their most sensitive files compromised. What the Darpa is looking for is the proverbial magic bullet. As of now defence against hackers constitutes identifying malware, removing it from the system and waiting for the next attack.
This is bad news for countries like India. In the past four years or so, many websites belonging to the government have been subject to cyber attacks. By their very nature the authors of these attacks have been difficult to pin down. The attacks vary—some are probing attacks to map out networks, others are deeper probes to locate and extricate important data. Yet, even something as innocuous as the Commonwealth Games of 2010 suffered as many as 8,000 attacks.

Incidence
This indicates that the scale of what has to be protected is enormous and goes well beyond what is called National Critical Infrastructure. Figures in the 2009 Annual report of  the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) show that phishing attacks had risen from just 3 in 2004 to 374 in 2009, peaking at 604 the year before. Likewise, network scanning and probing attacks had gone up from 11 in 2004 to 303 in 2009. Website compromise through malware propagation had gone up from 835 in 2008 to 6,548 in 2009, the last year for which Cert-In figures are available.
In June 2008, hackers struck at nearly 10 websites in various ministries over a period of 24 hours. But it was the Ministry of External Affairs which has been a major target. In February 2009, several of its over 600 computers were found to be infected with a spyware which tracks or controls  user action. In this case, the spyware would automatically “copy” an email being sent by an office and dispatch it to another address as well.
In an interview with The Times ( London), India’s then National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan confirmed that his own office, as well as two other government departments, were targeted on December 15, 2009. He also spoke of an earlier incident when a Trojan had been embedded in an email with a pdf attachment, allowing the attacker to access the computer remotely, download and also delete files.
More recently, in July 2011, Indian government systems faced one of the most serious and sophisticated attacks till now. In the early hours of July 12, emails from one address with an attached Microsoft Word document titled “cms.ntro:daily-elec.mediareport (2011)” were sent to the top officials of India’s security system, including the NSA, the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, and the Special Secretary (Internal Security) in the MHA. The document purported to be a daily report issued by the government’s Central Monitoring System which tracks radio broadcasts of neighbouring countries. Any attempt to open it would have actually resulted in the release of malware that established itself in their computer systems. Fortunately, the intrusion was prevented.
In an April 2010 report, Information Warfare Monitor, working with Shadowserver Foundation came out with a report titled, Shadows in the Cloud—Investigating Cyber Espionage 2.0. This report categorically asserted that it had uncovered a suspected Chinese cyberwar offensive against India. Among the Indian institutions targeted were the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) headed by the NSA.  During the period of observation, fourteen documents, including two marked “Secret”, and those assessing the situation in the North East, and Maoism, were taken out by hackers.
Computers of the Indian embassies in Kabul, Moscow, and consulates in Dubai and Abuja, Nigeria were compromised.  Military units such as the 21 Artillery Brigade in Assam, the Air Force Station at Race Course Road, New Delhi, and the Air Force station in Darjipura near Vadodara were compromised.

Source
Among the documents withdrawn was a detailed briefing on a live fire exercise, and another relating to the Pechora surface to air missile. Military educational institutions such as the Army Institute of Technology in Pune and the Military College of Electronics and Mechanical Engineering in Secunderabad were also attacked and 21 documents exfiltrated from them.
Who is responsible for these attacks? The “Shadows” investigators, as well as “The Dark Visitor”, a blog that researches Chinese hacking activities, have concluded that there are strong links of the attacks to Chengdu. This is interesting, since Chengdu’s University of Electronic Science and Technology has had a strong association with the Chinese hacking community. It is also the location of one of PLA’s Technical Reconnaissance Bureaus and the headquarters of the military region that deals with India.
The “Shadows” own assessment is tentative, even though it says that “this investigation and our analysis tracks back directly to the PRC”. It also says that the information may be moving from the underground fraternity of hackers to the Chinese state.
In early August 2011, the computer security company McAfee said in a report that there had been a series of cyber attacks on the networks of 72 organisations across the world, including the United Nations, governments and corporations, over a five-year period. India and the UN were, McAfee says, the primary target of the intrusions.

Steps
While it did not name the country, it did say that there had been “one state actor” behind the attacks. It takes little imagination to guess that the country in question is China. The sharply escalating nature of cyber attacks against India led to the government of India creating a Crisis Management Plan whose key action was the creation of the CERT-In as the national nodal agency in cyber security which works with international CERTs. Sectoral teams have also been created along with teams of security auditors that can provide a wide range of services on a commercial basis.
The legal basis of the national cyber security action in India is laid out by the Information Technology Act of 2000 which was amended in 2008. Under this, the government has the authority to scan Indian cyber space, detect incidents and threats, audit practices and protect critical and other infrastructure. India has only recently announced procedures and protocols for communications monitoring and interception, but like the rest of the world, it has some way to go before security can be assured in its networks and systems. Ever since the 2009 intrusions, the NTRO has been actively involved in the cyber security of India’s national security apparatus.
Days after the August 2011 report by McAfee, the Chinese government released a report claiming that far from being the aggressor, China was the victim when it came to cyber attacks. The report claimed that about half of the 493,000 cyber attacks on the websites of the Chinese government and other agencies in the past year “originated from abroad, particularly the United States and India”. The report was prepared by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Centre, which is said to be the Chinese government’s “primary computer security monitoring network”.
If the Chinese claim to be victims and the US says it is unable to guarantee protection against cyber attacks, countries like India are in trouble. There is need for those charged with cyber security in the country to look deeper, perhaps within our own IT institutions and companies, for talent that can come up with the necessary solutions.
Mail Today November 11, 2008