NCTC: Over the top ideas rain trouble on government

ONE of the features of the infirmity of the second UPA government is its poor power of anticipation. This is manifested in the manner in which it has been blind-sided by the negative response of almost all Opposition-ruled states to the order creating the National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC).
That these states include Tripura, ruled by the Leftists, centrist Orissa, Bihar and Tamil Nadu, and the right-wing BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Uttarakhand and Gujarat, tells its own story.
Though they have not spoken, the BSP that rules Uttar Pradesh and the Akali Dal-run Punjab are likely to have a similar view.
The situation is not dissimilar to what happened when the government announced its decision to permit 100 per cent Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail in December. But the issue of the NCTC is different.
It is not just a matter of anticipation, but something which appears to be questionable in law and utility. Everyone is agreed that India needs to do a great deal to enhance its ability to respond to the terrorist threat. For the past 30 years, we have suffered from the scourge of terrorism, and even today, our ability to thwart attacks in advance is negligible.
In the past month, we have heard of the peculiar clash between the Delhi Police special cell, acting as a proxy of the Intelligence Bureau (IB), and criticising the Mumbai Police for arresting one of their informants.
Insiders will tell you that the Mumbai Police are no angels, divided as they are between the crime branch and the Anti-Terrorism Squad.
The lack of coordination between the various intelligence agencies and the state police departments was one of the major reasons why the NCTC was mooted. It was proposed that the Multi-Agency Centre (MAC), set up by the group of ministers report of 2002 to fuse intelligence on terrorism from a variety of sources, become the core of the new NCTC. 
But where the MAC was confined to intelligence gathering and analysis, the NCTC will have investigation and operations functions as well.

Even more ambitious was the move, as enunciated by Union home minister P. Chidambaram in a speech at the Intelligence Bureau centenary endowment lecture in December 2009, to place institutions like the National Investigation Agency, the National Technical Research Office (NTRO), the National Crime Records Bureau, the Crime  and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems and  the National Security Guards under the NCTC; and have the counter-terror work of the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW), the Aviation Research Centre and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), too under this organisation.
Clearly, Chidambaram was poorly advised. The proposal was transparently way over the top.
Terrorism is a major threat to India, but it is by no means the only one, or the most potent one. It simply does not make sense to have the NTRO, which specialises in high-end technical intelligence against China and Pakistan, to be made subservient to a counter-terror body. And why should the JIC whose remit is to provide analytical reports on subjects ranging from nuclear weapons to climate change be part of the NCTC?
The result was that the proposal was put through the grinder through 2010 and 2011 and when it emerged late last year, Chidambaram’s more extravagant claims were shorn off. 
But even the truncated proposal which has now been notified by the government has problems.
First and foremost, it locates the NCTC within the IB. There is a problem here. Though the NCTC has drawn its powers from the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 1967, the IB itself is not subject to any legal statute. It was established in 1887 through an office order to spy on Russian activities, and later on the Indian national movement.
Subsequently, there has been no effort to legislate its existence and place it under some form of parliamentary oversight, as is the practice in democratic countries. The government of India has ensured till now that the IB has no powers of arrests and seizures.
Whatever information or evidence it gathers is handed over to the state police services, or the CBI, which undertakes investigations, effects arrests and detentions and processes the evidence for prosecution.
By first placing the NCTC under the IB, and then giving it investigation and operations functions, the government has crossed an important firewall.
In great measure, the response of the states to the NCTC proposal is based on the fear that the central intelligence agency, already something of a bugbear for the Opposition, will become even more all-pervasive and powerful. More important, it will encroach upon the powers of arrest and detention which currently reside with the states.
Of course, there is Article 355 of the Constitution which states that “It shall be the duty of the Union to protect every state against external aggression and internal disturbance….” The wording is unambiguous “It shall be the duty…”, in other words, there is a mandate. But taken together with other Articles, it is clear that the mandate is for a cooperative and consultative federalism, not one that is run by the diktat of the Union government.
There is nothing wrong with the idea of the NCTC, and our recent history will tell us that we need a strong counter-terrorist organisation. But there is also a need to understand that huge organisations which are “too big to fail” are not a particularly good idea.

Second, that crossing the firewall between intelligence gathering and operations, particularly within the national boundaries, is a no-no and will take India down a dangerous and slippery slope, especially since the IB does not have any form of administrative or parliamentary oversight, leave alone legislative authority.
Third, that counter-terrorism requires a bottom up approach where our state police and intelligence services need to be revamped first, before any effective counter-terrorist strategy can get under way.

Mail Today Feb 22, 2012

The politics of the holy cow

 It should be no surprise that in India, the cow and politics go hand in hand. The Sangh Parivar’s first move to mobilise the “masses” came through the anti-cow slaughter movement of 1966. The vehicle was the then newly created Vishwa Hindu Parishad. But, the movement did not yield any  political dividend, despite the unexpected, or really unanticipated, attack on Parliament in 1967 by thousands of sadhus demanding a ban on cow slaughter. In recent times we have been once again witnessing an effort to use the gentle bovine as a political vehicle by the Bharatiya Janata Party. Last month, the party’s manifestos for the state assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand featured issues relating to the cow.

Elections
Last week the UP election manifesto of the BJP promised a free cow for every below poverty line (BPL) family.  As Mail Today correspondent Piyush Srivastava pointed out, this would involve, at a minimum, a cost of Rs 56,000 crore to the state exchequer, since there are 5.60 crore BPL families in the state, and the going rate for cows ranges from Rs 10,000-Rs 20,000. That will be approximately 33 per cent of the total state budget (Rs 1,69,416 crore in 2011-12). And the BJP is offering an additional subsidy of Rs 750 per month for a cow and Rs 500 for a buffalo to small and medium farmers which would add another Rs 17,000 crore to the bill.

According to the National Sample Survey Organisation, 43 per cent of the rural households in the state are landless. No doubt most of them belong to the BPL category who are barely able to feed and shelter themselves; now they will also get a cow to shelter and to feed.
Not to be outdone, the party’s Uttarakhand unit’s manifesto came up with even more far-reaching proposals. If re-elected, the BJP would encourage the production of filtered Gau Mootra (cow’s urine) in the state. Besides the usual development issues, the manifesto flagged the promotion of cow products and cow reverence in the state.
 As the State unit in-charge and national general secretary Thawarchand Gehlot explained, cow’s urine would be filtered and cleaned to produce a drink called ‘ark’ which would have various benefits including curing cancer and injuries. Cow’s urine would also form the basis of medicines for treating eye and ear diseases, as well as toothpaste, detergents and aftershave. Of course, the urine would also be used for conventional requirements such as fertilisers.

Obscurantists
There is nothing new in all this. The Sangh Parivar has long promoted the use of cow’s urine and dung as medicine. In 2010, two leading newspapers reported that an institution which was affiliated to the Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh had got a US patent for an anti-cancer drug extracted from cow’s urine. Apparently the institution, Go Vigyan Anusandhan Kendra, had earlier received patents for other “bio” enhancers and anti-cancer drugs. The item also noted that the “drug” had been tested on three patients, hardly the norm for clinical trials.
A hilarious sidelight to this is that the Parivar kooks claim that the virtues of the cow are limited to Indian breeds. Some claim that the milk of foreign hybrids may even be toxic. In a “learned” article written in the Sangh Parivar journal Organiser in August 2009, Vaidya Kulamarva Jayakrishna laid out the various advantages of cow’s milk—it was nutritive, good for the eyes, brain and heart, it promoted immunity and could alleviate a variety of illnesses. But, he noted, “We have to understand that these properties have been explained in the context of desi or indigenous breed of cow and not the hybrid ones which are the major source of milk to us today.”
Cow slaughter and cow protection have been a vehicle of the Hindutva movement from the outset. Prior to the use of the Babri Masjid for the Ram Temple agitation, the Parivar had hoped to use an agitation calling for the ban of cow slaughter as its political vehicle.
This issue is still doing the rounds. In December, Madhya Pradesh’s new anti-cow slaughter bill received presidential assent. Under the new bill, the existing  anti-cow slaughter law was reinforced by enhancing the punishment for killing cows and transporting beef to up to seven years’ imprisonment. The Act also gave officials draconian powers of search and arrest and, worse, put the burden of proof on the accused.
Immediately after the bill became law, there were a spate of attacks on the Muslim community by Bajrang Dal activists. This was not unexpected, since the purpose of the law was, indeed, as much to harass them as to promote “cow reverence” as a means of consolidating the Hindu community behind the BJP.
Mr Chouhan is a canny and able chief minister. Significantly, what his bill did was to amend an Act penalising cow slaughter passed when Uma Bharti was the chief minister. He is probably using the issue to cement his position with the kooks who dominate the higher echelons of the Sangh Parivar. With Modi’s PM candidacy running into a roadblock of opposition, Chouhan is clearly positioning himself as an alternative.

Pasts
Hindus do not actually worship the cow. The bovine, however, has had a major role in Indian mythology, religious ritual, sentiment and everyday life. The five products of milk, curd, ghee, urine and dung form part of religious ritual. There is no revulsion to the urine or the dung of a cow. On the other hand, Indians will swear by the virtues of ghee and the value of milk and curd in their diet. Poets sing of the beauty of godhuli, the sight of the evening sun’s rays piercing the dust raised by cows coming back home from pasture.
The dung of the cow is mixed with straw to make patties which are the basic fuel in many households, and dung is also mixed with clay and used to coat the plaster of the walls of a mud-shack. When I was a child living in Almora, in the 1950s, the grandmothers of the house would often sprinkle cow’s urine on the sheets soiled by bed-wetting children. They said that it was the best thing available for removing the bad odour which would not go away with an ordinary washing. It was a primitive remedy, but life was like that—no electricity, little or no milk, eggs, sugar, or antibiotics, even for middle class families.
Given the semi-literate and cynical plane upon which politics operates in this country, it would be useless to argue that the role of the cow has actually evolved over time and that one of the most sacred texts of the Hindus, the Rig Veda, even speaks of cow sacrifice and beef eating.
I can understand why my grandmothers did what they did. The burden of tradition was heavy on them. In a primitive economy, the cow did play a big role in the lives of ordinary folk. Religion sanctified it and practice, such as the use of cow dung for fuel, cemented it. Cows remain an important part of Indian life even today, but not on the plane that the Parivar wants them to be.
But my memories are of an era when smallpox and TB were big killers, and penicillin had just about arrived in India; a lot has changed since. But it would be worthwhile exploring just what it is that is impelling the BJP to hark back to that era and beyond in its quest for political moksha.
Mail Today February 4, 2012

In supporting Rushdie, don't throw out the Jaipur Lit Fest bathwater

In 1996, in a book release in Washington DC, I posed this question to Salman Rushdie: You have been born a Muslim, and you knew the reaction something like The Satanic Verses would have in the community. So why did you write it?” Rushdie was a bit taken aback, and his somewhat fumbling response was anodyne— about coming to terms with himself and the faith he was born into and so on.
Many Indians, not all fundamentalists, have been a bit uncomfortable with the seeming auto da fé being conducted in Jaipur in the past week, but they are equally bemused by the way in which Rushdie has posed The Satanic Verses as a free speech issue. You don’t wave a red rag at a bull, and then complain when it charges at you. It is not just Muslims—say something derogatory about any of the Sikh gurus, or question Lord Rama’s character in a tea shop in a UP town and you are liable to be at the receiving end of extreme violence.

Controversy
Most Indians, who live in a crazy quilt of caste and ethnicities know where the red lines are, though as the banning of Ramanujan’s essays on the Ramayana in Delhi University reveals, these lines are changing and becoming narrower. It should not be forgotten that Rushdie, though born in India, is part of the western intellectual tradition which takes for granted certain liberties and rights that came after centuries of struggle there. In India, we have been trying to telescope that experience in a half century. Though our founding fathers gave us a good kick-off, the game has floundered in the past two decades.
Actually, the controversy in Jaipur was not about The Satanic Verses. As Javed Akhtar put it, “You may ban a film, but can you ban a film maker?” It was about Rushdie being able to move around freely and express his views on issues other than The Satanic Verses. India may have a case to ban that book in the interest of public order, but to ban Rushdie’s video link is quite different, and points to an uncomfortable edge of intolerance that we have arrived at in the 21st century. By the way,  you can ban film makers, as the mullahs in Iran or the commissars in China have done. But as in the case of the Internet, have we reached a point where we measure our liberties with those of North Korea, China and Iran? 

But, the Rushdie issue was not just about Muslim hotheads who had threatened violence at the otherwise remarkably peaceable literary fest. It was also about the manipulation of an incident for electoral gain. Make no mistake, the Muslim Manch and the various fire-breathing maulanas were merely the tools of cynical parties which used them for their purposes. Unfortunately, the negative consequences of the controversy will be to deepen the stereotyping of Muslims as being “different” from us, more violent and intolerant. The facts, of course, are that “the different” are us, and in every community today you have people who will resort to violence at every slight, mostly imagined, on their faith.
On Monday, a police officer recounted to me an incident that had taken place recently in a town in the south-eastern part of the state, in a locality next to a Muslim ghetto. A young man, wearing a blood spattered kurta pyjama had stumbled into a bazaar saying that he had been stabbed by people in the Muslim locality. The canny local police officer immediately took him to  hospital and insisted on calling a doctor to examine him in his presence. The young man’s demeanour suddenly changed, he said he would manage on his own and begged to be let off. Then, when the doctor arrived and stripped the “patient”, it became apparent that he had not received a single wound, and had merely been play acting on behalf of some people who had paid him for the purpose.

Festival
The sinister aim was obvious— trigger communal violence. Such incidents are common in the long and sordid history of communal violence in India. To say dark forces are afoot in the country would not be an exaggeration. Witness the outrageous incident staged by the Ram Sene on the New Year’s day  when they hoisted a Pakistani flag atop the tehsildar’s office at Singdi town near Bijapur in Karnataka. The idea was to blame the local Muslim community, trigger violence and gain political ground.
If there is a positive takeaway from the Rushdie incident, it is that it brought to the fore for the Indian public, or at least the better-off classes, the contradictions of modern India. At one level, they live in a democracy that promises all the freedoms that their cherished West offers, at another, they are besieged by forces of obscurantism and violence which try to pull them back to the medieval ages in which many of our religious and political leaders live. Yet, we cannot be unaware that we live on the edge of anarchy, public order is tenuous, and a small spark can set off a big blaze. And that we have leaders who first see which way public opinion, or the street is headed, and then take a stand on an issue.
The Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF) is an enormous gift to the country. A compressed intellectual fest— where Harvard’s Steven Pinker can comfort us  that violence has indeed declined through history, Abhijit Bannerjee of MIT refines his ideas about the choices we need to make to eliminate poverty, or a Richard Dawkins speaks of  the death of religion— has an immediate resonance in contemporary India, but largely to a certain growing middle class. Beyond their ideas, you cannot but think of the intellectual process from which they have emerged and the environment in which they flourish. This is a world which we can only aspire to at this juncture.
The JLF has provided the Indian middle class the opportunity to hear Pinker, Dawkins, Oprah Winfrey, Sunil Khilnani, Ben Okri, Mohammed Hanif and scores of other writers, novelists, intellectuals and personalities. It is, in its own way, a major effort to keep open the shutting minds in the country. They do not merely challenge orthodoxy, but our increasingly shoddy intellectual culture and its third-rate higher education system.

Battle
In the end, the battle is for the middle class mind. It is the ideas and aspirations of this class that shape the intellectual traditions of the nation. As of now inborn  ignorance, prejudice, “localitis” is tugging at this mind. But in the past decade of economic growth, the rise of information and communication technologies has given these Indians an enormous sense that they are part of the larger, dynamic world, and this is manifested by the crowds thronging the JLF. 
Among the audience you can see young women and men who had travelled from far, not just the cities of the state like Jodhpur and Ajmer, but smaller towns like Bhilwara and Tonk, and beyond—Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai. There were students from “deemed universities” as well as from the best colleges of the country. Given his background, Rushdie does protest too much, and it would be a pity if in defending him, we end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
That is because ideas are strange things, you never know when or where they flower. But you do require a seeding, and that is what the JLF has been doing in organising the unique intellectual mela in Jaipur for the past several years.
Mail Today January 26, 2012

BREAKDOWN

The VK Singh age issue is an extraordinary saga of victimhood. Army Chief General VK Singh says that he is a victim, though, since he reached the highest rank he could, it is not easy to discover just what he has lost. The government feels that it is the victim in a case which seems to be an outcome of internal politics in the Army. Actually the big losers are the people of the country who had, at last, got an Army chief who was willing to crack down on the rising instances of corruption in the organisation and provide it much needed leadership. Instead, he seems to have gone astray in a quest for personal vindication. In the process he has taken a step that has been unprecedented in the democratic world — challenged the government of the day through a law suit, even while continuing in office.

System
General Singh has repeatedly said that the issue is a personal one and relates to his honour and integrity. There is something puzzling here. In the public sphere, at least, virtually no one has questioned the general’s honour and integrity, claimed that he had forged his dates of birth, is a “liar”, or done anything improper. There have been whispers that in 2006 and again in 2008, faced with the prospect of losing out his promotion, the general was coerced to live with the incorrect May 31, 1950 date of birth, and he agreed in the interests of the organisation, whatever that may be.
Thereafter, though he did reach the top of the pyramid, he seems to have retained a deep sense of bitterness that injustice was done to him. Things indeed had come to a sorry pass if one chief, howsoever, wrongly or rightly, believes that two former chiefs have victimised him. As a citizen of the country, therefore, he has all the right to seek  redressal of  a wrong done to him. But the question lingers: as the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) what should have been the right course for him to adopt? And, perhaps more important: Has the Ministry of Defence mishandled the case beyond repair?
Actually Singh’s case is a system related problem. The government has so far never had someone who heads a major department file a suit against it, even while continuing in office. This is because there is an expectation that once appointed to such a post you do not “rock the boat”. This is a lesson that is well ingrained in the IAS bureaucracy where you will never hear of any complaint of victimisation or supersession being taken to court. Everyone is accommodated in the system.
In return, the government also ensures that it does not upset things by accepting the widest latitude—ranging from incompetence to moral turpitude and corruption—in the conduct of its department heads. In the past there have been at least three chiefs, two of the air force and one of the army, who have escaped being sacked for corruption, only because the government did not want to rock the systemic boat. In 1972, the government quietly sent two generals into retirement because it did not want to pursue a case relating to their involvement in looting in Bangladesh. Indeed, there has been no dearth of similar instances in the government. 
There is a major problem here relating to the Army and the armed forces. They have been considered outside the system as it were. Though in recent years the Ministry of Defence has claimed to have become the Integrated Headquarters of the Ministry of Defence, this is a Potemkin construction which has not fooled anyone. The Army continues to be administered by the civilians in the same rough-shod and incompetent manner that it was in the past.
Had the Ministry of Defence been a truly integrated organisation, with the uniformed and civilian personnel serving side by side, it is possible that the present episode may have taken another, more positive, turn. Unfortunately, the age episode will only persuade the civilians in the MOD to dig in their heels and perpetuate the present archaic system through which the armed forces are controlled.
The rocking the boat issue is significant in another way as well, as evidenced by the Attorney General’s claim that to accept May 31,1951 as the right date of birth for Singh would lead to disaffection in the army as it would alter the chain of succession.
This is a specious argument. There is no set chain of succession. Every chief is selected by the Cabinet Committee on Security from a panel of seven army commanders and the vice chief of army staff. The government is well within its right to appoint any of them and has, twice in the past, overlooked the claims of the senior most among these generals. The reason why they  choose the senior-most  is that it ensures that the system functions smoothly and that there is no unseemly lobbying or judicial challenge relating to the appointment. So, three chiefs ago, a certain injustice was done to ensure the succession after Singh’s retirement.

Transformation
In many ways Singh’s action marks the emergence of the new Army. For long it has claimed special honour as being comprised of people who lay down their lives for the country. The reality, of course, is that in a volunteer army today, most people sign up because it is a good career move. As for integrity, the spate of corruption and ketchup charges in the last decade reveal that the Army is like any other institution in the country. Regimental nepotism, corruption, victimising or “fixing” inconvenient officers, have been part of the Army since independence. But in the past the officers affected saw it as their karma and accepted it as part of their misplaced culture of honour and integrity. The rising instances of legal challenges finally compelled the government to set up the armed forces tribunal which has just about gotten underway a year or so ago. But no one could have foreseen that the Chief of the Army Staff himself would have a grievance that required redressal. And why not?

Citizens
The Army is like any other institution and it is not fair to expect an individual there to make an individual sacrifice “for the organisation”. The government needed to address V.K. Singh’s complaint, not that of the COAS.
Yes, the system matters, but then violence was done to the system by two previous chiefs, and needed to be redressed in some way or the other. Perhaps the correction could have been made along with a Cabinet Committee on Security decision that there would be no change in the superannuation date of General Singh. There may have been a legal challenge to that, but then again there may not.
A positive consequence of the present seemingly sordid episode could be the shift of the Army from a culture of faux patriotism and honour, into one that emphasises duty and professionalism.
Such a culture is not based on expectations that the men in uniform will display a stiff upper lip at any slight or order, but will question them and insist on transparency. This can change the Indian Army from a colonial relict that it is, into a citizen army where everyone is equal, in the eyes of the Constitution and its law, and there are no super-patriots with some special claim on honour and integrity.
Like any citizen, army personnel would be seen as people who are doing their job, and who deserve to be treated with respect and fairness.
Mail Today January 18, 2012

Don't talk up Chinese enmity

At first sight, we should not expect much on the Sino-Indian front in 2012. This is, after all, the year in which the Chinese leadership will have its decennial turnover. The highly successful team of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao will give way to the untested and relatively unknown Xi Jinping and Le Keqiang. In the Hu-Wen period we  came tantalisingly close to a border settlement in the 2003-2005 period, only to suffer setbacks in 2008-2009. The future with Xi and Le is, therefore, an unknown quantity.
But can some qualitative shift occur in the coming months, which can set a favourable course for the future? Early next week, Chinese Special Representative, Dai Bingguo, will arrive in Delhi to hold the 15th round of talks on the border issues with his Indian counterpart, Shivshankar Menon. Both the officials are, of course, senior officials of their respective governments. Dai has many titles, but he is effectively the National Security Adviser to the Chinese President, and, Menon, of course, is the Indian  National Security Advisor.

Shift
Following Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s visit in 2003, the two countries were able to fast track their border negotiations by appointing Special Representatives to take the process forward. The immediate gain was the 2005 agreement on the “Political Parameters and Guiding Principles for the settlement of the India-China border question.” The idea was that the two countries would next decide on a framework agreement that would incorporate their mutual concessions, and thereafter an agreement would be signed to delineate the border.
That there would be give and take was clear. So was the idea that the agreement would require concessions on the part of both sides. However, the second phase has got stuck and the talks have been going round and round since 2009 when the two sides actually expanded the scope of the SR’s talks, signaling that they had come to a roadblock on their primary mandate to resolve the border dispute. It appeared that not only did the Chinese want India to concede its demands in the West i.e. Aksai Chin, but also concede their claims in the East—if not all of Arunachal Pradesh, its key town Tawang with its important monastery. A negotiation where what’s yours is negotiable, and what’s mine is mine, is not acceptable to India.




At first, it appeared that the Chinese shift was occasioned by the Indo-US nuclear deal—with the Chinese recognising that this represented a major geopolitical gambit on the part of the United States whose aim was to contain China. But over the years it would appear that the situation is more complicated. It is linked to internal debates with the Chinese system where the PLA calls the shots when it comes to dealing with the border dispute with India.
More important it is linked to China’s Tibet policy. The demonstrations that hit Tibet in 2008— not just the Tibet Autonomous Region, but parts of Tibet which have been incorporated into various Chinese provinces— clearly shook the Chinese. Despite a huge investment for the development of the region, the Tibetans seemed unreconciled to the Chinese domination. Since then, the situation has not changed and protests by Tibetans have become a regular feature. An outcome of Chinese defensiveness was that they began to describe Arunachal Pradesh as “southern Tibet.” 
Another element of the changed situation is the Chinese perception that the 2008 economic crisis has enhanced their standing on the world stage. The Chinese have continued to grow at a fast pace, even while the rest of the world, especially the US and Europe, have seen depressed growth, unemployment and economic turmoil.
There is a clearly growing asymmetry in Sino-Indian relations. This is a consequence of China’s massive economic growth and its huge defence expenditures. While the latter do not specifically target India—they are aimed at Taiwan and the US—they do constitute capabilities that the Indian military cannot ignore. With the systematic  growth of the transportation infrastructure in Tibet, especially the railroads, India needs to keep up its guard in view of the fact that the entire Sino-Indian border remains disputed.

False
Unfortunately, some forces in India seem determined to push Sino-Indian relations over the brink. This comes from inspired reports of Chinese intrusions into Indian territory. Now there are parts of the Line of Actual Control that both sides claim.
They also patrol to the extent they consider their border. There is nothing unusual about this and there are protocols that have been established to deal with the situation though it is rare that the two sides actually meet up face to face at a place both sides claim.
On Christmas eve last year, for example, a few regional TV channels in Arunachal Pradesh started flashing “news” that the Chinese had intruded into the Tawang sector and damaged a wall made by the Indian army on its side of the border. The “news” gained such currency that the commander of the 190 Mountain Brigade formally clarified that no such thing had happened and that the news footage being aired with the news item was “false.” A leading channel in New Delhi, too, had done a detailed story on the presence of Chinese troops in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir and the news gained such currency that the number two man in the PLA, General Ma Xiaotian, personally told Prime Minister Singh, during a visit to New Delhi last month, that there was not a single Chinese soldier in Pakistan, leave alone POK. What has probably happened is that Chinese construction troops in POK, much like our Border Roads Organisation, are being conflated with the PLA.
Indian officials say that the Chinese do not seem to take India too seriously. While India meticulously follows the dialogue schedules on bilateral and multilateral issues between the two countries, the Chinese are wont to skip meetings. They put greater store by leadership summits which, though, are going well.
Indeed, one of the outcomes of Dai’s visit next week could be the establishment of a mechanism for consultation and coordination as an additional measure to ensure what the two sides call “peace and tranquility” on the border. This had been proposed by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao in 2010 during his visit to Delhi and in the April meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Hu Jintao, the two leaders reached an agreement in principle to implement it.
This could well be Dai’s last meeting with his Indian counterpart. He started with Brajesh Mishra, went through J.N. (Mani) Dixit, M.K. Narayanan and will conclude with Menon.  The 70 year old Dai has publicly stated his intention of stepping down with Hu and Wen. While the Chinese do think in the long term, they are also human, and there are expectations that he would like to leave some legacy of the talks he has been holding since 2003.

Ghosts
In a recent speech at a Chinese Embassy function Menon noted that there was nothing pre-determined about the Sino-Indian rivalry. He said the two countries had erected a fairly robust framework for managing differences and building on commonalities. The issue he said was whether the two could manage their competition “within an agreed strategic framework” that allowed them to pursue their core interests.
History can never be a true guide to future foreign policy. Were it so,  Germany and France,or the US and Japan  could never have had good relations. Enmities would be permanent and the world would be a rather bleak place to live in.
 Sino-Indian relations have undergone such dramatic change, especially in the last two and a half decades, that dwelling on the past is to invoke ghosts which should now be exorcised. 
Mail Today January 12, 2012

My take on the Pakistani developments

Pakistan is not your average democracy. Its military wields uncommon power, though formally it claims that it functions under the constitution of Pakistan. There are times when this fiction comes apart, and this is one of them.
Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani may have erred in pulling up the Army brass — Army Chief Pervez Ashfaq Kayani and ISI Chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha — for bypassing the civilian government, and been a bit over the top in sacking his Defence Secretary Lt Gen Khalid Nayeem Lodhi for “gross misconduct”. But no one can question his authority in taking those steps.
The Pakistan Army’s reaction however, is something else. On Wednesday the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) directorate issued a press release observing that the PM’s actions  have “very serious ramifications with potentially grievous consequences for the country”. This is something that would never be countenanced by a truly democratic polity.
And this is just the beginning of the game. On Thursday Kayani has summoned a meeting of his Corps Commanders, who arguably have more authority than that possessed by the Pakistan government’s Cabinet.  On Wednesday we have also had the announcement that 111th  Brigade, based in Rawalpindi, the General Headquarters of the Pakistan Army, has a new commander, Brigadier Sarfaraz Ali. This could be  a coincidence, but so could the fact that the formation has led all the coups that have taken place in Pakistan.
Tensions have been rising between the People’s Party of Pakistan (PPP) government and the Army in the past couple of months. But the issue that has brought things to a head seems to be submissions made by Kayani and ISI chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha to the Supreme Court of Pakistan on the Memogate case. This refers to a memo given by  Pakistani Ambassador to the US Hussain Haqqani, to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff  through Pakistani-American Mansur Ijaz, requesting US support to cut the Pakistan Army to size in the wake of the Bin Laden killing. The request was curiously revealed to the media by Ijaz, and the fallout was that Haqqani lost his job and is currently hiding out in Gilani’s official residence in Islamabad.
Curiously, as the ISPR release notes, Kayani and Pasha had been submitting their papers to the Supreme Court through the Attorney General’s office since the last week of December when the Memogate panel of the court began its inquiries. Curiously, Gilani chose to use People’s Daily Online of China to declare that the responses of the two were “unconstitutional and illegal” and that, too, on January 9 when Kayani was on a visit to Beijing.  Clearly he wanted the Pakistan Army chief to get the message, or he was waving a red rag in front of the bull.

This is a confrontation that Gilani cannot win. Both he and his boss, President Asif Zardari are not the most popular men in Pakistan. At the same time, the Army cannot easily contemplate a coup. On paper, at least, Zardari is the Supreme Commander of the Army and any coup against him could lead to the charge of treason against its perpetrators.
The Army also has to be careful because in the past the Pakistani judiciary has rubber-stamped the illegal actions of the Army under the Doctrine of Necessity. But the feisty Chief Justice Ifthikar Muhammad Chaudhry has made it clear that those days are over. On Tuesday, while hearing some  matter, he once again  reiterated that the judiciary will not follow the doctrine of necessity and will uphold the constitution regardless of the consequences. Of course  coups being coups, if the situation is untenable and its corporate interests threatened, the Army will go ahead and do the needful.
The way out could be a replacement of Gilani by another PPP man, or the replacement of both the PM and President Zardari. The PPP may be strong, but neither of these two individuals count for much. Early elections, too, are an option, but the Pakistan Army would still have to worry about that because the result could see the return of Nawaz Sharif whose estrangement from the Army are arguably deeper because of his 1999 experience. And if Zardari and Gilani come back, the Army would have more egg on its face. 
Many observers place great faith in the Pakistani civil society emerging as a bulwark against the Army. That faith is probably misplaced since the size of that group is minuscule. When it comes to the Army, Pakistanis have been trained to salute and that is what is likely to happen in the event of a coup, if indeed it takes place. As of now, the aam Pakistani is unlikely to support his civilian government against the Army.

Mail Today January 12, 2012