Countering the internet's demons: Or, why OSINT is the need of the hour

The events in Assam and its internet fallout has the government in a tizzy.
The government got wise to the incendiary SMSes and postings in anonymous websites more than a month after they first appeared.
And now they are hitting out at all and sundry—banning websites, bludgeoning hapless cyber cafés and lambasting Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.
Intelligence agencies claim that they had warned the government of the development and it failed to understand the gravity of the situation. 

 

 

But these agencies, too, became aware of the development well after the worst damage had been done.
In one sense they can’t be blamed. The internet has created a whole new world, and they have yet to understand it.
Where conventionally intelligence has been based on human intelligence (Humint), technical intelligence (Techint), communications intelligence (Comint) and so on, the universal domain of the internet has created a demand for a new category of Open Source Intelligence (Osint).

Facts

Traditionally, open source intelligence is stuff you get from the radio, newspapers, journals, TV, internet.
In some ways, these sources have long been used to supplement intelligence reporting.
But the potent combination of the new communications technologies—the internet and mobile phone—have created a new genre of Osint requirements which you can ignore at your own peril.
Intelligence agencies deal with secret facts, and the process of their verification is very important for them.
A particular source, the standing of an established agent, or a technical process, are all part of this. However, what do you do when the weapon is rumour spread to a crowd through an SMS or an MMS?
Till now rumour has been a subset of real situations —about holy books being burnt, cattle or pig heads thrown at holy places and so on.
What is needed is an ability to take all facts—proven and unproven, factual or fictional and make some sense out of them, ideally before the fire is actually lit.
This is what Osint is able to do.
For a variety of reasons, intelligence agencies have had a bias against what they say is “unverified” facts that Osint provides and in India, as in other countries, Osint has been considered a “second class” source.
Though, mind you, there is no dearth of cynics who will say that many an IB or R&AW report lifts matter from newspapers and magazines and passes it off as intelligence.
Intelligence agencies however, do legitimately need to use Osint to context their reports which are based on secret sources.
But in today’s world where communications technologies can trigger off a mass exodus or create massive protest movements, Osint cannot be ignored.
This is especially so when the Islamists have proved themselves to be adept at using the new internet related technologies.
For example a great deal of information about Al Qaeda has come through the as-Sahab Institute’s postings on the internet, rather than through any secret source.
The as-Sahab has acted as a messaging as well as a production site that comes up with propaganda material for the outfit.
As is well known, the Al Qaeda and other jihadists have used the internet for the purpose of recruiting and in some instances to train their far flung recruits to function as autonomous units.
Since World War II the Central Monitoring Service of the All India Radio, based in Shimla, used to provide reports on radio broadcasts to the government.
Subsequently, some monitoring of TV broadcasts also began. In 2005, the CMS was merged into the National Technical Research Office.

Osint

This must have appeared to be a strange decision, considering that the CMS job was to monitor open radio broadcasts, while the NTRO was supposed to use cutting edge high-tech resources to ferret out secret information.
But the reason for this was mundane—the fledgling NTRO welcomed the CMS into its fold, because the latter brought along a “dowry” in the form of enormous tracts of land on which their monitoring sites were located.
Today, though Osint is part of NTRO, it is only a subsidiary discipline for them.
India, like many other countries, lacks a dedicated Osint organisation or centre.
The Assam fallout should be a wake up call for the government on the subject.
While we have organisations like the CERT-IN or the NTRO to take care of cyber-threats, we have no way of determining when and how internet and communication technologies are being used to incite people or to create a mass movement through propaganda.

Speed

Osint is not just the simple monitoring of the internet, airwaves or TV channels. It also involves deep and sophisticated searches and analyses of the entire internet for trending developments.
This is based on special software which may, for example, trawl the YouTube for particular kinds of messages, or warn against possible social disturbances by monitoring certain chatrooms and websites.
Not surprisingly, the leading companies in the field are in the US whose intelligence agencies have invested in startups like Visible Technologies which trawls millions of posts and conversations in blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon.
Another company Attensity aids the process of digesting large volumes of information and making sense of it.
Recorded Future not only looks at the blogs, YouTube and the like, but also tries to link individuals, groups, organisations with incidents and actions.
The great advantage of Osint is speed.
You do not have to worry about revealing or protecting sources or seeking hierarchical clearance for some bit of information.
It is the slow speed of the government—state and Union— response to the Assam events that allowed the crisis to mature.
The internet has given birth to a whole new world—it is time we understood how to live in it.
 Mail Today August 22, 2012

It is really a battle for the middle classes

The nervousness of established political parties over their prospects in the 2014 general elections is evident. They were manifest in the intemperate BJP response to Lal Kishen Advani's statement that a non-Congress, non-BJP prime minister 'heading a government supported by these two principal parties is however feasible'.
The Congress which is following the Mad magazine mascot Alfred E Neumann's motto 'What-Me worry?' in the face of alarming signs of electoral erosion, immediately pounced on the comment and declared that the BJP had conceded defeat in advance.
Advani's analysis was unexceptional. He said that the trends in the recent decades had indicated that it was unlikely for New Delhi to have a government minus the support of either the BJP or the Congress. In other words, he ruled out the chimerical Third Front. 

However, a Charan Singh, VP Singh, and Chandrashekhar, Deve Gowda or I K Gujral type government was feasible-the first two had been supported by the BJP and the latter three by the Congress.
But he noted, stability would come only with a government anchored by one of the two major parties. At present, however, the Congress was in a bad shape, and may just manage a two digit performance in 2014.
The 'principal beneficiary' of this trend, he observed was the BJP, 'notwithstanding its blundering in Karnataka'.
Anna Hazare and Ramdev may not be drawing the kinds of crowds that they had in the past, but they represent a deep frustration of the people, mainly of the middle and lower middle class, with their own condition.
The economic downturn has no doubt contributed to the dark mood in the country, but the issue of corruption is what obsesses them. The Congress party may stand up in the Lok Sabha and list the steps they are taking to get the black money stashed abroad back to the country, or outline the tough measures they have taken to curb corruption, but it does not quite wash.
The people want change and that should worry both parties, even though, the likelihood of a new political vehicle to carry their expectations is yet to emerge. Sensing this mood, the BJP and its mentor, the RSS, have been trying to latch on to the popular upsurge.
The RSS very publicly declared that it was backing Anna's protest last year. This year, though, they have stayed away. Former BJP president Rajnath Singh has openly spoken of the possibility of the party joining Ramdev's agitation. A measure of the extent to which the BJP seems to have lost its independent plot is evident in the fiasco of the manner in which it handled the presidential election.
They have clearly abandoned any effort to shape policy even when in Opposition. The negativist approach of the party is evident in its opportunist rejection of the Indo-US nuclear deal, FDI in retail and the GST, all of which the BJP had supported while heading the NDA government.
The BJP's cynical approach could yet cost it a lot because the electorate is not clear what the party really stands for. Is it the pragmatic, development-first approach of Narendra Modi, or does it fly the Hindutva flag of the RSS, or is it really the cynical, world weary party of its Delhi-based leaders who keep on shifting stands, depending on the time of the day?
In politics, sometimes, even one week is a long time. And certainly, the twenty months or so that are left before the next general elections in 2014, constitute an eon. It is in these months that the party must discover its true self if it is to be, as Advani claims, the principal beneficiary of the Congress party's misfortunes.
They would be short-sighted to underestimate the ruling Congress party's travails. Its biggest worry is that its "Great White Hope" Rahul Gandhi seems to have failed to set the Gomti on fire, and now, the party loyalists are mooting their brahma-astra-Priyanka Vadra.
Somehow these two young scions seem to have lost their charisma. But this is the party of governance, and while it may not have done anything worthwhile in the past two years, it still has time to make up.
They have taken everything that the Opposition and fate can hurl at them and still remain a functioning entity. Were the economy to pick up in the coming year, things would begin to look different.
All this brings us back to the incipient revolutions that are being dreamed off by Anna and Ramdev. There should be no doubt that they are essentially a middleclass phenomenon, indeed, a consequence of the economic growth of the past decade and a half.
Corruption for the middle class is not just a loss of something which they feel belongs to them, but also a manifestation of a sense of helplessness. That is, if you take a wider definition of corruption to include not just officials and politicians taking illegal gratification, but also the burden on the common folk through services which are not rendered, or for which they have to pay additional money to touts and fixers.
It also includes the wayward ways of government officials, especially the police, in dealing with ordinary complaints and issues. Many politicians think that this class does not matter. They are mistaken; the middle class may not have numbers in the country, but it is they who create the 'hawa' (the direction of the wind) on which elections are often won and lost. In great measure this voluble and opinionated class- from which the country's powerful media draws its personnel- shapes public opinion.
Unlike their counterparts in more advanced democracies, we as a people act on sentiment-this is what drives a Bollywood hit or a scrip in Dalal Street, and this is what often determines the outcome of an election.

Mail Today August 11, 2012

State police are the weak link in countering terrorism in the country

It is a measure of the distance we have traveled in these matters that the 'P' word was absent from most comments on the bomb blasts in Pune on Wednesday night.
There was a time when, almost, by reflex, every blast was attributed to Pakistan. It is sobering to acknowledge that most thinking people now accept that there is a home-grown element to the terror attacks, even if they are guided and controlled by shadowy leaders working out of Pakistan and the Persian Gulf.
As of now, details of the Pune attacks are sketchy. What we know is that there were four low intensity blasts in the crowded Jungli Maharaj Road commercial area known for its eating places and restaurants between 7.30 and 8.30pm; two other bombs were found and defused. The bombs were all in a radius of less than a kilometre. 

A single blast may have been passed off as an act of miscreants, but six of them, would suggest considerable planning and the coordinated involvement of several persons. That they were in a crowded market-place, makes it a terrorist act, plain and simple.
Reports say most of the CCTVs installed near the blast sites were not in working condition. This points to the utter carelessness of the authorities in not putting in place security protocols following the German Bakery blast in February 2010.
According to a Pune Municipal Corporation official, the authorities were to have installed CCTVs at 70 key locations, but the proposal remained on paper, because the PMC and the police wrangled over who would pay for their maintenance.
It is not clear yet as to why the bombs did not do more damage. Indeed, the people in the area of the blasts have been lucky to get away with their lives.
While the correct answer will only come after forensic tests, we can speculate that there was some defect in assembling the bomb. Reports suggest that the bombs were fabricated competently enough. It is possible that either the detonator was not powerful enough, or the ammonium nitrate was not of high quality or not properly mixed with the fuel oil.
Who could be the perpetrators of the attack? The final verdict can only be made when all the facts are in. But analysis based on past experience would suggest that they are most likely part of the same radicalised Muslim youth group which has been involved in blasts across the country going back to 2006.
For the sake of convenience, you can call him the Indian Mujahideen, though it is far from certain whether they operate as part of one coherent group or constitute a number of separate modules which are run by leaders operating from Pakistan.
The modus operandi-the Ammonium Nitrate-Fuel oil (Anfo) bombs, the use of bicycles suggest this, though this time, there was no taunting email. However, the new bicycles could provide a clue as to those responsible for the blasts.
There is, however, a more direct Pakistani connection as well. In his confessions, Daood Gilani aka David Coleman Headley has said that he had conducted surveillance, which probably included videographing, of the German Bakery, as well as the Chabad House in Pune.
The IM began its rampage in 2006 and its peak was 2008 when it conducted blasts in Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and New Delhi before their cells were exposed and a number of their members killed and captured.
There were no blasts in 2009 and then, in February 2010, the German Bakery blasts occurred. In July 2011, triple bomb blasts targeted the Zhaveri Bazaar in Mumbai killing 26.
And in September the Delhi High Court blasts took place. The roots of IM radicalism lie, in considerable measure, on our faults of commission.
The repeated riots, in which Muslims were killed in large numbers, in cities in Maharashtra and Gujarat are responsible for radicalising some young men of the community. The connections are complex- running back from the ghettoes of cities in western India to the hinterland in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
The foot soldiers are not your clichéd madarsa educated Muslims with a beard, but clean-shaven men who are more likely to be technicians, artisans, vocational students and the like.
Mansoor Asghar Peerbhoy, a Pune computer engineer, arrested for his role in the 2008 blasts, has told the police that places like Pune have been an important recruiting ground for the IM and that he was part of the IM cell that had been involved in the blasts.
Fishing in the troubled waters of Indian Muslims are Pakistani agents who have now got enough Indian foot soldiers to do the job in a manner that does not leave Pakistani finger prints.
An equally sinister link is with radical Arab preachers in the Gulf who are buying their way to heaven by promoting violence in India by funding the Islamist extremists. The two pronged strategy to deal with the situation requires, first, the sharp upgradation of the intelligence networks of our state police forces.
Sadly, this is easier said than done. Politicisation and factionalism, in particular of the Maharashtra police, make this a steeply uphill task.
The second requires social and political efforts to de-radicalise the Muslim youth who fall prey to the call of extremism. This, again, requires the kind of effort which the shoddy state governments are unable to provide.
The Union government can do so much with intelligence gathering and coordination, but unless the states kick in with a matching effort, we are doomed to suffer from recurring cycles of terrorist strikes. The police say they have more or less figured out the perpetrators of the High Court blasts, but they have no clue as yet as to who was responsible for last year's Zhaveri Bazaar blasts, or the German Bakery blast of the year before.
In short, there are modules of terrorists who remain free to strike again.

Mail Today August 3, 2012
Mail Today August 3, 2012

Once again comes the war on corruption, but hope has wilted

They're back. Anna Hazare and his Team have renewed their agitation against corruption.
It is clear that in round four, Team Anna has ratcheted up its rhetoric.
Tuesday's press conference included a direct attack on the new President, where Arvind Kejriwal, the brains behind the movement, declared 'Pranab Mukherjee is also among the 15 corrupt ministers. It's unfortunate he will become the President tomorrow.'
Newly-elected presidents have been unwelcome before, but never in such blunt terms.
But then, for the director of Team Anna the issue is not personal, it is part of the street theatre of the anti-corruption movement.
Though the protest and the accompanying fast-unto-death have been carefully timed to peak with the beginning of the monsoon session of parliament, the campaign is not likely to have the dramatic impact it had last year.
The people's appetites are jaded, or to put it another way, the hopes that the movement would actually have an impact on corruption have wilted. In the past year, we have seen that the Lokpal Bill has been put on a walkway to nowhere.
As for corruption, it continues to rule the land. It has been pointed out before that India suffers from the double whammy of big and small corruption. 

 

 

You have the mega-corrupt such as those who have allegedly taken hundreds of crores of rupees in the 2G scam, the National Rural Health Mission scam of UP, or the combined Commonwealth Games rip-offs.
The extent of corruption and the brazenness of those behind it is evident from a report that said that a Karnataka mining baron was willing to pay as much as Rs100 crore just to get bail.
And you have the smaller ones where the poorest of the poor are bilked for anything up from Rs10. An active vigilance department has revealed how, in Madhya Pradesh, corruption goes into the very vitals of the administrative system, from the minister to the IAS officers and down to the very peons and clerks of government offices.
An ongoing set of exposes in MAIL TODAY reveal how it affects everyone. The series has revealed the manner in which touts, hand-in-glove with the booking clerks, used sophisticated software to corner the railway bookings and compel tens of thousands of desperate travellers to shell out hundreds of rupees extra to get a rail ticket.
The middle class has tolerated touts with the excuse that they get things done. But the expose has shown how touts not only reach down to the poorest in the land, but also deprive them of the special services they require.
One report has revealed how touts provide economically weaker sections (EWS) certificates to anyone with money to spare.
Wednesday's report shows how, like bloodsuckers, touts make money off the sick and the poor who crowd around to government hospitals for treatment. So even the tattered safety net that the government promises to the poor does not, in fact, exist.
The same, of course, could be said of the medicines that did not reach the numerous sick because of the NRHM scam, or the thousands of tons of food that was siphoned off government godowns in UP. Corruption has created a toxic swamp in which the entire country wallows. Team Anna's targeting cannot be faulted.
Fish rots from the head, and that has been the case in India. With corrupt leaders, what else can you expect? You do not have to believe in the India Against Corruption dossier on 15 government ministers, including the PM and the new President, to believe that corruption begins at the top.
The dossier may have been intended for shock effect, but it is not entirely off the mark. Manmohan Singh may be as pure as driven snow, but many of his Cabinet, Sharad Pawar, Kamal Nath, Praful Patel, M K Alagiri, Farooq Abdullah, Vilasrao Deshmukh and His Excellency President Mukherjee have a jaded past and, in some cases, a present.
It is astonishing that there is no explanation offered or otherwise for the growth of the fortunes of our politicians, as revealed by that most minimalist of documents - the returns filed before the filing of nominations for the parliament or assembly seat.
If you want to fight corruption you must begin at the top. It is the politicians who have been primarily responsible for the corruption of India's political and administrative system, and it is they who will have to be cleansed first, before the rest of the system can be cleaned.
Yet the solutions that Team Anna speaks of are also difficult to swallow. Their version of the Lok Pal would end up creating a parallel government of official vigilantes. There has to be another way, and that is the crux of the matter.
The effort needs to begin with tackling the problem of election funding. With elections costing crores of rupees per constituency, there is a built-in imperative for the political class to accumulate money. If it were elections alone the problem could have been dealt with.
There is also the matter of greed. Politicians are today making money to fit out their family and extended family for generations. This is where an effective vigilance machinery, along with fast courts needs to get to work. A couple of top-level convictions made in quick time will certainly make a difference.
The bigger hurdle, however, is the Anna Hazare movement itself. While it has captured the people's angst over corruption in everyday life, it has not been able to come up with a credible solution. The belief that only a small group of virtuous people can steer the destinies of this huge nation on the issue of corruption, is inherently flawed.
And this basic flaw begets a large degree of suspicion over the remedies that Mr Hazare and his acolytes suggest.

Mail Today July 26, 2012

Now a matter of leadership

With Congress heir apparent Rahul Gandhi taking a tentative step forward, the contours of the future leadership contest in the country seem to be getting clearer. As of now, from the point of view of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi is the chosen one, barring of course, the somewhat unlikely proposition that he will stumble in the forthcoming assembly elections in his state.

 Style

Things are not going too well for the world these days. Europe is teetering on the brink and the prognosis for the US and China is marginally better. Within the country, the economy seems to be faltering, and now, to compound our problems, the monsoon has gone truant. There are deeper problems as well. There is a crisis of ungovernability which has led to a paralysis of decision-making, not just in the Centre, but the states as well.
There was a time when it was said that India's animal spirits were sufficient to see the economy through the worst the government could do by way of incompetence and interference. Today that is no longer true. The country needs the agency of good men and sound decisions to pull it out of the multiple ruts it seems to be stuck in.
In essence, having exhausted whatever Lady Luck could give us, we now need leaders who take decisions, rather than adopt a policy of masterly inactivity, or triangulation between the voter and the compulsions of coalitions. The latter has led to a stasis in which this country has been stuck for the past three years, and will remain so in the coming period. In such matters, it is hard to assess one of our two candidates. Rahul Gandhi has never held an executive office and even his record as a party leader is eccentric and individualistic, characterised by guerilla action rather than a sustained campaign seeking victory.
On the other hand, notwithstanding what his critics say, Narendra Modi has through his leadership created an ambience which favours economic growth in his state. You can quibble with the metrics, but Modi's achievement is testified to by the generally positive response of India Inc to his state.
Even his best friends will admit that Modi has done this through an authoritarian 'take no prisoners' approach which brooks no opposition. His preemptory dealings in relation to his erstwhile RSS comrade Sanjay Joshi is a pointer to his style. There is, of course, that other matter- the handling of the Muslim massacres of 2002-which raises an important question mark on the BJP's relationship with its NDA allies, as well as the larger national electorate in states where Muslims are in electorally significant numbers.

 Vajpayee

In the coming five years, the world economy is likely to remain weak. In the 2004- 2008 period, the Indian economy coasted to 9 per cent growth along with a boom in the world economy. Government milked growth for whatever it was worth, but did not do anything unusual to promote it. In other words, growth happened, rather than was made to happen. The coming years will be different. The hard decisions-whether on retrograde labour laws, or on land acquisition and foreign investment will have to be taken. Governments will also have to bite the bullet on subsidies, particularly in the area of power where decrepit state electricity boards have left most of the country with a deficit which can only grow.
You may wonder where such a leader can come from. But in this century itself we had Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Whether it was nuclear weapons policy, disinvestment, removing administered pricing in fuel, highway development, the government policy made a difference. More instructive, perhaps, are Vajpayee's dealings with Pakistan and China.
His visits to Pakistan in 1999 and 2004 altered the dynamics of the India-Pakistan relationship. The Lahore Agreement of 1999 and the January 6, 2004 agreement on resuming dialogue with Pakistan broke the negative mindset that had taken hold in New Delhi. Instead of encouraging a mindless titfor- tat response to Pakistan's support for terrorism in India, Vajpayee responded with a creative and effective diplomatic offensive which has since unbalanced the hardliners in Pakistan.
In the case of China, too, Vajpayee's 2003 visit was a path-breaking event. It convinced the Chinese that they were dealing with a confident and sure-footed Indian leadership and that it was possible to do business, both political and economic with the country. The result was a far-reaching agreement on taking the long-running official- level talks to a political plane and an agreement which could have, had circumstances permitted in India, actually led to a border settlement by 2005 or 2006. 

Ability

These initiatives were not accidental or the products of some immediate circumstances. They were an outcome of the deep beliefs and long-standing ideas of Vajpayee. And in the case of both countries, they were a culmination of a journey that he had set off on in 1979 as the external affairs minister of the Janata government. He initiated the policy of normalising ties with Pakistan and China-the former having been frozen since the 1971 Bangladesh War, and the latter since the 1962 border conflict. And it was he as Prime Minister who persisted with Islamabad from Lahore, to Kargil and Agra.
Vajpayee, knew, too, that he had a unique opportunity here because he was the hardliner who had berated Nehru for his 'weak' China policy and as a leader of the Jana Sangh, been traditionally hostile to Pakistan. What was remarkable was his ability to turn this into a positive advantage and a win-win solution for all three countries.
Whether it is Modi or Rahul, or some other set of persons who will lead the country after 2014 only time will tell. But there can be little doubt about the quality he or she needs. They must be akin to those that Vajpayee has possessed. Political skills accompanied by deep convictions, and an ability to keep an eye on the target at all times.
Mail Today July 21, 2012

With Beijing on our minds

On Tuesday night, Singapore prime minister Lee Hsien Loong is expected to arrive in New Delhi on a state visit.
This is his second in a decade, and marks the close attention that Singapore pays to its relations with India.
While the formal agenda of his visit may cover issues like education and economic relations, you can be sure that the political discussions between him and his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh will be around China. 


Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong who visited New Delhi this week. 
 
Even as the United States promises a pivot to Asia, countries like Singapore, long friendly with Washington, worry about the increasing assertiveness of Beijing, a concern that is shared in increasing measure by New Delhi and is the key feature of the Asean Regional Forum ministerial meeting taking place in Phnom Penh, beginning Wednesday.
Standing at the proverbial crossroads of Asia, this tiny city-state can give any great power a lesson or two in geopolitics and, of course, civic administration. India may talk about its Look East policy and then get distracted by its numerous problems back home, but Singapore is deeply focused on India's role in Southeast Asia and assiduously pursues its goal. 


Of all the ASEAN nations, Singapore probably has the best relations with Beijing. One reason, perhaps, is that unlike Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines and Brunei, it does not have a maritime dispute with China.
Another is ethnicity- 95 per cent of the residents of the city-state are of Chinese origin. But the more important reason is Singapore's self-image as a nation-state.
Small it may be, but it has a clear-headed idea of its national interest, and it pursues it with great skill and determination.
Of all the ASEAN nations, Singapore also has the best relations with India, but these are not a matter of ethnicity, but its geopolitical world view. India's rediscovery of Southeast Asia began with Narasimha Rao's Look East policy which was quickly embraced by Singapore, whose prime minister Goh Chok Tong was invited to be the chief guest at the Republic Day parade in New Delhi in 1994, the year in which the policy was initiated.
From as far back as the early 1980s Singapore had seen that India and China will be the Asian giants who it will have to get along with and it has since then worked assiduously to woo both. It has continued to do so as both countries have developed economic profiles that spill outside their natural boundaries and collide in Southeast Asia.
That kind of a collision, Singapore can live with, what it worries about is a military standoff which would be a disaster for everyone, especially the city state which is dependent on open trade and financial flows for its First World like prosperity. 


Since then, the city state has sought to build up connections with India in trade and business ties, as well as through strategic investments. It is not surprising that Singapore was the first country with which India signed the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement in 2005.
Equally importantly, it has sought to develop cultural and educational ties by promoting projects like the Nalanda University in Bihar. Understanding Both Singapore and the 17-member ASEAN work on two tracks-one is to encourage India to play a greater role in the affairs of the Southeast Asian region and institutions like the East Asia Summit and the ASEAN.
The other is to hope that Indian economic and military might will be able to offset, at least in some measure, the compelling power of Beijing. Singapore also works along an additional third track-promoting understanding between India and China.
This role is not insignificant since there is very little civil society interaction between New Delhi and Beijing. The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), The National University of Singapore (NUS), Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and Nanyang Technological University have formed the Singapore Consortium for Indo-China dialogue.
Interestingly, two of the active academics anchoring the consortium are India-born scholars of classical China- Prasenjit Duara, Director of Humanities and Social Sciences Research at NUS and Tansen Sen Director of the Nalanda-Siriwijaya Centre at ISEAS. 


An example of their effort has been a series of symposiums that have brought media personnel of India and China together. At a conference last week titled "Image and Perceptions: The Role of the Media in India-China relations", two basic questions were posed: Is the media responsible for creating recent misperceptions between India and China and second, whether journalists in the two countries were trained and knowledgeable enough to cover each other.
Journalists from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Singapore and India participated in the discussions and, at the minimum, gained some understanding of the way the media functions in the two countries. Institutions But beyond perceptions, New Delhi and Singapore need to evolve a common means of dealing with Beijing.
China has, in the past, tried to soothe ASEAN fears with regard to its conduct, in recent years it has been more belligerent. The instance of warning India off a Vietnamese oil concession is only one of many incidents that have sent shivers down the ASEAN spine. Neither New Delhi, nor Washington, Tokyo and the ASEAN capitals have a good idea of how Beijing can be tackled. As of now the bets are on institutional frameworks like the ASEAN and the East Asia Summit. 


The 19th ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) ministers' meeting and the 2nd East Asia Summit foreign ministers meeting is taking place in Cambodia. The ARF established in 1994, is the key forum for a security dialogue in Asia involving the ASEAN, as well as China, India, EU, Japan, Russia and the US. No doubt some of these issues will form part of the discussions between India and Singapore on Wednesday.
Hopefully with a bit of Singaporean geopolitics and some growing Indian determination, Beijing can be nudged to play by the rules of international conduct to its own benefit, and that of the region.
Mail Today July 11, 2012