China-UK: A strategic friendship

In the coming days or weeks, American warships plan to conduct what is now called FONOP (freedom of navigation operations) in the South China Sea. This will involve sailing closer than 12 nautical miles to the artificial  islands created by China and could lead to a direct clash between the US and China with potentially portentous consequences.

In such a confrontation, governments will be compelled to take sides. It remains to be seen as to just how the UK, one of US’s closest allies will react. In the old days, you could expect London to line up with Washington, but there are changes blowing in the wind.

These are best brought out by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Britain and his grand reception there. While at one level this was  yet another manifestation  China’s economic power, it was also, at the political level, a move to break out of a subtle US-led containment strategy. Chinese media exulted over the “redder than red carpet” welcome and analysts spoke of the strategic shift in British attitudes towards China as a result of the first visit in a decade by a Chinese president.  

British Prime Minister David Cameron was criticized by many in Britain for kowtowing to Beijing. His former strategy adviser Steve Hilton who teaches in Stanford University declared the visit to be a  “national humiliation” and excoriated UK for not “standing up” to China. Sinologist Francesco Sisci has pointed out, studying the Chinese version of the UK-China joint statement, that this is the first time China has committed itself to a “complete and global strategic partnership for the 21^st century.” More significantly, the Chinese have got a commitment from the UK to “recognize the importance each side attaches to its own political system.”

The first order of business for UK is business, and, as Chancellor George Osborne noted, it is “China’s best partner in the West”. The UK, it may be recalled, broke ranks with the US and became the first western country to become a member of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Currently, UK is China’s second largest trading partner among EU countries, while China is the UK’s main investment destination in Asia.

During the visit deals worth more than $60 billion  were signed and as Osborne and Cameron emphasized, this was just the beginning. Among the important signs of the future were Chinese commitments to take a one-third stake in  a $28 billion nuclear power plant in UK and participate in other nuclear power projects as well. BP signed a deal to supply a Chinese company 1 million tonnes of LNG for the next 20 years in a deal worth $ 10 billion. Coinciding with the visit was the issuance of an offshore renminbi note worth $800 million  in London by the Chinese Central Bank. This is the first time such a note has been issued outside China and it is aimed at taking advantage of London’s status as a global financial centre to make the yuan an international currency. Separately, China announced a direct flight between Manchester and Beijing, as well as a $ 130 million commitment to a China cluster in a business development area of the city.

Xi’s visit was not about trade and investment only. It has an important strategic component viz. shaping China as a truly global power. Recall that the end station of both the land and maritime components of the Belt Road Initiative is Europe. As China shifts its economy towards high end manufacturing and services, it is targeting the European market where its two largest partners are Germany and UK.

 There is another angle to the UK ties.  Xi is hoping is that as China’s relations with the US go north, the UK, an old mentor of the US could play the role as a bridge to what remains the world’s foremost economic and military power. For UK, the China gambit is important as well. In recent times it has been buffeted by the Scots threatening to leave the union, the pressures from within the Conservative Party for a Brexit or exit from the European Union, an action that will inevitably lead to many banks and fund managers decamping to the Eurozone. Incidentally during the visit, Xi went out of his way to urge Britain  to remain in the EU.

Inevitably, there will be comparisons between Xi’s visit and the forthcoming visit of Prime Minister Modi to UK. Not being head of state, Modi will not be accorded the glitter of a royal welcome, but he will make it up with a massive rally of overseas Indians at the Wembley Stadium. While that is good for the ego of the diaspora and the PM, it will not have lasting consequences. India cannot match China in terms of economic deals; we have the potential of becoming an economic player, but we are not one as yet. For the present, we will have to be satisfied with patting ourselves on the back rather than have someone kowtowing to us. As for South China Sea, having steered clear from America’s Asian pivot, the UK can remain a bystander, while India has already made moved closer to the US a position which could bring us into a confrontation with China. 

Mid Day October 27, 2015

What saves India from suicide attacks

Earlier this month, Radio Free Asia revealed that nearly 80 people were killed by Uighur separatists in a September attack in a coalmine in the Xinjiang province of China.Beijing has yet to officially acknowledge the attack, which was carried out by terrorists armed with knives. 

There have been similar attacks linked to Uighurs in recent years. On June 18, people had died in a similar attack with knives and bombs at a traffic checkpoint in the city of Kashgar. In March 2014, an attack at the railway station of Kunming left 29 people and 4 attackers dead. 

Knife attacks 

In recent months, the trend has manifested itself in similar Palestinian attacks on Israelis. 

Given the strict policing, in China and Israel, the Uighurs and Palestinians have no access to either bomb-making material or guns, and so the use of primitive weapons like knives has become the weapon of choice. 

The knife may be primitive, but it is deadly. However, its use does require a certain nerve, physical strength and training on the part of the attacker. In comparison, a suicide bomber merely has to approach the target and pull a trigger to cause mayhem. 

There have been instances of suicide squads and attacks through history in almost all cultures in the military sphere. But something as primal as a knife has emerged as a new terrorist tactic which has rapidly spread in today’s wired world, just as suicide bombing did in the 1980s. 

It became a tactic of choice in Lebanon, compelling the US to pull out from Lebanon. In a parallel, the LTTE perfected the cult of suicide as it became prominent in the Sri Lankan civil war. Among the prominent targets of the LTTE were former prime minister of India Rajiv Gandhi and a slew of top Sri Lankan politicians, including president R Premadasa. 

The key role in suicide attacks is played by motivators - mainly seasoned political operatives and in the case of Muslims, mullahs who use precepts of Islam to persuade young and impressionable people to go through the horror of a suicide attack. They create an ethos where the attacker is hailed as a martyr and his/her family is raised in status among its peers. 

Acts of terror 

Attacks on non-combatants, regardless of motive, are acts of terrorism and deserve the highest condemnation. But attacks that target troops and police personnel of countries who are involved in military operations in the attackers’ country or region are different. 

There is a species of analysis which argues that there can be no ‘root cause’ of terrorism. Regardless of what a perpetrator does, retaliation using terrorist tactics is condemnable. 

This does not quite work in the real world, where unresolved grievances are often the template on which terrorist attacks are built. As a first step towards countering terrorism, an effort must be made to understand this and tackle grievances relating to political and human rights in places like Xinjiang, Palestine, Chechnya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Kashmir. 

In many cases, the issue is related to fears of a minority community that it will be swamped by the majority. Beliefs, often in economically-backward regions, that modernisation itself is an existential threat, cannot be tackled through military campaigns. 

What the knifing campaign brings out is that harsh counter-terrorist tactics and total and intrusive surveillance cannot by themselves put an end to terrorist attacks. 

Israel’s dilemma is the most manifest on this score. Relentless ferocity against Palestinian violence has not brought Israel the peace it has been looking for and is unlikely to do so. 

In contrast, look at India. Some Muslims have a sense of deep grievance against the state on account of communal violence, in Jammu & Kashmir, many are motivated by separatism. Yet, India has not seen the kind of suicide bombing and desperate knife attacks that have motivated Muslim radicals elsewhere. 

Terrorist violence that has rocked the country has often been motivated, directed and perpetrated by Pakistan. In any case, it peaked in 2008 and for the present it is at a low ebb, whether in Jammu & Kashmir, or elsewhere. 

Alienation 

The reason is that Indian Muslims have a strong sense of Indian identity. In both their grievances and aspirations they think like their fellow Indian citizens, rather through any religious or sectarian prism. 

That critical point of alienation which separates them from the mainstream and persuades them to wield a knife or a bomb has not been reached. At least, not as of now. 

Mail Today October 25, 2015

All's fair in love and geopolitics

The report that the US was contemplating a nuclear deal with Pakistan, similar to the one it has with India, is yet another confirmation of the salience of geopolitics in international relations.

America’s relations with Pakistan have had their decadal ups and downs. Not surprisingly, these have often mirrored the geopolitical interests of Washington. In the 1950s, it was the contest with the Soviet Union, and so Pakistan, located strategically in what was called the “northern tier”, was privileged over the much larger India, which wanted to avoid getting entangled in superpower competition.

Of course, as is well known, Pakistan was not motivated by any anti-communist ideology, but its own contest with India. This was evident as early as 1962, when it befriended communist China, because it offered a more consistent anti-Indian stage.

After a hiatus, in which the US was preoccupied by the Vietnam war, Pakistan’s importance was recognised by Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon as a key to their “China pivot” aimed at outflanking the Soviets. The monstrous price for this was the support that the Kissinger-Nixon duo gave to Islamabad in prosecuting its genocidal war against the liberation movement in Bangladesh.

A decade later came the final contest with the Soviet Union and this time Pakistan was not wanting. It provided Washington the platform needed to bleed the Soviets, never mind the price for that — the curse of jihadism, with which we are still grappling. The bonus for Islamabad was that Washington turned a Nelson’s eye on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme.

Roughly, a decade later, the Americans were back, this time to fight the jihadists their earlier intervention had bred. The price this time has been in dollars — the $31 billion that has come by way of Islamabad as military and economic aid between 2002-2015 — and in the blood and treasure that the US has expended in Afghanistan, in considerable measure because of Pakistani duplicity.

So, what motivates the US this time to offer Islamabad the hand of friendship ? No doubt, geopolitical considerations relating to jihadism and Afghanistan are important elements. But, the emerging Sino-Pak alliance is an added factor. Inter-mixed are legacy concerns of the Obama administration which has ambitiously articulated a vision of a nuclear weapons free world.

From the time of the Indo-US nuclear deal, Pakistan has sought a similar arrangement for itself. It is using its time tested tactic of holding a gun to its own. head to achieve its goal. First, it has blocked all efforts to finalise the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT). Second, it sharply ramped up its production of nuclear weapons, abandoning all pretenses of maintaining a “credible minimum deterrence” and moving to what it calls “full spectrum” deterrence.

However, given Islamabad’s terrible proliferation record, most experts initially laughed off the possibility. At the time, many of us argued that the Indo-US nuclear deal arose out of the desire of the US to build closer, strategic ties with India as a means of offsetting China’s rise. Now, it would appear that the American motives are more complex.

Islamabad has been insistently pushing for a nuclear deal, most recently in the seventh round of the US-Pakistan Security, Strategic Stability, and Nonproliferation (SSS&NP) working group in June. The press release, following the talks held under the auspices of the US-Pakistan strategic dialogue, says it all, “The US delegation welcomed Pakistan’s efforts to harmonise its strategic trade controls with those of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and other multilateral export control regimes. Both sides emphasised the desirability of continued outreach to integrate Pakistan into the international nonproliferation regime. Pakistan stressed the need for access to peaceful nuclear technology as a socio-economic imperative.”

A Pakistani nuclear deal would suggest that the US is determined, as it has always been to maintain good ties with both India and Pakistan. Those in India, who expected that Washington’s unhappiness with Islamabad would result in undivided attention to New Delhi, will be disappointed. But, the US is following the logic of its geopolitical interests.

So, sooner, rather than later, Pakistan will get what it wants. India’s best option is to let things ride. Opposing the deal, for the sake of opposing it, is a fool’s errand not unlike the hysteria that India unleashed when the US decided to supply F-16s to Pakistan in 1981-82.

What we need to do is to learn yet another lesson on the relentlessness with which big powers pursue their interests, and move ahead on the project that will give us geopolitical heft in Asia: The economic transformation that will enable us to straddle the region from the Middle East to South-East Asia.

Mid Day October 13, 2015

The report that the US was contemplating a nuclear deal with Pakistan, similar to the one it has with India, is yet another confirmation of the salience of geopolitics in international relations. - See more at: http://www.mid-day.com/articles/alls-fair-in-love-and-geopolitics/16603160#sthash.OxkAXY2j.dpuf

Make in India gets new wings

The government’s decision to insist that the Indian Air Force induct a large number of Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) fighters is the kind of shock treatment that was needed to push the ‘Make in India’ project. A news report says that the government has rejected the IAF’s demand for 44 more Rafale aircraft, in addition to the deal for 36 announced by the government earlier this year. Instead, the IAF has been told that the kind of numbers it wanted could only be met by inducting the LCA. 

The IAF has itself to blame for its predicament. The medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) was originally intended to be a stop-gap measure to enable the LCA project to be completed. However, the IAF rigged the competition by including the heavier, more` capable two-engine fighters and knocking out the best option, the Swedish Gripen. 

As a result, a competition for a $8 billion stop-gap fighter morphed into a huge buy involving 126 Rafales which would have cost the nation anywhere between $25-30 billion. 

Requirements 

Critics cite a C&AG report of May 2015 claiming that the aircraft had 53 shortcomings in respect of the IAF’s requirements such as an integral self-protection jammer and a radar warning receiver. They also noted that the aircraft weighed more than it should and had a lower internal fuel capacity. 

But K Tamilmani, the DRDO’s aerospace chief, has, more recently, said that the modified version of the LCA addressed most of the air force’s concerns relating to electronic warfare systems, flight computer, radar and maintenance problems. 

In pushing the LCA in the IAF’s face, the government has dealt with one of the two big problems faced by the project - the IAF's refusal to take ownership of the LCA. 

In contrast, the Indian Navy has ‘owned’ the LCA-Navy project and has worked with the DRDO to tweak the aircraft to meet its requirements.

Some of these modifications — a stronger undercarriage and Levcons to provide it greater agility — will figure in the aircraft that will now be made for the IAF. It needs to be noted that the LCA, which will be used for close air support or countercounter air missions, will not need the kind of sophisticated electronics that an aircraft designed to operate deep in enemy territory needs. 

Third party assessments are that the LCA is a capable fighter, better than its counterparts like the Sino-Pak JF-17. Its use of composites which cover 90 per cent of its surface provides it natural stealth. Its design makes it highly stable and easy to fly, a fact attested to by Ruag specialists who wanted to market a tandem-seat version as a lead-in fighter trainer (LIFT). 

Manufacturing 

But the government still needs to deal with the second big problem - getting the state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) to deal with the project with the seriousness it deserves. 

As the C&AG report noted, the manufacturing facilities at HAL currently cater to the production of only four aircraft per year, as against the eight needed, because of delays in procuring plant and machinery, tools and the construction of production hangars. 

Likewise, repair and overhaul (ROH) facility for LCA, as specified in the ASR, has not been fully created. HAL, which makes a great deal of money through licence-producing aircraft like the Su- 30MKI, for which it charges the government Rs 100 crore more than the cost for an off-the-shelf item from Russia, couldn’t be bothered with the need to encourage an Indian project. 

Indeed, some years back, the Swiss-German giant Ruag wrote to HAL offering its expertise in setting up assembly lines to manufacture the LCA and offering an industrial partnership to sell the aircraft abroad. But HAL did not even have the courtesy to reply. 

This would be a good time for the government to look into the IAF’s claim that it needs at least 45 squadrons to take on the ‘two-front collusive threat’ from Pakistan and China. As of now, says the IAF, it only has 35 active fighter squadrons, and even this could go down to 32. 

There are two issues here - the nature of war of the future. Given the fact that India, Pakistan and China are nuclear-armed states, the chances of any kind of an all-out war are low. At worst, we may see localised clashes such as the Kargil mini-war. 

Capabilities 

But this is not something which the IAF can decide, it requires the government to make an overall strategy assessment and then pinning down the kind of capabilities India’s armed forces need. 

This will enable a planned acquisition of capabilities, instead of the present chaos which has led to the fiasco of the Rafale buy and the decision to halve the size of the mountain strike corps. 

Mail Today October 12, 2015

Giants of Asia in Silicon Valley

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping have just made back to back visits to the United States. In keeping with the times both began their tours from that Mecca of our age —Silicon Valley. Thereafter their paths diverged because Xi was on his first state visit to Washington DC, whereas Modi, on the annual pilgrimage the Indian PM makes on the occasion of the UN General Assembly, had a brief meeting with Obama in New York City.

 

PM Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping both are visiting the US at a time when they have important political preoccupations back home. - See more at: http://www.mid-day.com/articles/giants-of-asia-in-silicon-valley/16568194#sthash.Tdn8qdFj.dpuf

PM Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping both are visiting the US at a time when they have important political preoccupations back home. - See more at: http://www.mid-day.com/articles/giants-of-asia-in-silicon-valley/16568194#sthash.Tdn8qdFj.dpuf

Both were competing with yet another international star for the attention of the American media—Pope Francis. But for both Xi and Modi, the real target was not the US but the audience back home.

 The reason is that the other thing that unites the two Asian giants is that both are visiting the US at a time when they have important political preoccupations back home. It is not just the Bihar election that demands Modi’s attention in India, it is the failure of his government to take concrete steps to make India a more business-friendly destination. True, the Indian economy is one of the few in the world that is growing and that FDI to India has gone up in the past year. But it is also a fact that a slew of measures to make high economic growth sustainable remain to be taken. The government has abandoned plans to pass a bill to ease land acquisition, a Goods and Service Tax (GST) is yet to be implemented, statutes to end retrospective taxation and ease labour laws is yet to reach Parliament.

As for Xi, the recent stock market crash and the bungled response of the government has taken away some sheen from China’s economic growth story. Meanwhile he is finding it difficult to push the reform of state owned enterprises (SOE), the key to rebalancing the Chinese economy. A proposal to reform the SOEs was unveiled on the eve of the Xi visit but they have proved to be a damp squib. A proposal for drastic reforms of the Chinese military was expected to be unveiled on September 10, but that, too, has not happened.

The economic troubles could well lead to the Communist party leadership taking recourse to nationalist displays, as manifested by the huge military parade to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Japan in World War II. This was clearly intended to burnish Xi’s aura. In the US, Xi signed an important agreement with the US committing both sides not to undertake cyber espionage. In the context of the forthcoming Paris Conference on Climate Change, President Obama gained an important commitment from Xi on China’s commitment to take drastic measures to limit emissions.

This said, actually even host America is in a somewhat distracted state. President Obama is lame duck and the 2016 Presidential election campaign has more or less begun. The state of American politics is parlous, with outliers like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders leading the Republican and Democratic fields respectively. The anti-establishment mood is so strong in the country that it has led to the resignation of US House Speaker John Boehner who was fed up by the actions of the hardliners in his party who are infuriated over their inability to push their anti-Obama agenda.

In all fairness, it is early days for Modi, he has just about finished the first year of government and all said and done, India’s economy still remains on the growth track. The Prime Minister remains personally popular and his party is expected to win the Bihar state assembly elections scheduled for next month. In contrast the Opposition remains divided and uncertain and its biggest party, the Congress, remains directionless.

But even so, there is need for Modi to understand that grand-standing in the Silicon Valley and supping with American CEOs will not bring India American investment. That will only happen when things happen on the ground and India moves up in the list of ease of doing business. That, in turn, is a task that cannot be achieved by Modi and his PMO alone, he needs to galvanise his government and its ministers who as of now are a bunch of faceless men and women who even the average newspaper reading person will not be able to mostly recognise.

All said, the Modi government needs to move from its penchant for event management and exhortation, to delivering on what brought them to power in the first place — the promise of a economic transformation of the country.

Mid Day Septermber 29 2015

NDA II prefers controlling people's lives to changing things for the better

The NDA II government seems to be displaying a controlling streak rather early in its tenure. 

Across the land, the word ‘ban’ seems to have become the leitmotif of its governance style and its personnel seem determined to tell the citizen what he must eat and when, what he can watch, hear or study - or to get established institutions working on their guidance.

Instead of getting on with the job it was elected for - transformational economic change - the government seems more obsessed with seeking to manage, guide and, in the ultimate analysis, control the way people live, think and express their views.

The problem is that the Modi government has not done its bit to restructure the economy to promote growth, so they are looking for cheap victories by forcing the central bank to lower interest rates

This tendency has many manifestations. 

It is visible in a sense in the way the Ministry of Finance is seeking to control the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). 

Economy 

The Monetary Policy Committee which the finance ministry is proposing is the instrument through which New Delhi would have a controlling majority in deciding issues like interest rates.

Across the world, independent monetary policy decision-making is hard for governments to accept, given their electoral compulsions. Yet, most advanced countries bite the bullet on that score because stable and sustained economic growth requires a steady and impartial hand at the monetary tiller.

The problem is that the Modi government has not done its bit to reform and restructure the economy to promote growth, so it is looking for cheap victories by forcing the central bank to lower interest rates as a means of giving a spurt to economic growth.

Such a process could hurt the longer-term prospects of the economy, but the governments in democratic countries usually look at the world in five-year cycles. 

Another instance of this tendency is the sedition order issued by the Maharashtra government.

This calls on the police to keep in mind that the sedition clause in the Indian Penal Code (IPC) can be invoked against those who, using either spoken or written words, display “contempt” and “dissatisfaction”, thereby provoking violence against the central or state governments, including public representatives like ministers, zila parishad chairmen, mayors or MLAs. 

Sedition is a very serious charge and in democracies it relates to the ‘state’ or ‘nation’ and not ‘governments’. 

Attacking a chief minister or minister can hardly be termed sedition, whereas seeking to overthrow the government system - as Maoists or jihadists seek to do - certainly can. 

What is embarrassing is the role of the government, formed of a party who consider themselves great nationalists.

It is a shame that a duly-constituted government in a state of India in 2015, is seeking to hide behind a statute where words like ‘disaffection’, and ‘sedition’ all come from an entirely different context of the mechanisms of colonial control of the people of India. 

The IPC was part of a series of measures that the British colonial government instituted in 1860 to control India after they had brutally crushed the Great Rebellion of 1857. 

Encryption policy 

A third instance of the domineering tendency of the Modi government has been the now-withdrawn encryption policy. 

The draft guidelines proposed would have had people keeping plain-text versions of their WhatsApp, Facebook, and Google messages for 90 days and make them available to the security agencies. 

The timing of the leak, on the eve of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the United States where he was scheduled to meet the Silicon Valley grandees like Mark Zuckerberg and other top executives, cannot but have been embarrassing. 

So it is not surprising that the information and technology ministry claims that the fault lay in the poor drafting of the guidelines rather than any intrinsic desire to restrict freedoms. 

The timing of the leak about the now-withdrawn encryption policy came on the eve of Narendra Modi's trip to Silicon Valley where he met Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

National security 

Tussles relating to the making of monetary policy are not unusual in other parts of the world. 

But the other two issues are uniquely Indian and contemporary. They represent the salience of national security bureaucracies in the everyday life of the country. 

This is manifested separately by the tendency to conflate the threat of terrorism in the country, despite the fact that there has been no serious terror incident in the country since the Mumbai attack of 2008. 

Terrorism remains a challenge and can lead to a tragic loss of life and generate fear, but by itself terrorism is hardly an existential threat of any kind to the country. 

Despite this you hear a policy narrative that seeks to show that terrorism is the biggest threat that this country faces.

For that we now have a tough government which will not brook sedition, keep a determined watch on the enemies of the state and give short shrift to Pakistan.

The aim is to give the government a nationalist sheen. 

By punching at shadows, it hopes to keep the country enthralled with its prowess, while the real problems and threats continue to grow. 

Mail Today September 27 2015