Out to isolate Pakistan on the issue of terrorism, India finds itself
isolated in the bigger game reshaping the geopolitical map of the
world. China’s ‘One Belt One Road’ scheme will have momentous
consequences, yet New Delhi has refused to even engage China on the
issue by staying out of the Belt and Road Forum that took place in
Beijing on Sunday and Monday.
The Chinese work on long-range
plans; many of their achievements of today are a result of the effort
that has gone into them in the past thirty years. Take Shenzen, the
greenfield city that today powers China’s economy. It began as a rural
backwater opposite Hong Kong on the mainland 40 years ago. Or, the six
Chinese high tech zones – which started with a dozen or so
establishments in the 1990s and today typically feature 30-40,000
businesses, including the leading companies of the world.
Why is China Seeking an Economic Embrace?
What does this have to do with OBOR? Everything. Having
achieved the status of the world’s largest manufacturer and exporter,
China is now in the process of transforming itself once again. The
benchmarks are 2021, the centenary of the founding of the ruling
Communist Party of China, and 2049, which will mark hundred years of the
People’s Republic of China. The first involves the doubling of the GDP
as of 2010, and making China a “moderately prosperous society”, and the
second is to take China to the level of a “moderately developed
country”, which means a per capita GDP of $55,000.
To achieve this, China needs to maintain an annual
per capita growth rate of at least 6.3 percent till 2021 and 5.8 percent
through 2049. Both these are daunting targets and China is facing
severe challenges in meeting them, in part because of the headwinds of
the global economy, and, in part, the excesses of the past, which
include over-investment, overcapacity in certain industries, and
indebted state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, left, is greeted by Chinese
President Xi Jinping during the welcome ceremony for the Belt and Road
Forum in Beijing on 15 May 2017. (Photo: AP)
China can no longer depend on an investment and export driven
model. Instead, it must enhance domestic consumption and enhance
productivity through innovation-driven growth. This is where OBOR comes
in.
Using its vast monetary reserves to invest in developing
infrastructure and economies around its periphery, China is
simultaneously seeking to get rid of its excess capacity in areas like
steel and cement while drawing large swathes of its neighbourhood into a
closer economic embrace.
Raising the Stakes
The actual Chinese target is Europe with its affluent economy,
high levels of technology and lifestyle products that the Chinese
middle class crave for. China is reaching out to the affluent West
through high-speed rail links and enhanced maritime connectivity.
Simultaneously,
China is upgrading its own industrial capacities through R&D and
acquisitions. In the past year, China has acquired the Swiss
agribusiness giant Syngenta and the world’s foremost automotive robotics
company, KUKA. It has spent over $150 billion in acquiring companies in
the area of integrated circuits or chips, though in the past year, the
regulators have prevented companies like Micron, Western Digital,
AIXTRON and Toshiba from selling their chip businesses to China.
Western
assessments are that in areas like artificial intelligence, biotech and
electric cars, Chinese technology, backed by an enormous amount of
government funding, is already amongst the best in the world.
Distracted by Pakistan
We in India are distracted by the China-Pakistan Economic
Corridor or the activities of China in Sri Lanka, and are taking our eye
off the ball in the main game. The Indian Ocean activity is a
side-show, albeit understandably important for India because it’s in our
neighbourhood and its military elements are all too clearly visible.
OBOR is a Chinese national project, aimed at fulfilling Chinese goals.
The government of India cannot
but formally protest the CPEC going through Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir.
But the tone and tenor suggests that, perhaps, we are protesting too
much.
And that the remonstrations are a pretext to adopt a
needlessly confrontationist stand against China. At least thrice in the
past 70 years, India has been willing to formalise a border along the
Line of Control in Jammu & Kashmir, so to make out that Chinese
projects in Gilgit-Baltistan are the cause of Indian ire is to truly
miss the wood for the trees.
A security official walks by a pagoda at the Yanqi Lake
International Conference Center, where the Belt and Road Forum was being
held, in Beijing on 15 May 2017. (Photo: AP)
A Missed Opportunity
A more sophisticated policy would use OBOR for Indian purposes
where it can. India cannot stop OBOR, neither can it ignore and nor
will it be immune to its effects. While it’s true that pipelines and
railroads hardwire a destination, ports do not, and can be used by
anyone. If China promotes an economic zone in Sri Lanka or East Africa,
Indian businesses are free to utilise them for their own ends.
India
is a member of the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and
the New Development Bank. What is to stop it from seeking funding there
to hardwire its own connectivity schemes to South-East Asia and across
Iran to Europe?
Focus on Implementation of Projects
New Delhi has two problems — first, India’s own hopeless
internal infrastructure, setting which right should be its priority.
Second, it lacks the structure of capable state-owned enterprises which
can execute projects in quick time. The 19.2-km Kamchiq tunnel in
Uzbekistan built by the China Railway Tunnel Group was completed in 2016
in exactly three years, the 756-km Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway in five
years by the China Railway Group. These are just random examples of the
accomplishments of Chinese companies.
As far as India is concerned, the Chabahar scheme,
the Kaladan Multimodal project and the International North South
Transportation Corridor have been in the works since the 2000s and none
of them are complete and the last-named has not even begun.
The same is the case with the India-Myanmar-Thailand highway project begun in 2001.
Beyond
the issue of connectivity, India needs to up its economic game by doing
more, rather than less planning. As we see, China’s achievements are a
result of sophisticated planning by outfits like the National
Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). A slogan a day like IT+IT=IT,
or Smart cities, Start-up India, Make in India and so on, are not going
to work. We need a sustained strategy of promoting economic growth and
qualitatively better governance, and a dose of modesty. The Quint May 15, 2017
The Chinese offer to rename
the China Pakistan Economic Corridor is the latest manifestation of the
new style of Chinese diplomacy. From the muscular assertion in the
South China Sea, the waters of the Senkaku (Diayou) islands, and frozen
wastes of Aksai Chin, Beijing seems to be taking a step back and
learning to say “please”.
This was, in an intriguing way, also the message contained in a recent article in the party-owned Global Times suggesting that, maybe, China could mediate between India and Pakistan to resolve the Jammu & Kashmir dispute.
For
decades now, the Chinese position has been quite straight-forward, and,
even from the Indian position, quite neutral. It has spoken of the need
for the two countries to resolve the dispute through bilateral
dialogue, even while refraining from actually suggesting a solution or a
mediation.
A week ago, in an article, Hu Weijia, a reporter with the Global Times,wrote:
“Given
the massive investment that China has made in countries along the One
Belt, One Road, China now has a vested interest in helping resolve
regional conflicts including the dispute over Kashmir between India and
Pakistan.”
Predictably the article created some waves in New Delhi.
But
as the context of the article reveals, the writer has urged change not
so much on behalf of its “iron brother” Pakistan, but Chinese self
interest, as he went on to add:
“China
has always adhered to the principle of non-interference in the internal
affairs of other countries, but that doesn’t mean Beijing can turn a
deaf ear to the demands of Chinese enterprises in protecting their
overseas investments.”
Till now China had been
advocating the idea of consensus-driven decision making,
non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and win-win
outcomes. But as its economic remit spreads across the globe, its
interests expand in regions which may be volatile or across regions
where countries are locked in disputes where China may be forced to take
sides.
As for Jammu & Kashmir, if it had wanted to do so,
China could have simply supported the Pakistani claim anytime earlier,
but the Chinese style in the past was to be cautious. The Chinese
position on Jammu and Kashmir is set in the Sino-Pakistan Agreement of
1963 that established a border between them. It resulted in Pakistan
ceding the Shaksgam Valley to China and receiving 1,942 kms in exchange.
The two sides agreed under Article 5 of the treaty that
“after
the settlement of the Kashmir dispute between Pakistan and India, the
sovereign authority concerned will reopen negotiations with the People’s
Republic of China , on the boundary…. So as to sign a formal Boundary
Treaty to replace the present agreement.”
In other
words, China did not endorse Pakistan’s claim to Jammu and Kashmir and
has been open to the possibility of India re-establishing its claim.
In
the 1965 war which was triggered by a Pakistani military grab for Jammu
& Kashmir, China came out in support of Pakistan. Not so much the
territorial claim, but plainly and simply to pull Islamabad’s burnt
chestnuts out of the fire.
Chinese chequers
In
the years since China has broadly maintained its stand of neutrality in
the dispute, though, it has periodically played an intriguing game. One
was the issuance of stapled visas for residents of Jammu and Kashmir,
including infamously the chief of the Northern Command headquartered in
Udhampur. In 2010, they suddenly declared that the disputed Sino-Indian
border, which by Indian count was 4,057 kms, was only 2,000 kms in
length. In other words, they refused to count the Sino-Indian border in
J-K as being Indian.
In fact back in 2009, there was another
episode in which China offered to play a “constructive role” in what it
agreed was a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan. “Kashmir is an
issue that has been longstanding left from history,” Hu Zhengyue, the
Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs in-charge of Asia told some
visiting journalists. “As a friend, China will be happy to see such
progress (in India-Pakistan consultations) and we will be happy if we
can play a constructive role in resolving of the issue, but after all it
is a bilateral issue,” he noted.
Of course, that was a time when
direct India-Pakistan talks were taking place, though this was just at
the point when the Musharraf government was about to melt down because
of its quarrel with the Chief Justice of the Pakistan Supreme Court.
So,
there are two compulsions now. First, that the dialogue between India
and Pakistan is frozen and tensions are high all along the Line of
Control. Second, China’s increasing commitment in Pakistan through the
China Pakistan Economic Corridor. And third, the pressure that it feels
as the OBOR gets underway to play a role in resolving disputes and
quarrels so as to ease the path of its connectivity plans.
For
that reason, Hu’s article actually leads off from the recent Chinese
mediation between Myanmar and Bangladesh over the Rohingya issue. Now
not many in India know that China has a key investment in the Rakhine
state where the Rohingyas come from – this is the state where the port
of Kyakpau is located and from where a pipelines are taking oil and gas
to Kunming bypassing the Straits of Malacca. Stability in the region,
therefore is as important for Myanmar, as it is for China now.
It
is in this context that, as Hu noted, given its massive One Belt One
Road investments, China had to abandon its long-held “principle of non
interference in the internal affairs of other countries”. Indeed,
China’s unique selling proposition used to be its claim that it does not
interfere in the internal affairs of countries. So, it has conveneintly
ignored the activities of despots like Robert Mugabe and the various
Pakistani dictators.
Great power games
In
Central Asia, it has to skirt between ethnic tensions involving the
Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kazakhs and Kyrgyzstan. The demands of OBOR do not make
it easy to avoid the continuing rivalry between Saudi Arabia, from
where China imports the largest amount of oil, and Iran, to which it has
given the largest amount of foreign aid in the 2001-2014 period. The
situation in Europe is no better. In the Balkans, where the Chinese
companies are active, there are tensions between Serbia and Kosovo,
Greece and Macedonia, Serbia and Albania and so on. An even bigger
headache is the standoff between European Union, the key target of the
One Belt One Road plan, and Russia, a critical Chinese ally, even if it
is for the short term.
So China has to learn to play the role of a
great power. While its economic clout gave it a certain ability to
mediate, it still had to steer through the shoals of competing
nationalisms and emotions, which are much more tougher to deal with, as
other great powers have realised over time.
As it is, along with
its desire to play a role as a benign global power, China is also caught
in the dilemma posed by its own assertiveness vis-à-vis India on the
border, or South-east Asian states in the South China Sea. In such
circumstances, it can hardly afford to put itself forward as any kind of
a mediator.
But the even bigger question comes from the
possibility that to protect its growing business interests, like other
global powers, China may be forced to send in its military to protect
its interests and nationals. In recent times, this has already happened
in the case of Libya and, more recently, Yemen. And as flag follows
trade, an expansive perception of national interests could require
military presence in far flung areas. This means bases, allies and the
entire paraphernalia of a great power. The bases are already there in
Djibouti and Gwadar and the navy is growing by the day.
As for
Kashmir, we can’t foretell what a Chinese mediation will bring. As the
history since 1947 reveals, the British, the Americans, the Russians and
the United Nations have been there, done that– and failed. Scroll.in May 8, 2017
India needs a strategic effort to understand that it is no longer
competing with China, but seeking to cope with an increasing asymmetry
of power
It is no secret that there’s a delay in India’s current cycle of
military modernisation. Ask the services and they will vaguely claim
that the cycle will be completed by 2022 or maybe 2027. The effort is to
induct the contemporary range of armoured vehicles, artillery, fighter
jets, submarines, frigates and so on. Given the decades taken to achieve
this, these systems will almost immediately become obsolete and another
delayed cycle will begin.
As long as an indigent Pakistan was the principal adversary, this
caused no big worry. But we now increasingly confront a risen China,
whose plans work on schedule, and whose modernisation is relentlessly
moving from copying western design and concepts towards leapfrogging to
become technology leaders.
In recent years, China has systematically built up its military, and
also undertaken a deep reorganisation of its structure. This is aimed at
creating a force that, as Xi Jinping is never tired of repeating, is
loyal to the Communist Party of China and capable of fighting and
winning wars. The reorganisation has led to an integrated military
divided into geographical theatre commands mimicking in many ways the
organisation of its principal adversary: the United States.
The modernisation is top to bottom—it begins with the nuclear forces,
the bedrock of Beijing’s status as a world power, and goes right down
to the maritime militias that are used to swamp fishing grounds in the
South China Sea. The Chinese are simultaneously aiming to deny the US
access to its mainland through the so-called A2/AD (anti-access area
denial) systems, and at the same time organising their own forces for
greater regional and even extra-regional reach.
So, while China’s navy moves from offshore defence to regional
capability, its air force is creating an integrated aerospace system for
offensive and defensive operations beyond its borders. All this means a
virtual assembly line of new generations of aircraft carriers,
destroyers, submarines, fighter aircraft, ballistic and cruise missiles
and associated systems. In all this, space is a key element for
C4ISR—command, control, communications, computers, intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance. We are talking here not of individual
satellites, but constellations. So by 2020, the existing 30 Beidou
navigation satellites will be replaced by 35 advanced versions. Already
40 Yaogan satellites move in a triplet formation providing imagery and
electronic intelligence. By 2020, China will be able to obtain 30-minute
updates from any part of the globe from 60 satellites including the
Gaofen and Jilin series. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is also
working on counter-space systems aimed at knocking out adversary
satellites.
For years, the PLA used to talk about “informationised warfare” which
was about digital systems and networks. Now, they are on the threshold
of what analyst Elsa Kania says is the era of “intelligentised warfare”
featuring artificial intelligence (AI), big data and cloud computing to
enhance their C4ISR capabilities. The depth of the Chinese effort is
obvious: many of the technologies now emerging are part of an effort
undertaken under Project 863, begun in March 1986. Among these are boost
glide vehicles, laser and high-power microwave (HPM) weapons. Earlier
this year, young scientist Huang Wenhua received a national technology
award for developing an HPM system for defending warships from anti-ship
missiles.
Beyond the horizon is an array of even more dramatic AI-based
technologies, where China has emerged as a global leader—in quantum
computing and communications and electromagnetic and pulsar propulsion
in space. These have great military consequences, and in all of them,
China has demonstrated a capacity, such as the launch last August of the
world’s first quantum communications satellite Micius.
But in the past few years, the challenge we have faced from China has
been somewhat strange. There has been Pakistan, the “iron brother” that
can always be counted on to keep India off balance, but we have also
seen a handful of Chinese soldiers pitching a tent in the middle of
nowhere in Aksai Chin in 2013, a disembodied voice warning INS Airavat
in 2011 that it was in Chinese waters, when, in fact, it was in
Vietnam’s EEZ, or, more recently, the invocation of a non-binding UN
Resolution 1172 of 1998 demanding that India end the development of
ballistic missiles, and the decision to rename six places in Arunachal
Pradesh. This is a new kind of warfare involving psychological, legal
and media elements. With both countries possessing nuclear weapons, it
is unlikely that they will openly fight each other. But, warfare has
many dimensions and the best victory is one that is obtained without
fighting at all.
Indeed, as Wu Chunqiu of the Academy of Military Sciences argued in
2000, “Victory without war does not mean that there is no war at all.
The wars one must fight are political wars, economic wars, science and
technology wars, diplomatic wars, etc. To sum up in a word, it is a war
of Comprehensive National Power (CNP). Although military power is an
important factor, in peacetime it usually acts as a backup force, and
plays the role of invisible might.” What India must understand is that
war is no longer about tanks and guns, but CNP. China has long had a
fascination with the concept pioneered by Ray Cline of the CIA, who came
up with an index based on the formula Pp = (C+E+M) x (S+W) in the
1960s. In the nuclear age, defeat and victory were about CNP, as the
erstwhile Soviet Union realised, not its military arsenal.
In Cline’s schema, Pp was perceived power, C was critical mass
(population plus territory), E was economic capability, M stood for
military strength, S was strategic purpose and W the will to pursue
national strategy. Subsequently other indices came up, using even more
refined variables.
The Chinese have never hidden their will to power. Where India has
always wanted to be seen as a ‘Great Nation’, the Chinese are clear that
they are once again destined to be a, if not the, ‘Great Power’. To
that end, they are deploying a range of elements relating to hard and
soft power, and the $1 trillion One Belt One Road scheme is its economic
manifestation.
One of the key areas being pursued is STI—science, technology and
innovation. In the next five years, the Chinese government alone will
spend $250 billion in S&T and innovation. Its tech giants, Baidu,
Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei and others will spend several times this sum.
The priority areas are quantum communications and computation, an arcane
field that is difficult to even conceptualise, but whose implications
are earth-shaking. In addition, focus remains on cyber security,
deep-space exploration, robotics, materials, genetics, big data and
brain research.
Hard power is used to control or coerce the behaviour of others, but
equally vital are soft power, persuasion, leading by example and a sense
of legitimacy. Here authoritarian China does not have it easy, but it
isn’t conceding anything. It is spending billions in winning friends and
influencing people. Through institutions and schemes like the AIIB, NDB
and the OBOR, it is expanding its remit to include Asia, parts of
Europe and the Indian Ocean Region. Its media and culture outreach aims
to present China in the best possible way to the international
community.
The Chinese challenge is not about guns and submarines, though the
disputed border and the Sino-Pak nexus signify the need to up our guard.
It is about CNP, of which the military is an important element, but not
the only one. We need a compound national strategic effort to enhance
all the CNP elements. In the first stage, India needs to understand
that it is no longer competing with China, but seeking to cope with an
increasing asymmetry of power. It should turn the Chinese strategy
inside out by ringing itself with A2/AD defences and make up our
military power deficit through effective coalitions and alliances.
It means a society working at a much higher level of efficiency than the
one we have now. It means a different kind of a military, not the World
War II kind of force we have today. But more important, we need a
socially cohesive India, led by people with a constructive and
forward-looking agenda. Most important, we need to understand that there
are no shortcuts. What you see in China is what began 30 years ago. Outlook May 15, 2017
If only some way could be found to target the BATs specifically,
then some kind of a deterrent pressure could be built. As of now, the
poor jawans who get killed are merely collateral damage.
There is a farcical debate going on about how India should deal with Pakistan on the beheading episode. Amarinder Singh, the chief minister of Punjab, wants three heads. Ramdev, the yoga entrepreneur, wants 10.
The government is silent, though army chief Bipin Rawat has hinted at retaliation,
saying that the army does not disclose its future plans, but that he
will share the details after the execution of the Indian response.
There is one problem. That the Indian jawans were beheaded
is known to the Indian authorities; presumably they have retained the
photographic evidence, since the personnel were cremated in sealed
caskets. The external affairs ministry’s spokesman Gopal Baglay saidon Wednesday (May 3)
that India had “actionable evidence,” which was the blood sample of the
slain personnel and the trail of their blood going to the Pakistan side
of the LoC.
Pakistan is predictably silent for the simple reason it knows that to
even acknowledge what their so-called Border Action Teams (BAT) have
done would be tantamount to a war crime. So, as far as they are
concerned, they will claim that non-state actors – call them Kashmiri
“freedom fighters” if you will – perpetrated the act, though it is well
known that they got their covering fire from Pakistani army posts.
This is what poses a dilemma for the Indian side. To go and lop off
10 heads and then declare that you have done it would immediately bring
the charge of committing a war crime on the Indian army. Considering its
generally good record, it would be a blemish that will not go away easily.
Now it is not that Indian soldiers have not lopped off heads before,
but they were done in covert operations that no one talked about. At the
same time, the message was received by the people who were meant to
receive it. Now, however, with the government tacitly encouraging the
media to raise the demand for revenge to a fever pitch, it will not be
enough if the army, say, a fortnight from now, simply issues a press statement saying that it has avenged the attack.
All that the Pakistani side will do is to simply claim that nothing
has happened. That is what they did in the case of the ‘surgical strike’
that the Indian side announced. Even now, that strike is only an Indian
claim, there is no collateral evidence, either from Pakistan or from
the UN Military Observers Group in India and Pakistan, which at least
nominally monitors the border.
The bigger problem is that we do not know what it takes to deter such
attacks on Indian troops. While the attacks are carried out by the
Pakistani BATs – and any retaliation by the equally tough Indian Special
Forces – the victims are ordinary soldiers on the LoC, either through
ambushes or silent attacks. If only some way could be found to target
the BATs specifically, then some kind of a deterrent pressure could be
built. As of now, the poor jawans who get killed are merely collateral
damage.
We do not even know what triggered the recent event. There is little
doubt that it was a carefully staged operation directed by the Pakistan
army. Maybe it was in retaliation for something our forces had done, or
aimed at raising India-Pakistan temperatures further by forcing India to
react. Perhaps it is linked to the possibility of an India-Pakistan
meet at the sidelines of the SCO summit in July, speculation for which
is rife ever since the visit to Muree of the Indian businessman Sajjan
Jindal, who is said to enjoy the confidence of both Prime Minister
Narendra Modi and Nawaz Sharif. If it is the first, silence would have
been a better option, and if it is the second, we need to remember the
American adage – revenge is a dish best served cold.
If the goal of the assault and beheading was to derail an India-Pakistan détente,
surely by now we ought to have learnt how to handle the Pakistani deep
state which resorts to a provocation whenever there is a talk of peace
between India and Pakistan.
This is a bizarre situation where India and Pakistan are being pushed
to fight a war literally at two ends of the spectrum. At one end are
ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons and at the other are knives and
fists. The middle ground of a good old-fashioned war with guns and
tanks, which the two armies are raring to fight, seems to have become
obsolete. The fist and knife war can go on indefinitely since it is not
destructive enough. On the other extreme is the nuclear option after
which there’ll be no one left to knife.
What is happening on the LoC is, as we noted, a farcical affair
because all it is doing, as far as India is concerned, is to provide
grist to the pseudo-nationalist mill. Instead of focusing on much more
important tasks in nation building, it is feeding people on a diet of
heightened and negative emotions, amplified by the TV channels.
The American novelist Norman Mailer once proposed, apropos the
American belief that the Vietnam war was really a proxy war with the
Chinese, that the two sides resolve the matter by both the US and China
selecting their best army division and having them fight it out, face to
face in the Brazilian jungle. Whoever won would be declared the winner
of the larger war that was going on in Vietnam. In other words, if
primal instincts needed to be assuaged, let it be done in the truly
primeval style where combat was often ritualised. The Wire May 6, 2017
The clearest indication that things on
the ground are regressing in Jammu and Kashmir is the massive Cordon
and Search Operation (CASO) launchedin Shopian, the southern part of the Valley last week.
At the beginning of the militancy, such door-to-door operations were
the norm, they were wasteful in terms of manpower and they obtained
indifferent results. But there was little alternative to them since the
J&K Police had melted down and local intelligence had dried up.
Square one
Subsequently, when the BSF G-Branch had developed a network of
informants from turning captured militants, and the J&K Police had
revived, such sweeps were wound up and instead, the security forces,
often led by the state police’s Special Operations Group, resorted to
intelligence-led operations that cause little collateral damage and
virtually decimated the militant network in the Valley.
Army personnel during a search operation in Shopian district of Kashmir. (PTI)
So, the indications are, that, at least in the southern part of the
Valley, things are back to square one. Reports suggest that the local
police has again melted and no local intelligence is coming through, and
hence the massive brigade-level sweep. Just how retro things are, is
evident from a comment by a retired general that maybe the time had come
to once again use turned militants, Ikhwanis, to hunt down militants.
In these past weeks and months, for the first time in a long while,
we have had international leaders saying that, maybe, there was need for
mediation between India and Pakistan on Jammu and Kashmir.
First it was our own Nikki Haley who said that the Trump
administration could play a role in de-escalating the India-Pakistan
situation, then came Turkish President Erdogan who in a interview on the
eve of his visit to New Delhi, called for “a multilateral dialogue” to
settle the Kashmir issue. Now, we have even had a Global Times
commentary noting that China “has a vested interest in helping resolve
regional conflicts including the dispute over Kashmir between India and
Pakistan. “
Many Indians don’t realise that for the world community, J&K is
not a closed chapter. It is just that, based on the India-Pakistan
dialogues, the world community has felt that perhaps, it was best left
to the two to sort out the problem. But if there is a feeling that there
is no dialogue and things are escalating, then there will certainly be
need for third–party intervention. Skewed perception
All these years, despite continuous Pakistani interference, the J-K
issue was slowly moving towards resolution. Militancy was declining and
even Pakistan was signaling that, maybe, it could accept a compromise in
which current borders would not change.
The big problem that we have today is that the BJP-led government has
different ideas. It actually believes it can resolve the issue once and
for all — liberate Pakistan occupied Kashmir, in particular Gilgit
Baltistan, and bludgeon the dissidents in the Valley into submission.This is, if anything, a perfect example of hubris.
New Delhi believes that the factors responsible for the violence and
tension in the Valley are entirely external. And there is little to be
gained through internal dialogue. This is a skewed understanding of the
situation. Pakistan is certainly responsible for pumping in men and
money into the Valley, but they are able to get shelter and function
because India has not been able to convince the locals that it has their
welfare in its heart.
Flexible tactics
Last week, the key BJP interlocutor, speaking behind the screen of
anonymity, ruled out all dialogue till the stone-pelting continued in
the Valley. Referring indirectly to some comments by former NSA MK
Narayanan and former RAW chief AS Dulat, he declared that they had “had
enough time and opportunity to implement their ideas… Now it is our turn
to get things in order. Let us handle the issue in the way we want.”
So the world, and the people of this country, must accept a strategy
where the government deliberately allows the health of Jammu and Kashmir
to deteriorate, claiming that this will effect a complete cure at the
end. If this sounds like a quack cure, it probably is.
Past governments had a more modest approach, believing that all they
could do was to manage the issue, not resolve it in the short term. To
that end, they adopted multiple, but flexible tactics — talks with
Pakistan, roundtables in the Valley, behind-the-scene dialogue with the
separatists and so on.
This led to a slow and steady improvement of the conditions in the
Valley. The search for the perfect solution is illusory, the best as is
well known, is often the enemy of the good. Mail Today May 8, 2017
When you mis-categorise a phenomenon or mislabel
an event, you are liable to err in dealing with it. This can have
serious consequences, just as faulty diagnosis leads to a worsening of a
disease.
And so it is with the Maoist insurgency in central India.In the minds
of the Modi government, the Maoists appear to be nothing but terrorists
who are wont to make “cowardly attacks” on our security forces who
were, in this most recent instance, killed in a “cold blooded manner”. A
senior minister weighed in against human rights activists for their
silence on the killings.
Now, from all accounts, the CRPF party was expertly ambushed by a
group of Maoists and the 25 personnel killed presumably died fighting,
gun in hand. This was an unfortunate development, tragic, even
disastrous. But it can hardly be termed either cold-blooded or cowardly.
As for human rights, the traditional use of the term relates to
atrocities against non-combatants, including disarmed security
personnel.
Perhaps the government had hoped that through its rhetorical arrows,
howsoever misdirected, it would quell the hard questions about its own
conduct. Why had it failed to appoint a person to head the CRPF for the
past two months (one has now been appointed on Wednesday)? Why are
poorly trained and led CRPF personnel being asked to take up such a
dangerous counterinsurgency duty?
Mao Zedong once said that you should respect your enemy tactically,
even while despising him strategically. So, even as we reject the Maoist
ideology and seek to destroy it tooth and nail, we should have a
healthy regard for Maoist guerrillas’ abilities as fighters. Only if we
do so will we be able to defeat them.
The Maoist challenge is not a new one. Police have been combating
them in various ways and locales since the mid-1960s. It has soundly
defeated them in Bengal and the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh and there is
need to learn from those experiences in taking on the latest version of
Maoists in central India’s jungles.
The key to the defeat was a combination of political action and
intelligenceled military operations. Clearly, in the case of
Chhattisgarh what we are witnessing is an incoherent application of
military force, sans any intelligence. This was evident in the terrible
2010 ambush in Dantewada when CRPF lost 76 jawans, and a year later when
26 died in Narayanpur. Then, as now, CRPF had zero intelligence about
large Maoist forces in its vicinity.
Such intelligence can be obtained through technical means UAVs,
foliage penetrating radars and so on. But it is best gathered through
the patient use of human sources.
The forces you employ must be highly skilled in jungle warfare as the
Greyhounds of Andhra are, or the army in the northeast. But more than
that you need effective political messaging through which you challenge
the Maoist narrative that the people are being exploited and their
rights violated by the Indian state. This does not mean a speech in New
Delhi or a declaration in Raipur, but action on the ground. The people
must be made to feel that the government cares for them and is doing its
best to resolve their problems.
In that sense the Raman Singh government is the biggest failure. He
has led the state for nearly 15 years, has done little or nothing to
undermine the Maoist challenge and is leaving the issue to be resolved
through exclusively military means.
The use of force to resolve a problem is very seductive, but it is
also extremely destructive. Now we seem to be seeing this
wrong-diagnosis-worsening-thedisease phenomenon in Jammu & Kashmir
as well where the government has decided that all dissenters are
terrorists who must be dealt with as such. As a result, the political
health of the state has taken a turn for the worse. Times of India April 29, 2017
Professional journalist interested in national security affairs, currently Distinguished Fellow with the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi looking after their national security programme
