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

Getting to the meat of the matter

Wrapping up a three-day visit to India in January, US President Barack Obama observed, “India will succeed so long as it is not splintered along the lines of religious faith.” 

He added that it was of utmost importance that Indians understood that every person had “the right to practise their faith how they choose or to practise no faith at all and to do so free from persecution.” 

Obama’s warning comes to mind as the peculiar drama of meat bans plays itself out across the country. 

There can be little doubt that this is being seen as part of the anti-Muslim project of the extremist elements of the Sangh Parivar. 

Ideology 

This is yet another manifestation of the belief among many in the Parivar that Narendra Modi’s election triumph victory was a victory for their pernicious ideology and not a consequence of the failure of the UPA II in delivering economic growth to the country. 

From the time the Modi government took office, there has been a sharp uptick in communal violence accompanied by a cacophony of declarations from Right-wing groups, promoting projects like ghar wapsi and banning beef. 

Modi himself has distanced himself from such views, or, has chosen to keep silent. 

He has sought to position himself as a development- oriented prime minister and has, in his speeches, focused on social issues. 

Earlier this year, speaking at an event organised by New Delhi’s Christian community, Modi emphatically declared, “We cannot accept violence against any religion”. 

In blunt terms, the mandate that Modi has got was for economic growth and good governance. 

At a time when people are awaiting a transformation of the economy and its direct impact on their personal lives they are bemused by the spectacle of our municipal and state governments getting involved in banning meat and policing abattoirs to prevent the eating of beef. 

At one level it is being used as a tool of political mobilisation, at another it is to distract the electorate from the inability of the governments, state and local, to come to grips with their substantive challenges. 

Modi himself should be aware that his government in New Delhi, too, is facing the test of credibility with regard to its tall electoral promises and its performance. 

People do not expect miracles to happen overnight and will not, like media commentators, switch to an attack mode overnight. 

However, they do expect that the government gets down to work on the real issues of the day instead of chasing the will o’ the wisp. 

Diversity 

In a diverse country like India, sectarian peace is something that must be prized. 

One way to maintain it is to allow communities to live with their customs and traditions and define their own pace of change. 

This is the premise of Indian secularism which has ensured that India’s 170 million Muslim population has been remarkably peaceable despite the pulls of extremism in the other parts of the Islamic world. 

But now Sangh Parivar hotheads appear determined to push the Muslim community to the margins. 

Given the numbers, that is simply not a viable project and will instead result in a rendering of the country’s social and political fabric. 

Hindu faith 

Actually, animal sacrifice is not alien to the Hindu faith as anyone who has travelled to Nepal during dussehra knows and visit any Puja pandal during the season you will find a great deal of excellent non-vegetarian fare. 

There are groups who tend to be vegetarians. 

But by no means can they be seen as representatives of the Hindu faith. 

Moreover, at what point does the state decide that you can eat this and that, or wear this or that. 

Could the Mumbai municipality decide that men and women must cover their heads? How different is it from khaps which ban jeans and cellphones for women? 

The time has come for the BJP to be more forthright in keeping its atavistic Parivar elements in line. 

The agenda is development and its mandate is for economic growth and good governance. If the BJP does not understand this, it will pay the price for it the next time elections come around. 

Unfortunately, that will be a messy process, and the country would have lost another five years that it cannot afford to lose. 

Mail Today September 13, 2015