Bangladesh's two begums must end their personal battle and combat Islamist violence

The Islamic State-inspired attack in an upmarket eatery in Dhaka that has taken the lives of 20 hostages, two policemen, and six terrorists, should be a watershed in the fight against Islamist radicalism in Bangladesh. 

But whether or not it is depends vitally on the dynamics of domestic politics, where the increasingly authoritarian Awami League government of Sheikh Hasina is locked in a no-quarter-given battle against her rival Bangladesh National Party President Khaleda Zia. 

 

Islamism 

India and the international community need to make it absolutely clear to the two Begums that their battle, which has allowed Islamism to flourish in their country, is now providing space for the Islamic State and the Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) to spread their roots and become an existential threat to Bangladesh. 

India, and indeed the world, cannot afford to sit by idly while this happens. 

Given Bangladesh’s location, happenings there have a vital bearing on our security, and we need to confront this emerging challenge with determination, sophistication and a cool head. 

Islamism is not a new factor in Bangladesh. It has deep roots going back to the years that led to the partition of the country in the 1930s. As such, Islamist groups like the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Islami Okiya Jote, Khelafat Majlis, and a clutch of other organisations have been active for years, but their context has been largely local, even though some have advocated a global Islamic Caliphate.

There is, of course, another sinister element, Pakistan’s ISI, which has funded and used several of these groups to launch attacks against India. 

Pakistani proxies like the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba are active in Bangladesh, again with a view of using it as a springboard to attack India. Even violent outfits like Harkat-ul Jihad Islami and Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) have functioned in a local context. These groups have been involved in attacks on writers, poets, bloggers and free thinkers since the attack on Shamshur Rehman in 1999. 

In 2016 we have seen an increase in such assaults in the killings of Nazimuddin Samad, Rezaul Siddique, and Xulhaz Mannan, as well as in the targeting of Hindu temples and priests. 

However, and importantly, the context has changed in recent years with international Islamist groups like Al Qaeda, Hizb ut-Tahrir, and now the Islamic State, which earlier found South Asia a difficult prospect, establishing a foothold in the country. 

The recruitment efforts of both AQIS and the Islamic State have benefited from poaching from local jihadi outfits. But most importantly, they have gained from the inability of the government to effectively deal with the jihadists. 

In many instances, the people attacked by them have been thrown into jail and charged with blasphemy. 

Mainstream 

Perhaps the most difficult task confronting India and the international community is to persuade the mainstream political forces to moderate their competition to prevent radical forces from gaining ground. 

Islamism has been encouraged by South Asian dictators to consolidate their power. Zia-ul Haq in Pakistan and Zia-ur-Rehman in Bangladesh moved simultaneously in 1977 to Islamise their respective states. 

Subsequently another dictator, HM Ershad, declared Islam to be the state religion of Bangladesh in 1988. 

In both Pakistan and Bangladesh, Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) played a key role in supporting their moves. 

In Bangladesh, Zia lifted the ban on the outfit which had supported Pakistani repression of Bangladesh in 1971. Today, the Jamaat-e-Islami remains one of the least understood, but most pernicious vehicles of Islamism in both countries. 

The alliance of the BNP with the JeI makes any effort to deal with Islamism in Bangladesh difficult. 

Surveillance 

While there is no need for alarm, we in India need to step up surveillance and ensure that we can separate the hard-core motivators and trainers from the gullible and naïve youths who stray into the process and are then brainwashed. 

n July 2015, Mail Today reported on the manner in which the authorities in Hyderabad detected 20 young individuals in the process of being radicalised through a mixture of the internet and their social networks. 

Instead of arresting them, the authorities counselled them and now maintain a watch on them. The process is not easy and requires specially-trained personnel which are in short supply. 

It is easy to slam suspects in jail and use third-degree methods, a process that surely results in hardening the radicals into fully-fledged militants and terrorists. 

The experience of Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood (the ideological progenitor of JeI) has revealed that simple repression is not enough to deal with the situation.  

At the diplomatic level, concerted international pressure needs to be put on the two Begums to get their act together. 

Bangladesh needs to be assisted in putting in place a deradicalisation strategy, along with better quality counter-terrorism procedures. 

The situation must be dealt with subtlety and care, rather than blundering into another ‘global war against terrorism’ which actually catalysed the formation of the Islamic State.

Mail Today July 3, 2016

India’s Abortive NSG Bid and the Kautilyan Lessons it Needs to Learn

Across the Indian media, there have been statements and opeds berating the Chinese for their perfidy, hypocrisy and cussedness in refusing to support India’s case for entry into the Nuclear Supplier’s Group (NSG). The complaints go that they themselves have broken all the rules; aided Pakistan with nuclear materials, design and testing; cocked a snook at the NSG by supplying allegedly grandfathered nuclear reactors to Pakistan and protected North Korea as it torpedoed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Yet they are denying India its just place in the world order. So, frustrated and angry Indians are demanding that we punish China, boycott their goods, join forces with the US to take on China and other such remedies.
 

The NSG is not an international treaty, but a cartel of nuclear equipment and material suppliers that sets its own rules and amends them through consensus among its 48 members. The US may have promised to get India into this club, but China owed India nothing – it made no such commitment and, in 2008, very reluctantly went along with the waiver India got on civil nuclear trade.
Indeed, far from isolating China, India has found itself alone when the NSG refused to consider its request for membership. India may take comfort that the holdouts were China, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and Switzerland (some reports also include Mexico in this list), but in the public statement on Friday, June 24, following its plenary in Seoul, the NSG said that the “participating governments reiterated their firm support for the full, complete and effective implementation of the NPT as the cornerstone of the international non-proliferation regime.” In other words, the entire outfit, including the US and the others, called for the “effective implementation of the NPT”, code for its universalisation (even though the u-word was not used) which means that either India signs or stays out of the NSG.
The Indian response has been that the 2008 NSG waiver to justify its application “states that the decision on India contributes to the widest possible implementation of the provisions and objectives of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.”
The Seoul communiqué speaks of the “full, complete and effective implementation of the NPT” and the 2008 waiver  “contributes” to the “provisions and objectives” of the NPT. No doubt this circle will be squared sometime in the future; after all, a club can write and rewrite the rules at will.
Just why India wants membership to the NSG so badly is not clear, since we already have a waiver for civil nuclear trade.  There has been talk of arriving at the nuclear high-table. But since 2011, the NSG has instituted a rule that would deny enrichment and reprocessing technologies even to members if they have not signed the NPT. In other words, we are probably condemned to a second-class membership anyway, whenever we do manage to get in.
There were expectations that the US would win the day for us. But that was a serious miscalculation. In 2008, the US was willing to do the heavy lifting because the waiver was necessary for the US to activate the Indo-US nuclear deal. But this time around, India’s membership to the NSG does not have the same salience for the US; it is a commitment to India, but not something that affects the US itself. India has the waiver it needs to trade with the US and other countries. And the US has never quite been committed to giving us enrichment and reprocessing technologies. Besides, the US cannot be entirely unhappy with the focus on China on this issue because it is pushing India into a deeper US embrace.

No free lunches
The NSG episode should deliver a few lessons in the way international politics is conducted, provided we have an audience willing to learn. International policy may be about summits and photo-ops, but these are based on deals that have been carefully worked out beforehand. The expectation that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would charm his interlocutors into supporting India is naïve, to say the least.
The doyen of realists, the political scientist John Mearsheimer, tells us that the world is inherently insecure and the great powers are locked in a tragic competition to be, and remain, number one. The hegemon of the day will do everything to prevent a rival from taking over, and no one will aid another in achieving primacy.
China is today an Asian regional power, aspiring to global primacy, and it is not about to give India, a regional state with some geo-economic and military heft, a leg up. A corollary to this could well be a question about the extent to which the US will help us to become a great power – the answer is surely, only to the point that we aid the project of balancing China in south-east Asia. In other regions, there are other options.
Realist international discourse is built on the principle of give and take and, as the adage goes, there are no free lunches.  Each country ruthlessly pursues its national interest and if other states get in the way, they find ways of winning them over, neutralising them or punishing them. Kautilyan injunctions call for pitilessly using saam  (suasion), daam (purchase), dand (punishment) and bhed (division) as the ways of getting on in the real world.
Instead of evolving policy through this matrix, India is displaying a petulant attitude, a sense of entitlement that somehow China owed it something and has therefore stabbed it in the back by not supporting its NSG bid. The hype over Modi’s diplomatic abilities is not particularly helpful.
Outfits like the NSG are not about international law, but about geopolitics. China’s views are not too difficult to understand.  Of all the Asian countries that have the potential to rival China in terms of geographical spread, military power and economy, India does. China has no intention of aiding a rival’s rise, even if that rival is way behind it. It is, of course, ready for normal relations, one involving carefully calibrated give and take.
There is a further disincentive to China giving too much – its relationship with Pakistan, the ‘iron brother’ that has helped it lock down India in South Asia.
The second lesson of international politics India needs to learn is that geopolitics always trumps world order. And of all the countries that have excelled in exploiting this, Pakistan is without a peer. In the 1980s, it persuaded the US to set aside its global non-proliferation agenda in exchange for facilitating the latter’s jihad against the Soviet Union. Today it has convinced China that its best chance of getting into the NSG lies in appending its application to that of India.
The Wire June 26, 2016

China paves the road to Europe

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s foreign visits relate to China’s enormously ambitious One Belt One Road or the Belt Road Initiative. There is a great deal of confusion as to what exactly OBOR means. It is a compound of two separate plans to develop connectivity — one over the land across Asia to Europe, and the other through sea routes. The OBOR is not simply a collection of highways, pipelines and sea routes, but a geopolitical destination. That endpoint in both the land and maritime versions is Eurasia and the aim of OBOR is to compact the vast region and make China its driving force in the coming two decades. So, even as the US pivots to Asia, China is rebalancing to Europe.



Europe is the largest economy in the world, if you count the 28 EU nations, Norway, Switzerland and Iceland. This grouping accounts for 25.4% of the world’s output in 2014 as compared to the US (22.5%) and China (13.4%). They also account for 28.5% of all consumer spending in 2014, above the 26.6% spent by US consumers and 15.6% by all BRICS nations combined. So the EU is both a potential market, as well as a source of high-tech and trade and commerce.
So, there is a class of foreign visits of Xi that are aimed at a Eurasian consolidation. It began with his first visit abroad as President, to Russia. Now it is clearer through his most recent tour to Poland, Serbia and then Uzbekistan, the last named also being the venue of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit. Prior to this, in March, Xi was in the Czech Republic, and before that in October 2015, UK, and in May 2015 in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Russia.
The visits are tied to more complex regional diplomacy that is visible in the summits of China and Central and East European Countries (CEECs), also known as the 16+1 summit. In November 2015, China hosted the fourth summit in Suzhou. Countries like Poland, Czech Republic, Serbia, Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, Lithuania, Macedonia, Slovenia, Montenegro sent their Prime Ministers or heads of state to the event and a few others sent senior ministers. Not surprisingly, the major theme of the meeting was connectivity. CEECs want to join up with China, hoping to rub off its prosperity and gain investments through the OBOR schemes.
China has already built up an impressive set of pipelines, roads and railways to link up to Central Asia. For some years, trains have begun carrying cargo from China to European destinations — Suzhou is now connected to Warsaw, Lianyuang to Rotterdam, Chengdu to Lodz, Chongqing to Duisburg, Yiwu to Madrid, Zhengzhou to Hamburg. The time taken for freight to reach from China is two weeks, and currently they go north and join up with the Trans Siberian route, or they go through Central Asia, Iran and Turkey, which however, is not too well developed. The Chinese also have ambitions of building a third route south of Kunming to Yunan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey before reaching Europe.
The relatively lower labour costs in some of these European states are being viewed by China as intermediate bases to establish its logistics and manufacturing facilities to target the richer states of EU. The way the Chinese plan it, in the coming decades they plan to get out of low-end manufacturing and move to higher value, innovation-based products. These would obviously require better off markets, and Europe fits well into this, having markets that become progressively richer as you move from east to west.
China is also working at this problem from the other end, which was evident from Xi’s visit to
UK in October 2015. He plonked down $8.7 billion in a one-third stake on a British nuclear power plant, a deal for British Petroleum to supply China with 1 million tonnes of LNG per annum, worth $10 billion, for 20 years, Rolls Royce got engine sales worth $3 billion. In addition, there were announcements of other joint ventures and investments in areas ranging from cruise ships, research and development in tissue engineering, hospitals, real estate, electric cars, education and training. London is of great interest to the Chinese as a finance centre and in the past two years, the trading volume of the RMB has doubled and recently, the London Metal Exchange announced its acceptance of RMB. Similar Chinese investments exist in the other two major European economies, Germany and France.
In this grand scheme of things, the message to countries like India is that either you participate, or risk being bypassed. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a manifestation of this. However, India is riposting through the Chah Bahar project and the International North South Transport Corridor to link Bandar Abbas in Iran with Russian ports. The hurdles before India are many, scarce finance being the lesser one. The big challenge is to implement the projects on schedule, something New Delhi is simply not good at.
Mid Day June 21, 2016

India needs a balanced 'give-and-take' relationship with China to negotiate NSG entry

Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar’s visit to Beijing last week indicates that New Delhi is undertaking direct diplomacy to obtain China’s support for India’s membership into the Nuclear Suppliers Group. 

This is as it should be. It was foolish and futile to try and somehow shame China into supporting the Indian cause.

Actually, the first round of diplomacy began with President Pranab Mukherjee’s visit to Beijing last month.

Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar (right) was in Beijing to undertake direct diplomacy with China, in a bid to get support for India’s membership into the Nuclear Suppliers Group

What is not widely known is that the Foreign Secretary, who was accompanying the President, took the opportunity to engage the Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi in a one-on-one meeting.

What transpired in either meeting will not be known, but the success or failure of the effort will soon become evident in the forthcoming NSG meeting in Seoul.

Trade

Suffice to say, it will make little difference. India has already sought and obtained a waiver to conduct civil nuclear trade from the body and also pledged to follow its rules, whether or not we are members.

However, it will be a dent in the prestige of the government, which had hyped-up India’s efforts to enter the body to the point where being denied entry will be seen as a major setback.

The NSG debate is a good primer of the manner in which world politics functions.

The NSG itself is not a body based in international law, but a cartel of the powerful - in this case, countries with the capacity to conduct nuclear trade. The only language in which it communicates is power; and the only method of negotiation is give and take.

There are other similar bodies, beginning with the G7/G8 - now somewhat chastened - but which once acted as arbiter of the international economic system.

So there is the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), a club of countries which have the know-how of making missiles, space systems or their components. 

The Australia Group is a cartel of countries making chemicals and the precursors of chemical weapons - and then there's the Wassenaar Group of countries with advanced conventional weapons technologies.

As part of the India-US nuclear agreement of 2008, the US promised India ease of entry into all these groups.

This was said to be huge for India, as the only country that could achieve this goal was the US, the sole global superpower.

Being cartels and not international agreements, these regimes are not always universal. China, the major missile and arms exporting power, is not a member of the MTCR or the Wassenaar, though it claims to harmonise its rules with both of them.

Position

Given this perspective, China’s formal position raising the issue of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty was a red-herring.

It was not India’s refusal to join the NPT that led to the NSG’s creation, but its first nuclear test.

With the world more or less accepting India as “a state with nuclear weapons”, and marking this by the 2008 waiver, that issue should no longer have any salience.

Neither should the Chinese need to assuage Pakistan’s angst. 

Beijing has been a major beneficiary of Islamabad’s obsession with India. It is in its interest to prolong this situation, rather than bringing in Pakistan from the cold. 

It is actually all about that oldest issue in diplomacy - give and take. What is India willing to offer to China, in exchange for its support for the Indian application for NSG membership? 

Far from being offered something, Beijing believes it is seeing increased Indian truculence. New Delhi has gone out of its way to connect freedom of navigation issues with the South China Sea, and tried to shame China into placing Jaishe-Muhammad chief Masood Azhar in the ISIS-Al Qaeda sanctions list at the UN. Indian entities with government backing sought to organise a conference of the entire galaxy of Chinese dissidents - and that, too, at the headquarters of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile.

As it is, India has been disdainful towards Beijijng’s pet initiative, the One Belt One Road. 

Membership

New Delhi, however, believes that it has sought to balance its ties with China by participating in the New Development (BRICS) Bank and the Asia Infrastructure Development Bank.

India has sought membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and sought to put an even spin on its position on maritime issues in the communiqué issued after the Russia-India-China meeting in April, upholding UNCLOS and addressing disputes through “negotiations and agreements” between the parties concerned.

In June it dropped references to the South China Sea in relation to freedom of navigation issues.

It has also indirectly signaled that, were it to become a member of the NSG, it would consider the Pakistani application on its merits.

But what will clinch the issue is the deal Jaishankar will be seeking to strike with Beijing.

Such deals are not made in public. We can only surmise their existence through the outcomes, or in hindsight.

Mail Today June 20, 2016

No Breakthrough or Sellout, Modi’s US Trip is Part of the Great Indian Balancing Trick

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with President Barack Obama. Credit: Reuters

Many of the reports on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the US are breathless and ignorant, and in some instances verge on the ridiculous. In part, this has to do with how Modi is perceived by his numerous bhakts – and there is no dearth of such ‘devotees’ in the media. On the other hand, his energy and at times over-the-top style results in a sensory overload – and in one missing the wood for the trees.
Then, of course, is the twist that comes with state visits – they have to be huge successes and so incremental advance is projected as breakthrough. Phrases like ‘indispensable partner’, ‘priority partner’ and so on are used liberally in joint statements to dramatise the effect.
So it is with the prime minister’s latest US visit. In substance, what it achieved was an all-round advance in issues ranging from climate change, clean energy, civil nuclear and defence cooperation to science and technology, cyber security and intelligence sharing. But to be honest, there was no one area that stood out and in which a real breakthrough was achieved.
Modi is being credited with things he didn’t do. Take the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), for instance, to which India is gaining entry thanks to the Supreme Court, which allowed the Italian marine charged with murder to go home, pending his trial. In response to the court’s order, the Italian government lifted its hold on India’s ascension to the MTCR. Claims that Modi’s visit will now lead to cutting-edge weaponry coming to India are equally misleading.
In fact, the Modi government’s successes are going against itself, with many people believing that India is now in a tighter American embrace – an impression senior officials in the government are now trying hard to dispel.  A closer look at the outcome will reveal that far from ‘giving away the farm’, Modi’s team has stuck to a fairly conservative script and, in some areas, advanced Indian interests.
A conservative script
Take climate change, for instance. The US was very keen that India commit to ratifying the Paris Agreement this year. President Barack Obama has made the treaty a legacy issue of his administration and wants to push for ratification this year, before his term ends. But, even while agreeing to the goals of the treaty, India has refused to commit itself to any timeline.
Secondly, in the Indian-American joint statements from 2014 and 2015, the two sides upheld the importance of ensuring the freedom of navigation and overflight, “especially in the South China Sea”. In the joint statement issued on June 7, there is no mention of the South China Sea. This is a significant signal to China that India is not ganging up with the US against it on the South China Sea issue, whatever the US establishment believes. The Chinese, presumably, have no problems with a general assertion of the importance of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and the freedom of navigation and overflight.
Thirdly, take the logistics support agreement that the US has been pushing for years. India first insisted and obtained an agreement specific to it, called the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement. This, as the wording suggests, is less than a full-fledged agreement and specifies cooperation in areas like joint exercises, training and humanitarian relief, rather than provideing for automatic access to facilities for operational contingencies.
Next, as the economic section of the joint statement brought out, India did not budge in its positions on intellectual property rights (IPR) and the bilateral investment treaty (BIT). Neither did it concede anything on the totalisation agreement.
Finally, in concluding his paean in the new Indo-American symphony, Modi emphasised that while there is a convergence of “interests and concerns”, it is vital to have “autonomy in decision making” in view of the “differing perspectives” India and the US have on certain issues.

An uneven trajectory
It is true, of course, that the US has also hardly budged on many of the issues of concern to India, especially terrorism emanating from Pakistan, flagged so emphatically by Modi in his address to the US Congress, without, of course, mentioning Pakistan by name. Equally important, the US did not budge on its views on the BIT, IPR and the totalisation agreement.
The movement in technology-sharing was incremental. A confusing formulation in the joint statement is the designation of India as a “Major Defence Partner” of the US. This category seems to have been created only for India and, as Sushant Singh explained in the Indian Express, is not backed by either a presidential directive or legislation. On the other hand, there is an existing category called ‘major non-NATO ally’ (MNNA), which is defined by a section of the Foreign Assistance Act. Very close allies of the US, such as Australia, Israel, Japan and South Korea are covered by this category, as are Pakistan, Bahrain, Afghanistan and Kuwait. In December 2014, the US passed the US-Israel Major Strategic Partner Act, a new category, one notch higher than MNNA.
It remains to be seen whether India can occupy a place similar to Israel in the American establishment’s legislative – and not just figurative – heart.
This year, there have been moves to pass special legislation to advance India-US ties, such as the Advancing US-India Defence Cooperation Act moved by Senators Mark Warner, John Cornyn and Marco Rubio in May 2016.
On the eve of Modi’s speech to the US Congress, two Congressmen, one a Republican and the other a Democrat, introduced legislation in the House of Representatives to designate India as a ‘special global partner of America’.
The US will pass the real test of sincerity when both houses pass, and the president signs, these legislations. But the very fact that the Acts have been put forward reflects the enormous interest within the US system in developing strong ties with India.
The US and India have been on a trajectory of improving relations since Indira Gandhi’s meeting with Ronald Reagan at Cancun in 1981. An entire generation has passed since then. There have been many ups and downs. Now, the two seem to be moving from a stage of corresponding interests to one of converging interests. But this is so only in some areas. When it comes to India’s bête noire Pakistan, the US and China are closer to each other than the US and India. The US also does not take sides when it comes to India’s border dispute with China. Of course, the US has far heavier economic and trade ties with China than with India.

The Asian pivot
The US’s most obvious interest is in anchoring its Asian pivot on the enormous geo-economic mass of India. Its other allies – Japan, Australia, the Philippines – simply lack the heft of India. The Indian market, too, is not entirely uninteresting for the US, especially when the Chinese are drawing very clear red lines to exclude US companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon, and thus putting the others on alert. Given the relative decline of the US, India offers it the means through which it can maintain its primacy without taking unnecessary risks.
As far as China is concerned, India’s views are informed by its border dispute and China’s all-weather friendship with Pakistan. Earlier governments were deferential to Chinese concerns and hesitant in enhancing cooperation with the US. Under Modi, the  government has spelled out a Joint Strategic Vision for Asia-Pacific and the Indian Ocean Region and worked out a roadmap “to better respond to diplomatic, economic and security challenges in the region”.
The Modi team has worked with the belief that being sensitive to China’s concerns provided no payoffs in South Asia. Beijing has continued to support Pakistan’s military ambitions and is now set to enhance its economic commitment there. Its indiscriminate support includes blocking Indian efforts to designate certain Pakistani nationals as terrorists under the ISIS-Al Qaeda sanctions committee of the UN. So, Modi has stepped up cooperation with Japan, Vietnam, the US and Australia. But as his visit to the US indicates, he has sought to nuance the Indian commitment.
However, India’s grand strategy must be informed by its regional predicament. China presses on us through our border dispute, and through its relationship with Pakistan and our other South Asian neighbours. But China is also a huge area of opportunity for India in terms of its capital, market and infrastructure expertise. It is important, therefore, for India to engage skilfully in play-offs with both China and the US. That would be the acme of diplomatic achievement.
The primary Indian goal in foreign policy is in effecting an economic transformation of this large and very poor country, even while ensuring the security of its territory and peripheries. The world’s richest and most powerful nation, the US, is a good partner in this enterprise. So is our giant neighbour China, with its vast investible resources. The trick is to finesse our respective goals in a manner that ensures regional stability, peace and prosperity.
The Wire June 14, 2016

Modi's US visit 2016

The challenge a writer confronts in analyzing anything Prime Minister Modi does is separating hype from achievement. And so it is with his recent US visit which was mainly routine, but has important clues pointing towards a maturing of his foreign policy.

The hype, of course, remains overwhelming and so does the spin. But that’s the Modi style, and you need to discount for it.  Take the issue of the Indian entry to the Missile Technology Control Regime. “India becomes a member of MTCR: PM Modi’s  big diplomatic success” read a headline in one of the country’s leading Hindi dailies. Actually, the moment the Supreme Court allowed the Italian marine held on murder charges to go back home two weeks ago, pending his trial, the Italian government withdrew its hold on India’s MTCR membership.

MTCR is not a gift from anyone; it was part of a deal in which the US agreed to get India into a range of technology control cartels like the MTCR and NSG, in exchange for a) putting its  civil reactors under IAEA safeguards b) agreeing not to conduct any more nuclear tests c) accepting the IAEA’s stringent additional protocol d) agreeing to abide by the NSG’s rules, current and future, without being a member of the NSG and e) giving significant business to American nuclear reactor companies.

We have kept our part of the bargain, now the US must reciprocate.

When you measure the visit on transactional scales-- the kind you must always use in international relations—you will see it was about  give and take. Notwithstanding the optics and the hype, the alleged friendship between Modi and Obama has little leverage here.  
Intriguingly,  in the joint statement issued on Tuesday the words “South China Sea” are missing. In Modi’s first visit to Washington in 2014 and during Obama’s visit to New Delhi  in 2015, the joint statements had spoken of the need of ensuring freedom of navigation and overflight throughout the Asia-Pacific region, “especially in the South China Sea.” There are three possible explanations. One,  India is delicately distancing itself from the somewhat advanced position of 2014 and 2015. Two, that this is part of a bargain with Beijing whose payoff will be in the NSG. Three, that it is simply an oversight signifying nothing.

An interesting  addition to the formulation this time speaks not only of upholding UNCLOS, ensuring freedom of navigation and overflight, but also “exploitation of resources as per international law” . This must be seen in the context of India’s interests in oil blocks off Vietnam, one of which is under challenge from China.

The Modi government finally announced its agreement on the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA),  something of primary  benefit for the US Navy since for some time to come, the Indian Navy will focus on the region between the Malacca Straits and Suez. Additionally, India committed to join the  Paris Climate Change Agreement but without accepting any  timeline which must have disappointed the Americans since the pact is something of a  legacy issue for Obama and he is keen have it ratified before it leaves office.  

On defence, there is more spin than achievement. “Major defence partner” means little, unlike “major non-NATO ally” which has a legal standing. The much touted Defence Technology Trade Initiative (DTTI) is not likely to yield much anyway.  A  technology leader does not share technology for love or money. You may do it for  money, as the indigent Russians do, but you do not give your  cutting edge stuff. But beggars, they say, cannot be choosers.

There is important movement in cyber-security and information sharing between the US and Indian terrorism screening authorities. But as for economics and trade, the ball remains in the court of the respective private sectors. The things that the two governments should do are simply not happening--  the completion of  the totalisation agreement, ironing out  differences over IPR and the Bilateral Investment Treaty.

Beyond the give and take is the emerging triangular relationship in Asia involving the US, India and China. It is in India’s interest to remain a pole, howsoever weak in this triangle, instead of becoming an adjunct to the US. By playing a balancer, New Delhi stands to gain, and beyond the rhetoric over the South China Sea, our border dispute and Sino-Pak relations, there is a lot that China has to offer. Our interest is in steadily and surely building up our economy in the period of our opportunity, which is the next two decades, and avoiding conflict to the extent we can.
In his speech to the US Congress, Modi spelt out the scope and terms of our engagement. He spoke of the overall convergence between the US and India, flagged several key issues like the lack of a security architecture in Asia and the importance of isolating “those who harbour, support and sponsor terrorists” (read Pakistan). But he also said that “autonomy in decision making and diversity in our perspectives can only add value to our partnership” (read strategic autonomy).

Economic Times June 9, 2016