Greek shadow on US-China ties

IN 2015, Harvard scholar Graham Allison penned an article in the Atlantic monthly. Its theme, later developed into a book published in 2017, was that the US and China could be at war at some point in the near future. This, he said, was because of the ‘Thucydides trap’, an idea developed from a 431 BC observation of the eponymous Greek writer, apropos Athens and Sparta, that a rising power will inevitably clash with the established one. In the article, Allison said in 12 of 16 cases he had studied in the past 500 years, such a clash occurred, mostly to the detriment to both the challenger and the challenged.

Coming in the years when China, with an assertive new leader Xi Jinping began to consolidate its presence in the South China Sea, built a modern navy that began forays into the Indian Ocean and laid plans to establish new global maritime and land links,  the idea took root. Despite the US push back through its Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPS) in the South China Sea and its so-called pivot to Asia, most people discounted the notion of war between two nuclear armed adversaries whose economies were  deeply enmeshed in each other.  

 Indeed, shortly after Allison’s article appeared,  Xi Jinping went out of his way to actually mention the concept even while rejecting it. ‘There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides trap in the world’ he declared at a public meeting in Seattle, though he did  warn against ‘strategic miscalculation’ that could lead to conflict.

 So, what are we to make of what sounds like the steady drumbeat towards war, with perhaps a Cold one to start with, but with always the danger of degenerating into a hot one.  

 Three decisions alone last week are a pointer to the rapidly deteriorating China-US relations. The first was the arrest and extradition from Belgium of a senior Chinese intelligence officer Yanjun Xu for economic espionage. He was charged with stealing trade secrets of a number of US aviation companies, including GE. Xu is said to be deputy division director with China’s Ministry of State Security, responsible for recruiting assets in the US aviation sector for industrial espionage.The second was the US treasury department’s announcement of new rules tightening national security reviews of foreign investment. The new rules are part of the overhaul of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) and the US export control system as such that were legislated in July. The new regulations bring in a much larger number of transactions into the purview of the CFIUS. The US will now require foreign investors to inform the committee of all deals relating to critical technology in 27 industries ranging from semiconductors, telecom and defence.

The third measure was the tightening of controls on nuclear technology exports to China. Though US officials say that the Chinese are seeking to enhance their military capacity through illegally acquiring nuclear technology, the real target are the civil nuclear exports of China which, the Americans say, involve the illegal diversion of American technology. In January 2017, an American of Chinese origin, Szuhsiung Ho, was sentenced to two years’ prison for helping the state-backed China General Nuclear Power Company to develop special nuclear materials based on his activities in the US.

According to SIPRI, the US was the biggest spender on defence in 2017 with $610 billion, while China was number two at $228 billion. All these developments are taking place after a slew of other moves such as the imposition of tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese imports to the US, Vice-President Mike Pence’s blistering attack on China earlier this month, the imposition of sanctions on China under CAATSA for purchasing Russian Su-35 fighters and S-400 missiles, the cancellation of US-China military dialogue and a dangerous encounter between an American and a Chinese warship in the South China Sea. The jury is still out on another, potentially more serious development—the charge that Chinese spies have infiltrated the networks of several US companies by installing very small chips in the server boards manufactured in China that are used in the systems of these companies. If the US confirms this, it could lead to a major effort to remove China from the global supply chains.

 Having worked out trade deals with its neighbours Canada and Mexico as well as South Korea, and begun negotiations with the Japanese, it remains to be  seen whether the US goes for a deal with  China or presses on with its new confrontational approach.

So far China has not revealed its counter moves. It does not import enough from the US to match the tariffs. But it can take other measures ranging from restricting tourism, a $33 billion per annum business for the US, it could devalue the yuan, sell or stop buying the US treasury bills it holds, thus raising US borrowing costs, and finally, make it difficult for US businesses to function in China.

Xi and Trump are scheduled to meet on the margins of the G-20 summit in November. What Trump will do is not clear. His team is divided among those like Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow supporting a deal and US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and his National Security Adviser John Bolton opposing it. But the clock is ticking, from January onwards, tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports will go up from the current 10 per cent to 25 per cent.

 But perhaps too much water has flowed under the bridge to allow for a straightforward trade deal. It may reduce some of the tensions, but the events of the past year have revealed faultlines that cannot be easily papered over. The perception of China has fundamentally shifted in the US, and this cannot be reversed. China is now viewed as a peer competitor, one that does not, and will not, play fair. And so, we still have no answer whether the Thucydides trap is in play, or not.

The Tribune October 16, 2018

Ajit Doval's New Job Description Won't Change India's National Security Management

At first sight, the decision to make National Security Adviser Ajit Kumar Doval the chairman of the Strategic Policy Group (SPG) of the National Security Council (NSC) would appear as though the government is working overtime to repair the rusted national security mechanisms of the country. 

The move has come along with other changes in the NSC system, and a couple of months after it took an even more consequential decision to appoint Doval the chair of the Defence Planning Committee, which virtually runs the Ministry of Defence.A closer look would, however, reveal that this is, to quote Shakespeare, a lot “of sound and fury signifying nothing”. The Modi government has a record of making announcement and grand declarations that turn out to be just that – announcements and declarations. The changes in relation to Doval’s job description also appear to amount to that.

Worse, they could also be part of an effort to paper over the real problems relating to the dysfunctional defence system and the government’s inability to adequately address them. This is manifested most clearly by a little-noticed decision to replace Major General (retired) B.C. Khanduri as the chairman of the parliament’s Standing Committee on Defence (SCOD). Earlier this year, under his leadership, the SCOD came out with an authoritative report revealing the extent of the problemsof the Indian armed forces.

To come to the latest decision on the SPG: the defence secretary was the designated chair of the SPG and now he has been replaced by the NSA. Some media commentary has gone over the top in suggesting that this gives Doval primacy over the entire government because key officials like the Reserve Bank of India governor and the cabinet secretary are also members of the SPG. That is simply not true, because the SPG carries out a specific function in relation to national security issues and there is nothing unusual in having the NSA chair it.

Actually, having the cabinet secretary in the chair was a bit of an anomaly, a holdover from the era when he was, indeed, the chief coordinator of India’s national security policy, including the nuclear weapons programme. That situation ended with the appointment of Brajesh Mishra as the first NSA.

A six-member NSC headed by the prime minister was set up in November 1998. The body comprised of the SPG consisting of senior officials like the chiefs of the intelligence agencies, the heads of the three armed forces, and other senior secretaries to the government as the key executive tier of the new body responsible for the inter-ministerial coordination of the national security system. At the second tier was the National Security Advisory Board comprising retired officials and non-government persons. Both these bodies and the NSA’s office were serviced by a National Security Council Secretariat.

The NSC was viewed as a body that would take a holistic view of national security issues based on the advice and specialist studies done by its constituent bodies, but the executive action on them would remain the purview of the Cabinet Committee on Security. The fact that the two bodies had a common membership helped the decision-making process.

In setting up the NSC, the government had hoped that it would bring a fresh angle to the traditional approaches to security. This would be facilitated by the independent advisers in the NSC system. But over time, things didn’t quite work that way. With former government officers dominating the alternate channels of advice, there was little by way of out-of-the-box thinking.

Also read: The Army Has Bared Its Iron Fist in Kashmir – and Wants Everyone to Know It

In any case, the NSC itself met fitfully over the years, and while the NSAB was always active, the SPG went through long periods when it simply did not meet.

Looking back, it is clear that the NSC system has not quite stabilised. To start with, the Joint Intelligence Committee was subsumed under the NSCS which was given the job of tasking the intelligence agencies. However under M.K. Narayanan, the JIC was again revived and the tasking system abandoned.

When Doval became NSA, he initially did away with the NSAB and chose not to have a military adviser, with the incumbent Lieutenant General Prakash Menon being re-designated Officer on Special Duty. Later a truncated NSAB came up with former ambassador to Russia P.S. Raghavan at its head, but without its crucial component of non-governmental experts. The chairman JIC R.N. Ravi, who was also the interlocutor for the Naga talks, has recently been re-designated as deputy NSA (internal). He is one of three such officials – Rajinder Khanna, former R&AW chief is deputy NSA looking after intelligence work and former diplomat Pankaj Saran deals with diplomatic issues. Whether the JIC has also again been subsumed by the NSCS is not clear.

The position itself has changed tenor since its first iteration. Its first incumbent Satish Chandra was “deputy to the NSA”, a notionally higher position. Subsequently, NSAs experimented with having one or two deputies. And now Doval has decided on three. According to a report, Lieutenant General V.G. Khandare, the former Defence Intelligence Agency chief, may now be appointed military adviser to the NSA.

Does the change of the chairmanship of the SPG amount to anything? Unlikely. As we have noted in the case of the Defence Planning Committee, the NSA simply has too much on his plate to devote time to issues of reform and restructuring that are needed in the area of defence. He is the principal security adviser to the prime minister, responsible for managing India’s policies towards Pakistan, China and the US. He manages India’s nuclear deterrent and, because of his background, also supervises the intelligence agencies. True, he has some highly capable people to assist him in carrying out his numerous tasks. But at the end of the day, the buck does stop with him.

The Wire 13 October 2018

Lal Bahadur Shastri, Architect of India's Real Surgical Strike and Much, Much More

At a time when we are led by a prime minister with a 56” chest who believes in over-the-top self-publicity, our thought goes out to a diminutive and self-effacing man who once occupied the same office – India’s second prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, whose birth anniversary we celebrate today, October 2, along with that of the Mahatma.

Shastri was born in 1904 in Mughalsarai – the railway station that serves this iconic Uttar Pradesh town was recently renamed ‘Deen Dayal Upadhyaya’ – served as prime minister for just 18 months. Despite his brief tenure, he has left a memorable imprint on the country as a politician, administrator and war leader. Many in the present generation don’t know he authored the slogan, “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan,” which captured the idea that peasants (and their welfare) are as integral to the security of the country as soldiers.

He was a seasoned freedom fighter who spent a total of 9 years in jail. After independence he held various ministerial and party positions. Apart from being general secretary of the Congress, he held the railways, transport and commerce portfolios before becoming Union home minister following the death of Govind Ballabh Pant in 1961.

In a world full of hollow men, Shastri was the genuine article. He displayed his moral calibre when he resigned from office in the wake of the 1956 Ariyalur train accident in Tamil Nadu in which 142 people were killed. That act of his still reverberates in the country. Hard-working but of weak disposition, he suffered  heart attacks in 1958  and again in June 1964, shortly after he took office as prime minister.

In 1963, Nehru and Congress president K. Kamaraj decided that six prominent ministers would resign and devote themselves to organisational work. The goal was to bring in fresh blood into the Cabinet, as well as send a signal to the electorate. This at a time when the Congress’s political supremacy was unchallenged.

Among those who left government were Shastri, who actually insisted that he be in the list, though Nehru did not want him there. But fate took an even more dramatic turn. Prime Minister Nehru suffered a  stroke on January 7, 1964 in Bhubaneshwar. Compelled to put a succession plan into position, he got Shastri back into the cabinet as a minister without  portfolio. Panditji’s death four months later, on May 27, was no surprise, though for a country over which he had ruled as a virtually undisputed ruler, it was a major blow.

Four days later, on May 31, Morarji Desai whose angularities were well known, was persuaded to withdraw his hat from the ring and Shastri was chosen prime minister by the Congress Working Committee. The power brokers of the Congress had hoped that the soft-spoken Shastri would be their puppet, but he turned out to be a man of firm views, decisive to boot.

These qualities had actually been evident in the period he was minister without portfolio, when he was asked to handle the crisis which followed the theft in Srinagar of the Hazratbal holy relic on December 27, 1963. Though it had reappeared after a week, the theft triggered off a popular uprising led by an action committee of people who were the forerunners of today’s separatists. Besides the release of Sheikh Abdullah, who had been imprisoned by Nehru at the time, they demanded a special deedar, or viewing ceremony, by experts to certify the authenticity of the relic.

The spooks and the babus in New Delhi strongly resisted the demanded, but on February 3, Shastri overruled the Union home scretary and ordered the deedar. The action committee duly certified that it was indeed the genuine article, which resulted in a cooling of tempers.

The slightly built leader had to fill the political shoes of the giant banyan, Jawaharlal Nehru. And he did so with a quiet panache. He battled pressure from the powerful men who had pushed him into office, accommodated Nehru’s daughter, Indira, in his cabinet, and made key appointments such as that of C. Subramaniam as the food and agricultural minister. To assist him, he created the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, headed by a secretary-level officer.

Among the long-term legacies of the Shastri era has been the attainment of self-sufficiency in food by India. When he took office, Indian agriculture was in crisis. India was, infamously, living from ship to mouth. Between 1960 and 1963, India had imported a staggering 15 million tonnes of US grains and the amount of the imports had been steadily rising.

Subramaniam, with the support of Shastri, took policy decisions that eventually led to the Green Revolution.

In the country today, Shastri is known for something he may not have really been trained for– as a war leader. The Indian military was still licking its wounds from the 1962 fiasco when Pakistan, hoping to rattle a new prime minister, initiated a series of provocations, ostensibly aimed at “liberating” Kashmir.

Pakistan had received US military aid for a decade, and its forces had developed a conventional edge over the Indian military, especially in the area of armour, artillery and the air force. Besides, Pakistan believed in its own myth that the manly Pathan, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, would make short-work of the short, dhoti-clad vegetarian, Shastri.

Hostilities began in 1965 with a feint in the Rann of Kutch, where Pakistan used the fact that the border had been delineated, though not demarcated in the swampy region. There was some skirmishing in the region. But Shastri was not rattled, either by the Pakistani action, nor the uproar in parliament. All through, he emphasised peace and wanted to resolve issues peacefully. He was also acutely aware that conflict with Pakistan would be used by Hindu chauvinists to stir up communal passions within India.

Then began phase 2 of the Pakistani plan, Operation Gibraltar or the invasion of Jammu and Kashmir by Pakistani covert forces on August 5, 1965 with the view of triggering a domestic uprising such as the one that had taken place after the Hazratbal theft. However, that did not happen, and ordinary Kashmiris helped the Indian Army round up the infiltrators. The devastating Indian response came in the capture of the Haji Pir Pass, a key point of ingress on August 30, 1965. This, if anything, was the real ‘surgical strike’.

The Pakistanis upped the ante and under Operation Grand Slam sent in two armoured regiments to cut the road from East Punjab to J&K. The Indian forces fell back in the face of the assault and things were looking grim. Shastri took two key decisions in the emergency committee of the cabinet. First, he ordered the Air Force to assist the Army and second, he gave the go-ahead for the Indian riposte – an attack across the international border towards Lahore, which caught Pakistan flat-footed.

The war carried on till September 23 and despite command failures and setbacks, India came out ahead because Pakistan, which had initiated the conflict, failed to make any gains in Kashmir and suffered a decisive defeat in Khem Karan in Punjab.

Shastri’s cool-headed leadership was vital in those days when, with the US staying away from the region and the British discredited, the Chinese jumped into the fray on behalf of Pakistan. His style was of wide consultation with the military brass as well as party colleagues, parliament and the cabinet.

In the post-war Tashkent talks, brokered by the Soviet Union, Shastri walked the talk of peace and did not rub Pakistan’s nose to the ground. He was willing to return captured territory in Haji Pir and on the Lahore front – real estate that was much more valuable than what Pakistan had in Chamb and Rajasthan.

But sadly, his heart gave out and shortly after the signing of the Tashkent Agreement, Shastri passed away in Tashkent in the early hours of January 11, 1966.

A look back at his life reveals a leader who deserves to be not just remembered, which India does from time to time but emulated too – which no one aspires to do. He was ethical, wise and far-sighted, he was a team-player, large-hearted and pragmatic. The adjectives could go on and on, and still be all true.

The Wire October 2, 2018

The rub with an irrational US

Maybe it is an anomaly, or maybe it is not. India-US relations seem to be running a smooth course in a period whereas Washington’s ties with everyone else are witnessing upheaval. The recently concluded 2+2 ministerial talks were a confirmation that the trend-line of Indo-US relations that began with Indira Gandhi’s meeting with Ronald Reagan in Cancun in 1981 remains positive.

Even so, we need to be careful. Credible reportage of what is happening within the Trump administration is somewhat scary. Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear: Trump in the White House, reveals that the inner working of the most powerful office in the world is verging on chaos. An op-ed by “Anonymous” in New York Times suggesting that there is a band of  dedicated officials, call them adult minders if you will, whose aim is to foil and check  the President’s worst urges, is not particularly comforting.

How then, are countries — friends, allies or adversaries — to deal with the world’s most formidable military and economic power going haywire? We in India, have, so far at least, nothing to worry about. But think of Canada, which had US tariffs placed on its industries on grounds of national security, or Turkey whose currency was sent into a tailspin by one presidential tweet. Think, too, of Iran which thought it had a water-tight deal with the Americans, signed, sealed and delivered at the UN.

And don’t forget Shinzo Abe, who has invested so much in wooing Trump and still remains shut out of the North Korea negotiations, and was told by Trump last June that ‘I remember Pearl Harbor’.

And then think of the Chinese who have in the short space of a year or so been re-designated as America’s principal adversary. Suddenly, the country that believed that it was in an era of its “strategic opportunity” finds itself the object of American wrath.

We don’t know what goes through the minds of leaders like Trudeau, Erdogan, Abe or Modi when they think of Trump. They are all formal or informal allies of the US. The obvious policy response is to hedge and hope for the best. Indeed, despite all the alarums and excursions over the US-South Korea FTA, in the end, the US left the old agreement more or less unchanged. Likewise, the fire and brimstone was more about updating NAFTA than replacing it.

The problems of these leaders pale into insignificance when compared to Xi Jinping’s perspective. So far the Chinese have hung tough with the US, matching tariff for tariff. But there is every indication that they may have miscalculated the US response and what the US is demanding is what China cannot satisfy — to end its dream of becoming a world technological power, a competitor of the US.

If they believe that Trump is, indeed, heading a chaotic administration will they be inclined to offer significant concessions to ward off immediate danger? On the other hand, the Chinese may believe that with the US blowing up the world order it created 70 years ago may, indeed, be ushering a real period of strategic opportunity for China.

 India should not have illusions that it will somehow gain from a full-blown US-China conflict. Too much protectionism will undermine global growth affecting financial flows to India and constraining its exports. And into this, if you inject unpredictable and whimsical policy-making by a US President, we have a recipe for disaster.

We can only speculate, but it is possible that the reported disastrous meeting in Manila with Trump in November 2017 persuaded Modi to seek a reset with China in Wuhan. This may not have altered the strategic trajectory of India’s relationship with the US, but it has sought tactical accommodation, maybe till the Trump era blows over. 

So far the Republican moderates have lined up behind their President and would not want to do anything that would upset the grassroots. But in the two years leading up to the 2020 elections, there could be a shift, engendered not only by the expected losses in November, but also the moderates rediscovering their mojo and a return to the more constitutional forms of checking the President.

But we should not have illusions about the direction of US policy. Trump is merely the convenient and somewhat outrageous vehicle for pushing policies which have considerable support in the US. The idea of a global retreat was there in the Obama administration which worked with all its might to wind down US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and stay away from Syria. There are powerful intellectual voices in the US such as that of Patrick Porter, Graham Allison and others who say that the US should move away from liberal internationalism.

The fact is that the US polity is in the state of a civil war since the Clinton administration with the old conventions of accommodation and compromise between the Democrats and Republicans thrown out the window. The US infrastructure is shot, its foreign policy over-militarised and flailing, yet all its Congress is good for is passing tax cuts. If there were any illusions about what kind of a world this envisages, just hear Trump’s speech to the UN last month. His point was that the US was sovereign, and each country needed to look out for itself. He belittled international institutions and that in their security, economic policy or diplomacy, nations were better off going on their own.

This can only presage a breakdown of the world order as we have known for the past 70 years, the liberal international order championed by the US. Though this order has deep flaws, it is still better than the order that preceded it — the one that gave us Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Tojo.

The Tribune October 3, 2018

What Shinzo Abe's victory in his party's internal election means to India

Mail Today September 24, 2018
 Shinzo Abe’s victory in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s internal election means that he can expect to head the government till the next election is due in late 2021, when he would have been the country’s longest serving prime minister.

In achieving his victory, Abe has overcome powerful headwinds, which include domestic political scandals, a persistently sluggish economy and an unpredictable Trump in the White House.

New Delhi and Tokyo have a robust relationship. (Photo: Reuters)

Japan is an important economic and political partner of India. Its low-interest loans are invaluable for India’s infrastructure. They are helping connectivity projects across the country and their assistance in urban development schemes is transforming the landscape in Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai. New Delhi and Tokyo have a robust relationship across the Indo-Pacific and are collaborating on the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor to provide a high-quality alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative in the Indian Ocean Region.

Abe’s strategies

When Abe took office for the second time in 2012, the stagnant economy was Japan’s only major problem. He had declared that he had three arrows in his arsenal to fix it — monetary easing, fiscal stimulus and structural reforms.

Since then, in the face of rising problems with the US and China, Abe has achieved a great deal, but he needs to do much, much more to ensure that Japan can meet the economic and political challenges it confronts.

His expansionary economic strategy has brought back a measure of growth in the otherwise stagnant Japanese economy.

It may not be much by global standards, but it is the strongest since the 1990s.

He has used his office to push Japan’s security perimeter beyond the bounds to which it is confined by the constitution and he has initiated structural reforms aimed at raising the retirement age, scrapping tax rules that encourage women to keep away from the workforce and make the wealthy pay for their own health care.

The arrival of Donald Trump in the White House added a headache that need not have been there. Abe has gone out of his way to work with Trump, but the latter has not quite reciprocated.

In his dealings with North Korea, Trump has often ignored Japanese interests.

The US is extremely important to Japan as a trade partner and security provider. But the US has challenged Japan in both these areas.

Trump famously walked away from the patiently negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which would have been greatly beneficial to Japan. Now, one of the short-term risks to the Japanese economy is the tariffs Trump has threatened to put on imported cars and car parts. Japan may have to make concessions to the US on this score and we may see some action when Trump meets Abe at the sidelines of the UNGA in New York this week.

The Trump factor has encouraged Abe to reach out to China. (Photo: Reuters)

Looking for solutions

Abe needs some skillful footwork in dealing with his problems. On trade, he has joined 11 nations of the Pacific littoral to give life to an alternative to the TPP and, at the same time, has reached out to the EU to create one of the world’s largest liberalised trade zones. The Trump factor has encouraged Abe to reach out to both China and Russia. His October visit to China is expected to normalise ties between the two East Asian neighbours after a decade of tension.

Trump may have dampened the Japan-China tensions, but they are not going to go away so easily. But if Abe is able to successfully fire his third arrow to restructure the Japanese economy, it can have a transformative impact not only in Japan, but the rest of Asia as well.

Among his most difficult problems he still confronts are to find ways of dealing with Japan’s shrinking workforce. The Japanese are notoriously allergic to immigrants and at the same time, they are reluctant to allow women into their workforce. Yet, with its shrinking population, Japan desperately needs additional hands to power its economy.

A pledge to the Army

Another significant domestic issue is his pledge to revise the Japanese constitution to make it clear that Japan’s military is legal. Currently, Article 9 of the Constitution bars Japan from maintaining “land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential”, though the country maintains de facto ‘Self Defence Forces’.

Neither of these two problems will be easy to resolve since there remains significant political resistance to change, especially that in relation to the pacifist Constitution. 

'Surgical Strikes Day' Is Just a Pre-Election Dose of Patriotic Political Fodder

The University Grants Commission has decreed that all universities celebrate September 29 as Surgical Strikes Day through marches by NCC contingents, pledges, lectures by ex-servicemen and so on.

The UGC is the regulator of India’s higher education system. Its job is to coordinate and maintain the standards of the higher education system. Funding for our universities is channelled through the commission.

It is no mystery as to why the UGC is suddenly discovering the patriotic virtues of celebrating “Surgical Strikes Day”. The so-called surgical strikes have been used as political fodder from the outset.

It has been pointed out repeatedly that such strikes had been conducted across the Line of Control since the mid-1990s. But the Narendra Modi government decided to broadcast what was essentially a shallow raid and make it out to be some kind of a major military victory.

It soon became evident why. Posters hailing the government’s action became a significant feature of the BJP’s campaign for the Uttar Pradesh assembly poll in November 2016.

Now to cap it comes this action by the UGC, which can only be termed farcical, because in following the government’s approach, the UGC ends up doing a disservice to the Indian Army’s achievements and also parades its ignorance to the world.

In India’s post-Independence history, there is no dearth of genuine military accomplishments that deserve to be celebrated.

Forgotten history?

The so-called surgical strikes were a coordinated shallow raid on some shacks used as launching pads by Pakistani militants and there is no doubt that they required bravery and professional skill to execute. Fortunately, the special forces teams managed to come back without any casualties.

But by no measure can they be compared with the accomplishment, say, of saving Srinagar from Pakistani raiders in October 1947. Neither can there be a comparison between them and their Parachute Regiment forbears who were besieged in Poonch for a year by Pakistani forces. Nor, for that matter, did they result in an achievement like the cleverly planned operation that led to the capture of Zoji La pass in late 1948.

It would be embarrassing to compare the so-called surgical strikes with the 1965 war’s superlative achievement – the capture of the Haji Pir Pass, in what was a far more complicated and hazardous operation. Surely, if the UGC needs to celebrate a military achievement, it could have considered the Battle of Asal Uttar in which Indian forces decimated three Pakistani armoured regiments.

Of course, in terms of the sheer scale, military skill and success, the liberation of Bangladesh and the capture of 90,0000 Pakistan Army personnel was orders and orders of magnitude beyond the outcome of the so-called surgical strikes.

And we have not even come to the Kargil mini-war, for which the predecessor BJP government must take its share of guilt. Because of its negligence, Pakistani forces occupied Indian territory and our boys had to make frontal attacks on Pakistani positions, sacrificing their lives in significant numbers in tactics reminiscent of World War I.

Yet the UGC has nothing to say for all these achievements. Indeed, the reality is that our actual wars do not even form part of the curriculum of our universities. True, you study the causes of these wars, the diplomatic action surrounding them, but not the actual conduct of operations and their consequences. Military history is lamentably absent from India’s higher education curricula.

Antidote to propaganda

A little recap of what has happened since the so-called surgical strikes will serve as a useful antidote to this fake nationalist propaganda.

The strikes were carried out in retaliation for the raid by Jaish-e-Muhammad militants on an Indian Army camp in Uri on September 18 leading to the deaths of 19 soldiers.

Soldiers patrolling along the Line of Control (LoC). Credit: PTI

The Modi government’s response was the “surgical strikes” of September 29 that struck against launch pads of the militants along the Line of Control. Media reports said that all the Indian personnel had returned safely after killing anywhere up to 50 militants.

Yet, if the so-called surgical strikes were aimed at deterring Pakistan from sending armed militants to attack Indian security forces, they were a failure.

For one thing, Pakistani shelling and attacks along the LoC continued, resulting in a heavy loss of life of civilians and a smaller number of security personnel.

A month after the so-called surgical strikes, on November 29, an Indian army formation was attacked in Nagrota, which is the headquarters of 16 Corps. Seven soldiers including an officer were killed.

This was much more serious than the Uri attack. For one thing, Nagrota is much further inland compared to Uri, which is proximate to the LoC. More important, it is the headquarters of the 16 Corps which looks after the defence of the Jammu, Poonch and Rajouri area. Despite this, and in contrast to the Uri incident, the government did not react.

There was no reaction either, when, on the last day of December 2017, five CRPF jawans were killed in an attack on their camp in South Kashmir by Jaish-e-Muhammad militants.

All that the UGC’s mindless action has done is betray its intellectual bankruptcy in playing up to the fake nationalism that is sought to be generated through repeated invocations of the so-called surgical strikes, which seem to be brought up suspiciously when elections approach.

The Wire Oct 1, 2018