Widespread prevalence of torture reveals the ugly face of this nation

During the short-lived V.P. Singh government, its Law Minister Dinesh Goswami tried to amend the colonial-era Official Secrets Act. After putting it through the bureaucratic mill, he had to admit defeat. Goswami, who died in a motor accident later, admitted candidly that he had to abandon the bill because the draft the Home and Law Ministries put before him had even more clauses than the original Act.
Something similar seems to have happened with the Prevention of Torture Bill. The bureaucracy has made monkeys of their political masters. They have brazenly put forward a bill before Parliament which waters down existing laws against torture, and adds qualifiers that make it more difficult, if not impossible, to convict anyone of the heinous act. The new Bill, promoted so assiduously by the Manmohan Singh government, is a masterpiece of dissembling and starkly exposes the moral vacuum in which our police and bureaucratic leaders function.

A person being hung and beaten by policemen who can easily be recognised in their plain clothes.

Officially the Bill’s aim is to enable India to ratify the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment which we had signed in 1997. In practical terms it cynically props up the medieval practices used by our police for criminal investigation in this country.

Flaws
The National Human Rights Commission has recorded nearly 17,000 custodial deaths in the 1994-2008 period. You can be sure that this is a severely understated figure. And these are only of people who actually died. The number of those who were inflicted with severe mental and physical pain is probably several times that number. This is pain, suffering and deprivation deliberately inflicted by Indian public servants on the citizens of the country, in violation of the law of the land and its Constitution.
The intentions behind the Bill were positive. It was aimed at bringing the Indian law enforcement machinery to the 21st century instead of remaining in the medieval era that it has been stuck in. Several activist organisations have detailed the weaknesses of the proposed Bill. The PRS Legislative Research paper points out that its definition of torture itself does not conform to that of the UN Convention.
The definition offered, “grievous hurt…or danger to life, limb or health (whether mental or physical) of any person” does not take into account mental pain which could be inflicted by sleep deprivation, compelling people to stand for long periods of time, mock executions, threats to the loved ones of a person as a means of torture. These are the “modern” methods that have taken the place of the old torture. Curiously enough, the only purpose for which the inflicting of pain amounts to torture according to the Bill is obtaining information or a confession. But torture can also be inflicted for revenge and punishment.
The second issue is the lenient punishment for torture. The Bill provides for a maximum of ten years for those convicted. The consequences of torture— being physically and psychologically crippled for life— surely merits a higher sentence. Ten years is what you get for having 15 grams of hashish.
If you take into account the fact that torture is inflicted by those who are supposed to uphold the law, there is need to enhance the punishment, rather than make it more lenient. An act as heinous as torture, carried out by the custodians of the law, cannot be equated with ordinary crime.
The Bill actually goes out of its way to make it difficult to prosecute someone accused of torture, more difficult than what the Criminal Procedure Code would make it. Under Section 197 of the CrPC, prior sanction is needed to prosecute any government official because he or she may have done what they did as part of their official duty. But by definition no one should be torturing anyone, especially as part of their official duty, so why this shield?

BJP
The second way in which it protects the guilty is by insisting that cognisance of the offence be restricted to a period of six months. There are thousands of people in Indian jails who have been there without trial or bail for years, leave alone months. Many of these are people who face the worst of the brutality of policemen and jailers. But as per the law, they will have no recourse since they are unlikely to be able to file a complaint from behind bars. Here again the CrPC has been diluted. The limit on cognisance under the CrPC is 6 months for crimes that attract sentences up to three years and less. But the Torture Bill’s maximum sentence is ten years.
The country’s ethically challenged polity allowed the Bill to sail through the Lok Sabha unchallenged. It was only in the Rajya Sabha that the Left and the BJP objected to the weak nature of the Bill. Then the BJP leaders L.K. Advani and Arun Jaitley did a somersault and declared that the Bill was too strong and would demoralise the police. The Bill has now been placed before a parliamentary committee.
This is a strange attitude indeed. Advani’s first ever reference to the arrest of Sadhvi Pragya Singh, accused of the Malegaon blasts, was to protest her barbaric treatment. In a statement in November 2008, he said he had been shocked at the Sadhvi’s charge that she had been “physically and psychologically” tortured. The same Advani is, today, unable to connect the ethical dots. Torture is bad and immoral, whether Pragya or Amit Shah is at the receiving end, or some Muslim accused of a terrorist act.
The most definitive case against the use of torture and for the need to outlaw it comes from practical experience. Through World War II, as the British counter-intelligence agency MI 5’s official history notes, no violence was used against suspect spies. The result— through the war the British were running all the German agents operating in UK.
Interrogators like Lt Col Oreste Pinto and Lt Col Robert Stephens shunned violence, yet got spectacular results. As Stephens, who ran the specialised camp where spies were interrogated, wrote in a classified memo, “Violence is taboo, for not only does it produce answers to please, but it lowers the standard of information.”
Equally compelling is the story of Nguyen Van Tai, the senior-most North Vietnamese intelligence officer caught in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. An American case-study reveals that while physical torture by the South Vietnamese succeeded in breaking his cover story, more useable intelligence was collected by his American interrogators through psychological ploys and skilful questions.
In our case we are not talking about enemy nationals or spies, but our own people, the biggest victims of torture in the country.

Aspirations
Through history some form of coercion has been used to elicit information and will continue to be used in the foreseeable future, but just like the UN Charter, the Convention Against Torture represents the positive impulse of humankind, a benchmark to be reached.
For a democratic country with the self-image of being a great civilisation, the need to act correctly is vital, regardless of the immediate threats we confront. Where that impulse ought to come from was best put across by the Israeli Supreme Court which ruled against the interrogation practices of the country’s security services.
“This is the destiny of democracy—it does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of its enemies are not always open before it. A democracy must sometimes fight with one hand tied behind its back. Even so, a democracy has the upper hand. The rule of law and the liberty of an individual constitute important components in its understanding of security. At the end of the day, they strengthen its spirit and this strength allows it to overcome its difficulties.”
This article appeared in Mail Today September 9, 2010

Don't trust the government with your privacy

Having brought Research In Motion aka BlackBerry to its knees, your government now intends to target your privacy in the name of protecting your liberty. They want to read your Gmail chats and listen in to your Skype calls. Of course, they already have the ability to read your emails and eavesdrop on telephone conversations. In making this unprecedented demand for an invasion into our privacy, the government usually cites national security. In a country scarred by terrorist attacks, the most violent being the one in Mumbai in November 2008 in which modern communications including VoIP were extensively used, such demands usually go unchallenged.
In the era of sophisticated terrorism, the government must possess the ability to surveil communications in all their forms. The question is its ability to balance the rights of the individual as against the larger security interests of the state. The issue is not so much about the morality or even the efficacy of tapping phones. It is about the trust people have in the government and its functionaries to do what they must do honestly and without malice.

Misuse
While most Indians would defer to the governments in matters of national security, very few would characterise their workings as being fair, honest and reasonable. The average Indian citizen gets the short end of the stick whether it is in terms of corrupt public servants or the near criminal police. To what extent, then, can citizens expect that they will respect his or her right to privacy?
As it is, India has a long and dishonourable history of phone tapping, the most notorious being the Intelligence Bureau’s tap of the President of India’s phones using equipment stationed in the office of the Prime Minister in South Block. You should not think that those days are past. Our intelligence agencies remain unsupervised by any authority, save their own, and our politicians have become even more unscrupulous than they were.
It’s a bit trite to lay it out like this, but people-to-people communications vary from the mundane exchanges between friends, lovers, and relatives to business and work-place conversations. The communications of terrorists, their ilk, and assorted criminals, are a microscopic minority. For the first category of ordinary folk—celebrities excepted— having someone snoop on your messages will arouse embarrassment and annoyance. But the interception of work and business-related conversations can have consequences. Take a hypothetical example: Mukesh Ambani and his advisers use BlackBerries to discuss issues relating to the purchase of 14 per cent of Eastern India Hotels stock. The real-life transaction was revealed after the stock markets had closed on Monday. The next day, EIH shares rose more than `15 per share. A hypothetical rogue spook could have accessed that information in advance because he had BlackBerry’s encryption code. He could have bought shares that turned him a nice illegal profit.
While your BlackBerry and mine deal with boring and commonplace exchanges, there are people whose information can make a huge difference to someone’s pocketbook or open them to blackmail on a matter that has nothing to do with national security.
It should hardly be a surprise that the edifice of the government’s intrusive powers rests on colonial era statutes. Section 5 (2) of the Telegraph Act of 1885 permits interception or wiretapping—at the time it was telegrams, but later it included telephones. Buttressing this is the secrecy with which this is done, which is based on the Official Secrets Act of 1922 which makes it illegal to transmit any information to any “unauthorised” person.

Authority
Surprisingly, it was only in 1997 that the Union government and the Supreme Court discovered that the Telegraph Act provided no safeguards for the citizens. Based on a petition filed by the PUCL, the apex court concluded that the right to privacy, and for that matter telephonic conversation, was covered by Article 21 of the Constitution and that it could not be curtailed except through the due procedure established by law. The court said that to rule out the arbitrariness inherent in the powers under the Act, some safeguards were needed and so it issued a set of guidelines which it said would operate till the government notified specific rules. In 1999, the government notified new rules to the Telegraph Act which were based on the Supreme Court guidelines. Essentially they provided a framework in which telephone taps would be authorised by the Union and State Home Secretaries and outlined the parameters under which the tapping could be done.
Similar rules were then created for the Information Technology Act of 2000 and notified last year to authorise interception by intelligence agencies and the police of computer-based communications like emails, chats and the like. Here, too, the authorising authority were the Home Secretaries, but it expanded the list by including other officers if the “competent authority” was not available. Indeed, it allowed police officers of Inspector-General rank to authorise taps in case of emergencies or in remote areas.
The authorisation has to be communicated to a review committee, headed by the Union Cabinet Secretary which was to meet once in two months and decide whether each order complied with the Act.
The rules are very clear on the manner in which private companies dealing with communications have to comply with the demands of the government. Rule 17, for example, specifically notes that if a demand is made for a decryption key by the nodal officer of an organisation of SP or ASP rank that has got the authorisation, the key holder will have to disclose the key and provide decryption assistance. Clearly, BlackBerry then will have to agree to the government’s requests because that is the law.
But even while demanding information, the government itself remains opaque. It has refused to provide information on the functioning of the Review Committee on grounds that they are classified under the Official Secrets Act. Instead of sharing information about how the Review Committee functions and thus building public confidence, the government treats its activities as top secret. Clearly, the body is born more out of a need to show that the government is concerned about providing safeguards, rather than actually providing them.

Right
In the US the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires companies to engineer their systems to enable phone, VoIP and broadband tapping — in other words even monitor the internet realtime. But the surveillance must be authorised by a special court whose judges are appointed by the US Supreme Court Chief Justice. US agencies have used other means to snoop on citizens, leading to stiff legal challenges.
Given the real threats India confronts no one will argue that the government should not access private information, if it requires to do so. What we need are more credible guarantees that the information is not collected illegally and that it is not misused in any way. Recall that earlier this year it transpired that the National Technical Research Office had “inadvertently” tapped the phones of some leading politicians.
A guarantee of proper use can only come through the legal system, not the bureaucracy or the police which have been known to crawl, when merely asked to bend, by the government of the day. The functioning of the Central Bureau of Investigation is an obvious case in point.
There is no point in making these unprecedented demands on our privacy in the name of securing our liberties, when civil rights can be trampled
upon easily.
Mail Today September 2, 2010

Hardball in Beijing

My comment on the denial of a visa to a senior Indian general appeared in Mail Today August 28, 2010. For a fuller analysis of the issue look in the blog down below dealing with the Chinese military.

THE CHINESE denial of a visa to Lieutenant- General B. S. Jaswal, may be to quote Churchill, “ a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”. But its message is unambiguous — the Chinese, or at least its People’s Liberation Army ( PLA) wishes to play hardball with India, just as it is doing with the US.

But you can comprehend China’s anger at the US — manifested in Beijing’s refusal to host a pre- arranged visit of US defence secretary Robert Gates in June — as an outcome of a major US arms sale to Taiwan earlier this year.

However, its attitude towards India is inexplicable.

Jaswal, the chief of the northern command, has been denied a visa allegedly because Kashmir is disputed territory, but the chief of our eastern command, then Lt- Gen. V. K. Singh, was granted one for his August 2009 visit to China. The eastern command’s area of responsibility includes the state of Arunachal Pradesh, claimed in its entirety by China. Why would Beijing act on Islamabad’s behalf and not its own ?

New Delhi’s hurt and somewhat puzzled response is that “ We have an important, multifaceted and complex relationship with the Republic of China.” And that “ the visit has not taken place for “ certain reasons”, pleading that “ there must be sensitivity to each other’s concerns”. Actually Gates himself hit the nub of the problem in his reaction in July, when he observed that “ nearly all of the aspects of the relationship between the United States and China are moving forward in a positive direction, with the sole exception of the military- to- military relationship... the PLA is significantly less interested in this relationship than the political leadership of China.”

The problem is to first grasp that the denial of the visa is a PLA decision, not that of the Chinese ministry of foreign affairs. It represents a dangerous loosening of the tight control that the Chinese Communist Party used to exercise over the PLA. This is what has led to a pattern of disturbing developments which have seen Beijing deliberately raise the temperature of China- Indian relations using one pretext or the other in the recent years.

Communist armies, and the PLA was no exception, were run through a dual authority system in which political commissars were attached to all formations at all levels to ensure ideological purity and to keep an eye on the military commanders. The professionalisation and modernisation of the PLA have led to a widening gap between the commissars and the military men in the PLA who are better educated and easily see through the party cant.

The problem goes all the way up to the Military Affairs Commission or the Central Military Commission which runs the PLA. Its earlier bosses ensured the party command over the gun.

Till the Deng Xiaoping era, the political leadership in the CMC and the senior commissars were Long March veterans who had an enormous depth of experience in planning and executing the PLA’s campaigns. But the current leadership beginning with Jiang Zemin and now Hu Jintao lack that experience and as is increasingly apparent, the authority to run the increasingly powerful PLA.

There are options on Jammu & Kashmir, but none of them are easy

"We need to revisit standard operating procedures and crowd control measures to deal with public agitations with non-lethal, yet effective and focused measures. We also cannot have an approach of one size fits all"

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to conference of police chiefs in New Delhi on August 25-26, 2010


THERE are indications that the long, hot summer that Kashmir has witnessed is going to yield results, but not of the kinds you may have hoped for. Omar Abdullah is likely to retain his job, but several other sacrificial goats are being readied— the director general of police, the chief secretary, possibly the director general, Central Reserve Police Force. Some sops could be offered— modifications of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and newer faces in the Abdullah Cabinet. Unfortunately, there is every indication that the impact of these steps will be strictly temporary, and they are unlikely to change what the Union Home Minister described as the new situation on the ground in the Valley.

It has been a time tested technique of parties and prime ministers to change chief ministers so as to alter the momentum of a particular political trend in a state. That is because the CM is like a CEO and his or her impact on local politics and governance is all- encompassing.

Changes of officials, on the other hand, have rarely proved to be efficacious and are unlikely to prove so this time as well.

The new set of officials will face the old set of circumstances, and soon they, too, will look jaded.

Force

We have earlier had occasion to point out that the entirely new political dynamics of the state require two sets of policies— a short term ( 1- 2 year time frame) and a longer term one ( 3- 5 year time frame).

The key short- term policy that needs to be put in place is the creation of a special police force for the Valley which is trained and mentally conditioned to deal with crowds, rather than militants. A word of caution here; it took the Union government several decades of communal riots to establish a special force to deal with it— the Rapid Action Force.

But the crowd control force that Kashmir needs requires an entirely different laundry list of equipment, training and personnel. It is not a matter of equipment alone. After all Tufail Mattoo whose June 11 death reportedly triggered off the current unrest died after being hit by a spent tear- gas shell, a non- lethal munition as such. People can die of pepper gun shots, if hit at close range, and it is a fact that many young boys may have drowned while trying to escape a police charge.

What is critical for the new force is numbers and conditioning. The numbers in every instance of confrontation must be sufficiently large so as to provide the police force with a sense of security as well.

Minus the equaliser of the gun, police personnel need to confront rioters on a oneon- one basis. Many instances of firing that take place are the result of panic by policemen who fear that their post is about to be over- run. Traditionally the CRPF and the paramilitary tend to be used in platoons and companies headed by Deputy and Assistant Commandants. What is needed is a larger unit where the command and control rests at all times with a more senior officer of the commandant rank.

The second is mental conditioning. This has two elements. First, an understanding that prolonged exposure to hostile crowds does generate enormous stress and that the personnel need to be trained to react in a disciplined and purposeful way each and every time. To do this, their commanders need to ensure that their forces are well- led and get sufficient rest and recreation so as to unwind from their arduous duties. This, again, underscores the need for numbers.

Since such a force does not exist, the Union Home Ministry and the Kashmir state government would be advised to begin establishing one right away. This is a short- term measure that may pay dividends next summer if acted upon now.

But you dither now, you face more of the same next year as well, and soon it will become a competition as to who breaks down first— the young stone pelters, or the police personnel.

It is axiomatic that only if the law and order situation improves can the other measures relating to jobs and gainful employment be implemented. In the present situation of prolonged disruption of normal life, even existing employment opportunities are endangered. There must be thousands of people— shop assistants, people working in the tourist and service sectors who are out of gainful employment.

The only people who get a salary in all circumstances are government servants.

It is simply not feasible or desirable to make all Kashmiris into babus.

The longer term measures, too, are contingent on first managing the runaway law and order problem of the state. With Indian authority visibly wilting, why should any Kashmiri party want to get involved in a dialogue with India? As for the fire- eaters in the Valley, the only discussion that is possible is one relating to the modalities of the Indian exit from Kashmir.

Responsibility

It is important, therefore, for the Indian state to show much more resolve than it has been able to muster till now. The reason for their irresolution is that they are essentially good men and they are rightly unnerved at the prospect of fighting the young Kashmiris armed with stones with gun- toting paramilitary personnel.

Lacking the appropriate instrumentalities in the form of a special riot police force, they are wandering around like headless sheep asking each other what to do.

Even so, whatever the separatists may say or feel, India has a historical and legal responsibility for Jammu & Kashmir that came through the Instrument of Accession in 1947. You may sneer at the reference to a document signed on by a Maharaja, but then the legal status of both India and Pakistan rests on an act of an imperial Parliament. You cannot cherry- pick history, it comes as a whole.

In this day and age, it must be clear that India cannot hold Kashmir indefinitely against the will of its people. The problem has been in determining that will.

People

There are many who will point to the various elections held in the Valley, the long periods of peace, or to the efforts to subvert the will through violence, electoral fraud and intimidation. Impartial polls show that not many in the state favour Pakistan. In fact, probably more favour remaining with India. But a significant number prefer to be independent.

At this point in time of heightened emotions and in the continuing presence of several hundred armed militants, it would not be possible to impartially determine what the people want, or to even give them what they want. Indeed, it is not possible to see Kashmir’s future today without reference to what is happening in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The war in Kashmir is not just about independence or separation from India. There is also an insidious culture war that is seeking to transform the state into another outpost of the global Islamic Emirate. If Indians walk away now, Kashmir will not become paradise. Indeed, there is every prospect that the Masrat Alams and Asiya Andrabis would make it hell on earth.

Just because they have chosen to stay in the background for the moment, don’t forget that the Lashkar- e- Tayyeba and the other domestic jihadis like the Hizbul Mujahideen and the Jamiat ul Mujahideen are very much there. And across the border there are tens of thousands more, ready to liberate Kashmir from whatever it means to be Kashmiri.

This appeared in Mail Today August 26, 2010

Forget the Chinese economy, worry about its military

The report that China’s economy is set to overtake Japan this year shows that the Chinese growth miracle is for real, and that its rise continues unabated. Now only the United States remains ahead and even that, too, may change by 2030, if not earlier. You do not have to be a determinist to believe that there will be strategic consequences to this unparalleled economic growth. But where China’s economic growth has been welcomed around the world, the same cannot be said of the concomitant growth of its military power.
The reason why people welcome Chinese economic growth is that it has spread prosperity around the world, and takes place in a relatively open environment. But Chinese military decision-making is opaque and there is little explanation as to why China is putting on military muscle at the rate that it is. It is a well-rounded nuclear weapons power and it is unlikely if it can be blackmailed or coerced by anyone, including the United States.

Disputes
You do not have to go by the Pentagon’s selective China’s Military Power document issued on Tuesday, to believe that China could become a threat. Last month, at an ASEAN symposium in Hanoi, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that a peaceful resolution of competing sovereignty claims in the South China Sea was in the US “national interest” and that “The U.S. supports a collaborative diplomatic process by all claimants for resolving the various territorial disputes without coercion,” and that the US opposed “the use or threat of force by any claimant.”

Chief of General Staff of the PLA Chen Bingde who is also a member of the Military Affairs or Central Military Commission

It was clear who she was talking about. The People’s Republic of China has some extraordinary territorial claims in the region. It has claimed a maritime border on the South China Sea, south of Vietnam, lapping the shores of Malaysia and the Philippines. It is almost the equivalent of India claiming the Seychelles and the Maldives and the waters around them.
A 2002 ASEAN-China code of conduct commits them to resolve the issue through negotiations. But this March, the Chinese upped the ante by declaring that South China Sea had become part of China’s “core interests” akin to Tibet and Taiwan. This unilateral declaration has led to Vietnam-led efforts to get the US to stand up for the ASEAN countries.
The Chinese reaction to Ms Clinton was over the top. Foreign Minister Yang Jichei declared that the US was needlessly internationalising the issue and creating tensions. At the end of the month, no less than two members of the all-powerful Central Military Commission, PLA Chief of General Staff Chen Bingde and naval commander Wu Shengli, landed up to personally supervise a massive military exercise in the South China Sea.
Last September, Clinton’s deputy James Steinberg, had raised the notion of a pact of “strategic reassurance” between the US and China through which the US would welcome the rise of China, provided Beijing reassured its neighbours and the world that it would not threaten them.
The tart Chinese response had been that if any country needed “strategic reassurance” from the US, it was China. Early this year, the US indicated that it was not buying any of this and over Beijing’s strenuous objections, President Obama notified China of a $6 billion arms sale to Taiwan. The new American maneuver in the South China Sea has China worried. Beijing’s claim that India is the only country with which it has an unresolved border dispute does not ring true when you realise that it disputes its maritime border with all its neighbours— Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam.
Earlier this month, American fleets, led by the US supercarrier George Washington exercised with regional navies in the Yellow and the South China seas raising Beijing’s ire. More significant was the American entente with its great foe of the past, Vietnam. Not only did the Vietnam Navy exercise with the Americans, but the George Washington visited Da Nang and, more significant, the two countries announced that they had arrived at a nuclear deal. As in the case of India, such a deal is a strategic signal, and it has been noted so in Beijing.

Leadership
The issue for China’s interlocutors and neighbours is not so much its massive economic growth or its transformation. It is in the nature of the Chinese polity. For the past 60 years and more this has been dominated by the Communist Party. It was manifested in practical terms in a unique relationship between the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party.
Leaders of the party served as political commissars in the armed forces, and in turn, top military figures were important members of the policy-making apparatus such as the Central Committee, State Council and the Politburo. The acme of this relationship was the Military Affairs Commission or the Central Military Commission, a body which is in its own way as powerful as the Politburo. In reforming the body in 1982, Deng Xiaoping sought to keep the military under the authority of the party.
But where in the past top party and military officials mingled to take the key decisions relating to China, today we have a body that is overwhelmingly military. After the passing of Deng, there has been no top civilian leader of the country who has extensive military experience. Hu Jintao, who, like his predecessor, has no military experience is, in fact, the only politburo member in the CMC.
In this sense, the party’s control over the armed forces has loosened. The military reforms have removed the PLA from its erstwhile business interests. They have been given large budgets and professionalised, but they no longer function in the tight political control of the party. The downgrading of political people who guided the armed forces is probably what has led to a more militaristic posture that we often see in relation to China.

India
What does all this mean for a country like India? The increased dominance of the military over the political in decision-making is never a happy sign. Given our long-standing border dispute and uneasy relations, it does not bode well. It is no secret that the Chinese are dramatically improving their infrastructure in Tibet. Besides roads and railways, there are a slew of new airfields. On the other hand, there are increasing reports that resistance to Chinese authority is actually growing. This could generate tensions on the Indo-Tibet border in the future.
There has been some alarm about reports of Chinese placing missiles on the Tibetan plateau aimed at India. The fact is that prior to India’s nuclear tests, the Chinese did not consider India as a strategic threat. But now that we have ourselves broadcast our capabilities vis-à-vis China, they are reacting.
But India, like Vietnam, is a difficult customer and the Chinese will handle both with sophistication, rather than through just threat and bluster. In the case of India, besides Pakistan, China has the advantage of good relations with all our neighbours. The most recent entrant into the “all weather friendship club” is Sri Lanka, where China is the biggest aid donor and military weapons supplier.
In terms of economic growth, military power and size, India is the only Asian country that can match China. Many Asian countries look to New Delhi as a hedge against Beijing. India is not seen as threatening by any country other than Pakistan. But New Delhi’s internal obsessions act as a self-limiting factor. As it is, India continues to live by God’s grace rather than efficient governance and sound neighbourhood diplomacy.
This appeared in Mail Today August 19 2010

The question of expertise

There is a ship floundering off India’s premier port, Mumbai. Its containers allegedly packed with petroleum products and perhaps pesticides, are spilling over into the sea and washing up ashore. Yet, the port seems to have no expertise in handling the accident. A Dutch company has been hired post-haste to deal with the problem. And what of the Coast Guard which has often displayed numerous exercises on how to manage oil spills? No one knows what it is up to.


India is set to jump into the company of the leading powers of the world. The presence of half a billion poor is supposedly offset by a 200 million strong middle class, allegedly as good as any in the world. But a little bit of introspection will reveal that the country seriously lacks all round abilities and expertise in a range of areas that are required for the functioning of a modern and sophisticated society.

Command
We have often witnessed the folly of self-proclaimed expertise of our Defence Research and Development Organisation or the Department of Atomic Energy. But there are a host of other areas where the gaps exist. On Tuesday there was an item in a leading newspaper about the serious lack of vascular surgeons in India. According to the report, Orissa, MP, Bihar and Manipur have no vascular surgeons at all, neither does any government-run hospital in New Delhi. This country, that exports doctors to half the world, has a serious shortage of expertise in an area that would help tens of thousands of people who, because of diabetes or accident-related injuries, lose their limbs.
A corollary of the problem is the inability to manage large projects— to mobilise a large number of human and marshal resources towards a particular objective. For obvious reasons, this ability is often most manifest in war. So its shortcomings have been visible India. Lt Gen Harbaksh Singh who commanded the western army in the Indo-Pak war of 1965 termed its outcome as “a sickening catalogue of command failures.” While in smaller units Indians fought superbly— witness the Poona Horse in Phillaurah— larger units failed to gel. The Kargil mini-war was a big success precisely because it was won by a huge amount of bravery and the tactical skill of our small unit commanders.
The experience of executing the allied invasion of Europe in June 1944 or fighting the battle of Stalingrad came after a lot of blood and tears, but it did. No one would want such circumstances to build expertise, but successful generals do require leadership and managerial skills which, in turn, come from societies which understand the need for them.
Is it any surprise that the Commonwealth Games is such a shambles? There is, for one thing, no one commander. An essential element in the management of large projects, or a battle, is a clear line of command and, of course, accountability. Here we have the Organising Committee Chairman Suresh Kalmadi telling us that he was not in charge of procurement or of the construction of the stadia. And of course he was not in charge of the civic works. But who was? Was it the CPWD run by the Union government, the Union Ministry of Sports, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the NDMC or the Delhi government?
Not surprisingly, the same lack of clear cut lines of authority mark the management of most of our cities which are, predictably, in a mess. There are mayors with no power, and a chief minister (Sheila Dikshit) who is not in charge of law and order or of all the land use of the state she is elected to run.
It is not as if Indians inherently lack expertise. There is an enormous amount of ability in the self-effacing men who run our space programme so well. The ONGC, NTPC and many public sector companies have skills in abundance. The expertise that E. Sreedharan has marshaled for the Konkan Railway and Delhi Metro projects is too evident to recount. There is no dearth of expertise and managerial skills in our private sector, for example, in running airlines, hotels and information technology companies.

Control
In part, the expertise comes from within a well-rounded society. Ours which is so cursed by chronic poverty, with such large patches of illiteracy and so riven by caste is bound to have a problem. Reading a book on the British use of deception in World Wars I and II, it struck me that the British expertise in camouflage came from its schools of design and arts, and that the top cryptanalysts that they fielded and who made a key contribution in winning the war came from Cambridge and Oxford. In other words, civil society provided the crucial ingredient that was then melded into the war effort of these societies.
By contrast, a great deal of expertise and abilities in India are confined to the government system. Whether it is agriculture, food storage, universities, airlines, broadcasting, healthcare, the stifling hand of government limits them all. It is difficult to find an expert who can independently and intelligently comment on not just high falutin’ issues like nuclear power or submarines, but simple things like environment and town planning.
Clearly, the one message that we get from this is not only the need for the development of our universities and civil society institutions, but their existence as truly autonomous institutions.

Generalists
The big problem is the way we are administered. No matter what reforms the government claims to have carried out, it still depends on a generalist administrative cadre. A sophisticated society has public administration specialists, professional managers, hospital and education administrators, works engineers and so on. They do not have a general fit-all cadre of bureaucrats who manage an army one day, an airline the next, and a broadcast network the day after, because it is not humanly possible for a person to have the high level of specialisation to manage institutions in such varied fields.
But the old order has the country in a tight grip, whether it is health policy management, education, airlines or the military, all suffer from the lack of managers who can deliver results. The sad part is that the failure of the IAS-oriented administration system is visible in the condition of public health, education, agriculture and general administration in the country, but no political leader has had the time to bell the cat and set things right.
This said, we need to enter a caveat. We must be wary of fetishising expertise. Indeed, the last five years have shown us how on the advice of highly acclaimed experts and officials, the US made war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has succeeded in making a mess of both.
The failure of economic and finance experts is even more manifest, especially since among their number are Nobel laureates who shaped theories that led to the collapse of the world economy in 2008.
But the country does need to advance in a well-rounded fashion. And this means the development, and celebration, of expertise, or, if you want to put it another way, high-end abilities, in a range of areas— project management, environmental engineering, medicine, public administration, military, agriculture and food policy management. Without this, you can convince yourself that you are world class, but you will not convince anyone else.
This appeared in Mail Today August 11, 2010