BREAK THE TOXIC CHINA-PAKISTAN CONNECTION

 

THE talks between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Hu Jintao at the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Sanya, in China, has led to yet another step— albeit incremental— to restore some kind of normality to Sino- Indian ties which have been buffeted by controversy in the last three years.

The problem, to be fair, was not the fault of one or the other side. Beijing’s calculated go- slow on the dialogue between the Special Representatives was to signal its unhappiness with the growing proximity of India to the US. This was sought to be countered by India through a media driven campaign to paint China as an aggressor on the Sino- Indian border. Events in Tibet on the eve of the 2008 Olympics compounded the problem.

The Chinese then escalated matters by stapling visas to Indian passport holders who were residents of Kashmir, signaling a shift in its Kashmir stance. When this, in August 2010, included the then chief of the Army’s Northern Command, Lt Gen B. S. Jaswal, India terminated military- to- military exchanges.

 

Sino- Pak

The Wen Jiabao visit in December and the meeting with Hu have clearly reversed the slide. As is its wont, China won’t announce that it has ended the stapled visa regime, but they will revert to the regular visas henceforth. India will send a military delegation to visit China, and will include a representative of the Northern Command. Just when the special representative level talks will press on from the high- point of 2005 is difficult to predict, as is the immediate future of Sino- Indian rapprochement.

The reason is that some of the underlying causes for the estrangement remain.

One instance of this is the media- driven effort to derail Sino- Indian relations. Early this month, a TV channel known for its steroid- driven approach to news, came up with what appeared, at first sight, to be a sensational report claiming that Chinese troops were deployed alongside the Pakistanis along the Line of Control in Kashmir.

The news package, complete with stock footage of massed tanks, missiles and marching soldiers, was clearly designed to scare. The hidden subtext of the programme was the growing danger to India of a two- front war.

A closer scrutiny revealed that the report was based on a speech made by Lt Gen K. T. Parnaik, the new Northern Army commander, at a media seminar that had taken place in Jammu some nine days previously.

At least two on- the- spot media reports merely have the general talking of Sino-Pak cooperation emerging as a possible future threat to the country. Referring to Chinese road and bridge building activity in Gilgit and Baltistan, the general said that the developments could “ jeopardise our geostrategical interests in the long run and pose great military challenges not only along the Sino- Indian border but also along the Line of Control for us.” All quite kosher stuff, the kind of things generals are paid to think about, and, note, that the danger was talked of in the future tense.

So alarming has been the effort by some media groups to promote bad blood between India and China that last December, at the end of his three- day visit to India Wen Jiabao complained that despite the fact that not a shot had been fired on the Sino- Indian border for a long time, “ the boundary question has been repeatedly sensationalised by the [ Indian] media…” 

China’s close military relationship with Pakistan is no secret. Neither is the fact that there are hundreds of Chinese personnel in the region participating in some 30 odd projects in the Azad Kashmir- Northern Areas region of Kashmir. But any talk of the Sino- Pak nexus must also take into account the fact that the Karakoram highway linking the two countries is virtually dysfunctional, with some 24 km of it under a lake formed by last year’s floods and landslides. Indeed, many Chinese personnel are involved in rebuilding this road.

Options 

We can, of course, make a fundamental objection to the presence of all Chinese personnel in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir based on our claim over the entire state.

But India has not formally taken that view.

Instead, the criticism has come via what appear to be clearly inspired efforts to heighten Sino- Indian tensions through the media. This is a dangerous game and has, alarmingly, been played once earlier in 1959- 1962 when a belligerent Indian media pushed an unprepared Indian Army into a disastrous war with China.

Those who see some sinister design in the Chinese presence in Pakistan, or parts of territory claimed by India are missing the wood for the trees. Improving Pakistan’s infrastructure or helping maintain it, is the least pernicious nature of the Pakistan- China link.

By providing nuclear weapons and missiles to Pakistan, China has already done far greater harm to Indian security than it can now do in any other way. As the record shows, the Chinese did not merely facilitate Pakistan’s nuclear programme, they actually gifted a weapon design to them, and tested that weapon at their own range in 1990. Since then it has provided Islamabad ballistic missiles, and more recently, cruise missiles to carry these weapons.

India can shout this from the rooftops and denounce China with all its might and main.

But that is unlikely to get us anywhere. We can, of course, contemplate war to redress our wrongs, but no matter what our chicken hawks may say, that would be an act of lunacy. India could alternatively ally itself to a big power like the US to settle scores with China. The US may pull Pakistan’s chestnuts out of the fire, but it is unlikely to oblige India. We could well end up pulling America’s chestnuts out of the fire.

Strategy

If you look at the current situation, it would appear that Indian policy feels compelled to move on two ruts called Pakistan and China. Those who advocate unrelenting hostility to Pakistan and China are actually trying to take us deeper into those ruts.

Any Indian grand strategy must have as its principal aim the need to weaken the links between our two inimical neighbours.

How you do it is not the issue. Because if you can’t you will lose the game. This strategy has to yield a policy that makes better ties— rather than hostility with New Delhi— the preferred option in Beijing and Islamabad.

India has managed to establish a mutually beneficial economic relationship with China. It now needs to shape the ties in such a way that Beijing is made conscious of the cost of alienating New Delhi.

Pakistan is a more complex problem. For the present, the Pakistani deep state comprising the Army and hard- line religious fundamentalists have the upper hand.

Broadly, Manmohan Singh’s policy of persisting with what seems to be a Sisyphean effort to normalise ties with Pakistan is a better option than adopting a hostile posture towards it. Carefully planned and executed engagement, at least points to a way out instead of remaining mired at a dead end.

The irony is that those who are warning about the dangers of a two- front war are doing everything to make that a reality.

Instead, they ought to be educating us about a viable strategy of delinking the China- Pakistan connection— our key strategic headache— one that will define our geostrategic footprint in our region and Asia.

India may be right to demonise China and denounce the sinister nature of the Sino- Pakistan relationship, but unrelentingly hostile rhetoric cannot substitute for a viable strategy that will ensure a peaceful neighbourhood, in which India can race against time to use its demographic dividend to eliminate poverty, and become a developed country.

Mail Today April 15, 2011

Nuclear power plans must face Fukushima fallout

On the evening of March 26       lights in Rashtrapati Bhavan and some houses in South Delhi were dimmed between 8.30 and 9.30 pm.  They were observing Earth Hour, an event organised by the World Wildlife Fund which sees millions of households and noted landmarks like the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Sydney Opera House and India Gate in New Delhi turning off their lights for an hour. Living as many do, in a privileged enclave of the national capital, they were perhaps unaware of the irony of their action.
Large parts of India, indeed many of its urban centres as well, observe endless “earth hours” every day. Their gesture would probably have been better appreciated if they had taken a pledge to turn off their lights for an hour or two every day, so that they could share the misery of the hundreds of millions in this country who do not know what 24x7 electricity supply means.




Our worries could well increase a great deal more now in the wake of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Nuclear power constitutes just about 3 per cent of all the electricity produced in the country today. But it has an important place in the plans for the coming decades. India’s hopes of meeting the huge demand of electricity from 2030 and beyond, with the least possible carbon emissions, rest on its civil nuclear programme.
 
Projections
That India is short of electricity today is hardly a secret, though many living in privileged city areas are often unaware of the extent to which their fellow citizens are deprived. In 2005, India’s electricity consumption per capita was a mere 480.5 kWh as compared to 1780 of China and 2013 of Brazil and 13,635 of the US.
India’s future growth depends on its ability to overcome this problem. Admittedly, we are not doing too well. The latest central electricity authority figures show that in the year 2010-11, we set a target of around 21,441MW, but achieved a little less than half that figure. Not surprisingly, of the three sectors—hydro, thermal and nuclear— the last named was the most disappointing, achieving only 18 per cent of the target set.
The government has undertaken several  reforms to promote higher electricity generation and better distribution. Plans are afoot to give a boost to the moribund coal mining sector and even grander policy measures are in place to enable nuclear energy to be produced. But the recent Fukushima accident has put a crimp on some of the more ambitious aspects of these plans.
A 2006 Planning Commission Report of the Expert Committee on Integrated Energy Policy chaired by Kirit Parikh said that to maintain an 8 per cent rate of growth— as well as a regime of the least possible carbon emissions and a maximisation of all the renewable sources of energy— we would still require a mix where coal and oil are the mainstays in 2031-32. But the other sources like nuclear and hydro would be vital to prevent shortfalls and the requirements of meeting our commitments to the low carbon emission regime.
It is possible to forgo the nuclear component in this mix, but the balance would have to be made up with more oil, natural gas or coal. The Parikh committee’s “coal-dependent” scenario projects the requirement increasing from 406 million tonnes in 2004-5 to 2,555 million tonnes in 2031-2. India has abundant coal, but it is of poor quality and as it is, more than 50 per cent of the traffic on the Indian Railways today is in ferrying coal. Of this one third is nothing but dirt, since Indian coal is not of good quality and most of it is not washed in the collieries. Carrying five times more coal would probably mean handing over our entire railway system for the exclusive carriage of coal.
Actually what it would more likely mean is that we sharply increase our import of coal, thus making us dependent on imports for yet another element of our energy matrix. Then, of course, is the issue of enhancing port capacity as well as transportation links. And, this is for an 8 per cent growth scenario. If we want double digit growth, you would have to rework the math.
It would be difficult, therefore, for India to say goodbye to nuclear power. Beggars, they say, cannot quite be choosers. Even so, given our relatively small nuclear power programme and great ambitions, this is the best time to confront the issues that have been raised by the Fukushima disaster.
 
Transparency
Sadly, the debate on the dangers of nuclear energy has been limited. One protagonist, a former member of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, has taken the occasion to ride his hobby horse—the criticism of the proposal to import light water reactors. Instead of using his supposed expertise—the safety of Indian nuclear plants—to tell us whether or not the Indian nuclear power reactor operation is safe— and will be so even when the fast breeder reactor comes into stream—he has been inveighing against foreign nuclear technology and giving a clean chit to the existing reactors being run by the Department of Atomic Energy.
He is missing the wood for the trees. Each reactor type imported will have to meet the type certification which will be done by the AERB. So, he should tell us whether or not  the AERB is up to the job, and if not, how the government could strengthen the regulatory system so that it can be so.
The Prime Minister has ordered a review of the systems, but the Department of Atomic Energy has, unfortunately, a poor record on the subject. It has used its “holy cow” status to deny information on nuclear “events” that ought to have been available for the asking. Post-Fukushima, there is need for the government to come up with a far more credible regulatory regime than the one that exists.
 
Alternatives
There is need here for systems and structures which are transparent and rigorous.  There should be nothing secret about the working of a power reactor. Everything about its operation, the status of spent fuel, the levels of radiation in key areas around the plant etc. should be in the public domain, preferably on a real time basis.
In addition to the review of the regulatory mechanism, there is need to revisit the “holy” three-stage nuclear programme of the DAE as well. The country has been told how much the DAE has achieved and how great its fast-breeder technology is, but no one has told us about its potential hazards, which are possibly greater than those of the existing power reactors, to go by the experience of Japan and France. Danger by itself need not deter us, provided we have a clear idea as to what they are, and what the nuclear establishment plans to do about them.
This is a good time, too, to look at the alternatives to fast breeder reactors. As the Parikh report has suggested, the import of light water reactors was seen as a hedge against the failure or delays in the fast breeder and thorium reactor programmes. There is, for example, the pebble bed reactor, a programme which the Germans and South Africans developed, and which the Chinese have adopted in a big way, which can utilise our abundant thorium resources without the dangers associated with fast-breeder reactors.
Fukushima has made it clear that we do need to have far better reassurance on the safety of Indian power plants—firstly of those functioning right now, as well as those that will come in the future.  This is not something we should take at one or the other person’s words. What is needed is a strong institutional response, not the high decibel opinion of one individual. 
Mail Today April 7, 2011

India's dodgy stand on the Libyan crisis

The Indian response to the  events in Libya has been craven and cynical. Just how craven is evident from the manner in which External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna rushed to condemn the coalition air strikes on Libya, even though by choosing to abstain on a crucial UN Security Council vote, New Delhi ensured that the action would take place. And just how cynical our polity’s response has been is manifested by the discussion in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday where all parties condemned the bombing. The fact that Mulayam Singh Yadav kicked off the discussion points to its true nature— the search for the Muslim vote.
After standing on the sidelines at the UN Security Council discussions and then shedding crocodile tears over the developments in Libya, India is displaying its tendency to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, a trait so painfully apparent in the triangular dealings between India, US and Iran, as revealed by Wikileaks.
 
Resolution
But why blame India? The Arab League called for the action and two of the key African nations—South Africa and Nigeria—along with Gabon, voted for the resolution along with the principal western countries, minus Germany. Had India and, say, Brazil, actually opposed the resolution, it would have failed, as it would have if either Russia or China had voted against it.
The language of the UN Security Council Resolution 1973 (UNSC 1973) mandating “all necessary measures” to protect Libyan civilians and the establishment of a no fly zone (NFZ) over the country, is as clear as it could be. The resolution was not passed in a hurry, but after extensive consultations and discussions.
All the diplomats there would have  known what a “no fly zone” meant. The one over southern Iraq in 1991-2003  involved attacks on any active air defence sites. Had Colonel Gadhafi immediately acknowledged UNSC 1973 on March 17 and indicated his compliance by grounding his air force and switching off his air defence radars, it would have been difficult to justify the attack that was launched three days later on March 20th. But the Colonel denounced the resolution and this meant that to implement the NFZ, it would be necessary to take out his air defence network.




Libya operates—to be precise operated—an extensive air defence network based on Soviet-era surface-to-air missiles (SAM) and fighter aircraft to protect its cities and oil installations along the Mediterranean coast. The coalition cruise missile attacks were clearly aimed at eliminating these. Of these, the SA-5 with a range of 250 kms and the Mig-25 fighters were particularly dangerous.
Two contrary pulls have marked the debate on Libya. One relates to the sanctity of the state, as underwritten by the Westphalian state system. The other is the right, sanctified in practice, if not international law, to revolt against tyranny. What is happening in Libya is not some western conspiracy. It arose out of the way in which Colonel Gadhafi sought to crush the rebellion in the state he had ruled with an iron hand for 40 years. Indeed as Gadhafi’s tank column neared Benghazi, the Colonel appeared on TV to declare that he would punish the “traitors” and “show no mercy” to them. Just what that would have implied was apparent from the use of tanks and aircraft in the process.
Clearly—as the discussions and the eventual vote in the UN Security Council reveal— there was consensus that something needed to be done to stop Colonel Gadhafi. No one opposed the NFZ, though India and China wanted the situation to be studied a bit more. But with Benghazi already under artillery bombardment, there was need for action, rather than discussion.
The world does have important and legitimate concerns over the action, though it seems strange that they did not figure in the discussions. First, for example, UNSC 1973 has not set any time-frame for the measures that it has mandated; second, we do not have a clear idea of what end state the world community seeks to achieve.
 
Intervention
The NFZ in Iraq did not solve the problem there; indeed, it set the stage for the subsequent war whose consequences we still witness. The attacks on Libyan missile sites and airfields was necessary to create the conditions for a no fly zone, but of what category were the attacks on Libyan tanks on the outskirts of Benghazi? And what are we to make of  Obama’s press conference statement in Santiago, Chile that “It is U.S. policy that Qaddafi needs to go”?
We can speculate that the western intervention arose out of its belief that the uprising represented democratic impulses, as in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, and therefore there was a need to support it. But there are some who argue that the rebellion was born out of the  long-standing tribal divisions in the country and that the eventual outcome of the present policy could be the division of the country along those lines.
In the last fifty or so years the world has witnessed many armed interventions. Most have been motivated by national interests and many minus the sanction of the United Nations. In this way, the US intervened in Vietnam in the 1960s and Iraq in 2003, India in East Pakistan in 1971 and Maldives in 1988, the Soviet Union in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979.
The list of interventions that did not take place is even more graphic. Between 1975 and 1978, the Khmer Rouge was allowed to carry on a genocide of the Cambodians and the Vietnamese invasion which overthrew the regime was opposed by China and the western nations. No one intervened in the massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, or the systematic killing of Bosnian Muslims in the mid-1990s.
More recently, people have pointed out that while the UNSC has authorised action in Libya, it remains silent on Bahrain and Yemen, both well-known American allies.

Responsibility
Like it or not, we cannot avoid intervening in the affairs of others. Should the world stand by when rulers decide to punish their own populace, or, as in Rwanda, Cambodia and erstwhile Yugoslavia, wipe out entire groups of people because of their ethnicity or religion?
Obviously we need rules to undertake such ventures. Despite the flaws in UNSC 1973, it is based on international law which  is admittedly imperfect. Even so, countries who are now wailing, that they did not realise what an NFZ would imply are lying.
President Obama’s behaviour has not been particularly courageous on Libya; his travails in Iraq and Afghanistan probably explain this. But he did have a point when he told our Parliament last year that it was “unacceptable to gun down peaceful protestors and incarcerate political prisoners decade after decade” and that national sovereignty could not be used as a shield for this.
In the same speech he had also bluntly pointed out that “in international fora, India has often avoided these issues.” In abstaining on the UN vote on Libya and fudging its stand the way it is doing, New Delhi’s response has, sadly, been par for the course.
Mail Today March 24, 2011

India must heed the lesson of Japan's nuclear disaster

The great Tohoku earthquake and the consequent 
tsunami has not just shifted the earth off its axis, it has also given a hard knock to the prevailing paradigm about nuclear power being the energy source of the future. Whether or not it is a fatal knock remains to be seen, as the disaster that has hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan plays itself out. As of the writing, Japanese workers continue to battle heroically to avert a wider nuclear catastrophe which could result in a large number of casualties.
An event of this magnitude has had predictable global consequences. The powerful and vocal anti-nuclear power community has pounced on the developments to revive a movement that had flagged in the face of the demands for clean energy in the era of global warming. Nuclear power votaries and personnel involved in the industry rose equally quickly to the defence of “their” technology. Both sides have valid arguments, and it would be hubristic to believe that the event was a one of kind and has  limited lessons. What it has done is to question our prevailing assumptions about the nature of natural disasters. 



The great Tohoku earthquake was  the fifth largest since 1900, and it has been 1200 years since an earthquake of this magnitude has hit that plate boundary, unleashing a tsunami which sent waves higher than ten metres crashing onto north-eastern Honshu, Japan’s main island.
It upended the contemporary knowledge about the scale of earthquakes and tsunamis that Japan had been used to in modern history.  Japan, of course, implements a strict building code for construction in the country which faces many major and minor earthquakes every year.  
 
Guidelines
Nuclear power has had its critics since its very inception. They have pointed to the inherent dangers of nuclear power technology. For strategic reasons, primarily the fact that it lacked any oil, Japan decided that nuclear energy would form an important part of its energy mix.  Japan has 52 operational power plants and three under construction, as many as fourteen of these are in the region facing the earthquake and tsunami. The Fukushima Daiichi plant has six reactors of which four are in serious trouble. The Fukushima Daini plant and the Onagawa plant with three reactors which face the region of the earthquake, did shut down and, in the case of the Daini plant, the cooling was temporarily halted, but soon resumed.
Everywhere in the world,  the design, construction and operation of nuclear power plants takes place in a tough regulatory environment. In Japan, because of the high seismicity of many parts of the country and its environs, the regulations have been that much more stringent.
Most nuclear power plants, including the Japanese, are designed to handle major earthquakes and shut down safely automatically. While nuclear plants near Kobe were not affected by the 1995 earthquake, in subsequent years earthquakes did result in several power plants shutting down. The reactors were originally designed to withstand earthquakes of the intensity of 6.7 on the Richter scale, assuming that the earthquake took place directly underneath the reactor. The event would result in an automatic shutdown of the reactor, maintenance of its cooling and its subsequent startup. After the 7.2 magnitude Kobe earthquake, the safety figure was revised upward to  7.75.
In the past decade, the Japanese nuclear safety agencies have revised even these guidelines and put in place newer parameters based on ground motion, rather than the earthquake intensity, and power companies upgraded their safety features  to meet the requirements.
The problem, however, was not an earthquake or a tsunami, but a combination of the two. While the earthquake did result in the planned shutdown of the four operational Fukushima reactors, the resulting tsunami really created the problem. It swamped the plant’s electrical machinery and the pumps used to keep the reactor cool failed. The backup generators, too, packed up and the limited battery backup was insufficient to meet the enormous requirements for cooling the fuel rods.
 
Hubris
The Indian nuclear establishment has reacted to the dismal news from Japan with alacrity, but the past record of obfuscations and secrecy makes the Department of Atomic Energy’s statements on the subject suspect.
As for the critics, they have used the event to buttress their case against nuclear power. There are a number of ongoing agitations against nuclear power  plants in India. Anti-nuclear power votaries, some of who make a living from their activism, are in the forefront, but in most cases the real momentum for the agitations come from farmers upset over the loss of livelihood from land that the government has taken over, or plans to take over. Some of the critics seem more eager to refight their battles against the Indo-US nuclear deal, rather than deal with the specific issue confronting us.
And that issue is: Can India do without nuclear power ? Given the overall shortage of power in the country, it cannot. It may not want to rely on nuclear power for all its energy, but it certainly needs nuclear power sources to meet the enormous demands that it confronts in the coming decades. DAE officials have been arguing that India does not have the same kind of seismicity that Japan has, and is unlikely to face an earthquake of the intensity that it has last Saturday.
True, but neither had the country heard about a tsunami till the 2004 event. Though that tsunami was not at the scale of the one that hit Japan last week, it was powerful enough to take tens of thousands of lives in India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Thailand. It also led to a shut-down of the Kalpakkam nuclear power plant. What would a ten-meter tsunami have done?
In all fairness, nuclear power alone is not threatened by earthquakes. Big dams, too, can be destroyed by a temblor.  We have several large dams such as the ones in Bhakra and Tehri whose destruction could result in a massive loss of life and property comparable to a nuclear disaster. But unlike a nuclear event which can contaminate a region for hundreds of years, the ecology will easily recover from a burst dam.
 
Response
What the country needs is to look at the Japanese experience with a cool head and a sharp eye. An event like the great Tohoku earthquake and the ensuing nuclear accidents demand a thorough review of the safety features of existing and planned power plants in the country. The prime minister has promised as much.
But he should also insist on establishing a truly independent regulatory body that would look into matters of siting nuclear power plants and  validating their designs. Such a body should be structured for credibility with the people, rather than comfort with the government.
We should also explore other advanced nuclear technologies where accidents  will not lead to long-term catastrophes. The Generation IV reactor initiative has several projects with safer and more proliferation resistant reactors. While many of these are still in the future,  the so-called pebble-bed reactor is a technology which has been around us for a while and which deserves serious consideration. A 300 MW reactor based on the technology was constructed in Germany, but later dismantled because of political opposition.
Governments and regulatory bodies cannot cater for every possible eventuality. After all a significant asteroid strike can bring a disaster of enormous magnitude and there is little that can be done to prevent it. Human beings have not achieved what they have by taking a neurotic approach to life, the Japan event has confronted us with a situation, and we must react to it in a prudent and mature fashion.
Mail Today March 17, 2011

Disarm the criminals, or arm the people to fight them

The proliferation of guns--licensed or otherwise-- poses risks for all

The death, on Tuesday, of Radhika Tanwar at the hands of a stalker is heart-rending. A young life has been snuffed out for no fault of her own. A cowardly killer used the easiest method to kill her —shot the unsuspecting victim at close range with a country-made pistol and walked away. On Wednesday, a gun was used to shoot a couple and injure them grievously. Almost every other day  a murder is committed with the use of a gun. It takes something to bludgeon or knife a person to death, pressing the trigger of pistol is much easier. The state has done little or nothing to make it difficult to get one and so,  for the homicidally inclined, the gun has become the weapon of choice.
 
History
Guns were not always so easily available. In the 1960s when the Maoists decided to take on the Indian state in Naxalbari, in West Bengal, the  only firearms they could muster were some  12 bore guns and hunting rifles looted from tea estates. In fact many of the Naxalites used pipe-guns made of ordinary water pipes.
Chambal had its dacoits and Mumbai  its gangsters, but the easy availability of guns in northern India is a relatively recent phenomenon. Its epicenter lies in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar where the breakdown of administration in the 1960s and 1970s led to the proliferation of workshops churning out country-made weapons. Today’s Naxalites, of course, are armed with a variety of weapons — .303 rifles, SLR and INSAS carbines — many of which have come from government armouries by means that are not easy to determine.
Parallel to this has been the exponential growth in the availability of licensed arms. Till the 1960s, getting a gun license was quite difficult in India because of the hang-over of British colonial laws where the issue of licenses was closely linked to loyalty to the empire. But the rise of democratic politics saw a proliferation of gun licenses as newly rising castes saw gun ownership as much an issue of prestige, as to offset the perceived advantage of their upper caste rivals. 
In India strict gun-control laws were an outcome of the imperial necessity. The eighteenth century, in which the British fought their way to dominance in the Indian subcontinent, was a very violent one. Given the Mughal mansabdari system, armed men owing allegiance to their feudatories were scattered across India. With the breakdown of Mughal authority, India, particularly in the north, saw a long period of anarchy where petty rajas and landlords vied with each other for control, and the British by virtue of their superior military organisation and world view managed to prevail. Once they came to power, and especially after the 1857 uprising, they undertook a policy of systematically disarming the people through tough legislation and laws that made the ownership of weapons without license a major crime.
This was not very different from the system they had back home. In the seventeenth century, the British aristocracy created laws restricting hunting and gun ownership to the upper classes and denying them to the poor.  The legacy of this continues to this day and UK has some of the toughest laws against owning guns. Civilians, regardless of the circumstances, cannot own handguns. Other guns, mainly for hunting and sport are strictly licensed.  
But by  themselves guns don’t kill. As the slogan goes, “guns don’t kill, people do.” It is true that the easy availability of guns promotes its use in crime in the US. The American  right to bear arms is written into their constitution and has as its basis the history of the country which was liberated from the colonial yoke because the people had the firearms to turn against their British overlords. But, Switzerland with a similar history, i.e. where people fought for their freedom and were able to defend their country against their bigger European neighbours because they remained armed and ready for war, does not have the kind of crime statistics you see in the US.
It is a certain kind of a social and political milieu that provides the backdrop of their usage for violent ends.
In the US it is obvious in its stratified social system and ghettoisation of the minorities.
Unfortunately, the ambiance in India with its burgeoning urbanisation, poverty and social tensions make for an incendiary situation. Layer upon this a ruthlessly  predatory attitude towards women and the weak, compounded by the breakdown in effective policing in most parts of India.
 
Proliferation
The big threat lies from unlicensed weapons. And these have proliferated widely. Making the weapon itself is not the problem, even the technology available to a village craftsman can do the needful. Ammunition is an issue, but leakages from the licensed system as well as from the police and the armed forces have created the problem. Last year, this paper reported how ammunition from CRPF armouries in UP managed to find its way to Maoists in the jungles of Chhattisgarh.
Given the rapid urbanisation of the country and the emergence of large unpoliced or poorly policed areas can result in the rise of criminal gangs who are not afraid of taking on the police. We already see some aspects of this phenomenon in the Ghaziabad-Meerut area of the national capital region. If something is not done to check the proliferation of country-made weapons, things could go from bad to worse.
The police need to first understand that there is a problem. The issue of misuse of licensed weapons is straightforward enough. Here the police need to not only strengthen the processes relating to the issue of licenses, but to also institute a process whereby which licenses can be withdrawn from people who  could become a threat to society because of their possession of a licensed weapon. In other words, the licensing process should involve much more continuous  monitoring.
As far as the country-made gun phenomenon is concerned, the challenge is vaster. One aspect of it is the location and destruction of workshops that produce them. The second is to break the supply chains of ammunition for such weapons.
 
Leaching
The third, and most doable, is to leach away the weapons from those who possess them. Countries have tried different ways of doing this — Brazil, Zambia, South Africa have experimented with amnesty and cash bounties to encourage people to turn in illegal weapons.  
What the Delhi police can easily do is to offer an amnesty, to start with, and then undertake a sustained drive to locate and seize these weapons. One way to do this is surprise search and seize drives where the police can seal off a mall, a market or a bus stand and search every person for hidden weapons. This will deter people from carrying the weapons around. For its part, the union government needs to pass laws that will enhance punishment for the manufacture, transportation and possession of illegal weapons.
If the police and the government throw up their hands and claim they cannot do anything, it may be a better idea to make licensing easier and encourage the ordinary citizen to become a gun-owner and train them in the use of guns.
 At least this will be able to equalise the advantage that the criminals have vis-à-vis the common folk as of now.
Mail Today March 11, 2011

The Home Ministry's cure for terrorism is worse than the disease

The Union Budget 2011-12 is unexceptional when it comes to supporting the Indian national security buildup. The formula adopted by the finance minister is to provide the sum asked for and add that “additional funds will be made available if required.” Such funds rarely get any public scrutiny, the parliament standing committees, do of course, examine the demands for grants, but in a normative rather than an analytical fashion.  As a result, people are unaware of the wider implications of certain decisions. One such relates to the Rs 39.75 crore appropriated for the National Intelligence Grid (Natgrid).
The challenge in the internal security area has only been seriously taken up in the wake of the Mumbai attack, even though the country has faced terrorist attacks for the past three decades. The post Mumbai efforts involve beefing up the National Security Guard to act as SWAT teams in various urban centres, creating a system of coastal and maritime security, as well as boosting internal intelligence coordination. 

Natgrid
All these are as they should be. But there are some measures which are now beginning to impinge on the rights of the average citizen. Prominent among these is the Natgrid for which some Rs 75 crore have been appropriated in the Union Budget in the last two years.  The proposal to link up all manner of individual information — tax, travel, internet and telecom usage, credit card spending, investments and so on, is the kind of thing that bureaucrats, especially national security ones, dream about. Sitting in their office, and at the press of the button, they can track everyone and everything at all times.
But this is the stuff of nightmares for the average law abiding person. Things would be fine if we had a sensitive and subtle bureaucracy. But we don’t. We have one which is already tipsy on power. While its core comprises of  dedicated and well-meaning persons, a significant proportion — much too large for comfort— are venal and not sufficiently ground in the ethics of good governance.  Trusting sensitive personal information to them is like allowing a fox to guard a hen coop.
A national grid where various intelligence agencies who collect information through various sources share their informationat various levels of classification makes for good sense and will aid  efficacious action against criminals and terrorists. But not the proposed Natgrid.
So far the principle behind the  interception of phone calls and its invasion into the privacy of a citizen is that he or she must  do something suspicious for which the authorities then seek a warrant which is signed by the Home Secretary and his equivalent. The interception  undertaken for a strictly limited period and the records subsequently destroyed.
What is being proposed now is an open ended system where as many as 11 intelligence agencies will be given a licence to trawl through the data banks of telecom and insurance companies, stock exchanges and banks, internet providers and airline booking networks to undertake  a grand fishing expedition which they hope will yield them something.
I am not being paranoid when I argue this. We have, after all, the example of the Radia tapes before us. These tapes were obtained by official sanction and were in official custody, yet they were leaked out. While there is an element of schadenfreude in the discomfort of some well known journalists being revealed as ethically challenged individuals, no crime seems to be evident, at least from the tapes so far released.
 Yes, they refer to lobbying and the craven politics of the UPA government, but that is in itself not a crime. There is considerable merit in Ratan Tata’s affidavit to the Supreme Court arguing that the indiscriminate publication of private conversations did constitute a violation of his constitutional rights.
Most of us will concede that the government needs to have the ability to tap phone conversations to take on organised crime, terrorism and money laundering. But the governments needs to assure us that its minions use the powers in a responsible way. As of now there is nothing in the law, nor the behavior of the government, to convince us that they will do so. 

NCTC
The Natgrid is the core of the grander plan of the Union Home Ministry to establish a National Counter Terrorism Centre. The scope of the NCTC, as outlined by Union Home Minister in his December 2009 Intelligence Bureau Centenary Endowment Lecture, would be truly awesome — not only would it subsume the Multi-Agency Centre, the Natgrid, National Investigation Agency and the like, but, also, more questionably,  the National Technical Research Organisation(NTRO) and the  the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC).
There are two problems here. First, the existing MAC and enhanced security awareness since 26/11 have yet to break up a conspiracy in advance using all the current level of snooping that they have presumably been doing. Consider, on the other hand, the record of UK where several conspiracies have been rumbled in advance with sufficient evidence to jail the conspirators through an open trial.
In India, the intelligence agencies claim that they have disrupted several conspiracies, but none of them at the point where there was enough evidence to enable people to be fairly tried and convicted for their acts. Of course, there are always encounters, but then dead men don’t talk. Given the reputation of the police, these more often than not raise more questions than answers.

Flaws
The second issue is the scope of the NCTC. The NTRO and the JIC that Mr Chidambaram wants in the NCTC do not only deal with terrorism. Notwithstanding Mumbai, the Union Home Ministry needs to understand that terrorism is not the main threat to the country’s security. They are painful and ugly challenges, but they can hardly damage our system, in the manner an attack by an external state adversary can. The NTRO’s remit, for example, includes ballistic missile defence, or that part of it that deals with the detection of hostile incoming missiles, it also looks at, among other things, the issue of cyber security. Surely these are not subjects that can be supervised by the NCTC.
Actually, the US experience with its NCTC has not been particularly good. The obvious example is the case of Umar Farook Abdulmuttalab, the so-called underwear bomber. Information on his activities was known — the British intelligence sent a report to their American counterparts in November 2009 and his own father met and informed two CIA personnel in Abuja, Nigeria a week later about his predelictions. His name was added to the data base of the US NCTC, but was not sent to that of the FBI that  screened incoming air travelers. On December 25, Abdulmuttalab tried to detonate plastic explosives sewn into his underwear while on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.
The obvious lesson here is that the large all-encompassing bodies are not a particularly good idea. In matters of security, as well of systems in general, there is need to build redundancies. In other words, systems where a failure does not end in a  cataclysmic disaster, because there are other systems  there as backups.
 We  need to stop,  think and question the logic of  outfits like the Natgrid and the NCTC which, besides being of questionable utility in fighting terrorism, are also a major encroachment into the very liberties our Home Ministry is supposed to protect.
Terrorism, a major threat, is not the only national security challenge we confront. But it is perhaps the only one which requires discrete and subtle use of strength, rather than a sledgehammer that the Home Ministry is envisaging and the Parliament  unquestioningly funding.
Mail Today March 3, 2011