About Chellaney

Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

The Strategic Importance of Water in Asia

Posted on August 26, 2008 by Chellaney

Billions of people suffer from acute water crisis

The Nation, Bangkok
August 25, 2008

Hundreds of millions of people in Asia are suffering from the acute water crisis caused by the adverse impact of climate change and China’s ambitious hydro-engineering projects that divert river water cascading from the Tibetan highlands, the source of almost all the major rivers of Asia.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research was speaking at the seminar, "The Strategic Importance of Water in Asia", held at Bali, Indonesia, by Singapore-based Media Programme Asia of Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.

Chellaney said that after reviewing the environmental situation in Asia, he found the water crisis in Asia is being aggravated both by climate change and by manmade environmental degradation in the form of shrinking forests and swamps that foster a cycle of chronic flooding and drought through the depletion of nature’s water and absorption cover.

Citing the survey conducted by the Remote Sensing Department of the China Aero Geophysical Survey, he said the study had warned that the Himalayan glaciers could be reduced by nearly a third by 2050 and up to half by 2090 at the current rate. The glacial melt would further deplete Tibet’s water resources, which are the lifeline for the people of southern and southeastern Asia and China.

He explained that the Tibetan plateau is a source of almost all the major rivers of Asia. Tibet’s vast glaciers, huge underground springs and high altitude have endowed it with the world’s greatest river systems.

Its river waters are a lifeline to the world’s two most populous states, China and India, as well as to Bangladesh, Burma, Bhutan, Cambodia, Laos, Nepal, Pakistan, Thailand and Vietnam. These countries make up 47 per cent of world population. "The Himalayan snow melt that feeds Asia’s great rivers could be damagingly accelerated by global warming," he warned.

He said the impact from climate change was not the only cause of the water crisis in Asia. The Chinese South-North Water Diversion (SNWD) Project is also a major reason for the water crisis, he warned. The project is aimed at supporting the growth and development of industry in China.

The US$62billion (Bt2.1 trillion) canal project includes three water-diversion routes connecting the Yangtze River, the Huai River, the Yellow River and the Hai River to help bring water to parched regions such as the Shandong province and the municipalities of Tianjin and Beijing.

The SNWD plan is to create three new waterways to run along the east, centre and southwest of China. Just the first phase of project entails an investment of some $15 billion.

The project’s eastern route, transporting water to the north from the Yangtze through a tunnel burrowed beneath the Yellow River, will involve expansion of the 1,600-km imperial Grand Canal into the world’s longest aquaduct. The 1,200-km-long central route, also intended to relieve pressure on the Yellow River, will pass beneath the Yellow River too in channelling water towards Beijing.

The most ambitious part of this project is to divert river waters cascading from the Tibetan highlands. This challenging phase includes a series of canals and tunnels along a 1,215-km route bissecting the eastern Tibetan Plateau to connect the upper reaches of the Yangtze with the upper reaches of the Yellow. The tunnels would have to be cut through the earthquake-prone Bayankala Mountains.

In the Tibetan plateau, China’s South-North Project calls initially for building 300 km of tunnels and channels to draw waters from the Jinsha, Yalong and Dadu rivers, located on the eastern rim of the plateau. The possible diversion of the Brahmaputra waters northward is to come later.

The idea of diverting the Brahmaputra waters would adversely affect the dry-season availability of Brahmaputra waters downstream in India and Bangladesh while increasing wet-season flooding.

The river’s ecological health is already being affected through the growing number of irrigation reservoirs and hydropower plants upstream. Overexploitation could reduce sediment transportation downstream, affecting agriculture in northeastern India and Bangladesh, besides eroding the river-centred biodiversity of fish and aquatic organisms in Tibet. Also, owing to the high ambient salt levels along the watershed, irrigation-induced salinity is already threatening the widespread farming introduced in the upstream basin.

Water is a key issue that would determine if there will be greater cooperation or greater competition in Asia," he said.

"The bad news is that water management is still not a major priority for most Asian governments, at the federal or state levels" he added.

However, in a bid to mitigate the adverse impact from the water crisis, which would cause conflict in many areas, Chellaney called on all Asian governments to focus on water management of shared interstate water resources as an important component to build regional and climate security.

India: The Global Bridge-Builder on the Ganges

Posted on August 13, 2008 by Chellaney

Brückenbauer am Ganges

Beitrag von Brahma Chellaney

Erschienen in: Ausgabe Juli/August 2008

Auf dem Weg zu einer multipolaren Weltordnung tun sich Brüche auf: Die ressourcenhungrigen Schwellenländer beuten die wirtschaftlich Abgehängten aus. In Asien verbünden sich demokratische Staaten gegen autokratische Regime. Indien kann dank seiner demokratischen, konsensgeprägten Traditionen helfen, diese Spaltungen zu überwinden.

…ie Weltordnung ist noch nicht multipolar und nicht mehr unipolar. Amerika hat es in dem Jahrzehnt seit dem Zusammenbruch der Sowjetunion bis zum Ende der neunziger Jahre verpasst, unter seiner Ägide eine liberale Weltordnung zu etablieren. Das mag die Vermutung nahe legen, die heutige sei eine nichtpolare Ordnung, in der vielfältige Bündnisse zwischen verschiedenen Akteuren der strategische Imperativ sind. Aber durch das Auftreten neuer Protagonisten auf der geopolitischen Bühne ist es nur eine …

http://www.internationalepolitik.de/archiv/jahrgang-2008/die-ohnmacht-der-machtigen/bruckenbauer-am-ganges.html

English version:

Bridge-builder on the Ganges

India’s Ascent in a Rapidly Changing Global Order

Brahma Chellaney | New global fault lines are evident as power — economic and political — has shifted eastward. Yet, the current international structures shun this reality — to their own peril. As a conduit between the East and West, India can help promote collaboration and consensus.

Internationale Politik, Vol. 7-8 (2008)

While the world is not yet multipolar, it is no longer unipolar, as it had been from the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse to at least the end of the 1990s — a period in which America failed to fashion a new liberal world order under its direction. What we have today is a world still in transition. This may appear to some as a nonpolar world in which multiple engagements between and among different actors have become a strategic imperative. But with the emergence of new players in the geopolitical marketplace, it is only a matter of time before multipolarity begins to characterize the international order.

The ongoing power shifts are primarily linked to Asia’s phenomenal economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history. Seat of ancient civilizations and home to the majority of the world’s population, Asia is bouncing back after a relatively short period of decline. Asia’s share of the world’s economy totaled 60 percent in 1820 at the advent of the industrial revolution. It then went into sharp decline over the next 125 years. Today, it already accounts for 40 percent of global production — a figure that could, according to some projections, rise to 60 percent within the next quarter of a century.

The shifts in economic and political power foretell a much different world — a world characterized by a greater distribution of power, but also by new uncertainties. As history testifies, tectonic shifts in power are rarely quiet. Such shifts usually create volatility in the international system, even if such instability is short-lived. The new international divisiveness may reflect such a reality. Indeed, with the revolution in technology over the past 25 years, we live in a world of rapid change. But unlike in past history, the qualitative reordering of power now underway is due not to battlefield victories or military realignments but to a peaceful factor unique to the modern world: rapid economic growth.

The paradox is that the power shifts are happening even as the United States remains the world’s sole superpower and thus militarily preeminent. Yet the reality is that after the triumphalism of the 1990s, this decade has helped underscore an erosion of US soft and hard power, with many seeing Iraq, Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, and the Middle East muddle as symbols of such decline. In an era of greater international fluidity as well as political and financial turbulence, as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admitted, “Whenever Americans start talking about idealism and optimism, international audiences groan.”[1]

Today’s international divisiveness, in part, mirrors the reality that power and influence are no longer one and the same in international relations. Despite its preeminence, the United States’ influence has been on the decline — a trend unlikely to be reversed even with a new administration in Washington. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the United States to set the international agenda on its own or just with its traditional allies. To secure issue-based support, the United States now has to reach out to states beyond its network of traditional allies. At the same time, one must concede that, for the foreseeable future, the United States is likely to remain the most decisive force in international politics and security.

Another factor has also contributed to the divisiveness: While we know the world is in transition, we still do not know what the new order will look like. The impasse or lack of movement on key international issues, therefore, should not come as a surprise. These issues include climate change, nuclear disarmament, international terrorism, global pandemics, and the Doha round of world trade talks. The most pressing challenges today are international in nature and thus demand international responses or solutions. Yet the existing international institutions, including the United Nations, are proving inadequate to deal with such global challenges, in part because such institutions no longer reflect the prevailing power structure. Their representational deficit, and the ensuing impact on their capacity to play an effective, forward-looking role, have become glaring.

The more the world changes, however, the more it remains the same in some critical aspects. The information age and globalization, despite spurring profound changes in polity, economy and security, have not altered the nature of international relations. In fact, the rapid pace of technological and economic change is itself a consequence of nations competing fiercely and seeking relative advantage in an international system based largely on national security.

Nearly a century after chemical arms were introduced in World War I and more than six decades following the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world is at the threshold of new lethal and precision weapons, as underlined by the ongoing research on lasers, information weapons, space-based platforms, anti-satellite weapons, and directed energy systems. Technological forces are now shaping geopolitics and power equations in ways unforeseen before in history.

We live in a Hobbesian world, with power coterminous with national security and success. The past century was the most momentous in history technologically, with innovations fostering not just rapid economic change, but bringing greater lethality to warfare. Consequently, the 20th century was the bloodiest. Weapons of mass destruction and missiles came to occupy a central military role. In the new century, the advance of technology and the absence of relevant safeguards or regimes evoke possible scenarios of deadly information and space warfare. Such are the challenges from the accelerated weaponization of science that instead of disarmament, rearmament today looms large on the horizon, with the arms race being extended to outer space.

Once the economic power structure changes internationally, shifts in military power will inevitably follow, even if in stages. Seen against the ongoing changes, the transatlantic order of the past 60 years will have to give way to a truly international order. The new order, unlike the current one founded on the ruins of a world war, will have to be established in an era of international peace and thus be designed to reinforce that peace. That means it will need to be more reflective of the consensual needs of today and have a democratic decision-making structure.

Until that happens, the new global fault lines will continue to signal rising geopolitical risks. The tensions between internationalism and nationalism in an era of a supposed single “global village,” for instance, have raised troubling questions about international peace and stability. With greater public awareness from advances in information and communications technologies encouraging individuals and even some states to more clearly define that identity in terms of religion and ethnicity, a divide has emerged between multiculturalism and artificially enforced monoculturalism. The rise of international terrorism shows that increased access to information is both an integrating and dividing force.

The political, economic, and security divides are no less invidious. The world is moving beyond the North-South divide to a four-tier economic division: the prosperous West; rapidly growing economies like those in Asia; countries that have run into stagnation after reaching middle-income nation status; and a forgotten billion people living on the margins of globalization in sub-Saharan Africa. These marginalized people have no stake in globalization. The international neglect of Africa has created a vacuum that China has sought to exploit by aggressively building commercial and political links with a number of African states.

There is also a global resource divide, with the resource-hungry employing aid and arms exports as a diplomatic instrument for commodity outreach. As the specter of resource conflict has grown, the contours of a 21st-century version of the Great Game have emerged in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Competition over oil and gas resources, driven by rapid economic growth in Asia, indeed constitutes one key dimension of the emerging Great Game.

The ongoing global shifts in economic power are manifest from the changes occurring in the energy and materials sectors, with the growth in demand moving from the developed to the developing world, principally Asia. Energy prices are going to stay high and volatile for the foreseeable future, given these shifts and the soaring demand in countries like China and India, which together are projected to double their oil demand between 2003 and 2020. However, despite the total consumption of energy in the Asia-Pacific having grown by 70 percent between 1992 and 2005, per capita energy consumption is still relatively low by international standards: 749 kilogram of oil equivalent in 2005, compared with the global average of 1,071. Not only will per capita consumption grow sharply in Asia, “on the supply side, Asia’s strong demand environment for energy and basic materials, coupled with its low labor costs, means that the region will increasingly become a global producer of aluminum, chemicals, paper, and steel.”[2]

Slaking the tremendous thirst of the fast-growing Asian economies and meeting the huge demands of the old economic giants in the West are at the core of the great energy dilemma facing the world in the 21st century. Finding an energy “fix” has become imperative if the Asian and other emerging economies are to continue to grow impressively and if the prosperous countries are to head off a slump. Such a fix would have to be rooted in three essential elements: low-cost, preferably renewable alternatives to fossil fuels; greater energy efficiency; and minimizing or eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions. The ongoing structural shifts in global energy markets carry important long-term political and economic implications, in addition to challenging the stability of these markets.

Also, with the rise of unconventional transnational challenges, a new security divide is mirrored both in the failure to fashion a concerted and effective international response to such threats, including transnational terrorism, and the divisiveness on issues like climate change. Efforts are needed to bridge the divide between the traditional security threats and the new unconventional threats that are increasingly the focus of international attention and concern.

Yet another global divide is centered on political values. At a time when a qualitative reordering of power is reshaping international equations, major players are playing down the risk that contrasting political systems could come to constitute the main geopolitical dividing line, potentially pitting an axis of autocracies against a constellation of democracies. The refrain of the players is that pragmatism, not political values, would guide their foreign-policy strategy. Yet the new Great Game under way plays up regime character as a key element.

Ordinarily, the readiness to play by international rules ought to matter more than regime form. But regime character often makes playing by the rules difficult. In modern history, the fault line between democrats and autocrats has at times been papered over through a common geopolitical interest. But today the failure to build greater political homogeneity by defining shared international objectives carries the risk that, in the years ahead, political values could become the main geopolitical dividing line.

It is well established that democracies rarely go to war with each other, even though democratic governments may not be more wedded to peace than autocracies. What role outsiders can play to help democracy take root, however, remains a difficult issue internationally. Yet that issue looms large in relation to Asia. Unlike Europe where democracy has become the norm, only 16 of Asia’s 39 countries surveyed by Freedom House are really free.[3] And as shown by the World Press Freedom Index by the Paris-based international rights group, Reporters Without Borders, a number of Asian countries are among the worst suppressors of freedom, with North Korea ranked at the very bottom of the 167-nation list, Burma 163rd, China 159th, Vietnam 158th, Laos and Uzbekistan 155th, Bangladesh 151st, Pakistan 150th, Singapore 140th and the Philippines 139th.[4]

With the Asia-Pacific region becoming more divided in the face of conflicting strategic cultures, major democracies are likely to be increasingly drawn together to help advance political cooperation and stability through a community of values. It can hardly be overlooked that China’s best friends are fellow autocracies, including pariah states, while those seeking to forestall power disequilibrium in the Asia-Pacific happen to be on the other side of the values-based divide. In that light, political values could easily come to define a new geopolitical divide.

What may seem implausible globally, given America’s lingering tradition of propping up dictators in the Arab-Islamic world, is thus conceivable in the Asia-Pacific theater as a natural corollary to the present geopolitics. It was China that took the lead in 2001 to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to help unite it with Eurasian strongmen in a geopolitical alliance. Designed originally to bring the Central Asian nations under the Chinese sphere of influence, the SCO is today shaping up as a potential “NATO of the East.” Yet, when Australia, India, Japan, and the United States started the exploratory Quadrilateral Initiative in 2007,[5] Beijing was quick to cry foul and see the apparition of an “Asian NATO.” A Chinese diplomatic protest to each Quad nation followed.

The Quad, founded on the historically valid hypothesis of democratic peace, was supposed to serve as an initial framework to promote security dialogue and interlinked partnerships among major Pacific Rim democracies. Such collaboration is already being built. As an idea, the Quad will not only survive the current vicissitudes, but it also foreshadows what is likely to come. But for the divergent geopolitical interests at play, the differing political values would not matter so much.

More broadly, there is need to improve global geopolitics by building cooperative political approaches that transcend institutions whose structure is rooted in a world that no longer exists. The reality is that just as the G-8, to stay relevant, has initiated the so-called Outreach for dialogue with the emerging powers, the five unelected yet permanent members of the UN Security Council can no longer dictate terms to the rest of the world and need to share executive authority with new powers.

It was a mistake to believe that greater economic interdependence by itself would improve geopolitics. In today’s market-driven world, trade is not constrained by political differences, nor is booming trade a guarantee of moderation and restraint between states.

Better politics is as important as better economics. That requires several major steps whose initiation so far has been frustrated: institutional reforms; greater transparency in strategic doctrines and military expenditures; and cooperative approaches on shared concerns. No international mission today can yield enduring results unless it comes with consistency and credibility and is backed by consensus — the three crucial “Cs.”

Against this background, what role can India play? India’s growing geopolitical weight, high GDP growth rate, and abundant market opportunities have helped increase its international profile. It is widely perceived to be a key “swing state” in the emerging order.

Given the greater political and financial volatility in the world, geopolitical risks today are higher. As a “swing” geopolitical factor, India has the potential to play a constructive role to help mitigate those risks by promoting collaborative international approaches. It is obvious that new thinking and approaches are needed to bridge the global fault lines and build great international cooperation and consensus on the larger geopolitical issues.

India has important advantages that it could exploit to play the role of a bridge between the East and West. Not only is it the world’s largest democracy, India also is the most diverse country. With a sixth of humanity living within its borders, India is more linguistically diverse than even Europe. India is where old traditions go hand-in-hand with post modernity, epitomized by the image of electronic voting machines being carried to a village balloting station atop an elephant.

India also has its constraints. Its neighborhood is more combustible than ever, with an arc of failing or problem states posing serious security-related challenges. Democracy may be India’s biggest asset. But Indian democracy tends to function by the rule of parochial politics. Putting a forward-looking national agenda ahead of parochial short-term politics is not easy. Furthermore, partly due to its historical experiences, the Indian state is intrinsically cautious and shy rather than proactive.

Yet India has a long, historical record of playing a mainstream, cooperative role in international affairs. With its wealth of philosophy and a culture emphasizing compromise, conciliation, and creativity, India views the world as a stage not for civilizational wars but for building bridges and meeting common challenges. Over the centuries, Indian civilization has thrived on synthesis. This ability to synthesize is one of the great strengths that India needs to employ internationally.

It is such traditions that explain, for example, why India lacks the US zeal to export democracy. Instead it looks at democracy in practical terms, as “the most effective means to reconcile the polyglot components of the state,” according to former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. He notes: “India, striving neither to spread its culture nor its institutions, is thus not a comfortable partner [of the United States] for global ideological missions.”[6]

Yet India will continue to pride itself as a model of a non-Western democracy. While the concepts of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law are normally associated with the West, India can claim ancient traditions bestowing respect to such values. As the 1998 Nobel economics laureate, Amartya Sen, has said, “A good example is the Emperor Ashoka in India, who during the 3rd century B.C. covered the country with inscriptions on stone tablets about good behavior and wise governance, including a demand for basic freedoms for all — indeed he did not exclude women and slaves as Aristotle did…”[7] According to economist Sen, “The claim that the basic ideas underlying freedom and tolerance have been central to Western culture over the millennia and are somehow alien to Asia is, I believe, entirely rejectable.”

Another issue relates to India’s role in helping shape a stable balance of power. At a time of warming US-Indian relations, too much is made about America’s desire to use India to hold China in check. A durable US-Indian partnership can be built not on strategic opportunism but on shared national interests. Shared interests mean far more than shared democratic values. It appears unlikely that India would allow itself to be used as a foil against another power.

In the coming years, India will increasingly be aligned with the West economically. But, strategically, it can avail of multiple options, even as it moves from the nonalignment of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to a contemporary, globalized practicality. Given the new international equations and power shifts, nonalignment in its original form holds no relevance today. But many Indians believe that the concept of following an independent foreign policy is still relevant.

In keeping with this long-standing preference for policy independence, India is likely to retain the option to forge different partnerships with varied players to pursue a variety of interests in diverse settings. That means that from being nonaligned, it is likely to become multialigned, while tilting more towards Washington even as it preserves the core element of nonalignment — strategic autonomy. In other words, India is likely to continue to chart its own course and make its own major decisions. A multialigned India pursuing omnidirectional cooperation for mutual benefit with key players will be better positioned to advance its interests and promote cooperative international approaches in the changed world.

In the Asian context, India’s interests lie in ensuring that strategic competition among the key players does not deteriorate into a major geopolitical confrontation. The deepening mistrust and nationalistic chauvinism in Asia threaten to create conditions that could seriously harm the interests of all the states. The common challenge thus is to find ways to minimize mutual mistrust and maximize avenues for reciprocally beneficial cooperation. But this can be done not by shying away from the contentious issues in Asia but by seeking to tackle them in a practical way.

India cannot but be concerned about the way the energy competition is beginning to make Asian geopolitics murkier. What is striking is that the new flurry of alliance formation or partnerships in Asia is being led by Asia’s rising powers, not by the United States, which has policed Asia since the end of World War II. In that light, Asian cooperation and security will be very much influenced by the equations between and among the major players. The need to secure stable energy supplies will drive the major players to increasingly integrate their energy policy with foreign policy, as they consciously promote diplomatic strategies geared toward seizing energy-related opportunities overseas.

Energy-driven competition must not be allowed to aggravate interstate rivalries. Mercantilist efforts to assert control over oil and natural gas supplies and transport routes certainly risk fuelling tensions. Given the lack of regional institutions in Asia to avert or manage conflict, the sharpening energy geopolitics makes the need for Asian energy cooperation more pressing. A challenge for India, China, and the other important Asian economies is to manage their energy needs through more efficient transport and consumption and more cooperative import policies. Multinational cooperation on the security of sea lanes is essential to avert strategic friction in Asia. Where maritime claims overlap, the answer to any such dispute cannot be unilateral drilling or production by one side. Disputes over what are legitimate zones of energy exploration in open seas need to be managed through an agreed code of conduct.

In an increasingly interdependent Asia, the interests of India, China, Japan and other players can hardly be advanced if they are seen as engaged in efforts to reduce the promotion of security to a zero-sum game. In fact, as the three main Asian powers, India, China, and Japan can set a model for other states in Asia by establishing stable political relationships that put the accent on mutually beneficial cooperation. Without these powers taking the lead, it may not be possible to deal with the increasingly complex security, energy, and development challenges facing Asia. Deterrence, stability, and peace have been at the heart of Asia’s growing dynamism and prosperity. These elements need to be preserved and strengthened to help fully ripen the Asian renaissance.

The challenges the world confronts today are unique. The issues are new — ranging from accelerating global warming to uncontained international terrorism — and their reach is truly global. In past history, the competition for a balance of power was centered on Europe. Even the Cold War was not really an East-West rivalry but a competition between two blocs over Europe. For the first time, we are facing the task of building power equilibrium across the world while simultaneously having to both adjust to new power shifts and deal with transnational challenges.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. His latest book is Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.

[1] US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Keynote Address at the World Economic Forum meeting, Davos, January 23, 2008, http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2008/01/99624.htm.

[2] Ivo J. H. Bozon, Warren J. Campbell, and Mats Lindstrand, “Global Trends in Energy,” The McKinsey Quarterly, Number 1 (2007), p. 48.

[3] Freedom in the World (Freedom House, 2006).

[4] Reporters Without Borders, “World Press Freedom Index,” http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=554.

[5] The Quadrilateral Initiative was not intended to be a formal institution. However, the Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, in an article has said: “As president, I will seek to institutionalize the new quadrilateral security partnership among the major Asia-Pacific democracies: Australia, India, Japan, and the United States.” McCain also has larger ambitions: A “worldwide League of Democracies” that could be a “unique handmaiden of freedom.” John McCain, “An Enduring Peace Built on Freedom,” Foreign Affairs (November/December 2007).

[6]Henry A. Kissinger, “Anatomy of a Partnership,” Tribune Media Services, March 10, 2006.

[7] Amartya Sen, “East and West: The Reach of Reason,” The New York Review of Books, July 20, 2000.

(Internationale Politik is Germany’s leading foreign-affairs monthly published by the German Council on Foreign Relations.)

Bullish partisanship over the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal

Posted on August 13, 2008 by Chellaney

Please don’t nuke facts

Brahma Chellaney

The Asian Age, August 13, 2008

With the future shape of the Indo-US nuclear deal now out of India’s grasp and in the hands of foreigners, two things stand out domestically. The first is that the line between fact and fiction has become so blurred that spin now dominates the discourse. Indeed, such is the bullish partisanship on the issue and the shutting out of parliamentary scrutiny — mirrored in the astonishing postponement of the Parliament’s traditional monsoon session to the end of the monsoon season — that little room has been left for an informed debate.

The second is that the risks of serious misunderstandings and tragedy in the years later have been compounded through deliberate ambiguities in the agreed documents. Ambiguities may be fine with the US and the International Atomic Energy Agency because the leverage lies with them. But for a recipient state to turn a deaf ear to the stated positions and interpretations of other parties is to court trouble.

In fact, New Delhi has publicly prided its ingenuity in fashioning ambiguities. Take the claim that the safeguards accord has been cleverly worded to enable India to take “unspecified sovereign actions” in a contingency — an assertion out of sync with the negotiating record.

Such claims flow out of a contested reference in that accord’s preamble, which records that an “essential basis” of India’s “concurrence to accept Agency safeguards” is the “conclusion of international cooperation arrangements” to help secure “uninterrupted” fuel supply and build a “strategic reserve” of fuel. Whether such rights-empowering international arrangements exist or not is merely a preambular insertion by India without tying the IAEA to anything.

The preamble also notes that India “may take corrective measures” in the event of fuel-supply disruption. But “corrective measures” neither find mention in the numbered articles of the accord nor have been defined in the text, although Section XI on “definitions” spells out simple terms like “facility”, “reactor”, “nuclear material” and “Director General”. In effect, the accord precludes real correction by making safeguards indefinite and legally irrevocable.

IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, in his statement introducing the accord for board approval, made clear that the preamble merely provided for “contextual background”. He pointed out “the agreement is of indefinite duration” and its termination provisions “are the same as for other INFCIRC/66-type agreements” (designed for non-nuclear-weapons states to cover individual plants and shipments of fuel). The IAEA will enforce inspections until any safeguarded Indian facility — indigenous or imported — is “no longer usable for any nuclear activity”.

Did India contest ElBaradei’s statement? No, although ElBaradei implicitly rubbished the India-specific claim by saying, “The text before you is an INFCIRC/66-type safeguards agreement based on the Agency’s standard safeguards practices and procedures”. Several states also put on the record the cosmetic and non-operational nature of the aforesaid preambular references. Still, despite presenting a three-page statement at the end, India chose not to deny such contentions or even to stress its right to take corrective measures.

So, apart from claims publicly proffered at home by officials, there is nothing in the negotiating record about India explicitly staking any right to take any corrective step. All it has is a dubious reference in the preamble, which the IAEA chief has dismissed as “contextual background”. In his subsequent news conference, ElBaradei went on to say that a “concrete result” would be India’s co-option to help implement the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and conclude the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty.

Against this background, would India have any case if it were stopped from building a strategic fuel reserve or slapped with a fuel cut-off? The onus will always be on India to behave well or risk a double whammy — a fuel squeeze or suspension while saddled with everlasting international inspections on its entire civil nuclear programme. Despite getting none of the rights the five established nuclear-weapons states have vis-à-vis the IAEA, India has accepted the Agency’s paramount authority to settle “any question arising out of the interpretation or application of this agreement”.

The board easily ratified the accord by consensus because it meets non-proliferation standards and opens the path to drafting India into the NPT regime as a de facto party. While this accord sets the technical parameters for co-opting India into the non-proliferation regime, the impending exemption by the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group will set the political parameters.

The potential costs of equivocation primarily flow out of the earlier-negotiated 123 agreement with the US — an accord that fudges or tiptoes around key issues relating to strategic fuel reserves, reprocessing right, corrective measures and a linkage between perpetual safeguards and perpetual fuel supply. It also stands out for its lack of a dispute-resolution mechanism and for merely recording that India would seek the right to corrective measures in the safeguards accord.

Clearly spelled-out provisions, not equivocation and semantic subterfuge, was what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had pledged in Parliament to “ensure there is no repeat of our unfortunate experience with Tarapur”. Yet the accords negotiated with the US and IAEA risk making India an easier prey to external pressures. A quick comparison of these accords with the 1963 Indo-US 123 agreement and the 1971 safeguards pact underscores that danger.

While the 1963 agreement guaranteed fuel “as needed” by India, the equivocation in the latest 123 accord is manifest from the fuel-related assurances left hanging in Article 5.6, which says the US is “willing to incorporate assurances regarding fuel supply in the bilateral US-India agreement” — that is, at some point in the future. The accord arms the US with an open-ended right to suspend supplies forthwith simply by issuing a one-year termination notice on any ground, however extraneous.

While the 1963 agreement permitted India to reprocess after a “joint determination” with the US that the reprocessing facility was “safeguardable”, the latest accord requires India not only to build a new dedicated facility to US satisfaction but also to separately negotiate and sign a congressionally vetted agreement on reprocessing. Although the US overrode the terms of the 1963 agreement through a new 1978 domestic law, the latest 123 accord says its implementation will be governed by national laws, underscoring the Hyde Act’s primacy.

The more-equitable 1971 safeguards accord was trilateral, with the US as a party. The applicability and duration of safeguards were explicitly tied to American fuel supply. Its structure and provisions were uniquely India-specific.

By contrast, the latest accord — modelled on the upgraded, NPT-system safeguards for non-nuclear-weapons states — is little India-specific. Despite a preambular reference to India’s civil-military separation plan — a mention that forms part of what ElBaradei sneeringly calls “contextual background” — the accord in none of its articles acknowledges the existence of an Indian nuclear-weapons programme even for the purpose of defining the scope or limits of safeguards.

The blunt fact is that India secured better agreements in an era in which the Chinese military invasion had shattered its confidence and the US PL-480 aid had fostered the image of a country with a begging bowl than in a period marking its rise as a knowledge powerhouse and nuclear-weapons state.

Little surprise, therefore, that spin is being aggressively employed to shroud inconvenient truths. In his July 22 speech in Parliament, the prime minister stated that while the G-8 passed a “harsh resolution” after the 1998 tests, at the “meeting of the G-8 held recently in Japan, the chairman’s summary has welcomed cooperation in civilian nuclear energy between India and the international community”. Really?

This is what the chair’s summary said: “We look forward to working with India, the IAEA, the NSG and other parties to advance India’s non-proliferation commitments and progress so as to facilitate a more robust approach to civil nuclear cooperation with India to help it meet its growing energy needs in a manner that enhances and reinforces the global non-proliferation regime”. Note the reference to cooperation is secondary. The primary thrust is on advancing “India’s non-proliferation commitments and progress”. Civil nuclear cooperation is just the means to achieve the objective to reinforce the NPT regime. The G-8 leaders, in their separate declaration, actually pledged to “redouble our efforts to uphold and strengthen” the NPT, which perpetuates a five-nation nuclear monopoly.

The prime minister also made the following dream-selling claim on July 22: “It will open up new opportunities for trade in dual-use high technologies, opening up new pathways to accelerate industrialization of our country”. The deal, however, is intended to open commercially lucrative exports for safeguarded Indian facilities while specifically denying dual-use nuclear technologies. Easing high-technology and civilian space export controls is not part of this deal.

New Delhi, after agreeing to more and more conditions, is now threatening to turn its back on the imports-centred deal unless the NSG waiver is “clean” and “unconditional”. This is redolent of what the prime minister told Parliament on August 17, 2006: “It is clear if the final product is in its current form, India will have grave difficulties in accepting the bill. The US has been left in no doubt as to our position”. But when the Hyde Act was passed ignoring that warning, New Delhi didn’t make even a peep.

More misrepresentation will come when the NSG makes multilateral some of the bilateral conditions of the 123 Agreement and unilateral terms of the Hyde Act. The latest US draft submitted to the NSG after consultations with India shows that New Delhi has already acquiesced to its test moratorium being turned into a multilateral legality. But to deflect attention, spinmeisters introduced a red herring — the draft’s “full-scope safeguards” objective, presenting that as the main sticking point and then claiming India has upheld its interest by making the US drop that reference.

Befriend China, Don’t Propitiate

Posted on August 11, 2008 by Chellaney

Sending A Wrong Signal

Sonia Gandhi’s Beijing visit is not good diplomacy

Brahma Chellaney, The Times of India, August 11, 2008

Vision, consistency and tenacity are critical to good diplomacy. Nothing can undermine foreign policy more than spur-of-the-moment initiatives or actions based on personal whims and fancies. Pragmatic foreign policy, as legendary French diplomat Charles-Maurice de Tellyrand-Périgord said, cannot display too much zeal. In that light, Sonia Gandhi’s sudden decision to go to the Beijing Olympics runs counter to the central precepts of sound diplomacy.

That this is her second visit to China in less than a year smacks not just of overzealousness but borders on indiscretion, coming as it does in the face of mounting Chinese assertiveness. Her previous visit last October, in the company of son Rahul Gandhi, was ill-timed because it followed several provocative Chinese actions, including Beijing publicly upping the ante on territorial disputes, compelling India to call off an IAS officers’ tour by denying a visa to an Arunachali officer, and repudiating a 2005 agreement that any border-related settlement should not disturb settled populations. Her latest visit, with members of her extended family, follows more Chinese provocations, including border incidents (like the demolition of makeshift Indian army bunkers at the Sikkim-Bhutan-Tibet trijunction) and the post-midnight summoning of the Indian ambassador.

Reciprocity is the first principle of diplomacy. While no senior Chinese official has visited India since President Hu Jintao’s late 2006 stopover, a steady stream of Indian functionaries have continued to go to Beijing, even as Defence Minister A.K. Anthony put on public record recently India’s concern over rising Chinese cross-border incursions. This year alone, China has played host first to the prime minister, then to the external affairs minister and now to Sonia Gandhi, with Manmohan Singh set to return to Beijing in October for the ASEM summit. Sonia’s visit comes shortly after China slighted External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee by cancelling his scheduled meeting with Premier Wen Jiabao and deputing a junior functionary to receive earthquake-related relief from him.

That was not the only diplomatic snub by China recently. It publicly extended an Olympic opening-ceremony invitation to the most powerful person in India but not to the Indian president or prime minister, although under International Olympic Committee rules such invitations are the prerogative of each participating country’s national Olympic committee. The message was clear: Beijing does not care much for the duly elected Indian government but knows where actual power resides and what strings to pull in India. It also correctly calculated that unlike Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown, Stephen Harper, Donald Tusk and other leaders who are staying away from the Games, Sonia Gandhi will not fuss about the continuing repression in Tibet or China and attend, even though the Tibet issue is much closer to India’s interests than to the boycotters’.

Sonia’s fascination with China, as this writer learned long ago in a one-to-one meeting with her, dates back to her 1988 Beijing visit with late husband Rajiv Gandhi. The Chinese leadership rolled out all the pomp and pageantry, although that visit followed the 1987 Sumdorong Chu military showdown that brought war clouds out of a clear blue sky. Beijing’s perception of Sonia as someone it can work with was reinforced by her visit last October, when it accorded her a welcome fit for a head of state.

Her latest visit, at a time when China has stepped up pressure on India, will only help engender more Chinese pressure. By sowing confusion in India’s China policy, it not only sends out a message incongruous with Indian interest, but also unconsciously plays into Beijing’s game-plan to belittle the elected government as ineffectual and rudderless and reach out to her. Beijing is content that the Indian officialdom has fallen into the Chinese trap of talking about talks in a never-ending process. That leaves China free to pursue “congagement” with India, a blend of containment symbolized by aggressive flanking manoeuvres and engagement aided through the instrumentality of Sonia Gandhi.

In a year in which Chinese security forces cracked down harshly on Tibetans, the Olympics have focused global attention on China’s poor human-rights record. Yet, given India’s stake in stable, peaceful ties with China, New Delhi was right not to boycott the Games ceremony, deputing the sports minister to represent India. Befriend, not propitiate, ought to be the thrust of Indian policy. Sonia’s visit, however, throws a spanner in the carefully calibrated Indian approach.

Her visit cannot be defended as personal or apolitical, for her presence at the Games ceremony sends out a potent political message. To go with children and grandchildren and treat the trip as all fun and games will be out of step with her political status. After all, she heads India’s ruling party and her son is its general secretary. A jaunt fraught with foreign-policy implications is irreconcilable with such standing.

Sonia Gandhi’s life story is like a fairy tale come true: an au pair who marries Prince Charming and rises to become the most powerful figure in a distant foreign land she makes her home. Her ascension from humble origins is as much a tribute to her grit as to the openness of her adopted country. But while India celebrates diversity, China honours homogeneity. Sonia has to realize she is dealing with a state that has replaced Maoism with nationalism as the legitimating credo of the 59-year-old communist rule. And the element of homogeny is implanted in both its institutional structures and popular thought.

Ad hoc, personality-driven approach is no way to deal with such a state that calculatedly plays to its national pride and resolutely pursues long-term strategic interests. To upstage your own government through presence at China’s coming-out party is no mean matter. Once the party is over, it may not be long before China takes its gloves off. Given its growing bellicosity, can anyone discount the possibility that it may try to give India a bloody nose through a lightening but localized military expedition?

Jawaharlal Nehru had advised that the 1962 invasion become “a permanent piece of education”. Today, not only have the lessons of 1962 been forgotten, but also the flurry of Indian officials visiting Beijing for the party shows the manner India’s self-esteem is ebbing.

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research.

Climate Change As Threat Multiplier

Posted on August 7, 2008 by Chellaney

Say no to ‘NPT’ of climate change

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY Japan Times, August 7, 2008

Climate change has been correctly identified as a threat multiplier. Yet it has already become a divisive issue internationally before a plan for a low-carbon future has emerged.

Just as the five original nuclear- weapons states helped fashion the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to perpetuate their privileges, states that become wealthy early wish to preserve their prerogatives in a climate-change regime, despite their legacy of environmental damage and continuing high carbon emissions.

This has raised the danger that efforts to lock in the rich nations’ advantages by revising the 1992 Rio bargain and rejiggering the Kyoto Protocol obligations through a new regime could create another global divide between haves and have-nots — an NPT of climate change. In fact, a new bargain is at the heart of the efforts to fashion a 2009 Copenhagen Protocol.

With the Kyoto Protocol’s target of a mere 7 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions below 1990 levels falling by the wayside as global emissions continue to grow at 1.8 percent a year, the standard excuse being trotted out for failing to meet one’s responsibility is that global warming cannot be slowed unless India and China also agree to cut their emissions.

That China and India serve as a convenient pretext for political foot-dragging is apparent from the widely held belief that the climate crisis impact would be borne largely by the developing world and, therefore, the rich nations ought not to slow their economic growth through major emission cuts at a time when they face a growing challenge from the emerging economies.

Such smug beliefs, as U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman acknowledged at a group discussion two months ago in which this writer was involved, have helped foster resistance in Congress to America slashing its high emissions, accounting for almost a quarter of the world’s total. The recent defeat of the Lieberman- Warner cap-and-trade bill on climate change thus is not a surprise.

Ironically, the desired new global bargain would call upon the vulnerable states on the frontline of climate change to shoulder responsibility with those who would supposedly benefit.

The blunt fact is that there will be no winners from climate change. Not only will its effects be global, climate change is likely to make weather patterns more unpredictable in higher latitudes. Indeed, with the upper reaches of the Arctic already warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, climate change could wreak havoc on agriculture, public health and ecosystems in colder lands, besides helping breed unmanageable viruses.

At a time of greater international divisiveness on core challenges — from disarmament and terrorism to the food crisis and the Doha Round of world trade talks — the world can ill-afford political rancor over the climate crisis, which carries the seeds of exacerbating existing security challenges, without necessarily creating a new category of threats.

While it is easy to exaggerate or underestimate the likely impact of climate change owing to the continuing gaps in scientific knowledge, three broad strategic effects can be visualized on the basis of studies so far.

First, climate change would intensify interstate and intrastate competition over natural resources, making resource conflicts more likely. A new Great Game over water, for example, could unfold, with Asia as the hub, given China’s control over the source of all of Asia’s major rivers except the Ganges. Accelerated melting of glaciers and mountain snows would affect river-water flows, although higher average temperatures are likely to bring more rainfall in the tropics.

Second, higher frequency of extreme weather events (such as hurricanes, flooding and drought) and a rise in ocean levels are likely to spur greater interstate and intrastate migration — especially of the poor and the vulnerable — from the delta and coastal regions to the hinterland.

Such an influx of outsiders would socially swamp inland areas, upsetting the existing fragile ethnic balance and provoking a backlash that strains internal and regional security. It should not be forgotten that many societies are a potent mix of ethnicity, culture and religion.

India, for example, could face a huge refugee influx from the world’s seventh most populous country, Bangladesh, which is already losing land to saltwater incursion. Having been born in blood in 1971, Bangladesh faces extinction from water, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) saying that country is set to lose 17 percent of its land and 30 percent of its food production by 2050.

In some cases, the effect of large-scale refugee influx would be to undermine the political stability and internal cohesion of the state. That could even foster or strengthen conditions making the state dysfunctional.

Third, human security will be the main casualty as climate change delivers a major blow to vulnerable economic sectors. Economic and social disparities, already wide in many societies, would intensify. The specter of resource conflicts, failed states, large-scale migrations, growing extremism, and higher frequency and intensity of extreme weather events helps underscore the human-security costs.

The diversion of food for biofuels, for instance, has only helped create a windfall for major farm industries while burdening the world’s poor. Also, buying carbon credits from poor states to exceed one’s own emission targets is environmental grandstanding, at best, and carbon colonialism, at worst.

The hope was that such carbon trading would allow emission cuts to happen where they are the cheapest. But the evidence thus far is that it has done little more than provide a greener reputation to the states promoting the scheme.

A strengthened international regime to combat global warming will have to be anchored in differential responsibility, a concept at the heart of the Climate Change Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol, but also embedded in international law through several other agreements — from the Montreal Protocol to the Maastricht Treaty.

A lot can also be done outside a climate change regime. Take energy efficiency, which can help bring a quarter of all gains. The United States belches twice as much carbon dioxide per person as Japan, although the two countries have fairly similar per capita incomes. Or take the case within the U.S.: California has held its per capita energy consumption essentially constant since 1974, while per capita energy use in America as a whole has jumped during the same period by 50 percent.

Furthermore, given that deforestation accounts for as much as 20 percent of the emission problem, carbon storage is as important as carbon cuts. Each hectare of rainforest, for example, stores 500 tons of carbon dioxide. Forest management is thus important to tackle climate change. In fact, to help lessen the impact of climate change, states need to strategically invest in ecological restoration — growing and preserving rainforests, building wetlands and shielding species critical to our ecosystems.

Climate change is not just a matter of science but also a matter of geopolitics. Without improved geopolitics, there can be no real fight against climate change.

Equity in burden-sharing holds the key to a strengthened regime emerging at Copenhagen. The challenge is to devise carbon standards that help protect the material and social benefits of economic growth in the developing world but without damaging prosperity in the developed countries.

If the emerging economies were to assume obligations of the rich states, emission-cut targets would have to be based on objective criteria calibrating a country’s reduction burden both to its historic contributions to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and to its current per capita emissions. But if the privileged kept their present emission rights and tied any carbon cuts to burden-sharing with the underprivileged, it would constitute an NPT variant.

Brahma Chelleney, a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author, among others, of "On the Frontline of Climate Change: International Security Implications."

The Japan Times: Thursday, Aug. 7, 2008

U.S.-India nuclear deal set to attract more conditions

Posted on August 7, 2008 by Chellaney

A corrupt deal pushed corruptly

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, August 16-31, 2008

Those who egged on the prime minister to take the nuclear deal to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board even if it meant breaking the governing alliance didn’t have much to do: Manmohan Singh himself led the charge. With his V signs for the media cameras, Singh took the lead to survive the confidence vote in Parliament by hook or by crook.

That the government triumphed by winning over or neutralizing a number of opposition MPs through various illicit inducements now hangs as a national shame — a stigma that will haunt Singh forever and undermine his leadership during his remainder months in office. The subsequent terrorist bombings in Bangalore and Ahmedabad, and the popular uprising in the Jammu region, have helped reinforce the image of a weak, irresolute prime minister fixated on one issue, to the detriment of a balanced, forward-looking approach on advancing national interests.

When history is written, Singh will be remembered for the two nasty surprises he sprung on the nation, not for his legacy in continuing high GDP growth. The first was the nuclear deal whose “final draft came to me from the U.S. side”, as he confessed in Lok Sabha on August 3, 2005, after he had already reached Washington in July 2005, without any nuclear scientist in his delegation. And the other was his action, on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, in turning Indian policy on its head by embracing Pakistan as a fellow victim of and joint partner against terror — a blunder that brought more deadly attacks scripted by the Pakistani intelligence. Both the nuclear deal and the joint anti-terror mechanism were the product not of institutional thinking but of personal caprice.

The imports-oriented nuclear deal centres on big bucks, with exporters hoping for a windfall and importers looking forward to commissions and kickbacks. If the deal takes effect, India, over the next two decades, is likely to spend more than $100 billion expanding its national-power capacity, according to Ron Somers, president of the Washington-based U.S.-India Business Council. Such spending would not only help revive the moribund U.S. nuclear-power industry, but also bring billions of dollars worth of business to European, Russian and Japanese firms. The deal additionally comes with auxiliary understandings, including on U.S. arms exports to India. It is such interests that have helped lubricate a deal whose very rationale is fundamentally flawed: Generating electricity from high-priced imported reactors dependent on foreign fuel makes little economic or strategic sense.

Against that background, it should come as no surprise that a corrupt deal has been pushed corruptly. In fact, never before in independent India’s history has a major strategic issue been pushed in such a blatantly partisan way — with no regard to solemn promises made in Parliament. Such has been Singh’s partisan doggedness that, unlike for instance on the Jammu-agitation issue, he never called an all-party meeting on the deal, despite pledging in Parliament to “seek the broadest possible consensus within the country to enable the next steps to be taken”.

With Singh repeatedly acquiescing to goalpost shifting, the deal has acquired more and more conditions at every step of a still-continuing process. The civil-military “Separation Plan”, the Hyde Act, the so-called 123 Agreement and the latest IAEA safeguards accord have helped change the original terms, seeking to firmly tether India to the U.S.-led international non-proliferation regime in order to tame its nuclear waywardness. The way has been cleared to draft India into the NPT as a de facto party. Today, Singh’s pledges to Parliament stand belied, including that India will accept only the “same responsibilities and obligations as other advanced nuclear states like the U.S.”, that it will get “the same rights and benefits” as the U.S., and that it will “never accept discrimination”.

In that light, it is predictable that the deal would attract more grating conditions as it traverses the final two stages — clearances from the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group and the U.S. Congress. The U.S. ambassador has publicly dismissed India’s demand for an unconditional NSG clearance as “provocative”. In fact, India’s position has been undermined from within, with the prime minister’s irrepressible special envoy, Shyam Saran, terming as “unrealistic” the demand that the NSG put no condition, not even a test ban. When the new conditions come, you can be certain that Singh and his handlers would spin reality to present the outcome as another “victory” for India.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Book review: Pakistan’s descent into chaos

Posted on August 2, 2008 by Chellaney

The Road to Terroristan

Brahma Chellaney, India Today, July 31, 2008

Descent Into Chaos

Ahmed Rashid

(Allen Lane)

This book is more about Pakistan’s tumble into chaos than about Afghanistan’s continuing bedlam. Central Asia appears only in passing, despite its subtitle, “How the War Against Islamic Extremism is Being Lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia”. Written in the narrative style of a reporter, the book recounts the events and actions that have earned Pakistan disparaging labels like “Problemistan”, “Terroristan” and “Al Qaidastan” — epithets that underline its potential threat to global security.

Jihad culture is now deeply woven into Pakistan’s national fabric. Unravelling it won’t be easy. But it is essential for regional and global security. Pakistan remains a common thread in the investigations of most acts of international terrorism. India has officially blamed “elements in Pakistan” for the deadly bombing at its embassy in Kabul.

The book is well-timed, with growing recognition among U.S. analysts of the need for a broader, post-Iraq focus on Pakistan and Afghanistan — a theme central to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s foreign-policy agenda. The book indeed is a trenchant compendium of the Bush administration’s blunders that have undermined the global war on terror and helped fan Islamic extremism. Its author is well-known for a previous, equally well-timed book on the Taliban, published just before 9/11.

Rashid, one of Pakistan’s most-respected journalists, has an unusual background: As a youth, he spent 10 years as a guerrilla fighter and underground revolutionary in the hills of Baluchistan. When the April 1978 Marxist coup occurred in Afghanistan, Rashid was living in exile in Kabul. His mutinous credentials and Afghan links subsequently helped him as a writer to gain access to the Taliban.

Rashid’s objectivity stands out in his latest book. He is unsparingly critical of the Bush administration’s indulgent approach toward Pervez Musharraf in the years the general ran a one-man dictatorship. While then Secretary of State Colin Powell “liked Musharraf enormously and had developed a close relationship with him”, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was reluctant to “put pressure on Pakistan”. Such lenience spilled over into President Bush’s second term, according to Rashid, even as the Pakistan military and its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency aided and abetted the Taliban and the Islamist groups waging a terror campaign against India. The 2003 Iraq invasion only helped derail the war on terror. “Ultimately the strategies of the Bush administration have created a far bigger crisis in South and Central Asia than existed before 9/11”, Rashid writes. “There are more failing states in the Muslim world, while Al Qaeda has expanded around the world”.

Hobbled by a domineering military, militant Islam, endemic corruption and dependency on foreign aid, Pakistan remains a main breeding ground of global terror and the likely hideout of the most wanted terrorists, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri. Yet, as Rashid says, “the Taliban are now expanding in Pakistan much faster than anyone could have imagined”. Pakistan’s success in meeting its central challenge — to move away from militarism and extremism, and toward a stable, moderate state — hinges on “the army and the ISI being pressured or persuaded to give up their twisted logic of insecurity, national pride and expansion in the region, [so as] to help sort out the country’s problems, and to be good friends to Pakistan’s neighbours, instead of constantly trying to undermine them. The army’s insecurity, which since 1947 has essentially bred a covert policy of undermining neighbours, has now come full circle, for Pakistan’s very future is at stake as extremists threaten to undermine Pakistan itself”.

While such writings clearly do not sit well with the military establishment, with the author disclosing that he was once summoned by Musharraf and warned to stop writing about the ISI’s continuing assistance to the Afghan Taliban, Rashid at times is unable to rise above Pakistani prejudices against India in his book, alleging for example “the systematic use of rape as a weapon of terror by Indian soldiers” in Kashmir. He also equates Indian intelligence with the ISI in waging “a non-stop proxy war”.

The book’s main weakness, however, is that it is neither investigative nor scholarly but mainly a collation of events of recent years, up to Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. The author narrates some events at length but other equally significant developments are inexplicably ignored or under reported. For instance, he dismisses the Kargil War in one sentence but spends several pages on the highjacking of Flight IC-814. Still, the book overall is good and worth reading. It rightly argues that without elimination of Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan, Afghanistan cannot be pacified.

Climate Change: Equity in Burden-Sharing Holds the Key

Posted on August 2, 2008 by Chellaney

Share the Burden

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, July 30, 2008

Climate change has been correctly identified as a threat multiplier. Yet it has already become a divisive issue, with the danger that the rich nations’ efforts to lock in their advantages by revising the 1992 Rio bargain and rejiggering their Kyoto Protocol obligations through a new regime could create another global divide between haves and have-nots — an NPT of climate change. A new bargain is at the heart of the efforts to fashion a 2009 Copenhagen Protocol.

With the Kyoto Protocol’s target of a mere 7 per cent reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions below 1990 levels falling by the wayside, the standard excuse being trotted out for failing to meet one’s responsibility is that global warming cannot be slowed unless India and China also agree to cut their emissions. That China and India serve as a convenient pretext for political foot-dragging is apparent from the widely held belief that the climate-crisis impact would be borne largely by the developing world and, therefore, the rich nations ought not to slow their economic growth through major emission cuts at a time when they face a growing challenge from the emerging economies.

An extension of that belief is the contention that global warming would change the relative strategic weight of nations, with those in the colder climes gaining, like Russia, but many others suffering an erosion of security and status. Such smug beliefs, as Senator Joe Lieberman acknowledged at a group discussion two months ago in which this writer was involved, have helped foster resistance in the US Congress to America slashing its high emissions, accounting for almost a quarter of the world’s total. The recent defeat of the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill thus is not a surprise. Ironically, the desired new global bargain would call upon the vulnerable states on the frontline of climate change, like India, to shoulder responsibility with those who would supposedly benefit.

At a time of greater international divisiveness on core challenges — from disarmament and terrorism to the food crisis and the Doha Round — the world can ill-afford political rancour over the climate crisis, which carries the seeds of exacerbating existing security challenges, without necessarily creating a new category of threats. While it is easy to exaggerate or underestimate the likely impact of climate change owing to the continuing gaps in scientific knowledge, three broad strategic effects can be visualized.

First, climate change is likely to intensify interstate and intrastate competition over natural resources. A new Great Game over water, for example, could unfold, with Asia as the hub, given China’s control over the source of all of Asia’s major rivers except the Ganges — Tibet. Accelerated melting of glaciers and mountain snows would affect river-water flows, although higher average temperatures are likely to bring more rainfall in the tropics.

Second, higher frequency of extreme weather events and a rise in ocean levels are likely to spur greater interstate and intrastate migration — especially of the poor and the vulnerable — from the delta and coastal regions to the hinterland. Such an influx of outsiders may provoke a backlash that strains internal and regional security. India, for example, could face a huge refugee influx from the world’s seventh most populous country, Bangladesh, already losing land to saltwater incursion.

Third, human security will be the main casualty as climate change delivers a major blow to vulnerable economic sectors. Disparities would intensify. The spectre of resource conflicts, failed states, large-scale migrations, growing extremism, and higher frequency and intensity of extreme weather events helps underscore the human-security costs.

Unlike other unconventional challenges, climate change is caused not by hostile forces but by production and consumption patterns. While the reluctance of the rich to accept any diminution in their lifestyle comforts is understandable, there is a need to go beyond symbolic approaches. The diversion of food for biofuels, for instance, has only helped create a windfall for major farm industries while burdening the world’s poor. Also, buying carbon credits from poor states to exceed one’s own emission targets is environmental grandstanding, at best, and carbon colonialism, at worst.

A strengthened regime will have to be anchored in differential responsibility, a concept at the heart of the Climate Change Convention and the Kyoto Protocol, but also embedded in international law through several other agreements — from the Montreal Protocol to the Maastricht Treaty. If the emerging economies were to assume obligations of the rich states, emission-cut targets would have to be set on objective criteria calibrating a country’s reduction burden both to its historic contributions to the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and to its current per-capita emissions. But if the privileged were to keep their emission rights and tie any cuts to burden-sharing with the underprivileged, it would constitute an NPT variant. By pledging that its per-capita emissions would never exceed developed countries’, India has ingeniously challenged the rich to help cap its emissions by cutting back on their own.

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research.

(c) Times of India, 2008.

To handle China, be a bit Chinese

Posted on July 31, 2008 by Chellaney

Beat them at their own game

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, July 30, 2008

As an extension of the truisms of politics, like sunny beats gloomy, Beijing has devised its own positive slogans that its diplomats love to recite, such as a “win-win situation” and “common goals”. Such sloganeering provides diplomatic cover for the assertive promotion of Chinese interests. India needs to similarly strike an upbeat note and emphasize positives like “constructive engagement” and “shared benefits”. And through such catchphrases, New Delhi ought to publicly encourage Beijing to have a more “forward-looking approach” and shed the current negatives in its approach.

For example, China’s harking back to the past — to the unfinished business of 1962 — by laying claim to additional Indian territories runs counter to the constructive spirit essential to a win-win situation. Its pressing of increasingly assertive territorial claims on the basis of Tibet’s putative historical ties to those areas shows a mindset anchored in the past. That is a loss-loss situation, not a win-win situation. Similarly, China’s reluctance, while stepping up cross-border intrusions, to define the frontline with India by hiding behind shibboleths like, “It’s a problem left over from history” and “We need time and patience”, needs to be openly challenged as unconstructive, uncooperative and downright negative, with the intent to keep India under pressure.

India’s use of positives to bring out China’s negatives has become imperative in view of the rising Chinese belligerence, manifest from the proliferation of incursions and other border-related incidents since 2006 along a once-tranquil line of actual control (LAC). Even Defence Minister A. K. Antony was constrained to admit on July 23 that India is “concerned” over the increasing frequency of Chinese incursions. “We don’t take these things lightly”, he said. Such military incidents are proof that China’s negatives do not sit well with its claims.

Beijing, not content that Han territorial power is at its pinnacle, still seeks a Greater China. With 60 per cent of its present landmass comprising homelands of ethnic minorities, modern China has come a long way in history since the time the Great Wall represented the Han empire’s outer security perimeter. Yet, driven by self-cultivated myths, the state fuels territorial nationalism, centred on issues like Tibet and Taiwan, and its claims in the East and South China Seas and on Arunachal Pradesh — a state nearly thrice the size of Taiwan. China’s insistence on further expanding its national frontiers stymies a forward-thinking approach essential to building peace and stability in Asia.

The challenge China poses emanates principally from the character of its regime, not of its people. After all, weapons don’t kill until those holding the reins of power employ them. The military machine has been repeatedly unleashed against China’s own residents. The Chinese regime fans ultra-nationalism because the central tenet of its philosophy is uniformity, with Hu Jintao’s slogan of a “harmonious society” designed to undergird the theme of conformity with the state. While India celebrates diversity, China honours homogeneity. This quality of being uniform is implanted not just in institutions but also in popular thought.

Building consensus in democratic states entails reaching out to political opponents. In China, consensus is contrived simply through censorship, which snuffs out dissent. To stay healthy and to improve, a society needs an open, vigorous debate of its failings. But when a regime blocks such discussion, it can mean trouble for its inhabitants (as the latest repression in Tibet shows) and for its neighbours (as underlined by Beijing’s increasingly muscular foreign policy). The greatest genocide in modern history was not the Holocaust but Mao’s so-called Great Leap Forward.

That record, coupled with the counterproductive approach toward Tibet and India, belies the myth that Chinese rulers are pragmatic and farsighted. Indeed, the record shows them as proverbial extremists, lurching from one end of the pendulum (hardcore communists) to the other extreme (unabashed capitalists). Whom they denounced as China’s enemies in the past are the very nations they zealously befriend today. They pursued policies previously that had no regard for human costs. Today, they pursue policies with little respect for the environment.

The secretive, suspicious and paternalistic culture in which Chinese leaders have been reared is reflected in their shadowy and shifty policy toward India. To tackle a regime wedded to nationalism as state religion and opacity as strategy, New Delhi needs greater clarity and resolve on the ends and means of its China policy. In fact, to outwit this regime at its own game, New Delhi should be willing to employ some of the Chinese tactics and tools. In order words, to handle China, emulate the Chinese.

While publicly speaking the language of conciliation, New Delhi has to brace up to the prospect that once the Olympics are over, Beijing may be tempted to provoke more military incidents, especially if India’s domestic politics remain murky and policy in disarray. A full-scale war will militate against the regime’s portrayal of China as a peaceful rising power. But can anyone discount the possibility that it may seek to achieve limited strategic objectives through short, swift, localized forays across a couple of points along the LAC that give India a bloody nose? A lightening Chinese military expedition may be designed to cut a peer rival down to size in the eyes of the world and help end the now-fashionable China-India pairing the regime viscerally detests.

Growing Chinese assertiveness against India

Posted on July 22, 2008 by Chellaney

China’s next India war

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, July 16-31, 2008

China’s rapidly accumulating power is emboldening Beijing to pursue a more muscular foreign policy. After having touted its “peaceful rise”, it has shown a creeping propensity to flex its muscles — a tendency that has become more pronounced since it surprised the world with an anti-satellite weapon test in January 2007. Once the Beijing Olympics are over, it may not be long before China takes its gloves off. In fact, over the past year, its actions have ranged from provocatively seeking to assert its jurisdiction over islets claimed by Vietnam and staging large-scale war games in the South and East China Seas, to showcasing its new nuclear submarine capability and whipping up diplomatic spats with countries that grant official hospitality to the Dalai Lama.

What stands out the most is the perceptible hardening of China’s stance towards India. This is manifest from the Chinese military assertiveness on the ground (reflected in rising cross-border incursions), the supply of Chinese arms to rebels in India’s northeast, the instigation of the Gorkhaland agitation via Nepal connections, and the waging of intermittent cyberwarfare by targeting official Indian Web sites. From Chinese forces in November 2007 destroying some makeshift Indian army bunkers near Doka La, at the Sikkim-Bhutan-Tibet trijunction, to the Chinese foreign minister’s May 2007 message that Beijing no longer was bound by a 2005 agreement that any border-related settlement should not disturb settled populations, bellicosity has been writ large.

Recent unfriendly actions include the post-midnight summoning of the Indian ambassador in Beijing, slighting visiting External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee by cancelling his scheduled meeting with Premier Wen Jiabao, and deputing a junior functionary to receive earthquake-related relief from Mukherjee. These and other actions run counter to the stated aim of the high-level visits between the two countries to build a stable Sino-Indian relationship based on equilibrium and forward thinking. The public statements coming out from such visits, of course, are deceptively all sweetness and light.

The big question is: What objectives is China seeking to achieve by hardening its position? Indeed, it has gone to the extent of warning India of another 1962-style invasion through one of its state-run institutes. In a recent Mandarin-language commentary posted on the Web site of the International Institute of Strategic Studies of China, http://www.chinaiiss.org/, the author, using an assumed name, cautioned an “arrogant India” not “to be evil” or else Chinese forces in war “will not pull back 30 kilometres” like in 1962. Such belligerence, which has led to more than three dozen Chinese military forays into Sikkim alone this year, has prompted India to redeploy forces by beefing up defences in the vulnerable Siliguri Corridor, stationing Sukhoi-30s in Tezpur and initiating moves to reactivate seven abandoned airstrips along the Himalayas.

China’s motives remain a puzzle. Yet there are several disturbing parallels between what is happening now and the events between 1959 and 1962 that led to the Chinese invasion. That aggression had been cleverly timed to coincide with the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of a nuclear Armageddon. Consider the following parallels:

■ Like in the pre-war period, it has now again become commonplace internationally to speak of India and China in the same breadth. The aim of “Mao’s India war” in 1962, as Harvard professor Roderick MacFarquhar has called it, was mainly political: to cut India to size by demolishing what it represented — a pluralistic, democratic model to China’s totalitarian political system. As Premier Zhou Enlai publicly admitted then, the war was intended “to teach India a lesson”. The swiftness and force with which Mao Zedong managed to teach India a lesson not only discredited the Indian model in the eyes of the world, but boosted China’s international image and consolidated the Chinese strongman’s internal power to the extent that he could go from his disastrous 1957-61 Great Leap Forward — the greatest genocide in modern history, surpassing even the Holocaust — to wreaking more damage in the name of the Cultural Revolution.

It has taken India more than 45 years to again be paired with China — a comparison Beijing viscerally loathes.

■ In the Mao years, China instigated and armed major insurgencies in India’s northeast. That included the Naga rebels, with the China-trained Thuingaleng Muivah still the military chief of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah faction); the Mizo guerrilla movement whose leader Laldenga was openly embraced by Chinese leaders; and Manipur’s so-called People’s Liberation Army. Such assistance ceased after Mao’s death. But today, China may be coming full circle, with Chinese-made arms increasingly flowing into guerrilla ranks in the northeast. Although an 11-year-old ceasefire between Naga militants and New Delhi has brought peace to Nagaland, several other parts of the northeast are today wracked by insurgencies, allowing Beijing to fish in troubled waters.

■ Like in the period up to 1962, there is a mismatch today between Indian talk and capability, offering a potential incentive to China to try and put India in its place. India’s power pretensions today are such that it believes it can punch above its weight. Yet the gaps in its defences make the parallel with the pre-1962 period glaring.

More than a decade after it went overtly nuclear, the country still lacks a barely minimal deterrent against China. To have peace with China, India needs to be able to defend peace. The advantages China has over India in military infrastructure and logistics, size of conventional forces and being on the upper heights can be neutralized only through an effective nuclear-missile capability. But India has still to deploy its first Beijing-reachable missile. Three decades after China tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile, India doesn’t have an ICBM programme even in the pipeline, although it is spending a staggering $3.4 billion on a lunar project bereft of security benefits. While Jawaharlal Nehru made the mistake of chasing romantic goals, the present prime minister has consciously chosen deal-making over deterrent-building.

■ Mirroring the confusion in New Delhi’s Beijing policy from the mid-1950s to 1962, India today lacks clarity on the ends and means of its strategy vis-à-vis China. Just as there was a propensity in the pre-war period to take Chinese statements at face value and condone furtive Chinese moves, including the nibbling at Indian territory, the Indian establishment today willingly makes allowances for China’s assertiveness. Nothing better illustrates this than army chief Gen. Deepak Kapoor’s public assertion that India is as culpable as China in committing cross-border intrusions. His shocking statement not only made light of the increasing number of Chinese incursions, but also implicitly condoned China’s calculated refusal to clarify the frontline. To say the “Chinese have a different perception” of the frontline, as he did, is to disregard the fact that it suits China not to clarify the line of control and keep India under military pressure.

Such wanton indulgence — reminiscent of India’s pre-war miscalculations — can only embolden China to step up intrusions. In another reminder of that era, New Delhi first sought to sweep under the rug the November 2007 Chinese military action near Doka La, only to sheepishly admit the truth four months later, with Pranab Mukherjee telling Parliament last March that although Beijing accepts the Sikkim-Tibet border “as settled in the Anglo-Sikkim Convention of 1890”, “some bunkers have been destroyed and some activities have taken place”.

■ Just as India retreated to a defensive position in the border negotiations with Beijing at the beginning of the 1960s after having undermined its leverage through its formal acceptance of the “Tibet region of China”, New Delhi today has drawn back to an untenable negotiating position. Instead of gently shining the spotlight on the core issue of Tibet and China’s continuing occupation of Aksai Chin, India is willing to discuss the newly assertive Chinese claim on Tawang. By contrast, Beijing sticks to its tested old line that what it occupies is Chinese territory and what it claims is also Chinese territory. So what it claims has to on the negotiating table — a cynical stance India meekly countenances.

As a consequence, the wounds of that 32-day war have been kept open by China’s claims to additional Indian areas even as it holds on to the territorial gains of that conflict.

The reality is that the trans-Himalayan military equations have been significantly changed by China’s July 2006 opening of the new railway to Lhasa. The railway, which is now being extended southward to Xigatse and then beyond to Nepal and to two separate points along the Indian border, arms Beijing with a rapid military deployment capability. It may not be a coincidence that China’s growing hardline approach has followed its infrastructure advances on the vast but sparsely populated Tibetan plateau, including the building of the railway and new airfields and highways. It is now constructing the world’s highest airport at Ngari, on the southwestern edge of Tibet.

India can expect little respite from the direct and surrogate pressure China is mounting. Through Burma, Bangladesh and Nepal, it will seek to destabilize the northeast. It will continue to prop up Pakistan militarily to help keep India boxed in on the subcontinent. In fact, it is now seeking to do a Burma in Sri Lanka by emerging as a key arms supplier to Colombo and building a billion-dollar port at Hambantota. More broadly, China has aggressively pursued port-related projects in the Indian Ocean rim countries. The symbols of such Chinese activity include Hambantota, Chittagong and Gwadar, now being expanded into a deepwater naval base.

China’s ravenous pursuit of resources, including in India’s periphery, is another factor New Delhi cannot ignore. Constraints on resources are likely to become pronounced as more and more Indians and Chinese gain income to embrace modern comforts. The global demand for resources is set to soar, along with their prices. Beijing’s energy-import needs have come handy to expand Chinese maritime presence along vital sea-lanes.

An imperial energy age indeed appears to be dawning as a result of China’s aggressive resources-related diplomacy. Consider the following developments:

● The emergence of a 21st-century, energy-related Great Game, with China outmanoeuvring India. Beijing has used its rising energy imports as justification for openly advancing military objectives. While conserving its own oil-and-gas reserves, it has stepped up imports — a strategy it is also pursuing on key minerals. For example, it has more iron-ore reserves than India, yet 52 per cent of Indian exports to China now consist of just one item — iron ore.

● Determined efforts to assert control over energy supplies and transport routes, including mercantilist moves to lock up long-term supplies. Such is China’s emphasis on legal ownership that it has been buying energy assets in faraway lands often at inflated prices.

The popular perception is that Chinese and Indian energy companies are engaged in fierce bidding wars to acquire overseas assets. But the cash-rich Chinese companies have easily beaten Indian competition everywhere. The only exception was the Akpo deepwater oil field in Nigeria, where India’s ONGC won the right to buy South Atlantic Petroleum’s 45 per cent stake. The irony, however, is that New Delhi blocked ONGC from picking up that stake on grounds that the $2-billion investment entailed unacceptable risks as the Nigerian majority stakeholder was a dubious, politically manipulated shell company. But no sooner had ONGC backed out from the deal than the state-run China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) Ltd., China’s largest offshore oil producer, signed an accord on January 9, 2006, to pay $2.27 billion for the same 45 per cent stake.

● China is actively pursuing access-gaining projects along the major trade arteries in the Indian Ocean rim. Consequently, it is beginning to position itself along the sea-lanes from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea.

With an increasingly assertive China to the north, a China-allied Pakistan on the west, a Chinese-influenced Burma to the east, and growing Chinese naval interest in the Indian Ocean, India has to foil its strategic encirclement. India’s energy-security interests, in fact, demand that its navy play a greater role in the Indian Ocean, a crucial international passageway for oil deliveries. In addition to safeguarding the sea-lanes, the navy has to protect the country’s large energy infrastructure of onshore and offshore oil and gas wells, liquefied natural gas terminals, refineries, pipeline grids and oil-exploration work within the vast Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

● The establishment of interstate energy corridors (which also double up as strategic corridors) through the planned construction of pipelines to transport oil or gas sourced from third countries. China is busily fashioning two such corridors on either side of India through which it would transfer Gulf and African oil for its consumption, reducing its reliance on U.S.-policed shipping lanes through the Malacca and Taiwan Straits and also cutting freight costs and supply time in the process.

One corridor extends northwards from the Chinese-built Pakistani port of Gwadar, which represents China’s first strategic foothold in the Arabian Sea. Located at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz, Gwadar is to link up with the Trans-Karakoram Strategic Corridor to western China.

The second is the Irrawaddy Corridor designed to connect Chinese-aided Burmese ports with China’s Yunnan, Sichuan and Chongqing provinces through road, river, rail and energy links.

● Strategic plans to assemble a “string of pearls” in the form of listening posts and special naval-access arrangements along the Indian Ocean sea-lanes. With its new blue-water navy and access arrangements around peninsula India, China is threatening to turn the Indian Ocean into the Chinese Ocean one day. As navy chief Adm. Suresh Mehta said in a speech last January, “Each pearl in the string is a link in the chain of Chinese maritime presence”. That presence is now being extended all the way to Mauritius, where China is opening a trade development zone at a cost of some $730 million, making it the largest foreign direct investment in that island-nation.

Add to this picture another resource issue, the one with the greatest strategic bearing on the long-term interests of India and China — water. Although India’s usable arable land is larger than China’s — 160.5 million hectares compared to 137.1 million hectares — the source of all the major Indian rivers except the Ganges is the Chinese-held Tibetan plateau. But even the two main tributaries of the Ganges flow in from the Tibetan plateau — the source of the great river systems of China, South-East and South Asia, including the Brahmaputra, Indus, Mekong, Salween, Yangzi and Yellow. These rivers, fed by Himalayan snowmelt, are a lifeline to the 1.4 billion people living in their basins.

Given China’s ambitious inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects in the Tibetan plateau and its upstream damming of the Brahmaputra, Sutlej and other rivers, water is likely to become a cause of Sino-Indian tensions. If President Hu Jintao — a hydrologist by training who has served as party secretary in Tibet — begins China’s long-pending project to divert the waters of the Brahmaputra northwards to the parched Yellow River, it would constitute the declaration of a water war on lower-riparian India and Bangladesh. Climate change, in any event, will have a significant impact on the availability and flow of river waters from the Himalayas and Tibetan highlands, making water a key element in the national-security calculus of China and India.

The centrality of the Tibet issue has been highlighted both by China’s Tibet-linked territorial claim to Arunachal Pradesh and by its hydro projects on the plateau. Through its water-transfer projects, Beijing is threatening to fashion water into a weapon against India. Also, given the clear link between Tibet’s fragile ecosystem and the climatic stability of the Indian subcontinent, China’s reckless exploitation of Tibet’s vast mineral resources and its large engineering works there are already playing havoc with the ecology.

India and China may be 5,000-year-old civilizations, but it is often forgotten that the two have been neighbours for only the past 58 years. After all, it wasn’t geography but guns — the sudden occupation of the traditional buffer, Tibet, soon after the communists came to power in Beijing — that made China India’s neighbour. Nehru later admitted he had not anticipated the swiftness and callousness with which China forcibly absorbed Tibet because he had been “led to believe by the Chinese foreign office that the Chinese would settle the future of Tibet in a peaceful manner by direct negotiation with the representatives of Tibet”.

Latest developments are a reminder that the 1962 war did not fully slake China’s geopolitical or territorial ambitions. In fact, instead of building a win-win relationship with India based on a constructive, forward-looking approach, China still harks back to the past, to the unfinished business of 1962, by assertively laying claim to additional Indian territories while blocking progress on defining the long line of control separating the two countries. Such intransigence and expansionist intent come even as it continues to occupy one-fifth of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir and steps up its cross-border incursions into India.

It is against this background that a key question emerges: what if China sets out to “teach India a lesson” again? This is a question that can no longer be brushed aside, considering China’s growing proclivity to up the ante against India. Henry Kissinger once said China is a closed society with an open mind, while India is an open society with a closed mind and a know-all attitude. It was that attitude — and the refusal to heed the warning signs — that caught India by surprise when the Chinese army poured in from two separate fronts in 1962.

Today, two words define India’s China policy: confusion and forbearance. Caution with prudence is desirable. But can India afford to be overcautious, clueless and indulgent? In the celebrated words of Edmund Burke, those who fail to learn from history are sure to repeat history. Whatever India learned from 1962 seems to have been forgotten, with the country now torn by internal squabbling and policy disarray.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

http://www.covert.co.in/brahma.htm