About Chellaney

Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

Resource Conflict: The Next Struggle

Posted on June 29, 2007 by Chellaney

Averting Water Wars in Asia

By Brahma Chellaney

International Herald Tribune

June 27, 2007

The sharpening Asian competition over energy resources has obscured another danger: Water shortages in much of Asia are becoming a threat to rapid economic modernization.

Water has emerged as a key issue that could determine if Asia is headed toward cooperation or competition. No country would influence that direction more than China, which controls the Tibetan plateau, the source of most major rivers of Asia.

Tibet’s vast glaciers and high altitude have endowed it with the world’s greatest river systems. Its rivers are a lifeline to the world’s two most-populous states — China and India — as well as to Bangladesh, Burma, Bhutan, Nepal, Cambodia, Pakistan, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. These countries make up 47 percent of the global population.

Yet Asia is a water-deficient continent. Although home to more than half of the human population, Asia has less fresh water – 3,920 cubic meters per person – than any continent other than the Antarctica.

The looming struggle over water resources in Asia has been underscored by the spread of irrigated farming, water-intensive industries and a growing middle class that wants high water-consuming comforts like washing machines and dishwashers. Household water consumption in Asia is rising rapidly, although several major economies there are acutely water-stressed.

The specter of water wars in Asia is also being highlighted by climate change and environmental degradation in the form of shrinking forests and swamps that foster a cycle of chronic flooding and droughts. The Himalayan snow melt that feeds Asia’s great rivers could be accelerated by global warming.

While intrastate water-sharing disputes have become rife in several Asian countries — from India and Pakistan to Southeast Asia and China — it is the potential interstate conflict over river-water resources that should be of greater concern.

This concern arises from Chinese attempts to dam or redirect the southward flow of river waters from the Tibetan plateau, starting point of the Indus, the Mekong, the Yangtze, the Yellow, the Salween, the Brahmaputra, the Karnali and the Sutlej Rivers. Among Asia’s mighty rivers, only the Ganges starts from the Indian side of the Himalayas.

The uneven availability of water within some nations has given rise to grand ideas — from linking rivers in India to diverting the fast-flowing Brahmaputra northward to feed the arid areas in the Chinese heartland. Interstate conflict, however, will surface only when an idea is translated into action to benefit one country at the expense of a neighboring one.

As water woes have intensified in its north owing to intensive farming, China has increasingly turned its attention to the bounteous water reserves that the Tibetan plateau holds. It has dammed rivers, not just to produce hydropower but also to channel the waters for irrigation and other purposes, and is presently toying with massive inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects.

After building two dams upstream, China is building at least three more on the Mekong, stirring passions in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. Several Chinese projects in west-central Tibet have a bearing on river-water flows into India, but Beijing is reluctant to share information.

Having extensively contaminated its own major rivers through unbridled industrialization, China now threatens the ecological viability of river systems tied to South and Southeast Asia in its bid to meet its thirst for water and energy.

The idea of a Great South-North Water Transfer Project diverting river Tibetan waters has the backing of President Hu Jintao, a hydrologist. The first phase of this project calls for building 300 kilometers of tunnels and channels to draw waters from the Jinsha, Yalong and Dadu rivers, on the eastern rim of the Tibetan plateau.

In the second phase, the Brahmaputra waters may be rerouted northward, in what be tantamount to the declaration of water war on lower-riparian India and Bangladesh. In fact, Beijing has identified the bend where the Brahmaputra forms the world’s longest and deepest canyon just before entering India as holding the largest untapped reserves for meeting its water and energy needs.

The future of the Tibetan plateau’s water reserves is tied to ecological conservation. As China’s hunger for primary commodities has grown, so too has its exploitation of Tibet’s resources.

And as water woes have intensified in several major Chinese cities, a group of ex-officials have championed the northward rerouting of the Brahmaputra waters in a book titled, "Tibet’s Waters Will Save China."

Large hydro projects and reckless exploitation of mineral resources already threaten Tibet’s fragile ecosystems, with ore tailings from mining operations beginning to contaminate water sources.

While China seems intent on aggressively pursuing upstream projects on interstate rivers, the forestalling of water wars demands a cooperative Asian framework among basin states to work toward common ownership of the resources.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

Copyright: International Herald Tribune, 2007

Water as a Chinese Weapon

Posted on June 28, 2007 by Chellaney

China aims for bigger share of South Asia’s water lifeline

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Japan Times

Sharpening Asian competition over energy resources, driven in part by high growth rates in gross domestic product and in part by mercantilist attempts to lock up supplies, has obscured another danger: Water shortages in much of Asia are beginning to threaten rapid economic modernization, prompting the building of upstream projects on international rivers. If water geopolitics were to spur interstate tensions through reduced water flows to neighboring states, the Asian renaissance could stall.

Water has emerged as a key issue that could determine whether Asia is headed toward mutually beneficial cooperation or deleterious interstate competition. No country could influence that direction more than China, which controls the Tibetan plateau — the source of most major rivers of Asia.

Tibet’s vast glaciers 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, Myanmar, Bhutan, Nepal, Cambodia, Pakistan, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. These countries make up 47 percent of the global population.

Yet Asia is a water-deficient continent. Although home to more than half of the human population, Asia has less fresh water — 3,920 cubic meters per person — than any continent besides Antarctica.

The looming struggle over water resources in Asia has been underscored by the spread of irrigated farming, water-intensive industries (from steel to paper making) and a growing middle class seeking high water-consuming comforts like washing machines and dishwashers. Household water consumption in Asia is rising rapidly, according to a 2006 U.N. report, but such is the water paucity that not many Asians can aspire to the lifestyle of Americans, who daily use 400 liters per person, or more than 2.5 times the average in Asia.

The specter of water wars in Asia is also being highlighted by climate change and environmental degradation in the form of shrinking forests and swamps, which foster a cycle of chronic flooding and droughts through the depletion of nature’s water storage and absorption cover. The Himalayan snow melt that feeds Asia’s great rivers could be damagingly accelerated by global warming.

While intrastate water-sharing disputes have become rife in several Asian countries — from India and Pakistan to Southeast Asia and China — it is the potential interstate conflict over river-water resources that should be of greater concern. This concern arises from Chinese attempts to dam or redirect the southward flow of river waters from the Tibetan plateau, where major rivers originate, including the Indus, the Mekong, the Yangtze, the Yellow, the Salween, the Brahmaputra, the Karnali and the Sutlej. Among Asia’s mighty rivers, only the Ganges starts from the Indian side of the Himalayas.

The lopsided availability of water within some nations (abundant in some areas but deficient in others) has given rise to grand ideas — from linking rivers in India to diverting the fast-flowing Brahmaputra northward to feed the arid areas in the Chinese heartland.

As water woes have been aggravated in its north due to environmentally unsustainable intensive farming, China has increasingly turned its attention to the bounteous water reserves that the Tibetan plateau holds. It has dammed rivers, not just to produce hydropower but also to channel waters for irrigation and other purposes, and is currently toying with massive interbasin and inter-river water-transfer projects.

After building two dams upstream, China is building at least three more on the Mekong, inflaming passions in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. Several Chinese projects in west-central Tibet bearing on river-water flows into India, but Beijing is loath to share information.

Following flash floods in India’s northern Himachal Pradesh state, however, China agreed in 2005 to supply New Delhi data on any abnormal rise or fall in the upstream level of the Sutlej River, on which it has built a barrage. Discussions are on to persuade it to share flood-control data during the monsoon season on two Brahmaputra tributaries, Lohit and Parlung Zangbo, as it has done since 2002 on the Brahmaputra River, which it has dammed at several places upstream.

The 10 major watersheds formed by the Himalayas and Tibetan highlands spread out river waters far and wide in Asia. Control over the 2.5 million-square-km Tibetan plateau gives China tremendous leverage, besides access to vast natural resources. Having extensively contaminated its own major rivers through unbridled industrialization, China now threatens the ecological viability of river systems tied to South and Southeast Asia in its bid to meet its thirst for water and energy.

Tibet, which existed independently up to 1950, comprises approximately one-fourth of China’s land mass today, having given Han society, for the first time in history, a contiguous frontier with India, Myanmar, Bhutan and Nepal.

Tibet traditionally encompassed the regions of the central plateau, Kham and Amdo. After annexing Tibet, China separated Amdo (the present Dalai Lama’s birthplace) as the new Qinghai province, made the central plateau and eastern Kham the Tibet Autonomous Region, and merged the remaining parts of Tibet into the Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu.

The traditional Tibet is not just a distinct cultural entity but also a natural plateau, the future of whose water reserves is tied to ecological conservation. As China’s hunger for primary commodities has grown, so too has its exploitation of Tibet’s resources. And as water woes have intensified in several major Chinese cities, a group of ex-officials have championed the northward rerouting of the waters of the Brahmaputra in a book enlighteningly titled "Tibet’s Waters Will Save China."

Large hydro projects and reckless exploitation of mineral resources already threaten Tibet’s fragile ecosystems, with ore tailings beginning to contaminate water sources. Unmindful of the environmental impact of such activities in pristine areas, China has now embarked on constructing a 108-km paved road to Mount Everest, located along the Tibet-Nepal frontier. This highway is part of China’s plan to reinforce its claims on Tibet by taking the Olympic torch to the peak of the world’s tallest mountain before the 2008 Beijing Games.

As in the past, no country is going to be more affected by Chinese plans and projects in Tibet than India. The new $ 6.2 billion Gormu-Lhasa railway, for example, has significantly augmented China’s rapid military-deployment capability against India just when Beijing is becoming increasingly assertive in its claims on Indian territories. This hardline stance, in the midst of intense negotiations to resolve the 4,057-km Indo-Tibetan border, is no less incongruous than Beijing’s disinclination to set up, as agreed during its president’s state visit to New Delhi last November, a joint expert-level mechanism on interstate river waters.

Contrast China’s reluctance to establish a mechanism intended for mere "interaction and cooperation" on hydrological data with New Delhi’s consideration toward downstream Pakistan, reflected both in the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty (which reserves 56 percent of the catchment flow for Pakistan) and the more recent acceptance of World Bank arbitration over the Baglihar Dam project in Indian Kashmir. Yet, as if to demonstrate that if you give an inch, it takes a mile, Islamabad has now raised objections to two more Indian hydropower projects — Uri 2 and Kishanganga.

No Indian project has sought to reroute or diminish trans-border water flows, yet Pakistan insists on a say in the structural design of projects upstream in India. New Delhi permits Pakistani officials to inspect such projects. By contrast, Beijing drags its feet on setting up an innocuous interaction mechanism. Would China, under any arrangement, let Indian officials inspect its projects in Tibet or accept, if a dispute arose, third-party adjudication?

If anything, China seems intent on aggressively pursuing projects and employing water as a weapon. The idea of a Great South-North Water Transfer Project diverting river waters cascading from the Tibetan highlands has the backing of President Hu Jintao, a hydrologist who made his name through a brutal martial-law crackdown in Tibet in 1989. In crushing protesters at Tiananmen Square two months later, Deng Xiaoping actually borrowed a leaf from Hu’s Tibet book.

The Chinese ambition to channel the Brahmaputra waters to the parched Yellow River has been whetted by what Beijing touts as its engineering feat in building the giant $ 25 billion Three Gorges Dam project, which has officially displaced a staggering 1.2 million citizens. While China’s water resources minister told a Hong Kong University meeting last October that, in his personal opinion, the idea to divert waters seems not viable, the director of the Yellow River Water Conservancy Committee said publicly that the mega-plan enjoys official sanction and may begin by 2010.

The Brahmaputra (Yarlung Tsangpo to Tibetans) originates near Mount Kailash and, before entering India, flows eastward in Tibet for 2,200 km at an average height of 4,000 meters, making it the world’s highest major river. When two other tributaries merge with it, the Brahmaputra becomes as wide as 10 km in India before flowing into Bangladesh.

The first phase of China’s South-North Project calls for building 300 km of tunnels and channels to draw waters from the Jinsha, Yalong and Dadu rivers, on the eastern rim of the Tibetan plateau. Only in the second phase would the Brahmaputra waters be directed northward. In fact, Beijing has identified the bend where the Brahmaputra forms the world’s longest and deepest canyon just before entering India as holding the largest untapped reserves for meeting its water and energy needs.

While some doubts do persist in Beijing over the economic feasibility of channeling Tibetan waters northward, the mammoth diversion of the Brahmaputra could begin as water shortages become more acute in the Chinese mainland and the current $ 1.2 trillion foreign-exchange hoard brims over. The mega-rerouting would constitute the declaration of a water war on lower-riparian India and Bangladesh.

The Japan Times: Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Chinese Diplomacy: Make Principles to Lull Your Foe

Posted on June 15, 2007 by Chellaney

Unprincipled Principles

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, June 16, 2007

One passion of Chinese diplomacy is to go in for numbered policy pronouncements, like the “10-pronged strategy” unveiled in the joint declaration with India during President Hu Jintao’s visit last November. Another fetish is to enunciate diplomatic principles with another state and later, at an opportune time, reinterpret them unilaterally to add force to Chinese claims and ambitions.

Defining high-sounding principles to advance bilateral relations or dispute resolution helps Beijing to hold the other side to basic parameters, including a one-China policy, and foster a belief that the enunciation of cadenced concepts is progress by itself. Yet the idea behind formulating such principles is to bind the other party to them more than oneself. The principles devised are invariably so general and nebulous that Beijing, in any event, has ample room to reinterpret them or emphasize a single principle over the rest.

At times, the Chinese reinterpretation is nuanced, intended to bring the other state under transient pressure, with a particular aim in mind, such as to “correct” its behaviour. At other times, it is designed to be less subtle by signalling a diplomatic breakdown, as happened in the run-up to the 1962 Chinese invasion of India.

Beijing has proven an international past master in such diplomatic play. A fresh reminder of that was the message the new Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, conveyed to his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukherjee in Hamburg recently that the “mere presence” of settled populations does not affect Chinese claims on Indian territories.

Contrast that with what Premier Wen Jiabao had signed on to just two years ago in New Delhi. One of the six main principles defined in the much-touted “Agreement on the Political Parameters and Guiding Principles for the Settlement of the Boundary Question” mandates that the two sides “safeguard due interests of their settled populations in the border areas.”

While the message signals that Beijing is hardening its stance over the territorial disputes, should India be surprised by the development? The history of Sino-Indian relations, in fact, is largely a cyclic narrative of noble principles being framed, only to lull India into a false sense of complacency.

Consider the famed 1954 Panchsheel Agreement that defined the five principles of peaceful coexistence. Officially titled as the agreement on “trade and intercourse between Tibet Region of China and India,” the accord simplistically identified the following principles, without elaboration:

(i) “mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty;”

(ii) “mutual non-aggression;”

(iii) “mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs;”

(iv) “equality and mutual benefit;” and

(v) “peaceful coexistence.”

No sooner had the accord been signed than China began finding new and different meanings in the Panchsheel principles. It laid claim to Indian border areas like Barahoti (located at the Uttarakhand-Tibet-Nepal tri-junction) and then stealthily intruded south of Niti and Shipki mountain passes — all specified border points in that accord. Before long, China began building a highway through India’s Ladakh region to link rebellious Tibet with another vast, occupied region, Xinjiang, home to Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups.

Indeed, even as it started furtively encroaching on Indian territories, Beijing kept asking New Delhi to honour the principles of “mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty” and “mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.” That call only reflected the fact that everything about the Panchsheel Agreement was one-sided.

First, the Panchsheel was the first accord signed by any third party with China recognizing Tibet to be a “region of China”.

Second, the accord involved no give-and-take, only give from India’s side. It incorporated a formal Indian recognition of Chinese control over Tibet, without securing Beijing’s acceptance of the then-existing Indo-Tibetan frontier. When asked about the border having been left undefined, Jawaharlal Nehru blithely said: “All these are high mountains. Nobody lives there. It is not very necessary to define these things.”

Third, India forfeited all its extra-territorial rights and privileges in Tibet. The accord’s operative parts read as if victor China was imposing its will on vanquished India. Consider the following language: India “will be pleased to withdraw completely within six months from date of exchange of the present notes the military escorts now stationed at Yatung and Gyantse in Tibet Region of China;” “will be pleased to hand over to the Government of China at a reasonable price the postal, telegraph and public telephone services together with their equipment operated by the Government of India in Tibet Region of China;” “will be pleased to hand over to the Government of China at a reasonable price the 12 rest houses of the Government of India in Tibet Region of China;” and “will be pleased to return to the Government of China all lands used or occupied by the Government of India…”

Just eight years later, the Panchsheel principles went up in smoke when China invaded India.

Now fast-forward to the 2005 “guiding principles” for a border settlement. In substance, they are a tad less simplistic than the Panchsheel principles. But these six broad principles hardly lay the basis for a frontier settlement:

(i) “a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution through consultations on an equal footing;”

(ii) “meaningful and mutually acceptable adjustments to their respective positions;”

(iii) “due consideration to each other’s strategic and reasonable interests;”

(iv) “take into account, inter alia, historical evidence, national sentiments, practical difficulties and reasonable concerns and sensitivities of both sides, and the actual state of border areas;”

(v) the “boundary should be along well-defined and easily identifiable natural geographical features to be mutually agreed upon;” and

(vi) “safeguard due interests of their settled populations in the border areas.”

Amazingly, it took several rounds of negotiations between the “special representatives” of the two countries to arrive at principles that are actually grist for the Chinese mill. A succession of three Indian national security advisers participated in this exercise in which, as is evident now, India struck a dry well. After 26 years of continuous border-related negotiations, a settlement is still no closer.

After every hardline action, be it the denial of a visa to any Arunachal Pradesh official or a provocative statement in public, like by Chinese Ambassador Sun Yuxi, Beijing repeats a platitudinous line borrowed from the so-called guiding principles: “We hold that the boundary issue be settled fairly and reasonably at an early date through friendly consultations.” When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh urged in his meeting with Hu Jintao in Berlin last week that the two sides adhere to the full set of guiding principles, the Chinese president merely repeated the “fair and reasonable” line.

The mechanical recitation of such bromides highlights that China neither wishes to settle issues with India fairly and reasonably nor seeks result-oriented consultations.

From Panchsheel to the border-related guiding principles, the road is littered with shattered principles. Yet the 1993 agreement to maintain “peace and tranquillity along the Line of Actual Control” — a line that has not been mutually defined up till now — repeated the defiled Panchsheel principles. How can peace and tranquillity be ensured if the frontline remains unclear and Chinese forces aggressively patrol certain sectors to sustain military pressure on India, not hesitating to carry out forays into, for instance, the Sumdorong Chu Valley?

Just as India tried unsuccessfully to persuade China between 1954 and 1962 to live up to the Panchsheel principles, it now seeks to promote the guiding principles. Yet China’s increasingly blunt assertion of claims to Arunachal Pradesh — a state more than twice the size of Taiwan — shows that those principles are already of little guidance.

All this begs a question: Why expend political capital, in the first place, to put together a set of principles, knowing that the strength of Chinese diplomacy is to design vain principles and then translate them in a way to suit Beijing’s convenience? What makes this question more troubling is that India, under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, agreed in 2003 to the diversionary Chinese proposal to shift the focus of the negotiations from the much-needed frontline clarification to the enunciation of principles for a border settlement.

Beijing’s partiality for numbered declarations, similarly, doesn’t mean it respects what it commits to. It continues to drag its feet on setting up what the “10-pronged” joint declaration of last November called for: “an expert-level mechanism to discuss interaction and cooperation on the provision of flood-season hydrological data, emergency management and other issues regarding trans-border rivers.” With China seeking to divert the waters of rivers flowing southward from the Tibetan plateau, a future conflict over the sharing of interstate water resources can no longer be ruled out.

Sardar Vallabhai Patel was the first Indian leader to grasp the enormity of the challenge from China. What he wrote 57 years ago still resonates today: “We have to take note of a thoroughly unscrupulous, unreliable and determined power practically at our doors… Any friendly or appeasing approaches from us would either be mistaken for weakness or be exploited in furtherance of their ultimate aim.”

© Asian Age, 2007

China’s Rising Assertiveness: Lessons for India

Posted on June 7, 2007 by Chellaney

Dragon Fire

1962 war wounds kept open by China’s hardline claims

The Times of India, June 7, 2007

Brahma Chellaney

China is a rising power but also an increasingly truculent state on territorial or maritime disputes with its neighbours, unable to rise above narrow considerations. Having awakened India long ago from its Nehruvian dream that good intentions are sufficient to run foreign policy, Beijing is now helping New Delhi discover how Chinese diplomacy helps underpin assertive claims and ambitions. Even as India has become more accommodating and forbearing in its dealings with China, Beijing has hardened its position on territorial issues.

China’s assertiveness is mirrored in its refusal to grant visa to any official from Arunachal Pradesh and aggressive patrolling of the still-fuzzy Himalayan frontier. In recent days, a flustered New Delhi has had to cancel a China visit by 107 elite civil servants and also respond to charges by two opposition MPs from Arunachal that Chinese forces have been nibbling at Indian territory there. In seeking to deny that claim, New Delhi has made an unusual revelation — that China maintains more than one line of control and sends regular patrols right up to the outer claimed perimeter.

Through its forcefulness on Arunachal, China is signalling that the ongoing negotiations with India cannot centre merely on border demarcation, even if both sides still call them “border talks”. Recent events indeed highlight the lack of real progress in these epic, 26-year-old negotiations.

Sharing one of the world’s longest and most rugged frontiers, India and China are the only two countries whose entire border is in dispute, without a mutually defined line of control separating them. China continues to lay claim to more Indian territories, even as it holds on to Himalayan areas it seized furtively or by conquest in the 1950s and early 1960s. It occupies one-fifth of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir.

India and China are old civilizations but new neighbours. It was the 1951 Chinese annexation of the historical buffer, Tibet, that brought Chinese troops to what is now the Sino-Indian frontier. Just 11 years later, China invaded India. Today, both countries have built a stake in maintaining the peaceful diplomatic environment on which their economic modernization and security depend. Yet the wounds of the 1962 war have been kept open by China’s publicly assertive claims to Indian territories. As long as China is unwilling to accept the status quo, it will keep alive the memory of 1962.

That China is not a status quo power, at least territorially, is evident from the way it has placed Taiwan under a permanent threat of force and asserted land and maritime claims vis-à-vis other neighbours. Its claims on India, however, involve the largest chunks of territory. Arunachal alone is more than double the size of Taiwan.

For almost half of the period they have been neighbours, India and China have pursued negotiations to resolve their territorial disputes. Since 1981, the two countries have been engaged in regular border-related talks in what is the longest and most-barren negotiating process in modern world history. Of late, however, China has pugnaciously pressed its claims. A classic instance was last November when the Chinese ambassador — backed by his foreign ministry — publicly renewed China’s claim on Arunachal, stoking an unusual diplomatic spat on the eve of President Hu Jintao’s visit to India.

Sino-Indian negotiations, although rich in symbolism, have yielded little progress for three main reasons. First, China has sought to stretch the talks to keep India under strategic pressure. It has employed negotiations as a diplomatic tool to engage India, not to reach accord. This tactic dovetails with China’s broader strategy to present a friendly face while building up its capabilities to go on the offensive.

Second, China persuaded India in 2003 to shift from the practical task of clarifying the frontline to the abstract mission of developing “principles,” “concepts” and “framework” for an overall border settlement. This shift was intended to release Beijing from its 2001 commitment to exchange maps with India of first the western sector and then of the eastern sector — a pledge it had already breached by missing the mutually agreed deadlines.

The contours of a possible settlement have been known for long — a simple trade-off involving India foregoing its claims to territories it has lost to China, in return for Beijing’s abandonment of its claims to Indian-held areas. But given its hegemonic intent, China is loath to settle on the basis of the status quo.

Third, India has needlessly retreated to a more and more defensive position, bringing itself under greater Chinese pressure. Rather than gain leverage by adopting a nuanced position on the core issue of Tibet, India continues to be overcautious in its diplomacy, even when Beijing acts antagonistically. New Delhi’s acquiescence to China’s annexation of Tibet has come to haunt it, as Chinese claims on Indian territories are openly predicated on their alleged historical or ecclesiastical links with Tibet. Seeking to territorially extend the gains from its Tibet annexation, Beijing pushes a bald principle: What is ours is ours to keep, but what is yours must be shared with us.

India can no longer shy away from making hard diplomatic choices. With an overly ambitious and revisionist China on the offensive, India needs to discriminate between appeasement and diplomacy.

The writer is a security affairs analyst.

© Times of India, 2007

Global Power Shifts

Posted on June 7, 2007 by Chellaney

Playing the new Great Game in Asia and beyond

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times

NEW DELHI — A nifty new enterprise to discuss security dangers in the Asia-Pacific and evolve a coordinated approach — the Quadrilateral Initiative — has kicked off with an unpublicized first meeting. U.S., Japanese, Indian and Australian officials, at the rank of assistant secretary of state, quietly met recently on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) gathering in Manila.

Given the qualitative reordering of power under way, with Asia boasting the world’s fastest-growing economies and fastest-rising military expenditures, it is vital to ensure strategic stability and power equilibrium. The shifts in international power — most conspicuous in Asia — are being spurred by rapid economic growth, not military triumphs.

The rise of any new world power engenders serious challenges, especially when the concerned power is opaque or harbors imperial ambitions. China’s emergence as a global player is transforming geopolitics like no other development since the time Japan rose to world-power status in the late 19th century during the Meiji Restoration. Ironically, it had been China’s failure to grasp the dramatic rise of Japan that led to its rout in 1895 in the Sino-Japanese War, opening the way to Western imperialistic expeditions into China over the subsequent decades.

Today, major powers don’t wish to make a similar mistake over China’s rapid rise. Given the new fluidity, all important players, including China, are maneuvering for strategic advantage through new equations and initiatives. Just as China, for the first time since the Ming Dynasty, is pursuing security interests and seeking allies far from its shores, other powers are working to build new equations and partnerships.

The "quad" is just one of several initiatives currently being developed in the Asia-Pacific. Yet its preliminary first meeting was not made known for fear of raising China’s hackles. If the China-India-Russia "strategic triangle" can hold high-level meetings with fanfare, why should the United States, Japan, India and Australia shy away from announcing a meeting to discuss issues of common interest and concern?

Considering that Asia is coalescing economically but becoming more divided politically, Asian security and prosperity demands cooperative relationships between the major players. This is more so because of Asia’s conflicting political and strategic cultures and weak regional institutions. Initiatives like the 26-nation ARF, the 16-state East Asia Summit (EAS) and the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum are too large and unwieldy to bear enduring results by themselves. They need to be complemented by smaller initiatives that involve the important powers in different permutations.

In that light, the quad is surely a good idea. In fact, Tokyo and New Delhi ought to also explore the establishment of Russia-India-Japan and Japan-China-India triangular initiatives. Both such initiatives, like the quad, could contribute to building strategic stability and understanding rival military doctrines in Asia.

The quad opens the path to greater strategic interaction among four major democracies. Some factors, however, need to be borne in mind. First, how the initiative shapes up will hinge on the resolution of a key issue: Will India be a Japan or an Australia to the U.S. (in other words, an ally), or will it be a strategic partner? An ally must follow the alliance leader, while in a partnership there is at least the semblance of equality.

This question won’t go away easily. Australia and Japan have not only a bilateral security treaty with America but also trilateral security arrangements. With India, the U.S. has worked out only a defense-framework agreement.

New Delhi agreed in the framework accord signed in June 2005 not only to "conclude defense transactions" and share intelligence with America, but also to participate in U.S.-directed "multinational operations" and join the U.S.-led nonproliferation regime. India, however, is going to be reluctant to outsource its security to the U.S. in any way.

It is Tokyo that pushed for India’s inclusion to turn the existing trilateral security arrangements into quadrilateral. Even before becoming Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe proposed the quad idea in his book, "Utsukushii Kunihe" (Toward A Beautiful Country), published in July. The idea was supported by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney when he visited Japan and Australia earlier this year.

Second, the quad, once it matures, would involve India in activities to which New Delhi is already committed bilaterally with the U.S. — from promotion of democracy and collaboration on homeland security to joint disaster-response operations and building greater interoperability between the armed forces. It is significant that the first quad meeting was preceded by the first-ever U.S.-Japan-India joint naval exercises.

The Indian naval ships actually first went to Okinawa for a joint maneuver with U.S. forces before taking part in the trilateral exercises off Tokyo Bay. The trilateral exercises, interestingly, intersected with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s Tokyo visit. New Delhi, however, had taken care to placate Beijing by dispatching two to three ships to China from Okinawa for a friendly exercise immediately after the bilateral maneuvers with the U.S.

Third, just because Washington, New Delhi, Canberra and Tokyo are coming together to build a four-way arrangement based on shared values and interests doesn’t mean that they intend to jointly countervail China. Such a mechanism, at best, can give the four countries extra leverage with Beijing as part of a common desire to ensure that the fast-rising Chinese power does not slide into arrogance. The fact is that for each quad member, a stable, mutually beneficial relationship with Beijing is critical to national interest.

In reality, the four have still a long way to go before they can synchronize their approaches toward China. Given their geographical proximity to China and the direct impact Chinese power and ambitions hold for them, Japan and India view power equilibrium as a more pressing imperative. In the years ahead, the two are likely to be more in sync with each other than with the U.S. and Australia on how to contend with Beijing. For the present, the growing asymmetry in power with China puts them at a disadvantage while bilaterally dealing with Beijing, making broader initiatives like the quad attractive.

U.S. strategy is geared toward maintaining a calibrated balance between strategic hedging and greater engagement with Beijing. As part of the hedging, the U.S. is interested in co-opting India, an important geopolitical swing state. But such co-option is unlikely to be at the cost of America’s closer engagement with Beijing.

After all, America now relies on Chinese savings and trade surpluses to finance its super-size budget deficits, hold down U.S. interest rates and prop up the value of the dollar. China, indeed, has become an engine for U.S. economic growth. Politically, too, the U.S. depends on Beijing’s assistance on challenges ranging from North Korea’s future to the Iranian nuclear program. Once allies of convenience during the Cold War, the U.S. and China today are partners tied by interdependence.

Australia’s extraordinary economic boom, likewise, is being driven by exports to a resource-hungry China, and Canberra is loath to take sides between Japan and China, or between China and India. Once regarded with distrust, China has gained recognition and respectability in Australia, securing in the process a controversial deal to import Australian uranium for power generation without having accepted verifiable measures of the kind India is ready to embrace against diversion for weapons purposes.

Lastly, the quad doesn’t mean that the U.S. is reversing the strategy it has maintained in the Asia-Pacific since it took the Philippines in 1898 as spoils of the naval war with Spain — counterbalancing one power against the other to reinforce America’s role as the main arbiter. As part of this continuing strategy, the U.S. has in recent years strengthened its bilateral military alliances, reconfigured its forward-deployed military forces, designated Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines as its major non-NATO allies, and built strategic cooperation with India and Singapore.

America can live with a China that challenges India and Japan, but not one that challenges U.S. pre-eminence. To tie down China regionally, the U.S. is not averse to Japan coming out of its pacifist cocoon as a "normal" military power — but under American tutelage. The revival of the Sino-Japanese historical rivalry indeed can only help the U.S. retain its position as Asia’s strategic pivot.

Similarly, after having penalized New Delhi for more than three decades for its 1974 nuclear test through U.S.-inspired technology controls, Washington is now ready to promote India’s "normalization" as a nuclear power, but at a price: India is to bind its interests to America’s, and accept constraints on the development of its still-nascent nuclear-deterrent capability.

The quad is just one of several new initiatives intended to help shape a new international balance in response to the ongoing power shifts. It seeks not to establish a new security bloc but to evolve common thinking on shared concerns.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

The Japan Times: Thursday, June 7, 2007

The U.S.-India-Japan-Australia Quadrilateral Initiative

Posted on June 1, 2007 by Chellaney

A New Great Game

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, June 2, 2007

A new enterprise focussed on security dangers in the Asia-Pacific — the Quadrilateral Initiative — has kicked off with an unpublicized first meeting. US, Indian, Australian and Japanese officials, at the rank of assistant secretary of state, quietly met last weekend on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) gathering in Manila.

Given the qualitative reordering of power underway, with Asia boasting the world’s fastest-growing economies and fastest-rising military expenditures, strategic stability has become a key challenge. The shifts in international
power — most conspicuous in Asia — are occurring not because of battlefield victories or new military alliances but due to a factor unique to the modern world: rapid economic growth.

A new world power brings with it new challenges, especially if it is opaque or harbours imperial ambitions. China’s emergence as a global player is transforming geopolitics like no other development since the time Japan rose to world-power status during the Meiji Restoration. Ironically, it had been the Qing dynasty’s failure to grasp the dramatic rise of Japan that led to China’s rout in 1895 in the Sino-Japanese war, opening the way to Western imperialistic intervention and China’s quasi-colonization over the subsequent decades.

Today, major powers don’t wish to make a similar mistake over China’s rapid rise. All important players, including China, are manoeuvring for geopolitical advantage through new equations and initiatives. Just as China, for the first time since the Ming dynasty, is pursuing security interests and seeking allies far from its shores, other powers are working to build new equations and partnerships.

The “quad” is just one of several initiatives currently being developed. Yet its preliminary first meeting was not made known for fear of raising China’s hackles. If the China-India-Russia “strategic triangle” can hold high-level meetings with fanfare, why should India, the United States, Australia and Japan shy away from acknowledging discussions on issues of common interest?

With Asia becoming more divided in the face of conflicting strategic cultures and weak regional institutions, the accent has to be on cooperative relationships among the major players. Initiatives like the 26-nation ARF, the
16-state East Asia Summit (EAS) and the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, however, are too large and unwieldy to bear enduring results by themselves. They need to be complemented by smaller initiatives involving important powers in different permutations.

In that light, the “quad” is an appealing idea. In fact, New Delhi ought to also explore the establishment of triangular Russia-India-Japan and Japan-China-India initiatives. Along with the “quad,” they could contribute to building strategic transparency and understanding.

A Russia-India-Japan triangle is of immense strategic import. It can help deter power disequilibrium in Asia. But its formation depends on Tokyo and Moscow settling (or, in the interim, setting aside) their Northern Territories
dispute and fully normalizing bilateral relations, which remain underdeveloped and riven by mutual distrust since the end of World War II.

How the “quad” initiative shapes up will hinge on the resolution of a key issue: will India be a Japan or an Australia to the US (in other words, an ally), or will it be a strategic partner? An ally has to follow the alliance leader, while in a partnership there is at least the semblance of equality.

This question won’t go away easily. Australia and Japan not only have a bilateral security treaty with America but also trilateral security arrangements with Washington. With India, the US has worked out only a
defence-framework agreement. New Delhi agreed in the framework accord signed in June 2005 not only to “conclude defence transactions” and share intelligence with America, but also to participate in US-directed “multinational operations” and join the US-led non-proliferation regime. India,
however, is going to be reluctant to outsource its security in any way or slavishly follow Washington.

It is Tokyo that pushed for India’s inclusion to turn the existing trilateral security arrangements into quadrilateral. Even before becoming Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe had proposed the “quad” idea in his book, Toward A Beautiful Country, published last July. In the book, Abe says, “It is of crucial importance to Japan’s national interest that it further strengthen ties with India,” adding, “It would not be a surprise if in another 10 years, Japan-India relations overtake Japan-US and Japan-China relations.”
The “quad” idea was supported by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney when he visited Japan and Australia earlier this year.

The “quad” seeks to involve India in activities to which it is already committed bilaterally with the US — from promotion of democracy and collaboration on homeland security to joint disaster-response operations and building greater military interoperability. Significantly, the initial “quad”
meeting was preceded by the first-ever US-India-Japan joint naval exercises.

Indian naval ships first went to Okinawa for a joint manoeuvre with US forces before taking part in the trilateral exercises off the Tokyo Bay. The trilateral exercises, interestingly, intersected with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s Tokyo visit. New Delhi, however, had taken care to placate Beijing by despatching two-three ships to China from Okinawa for a friendly exercise immediately after the bilateral manoeuvre with the US.

Just because Washington, New Delhi, Canberra and Tokyo are coming
together to build a four-way arrangement based on shared values and interests doesn’t mean that they intend to jointly countervail China. Such a mechanism, at best, can give the four democracies extra leverage with Beijing as part of a common desire to ensure that the fast-rising Chinese power does not slide into arrogance. For each “quad” member, a stable,
mutually beneficial relationship with Beijing remains critical to national interest.

In reality, the four have still a long way to go before they can synchronize their approaches toward China. Given their geographical proximity to China and the direct impact Chinese power and ambitions hold for them, Japan and India view power equilibrium as a more pressing imperative. Yet the
growing asymmetry in power with China puts them at a disadvantage while dealing with Beijing just at the bilateral level, making broader security arrangements or initiatives attractive.

US strategy, however, is geared toward maintaining a calibrated balance between strategic hedging and greater engagement with Beijing. The China
factor is so overplayed — as on the much-touted Indo-US nuclear deal — that it obscures the fact that America today has much deeper political and economic engagement with Beijing than with New Delhi.

As part of the hedging, the US is eager to co-opt India, an important geopolitical swing state. But such co-option is unlikely to be at the cost of America’s closer engagement with Beijing. After all, America now relies on Chinese savings and trade surpluses to finance its super-sized budget deficits, hold down US interest rates and prop up the value of the dollar. China indeed has become a locomotive for US economic growth. Politically, the US depends on Chinese assistance on challenges ranging from North Korea’s future to the Iranian nuclear programme. Once allies of convenience during the Cold War, the US and China today are partners tied by interdependence.

Australia’s extraordinary economic boom, likewise, is being driven by exports to a resource-hungry China, and Canberra is loath to take sides between Japan and China, or China and India. Once regarded with distrust, China has gained respectability in Australia, securing a controversial deal to import Australian uranium for power generation without having accepted verifiable measures of the kind India is ready to embrace against diversion
for weapons purposes.

The “quad” also doesn’t mean the US is reversing the Asia-Pacific strategy
it has maintained since it took the Philippines in 1898 as spoils of the naval war with Spain — counterbalancing one power against the other to reinforce America’s role as the main arbiter. To underpin that very strategy, the US has in recent years strengthened its bilateral military alliances, reconfigured its forward-deployed military forces, designated Pakistan,
Thailand and the Philippines as major non-NATO allies, and built strategic cooperation with India and Singapore.

America can live with a China that challenges India and Japan but not one that challenges US pre-eminence. To tie down China regionally, the US is not
averse to Japan coming out of its pacifist cocoon as a “normal” military power — but under American tutelage. The revival of the Sino-Japanese
historical rivalry indeed can only help the US retain its position as Asia’s strategic pivot.

Similarly, after having penalized New Delhi for its 1974 nuclear test through stringent technology controls, Washington is now ready to promote India’s “normalization” as a nuclear power, but at a price: India is to bind its interests to America’s, and accept fetters on its still-nascent nuclear-deterrent capability. Given that a stunted Indian nuclear deterrent equally suits Chinese interests, it is hardly a surprise that Washington has kept Beijing in the loop, with Undersecretary Nicholas Burns declaring that China
would not be an obstacle when the nuclear deal goes before the Nuclear
Suppliers’ Group.

To help preserve US interests and primacy in the long run, American policy seeks to build close security cooperation with friendly democracies and bring them within US strategic influence. India is a prominent case. Yet the US hews to its benighted traditional role as the offshore balancer on the subcontinent. It has not only resumed the rearming of Islamabad with lethal, India-directed weapons, but also is beginning to sell New Delhi the very systems it has transferred to Pakistan. In notifying Congress this week of its intent to sell India six C-130 Hercules military transport aircraft for $1.1 billion, Washington has stressed the sale “will not affect” the subcontinental
military balance.

The “quad” is one of several new initiatives intended to help shape a new international balance in response to the ongoing power shifts. It seeks not to establish a new security bloc but to evolve common thinking on shared concerns. For India, its geopolitical value lies in the opportunity it offers to better understand the strategic outlook of the other three players.

© Asian Age, 2007.

The 123 of U.S.-India Nuclear Discord

Posted on May 29, 2007 by Chellaney

The Hindustan
Times, May 29, 2007

No strategic issue has proven
more divisive in modern India than the nuclear
deal

Fission for Trouble

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

It has taken the US years of
negotiations to conclude a still-valid nuclear cooperation agreement (NCA) with
any close ally. Yet, as illustrated by President George W. Bush’s telephone
call to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, it has stepped up pressure on India to
conclude an NCA straight away, although the two sides remain poles apart on some key issues after barely five
months of negotiations. Now Undersecretary Nicholas Burns is arriving to press for an agreement at next week’s Bush-Singh meeting
in Germany.

Having been hustled into
signing the nuclear deal in July 2005 without understanding its implications for strategic autonomy, India currently
is being pressed to conclude the follow-up
NCA, despite the draft accord’s one-sidedness or lack of clarity on core
issues. The new formulations proffered by the US
seek to address India’s
concerns more by semantic jugglery than substance.

If the NCA were to
paper over fundamental differences, US-India civil nuclear cooperation could
engender serious discord in the
years ahead. Given that India
would be at the receiving end in any conflict — as happened when the US walked out midway through an earlier 30-year
NCA signed in 1963 — New Delhi cannot accept
equivocation clothed as compromise.

An NCA is required
under Section 123 of the US Atomic Energy Act. Dubbed the ‘123 agreement’, it
is merely a framework accord under US law, setting
the bilateral terms of reference. It does not guarantee that nuclear
cooperation would indeed take place.
This is especially so in relation to
India.

First, the US Congress has retained
the right to stop the deal from taking
effect if it does not meet the long list of conditions established through the new
Hyde Act. A 123 agreement cannot trump those conditions even if it were silent
on any of them. Unlike NCAs with other partner-states, America’s cooperation with India is to be
uniquely governed by this all-embracing,
country-specific Act.

Second, even in the best-case scenario, with the deal in force, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission would
still need to license each nuclear export. And that means public hearings. Every application to license an export would
be an occasion for non-proliferation zealots to turn the NRC into a platform to critically scrutinize India’s
record, as happened whenever the US sought to ship fuel for the
Tarapur power reactors between 1974 and 1980.

India’s nuclear-weapon
and missile programmes are still in
the developmental phase. In light of the Hyde Act’s proviso that the US “seek”
to cap, roll back and eliminate South
Asian nuclear arsenals as well as its requirement for a cyclic report on India’s
“rate of production” of fissile material and nuclear-explosive devices, Indian
developmental plans and actions would spur political pressures through congressional
and NRC hearings.

Third, the US is working
to ensure India
will not be able to avail civil nuclear technology from any other
supplier-state on terms less onerous that those it is imposing. It intends
to make sure the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group guidelines
on India
mirror the congressional conditions, as mandated by the Hyde Act.

For India, the writing on the wall is clear. Instead of the original deal’s promise of “full cooperation” and the
“same benefits and advantages as other leading
countries with advanced nuclear technology, such as the US”, restrictive, conditions-laden cooperation
is on offer today, with the Hyde Act also aiming
to regulate India’s
conduct in areas unrelated to civil
nuclear commerce.

India
thus needs to proceed with caution. It is one thing
for the US to legislate
assorted conditions and limitations on nuclear commerce with India. But if
India itself acquiesced to restricted and restraining cooperation through the means of a bilateral
accord, it would compound its missteps since
July 2005. Political prudence lies in
negotiating as long as it takes to
clear the draft text of unreasonable restrictions, imbalance and prevarication.

In any event, why
should India make haste when the deal’s avowed rationale is anchored in long-term issues of energy? The deal isn’t
pivotal to the growth of Indo-US ties either. Those relations do not need this
deal for traction as their direction has already been set — toward closer
strategic cooperation. If anything,
the deal has infused controversy and
soured the public mood in India.

In fact, no
strategic issue has proven more divisive in
India in modern times than this
nuclear deal. The benchmarks the PM laid down in
Parliament last August 17 — even if they did not succeed in
dissuading the US from enacting a tough law on India — have to hold good at least in the bilateral accord. How would the discerning Singh
justify his government signing a 123
agreement that fell short on his own bottom-line?

A circumspect negotiating stance should aim to fully address India’s core
concerns and ensure no further US shifting
of the goalpost. If not, the deal would attract more grating
conditions as it traverses the next stages. Indeed, the need for two separate
India-specific multinational
clearances — from the 35-nation IAEA board and the 45-state NSG — is going to launch New Delhi into
uncharted international waters.

The US wants an NCA
that reads more like the 123 of how to yoke India. It will arm the US with five unique sets of double
rights.

First, the US will have the right not only to cut off
all cooperation but also the right to secure the return of transferred nuclear
equipment and material if India conducts a nuclear test. The US says it is
entitled to terminate cooperation
retroactively and to bind India to an international pact the Senate rejected in 1999 — the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Second, the US
will have the right to determine how
much fuel India can stockpile for “reasonable” reactor-operating needs as well as the right to impound such
stocks if New Delhi failed to adhere to the prescribed good behaviour. The claimed
“right to return” negates the very notion of lifetime fuel reserves that the PM
has sought as an insurance against a Tarapur-style fuel cut-off.

Third, the US will enjoy a double right even on the fuel
discharged from reactors. India is to neither ship back the spent fuel to
America without its consent, nor
reprocess it sans prior US approval. By declining to grant long-term
advance consent for reprocessing,
the US is loath to put India on par even with its non-nuclear allies. Worse, its dual veto against India is to hold even if it unilaterally terminated or suspended cooperation. With a lesser right
in the now-expired 1963 NCA, the US
has stopped India to this day from reprocessing
the accumulating Tarapur spent fuel.

Fourth, the US
will have the right to deny India the promised “full cooperation” through continued sanctions on export of civil enrichment, reprocessing
and heavy-water equipment and technology. Yet it will have the right to enforce
India’s “full compliance” with US-led technology-control regimes. Put simply, India
is to be tethered to these cartels while remaining their target.

Fifth, in addition to ensuring
IAEA inspections on all aspects of
India’s civilian nuclear programme, the US will have an unparalleled double
prerogative: the right to statutorily establish its own end-use monitoring, as called for in
the Hyde Act Section 104(d)(5)(B)(i); and the right to institute
“fall-back US safeguards” in case of
“budget or personnel strains
in the IAEA”. The fall-back option
will ensure India is subject to intrusive,
challenge inspections of the type
the IAEA applies in non-nuclear
states.

The unbridled binary
entitlements the US asserts should make India summon the courage and resolve to
hold off on a bilateral accord. Surely, the 123 agreement cannot come ahead of long-term national
interests.

Brahma on board “JDS Shirayuki,” Japanese destroyer, at the Yokosuka naval base on May 23, 2007

Posted on May 24, 2007 by Chellaney

Also in the picture are Captain Umio Otsuka, commander of the Escort Division 21 of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (on the left), the captain of the destroyer, Commader Fujita (on the far right), and two Japanese Defense Ministry officials, Mr. Kenji Mizunoya (senior deputy director of international policy planning division) and Ms. Kumiko Morino.

U.S.-India Nuclear Negotiations Part I

Posted on May 15, 2007 by Chellaney

Escape From Reality

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, May 14, 2007

Having made the nuclear deal the centrepiece of their warming ties, India and the United States are discovering the hard way that the commitments they made in July 2005 are difficult to reconcile and implement. If the world’s most populous and most powerful democracies are not to be saddled with a political albatross, they will have to ensure that what they had hyped as a “historic deal” does not foster such lingering disputes as to set back bilateral relations.

The latest discord centres on the terms of a follow-up bilateral accord to define the technical rules of civil nuclear commerce. Such an accord is required not by international law but by US law — the Atomic Energy Act, Section 123 of which demands a congressionally ratified nuclear cooperation agreement (NCA) as a prerequisite. But unlike the existing Section 123 agreements with other countries, Indo-US civil nuclear cooperation will be uniquely governed by a special, India-specific US domestic law, the Hyde Act.

The deal has become such a technical subject that it is easy to loose the bigger picture by focusing on the twists and turns in a never-ending saga or on the fine print of the NCA under negotiation. Despite its ostensible rationale to aid India’s energy needs, the deal would have an important bearing on the autonomy and integrity of Indian foreign policy and security.

Although the deal has been marketed as a major favour to India, it is America that is piling up pressure on New Delhi to yield further ground, as shown by the recent telephone calls by President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as well as by the official statements in Washington expressing frustration over New Delhi’s alleged narrow-mindedness. To rub in the point that a Section 123 agreement would emerge only if New Delhi gives in, Undersecretary Nicholas Burns claimed the US has “carried through on all its commitments” and now “the ball is in India’s court.” Contrast this truculence with the love-fest that greeted the signing of the deal.

US pressure tactics in recent weeks have included shining renewed spotlight on New Delhi’s legitimate relations with Tehran, and the April 2 indictment of an Indian national and a Singaporean for allegedly conspiring to illegally export to India some dual-use but outdated American memory chips and capacitors. This indictment not only appeared politically timed to step up pressure on New Delhi just when the NCA negotiations had hit a major snag, but it also conflicts with Washington’s avowed objective to open high-tech commerce (with the US-India High-Technology Cooperation Group meeting since 2003).

The deal constitutes a major diplomatic accomplishment for the US, opening the path to its influencing India’s strategic policies. Naturally, Bush is eager to hold on to a deal that is one of his few second-term foreign policy successes. Bush knows that like him, Dr. Singh is coming under growing political siege at home. But while Bush has another 20 months in office left, Dr. Singh’s political future is uncertain. So the haste to tie up a 123 agreement. As the White House put it bluntly last Thursday, “We are determined to make it happen.”

Another reason for such intense pressure is that once the 123 agreement is concluded, the deal would virtually go out of India’s hands. It would be then up to the 35-nation IAEA board, the 45-state Nuclear Suppliers’ Group and the US Congress — in that order, according to the revised sequence the US has laid down — to refine and expand the conditions applicable to cooperation with India.

While peaceful nuclear cooperation would nicely dovetail with a US-India strategic partnership, the deal has evolved in such a way as to attenuate the obligations Bush undertook on July 18, 2005, while enlarging (and legalizing) Indian commitments through the means of the five-month-old Hyde Act. Not surprisingly, the US effort now is to ensure that a final 123 accord is in consonance with — or at least not incompatible with — this Act.

In any event, as a subsidiary bilateral arrangement under US law, the 123 agreement cannot circumvent the Hyde Act, which has defined the “procedures and conditions” by which such an accord may be considered by Congress. In fact, to qualify for such consideration, the 123 agreement would have to be submitted to the appropriate congressional committees with the entire deal package, including “a completed IAEA-India safeguards agreement and other documents and Presidential determinations” in a report form.

The “Presidential determinations” — on 10 different conditions listed in the Act’s Section 104(c)(2) — would centre on New Delhi’s compliance. They include extraneous conditions, such as binding India to the Proliferation Security Initiative, Australia Group and Wassenaar Arrangement, and securing its full participation in “efforts to dissuade, isolate, and, if necessary, sanction and contain Iran.” That the Hyde Act represents a blend of the toughest elements from the Senate and House bills is apparent from a Congressional Research Service comparative assessment, in table form, by Sharon Squassoni and Jill Marie Parillo.

The PM had assured Parliament last August 17 that, “If in their final form, the US legislation or the adopted NSG guidelines impose extraneous conditions on India, the government will draw the necessary conclusions, consistent with the commitments I have made to Parliament.” Yet, when the Hyde Act bristling with extraneous and mortifying conditions was passed, Dr. Singh paused only to admit that some of its provisions were “a cause for concern” before sanctioning negotiations on a 123 agreement.

It has now become clear that if the 123 accord is to be in harmony with the Hyde Act and yet not rub salt on Indian wounds, there is only one way out — semantic guile on the fine print. That is exactly what is on offer from the US side to break the current deadlock and seal the accord.

The new formulations proffered by the US in the last round of talks in Washington early this month centre not on substance but on a semantic exercise that would take India round the mulberry bush and defer its day of reckoning to a time when it has no escape route. Yet Burns characterized these formulations as “extensive progress” and Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon hailed them as “considerable progress.”

In such hoopla, the principal fact is getting obscured — that the grating conditions against India are in the Hyde Act, and even if they did not figure in the 123 agreement, New Delhi would still be bound by them. After all, it is only after India has complied with all the Hyde Act’s preconditions that Congress would take up the final deal for approval. Indeed, even after such approval, the US is to hang the threat of re-imposition of civil nuclear sanctions to enforce India’s continuous compliance with the Act’s post-implementation conditions.

Put simply, no semantic trickery over the fine print of the123 agreement can free India from the rigours of the Hyde Act. While New Delhi, of course, would not want to compound its burden by entering into an adverse 123 accord with the US, the devil is not so much in the details of such an agreement as in the Hyde Act — a red rag to a bull.

Yet New Delhi remains fixated on the terms of the 123 agreement, to the exclusion of the onerous conditions the Hyde Act already seeks to enforce. Such a blinkered focus also raises an important question: Whatever 123 accord were to emerge, will India be able to hold the US to its terms? In other words, will India be signing on to a legally enforceable agreement?

India’s bitter experience over an earlier 123 agreement with the US, signed in 1963, is a sobering guide to this question. That accord was protective of Indian interests and free of any Hyde Act-style overarching domestic-legal framework. Yet, when the US walked out midway through that 30-year accord — cutting off fuel supply to the twin-reactor Tarapur power station, despite a guarantee to provide “timely” low-enriched uranium on demand — New Delhi could do little more than sulk. With the accord not enjoying the status of a treaty in international law, India realized it was futile to keep claiming it had the “force” of a treaty.

The truth is that the US has maintained a consistent legal position that because it enters into a 123 agreement to meet a requirement of its own internal law, it follows logically that such an accord cannot supersede American law. Indeed, the Carter administration used that very contention to rationalize the 1978 US action in changing domestic law in such a way as to unilaterally rewrite American obligations under the 1963 accord with India.

A 123 agreement, in effect, will legally bind India but not America. Nothing better illustrates this than the manner New Delhi still adheres to the terms of the 1963 agreement, despite America’s material breach long ago and the accord having itself expired in 1993. New Delhi has continued to exacerbate its spent-fuel problem at Tarapur by granting the US a right it didn’t have even if it had honoured the 123 agreement — a veto on India reprocessing the discharged reactor fuel. Nor has India ever sought compensation from the US for the large costs it continues to incur to store the highly radioactive spent fuel.

When New Delhi signed the 2005 deal, it could have asked the US to show its sincerity by beginning immediate cooperation to facilitate the reprocessing of the Tarapur spent fuel, a source of continuing storage and safety concern. Instead, even as key issues from the earlier 123 accord remain outstanding, India is seeking to enter into a new 123 agreement.

(To be continued)

U.S.-India Nuclear Negotiations Part II

Posted on May 15, 2007 by Chellaney

123
Semantic Subterfuges

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, May 15, 2007

The wheel has come full circle. America broke its 1963 agreement with India by enacting a new domestic law — the 1978 Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Act (NNPA) — which in
turn amended its 1954 Atomic Energy Act (AEC). Now New
Delhi is negotiating a
new Section 123 bilateral accord under the very US
legal provisions that were devised to discipline
India
for its 1974 detonation and to deter any other state from emulating its example.

One expected New
Delhi to know those clauses better than any other
state. Yet, it seems caught by surprise by the US
insistence that the new 123 accord incorporate an explicit American right to secure the
return of transferred nuclear items and materials if India (to quote the AEC Section
123a proviso) “detonates a nuclear-explosive device or terminates or abrogates an agreement providing for IAEA safeguards.”

The “right to return” is just one of nine conditions under the amended AEC Section 123a
that a bilateral agreement is required to meet. In the legislative process that
led to the Hyde Act, the four versions — the official bill, the House bill, the
Senate bill and the final product —
had only one common element: none exempted any Section 123a criteria other than
the requirement for “full-scope” or comprehensive IAEA inspections
on all nuclear facilities. Among the
eight not-exempted criteria include
the right-to-return rider and a veto-empowering
condition — “no enrichment or reprocessing
by the recipient state without prior approval.”

The Hyde Act not
only classifies India
as a non-nuclear-weapons state (NNWS), but also authorizes the president to
waive sanctions on Indian activities, inconsistent
with the AEC Section 129 non-proliferation conditions, that occurred only prior
to July 18, 2005. For all subsequent activities since
that date, India
is to be held to various NPT-style prohibitions for an NNWS as defined by Section 129 except one — the possession of
nuclear-explosive devices.

In the ongoing
123-agreement negotiations, the newly submitted US
formulations
seek to allay India’s
misgivings through semantic rather
than policy shifts. Where differences are irreconcilable, the formulations equivocate
or even omit a direct reference to an issue. The US
wordsmiths have fashioned a revised draft that beats about the bush on issues
of primary concern to India.
Armed with the overarching Hyde Act
and the long-term India trap
it sets, the US
has little to lose through some dissemblance in
the 123 accord.

Let us examine what is on offer.

■ Reprocessing
of spent fuel. Having branded India as an NNWS in
its new law, the US is willing to
offer not the advance-consent right it now provides its European partner-states
and Japan but an assurance of the type it has given to a single nuclear-weapons state (NWS) — that it would hold
joint consultations on any reprocessing request and attempt to reach agreement within a finite
timeframe.

That
assurance is in the 1985 US-China agreement. Article 5(2) of that agreement says
that although neither party “has any plans” to reprocess, “in the event that a party would like at some future
time to undertake such activities, the parties will promptly hold consultations
to agree on a mutually acceptable arrangement.”

It
then goes on to say that “the parties will consult immediately and will seek
agreement within six months on
long-term arrangements for such activities … If such an arrangement is not
agreed upon within that period of
time, the parties will promptly consult for the purpose of agreeing on measures … to undertake such activities on an
interim basis.”

It
is odd that the US wishes to offer New Delhi the 1985 assurance it gave China — which is unencumbered by any of the constraints being
enforced on India — rather than the post-1985 reprocessing
arrangements it has worked out with its NNWS partners, including Japan and the European Atomic Energy Community
(EURATOM), eight of whose 15 member-nations have power reactors.

To
get around the NNPA (and AEC) condition for US prior consent, the US has granted
its non-nuclear partners long-term “advance programmatic approval” to reprocess
and recycle US-origin plutonium. For
example, just over a decade ago, EURATOM states were given advance rights, with
inbuilt safeguards against arbitrary revocation by the US.

Without
at least a similar advance right, India would get into a much bigger mess than Tarapur. Even though the
US did not have any
prior-consent veto in the 1963
agreement, it still breached its terms by continuously
refusing to either exercise its first option to
buy Tarapur spent fuel in excess of India’s needs or to carry out a safeguards-related
“joint determination”
with India
of the reprocessing facility.

In the new 123 accord, the US has staked claim to an explicit double veto: India cannot ship back spent fuel to America without its prior consent, as decreed by
the Hyde Act Section 103(b)(6); nor can India start any reprocessing activity sans prior US consent. This dual right to
doubly squeeze India is to hold
even if the US
were to unilaterally terminate or
suspend all cooperation.

A
US assurance to India like that to China
would be meaningless. First, the 123
agreement with China
openly encourages collaboration on reprocessing,
in sharp contrast to the way the US
Congress has beforehand sought to dissuade reprocessing
cooperation with India.
Second, seen against the US bad faith in
rebuffing India
for decades on a “joint determination” on Tarapur, the new formulation merely proposes
“joint consultations” within a timeframe without any assurance that the US would actually allow India to reprocess.

Third,
while India
has agreed to permanent, legally irrevocable IAEA inspections
on its entire civilian programme, the Sino-American
agreement stands out for not applying
even voluntary, revocable IAEA safeguards on US nuclear exports. It is so lax
that Article 8(2) declares that even “bilateral safeguards are not required,” although
Beijing
agreed more than a decade later to some loose end-use checks under US
congressional pressure. China
has taken on no irreversible commitment and can easily walk out from the agreement,
but India will not be able to
free itself from grating legal obligations
even if the US
rejected its reprocessing request
after joint consultations.

And
fourth, the US-China arrangement
grants Washington
no leverage to deny Beijing reprocessing permission. It was only recently that Beijing signed up to buy its first US-origin power reactors — that too from the Japanese-owned
Westinghouse
company — after Westinghouse agreed
to transfer substantial technology and expend 50 per cent of the value of the
contract on goods and services produced in
China.

Because its 123 agreement permits Beijing
to terminate cooperation at will and
yet keep its spent fuel outside IAEA inspections,
it did not need a permanent or advance consent right. In
the years ahead, when the Westinghouse
reactors are commissioned and produce sufficient spent fuel for reprocessing, Beijing
would simply notify Washington of its plan and, if
the latter didn’t cooperate, unilaterally begin
to reprocess after six months and/or terminate
all cooperation. In contrast, the Indo-US deal stacks the deck against India.

The reason why the US
takes a dim view of Indian reprocessing
is that it would allow India,
as part of its long-term energy security plans, to expand its
plutonium economy and develop its fast-breeder and thorium capabilities. That conflicts with the US
aim to constrict India
from further developing its independent fuel-cycle capabilities even under IAEA
safeguards.

No wonder US negotiators
today are offering India a deceptive formulation on reprocessing, not the long-term “advance
consent” concept that America
pioneered in the early 1980s in agreements with Sweden
and Norway.
That concept comes with objective criteria for revocation of any US advance
consent so that a future American administration
does not arbitrarily withdraw it.

US
negotiators today disingenuously
cite the NNPA restriction. The fact is that ever since
1984, when a federal district court dismissed a suit by non-proliferation
activists challenging long-term
consents as violating the NNPA, American
courts have consistently held that the NNPA’s interpretation
is a political matter inappropriate
for judicial resolution.

More
importantly, the US Congress has not prohibited or limited the use of advance
consents. Indeed, the Senate defeated a 1988 resolution to reject a 123
agreement with Japan
because of its advance-consent provision. And in
1996, a new 123 agreement with EURATOM took effect after the US not only
granted advance consent, but also proclaimed “no interference”
in fuel-cycle decisions of that
Community’s member-states.

Bush
has the executive authority to “exempt” India from or otherwise skirt the
prior-consent requirement. Congress has anyway spurned his plea that the new 123
accord automatically take effect unless a disapproval
resolution was passed with a two-thirds vote. Instead, it will treat the accord
as making an “exemption,” thus requiring a
joint resolution of approval within 90 days. Bush’s problem, if any,
is the Hyde Act, which implicitly treats nuclear India’s
status as being even less than that
of America’s
NNWS allies.

■ Right to
return. This claimed right is founded on a one-sided concept that the supplier
is at liberty to terminate
cooperation retroactively. America’s
new proposal is to formulate an intricate,
drawn-out process to give effect to an explicit US right to an all-encompassing return of transferred nuclear items and
materials if it terminates
cooperation on grounds that its continuation
would jeopardize its supreme national interests. By making
the actual implementation of the “right to return” problematic, the proposal
aims to calm India.

However, such semantic
subterfuge in the draft 123 accord seeks
to obscure the key point: any
acknowledgement of the American right to seek return on account of a US-determined Indian non-compliance with non-proliferation
conditions would turn India’s voluntary test moratorium into
a binding,
irrevocable prohibition through a double instrument
— a bilateral agreement atop the Hyde Act.

The
“right-to-return” demand and the Hyde Act Section 106 prohibition on further
testing are part of the same design
that has prompted the Bush administration
to propose an NSG exemption for India
tied to a test ban. India
is being dragged through the
backdoor into the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty, rejected by the Senate in
1999. By going beyond the CTBT and technically
quantifying a nuclear-explosive test,
the Hyde Act actually seeks to hold India to CTBT-plus obligations.

■ Full
cooperation. To escape from its obligation to open “full civil nuclear cooperation and trade” with India, the US wants the 123-agreement text to
be neutral on that subject. The intent
is to use such undefined scope of
cooperation to create an illusion in
India that full cooperation
has not been ruled out, while allowing
the US to stay faithful to
the Hyde Act’s bar on civil enrichment, reprocessing
and heavy-water cooperation with New
Delhi.

Where the
replication of a provision from the US-China
agreement will be worthless in
relation to India, Washington
eagerly offers it. But where a provision is indeed
worth replicating — such as Article
3, which provides for unrestricted fuel-cycle cooperation — it looks the other
way.

■ Lifetime fuel reserves. While India
wants to build “lifetime” strategic fuel reserves for civilian reactors as an insurance against
supply cut-off, the US
offers only assured fuel shipments. The Hyde Act precludes “lifetime” fuel
stockpiling by allowing stocks only for “reasonable” operating needs, with reasonableness defined by the US.

And while India wants the right to take “corrective measures”
if supplies were disrupted, the US
is willing to permit such action if
it meant convening a meeting of “friendly” supplier-states, not the lifting of IAEA inspections.
Given that the Hyde Act forbids India
from breaking out of its obligations
even if supplies are discontinued,
correction can only be toothless.

There are other
core disagreements, too. All are rooted in
three factors. The first is America’s
failure to fully discharge its pledge to “adjust
US laws and policies … to achieve full civil nuclear energy cooperation with India.” There
has also been a breach of the deal’s underlying
principle that such adjustments
would not hold India
to an NNWS status.

And finally, while India
is ready to be a friend and partner of the US,
America
insists it become its ally. Friendship
or partnership is based on parity, reciprocity and mutual respect, while an
alliance has a leader that dictates terms. The nuclear deal, in principle,
offered India parity and
reciprocity but, in practice, the US still insists on setting
the terms.

(Concluded)

Stagecraft and Statecraft

Author Archives: Chellaney

About Chellaney

Resource Conflict: The Next Struggle

Water as a Chinese Weapon

Chinese Diplomacy: Make Principles to Lull Your Foe

China’s Rising Assertiveness: Lessons for India

Global Power Shifts

The U.S.-India-Japan-Australia Quadrilateral Initiative

The 123 of U.S.-India Nuclear Discord

Brahma on board “JDS Shirayuki,” Japanese destroyer, at the Yokosuka naval base on May 23, 2007

U.S.-India Nuclear Negotiations Part I

U.S.-India Nuclear Negotiations Part II