About Chellaney

Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

Why India Lost Out in Copenhagen

Posted on December 31, 2009 by Chellaney

India unwisely provided China cover

India, far from gaining anything by aligning itself with China at Copenhagen, only undercut its interest by getting bracketed with the world’s largest polluter and being made to accept mitigation obligations, writes Brahma Chellaney

Make no mistake: China, the world’s largest net polluter whose carbon emissions are growing at the fastest rate, was the principal target at Copenhagen, which has given its imprimatur to revising the climate-change regime. But China cleverly deflected pressure by hiding behind India and other developing countries.

China, however, has little in common with India. With its carbon-intensive, manufacturing-based economy, China’s per-capita carbon emissions are four times higher than India’s. India, with its white-collar, services-driven economy, has the lowest per-capita emissions among all important developing countries. Although both countries seem to have similar competitive advantages, China’s rise has been on the back of an increasing export surge that has made it the world’s back factory for cheap goods, while India’s imports-dependent economy is carbon light, reflected in the fact that its per-capita emissions are just 26 per cent of the world average.

Yet, in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit, India signed a five-year understanding with China to present a united front in international climate-change negotiations, with the Indian minister of state for environment, in a hallucinatory loop of delusion, going to the extent of saying that there “is no difference between the Indian and Chinese negotiating positions.” What is the commonality between the two countries when China openly rejects India’s approach that per-capita emission levels and historic contributions to the build-up of greenhouse gases should form the objective criteria for carbon mitigation? China, as the world’s back factory, wants a different formula that marks down carbon intensity linked to exports.

Had the situation been the opposite — with India’s per-capita emissions four times higher than China’s, and with India in the line of international fire — would Beijing helped provide New Delhi diplomatic cover? India gained little by aligning itself with China at Copenhagen. Indeed, it ended up undercutting its interest by getting bracketed with the world’s largest net polluter and being made to accept mitigation action under international monitoring under undefined international monitoring. In the process, it has helped formulate, even if unintentionally, the broad terms for revising what admirably suits Indian interests — the existing climate-change regime.

The price for providing political cover to China at Copenhagen is that carbon-thin India got roped in to commit itself to mitigation when hundreds of millions of Indians have no access to most-basic rights: Electricity and safe water. Instead of a deal being struck between the world’s two largest polluters, the U.S. and China, the U.S. was forced to cut a deal with the BASIC bloc comprising Brazil, India, South Africa and China, because China expediently hid behind that banner. In fact, India has little in common even with South Africa and Brazil either in carbon or industrial-development level. While India’s per-capita emission was 1.2 tons in 2007, it was 9.4 in South Africa, 2.1 in Brazil and 4.8 in China, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

India not only aligned itself with the wrong group, but also it presented itself inadvertently as a major global polluter by making common cause with China, whose developmental path threatens to unleash a carbon tsunami on the world. As China and India gain economic heft, it has become fashionable to internationally pair them. But these two demographic titans are a study in contrast on carbon intensity, with China now responsible for 24 per cent of global carbon emissions with 19.8 percent of the world population, but India’s current contribution not matching even half its population size. India indeed has more in common with the poor countries that cried foul over the U.S.-BASIC deal.

India would have done better at Copenhagen had it not associated itself so closely with China. It should have gone into the negotiations by consciously seeking to de-hyphenate itself from China, including by pointing out that China has more in common with the U.S. than with India. After all, the U.S. (currently responsible for 22 per cent of global emissions) and China, as the top polluters, have emerged as the key “problem states” in combating climate change.

But instead of de-hyphenating itself, India went into the negotiations as if it were joined at the hip with China, first by agreeing to put up a united stance and then by following in Beijing’s footsteps to unveil a plan to slash its carbon intensity by 2020. Not only was the target of 20 to 25 per cent reductions disproportionate to the level of Indian emissions, but it also made India ripe in Copenhagen for acceptance of mitigation action. In any case, it was poor negotiating strategy to announce such a major voluntary concession beforehand.

Past experience should have taught India that whenever it has joined hands with China on environmental issues, it has been let down by the Chinese proclivity to jettison principles and play power politics to serve its narrow interests. Take the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. In the negotiations, it teamed up India, only to reverse its stance and leave India in the lurch. It agreed to abide by the protocol if it were compensated for the compliance costs. That forced India eventually to take that very position, lest it stood out as a loner. Under the Kyoto Protocol, China — through international manoeuvring — has captured the bulk of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) funding.

How much it suits China to be seen in the same class as India on carbon issues than with its real polluting peer, the U.S., was made clear by the post-Copenhagen telephone call the Chinese foreign minister made to his Indian counterpart to emphasize continuing Sino-Indian collaboration. But when it comes to global or Asian geopolitics, China insists India is in a junior league.

New Delhi can be sure that when criteria for mitigation action is defined in future negotiations, China will work to unduly burden India by insisting that weight be given to elements other than per-capita emission levels and historic contributions. Having unwittingly aided the Chinese game-plan in Copenhagen, India is set to come out a loser. Isn’t that precisely what India did on UN Security Council permanent membership? When the U.S. and Soviet Union offered India a permanent seat in 1955, Jawaharlal Nehru demurred, according to his own collected works, saying the seat rightfully belonged to China. Now, China is the main obstacle to India’s UNSC aspirations.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research, is the author of “On the Frontline of Climate Change: International Security Implications”.

(c) The Economic Times, January 7, 2009.

Hatoyama comes calling

Posted on December 29, 2009 by Chellaney

Powering a dynamic, multipolar Asia

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindu newspaper, December 30, 2009

Given that the balance of power in Asia will be determined by events as much in the Indian Ocean rim as in East Asia, India and Japan have to work together to promote peace and stability.

The visit of the new Japanese Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, is part of Japan’s growing economic and strategic engagement with India. Japan and India indeed are natural allies because they have no conflict of strategic interest and actually share common goals to build stability, power equilibrium and institutionalised multilateral cooperation in Asia. There is neither any negative historical legacy nor a single outstanding political issue between them. If anything, each country enjoys a high positive rating with the public in the other state.

Mr. Hatoyama’s year-end visit, fulfilling a 2006 bilateral commitment to hold an annual summit meeting, shows he is keen to maintain the priority on closer engagement with India that was set in motion by his predecessors, Junichiro Koizumi, Shinzo Abe and Taro Aso of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), now in the opposition. Mr. Hatoyama came to office vowing to reorient Japanese foreign policy and seek an “equal” relationship with the United States. But he and his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) had said little on India.

Today, just when America’s Sino-centric Asia policy has became unmistakable, Mr. Hatoyama’s government has put Washington on notice that Japan cannot indefinitely remain a faithful servant of U.S. policies. With Tokyo seeking to rework a 2006 basing deal with the U.S., besides announcing an end to the eight-year-old Indian Ocean refuelling mission in support of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, Japan no longer can be regarded as a constant in America’s Asia policy. This has been further highlighted by Mr. Hatoyama’s re-examination of a secret agreement between the LDP and the U.S. over a subject that is highly sensitive in the only country to fall victim to nuclear attack — the storage or trans-shipment of U.S. nuclear weapons in Japan.

Against this background, New Delhi must be pleased that Mr. Hatoyama’s visit signals continuity in Tokyo’s India policy. It also shows that at a time when Asia is in transition, with the spectre of power disequilibrium looming large, Tokyo wishes to invest in closer economic and strategic bonds with India.

As Asia’s first modern economic success story, Japan has always inspired other Asian states. Now, with the emergence of new economic tigers and the ascent of China and India, Asia is collectively bouncing back from nearly two centuries of historical decline.

The most far-reaching but least-noticed development in Asia in the new century has been Japan’s political resurgence — a trend set in motion by Mr. Koizumi and expected to be accelerated by Mr. Hatoyama’s efforts to realign the relationship with the U.S. With Japanese pride and assertiveness rising, the nationalist impulse has become conspicuous at a time when China is headed to overtake Japan as the world’s second largest economy by the end of next year.

Long used to practising passive, cheque-book diplomacy, Tokyo now seems intent on influencing Asia’s power balance. A series of subtle moves has signalled Japan’s aim to break out of its post-war pacifist cocoon. One sign is the emphasis on defence modernisation. Japan’s navy, except in the nuclear sphere, is already the most sophisticated and powerful in Asia. China’s rise has prompted Japan to strengthen its military alliance with the U.S. But in the long run, Japan is likely to move to a more independent security posture.

Although the two demographic titans, China and India, loom large in popular perceptions on where Asia is headed economically, the much-smaller Japan is likely to remain a global economic powerhouse for the foreseeable future. Given the size of Japan’s economy — its GDP was just under $5 trillion in 2008 — annual Japanese growth of just 2 per cent translates into about $100 billion a year in additional output, or nearly the entire annual GDP of small economies like Singapore and the Philippines. Still, given China’s rapid economic strides, Japan has been readying itself for the day when it is eclipsed economically by its neighbour.

Leading-edge technologies and a commitment to craftsmanship are expected to power Japan’s future prosperity, just as they did its past growth. Its competitive edge, however, is threatened by the economic and social implications of a declining birth-rate and ageing population. With a fertility rate of just 1.37 babies per woman in 2008 — America’s is 2.12 — Japanese deaths have started surpassing births in recent years. Permitting immigration on a large scale is no easy task for the Japanese homogenised society. But just as Japan has come to live with the discomforting fact that today’s top sumo wrestlers are not Japanese, it will have to open its research institutions and factories to foreigners in order to raise productivity.

India and Japan, although dissimilar economically, have a lot in common politically. They are Asia’s largest democracies, but with messy politics and endemic scandals. Mr. Hatoyama, in office for just three months, has already come under pressure following the indictment of two former secretaries over a funding scandal. In both Japan and India, the Prime Minister is not the most powerful politician in his own party. Fractured politics in both countries crimps their ability to think and act long term. Yet, just as India has progressed from doctrinaire nonalignment to geopolitical pragmatism, Japan — the “Land of the Rising Sun” — is moving toward greater realism in its economic and foreign policies.

Their growing congruence of strategic interests led to the 2008 Japan-India security agreement, a significant milestone in building Asian power stability. A constellation of Asian states linked by strategic cooperation and sharing common interests is becoming critical to ensuring equilibrium at a time when major shifts in economic and political power are accentuating Asia’s security challenges. After all, not only is Asia becoming the pivot of global geopolitical change, but Asian challenges are also playing into international strategic challenges.

The Indo-Japanese security agreement, signed when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Tokyo in October 2008, was modelled on the March 2007 Australia-Japan defence accord. Now the Indo-Japanese security agreement has spawned a similar Indo-Australian accord, signed when Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd came to New Delhi last month. As a result, the structure and even large parts of the content of the three security agreements — between Japan and Australia, India and Japan, and India and Australia — are alike.

Actually, all three are in the form of a joint declaration on security cooperation. And all of them, while recognising a common commitment to democracy, freedom, human rights and the rule of law, obligate their signatories to work together to build not just bilateral defence cooperation, but also security in Asia. They are designed as agreements to enhance mutual security between equals. By contrast, the U.S.-India defence agreement, with its emphasis on arms sales, force interoperability and intelligence sharing — elements not found in the Australia-Japan, India-Japan and India-Australia accords — is aimed more at undergirding U.S. interests.

The key point is that the path has been opened to adding strategic content to the Indo-Japanese relationship, as underscored by the growing number of bilateral visits by top defence and military officials. As part of their “strategic and global partnership,” India and Japan are working on joint initiatives on maritime security, counterterrorism, counter-proliferation, disaster prevention and management, and energy security. But they need to go much further.

India and Japan, for example, must co-develop defence systems. India and Japan have missile-defence cooperation with Israel and the U.S., respectively. There is no reason why they should not work together on missile defence and on other technologies for mutual defence. There is no ban on weapon exports in Japan’s U.S.-imposed Constitution, only a long-standing Cabinet decision. That ban has been loosened, with Tokyo in recent years inserting elasticity to export weapons for peacekeeping operations, counterterrorism and anti-piracy. The original Cabinet decision, in any event, relates to weapons, not technologies.

As two legitimate aspirants to new permanent seats at the U.N. Security Council, India and Japan should work together to persuade existing veto holders to allow the Council’s long-pending reform. They must try to convince China in particular that Asian peace and stability would be better served if all three major powers in Asia are in the Council as permanent members. Never before have China, Japan and India all been strong at the same time. Today, they need to find ways to reconcile their interests in Asia so that they can coexist peacefully and prosper.

(Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan,with a new U.S. edition scheduled for release in March.)

Chemical Weapons: India’s Forgotten Armaments

Posted on December 24, 2009 by Chellaney

Haste Makes Waste

India’s chemical-weapons record holds key lessons

Brahma Chellaney The Times of India December 24, 2009

The Hague: At the annual meeting of state-parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), US officials disclosed that their country’s stockpile destruction will not finish before 2021, missing the treaty’s final extended deadline of 2012 by a long shot. In fact, two new US chemical-demilitarization plants will not be ready until nine years from now — an unusually long timeframe for construction. With the US making plain its intention to allow domestic considerations to trump international obligations, Russia has little incentive to meet the final deadline.

More than 12 years after the CWC entered into force, this regime faces several challenges that extend beyond the still-existing stockpiles of chemical weapons (CWs) in the US, Russia, Libya and Iraq. Of the seven declared possessor states, only India, South Korea and Albania have fully eliminated their stockpiles.

Some states strongly suspected of holding CWs, including China and Pakistan, did not declare any arsenal. China was the assumed source of Albania’s stockpile of chemical-warfare agents. It also aided Pakistani and Iranian CW programmes. By declaring former production facilities, China, however, tacitly admitted it built and destroyed CWs before joining the treaty, although the US has accused it of still holding “an inventory of traditional CW agents” and maintaining an “advanced R&D programme”.

One CWC challenge is the lack of universality, with seven key players still not parties to the treaty, including North Korea, Israel, Egypt, Syria and Myanmar. A second challenge is that more than half of the present 188 parties have yet to implement their obligations by enacting enabling legislation and setting up a National Authority. Yet another challenge is that although CWs are the least-important weapons of mass destruction (WMD), they are the most likely to be used by terrorists. Containing that challenge demands effective and full CWC implementation.

CWC has long been seen as a model pact that applies, unlike the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), similar standards to all. But today it faces gnawing uncertainties. For example, how will the anticipated failure of its most-powerful parties, America and Russia, to meet the final 2012 deadline affect the regime’s integrity and authority? The US, for its part, is now emphasizing non-proliferation and intrusive, more-frequent inspections of national chemical industries. But the word “non-proliferation” doesn’t exist in the CWC text.

Against this background, India’s surprise declaration of its CWs, followed by their rushed destruction, stands out. When it signed the CWC in 1993, India stated it had no CWs or production facilities. But three years later, it stunned everyone, including its own military, by declaring it possessed a CW stockpile — one of only three countries (the others being the US and Russia) to make such a disclosure by the CWC’s June 1996 cut-off date for original signatories. India had secretly built CWs, mostly mustard-gas shells, without integrating the small arsenal with its defence strategy and overall military operations.

Rather than first eliminate its puny, militarily insignificant CW stocks before becoming party to the CWC, India’s penchant to take the moral high ground, whatever the price, found expression in its ratifying the treaty ahead of its regional adversaries, and then rushing to meet the pact’s 10-year deadline for stockpile destruction. It incinerated most of its CWs by the 2007 deadline, even as the other possessor states had set protracted timeframes for stockpile destruction. While the US and Russia sought and got five-year deadline extensions in 2007, India asked for only two years’ more time, fully completing its dismantlement in March 2009. Meeting deadlines took precedence over guaranteeing environmentally safe and sound destruction, with secrecy the leitmotif even in dismantlement. The government’s fiat to the DRDO was to meet the deadlines, come what may.

But India hasn’t earned international respect from such faithful, speedy compliance. Indeed, like in the nuclear realm, India has been left to blow its own trumpet about its “impeccable” credentials. Far from gaining any reward, India has little clout in The Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), where no Indian has yet held a top-management position. Worse still, Indian taxpayers have had to pick up the tab for international verification of stockpile destruction, with the obliteration bill surpassing the CW production expenses several fold. Pakistan and China, by contrast, have come out better.

The lack of any public discussion in India over its CW experience is unfortunate, given the lessons it holds for its other WMD capabilities and for Indian policy on the whole. Just as it built CWs of little military utility, India continues to lag far behind its credible minimal nuclear deterrent needs, as underscored by the recent failed nighttime test of Agni-2 and the weaponization of only the diminutive 25-kiloton fission prototype warhead. Open debate is indispensable if India is to learn from its record.

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research.

Copenhagen: A key step toward new climate-change regime

Posted on December 22, 2009 by Chellaney

Door opens to climate-change NPT

Brahma Chellaney

The Economic Times, December 22, 2009

The global climate negotiations in Copenhagen did
not produce an ambitious, legally binding action plan for reducing
greenhouse gas emissions. But Copenhagen did yield
something significant: It won political commitments from China, India,
Brazil and South Africa to
be part of the solution and thus to an overhaul of the present climate-change
regime, which puts the carbon-mitigation onus entirely on the developed
countries.

Future international negotiations would proceed on the basis of
these political commitments, enshrined in the so-called Copenhagen Accord. The
1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 1992 UN Framework Convention — the two legs of the
current regime — would become less relevant.

President Barack Obama’s 13 hours of negotiations in Copenhagen yielded a two-fold success for the U.S.: First,
the country which emits more than a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases with
just 4.5 per cent of the global population escaped without making any binding commitment.
Second, Obama brought on board not only China,
Brazil and South Africa but also the much-poorer India, whose
per-capita emissions are far lower than any important developing country. India is to submit
to a universal system of transparently reporting on national mitigation actions.

Put simply, Copenhagen
generated not a new international protocol but the political framework to
revamp the existing climate-change regime. Changing the terms of negotiations
is essential to changing a regime. The Copenhagen Accord embodies the new
terms.

For the developed countries, this symbolizes success. There isn’t
even a passing reference in the Copenhagen Accord to historic contributions to the build-up of
greenhouse gases or to an objective criteria factoring in per-capita emission
levels.

For India, this has
meant a diplomatic climbdown from its negotiating stance. It has agreed to bear
an economic burden for combating climate change when hundreds of millions of Indians are
still mired in abject poverty.

The rich states, by securing
an interim accord tying their carbon cuts to burden-sharing with the
underprivileged, have opened the doors to the creation of an NPT on climate
change. Indeed, Obama, in his next major international move, is hosting a
summit meeting in April to strengthen the nuclear NPT.

The significant aspect, in
comparative terms, is that the most-powerful players want to reinforce the
nuclear non-proliferation regime but revamp the climate-change regime by
re-jiggering their legal obligations. So the key words are: Preserve, uphold
and strengthen the NPT regime, but update, rework and improve the
climate-change regime.

In other words, the NPT
regime is being treated as sacrosanct that cannot be tinkered with or amended, even
as the Copenhagen Accord presents the climate-change regime as an evolutionary
process open to overhaul. Given that the NPT regime predates the climate-change
regime by a generation and a half, one would have thought that it is the former
that needs updating, if any.

Having paid a heavy price to
the NPT regime, India
now has agreed to pay a price in a new climate-change regime. By contrast, China — a winner in the NPT regime because it first
concentrated, unlike India, on acquiring military muscle
— has less to lose in a new
climate-change regime. After all, as the world’s largest net polluter, China has more in common with the U.S. than India.

Copenhagen has shown that climate change is not just about science
but about geopolitics too. And in geopolitics, those with economic and military
muscle fare better.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at
the Centre for Policy Research, is the author of “On the Frontline of Climate
Change: International Security Implications.”

Dragon steps beyond the Great Wall

Posted on December 20, 2009 by Chellaney

What China needs now
is political modernization

Brahma Chellaney

Economic Times, December 20, 2009

SIX DECADES after it was founded, the People’s Republic
of China
has emerged as a major global player. In fact, China’s
rise in one generation as a world power under authoritarian rule has come to
epitomise the qualitative reordering of power in Asia
and the world. As the 2009 assessment of US intelligence agencies predicted, China is
“poised to have more impact on the world over the next 20 years than any other
country.”

The ascent of China, while a symbol of the ongoing global
power shifts, has been accentuated by major geopolitical developments — from
the unravelling of the Soviet Union that eliminated a mighty empire to China’s north
and west, to the manner the American colossus has stumbled after the
triumphalism of the 1990s. China’s
economy has expanded more than 13-fold over the last 30 years. Consequently,
its state-owned corporate behemoths are frenetically buying foreign firms,
technologies and resources. Add to the picture its rapidly swelling
foreign-exchange coffers, which now total over $2.1 trillion. Beijing thus is well-positioned
geopolitically to further expand its influence.

China
also became militarily powerful even before it sought to become economically
strong.

China’s economic rise, however, owes a lot to
the West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, but
instead to integrate Beijing
with global institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign
investment and trade. That the choice made was wise can be seen from the baneful
impact of the opposite decision that was taken on Myanmar from the late 1980s — to
pursue a penal approach centred on sanctions.

Also, without
the expansion in US-Chinese trade and financial relations, China’s growth
would have been much harder. Its phenomenal economic success has been
illustrated by its emergence with the world’s biggest trade surplus, largest
foreign-currency reserves and highest steel production. Today, having vaulted
past Germany to become the
world’s biggest exporter, China
is set to displace Japan
as the world’s No 2 economy.

In today’s
context, the single biggest factor aiding Chinese foreign policy and currency
manipulation is US
dependence on large capital inflows from China. The US-China relationship
has a deeper base than US-India relations. From being allies of convenience in
the second half of the Cold War, they have gradually emerged as partners tied
by interdependence. Just as the beleaguered US
economy cannot do without continuing capital inflows from China, the
American market is the lifeline of the Chinese export juggernaut. America indeed depends on Chinese surpluses to
finance its supersized budget deficits, while Beijing
depends on its huge exports to America
both to sustain its high economic growth and subsidize its military
modernization.

It was thus no
surprise that US President
George W. Bush left the White House with a solid China-friendly legacy, best
illustrated by the manner in which he ignored the Chinese crackdown in Tibet and
showed up at the Beijing Olympics. It isn’t a surprise either that his
successor, Barack Obama, has gone further by demoting human rights and by
emphasizing economic, environmental and security relations with China. Today,
there is talk even of a US-China diarchy — a G-2 — ruling the world.

Obama indeed
seems fixated on the very country whose rapidly accumulating power and
muscle-flexing threaten Asian stability. The new catchphrase coined by US
Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg in relation to China, “strategic reassurance,” signals an
American intent to be more accommodative of China’s ambitions. China’s primacy
in the Obama foreign policy has become unmistakable even though the president,
soon after assuming office, invited then Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso as
his first foreign guest at the White House.

US policy has either encouraged some of Beijing’s international actions (such as China’s first-ever deployment of a naval task in
the Indian Ocean rim under the anti-piracy banner) or turned a blind eye to
some others (including the growing Chinese economic and strategic presence in Africa). China’s
covetous hunt for oil and other resources in Africa,
however, has helped portray it as the new colonial power in that continent,
leading to a backlash in some areas. Emulating Japan
and the US in the earlier
decades, China
is underpinning its commodity outreach through financial muscle by offering
soft loans to primary-commodity producers. Through such aid diplomacy, China has won access to key resources — from
gold in Bolivia, to coal in Indonesia, to nickel in the Philippines and Myanmar,
to oil in Ecuador and Indonesia, to copper in Chile, and to gas in Myanmar. China is already the world’s
largest consumer of iron ore, aluminium, steel, copper and cement.

For more than
three decades, China
has driven its remarkable economic growth by becoming the world’s back factory,
exporting low-value products across the globe. In the process, it has built up
a mammoth trade surplus. However, China is now reaching the point
where this approach can no longer continue to deliver high returns. Besides
moving to higher-value productivity, China needs to reduce its reliance
on exports by stoking domestic consumption.

Sustaining China’s
economic miracle demands a dynamic, continually evolving, forward-looking
approach. More broadly, political modernization, not economic modernization, is
the central challenge staring at China. If it is to build and
sustain a great power capacity by 2030, it has to avoid a political hard
landing.

Given China’s
territorial size, population (a fifth of the human race) and economic dynamism,
few can question or grudge its right to be a world power. China can also be a positive influence in Asia. But it can just as easily become the biggest
geopolitical problem. China’s
rise thus presents both an opportunity and a threat.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies,
Centre for Policy Research.

New Australia-India security accord

Posted on December 9, 2009 by Chellaney

Asia’s new strategic partners

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times, December 10, 2009

The recently concluded India-Australia security agreement has come at a time when tectonic power shifts are challenging Asian strategic stability. Asia has come a long way since the emergence of two Koreas, two Chinas, two Vietnams and a partitioned India. It has risen dramatically as the world’s main creditor and economic locomotive. The ongoing global power shifts indeed are primarily linked to Asia’s phenomenal economic rise.

Even so, Asia faces major challenges, as underscored by festering territorial and maritime disputes, sharpening resource competition, fast-rising military expenditures, increasingly fervent nationalism and the spread of transnational terrorism and other negative cross-border trends.

In that light, an expanding constellation of Asian countries linked by strategic cooperation and sharing common interests can help foster power stability and build institutionalized cooperation. A close India-Australia strategic relationship indeed is a critical link in this picture, given the common security interests in several spheres that bind the two democracies.

Unfortunately, the Indo-Australian relationship hasn’t gone too well ever since Kevin Rudd two years ago became the free world’s first Mandarin-speaking head of government. Among his first actions, he pulled the plug on the nascent India-Japan-Australia-U.S. "Quadrilateral Initiative" and reversed his predecessor’s decision to export uranium ore to India. For reasons unrelated, the growth in Indo-Australian educational and defense ties also came under pressure, even as India remained Australia’s fastest-growing merchandise export market.

Rudd’s India visit last month has helped to put the bilateral relationship on an even keel and, more importantly, to elevate it to a strategic partnership. The new security agreement will help add concrete strategic content to the relationship.

Underlining the significance of their new accord, India and Australia have agreed to "policy coordination" on Asian affairs and long-term international issues, and to work together in Asian initiatives like the East Asia Summit and ASEAN Regional Forum. Toward that end, they will institute regular defense-policy talks, including consultations between their national security advisers, and set up a joint working group on counterterrorism. They also have agreed to cooperate on maritime and aviation security and participate in military exercises and other service-to-service exchanges.

Like the October 2008 Indo-Japanese security accord and the June 2005 Indo-U.S. defense agreement, the India-Australia declaration is a "framework" understanding that is to be followed by an action plan with specific steps. In fact, all these three bilateral accords call for advancing security cooperation in wide areas that extend from sea-lane security and defense collaboration to disaster management and counterterrorism.

The Indo-Japanese security agreement, signed when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Tokyo last, was modeled on the March 2007 Australia-Japan defense accord. Now, the India-Australia accord follows that lead. Its structure and even a large part of its content mirror that of the Japan-Australia and Japan-India declarations.

Actually, all three — the Japan-Australia, Japan-India and Australia-India agreements — are in the form of a joint declaration on security cooperation. And all three, while recognizing a common commitment to democracy, freedom, human rights and the rule of law, obligate their signatories to work together to build not just bilateral defense cooperation, but also security in Asia. They are designed as agreements to enhance mutual security between equals. By contrast, the U.S.-India defense agreement, with its emphasis on arms sales, force interoperability and intelligence sharing — elements not found in Australia-Japan, India-Japan and India-Australia accords — is aimed more at undergirding U.S. interests.

Paradoxically, Rudd, having nixed the Quadrilateral Initiative, has come full circle implicitly by plugging the only missing link in that quad — an Australia-India security agreement. With the Indo-Australian accord, quadrilateral strategic cooperation among the four major democracies in the Asia-Pacific region — Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. — is set to take off without the aid of an institutional mechanism like the Quadrilateral Initiative.

Such cooperation, of course, is intended to be in a bilateral framework. But the bilateral cooperation inexorably will help lay the foundation for greater cooperation and coordination at trilateral and quadrilateral levels among these four powers.

Australia, Japan and the United States already are engaged in institutionalized trilateral strategic dialogue, while India, Japan and the U.S. have held naval maneuvers since 2007, the last time being in April-May this year off the Okinawa coast. In addition, the quad members jointly staged major naval-war games in the Bay of Bengal in September 2007, roping in Singapore, too. Indeed, the coordination established among the Indian, Japanese, Australian and U.S. militaries in rescue operations following the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami has helped promote closer cooperation among them on disaster relief.

Make no mistake: The U.S. has actively encouraged Indian defense cooperation with Australia and Japan, which are tied to the U.S. by security treaty — the ANZUS treaty in the case of Australia and a 1951 treaty with Japan that was revised in 1960.

Closer Indian defense ties with key Asia-Pacific members of America’s hub-and-spoke global alliance system, in fact, are a natural corollary to the U.S.-India strategic tieup, which seeks to institute a "soft" alliance without treaty obligations, but with complex arrangements extending from the defense-framework accord and nuclear deal in mid-2005 to the recent End-Use Monitoring Agreement. As part of this tieup, India placed arms-purchase orders with the U.S. worth $3.5 billion just last year.

But while the U.S. has treaty commitments to defend Australia and Japan, its reciprocal security obligations to an emerging de facto ally like India are unclear. It also is doubtful whether security accords of the Japan-Australia, Australia-India and Japan-India type translate into tangible gains for the parties’ national defense against visible threats, even though they do aid their diplomacy and are likely to contribute to Asian power stability.

Australia’s own recent defense white paper, by unveiling the country’s biggest military buildup since World War II, serves as a reminder that there is no substitute to building adequate national deterrent capabilities, even for a country under the U.S. security umbrella. Japan, for its part, is likely to move to a more independent security posture in the years ahead, even though a muscular Chinese approach has prompted Tokyo in this decade to strengthen its military alliance with the U.S.

More broadly, Rudd’s government — through its record of being hyper-responsive to Chinese concerns, including on the Quadrilateral Initiative — has taken the lead for the U.S. in certain spheres. Just as Canberra has sought to balance its ties with Tokyo and Beijing, as well as with New Delhi and Beijing, the Obama administration now is following in those footsteps. Indeed, the new catchphrase coined by the Obama administration on China, "strategic reassurance," signals an American intent to be more accommodative of Chinese ambitions.

Or take another example: China’s resurrection of its long-dormant claim to India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. Just as Australia has publicly chartered a course of neutrality on the Arunachal issue — to the delight of Beijing, which aims to leave an international question mark hanging over the legitimacy of India’s control over that large Himalayan territory — U.S. policy is doing likewise, albeit quietly. Indeed, the Obama administration has signaled its intent to abandon elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including a joint military drill in Arunachal and any further Indo-U.S. naval maneuvers involving Japan or more parties like Australia.

In New Delhi, Rudd underscored both the promise and limitations of the new Australia-India strategic partnership. While lauding the new security agreement, he contended disingenuously that his continued refusal to sell India uranium was "not targeted at any individual country," although India is the only country affected by his policy. Worse still, he proffered a specious justification — India’s nonmembership in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). That treaty has no explicit or implicit injunction against civil nuclear cooperation with a nonsignatory. Rather, it enjoins its parties to positively facilitate "the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy," so long as safeguards are in place.

Any restriction is not in the NPT but in the revised 1992 rules of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group that, paradoxically, were changed with Australian support last year to exempt India.

Eventually, Canberra will come round to selling India uranium. After all, how can Canberra continue to justify selling uranium to authoritarian China but banning such exports to democratic India, even though the latter has accepted what the former will not brook — stringent, internationally verifiable safeguards against diversion of imported uranium to weapons use? Canberra will not be able to plow a lonely furrow on India indefinitely.

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

The Japan Times: Thursday, Dec. 10, 2009

Climate change: Risks to India’s national security

Posted on December 9, 2009 by Chellaney

Climate Risks to Indian National Security

Brahma Chellaney

From: Indian Climate Policy: Choices and Challenges, Edited By

David Michel and Amit Pandya (Washington, DC: Stimson Center, November 2009)

India may be a great power-in-waiting, but it probably lives in the world’s

worst neighborhood. Whichever way India looks, it sees crisis across its

frontiers. The tyranny of geography that India confronts is only getting worse,

putting greater pressure on its security. To this picture must now be added the

risks from climate change, which has been correctly identified as a threat

multiplier. What all this underscores is the need for the Indian republic to evolve

more dynamic and innovative approaches to diplomacy and national defense as

well as to build greater state capacity in order to meet contingencies.

Climate change, unfortunately, has become a divisive issue internationally before

a plan for a low-carbon future has evolved. At a time of greater international

divisiveness on core challenges – from disarmament and terrorism to the energy

crisis and the Doha Round of world trade talks – the world can ill afford political

rancor over a climate crisis that threatens to exacerbate security challenges.

While gaps in scientific knowledge make it easy to exaggerate or underestimate

the likely impact of climate change, three broad strategic effects can be

visualized in relation to India.

MULTIPLYING CLIMATE THREATS

1. Climate change would intensify interstate and intrastate competition over

natural resources, making resource conflicts more likely.

A new Great Game over water could unfold, given China’s control over the

source of most of Asia’s major rivers—the Plateau of 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.

Intrastate water disputes already are endemic in Asia, with India being the most

prominent case. But it is the potential for interstate water conflict in Asia that

ought to be of greater concern because of the strategic ramifications.

Tibet’s water-related status in the world indeed is unique. No other area in the

world is a water repository of such size, serving as a lifeline for nearly half of the

global population living in southern and southeastern Asia and China. Tibet’s

vast glaciers, huge underground springs, and high altitude have endowed it with

the world’s greatest river systems. But China is now pursuing major inter-basin

and inter-river water transfer projects on the Tibetan plateau which threaten to

diminish international river flows into India and other co-riparian states. In fact,

China has been damming most international rivers flowing out of Tibet (Tibet’s

fragile ecosystem is already threatened by global warming). The only rivers on

which no hydro-engineering works have been undertaken so far are the Indus

(whose basin falls mostly in India and Pakistan), and the Salween (which flows

into Burma and Thailand.) Local authorities in China’s Yunnan province,

however, are considering damming the Salween in the quake-prone upstream

region.

Before such hydro-engineering projects sow the seeds of water conflict, China

ought to build institutionalized, cooperative river basin arrangements with

downstream states. Against this background, it is hardly a surprise that water is

becoming a key security issue in Sino-Indian relations and is a potential source of

enduring discord. India has been pressing China for transparency, greater

hydrological data-sharing, and a commitment not to redirect the natural flow of

any river or diminish cross-border water flows. But even a joint expert-level

mechanism – set up in 2007 merely for “interaction and cooperation” on

hydrological data – has proven of little value. The most dangerous idea China is

toying with is the northward rerouting of the Brahmaputra River, known as

Yarlung Tsangpo to Tibetans. Diversion of the Brahmaputra’s water to the

parched Yellow River is an idea that China does not discuss in public because the

project implies environmental devastation of India’s northeastern plains and

eastern Bangladesh and would thus be akin to a declaration of water war against

India and Bangladesh.

China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated

farming and water-intensive industries – together with the demands of a rising

middle class – have led to a severe struggle for more water. Indeed, both

countries have entered an era of perennial water scarcity. Rapid economic

growth could slow in the face of acute scarcity if the demand for water continues

to grow at its current frantic pace. Such a development would transform China

and India – both food-exporting countries – into major importers and would thus

exacerbate the global food crisis.

2. 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 hinterlands.

Such an influx of outsiders would socially swamp inland areas and upset existing

fragile ethnic balances—provoking a backlash that strains internal and regional

security. It should not be forgotten that many societies in the region 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. Having been born in blood in 1971,

Bangladesh faces extinction from saltwater incursion, with the International

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. Bangladesh today faces a

rising frequency of natural disasters. In addition to the millions of Bangladeshis

that already have illegally settled in India, New Delhi would have to brace up for

the potential arrival of tens of millions more people.

For India, the ethnic expansion of Bangladesh beyond its political borders not

only sets up enduring trans-border links, but it also makes New Delhi’s alreadycomplex

task of border management even more onerous. As brought out by

Indian census figures, Indian districts bordering Bangladesh have become

Bangladeshi-majority areas. It is perhaps the first time in modern history that a

country has expanded its ethnic frontiers without expanding its political borders.

“Climate refugees,” however, would not all come from across India’s borders.

Within India itself, those driven out by floods, cyclones, and saltwater incursion

would head for settlements on higher ground. In some cases, the effects of such

refugee influxes would be to undermine social stability and internal cohesion

locally.

3. 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 Indian society – would

intensify. The fact that there is a Maoist insurgency in the poorest districts of

India at a time when the country is booming economically is a testament to the

costs of growing inequalities. That ragtag band of rebels wishes to supplant

Indian parliamentary democracy with a proletariat dictatorship inspired by Mao

Zedong’s Little Red Book.

The specter of resource competition, large-scale movement of “climate

refugees,” social and political tensions, and a higher frequency and intensity of

extreme weather events helps underscore the human-security costs. Climate

variability will bring change to the social-economic-political environments on

which the security of individuals and communities rest. Authorities – as well as

communities – will be forced to innovate and manage under a climate changedriven

paradigm. Building greater institutional and organizational capacity,

early-warning systems, more efficient irrigation practices, and new farm varieties

will all become necessary.

THE FRONTLINE OF CLIMATE CHANGE

Against this background, India is likely to find itself on the frontline of climate

change. To deal with these national security implications, India needs to frame

the concept of security more broadly and redefine its defense planning and

preparedness. Unconventional challenges – from transnational terrorism to

illegal refugee inflows – already have become significant in India’s security

calculus. India also needs to build greater state capacity – at federal, provincial,

and local levels – to tackle various contingencies and adapt to a climate changedriven

paradigm. Climate change holds the greatest risks for India in the

agricultural sector—a sector that employs half of the Indian workforce and yet

makes up just 18 percent of the GDP. The challenge of ensuring food security

and social stability demands greater national investments in rural infrastructure

and agriculture and also simultaneously requires finding a way to leapfrog to

green technologies.

A lot can be done to combat climate change outside any regime. India’s US$ 22

billion solar-energy program, US$ 2.5 billion forestation fund, and new national

energy-efficiency mission are initiatives in the right direction.

Internationally, though, Indian diplomacy must ensure that the country is not

saddled with unfair obligations that compound its challenges. Equity in burdensharing

has to be ensured. The challenge is to devise carbon standards that help

protect the material and social benefits of economic growth in the developing

world without damaging prosperity in the developed countries.

But just as the five original nuclear weapons states helped fashion the 1970

Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to perpetuate their privileges, countries

that became 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 of rich nations locking in their advantages

by revising the 1992 Rio bargain and re-jiggering the Kyoto Protocol obligations

through a new regime. This could create another global divide between haves

and have-nots—an NPT of climate change. An enduring international regime to

combat global warming will have to be anchored in differential responsibility, a

concept at the heart of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate

Change and the Kyoto Protocol (it is a concept also embedded in international

law through several other agreements—from the Montreal Protocol on

Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer to the Treaty of Maastricht.) Climate

change, it is evident, is not just a matter of science but also a matter of

geopolitics.

http://www.stimson.org/rv/pdf/Indian_Climate_Change/Chellaney_Climate_Risks.pdf

Prime Minister returns with little from Washington

Posted on December 9, 2009 by Chellaney

A deal gone sour

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, November 27, 2009

The ritzy state dinner US President Barack Obama hosted in honour of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the White House could not obscure the fact that Singh’s visit yielded little in substance. The elaborate pomp and ceremony also did little to change perceptions in India that it has lost ground in America’s Sino-centric Asia policy. During the presidency of George W Bush, many in India had whipped themselves into rapturous frenzy over what they saw as a tectonic shift in US policy toward India. All it required to shatter their bliss (and belief) was a change of government in Washington.

The lesson: Unlike India’s personality-driven, sentiment-laced approach, US foreign policy is shaped by institutional processes that preclude abrupt U-turns or shifts. To be sure, Bush was India-friendly. But he left office without translating his thinking into concrete policy guidance to various departments to treat India as a strategic priority. In the absence of a national security directive to the powerful State Department, Pentagon and Commerce Department bureaucracies that run day-to-day aspects of India policy, the vaunted Indo-US nuclear deal has failed to deliver tangible strategic benefits, or even to promote joint defence research and development. US export controls on high technology continue to target India like before.

The developments since 2008 actually hold the most-sobering lesson for Singh, who staked his political reputation to push through the nuclear deal. He peddled the deal as a transformative initiative that would help put the Indo-US relationship on a much-higher pedestal. But more than a year after the deal came to fruition there is no sign of its transformative power. Rather, India now is concerned about its diminished role in US foreign policy. Despite a much-celebrated strategic partnership between the world’s most-populous democracies, the US values India more as a market for its goods and services than as a collaborator on pressing strategic issues. Indeed, just as it has been balancing its relationships with India and Pakistan for long, Washington now is balancing its ties with India and China.

The nuclear deal itself is turning sour. It will take a decade or so before the first imported nuclear-power reactor begins to generate electricity. The economics of generating power from imported reactors hasn’t even been discussed. Costs are likely to be so high as to saddle Indian taxpayers with a major subsidy burden. Two nuclear-power plants currently under construction in Finland and France are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.

Despite a strong US push to bag major reactor contracts and New Delhi’s action in reserving two nuclear parks exclusively for American firms, no reprocessing agreement could be clinched during Singh’s visit. Key differences remain over such an agreement, which would have to pass US congressional muster. Singh went to Washington after getting his Cabinet to approve a nuclear-accident liability bill, which seeks to cap liability at a mere $537 million (Rs2,500 crore) and makes the Indian state-run operator, rather than the foreign supplier, liable for compensation payment. Parliament must seize the opportunity when this bill is tabled to examine in full the nuclear deal, which thus far has escaped legislative scrutiny in India. The bill — intended to provide cover mainly to US firms, which, unlike France’s Areva and Russia’s Atomstroyexport, are in the private sector — seeks to further burden Indian taxpayers, rather than put the onus on the sellers of multibillion-dollar reactors.

If anything, Singh’s visit was a reminder that Obama’s tilt towards China on key Asian issues and growing US reliance on and aid for Pakistan have emerged as major sticking points in the Indo-US relationship. The policy frame in which Washington is viewing India is not the larger Asian geopolitical landscape, but the southern Asian context. But even on regional matters, the US has on occasion sought to pursue approaches antithetical to India’s vital interest. Also, at a time when Sino-Indian border tensions have escalated, Washington has failed to even caution China against any attempt to forcibly change the territorial status quo.

But more than Washington, New Delhi is to be blamed. The deal-peddlers in India allowed their wishful thinking to blind them to the strategic trends that were firmly set long before Obama came to the White House. Take the China factor. Bush left office with a solid China-friendly legacy, best illustrated by the manner in which he ignored the Chinese crackdown in Tibet and showed up at the Beijing Olympics. The talk of a US-China diarchy — a G2 — ruling the world had begun before Obama was elected. It was also under Bush that the US renewed its aid to Pakistan on a massive scale, while pressuring India not to take the mildest diplomatic sanctions against Islamabad after 26/11. Clearly, the deal was oversold.

The writer is Professor Strategic Studies, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/main-article_a-deal-gone-sour_1316954

The elephant in the India-China theater

Posted on November 15, 2009 by Chellaney

Three's A Crowd In The India-China Theater

By Brahma Chellaney

FAR EASTERN ECONOMIC REVIEW (November 2009)

The renewed Sino-Indian border tensions arising from growing Chinese assertiveness raise an oft-asked question: What has prompted Beijing to up the ante against New Delhi? Until mid-2005, China was eschewing anti-India rhetoric and pursuing a policy of active engagement with India, even as it continued to expand its strategic space in southern Asia, to India’s detriment. In fact, when Premier Wen Jiabao visited New Delhi in April 2005, the two countries unveiled an important agreement identifying six broad principles to govern a settlement of the long-festering Himalayan frontier dispute that predates their 32-day bloody war in 1962.

But by late 2005, the mood in Beijing had noticeably changed. That, in turn, gave rise to a nationalistic streak: Chinese newspapers, individual bloggers, security think-tanks and officially-blessed websites ratcheting up an "India threat" scenario. By early 2006, some Chinese strategic journals and pro-Beijing Hong Kong newspapers like Ming Pao had begun publishing commentaries about a "partial border war" to "teach India" a 1962-style lesson. And in the fall of 2006, Beijing publicly raked up an issue that had remained dormant since the 1962 war—Arunachal Pradesh, India’s remote northeastern state that China claims largely as its own on the basis of putative historical ties with Tibet. In fact, the Chinese practice of describing Arunachal, with 1.3 million residents, as "southern Tibet" started only in 2006.

The following year, Beijing repudiated the most important principle it had agreed to during Mr. Wen’s 2005 visit—"in reaching a boundary settlement, the two sides shall safeguard due interests of their settled populations in the border areas." Since then, China has stepped up military pressure along the Himalayas through cross-frontier incursions and border provocations. New Delhi has been compelled to urgently enhance Indian defenses, including the deployment of new forces and a crash program to improve logistics.

Ominously, commentaries in the official Chinese media now echo the coarse anti-India rhetoric of the Mao era. The People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, berated India in an Oct. 14, 2009 editorial for its "recklessness and arrogance" and for seeking "hegemony." Even Chinese government statements on India have taken a harsher, more strident tone; the foreign ministry has begun using language such as "we demand" and labeling the Indian prime minister’s recent Arunachal visit a "disturbance."

What happened in the months after Mr. Wen’s visit to prompt such a change of heart? The only major development in that period was the new U.S.-India strategic tie-up, as defined by the defense-framework accord and nuclear deal, but a U.S.-India military alliance has always been a strategic nightmare for the Chinese. Thus, the ballyhooed global strategic partnership triggered alarm bells in Beijing. Today, the relationship between the two Asian powers has deteriorated to the extent that trading verbal blows has become common.

Did Delhi help create the context, however inadvertently, for the new Chinese aggressiveness? In June 2005, India agreed to participate in U.S.-led "multinational operations," to share intelligence and to build military-to-military interoperability, all key elements of the June 2005 defense-framework accord. Delhi also pledged to become Washington’s partner on a new "Global Democracy Initiative," a commitment found in the July 2005 nuclear agreement-in-principle. While Beijing cannot hold a veto over India’s diplomatic or strategic initiatives, Delhi could have avoided creating an impression that it was being primed as a new junior partner in America’s hub-and-spoke global alliance system.

India—with its hallowed traditions of policy independence—is an unlikely candidate to be a U.S. ally in a patron-client framework. The strategic partnership with the America falls short of a formal military alliance. But the high-pitched rhetoric that accompanied the new partnership represented a tectonic shift in geopolitical alignments, and apparently Chinese policy makers began to believe that India was being groomed as a new Australia to America. This perception was reinforced by subsequent security arrangements, defense transactions and an end-use monitoring agreement. New Delhi failed to foresee that its rush to forge close strategic bonds with Washington could provoke greater Chinese pressure and that the U.S. would be able to offer little comfort to India in such a situation.

First, Beijing calculatingly has sought to badger India on three fronts—border (according to the Indian government, Chinese cross-frontier incursions nearly doubled between 2007 and 2008, with "no significant increase" in 2009); diplomatic (issuing visas on a separate sheet to residents of the Indian-administered state of Jammu and Kashmir so as to set apart that region from India); and multilateral (launching an international offensive to undercut Indian sovereignty over Arunachal; for example, by successfully blocking the Asian Development Bank from identifying that region as part of India in its latest $1.3 billion credit package). As the resistance to its rule in Tibet has grown since last year, Beijing has sought to present Tibet as a core issue to its sovereignty, just like Taiwan. Tibet now holds as much importance in Chinese policy as Taiwan. In ratcheting up the Arunachal issue with India, Beijing seems to be drawing another analogy: Arunachal is the new Taiwan that must be "reunified" with the Chinese state.

The Dalai Lama has said that Arunachal was never part of Tibet, using this to explain why Arunachal was not included in Tibet in a 1914 agreement that demarcated the borders between the then-independent Tibet and British-ruled India. Beijing does not recognize that agreement because China’s acceptance of the 1914 border would be admission that Tibet was once independent, which would seriously undercut the legitimacy of its control over the increasingly restive region.

Beijing originally fashioned its claim to Arunachal, a territory almost three times larger than Taiwan, as a bargaining chip to compel India to recognize the Chinese occupation of the Aksai Chin, a Switzerland-size plateau once part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Thus, China withdrew from the Arunachal areas it invaded in the 1962 war but retained its territorial gains in Aksai Chin, which provides the only passageway between its rebellious regions—Tibet and Xinjiang. The late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping put forth a package proposal: New Delhi accept the Chinese control over Aksai Chin and Beijing drop its claim on Arunachal, subject to "minor readjustments" in the line of control.

But as part of its hardening stance toward India, China has dredged up its long-dormant claim to Arunachal. It openly covets Arunachal as a cultural extension to Tibet—a classic attempt at incremental annexation. Because the sixth Dalai Lama was born in the 17th century in Arunachal’s Tawang district, Beijing claims that Arunachal belongs to Tibet and thus is part of China. By the same argument, it can also lay claim to Mongolia, as the fourth Dalai Lama was born there in 1589. The traditional ecclesiastical links between Mongolia and Tibet indeed have been closer than those between Arunachal and Tibet.

What makes China’s claim even more untenable is that it has hived off the birthplaces of the seventh, 10th, 11th and the present 14th Dalai Lamas from Tibet. Before seeking Arunachal, shouldn’t Beijing first return the traditional Tibetan areas of Amdo and eastern Kham to Tibet?

Second, even though the Indo-U.S. strategic tie-up has served as the key instigator of China’s more muscular stance toward India, Washington is more reluctant than ever to take New Delhi’s side in any of its disputes with Beijing. President Barack Obama’s administration—far from supporting New Delhi—has shied away from even cautioning Beijing against any attempt to forcibly change the territorial status quo. Indeed, on a host of issues, from the Dalai Lama to Arunachal, Washington has chosen not to antagonize Beijing.

In effect that has left New Delhi on its own at a time when some in China seem to believe that a swift, 1962-style victory in a border war with India is attainable to help cut a potential peer rival to size and fashion a Sino-centric Asia. Accusing India of "walking along the old road of resisting China," an article on the Web site of the China Institute of International Strategic Studies—a think tank run by the PLA General Staff Department’s 2nd Department—warned India "not to requite kindness with ingratitude" and not to "misjudge the situation as it did in 1962." As a result of the bellicose rhetoric on India, 90% of respondents in a June 2009 online poll by Global Times—published by the Communist Party’s information department—cited India as the No. 1 threat to China’s security.

India’s current predicament is a far cry from what former U.S. President George W. Bush had touted in his valedictory speech as one of his signal achievements: "We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India." The Obama administration isn’t unfriendly to India. It just doesn’t see India as able to make an important difference to U.S. geopolitical interests. Another factor is that America’s Asia policy is no longer guided by an overarching geopolitical framework.

Whether one agreed with the Bush foreign policy or not, at least its Asia component bore a distinct strategic imprint. By contrast, the best that can be said about Obama’s Asia policy is that it seeks to nurture key bilateral relationships—with China at the core of Washington’s present courtship—and establish, where possible, trilateral relationships. The upshot is that the Obama team has unveiled a new trilateral security-cooperation framework in Asia involving the U.S., China and Japan.

In deference to Chinese sensitivities, however, the Obama administration has so far failed to even acknowledge another trilateral alliance that started under President Bush, involving the U.S., India and Japan. It is as if this concept has fallen out of favor with Washington, just as the broader U.S.-India-Japan-Australia "Quadrilateral Initiative"—founded on the concept of democratic peace—ran aground after the late-2007 election of the Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd as the Australian prime minister.

At a time when Asia is in transition, with the specter of power disequilibrium looming large, it has become imperative to invest in institutionalized cooperation and regional integration in order to help underpin long-term power stability. After all, not only is Asia becoming the pivot of global geopolitical change, but Asian challenges are also playing into international strategic challenges. But the Obama administration seems fixated on the very country whose rapidly accumulating power and muscle-flexing threaten Asian stability. The new catchphrase coined by Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg in relation to China, "strategic reassurance," signals an American intent to be more accommodative of China’s ambitions.

China’s primacy in the Obama foreign policy has become unmistakable. Indeed, Obama’s Asia tour is beginning in Japan and ending in China but skipping India entirely. But playing to India’s well-known weakness for flattery, Obama is massaging its ego by honoring it with his presidency’s first state dinner. In fact, such a ritzy event fits well with Washington’s current focus on promoting business interests in India, including big-ticket export items like nuclear reactors and conventional weapons.

Obama is committed to a strategic partnership with India, including developing close military ties. New Delhi has placed arms-purchase orders, according to the Indian ambassador to the U.S., worth a staggering $3.5 billion just last year. But he also has signaled that such a relationship with India will not be at the expense of Washington’s fast-growing ties with Beijing. America needs Chinese capital inflows as much as China needs U.S. consumers—an economic interdependence of such importance it has been compared to mutually assured destruction. Even politically, China, with its permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council and other leverage, counts for more in U.S. policy than India or Japan. As the U.S.-China relationship acquires a wider and deeper base in the coming future, the strains in some of America’s existing military or strategic tie-ups in Asia are likely to become pronounced.

Against this background, it is no surprise that Washington now intends to abjure elements of its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including a joint military drill of any type in Arunachal or a 2007-style naval exercise involving the U.S., India, Australia, Japan and Singapore. Even trilateral U.S. naval maneuvers with India and Japan now are out so as not to raise China’s hackles. In fact, Washington is quietly charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal dispute, just as its ally Australia has done rather publicly.

Despite the Obama administration bending over backward to ease its concerns, Beijing remains suspicious of the likely trajectory of U.S.-India strategic ties, including pre-1962-style CIA meddling in Tibet. This distrust found expression in a recent People’s Daily editorial that accused New Delhi of pursuing a foreign policy of "befriending the far and attacking the near." But the mocking newspaper commentaries on India’s power ambitions indicate that Beijing is also angered by what it sees as its neighbor’s audacity in competing with it.

Left to fend for itself, New Delhi has decided to steer clear of any potential confrontation with Beijing. But while seeking to publicly tamp down military tensions with China, the Indian government—under attack at home for being "soft" on China—has begun asserting itself at the political level. While Obama declined to meet the Dalai Lama during his recent Washington visit, India is allowing the Tibetan leader to go ahead with his scheduled Arunachal tour—a red rag to the Chinese bull. It also has announced an end to the practice of Chinese companies bringing thousands of workers from China to work on projects in India. And in a public riposte to Beijing’s raising of objections to multilateral funding of any project in Arunachal, India has asked China to cease its infrastructure and military projects in another disputed region—Pakistan-held Kashmir.

Diplomatically, however, India cannot afford to be out on a limb. The vaunted Indo-U.S. partnership has turned into an opportunity for Washington to win multibillion-dollar Indian contracts and co-opt India into strategic arrangements, without a concomitant obligation to be on India’s side or to extend political help on regional and international matters. Joint military exercises, for example, have become a basis to make India buy increasing quantities of U.S. arms so as to build compatibility and interoperability between the two militaries. Even counterterrorism is emerging as a major area of defense sales to India.

With Obama pursuing a Beijing-oriented Asia policy, and with China-friendly heads of government ensconced in Australia, Japan and Taiwan, New Delhi’s diplomatic calculations have gone awry. Yet the present muscular Chinese approach paradoxically reinforces the very line of Indian thinking that has engendered Chinese belligerence—that India has little option other than to align with the U.S. Such thinking blithely ignores the limitations of the Indo-U.S. partnership arising from American policy’s vicissitudes and compulsions. Washington is showing through its growing strategic cooperation with China and Pakistan that it does not believe in exclusive strategic partnership in any region.

As was the case before the 1962 war, the China-India-U.S. triangle today is at the center of the Himalayan tensions. The Obama team, however, has yet to propose establishing a trilateral initiative to help contain growing Sino-Indian friction. Having declared that America’s "most important bilateral relationship in the world" is with China, the Obama team must caution Beijing against crossing well-defined red lines or going against the self-touted gospel of its "peaceful rise." The U.S. message should be that any military adventure—far from helping fashion a Sino-centric Asia—would prove very costly and counterproductively trigger the rise of a militaristic, anti-China India.

New Delhi, for its part, has to adroitly manage its relationships with Beijing and Washington in a way that it does not lose out. A stable equation with China is more likely to be realized if India avoids a trans-Himalayan military imbalance, as well as security dependency on the third party that has emerged as the elephant in the India-China theater.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author ofAsian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan, published by HarperCollins, with a new U.S. edition scheduled for release in January.

http://www.feer.com/essays/2009/november51/threes-a-crowd-in-the-india-china-theater

Obama should speak up for India in Beijing

Posted on November 15, 2009 by Chellaney

Obama should stop China from provoking India

By Brahma Chellaney

Financial Times, November 13 2009

The economic rise of China and India draws ever more attention. But the world has taken little notice of the rising border tensions and increasingly visible differences between the two giants.

With Barack Obama, US president, headed to Beijing and the Dalai Lama’s tour of the remote north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh provoking an angry Chinese response, the China-India-US triangle and Tibet have emerged at the centre of escalating tensions.

China has resurrected its long-dormant claim to Arunachal Pradesh – almost three times as large as Taiwan – and stepped up military pressure along the 4,057km frontier with India through frequent incursions.

Beijing seems to be drawing the analogy that Arunachal is the new Taiwan that must be “reunified” with the Chinese state.

Tibet, however, has always been the core issue in Sino-Indian relations. China became India’s neighbour not by geography but guns – by annexing buffer Tibet in 1951. Today, Beijing is ready to whip up spats with western nations that extend hospitality to the Dalai Lama. But India remains the base of the Tibetan leader and his government-in-exile.

The key cause of the more muscular Chinese stance towards India is the US-Indian tie-up, unveiled in 2005.

Since then, the official Chinese media has started regurgitating the coarse anti-India rhetoric of the Mao Zedong era, with one commentator this week warning New Delhi not to forget 1962, when China humiliated India in a 32-day, two-front war.

Yet the Obama administration is reluctant to take New Delhi’s side in its disputes with Beijing. Washington has also shied away from cautioning Beijing against attempts to change the territorial status quo forcibly.

Mr Obama is committed to the partnership with India as part of which New Delhi has placed arms-purchase orders worth $3.5bn last year alone. But he has also signalled that any relationship will not be at the expense of fast-growing ties with Beijing.

Washington now intends to abandon elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including a joint military drill in Arunachal or a 2007-style naval exercise involving the US, India, Australia, Japan and Singapore. Even US naval manoeuvres with India and Japan are out. Washington is charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal issue.

As his secretary of state did in February, Mr Obama has started his Asia tour in Japan and will end in China – the high spot – while skipping India. But playing to India’s well-known weakness for flattery, he will honour it with his presidency’s first state dinner later this month.

Left to fend for itself, New Delhi has steered clear of confrontation with Beijing. It has sought to damp down military tensions and cut off all information to the media on the Himalayan border situation, including Chinese intrusions.

But faced with attacks at home for being “soft” on China, the government has asserted itself politically. It rebuffed repeated Chinese diplomatic appeals and allowed the Dalai Lama to travel to Arunachal. It also announced an end to the practice of Chinese companies bringing thousands of workers from China to work on projects in India.

But India cannot afford to be isolated. With Mr Obama pursuing a Sino-centric Asia policy, and with China-friendly heads of government in Australia, Japan and Taiwan, New Delhi’s diplomatic calculations have gone awry. But the hardline Chinese approach reinforces the Indian thinking that engendered Chinese belligerence: that India has little option other than to align with the US.

New Delhi has to manage its relationships with Beijing and Washington wisely so it does not lose out. Meanwhile, the US cannot ignore the pattern of Sino-Indian border provocations and new force deployments similar to what happened 47 years ago when China, taking advantage of the Cuban missile crisis, routed the Indian military in a surprise invasion.

When Mr Obama is in Beijing, his message should be that any military adventure will prove costly and trigger the rise of a militaristic, anti-China India. Mr Obama should propose a US-China-India initiative and encourage his hosts to begin a process of reconciliation and healing in Tibet.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of ‘Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan’

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