Category Archives: Asian Security

Singh’s Sham Water Accord

Posted on by

A new agreement between China and India doesn’t require Beijing to institutionalize rules-based cooperation on shared resources.

  • By Brahma Chellaney

    • Zuma

    The Brahmaputra River in Tibet, site of the Zangmu hydroelectric project. Zuma Press

    For the past decade, China has pursued a series of ambitious dam-building projects in Tibet, making water a source of significant discord in Sino-Indian relations. Yet last week Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh returned from a much-publicized visit to Beijing with an accord on water cooperation that offers only jingles and slogans.

    The memorandum of understanding signed during Mr. Singh’s visit merely records that both parties “recognized that transborder rivers and related natural resources and the environment are assets of immense value,” and that they “agreed that cooperation on transborder rivers will further enhance mutual strategic trust and communication.” India even “expressed appreciation to China for providing flood-season hydrological data.”

    With the help of the planeload of journalists he took with him at taxpayer expense, Mr. Singh has presented this trivial accord as a diplomatic success. In truth, the deal hands China a propaganda lever without addressing India’s concerns.

    In an increasingly water-stressed Asia, China has established a hydro-supremacy unparalleled in the world by annexing the starting place of Asia’s major rivers—the Tibetan plateau—and working to reengineer cross-border flows through dams, barrages and other structures. More transboundary rivers flow from China than from any other hydro-hegemon.

    Having already built more large dams than the rest of the world combined, Beijing has in the past decade shifted focus from dam-saturated internal rivers to international rivers. This year alone it has approved the construction of 54 new dam projects mainly concentrated in southeastern Tibet, including on rivers flowing to South and Southeast Asia.

    India is particularly vulnerable because it directly receives more than 48% of the 718 billion cubic meters of surface water that flows out of Chinese territory every year. In addition, Nepal’s Tibet-originating rivers empty into India’s Ganges basin. India has more arable land than China, but the source of most major Indian rivers is Chinese-controlled Tibet.

    If Beijing continues on its present unilateralist path, its upstream projects could complicate India’s water-sharing with Bangladesh and Pakistan. In the 1996 Ganges Treaty, India guaranteed Bangladesh an equal share of the downriver flows during the difficult dry season. But China is now planning to build a cascade of dams on the Ganges tributaries that contribute significantly to such downstream flows.

    The 1960 Indus Treaty remains the world’s most generous water-sharing arrangement, under which India agreed to set aside 80.52% of the waters of the six-river Indus system for Pakistan indefinitely, hoping it could trade water for peace. Two of these six rivers are now targeted by China’s dam builders.

    New Delhi has been pressing Beijing for transparency on its dam projects and a commitment not to redirect the natural flow of any river or to diminish cross-border flows. But even a joint expert-level mechanism between China and India—set up in 2007 for “interaction and cooperation” on hydrological data—has proven of little value. China has limited its cooperation to the sale of flood-season hydrological data. India provides such data free to Pakistan year-round.

    Averting water wars demands rules-based cooperation, water-sharing and dispute-settlement mechanisms. Yet China rejects the very concept of water-sharing and doesn’t have a single water-sharing treaty with any of its neighbors. India has such treaties with both of its downstream neighbors, Pakistan and Bangladesh, including mechanisms to help resolve disputes that flare intermittently.

    Prime Minister Singh pleaded for a bilateral water treaty in separate meetings this year with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang, asking at least for a joint commission to ensure transparency in upstream dam-building on the Brahmaputra River (which runs from Tibet to eastern India and Bangladesh) and other southerly-flowing rivers. India currently has to rely on aerial reconnaissance and other intelligence inputs to know of Chinese dam-building activities. Messrs. Xi and Li rebuffed Mr. Singh’s plea.

    Now, with his job-approval rating plummeting to an all-time low and corruption scandals swirling, Mr. Singh didn’t wish to return empty-handed from Beijing. So he accepted what China was willing to offer—a token accord bereft of substance. Beijing will henceforth flaunt this accord to rebut criticism that it is unwilling to cooperate on shared water resources.

    This accord cannot obscure the importance of persuading Beijing to institutionalize rules-based cooperation on shared resources. The failure to build such cooperation between China and its neighbors will have long-term consequences, including making China the master of Asia’s water taps.

    China’s geographic advantage and rising military and economic might limit India’s bargaining power. To influence Beijing, then, India must leverage China’s growing Indian-market access. Yet India’s trade deficit with China in the past decade has climbed at about four times the pace of aggregate bilateral commerce. Perpetuating such a lopsided economic relationship while China disturbs the territorial and river-flow status quo is a double whammy for India.

    China’s dam-building spree is a reminder that Tibet remains at the heart of the India-China divide. This sprawling region ceased to be a political buffer when China annexed it more than six decades ago. For Tibet to turn into a political bridge between China and India, water has to become a source of cooperation, not conflict.

    Mr. Chellaney is the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.”

  • Copyright 2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

    • Dancing in the dragon’s jaws

    Posted on by

    Why India’s new border pact with China won’t work

    Brahma Chellaney, Mint, October 22, 2013

    Seeking to compensate for his low political stock at home, Manmohan Singh has undertaken more overseas trips as prime minister than any predecessor, visiting China multiple times. Yet, India punches far below its weight internationally, while its regional security has come under siege, with Singh’s tenure witnessing a sharp deterioration in ties with China.

    The highlight of the latest China visit of India’s most-travelled prime minister will not be progress on any of the core issues dividing the two countries but a Chinese-ordained border accord designed to supplant existing frontier-peace and confidence-building agreements that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has undermined through repeated cross-frontier raids and other incursions. No Indian official has explained the rationale for entering into a new agreement demanded by the party that has breached existing border-peace accords with impunity.

    New Delhi’s willingness to let China dictate the so-called Border Defence Cooperation Agreement (BDCA) mirrors its broader strategic timidity in permitting Beijing to lay down the terms of the bilateral relationship. China has fashioned an asymmetrical commercial relationship, reaping a swelling trade surplus, even as it stymies any progress on issues of core concern to India, including the territorial and water disputes, recurrent cross-border military raids, China’s continuing nuclear and missile collaboration with Pakistan, and the growing Chinese strategic footprint in Pakistani-held Kashmir.

    China’s most-insidious warfare against India is in the economic realm, yet India has done little to stop Beijing from turning it into a raw-material supplier to the Chinese economy and from subverting Indian manufacturing through dumping of goods. Official statistics show that India’s trade deficit with China in the past decade has soared at about four times the pace of aggregate bilateral commerce. The widening trade imbalance with China, in fact, has become a major contributor to India’s worsening current account deficit.

    Perpetuating such a lopsided economic relationship gives Beijing little incentive to bridge the political divide. If anything, it aids China’s strategy to prevent India’s rise as a peer competitor.

    Even as Beijing disturbs the territorial and water-flow status quo, New Delhi won’t leverage China’s growing India-market access to influence Chinese conduct. China, however, does not shy away from mixing politics and business. It has a record of quietly using trade to punish countries it quarrels with. For example, Japanese exports to China, which sank 13.2% in the first seven months of this year, began falling after Beijing unsheathed its trade sword in September 2012 over the Senkaku Islands dispute.

    Singh’s visit will likely yield the usual platitudes about friendship and cooperation while leaving India’s concerns unaddressed. With an unresolved border arming China with leverage to keep India under military pressure, Beijing has been reluctant to even clarify what the two sides farcically call “the line of actual control” (LAC). And even as it turns Tibet into the new hub of its dam-building spree, China has brazenly sought to turn the tables on India, accusing it through a state mouthpiece last week of “attempting to reinforce its actual control and occupation of” Arunachal Pradesh through water projects there.

    Singh, acquiescing to China’s sidelining of the core issues, told reporters before leaving that, “The two governments are addressing them with sincerity and maturity without letting them affect the overall atmosphere of friendship and cooperation”. Even by his pusillanimous standards, making a Chinese-dictated accord the highlight of his official visit marks a new low in Indian diplomacy.

    Consider the humiliating circumstances that spawned this agreement: the PLA intruded deep into Ladakh’s Depsang Plateau by stealth before Beijing embarked on coercive diplomacy, forcing India’s hand on BDCA, whose draft it had sent earlier. In return for China withdrawing its encamped troops from Indian land, India demolished a line of defensive fortifications in Chumar—much to the south of Depsang—and ended forward patrols in the area, besides agreeing to wrap up negotiations on BDCA, which until then it had baulked at.

    The Depsang encroachment inflicted permanent damage to the existing border-peace accords, including the 2005 mutual commitment to “strictly respect and observe” the LAC. Yet, paradoxically, China demanded a new agreement to take precedence over the more equitable 1993, 1996 and 2005 border-peace accords.

    Indeed, such was the bloodless victory China scored by deploying a single platoon of no more than 50 soldiers in Depsang that India, in the manner of a vanquished nation, merely offered its comments and suggestions on the Chinese-imposed draft and sent its national security adviser and defence minister in rapid succession to Beijing to commit itself to BDCA’s “early conclusion.”

    Now, by personally paying obeisance in Beijing, Singh culminates this mortifying process, lending his imprimatur to an agreement that can only embolden China to up the ante. In fact, since India’s virtual capitulation to Chinese demands more than five months ago, China’s military provocations have included multiple daring raids and other forays across the Himalayan frontier, the world’s longest disputed border.

    Via the planeload of journalists he takes, Singh trumpets almost every overseas visit as a diplomatic success. His spinmeisters are also marketing BDCA as positive for India, highlighting features that in reality are dubious.

    Why would a new military hotline with China make a difference when a similar hotline with Pakistan hasn’t worked? Given that India timorously deploys border police (such as the Home Ministry-administered Assam Rifles and Indo-Tibetan Border Police) to fend off incursions by the aggressive PLA, the clause on “no tailing” of each other’s patrols is really applicable to China. But any accord for China is just a political tool to advance its interests, including by lulling the other party into complacency and creating exploitable opportunities.

    Any Chinese leader combines an India visit with a visit to his country’s “all-weather ally,” Pakistan, but Singh declined to club his China visit with a pending trip to Japan. Singh, in fact, will be in Beijing at the same time as the Russian and Mongolian prime ministers, with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev beginning his Beijing trip while Singh was still in Moscow on an official visit.

    Singh’s China policy, by leaving India more vulnerable to Chinese belligerence, represents a case study in how meekness attracts bullying. BDCA is a symbol of that.

    Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

    (c) Mint, 2013.

    Southern Asia: A unique nuclear triangle

    Posted on by

    Brahma Chellaney

    Politics and Strategy: The Survival Editors’ Blog

    In the two decades since I published an essay in Survival on South Asian nuclearization, one of my conclusions has been proven right, but another wrong. The South Asian nuclear genie remains uncontrolled, as I anticipated. But contrary to my doubt then, India and Pakistan have completed the transition from covert to overt capabilities by conducting nuclear-explosive tests, adopting a nuclear doctrine and deploying nuclear weapons. More strangely, Pakistan now boasts the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal. Indeed, according to several international estimates, its arsenal of nuclear warheads is larger than that of India, which, with China to its north, faces two closely aligned nuclear-armed neighbours.

    India’s recent test launch of the Agni V ballistic missile, which can reach Beijing, served as a fresh reminder that the Indian nuclear-deterrence programme is primarily focused on China, with Pakistan remaining subordinate in nuclear planning. To be sure, it was the Sino-Pakistani nuclear nexus — cemented by transfers of Chinese nuclear and missile technology to Islamabad — that propelled India to shed its posture of nuclear ambiguity and go overtly nuclear in 1998. Since then, China’s rapidly accumulating military and economic power, and its increasing assertiveness on territorial disputes, have increased the importance of the nuclear deterrent for India. Given its retaliation-only posture, India has focused its attention in the past decade on erecting a triad of land-based, air-deliverable and submarine-based nuclear capabilities that can survive an enemy first strike.

    Strikingly, neither India’s economic rise nor its graduated action to put in place a ‘small but credible’ nuclear force is seen internationally as a threat, unlike the deep concerns that China’s ascent continues to generate. A 2008 civilian nuclear deal between the United States and India, in fact, has come to symbolise their new strategic partnership. International proliferation-related concern instead has focused on Pakistan’s rapid expansion of its nuclear arsenal that has put it on a path to overtake Britain as the world’s fifth-largest nuclear-weapons power. Unstable Pakistan is heavily dependent on foreign aid, yet it has ramped up production of bomb-grade materials.

    Nuclear weapons have not prevented Pakistan’s slide into a jihadist dungeon. Given its military’s sponsorship of jihad under the nuclear umbrella and the jihadist infiltration of the armed forces, the biggest international concern relates to the safety of Pakistani nuclear warheads and fissile materials. Compounding this concern is the fact that Pakistan’s military, intelligence and nuclear establishments remain outside civilian oversight. Such concern, along with major gaps in American intelligence about Pakistan’s weapons of mass destruction, has made that country a principal target of US ‘black budget’ surveillance, according to recent revelations. Yet the only plausible scenario of Pakistani nukes falling into Islamist hands is an intra-military struggle in which the jihadists within the armed forces gain ascendancy.

    Southern Asia remains the only region in the world where three contiguous neighbours, sharing disputed land frontiers, form a nuclear triangle that pits two of them against the third party. The regional intersection of nuclear issues, terrorism, territorial disputes, competition over natural resources and nationalism creates complex and dangerous challenges. This region will continue to serve as a reminder that any progress in an inter-state context on nuclear issues, including nuclear confidence-building measures, cannot happen independently of the broader geopolitics.

    Brahma Chellaney is a Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research. His article,‘The Challenge of Nuclear Arms Control in South Asia’, appeared in Survival, 35:3 (1993).

    Wages of prolonged leadership drift

    Posted on by

    Brahma Chellaney, The Economic Times, August 8, 2013

    Two back-to-back attacks on Indian targets scripted by the Pakistani military since last weekend — a terror strike on the consulate in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and the ambush-killing of five soldiers on the Indian side of the line of control — highlight the escalating costs of India’s prolonged leadership drift. India has never before presented itself as being so directionless, weak, impotent and vulnerable. This same factor has created a sinking feeling economically, dragging the stock markets and the rupee down.

    Clipboard01Ominously, Pakistan and China are now harassing and provoking India on opposite flanks of Jammu and Kashmir, as if they were acting in concert. Chinese military forays into Ladakh have increased in parallel to the Pakistani ceasefire violations this year.

    The question whether the two “all-weather” allies are pursuing a pincer strategy to squeeze India must be examined in context of Beijing’s open use of the Kashmir card. With India deploying additional forces to guard Arunachal Pradesh, especially its critical Tawang Valley, China has focused on Kashmir, disputing India’s sovereignty over J&K, stepping up raids into Ladakh, and enlarging its strategic footprint in Pakistan-held Kashmir.

    Yet time and again, when faced with an act of cross-border aggression, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s beleaguered government has turned the other cheek, as if India’s only options are appeasement or all-out war. To cover up its timidity, it has also sought to make light of virtually every onslaught.

    In the way the external affairs minister — as if reading from the aggressor’s script — belittled the 19-km Chinese encroachment in April-May by calling it a “small little spot” of “acne”, the defence minister contradicted the army’s written statement implicating the Pakistani military directly in the latest killings. The defence minister has no independent way to assess what happened, yet he twisted the army’s version unconscionably for narrow political ends.

    Make no mistake: The ministers in charge of national security — including an equally bungling home minister, whose heedless comments have come handy to Pakistan and its terrorist proxies like Hafiz Saeed — have emerged as millstones around the country’s neck.

    In the U.S. and other important democracies, any act of aggression prompts a quick statement by the country’s top leader. But Singh typically responds by staying mum initially as he works to ensure the “peace” process is not derailed.

    Had the PM forthrightly spoken up promptly like Sonia Gandhi — who said the latest killings mirrored Pakistan’s “blatant acts of deceit” — he would have shocked a nation that has come to regard him as irremediably meek. After all, he has put the internationally unprecedented Mumbai terrorist siege behind him.

    Even when Pakistani troops raided Indian territory seven months ago and chopped two soldiers, taking away one severed head as a “trophy”, that savagery did not deter Singh from quickly returning to business-as-usual with Pakistan. Every Pakistani or Chinese act of aggression is just more water under the bridge for him.

    The leadership deficit is exacting a serious toll on national security and Singh’s own credibility, with even markets and investors losing faith and the economy lurching towards a potential balance-of-payments crisis. Having been catapulted into public life by the 1991 BoP crisis, Singh now risks coming full circle.

    Tellingly, Singh has greeted each cross-border ambush or intrusion with inaction and stoic tolerance, thereby emboldening India’s adversaries to up the ante. As a result, his Pakistan and China policies enjoy little public support, crimping the political space for any bold action by a government that, in any event, is now on its last legs.

    It should not be forgotten that Singh has already granted Islamabad a series of unilateral political concessions, including delinking dialogue from terrorism. He has also pursued a host of goodwill gestures, including resuming cricketing ties and introducing a less-restricted visa regime for Pakistanis. All these moves have failed to tame Pakistani military belligerence.

    The latest attacks actually accentuate India’s policy dilemma. India would like to do its bit to strengthen the hands of Pakistan’s civilian government, including through a genuine peace-building process. But its efforts can prove meaningful only if the Pakistani government reclaims authority from the powerful military to run the country’s foreign policy, especially its India policy.

    Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has made little effort to assert such authority. In fact, throughout his political career during which he has thrice served as PM, Sharif has danced on both sides of the civil-military faultline. Sharif is no sharif. He rose to prominence in politics as the military’s front man before eventually running afoul of the military. The lesson he has learned is not to clash with the military again.

    So, with the military effectively running Pakistan’s India policy, whom can India engage to help chart a new direction to bilateral ties? Singh, in his gushy chase of peace and open borders with Pakistan, has ducked this question, even though he risks making the same mistake with Sharif that his predecessor, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, did in 1999 when he admitted that his peace bus to Lahore was “hijacked” to wage war in Kargil.

    The hard fact is that subcontinental peace hinges on Pakistan’s internal dynamics — on the ability of its government and people to correct the heavily skewed civil-military relations. Unless that happens, India-Pakistan dialogue cannot yield a breakthrough. Indeed, without the structural correction, such dialogue will only encourage the military to undermine that process through direct or surrogate acts of aggression.

    (c) The Economic Times, 2013.

    China’s game plan is to keep India on the back foot

    Posted on by

    Brahma Chellaney, Mint, July 31, 2013

    An increasingly assertive China has indisputably emerged as India’s immediate strategic challenge. While erring on the side of caution is prudent, strategic diffidence and tentativeness are likely to exact increasing costs. The more feckless and fearful a policy, the more pressures it is bound to invite.

    India’s current China policy indeed exemplifies how meekness attracts bullying. The more timorous India has been, the more belligerent China has become.

    A key defining event has been the three-week Chinese military incursion into Ladakh’s Depsang plateau, which ended on May 7 only after India virtually capitulated by demolishing a line of new defensive fortifications in the Chumar region, 400 kilometres to the south, and agreeing to consider a Chinese-drafted “Border Defence Cooperation Agreement”. Since then, an emboldened China has escalated its military pressure on India.

    Its provocations have included several military forays into Chumar — a lightening raid on June 17 to smash up surveillance equipment was followed by more incursions on July 16-17, 18 and 20. Depsang was the scene of a 28-kilometre-deep Chinese intrusion on July 12. Border transgressions also occurred this month in Arunchal’s Dichu and Uttarakhand’s Barahoti areas.

    Yet this spate of incursions has received little attention as the Indian state, mired in petty politics, remains woefully adrift. Indeed, the government kept the June 17 Chinese raid under wraps for three weeks for fear that news about it would provoke public pressure to cancel the impending separate visits to Beijing of the national security adviser and defence minister. Similarly, to safeguard the Chinese premier’s visit earlier, New Delhi — as if reading from the aggressor’s script in Chinglish — tried to pass off the watershed event at Depsang as a “small little spot” of “acne” treatable with “an ointment”.

    China’s newest provocations, in fact, draw encouragement from its bloodless victory when it sneaked troops into Depsang and then, employing the threat of escalation, extracted Indian concessions. One of the concessions — suspension of forward patrolling in Chumar — has created the opening for stepped-up Chinese intrusions, designed to assert claims to that highly strategic area overlooking the Tibet-Xinjiang highway.

    By making India remove fortifications and halt forward patrolling in Chumar, China accomplished two objectives — securing India’s acquiescence to Chinese-defined constraints on deployment and surveillance and an Indian acknowledgment, even if tacit, that the area is disputed. Pursuit of the next objective will likely witness Beijing’s call for “mutual accommodation” and “mutual respect” to achieve a dispute resolution on the basis of a now-familiar Chinese dictum — “what is ours is ours to keep, but what is yours must be on the negotiating table to be settled through give-and-take”.

    To cover up its entrenched strategic timidity, however, New Delhi has flaunted its go-ahead for establishing a new mountain strike corps — a clearance that should have come several years earlier and without media hype. Yawning gaps in India’s Himalayan defences remain unplugged owing to sluggish decision-making. Even as China develops and deploys capabilities quietly, New Delhi advertises any deterrence move, however nascent.

    It will take India probably up to seven years to establish and fully deploy the new strike corps. But the government has already betrayed its trademark meekness by deciding to deploy the new strike corps, or any of its formations, not where most needed — Arunachal Pradesh — but in West Bengal and elsewhere so as not to raise the hackles of Beijing, which calls Arunachal “disputed territory”. This is just one example of how New Delhi allows Beijing to dictate terms to it.

    Consider another, more mortifying example: China’s draft Border Defence Cooperation Agreement is receiving India’s fullest consideration. The draft was handed to India in circumstances that amounted to holding a gun to its head and demanding that it enter into discussions on concluding the agreement. It was given on May 4 before Beijing agreed to dismantle its Depsang encampment.

    China’s intent is to keep India at a strategic disadvantage and thus vulnerable to Chinese military pre-emption through an agreed freeze on build-up of border defences and troop levels. The aim clearly is to stymie India’s belated and still-bumbling efforts to enhance its defences and military logistics support.

    China has a knack of defining important principles in an accord so as to bind the other party to them by fostering a belief that their mere enunciation represents progress, even as Beijing pays lip service to those principles. In the face of belligerent Chinese actions, however, it has become difficult to keep up the pretence of progress. The Depsang encampment represented a shot through the heart of the border-peace concept central to the existing accords concluded in 1993, 1996 and 2005. China thus wants these accords replaced with a new lopsided agreement to aid its containment-behind-engagement strategy.

    But why is New Delhi furthering China’s game plan? Can a draft thrust by China at gunpoint be the basis for negotiating an agreement? As if content to play second fiddle to China, India is offering its comments and suggestions on the Chinese draft. In a July 6 joint statement with his Chinese counterpart, General Chang Wanquan, Defence Minister A.K. Anthony even “agreed to the early conclusion of negotiations” on the proposed agreement. Is India a vanquished nation that had little choice but to embrace an imposed draft as the basis for negotiations?

    With India’s lame-duck prime minister scheduled to visit Beijing in November, symbolism will again trump substance. Yet, without a fundamental course correction, India seriously risks courting another 1962-style Himalayan debacle.

    Brahma Chellaney is a professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

    (c) Mint, 2013.

    China’s Stealth Wars

    Posted on by

    A Project Syndicate column internationally distributed

    Portrait of Brahma Chellaney

    China is subverting the status quo in the South and East China Seas, on its border with India, and even concerning international riparian flows ― all without firing a single shot. Just as it grabbed land across the Himalayas in the 1950s by launching furtive encroachments, China is waging stealth wars against its Asian neighbors that threaten to destabilize the entire region. The more economic power China has amassed, the greater its ambition to alter the territorial status quo has become.

    Throughout China’s recent rise from poverty to relative prosperity and global economic power, the fundamentals of its statecraft and strategic doctrine have remained largely unchanged. Since the era of Mao Zedong, China has adhered to the Zhou Dynasty military strategist Sun Tzu’s counsel: “subdue the enemy without any battle” by exploiting its weaknesses and camouflaging offense as defense. “All warfare,” Sun famously said, “is based on deception.”

    For more than two decades after Deng Xiaoping consolidated power over the Chinese Communist Party, China pursued a “good neighbor” policy in its relations with other Asian countries, enabling it to concentrate on economic development. As China accumulated economic and strategic clout, its neighbors benefited from its rapid GDP growth, which spurred their own economies. But, at some point in the last decade, China’s leaders evidently decided that their country’s moment had finally arrived; its “peaceful rise” has since given way to a more assertive approach.

    One of the first signs of this shift was China’s revival in 2006 of its long-dormant claim to Indian territory in Arunachal Pradesh. In a bid to broaden its “core interests,” China soon began to provoke territorial disputes with several of its neighbors. Last year, China formally staked a claim under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to more than 80 percent of the South China Sea.

    From employing its strong trade position to exploiting its near-monopoly on the global production of vital resources like rare-earth minerals, China has staked out a more domineering role in Asia. In fact, the more openly China has embraced market capitalism, the more nationalist it has become, encouraged by its leaders’ need for an alternative to Marxist dogma as a source of political legitimacy. Thus, territorial assertiveness has become intertwined with national renewal.

    China’s resource-driven stealth wars are becoming a leading cause of geopolitical instability in Asia. The instruments that China uses are diverse, including a new class of stealth warriors reared by paramilitary maritime agencies. And it has already had some victories.

    Last year, China effectively took control of the Scarborough Shoal, an area of the South China Sea that is also claimed by the Philippines and Taiwan, by deploying ships and erecting entry barriers that prohibit Filipino fishermen from accessing their traditional fishing preserve. China and the Philippines have been locked in a standoff ever since. Now the Philippines is faced with a strategic Hobson’s choice: accept the new Chinese-dictated reality or risk an open war.

    China has also launched a stealth war in the East China Sea to assert territorial claims over the resource-rich Senkaku Islands (called the Diaoyu Islands in China), which Japan has controlled since 1895 (aside from a period of administration by the United States from 1945 to1972). China’s opening gambit ― to compel the international community to recognize the existence of a dispute ― has been successful, and portends further disturbance of the status quo.

    Likewise, China has been posing new challenges to India, ratcheting up strategic pressure on multiple flanks, including by reviving old territorial claims. Given that the two countries share the world’s longest disputed land border, India is particularly vulnerable to direct military pressure from China.

    The largest territory that China seeks, Arunachal Pradesh, which it claims is part of Tibet, is almost three times the size of Taiwan. In recent years, China has repeatedly attempted to breach the Himalayan frontier stretching from resource-rich Arunachal Pradesh to the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir ― often successfully, given that the border is vast, inhospitable, and difficult to patrol. China’s aim is to needle India ― and possibly to push the Line of Actual Control (LAC) southward.

    Indeed, on April 15, a platoon of Chinese troops stealthily crossed the LAC at night in the Ladakh region, establishing a camp 19 kilometers (12 miles) inside Indian-held territory. China then embarked on coercive diplomacy, withdrawing its troops only after India destroyed a defensive line of fortifications. It also handed a lopsided draft agreement that seeks to freeze the belated, bumbling Indian build-up of border defenses while preserving China’s capability to strike without warning.

    India has countered with its own draft designed specifically to prevent border flare-ups. But territory is not the only objective of China’s stealth wars; China is also seeking to disturb the status quo when it comes to riparian relations. Indeed, it has almost furtively initiated dam projects to reengineer cross-border river flows and increase its leverage over its neighbors.

    Asian countries ― together with the U.S. ― should be working to address Asia’s security deficit and establish regional norms. But China’s approach to statecraft, in which dominance and manipulation trump cooperation, is impeding such efforts. This presents the U.S., the region’s other leading actor, with a dilemma: watch as China gradually disrupts the status quo and weakens America’s allies and strategic partners, or respond and risk upsetting its relationship with China, the Asian country most integral to its interests. Either choice would have far-reaching consequences.

    Against this background, the only way to ensure peace and stability in Asia is to pursue a third option: inducing China to accept the status quo. That will require a new brand of statecraft based on mutually beneficial cooperation ― not brinkmanship and deception.

    Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut, Water: Asia’s New Battleground, and Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.

    (c) Project Syndicate, 2013.

    Asia’s pivotal triangle

    Posted on by

    India has to build on its close ties with Japan to counterbalance an assertive China

    India Today, June 3, 2013

    ClippedIndia, China and Japan, as they manoeuvre for strategic advantage, are transforming relations between themselves in a way that portends growing strategic collaboration between New Delhi and Tokyo but sharper geopolitical competition between China and the other two Asian powers. This had an echo in two virtually back-to-back summit meetings: the genuine warmth and expansion of substantive cooperation that boosted Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Japan visit contrasted vividly with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s all-smiles-but-no-compromise approach during his India tour, which, behind the hype, helped to underscore the deep Sino-Indian divide.

    Li, who brought a large team of exporters, sought to secure bigger commercial benefits in India—in spite of an already lopsided trade—while safeguarding China’s latitude to box-in India from practically all sides. The visit stood out for the manner it attempted to cloak or underplay the contentious issues and put a positive gloss on the current bilateral relationship.

    But just as President Hu Jintao’s 2006 India trip was preceded by Beijing’s jarring resurrection of its long-dormant claim to Arunachal Pradesh in the east and Premier Wen Jiabao’s 2010 tour followed China’s challenge to Indian sovereignty in the western sector, Li also delivered a pre-visit gift—a stealthy, 19-kilometre-deep incursion into Ladakh. The daring military raid after more than six years of increasing Chinese territorial assertiveness should have prompted India to link closer political and commercial engagement with China to substantive progress on the territorial disputes. Yet, a politically besieged Singh responded in a way that can only embolden China to step up its pressure on India.

    First, China vindicated its coercive diplomacy by ending the intrusion only after India destroyed defensive fortifications at Chumar to the south and suspended patrolling along the critical borderline there. And second, Li had his way on the joint statement, which omits the standard commitment to try and resolve the border dispute “at an early date”; instead it expresses strange “satisfaction” with never-ending border talks that continue to take India round and round the mulberry bush. Beijing has signalled that it will not cede its territorial and border cards against India.

    These are also the cards that China is now wielding against Japan. In the way it is trying to furtively disrupt the territorial and international-river flow status quo in the Himalayas, China launched a stealth war in the East China Sea to assert territorial claims over Japan’s resource-rich Senkaku Islands. China’s opening gambit—to compel the international community to recognize the existence of a dispute—has been successful, and foreshadows further disturbance of the status quo.

    Far from allowing its booming bilateral trade to come in the way of its stealth wars against Japan and India, China is employing trade as a political weapon. With China serving as Japan’s largest overseas market, Beijing has sought to punish Tokyo through an informal boycott of Japanese products since last September. For China, trade is also about geostrategic interests. It values the lopsided trade with India as a strategic weapon that undercuts its rival’s manufacturing base, yet yields handsome dividends for it.

    The more openly China has embraced market capitalism, the more nationalist it has become, encouraged by its leaders’ political-legitimacy need for an indigenous alternative to the imported but worn-out Marxist dogma. An increasingly muscular foreign policy thus has become intertwined with national renewal.

    Cartoon in China’s Global Times (http://goo.gl/hzCCT) mocks Japan-India partnership, with accompanying article warning New Delhi that strategic ties with Tokyo can “only bring trouble to India.”

    With China’s rise casting the shadow of a power disequilibrium over Asia, Singh’s Tokyo visit highlighted the imperative for Japan and India to lead an effort to build freedom, prosperity, and sea-lane security in the Indo-Pacific region, the world’s leading trade and energy seaway. Given China’s mercantilist strategy to assert control over natural-resource supplies and their transport routes, the maintenance of a peaceful maritime domain, including unimpeded freedom of navigation, has become critical to the well-being of resource-poor Japan and India.

    The fast-growing relationship of these two natural allies is remarkably free of any strategic dissonance. However, meaningful strategic collaboration between them hinges on important shifts in their policies. Japan, America’s treaty ally, has established military interoperability only with U.S. forces. Following its 2008 security-cooperation accord with India, Japan—with Asia’s largest naval fleet—must also build interoperability with Indian naval forces, so that, as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in New Delhi before returning to power, “Japan’s navy and the Indian navy are seamlessly interconnected.”

    Brahma Chellaney is a strategic thinker and author.

    (c) India Today, 2013.

    China’s Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove

    Posted on by

    Brahma Chellaney

    The Economic Times, May 26, 2013

    Behind the hype and hustle, any India-China summit meeting runs along familiar lines: India flags its concerns sedulously, especially over Beijing’s reluctance to clarify the line of control, the lopsided trade relationship, China’s activities in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), and the opaque Chinese projects on transnational rivers. The Chinese side responds with pious platitudes about friendship and cooperation that win front-page coverage in Indian press. All this is quickly forgotten until the next summit, when India goes through the same motions again.

    In the intervening time, however, the trade pattern has turned more unequal, China has unveiled new dam projects on transboundary rivers and enlarged its strategic footprint in PoK, and the number of cross-frontier forays and border incidents staged by Chinese troops to pressure India has increased. This is exactly what happened between the 2010 New Delhi visit of Premier Wen Jiabao and the just-concluded trip of his successor, Li Keqiang.

    Take the growing trade asymmetry. The joint statement issued at the end of Li’s visit promises “measures to address the issue of the trade imbalance.” But when Wen Jiabao came calling, China made a similar commitment to level the playing field by taking “measures to promote greater Indian exports to China with a view to reduce India’s trade deficit.”

    Yet China’s trade surplus has soared since then, significantly expanding India’s current account deficit. With trade talks that began in late 2010 yielding little, there is little hope of any respite for India from China’s escalating dumping of goods.

    Confident that India will continue to do little else other than file anti-dumping cases at the World Trade Organization, Beijing is systematically undermining Indian manufacturing. Moreover, it still largely imports raw materials from India and exports finished products. One new way it is seeking to perpetuate this distorted pattern is by providing debt financing through its banks to financially troubled Indian companies that agree to buy Chinese equipment or supply primary commodities.

    Now consider China’s response to India’s exhortations to stem its growing strategic involvement in PoK, a disputed territory. Li, as if to mock India’s pleas, went straight from India to “all-weather” ally, Pakistan, and signed an agreement to build an economic corridor through PoK, where China is already engaged in several strategic projects. To shield these projects, Beijing has stationed its own forces in the rebellious, Shia-majority Gilgit-Baltistan, with the result that India now faces Chinese troops on both flanks of Jammu and Kashmir, one-fifth of which China has annexed.

    Contrast China’s refusal to heed New Delh’s PoK-related protestations with the intense diplomatic pressure it mounted after India’s ONGC Videsh Limited (OVL) signed a contract with PetroVietnam to jointly explore for oil in two blocks in the South China Sea. Beijing warned India against “any unilateral exploration activities” there. OVL eventually withdrew from one block in 2011 and the other in 2012 after paying millions of dollars in exit fees to PetroVietnam.

    Water has emerged as a key security issue in Sino-Indian relations and a potential source of enduring discord. But like Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier, Li snubbed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s plea that water cooperation ought to extend beyond mere data-sharing to institutionalized transparency on dam building.

    China is the source of river flows to a dozen countries. But India is the most vulnerable of them to China’s reengineering of transboundary flows because it alone receives nearly half of all river waters that leave Chinese territory. Beijing, however, continues to spurn India’s proposal to conclude a pact or establish an inter-governmental institution to define rights and responsibilities on shared rivers. China wants only to sell flood-related hydrological data.

    While working to disturb the status quo on international-river flows, China is clearly unwilling to accept the territorial status quo with India. The Indian assumption that greater trade would make Beijing more amenable to solving the border dispute and more sensitive to India’s other concerns has been belied.  

    For more than three decades now, India has engaged China in never-ending rounds of sterile discussions on the boundary issue in what has become the longest, most-barren process of negotiations between any two countries in modern history. China has not only derailed the process to clarify the Line of Actual Control (LAC), rendering that term farcical, but it has also signalled unequivocally that it will not accept the LAC as the basis for a boundary settlement.

    When Wen Jiabao came in 2010, he delivered a hard message on the border issue — that it will “not be easy to completely resolve the question” and that, in any event, it will “take a fairly long period of time.” These remarks in a prepared speech amounted to a public disavowal of the “firm commitment” enshrined in the joint statement issued just hours earlier to resolve the border dispute “at an early date.”

    The latest joint statement, deferring to China, actually drops the “early date” reference. The fact that Li’s visit was preceded by a 19-kilometre-deep Chinese incursion into Ladakh attests to China’s resolve to keep India under sustained pressure by neither clarifying the LAC nor moving towards a border settlement. Beijing earlier sabotaged the Joint Working Group (JWG) on border talks by going back on its 2001 commitment to exchange maps of the eastern and western sectors with India. And by playing the Arunachal and Kashmir cards, it is now seeking to stymie the JWG’s replacement mechanism led by the so-called special representatives (SRs).

    Having being shaken by the daring Ladakh incursion, India has every right to tacitly link China’s one-sided market privileges and bilateral political and military exchanges to substantive progress on the border issue. But it is flubbing the opportunity. The joint statement, for example, preposterously expresses “satisfaction” over the decade-long border talks between the SRs, even as it encourages them to “push forward the process of negotiations.” This stance only aids the Chinese game-plan to take India round and round the mulberry bush.

    India, however, has done well to counter China’s draft “Border Defence Cooperation Agreement” by proposing its own accord designed specifically to prevent border flare-ups and incursions. The Chinese-drafted agreement, in the name of preserving Himalayan peace and tranquillity, cleverly aims to keep India vulnerable to Chinese military pre-emption by freezing its belated build-up of border defences.

    Li’s visit has served as a fresh reminder that India-China summits yield little more than hype, spin and reassuring clichés. Imploring China to see reason on border, trade, water and other issues is pointless because Beijing only understands the language of leverage. Combating China’s containment-behind-engagement strategy demands a concerted Indian plan of action that combines beefed-up deterrent capabilities with leveraged diplomacy and military cooperation with friendly countries.

    Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of  “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

    (c) The Economc Times, 2013.

    China’s bloodless victory over India

    Posted on by

    Brahma Chellaney

    The Economic Times, May 12, 2013

    In a classic replay of its old game, China intruded stealthily into a strategic border area in Ladakh and then disingenuously played conciliator by counselling “patience,” “wisdom” and “negotiations.” The incursion bore all the hallmarks of Chinese brinkmanship, including taking an adversary by surprise, seizing an opportunistic timing, masking offence as defence, and discounting risks of wider escalation. Occurring at a time when India has never been so politically weak, the intrusion was shrewdly timed to exploit its political paralysis and leadership drift.

    What China did was to impudently violate border-peace agreements with India by employing coercive power on the ground. Then — armed with the leverage from its encroachment into the Debsang plateau — it embarked on coercive diplomacy by setting out military demands for India to meet.

    In doing so, it presented India with a Hobson’s choice: either endure the Chinese ingress into a region controlling key access routes or meet China’s demands at the cost of irremediably weakening Indian military interest in a wider strategic belt extending up to the Karakoram Pass and the Siachin Glacier. After a three-week standoff, China withdrew from the occupied spot but only after India blinked by ceding some ground — an action it has tried to rationalize as granting China a “necessary face saver.”

    The plain fact is that India made a concession to end the standoff, while China — in a triumph for its coercive diplomacy — conceded nothing. In fact, placing the aggressor and the victim on the same pedestal, India announced both sides would pull back troops to end the standoff.

    India, oddly, wilted just when China was coming under adverse international spotlight for intruding into Indian-controlled territory after expanding its “core interests” and provoking territorial spats with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. Instead of raising China’s diplomatic costs for the encroachment so as to deter it from staging another intrusion at a time and place of its choosing, India rewarded the aggression by dismantling its defensive structures at Chumar. It took China just one platoon of up to 50 troops to bring India to heel.

    The intruding troops could not have survived the icy wintertime conditions in the temporary shelters they erected. But had the intrusion continued for several more weeks, it would have shone an unlikable international light on China’s territorial revanchism and imperial resurgence.

    All that India needed to do was to reinforce its military positions without encircling the intruders, yet standing firm on the demand it initially made while summoning the Chinese ambassador — an unconditional return to the status quo ante. Yet India gratuitously brought itself under pressure over Premier Li Keqiang’s impending visit, instead of feeling insulted that Li was stopping over in New Delhi on his way to Pakistan to bless the newly elected government there.

    Making the most of India’s apparent lack of self-respect, Beijing insisted that India degrade its border defences by dismantling a key forward observation post, destroying defensive fortifications such as live-in bunkers for its troops, and suspending infrastructure development near the line of actual control (LAC). For its part, China, seeking to bolster its larger game-plan in eastern Ladakh to encroach on Indian land bit by bit, continues to rapidly build up an offensive capability.

    In forcing Indian troops to start demolishing bunkers before officially terminating the standoff and softening up India for further bargaining, China has vindicated its coercive diplomacy while rendering India more vulnerable to Chinese military manoeuvres and raids. The razing of bunkers has already forced Indian troops to suspend patrolling up to the LAC in the Chumar area, a development that threatens to whittle down Indian salience in a critical border region while opening space for China to expand its sovereignty claims.

    Having overtly challenged India’s belated, bumbling moves to fortify frontier defences against a rising pattern of Chinese border provocations, China will now hold the threat of unleashing its coercive power again. In fact, with boundary tensions still lingering, Beijing has made it clear that it has “terminated” the standoff, not settled the dispute, with the two sides, according to it, reaching “an agreement on resolving the incident in the western section of the border.” An actual resolution, Beijing has indicated, hinges on India making more border-related concessions, which is why it is pushing a new Chinese-drafted frontier deal — a clear attempt to rub salt into Indian wounds.

    More fundamentally, China’s incursion has wreaked lasting damage on the dual Sino-Indian border accords of 2005, a development scarcely conducive to ensuring Himalayan tranquillity and stability. One pact relates to military confidence building and the other defines political parameters for border peace and an eventual frontier settlement.

    While the political accord enjoins the two parties to “strictly respect and observe the LAC and work together to maintain peace and tranquillity in the border areas” (Article IX), the military agreement — echoing an earlier accord of 1993 — mandates that “if the border personnel of the two sides come to a face-to-face situation due to differences on the alignment of the Line of Actual Control or any other reason,” they “shall cease their activities in the area, not advance any further, and simultaneously return to their bases,” without putting up “marks or signs on the spots” (Article IV).

    China openly violated these accords by pitching tents in Indian-held territory, provoking an extended faceoff, and publicly justifying its actions. Notwithstanding the “face-to-face situation,” the intruding troops refused to retreat and raised provocative banners such as, “This is Chinese Land” and “Go Back.” If one side violates agreements with impunity, how can their sanctity or value be preserved?

    Even so, the incursion betrayed the fecklessness of India’s leadership, which has pathetically sought to disguise its capitulation as a win for quiet diplomacy. It is as if history is repeating itself. Today’s national-security disarray mirrors the confusion and mess of 1962.

    Just as the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement paved the way for China’s nibbling at Indian territory, culminating in the 1962 invasion, India lulled itself into complacency by signing the 2005 accords. These accords have yielded a sharp escalation by China in cross-LAC forays and border incidents, including the 2007 destruction of Indian army bunkers near Doka La at the Sikkim-Tibet-Bhutan tri-junction.

    For China, agreements are just a tool of deception to lull the enemy. As Sun Tzu famously said, “All warfare is based on deception.” Having scored a bloodless victory, the latest intrusion will not be China’s last. Rather, it is just the first major shot China has fired across India’s bows to alter the Himalayan status quo in its favour by employing coercive power short of an open war.

    Brahma Chellaney is professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and winner of America’s 2012 Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

    (c) The Economic Times, 2013.