Brahma Chellaney

Survival | vol. 54 no. 2 | April–May 2012 | pp. 143–156, DOI: 10.1080/00396338.2012.672806

Of all the natural resources on which the modern world depends, water is the most critical. There are replacements for oil, but there is no substitute for water. It is essential to produce virtually all the goods in the marketplace, from food to industrial products, as well as to produce electricity, to refine oil and gas, and to mine coal and uranium. Put simply, water scarcity and rapid economic advance cannot go hand in hand.[1] Yet water scarcity now affects more than two-fifths of the people on Earth, and by 2025 two-thirds of the global population is likely to be living in water-scarce or water-stressed conditions.[2] Water-scarce nations face very tough choices and serious socioeconomic consequences. And the majority of the world’s people living in water-related despair will be in Asia.

Water has emerged as a key issue that will determine if Asia heads toward greater cooperation or greater competition. Asia is the world’s driest continent, with availability of freshwater less than half the global annual average of 6,380 m³ per inhabitant. Asia’s rivers, lakes and aquifers give it, per capita, less than one-tenth the water of South America or Australia and New Zealand, less than one-fourth of North America, almost one-third of Europe, and moderately less than Africa.[3] Yet the world’s fastest-growing demand for water is in Asia, which now serves as the locomotive of the world economy. Today, the most dynamic Asian economies, including China, India, Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam, are all in or close to being in conditions of water stress. The exceptions are few: Bhutan, Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.

Yet Asia continues to draw on tomorrow’s water to meet today’s needs.[4] Worse still, Asia has one of the lowest levels of water efficiency and productivity in the world. Against this background, it is no exaggeration to say that the water crisis threatens Asia’s economic and political rise and its environmental sustainability. For investors, it carries risks as potentially damaging as non-performing loans, real-estate bubbles, infrastructure overbuilding and political corruption. The water crisis means that the cost of doing business in Asia is set to rise. Water has also emerged as a source of increasing competition and discord within and between nations, spurring new tensions over shared basin resources and local resistance to governmental or corporate decisions to set up water-intensive industries.

Asia’s water challenges

In the face of rising populations, rapid growth of the middle class, expanding irrigation and water-intensive industries, and spiralling household consumption, per capita water availability in Asia is actually declining by 1.6% per year. The decline is greater across central, southern, southwestern and western Asia as well as in semi-arid northern China. In areas where water availability has traditionally been very low, such as the Near East and the Arabian Peninsula, even small declines or annual variation in precipitation can exacerbate the vulnerabilities of entire communities by creating drought-like conditions. The spreading water stress in Asia has direct consequences for economic and human development as well as environmental protection.

With aquifers being drained to dangerously low levels, a number of cities in Asia that rely on groundwater, such as Yemen’s capital Sana’a and Quetta in Pakistan, face the spectre of running out. Beijing increasingly depends on water brought in from elsewhere. In an ever-deeper search for water, millions of pump-operated wells threaten to suck Asia’s subterranean reserves dry, even as the continent confronts river depletion. Asian economies can import fossils fuels, mineral ores and timber from distant lands, but they must make do with their own water resources.

Pressure on national water resources is said to be high when water withdrawal exceeds 25% of total renewable water resources. This ratio is 34% for India and 26% for South Korea. China’s 18.57% may be relatively decent, but the country remains chronically unable to meet its water needs in the north, where almost half its population lives and where rivers are dying. In contrast, Japan, at 21.26% is doing a better job than China in managing its water resources by maintaining water quality.[5]

The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) captured the Asian crisis through its 2009 Index of Water Available for Development, a measure of per capita water availability for human, economic and ecological uses per year on the basis of each country’s internal renewable water resources minus total water used. This index reveals that there have been steep declines in water availability for development since the baseline year of 1980 in a number of Asian nations, including the two giants, China and India, that make up nearly two-fifths of the global population.[6] The water situation in India looks particularly ominous. The report warned that ‘water shortfalls on this scale heighten competition for a precious resource and frequently lead to conflicts, which are emerging as new threats to social stability’.[7]

Although Asia’s overall population growth has slowed, an important factor driving the water crisis is growth in consumption due to rising prosperity. This is best illustrated by changes in diet, especially a greater intake of meat, whose production is notoriously water intensive. In China, for example, meat consumption rose fourfold between 1980 and 2010, with its beef sector growing from almost nothing to become the third largest in the world. By 2030, Chinese meat consumption is projected to double further. This shift from traditional rice and noodles to a meatier diet has already fuelled a doubling of China’s water footprint for food production since 1985: it takes ten times more water to raise a kilo of beef than grow a kilo of rice or wheat.[8]

Once plagued by serious food shortages and recurrent famines, Asia opened the door to its dramatic economic rise by emerging as a net food exporter on the back of an unparalleled expansion of irrigation: total irrigated cropland in Asia doubled between 1960 and 2000. It is notable that few advanced industrial countries depend on other countries to feed their populations; many of them, on the contrary, are important food exporters.

This may explain why Asian nations have attached great strategic importance to food security, often equating that goal, rather imprudently, with food sovereignty. Yet the extension of agriculture to semi-arid and arid areas in Asia has necessitated intensive irrigation, which, in turn, has created serious waterlogging and soil-salinity problems and undercut crop-yield growth. Even in Asia’s fertile valleys drained by major river systems, irrigation is usually necessary in the dry season; much of the continent’s rainfall is concentrated in a three- or four-month monsoon period. By contrast, Europe, with its temperate climate and long rainy periods, is able to produce most of its food through rain-fed crops. In fact, such is the widespread prevalence of rain-fed agriculture among rich nations that industry, not agriculture, is their leading water consumer, except in Australia and New Zealand.

Asia now boasts the lion’s share, about 70%, of the world’s irrigated land. Three sub-regions — South Asia, China and Southeast Asia — by themselves account for about 50% of the global total. It is thus hardly a surprise that Asia leads the world in the total volume of freshwater withdrawn for agriculture. Indeed, almost 74% of the total global freshwater withdrawals for agriculture by volume are made in Asia.[9] As a proportion of its own renewable water resources, Asia’s yearly agricultural water withdrawals aggregate to 81%, or at least 10 percentage points higher than the global average. By contrast, that figure is just 29% in Europe and 38% in North America. Water withdrawals for industrial purposes account for a mere 11.4% in Asia; and for household needs the figure is 7.3%.

Yet the growth of rice and wheat output in Asia, after the dramatic increases of the previous quarter century, has slowed since the late 1990s, raising concerns that Asian countries such as China and India that are largely self-sufficient in food will become major food importers, disturbing the international market, which is not large enough to meet such demands. With population, consumption and developmental pressures growing and increases in yield gains flattening, Asia needs a second green revolution, for which water will be the single biggest constraint.

The fastest increase in water demand in Asia, however, is coming not from agriculture but from the industrial sector and urban households. The United Nations projects that industrial water withdrawals in the world will double between 2000 and 2025, with much of the increase likely to occur in the Asia-Pacific region, ‘given its rapidly rising status as a global industrial production centre and the fast growth in subsectors with high water consumption, such as the production of transportation equipment, beverages and textiles’.[10] The fastest rise is projected for India, whose economy is currently led by the services sector but where industrial water use is expected to almost quadruple by 2050 as manufacturing rapidly expands. But water shortages are already impeding this rapid industrial expansion in Asia; water scarcity is, for example, causing billions of dollars’ worth of annual losses in industrial output in China.[11]

A final factor underlying water stress in Asia is the long-term environmental impact of large-scale sequestration of water resources through dams, barrages, reservoirs and other structures. Dams do bring important benefits: if appropriately designed and scaled, they aid economic and social development by regulating water supply, controlling floods, facilitating irrigation, generating hydroelectricity and bringing drinking water to cities. But they can affect water quality and quantity downstream, alter fluvial ecosystems, damage biodiversity and promote coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion.

Large dams have caused sedimentation, inundation, habitat damage, destruction of fish species, and other environmental and public-health problems in Asia. Equally significant is the fact that heavy damming upsets a river’s natural tropical flooding cycle, which is critical to fisheries and the re-fertilization of soil. The Aral Sea in Central Asia has shrunk by more than half owing to the over-damming of its sources, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, and the heavy extraction of their waters for irrigation.

The vast majority of dams in the world have been built since the 1950s. The construction of large dams has, by and large, petered out in the West but continues in full swing in Asia, where a host of countries from Japan to Turkey are involved in major dam-building activities. Over the next decade, the number of dams in developed countries is likely to remain about the same, while much of the dam building in the developing world (in terms of aggregate storage-capacity build-up) will be concentrated in China, which already has slightly more than half of the approximately 50,000 large dams on the planet.[12] But most of the best dam sites in Asia are already in use.

New dam construction to boost water supply may no longer be a viable option other than in underdeveloped countries such as Laos, Myanmar and Nepal that have not adequately exploited their water resources or in autocracies that can effectively stifle grassroots opposition. Yet the numerous new projects in Asia show that the damming of rivers is still an important priority for national and provincial decision-makers.

This focus on dam building has intensified water disputes and tensions in Asia, with implications for regional security and stability. These disputes are bound to worsen, given China’s new focus on erecting mega-dams on international rivers, exemplified by its latest addition on the Mekong River (the 4,200MW Xiaowan Dam, which dwarfs Paris’s Eiffel Tower in height) and a 38,000MW dam planned on the Brahmaputra at Metog, close to the disputed border with India. The Metog Dam will be twice as large as the 18,300MW Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest, construction of which officially uprooted at least 1.7 million Chinese. Turkey, too, is building big dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

The countries likely to bear the brunt of such massive diversion of waters are those located farthest downstream on rivers such as the Brahmaputra, Mekong and Tigris–Euphrates: Bangladesh, whose very future is threatened by climate and environmental change; Vietnam, a rice bowl of Asia; and Iraq, still internally torn. China’s water appropriations from the Illy River threaten to turn Kazakhstan’s Lake Balkhash into another Aral Sea.

Continued dam building in a number of Asian nations is also creating new intra-state tensions and challenges. Degraded watersheds constitute one of the most serious problems for sustainable development in Asia. Dams are also having other impacts, including changing river hydrology, sediment load, riparian vegetation, patterns of stream-bank erosion, migration of fish, and water temperature.

Rising security risks

With increasingly fierce intra- and inter-state water competition, the risk of water conflict is higher in Asia than elsewhere in the world. Water is a new arena in the Asian Great Game. In fact, political, diplomatic or economic ‘water wars’ are already being waged between riparian neighbours in several parts of Asia, fuelling a cycle of bitter recrimination and fostering mistrust that impedes broader regional cooperation and integration. The resources of transnational rivers, aquifers and lakes have become targets of rival appropriation plans. Securing larger portions of shared resources has become a flashpoint in inter-country relationships; there is no incentive to conserve or protect supplies for users beyond national borders, unless there are specific water-sharing arrangements in place.

With a particular river or groundwater basin often tied into a country’s identity and self-image, ownership and control over such resources can be perceived as crucial to national interest. This has helped give rise to grand but environmentally questionable ideas: China’s Great Western Route to divert river waters from the Tibetan Plateau to its parched north; South Korea’s politically divisive Four Rivers Project; India’s proposal to link up its important rivers; and Jordan’s plan to save the shrinking Dead Sea by bringing water from the Red Sea through a 178-kilometre-long canal (which is also to serve as a source for desalinated drinking water). India’s river-linking plan was conceived by a poet prime minister, which may explain why it never took off and was abandoned by the current government. In contrast, the Great Western Route plan was conceived by the engineers who dominate China’s top political leadership.

Asia’s water map fundamentally changed after the 1949 Communist victory in China. Most of the continent’s important international rivers originate in territories that the People’s Republic of China either forcibly annexed or reasserted Chinese control over. The annexed Tibetan Plateau, for example, is the world’s largest freshwater repository and the source of Asia’s greatest rivers, including those that are the lifeblood of mainland China and South and Southeast Asia. Other such Chinese territories contain the headwaters of rivers such as the Irtysh, Illy and Amur, which flow to Russia and Central Asia.

This makes China the source of cross-border water flows to more countries than any other upstream power in the world. Beijing now controls the headwaters of more than a dozen important international river basins. Yet China rejects the notion of water sharing or institutionalized cooperation with downstream countries. Whereas riparian neighbours in Southeast and South Asia are bound by water pacts that they have negotiated between themselves, China does not have a single water treaty with any coriparian country.

For example, it is a dialogue partner but not a member of the Mekong River Commission, suggesting a desire to listen to discussions among other basin states without agreeing to abide by the commission’s rules or taking on legal obligations by becoming a party to the 1995 Mekong Treaty. Moreover, while promoting multilateralism on the world stage, China has given the cold shoulder to multilateral cooperation among river-basin states. The lower Mekong countries view China’s strategy as an attempt to divide and conquer. It is hardly a surprise, then, that China is at the centre of much of the current water-related tension in Asia.

Although China publicly favours bilateral initiatives over multilateral institutions in addressing water issues, it has not shown any real enthusiasm for meaningful bilateral action. As a result, water has become a new political issue in the country’s relations with neighbours such as India, Kazakhstan, Nepal and Russia. China deflects attention from its refusal to share water, or to enter into institutionalized cooperation to manage common rivers sustainably, by promoting the accords it has signed on sharing flow statistics with riparian neighbours. These are not agreements to cooperate on shared resources, but rather commercial accords to sell hydrological data that other upstream countries provide free to downriver states.

Beyond China, there are water tensions between India and Pakistan, among the Central Asian nations, between Turkey and its downriver neighbours, and between Israel and the Palestinians. But given China’s unique riparian position and role, it will not be possible to transform Asian water competition into cooperation without its active participation.

Internal water disputes are also rife across the continent. The lopsided availability of water within some Asian nations (abundant in some areas but deficient in others) has given rise to plans for mega-dam projects or grand diversion structures, which have run into stiff grassroots opposition over issues of population displacement and submergence of land. To compound matters, governmental or commercial decisions on where to set up new manufacturing or energy plants are increasingly being influenced by local availability of adequate water resources.

Where availability is already low, a decision to establish a new plant often triggers local protests because it is likely to spur greater competition over scarce water resources. It has become virtually impossible to site nuclear power plants along freshwater bodies in water-scarce Asia, the centre of the so-called global nuclear renaissance. These water-guzzling plants must instead be built on coastlines where they can rely on seawater for their operations. Yet, Fukushima has served as a warning of the vulnerability of coastal nuclear facilities to extreme events, which are likely to become more common as the climate changes.

Water conflict within nations, especially those that are multi-ethnic and culturally diverse, often assumes ethnic or sectarian dimensions, accentuating internal security challenges. Such intrastate water disputes rarely get the kind of international attention that interstate discords do, but as the internal conflicts in Yemen and Afghanistan show, recurrent drought and water scarcity can poison inter-ethnic or inter-sectarian relations and trigger bloodletting. Endemic local conflicts over water in some drought-ridden areas in Asia have even led villagers to engage security guards to protect their sources of freshwater, such as wells or water trucks. Asia’s experiences over the past quarter century show that internal water conflicts tend to be more damaging and violent than disputes between countries.

Containing the risks

To underpin strategic stability, protect continued economic growth, promote environmental sustainability and prevent the struggle for water resources from tipping into overt conflict, Asian states must invest more in institutionalized cooperation on transboundary basin resources. Water has emerged as a test case of Asia’s ability to build cooperation rather than competition over a critical resource.

National dependency on waters from transnational rivers or aquifers is widespread across Asia. China is an exception: with less than 1% of its water resources dependent on cross-border inflow (one of the lowest rates in the world) it is happily placed. There are at least 57 transnational river basins in Asia, and most lack any kind of cooperative institution. The exact number of transnational groundwater basins is unknown as no scientific assessment has been undertaken.

Yet some of the shared aquifer systems have already become targets of rival appropriation plans and political tensions, for example al-Disi, which straddles the Saudi Arabian–Jordanian border. The existence of inter-country water agreements can be deceptive: most such accords in Asia relate to more mundane issues than sharing waters or sustainably managing transboundary basin resources. Commercial contracts, joint research or flood-control projects, use of river islands, hydropower development, and non-binding memoranda of understanding masquerade as water agreements.

In fact, only four of the transnational river basins in Asia are subject to treaties covering water sharing or other institutionalized cooperation. These are the Mekong (where the non-participation of China, the dominant upper riparian nation, has stunted development of a genuine basin community), the Ganges (between Bangladesh and India), the Indus (between India and Pakistan, with the greatest guaranteed cross-border flows of any treaty regime in the world) and the Jordan (a four-nation basin whose resources are the subject of a treaty arrangement restricted to Israel and Jordan).

The only treaties that incorporate a sharing formula on cross-border river flows are those covering the Indus and Ganges. But even these are far from perfect and often rife with dispute, especially in the Indus basin. They nevertheless serve useful purposes. In fact, all four Asian treaties demonstrate that inter-country basin arrangements can be concluded even among rival states and that such arrangements can survive political tensions and conflicts.

One imperative is to build Asian norms over shared transnational basin resources, using as a guide the codification of the principles of customary water law by the United Nations Convention on the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses, even though this 1997 convention’s entry into force still seems distant. The only real way to avert or manage water disputes in Asia is to build basin arrangements involving all riparian neighbours. If a dominant riparian state refuses to join, such institutional arrangements will be ineffective. The arrangements must be centred on transparency, information sharing, equitable distribution of benefits, dispute settlement, pollution control, joint projects and a mutual commitment to refrain from any projects that would materially diminish transboundary flows.

Water institutions, by facilitating constructive dialogue and structured cooperation, help stem the risk that disputes over water sharing or water quality could escalate to open conflict. Building such regimes is never easy, given the complex physical, geopolitical and economic factors at play, including mismatched levels of economic development and the unilateral harnessing of shared waters by one or more coriparian states. Their legal, institutional and consultative mechanisms are designed not only to forestall interstate competition and conflict, but also to ensure that national water policies serve as a catalyst for social progress and economic growth through a stake in the integrated management of basin resources. Such cooperative arrangements can actually help improve water quality and availability.

Asia has little choice but to improve its water efficiency and productivity levels. Improvements in efficiency of water use in agriculture, energy and industry have stagnated at 1% or less per year for two decades.[13] Greater investment is also needed to upgrade and maintain the water-supply infrastructure; losses from leaks amount to up to 29 billion m³ of treated water a year, valued conservatively at $9 billion.[14]

Asia’s water crisis is opening opportunities for investment and technological innovation in two main areas. One is securing higher water efficiency and productivity gains, including through micro-irrigation systems and industrial water-use efficiency. The other area is clean-water technologies, including wastewater treatment and recycling, desalination, and cleaning up contaminated or brackish water. These technologies hold the key to containing Asia’s mounting water challenges.

Given Asia’s exceptionally high water withdrawals for farming, savings will need to come primarily from water conservation and efficiency in agriculture so that more waters can be channelled to industries and cities. Asian states have little choice but to upgrade their old irrigation systems and promote drip-feed irrigation, which is yet to be widely adopted. This technology, which directs water flow straight to the root zone of plants, can help slash agricultural water consumption by 50–70% compared to gravity irrigation, and by 10–20% compared to sprinkler irrigation. Agricultural water productivity can also be increased through development of new grain varieties that are more tolerant of drought and flooding.

The Asian experience shows that the more populous a sub-region, a nation, or an area within a country, the greater are its water challenges, with water stress often being accompanied by a fall in water quality. But when water quality is maintained, the scarcity of water can be better managed. For example, Japan and South Korea have low per capita availability of freshwater compared with the global average, yet their good water quality overall better positions them to meet their national needs.

In cases where water quality and productivity have both appreciably increased, conditions of water stress tend to perceptibly lessen. South Korea’s per capita water availability is close to Pakistan’s, but it has done a much better job of building water quality and improving productivity. As a result, South Korea, while prone to the ravages of drought, does not face the serious crisis situation haunting Pakistan. There is, in fact, much scope to increase water quality and productivity in many Asian countries, including those with already high efficiency and quality standards, such as South Korea, Japan and Singapore.

Even if energy- and cost-efficient clean-water technologies become available, the cost of water is set to rise sharply in Asia, especially for businesses. Solar-powered desalination and wastewater recycling will help improve the situation, but the cost of supply is still bound to escalate because of additional infrastructure and maintenance needs. Desalination and wastewater-treatment technologies remain expensive as well as energy- and greenhouse-gas intensive.

* * *

Despite its rich history, ancient cultures and an ongoing economic renaissance, Asia is the only continent other than Africa where regional integration has yet to take hold. In fact, Asia’s political and cultural diversity has acted as a barrier to collaboration and integration. Consequently, Asia lacks institutions to avert or manage conflict, even as greater prosperity and rising nationalism are stoking territorial and resource disputes. Yet given that water now is a key factor in instigating global geopolitical change, the continent needs to be better integrated, with institutionalized collaboration on shared resources. Asia needs a new strategic approach to water centred on conservation, efficiency and productivity gains, and, more broadly, integrated resource management involving all states sharing a particular basin. The rivalries over water will test Asia’s ability to manage its resource problems.

Brahma Chellaney

Mohamed Nasheed who was ousted at gunpoint as president of the Maldives

From the virtual coup d’état that deposed Maldives’ first democratically elected president to the undermining of an elected but toothless government in Pakistan by its Supreme Court, South Asia is witnessing a backsliding on democratic advances, just as the democratic awakening triggered by the “Arab Spring” movements has brought not democratic empowerment but more human-rights abuses in much of the Arab world.

The recent abortive coup attempt in Bangladesh has served as a warning that the world’s seventh most-populous country — while struggling to remain a democracy — is vulnerable to renewed army intervention. In its four-decade-long history, Bangladesh has experienced 23 coup attempts — some successful.

The forced resignation at gunpoint of its president, Mohamed Nasheed, a week ago has made the Maldives the third country in the region after Nepal and Sri Lanka where a democratic transition has gone wrong. The Maldives now seems in for prolonged instability.

A fourth country, Pakistan, has yet to begin a genuine democratic transition because the army chief remains its effective ruler. How can democratization begin if Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence stay outside civilian oversight and decisive power remains with military generals?

To make matters worse, Pakistan’s Supreme Court seems to be playing the army’s game in moving to ease the prime minister out of office. A constitutional coup, instead of a military coup, will be a win-win situation for the army and ISI, allowing them to rule from behind the curtain through a more-pliable government, on which all the blame can be pinned for the violence and economic mess.

Sri Lanka’s human-rights situation under President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s quasi-dictatorship continues to evoke international concern. Reversing the militarization of society, ending the control of information as an instrument of state policy, and promoting political and ethnic reconciliation remain daunting tasks in Sri Lanka.

The end of the 26-year civil war actually has emboldened Rajapaksa to step up attempts to fashion a mono-ethnic identity for a multiethnic Sri Lanka. This has important strategic implications for India in terms of the plight of Tamil civilians, refugee flows, and the potential for renewed civil strife.

In Nepal — a strategic buffer between India and restive Tibet, where China says it is launching a “war against secessionist sabotage” — the political disarray persists, with parties continuing to bicker over a new constitution. Nepal remains in danger of becoming a failed state, a development that will have major implications for India’s security.

More broadly, the political developments in the region underscore that regular elections, as in Pakistan or Sri Lanka, are no measure of progress on democratic transition. Genuine democratic empowerment at the grassroots demands more than the holding of elections.

The backsliding on democratization leaves India as the sole country in the region with a deeply rooted democracy and pluralism. But it also seriously weakens India’s interests.

India’s neighbourhood remains so chronically troubled that it confronts what can be called a tyranny of geography. As a result, India faces serious external threats from virtually all directions.

To some extent, this tyranny of a combustible neighbourhood is self-inflicted. If India faces security concerns over Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or even Pakistan, it is because of failures of past policy. And the rollback of democracy in South Asia only exposes India’s lack of clout to influence political developments in its backyard.

Today, the political chaos and uncertainty in the neighbourhood heighten the danger of spillover effects for India. It is no accident that India’s internal security is coming under growing pressure. An increasingly unstable neighbourhood also makes it more difficult to promote institutionized cooperation and integration in the region, including free trade.

Institutions are products — not drivers — of the political environment. In any continent, institutions have flourished only if there is political and economic compatibility between their member-states. When member-states have conflicting political and economic systems, the institutions have stunted. Divergent political systems are a major reason why Asia has failed to build real institutions. In South Asia, the underdeveloped SAARC, as a retarded institution, is more a hindrance than a help to regional cooperation. If all South Asian states became real democracies, the present barriers to open trade would erode.

More fundamentally, the rise of Islamist groups in several South Asian countries poses a direct challenge to Indian security. In 2001, the Taliban destroyed the monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. And on the day Nasheed was ousted, Islamists ransacked Maldives’ main museum in Male, the capital, and smashed priceless Buddhist statues. By destroying the 12th-century artefacts made of coral stone and limestone, they erased virtually all evidence of Maldives’ pre-Islamic past.

Encouraged by opposition politicians, Islamist groups in the Maldives are “getting more powerful,” according to Nasheed. And in Pakistan and Bangladesh, the military intelligence agency has nurtured jihadist groups, employing them for political purposes at home and across the national frontiers.

Regional experience has shown that autocratic rule, due to the absence of public accountability, tends to promote extremist elements, especially when those in power form opportunistic alliances with such forces. For example, Pakistan’s descent into a jihadist dungeon occurred not under civilian rule, but under two military dictators — one who nurtured and let loose jihadist forces, and another who took his country to the very edge of the precipice. Even today, the scourge of Pakistani terrorism emanates more from the country’s Scotch whisky-sipping generals than from the bead-rubbing mullahs.

When a democratic experiment gains traction, as in Bangladesh under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, it crimps the extremist forces’ room for manoeuvre.

A broader lesson that the regional retreat of democracy holds is that democratic progress will remain tenuous and reversible unless the old entrenched forces are cut to size and the rule of law firmly established.

For example, Maldives’ 2008 democratic election, which swept away decades-old authoritarian rule, became a beacon of hope, only to dissipate in less than four years. As Nasheed reminded all after being deposed, “Dictatorships don’t always die when the dictator leaves office … long after the revolutions, powerful networks of regime loyalists can remain behind and can attempt to strangle their nascent democracies.”

In fact, Nasheed has a message for the Arab Spring movements: “The problems we are facing in the Maldives are a warning for other Muslim nations undergoing democratic reform. At times, dealing with the corrupt system of patronage the former regime left behind can feel like wrestling with a Hydra: when you remove one head, two more grow back. With patience and determination, the beast can be slain. But let the Maldives be a lesson for aspiring democrats everywhere: the dictator can be removed in a day, but it can take years to stamp out the lingering remnants of his dictatorship.”

With India’s tyranny of geography only getting worse and putting greater pressure on its external and internal security, India has to evolve more-dynamic and innovative approaches to diplomacy and national defence. For example, if it is to advance its national interest by supporting democracy and pluralism in its neighborhood and beyond, it will need to go beyond government-to-government channels for disbursing its increasingly large aid. Its aid diplomacy must reach out to civil-society groups and other liberal constituencies that can take on retrograde elements. Only through forward thinking and more-vigorous defence and foreign policies can India hope to ameliorate its regional-security situation and play a bigger role on the world stage.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research, is the author, mostly recently, of Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

A version of this article appeared in The Economic Times, February 14, 2014.

Brahma Chellaney

As the 50th anniversary year of China’s 1962 invasion, 2012 should serve as a time of reflection on what lessons that attack still holds for India.

Given that the Year of the Dragon — a monster that has been universal since before biblical times — begins on January 23, this year holds significance for China’s other neighbors as well. After all, the declared intent of the 1962 war — “to teach a lesson” — was publicly restated in the 1979 Chinese aggression against Vietnam and appeared to guide Beijing’s top-heavy response in the boat incident with Japan in the fall of 2010.

By roaring at its neighbors and picking territorial fights with them, China lived up to the Year of the Tiger that 2010 represented in its astrology. Then in 2011, the Year of the Rabbit, China seemed to emulate that burrowing animal. It blasted more tunnels through mountain ranges in its borderlands. And — as was apparent, for example, from its use of different cards against India, including the stapled-visa issue and cross-frontier incursions — it demanded “carrots” (rabbit’s favorite) to eschew irascible behavior. Will it breathe fire in the Year of the Dragon?

One facet of China’s grand strategy has remained constant over the years. Strategic deception and military surprise are enduring elements in Chinese strategy. The 1962 war was a classic example of the fusion of these two elements.

Integral to deception is taking an opponent by surprise, as emphasized in Sun Tzu’s Art of War some 2,500 years ago. Since the Communists came to power, China has been involved in the largest number of military conflicts in Asia. In all these conflicts, Chinese forces struck with no forewarning.

Indeed, a 2010 Pentagon report points out that China has repeatedly carried out military pre-emption in the name of defense: in 1950 (Tibet invasion, followed immediately by entry into Korean War), 1962, the 1969 border conflict with the Soviet Union, and the 1979 attack on Vietnam. According to the report, “The history of modern Chinese warfare provides numerous case studies in which China’s leaders have claimed military pre-emption as a strategically defensive act.” China’s seizure of the Paracel Islands from Vietnam in 1974 was another example of offense as defense.

The 1962 attack — justified as a defensive act by Beijing, which used Nehru’s unguarded remarks (“our instructions are to free our territory”) to brand India the aggressor — stands out for China’s masterly blending of deception and surprise. The invasion, mounted from two separate fronts, caught India off guard. The “stab-in-the-back” was best summed up by Nehru, who told the nation that “a powerful and unscrupulous opponent, not caring for peace or peaceful methods” had returned “evil for good.”

The aggression was cleverly planned and timed. It coincided with the start of the Cuban missile crisis, which put the Soviet Union and the U.S. on the edge of a nuclear Armageddon. And the very day the U.S. quarantine of Cuba was lifted to help end the Cuban missile crisis, China ceased its 32-day aggression against India. The cunning timing — just when global attention was focused on averting a nuclear catastrophe — ensured that India received no outside help.

The deception began much earlier, in keeping with the utility of deception in Chinese strategic culture for both peacetime functions and warfighting applications. One example of peacetime deception was Premier Zhou En-lai’s 1960 New Delhi visit, during which he dangled the carrot of a border settlement without putting his money where his mouth was. Of course, it didn’t take much effort to trick the Indians, who had convinced themselves that by merely signing the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement, they had bought peace with China.

If anything, this agreement — which incorporated five principles of peaceful coexistence — provided a perfect cover for China to launch aggressive plans against India, including its quiet construction of a highway through the Aksai Chin Plateau in the state of Jammu and Kashmir and furtive nibbling at Indian territories across the Himalayas. The period up to 1954 marked Communist China’s annexation and consolidation of rule in Tibet, whereas the post-1954 phase heralded its belligerence toward India, culminating in the surprise invasion. The iniquitous Panchsheel Agreement — under which India, without any quid pro quo, surrendered its extra-territorial rights in Tibet and recognized the “Tibet region of China” — constituted a watershed in opening the path to hostilities.

It took a war humiliation for India to wake up to the reality that a nation can get peace only if it is able to defend peace.

Today, as part of its larger game of deception, China identifies Taiwan as the primary focus of its defense strategy. That is to divert international attention from its single-mindedness on achieving broader military goals. Taiwan serves metaphorically as a red carpet on which to invite all the bulls while Beijing busily seeks to accomplish bigger tasks.

If the countries around India have become battlegrounds for China’s moves to encircle India, it is because Beijing heeds Sun Tzu’s counsel: “Contain an adversary through the leverage of having made its neighbourhood hostile.” According to Sun Tzu’s core guidance, “The ability to subdue the enemy without any battle is the ultimate reflection of the most supreme strategy.”

China employs deception to also camouflage its refusal to accept the territorial status quo with several of its neighbours. It is disturbing the status quo even on cross-border river flows. The insistence on changing the status quo, coupled with its strategic opacity and penchant to take an adversary by surprise, only increases the unease in Asia over its rise. Indeed, the more than three-decade-old border talks with India mesh well with China’s use of strategic deception.

As long as the territorial status quo is not accepted, the possibility that the Chinese military will strike again cannot be ruled out. As U.S. National Intelligence Director James Clapper said in his prepared testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on January 31, “The Indian Army believes a major Sino-Indian conflict is not imminent but the Indian military is strengthening its forces in preparation to fight a limited conflict along the disputed border, and is working to balance Chinese power projection in the Indian Ocean.”

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s emphatic statement in the Lok Sabha in December 2011 that “China will not attack India” thus seems more than gratuitous. Can anyone turn a blind eye to the Chinese state-run newspaper and military publications launching an anti-India tirade and warning New Delhi of the consequences of a confrontation with China? Some military analysts in China have publicly discussed the merits of a 1962-style short, sharp, decisive border war that helps put India in its place for the next few decades? Disturbingly, the more timorous Singh has been, the more belligerent China has become.

India needs to counter the asymmetrical capabilities China is fashioning to take an adversary by surprise. Its anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons, for example, are being designed to “shock and awe” in space. China is already waging a quiet cyber-war, as if to underscore its ability to sabotage vital infrastructure in wartime. Moreover, its military is developing a blitzkrieg approach to warfare: a surprise blitz will seek to stun, confound and overwhelm an opponent.

The lasting lesson of 1962 is that India must be ready to repulse any kind of attack, including by undercutting the aggressor where it is the weakest. Otherwise, China’s Achilles’ heel — Tibet — will become a stronger launch-pad for aggressive acts.

A version of this article appeared in The Times of India of January 22, 2012.

Copyrighted material. Reprinting this article without written consent will constitute a violation of international copyright law. 

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY  Japan Times  December 28, 2011

At a time when the specter of power disequilibrium looms large in Asia, the visit of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda to India offers an opportunity to the two natural allies to help promote Asian stability by adding concrete strategic content to their fast-growing relationship. Japan and India need to build close naval collaboration.

The balance of power in Asia will be determined by events principally in two regions: East Asia and the Indian Ocean. Japan and India thus have an important role to play to advance peace and stability and help safeguard vital sea lanes in the wider Indo-Pacific region.

Asia’s booming economies are bound by sea, and maritime democracies like Japan and India must work together to help build a stable, liberal, rules-based order in Asia. Whereas 97 percent of India’s international trade by volume is conducted by sea, almost all of Japan’s international trade is ocean-borne. As energy-poor countries heavily dependent on oil imports from the Persian Gulf region, the two are seriously concerned by mercantilist efforts to assert control over energy supplies and transport routes. The maintenance of a peaceful and lawful maritime domain, including unimpeded freedom of navigation, is thus critical to their security and economic well-being.

In this light, Japan and India have already agreed to start holding joint naval exercises from the new year. This is just one sign that they now wish to graduate from emphasizing shared values to seeking to jointly protect shared interests. Today, the fastest growing bilateral relationship in Asia is between India and Japan. Since they unveiled a “strategic and global partnership” in 2006, their political and economic engagement has deepened remarkably.

Their growing congruence of strategic interests led to the 2008 Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation, a significant milestone in building Asian power stability. A constellation of Asian states linked by strategic cooperation and sharing common interests has become critical to ensuring equilibrium at a time when the ongoing power shifts are accentuating the security challenges that now exist in Asia.

The joint declaration was modeled on Japan’s 2007 defense-cooperation accord with Australia — the only country with which Tokyo has a security-cooperation declaration. Japan, of course, is tied to the United States militarily since 1951 by a treaty. The India-Japan security agreement, in turn, spawned a similar India-Australian accord in 2009.

A free-trade accord between Japan and India, formally known as the comprehensive economic partnership agreement (CEPA), entered into force just three months ago. By covering more than 90 percent of the trade as well as a wide range of services, rules of origin, investment, intellectual property rights, customs rules and other related issues, CEPA promises to significantly boost bilateral trade, which remains small in comparison with Japan’s and India’s trade with China. India is already beginning to emerge as a favored destination in Asia for Japanese foreign direct investment.

In response to China’s use of its monopoly on rare-earths production to punitively cut off such exports to Japan during the fall of 2010, Japan and India have agreed to the joint development of rare earths, which are vital for a wide range of green energy technologies and military applications.

Today, the level and frequency of India-Japan official engagement is extraordinary. Noda’s New Delhi visit is part of a bilateral commitment to hold an annual summit meeting of the prime ministers. More important, Japan and India now have a series of annual minister-to-minister dialogues: a strategic dialogue between their foreign ministers; a defense dialogue between their defense ministers; a policy dialogue between India’s commerce and industry minister and Japan’s minister of economy, trade and industry; and separate ministerial-level energy and economic dialogues.

Supporting these high-level discussions is another set of talks, including a two-plus-two dialogue led jointly by India’s foreign and defense secretaries and their Japanese vice minister counterparts, a maritime security dialogue, a comprehensive security dialogue, and military-to-military talks involving regular exchange visits of the chiefs of staff.

To top it off, Japan, India, and the U.S. have initiated a trilateral strategic dialogue, whose first meeting was in Washington last week. Getting the U.S. on board will bolster the convergences of all three partners and boost India-Japan cooperation.

As Japanese Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba said recently, “Japan and the U.S. are deepening a strategic relationship with India,” and the trilateral dialogue is “a specific example of collaboration” among the three leading Asia-Pacific democracies.

Bilaterally, Japan and India need to strengthen their still-fledgling strategic cooperation by embracing two ideas, both of which demand a subtle shift in Japanese thinking and policy. One is to build interoperability between their naval forces. These forces — along with other friendly navies — can undergird peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region. As former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe put it in a recent speech in New Delhi, the aim should be that “sooner rather than later, Japan’s navy and the Indian navy are seamlessly interconnected.” Presently, Japan has naval interoperability only with U.S. forces.

Another idea is for the two countries to jointly develop defense systems. India and Japan have missile-defense cooperation with Israel and the U.S., respectively. There is no reason why they should not work together on missile defense and on other technologies for mutual security. Their defense cooperation must be comprehensive and not be limited to strategic dialogue, maritime cooperation, and occasional naval exercises.

There is no ban on weapon exports in Japan’s U.S.-imposed Constitution, only a long-standing Cabinet decision, which in any event has been loosened. That decision, in fact, related to weapons, not technologies.

Japan and India should remember that the most-stable economic partnerships in the world, including the trans-Atlantic ones and the Japan-U.S. partnership, have been built on the bedrock of security collaboration. Economic ties that lack the support of strategic partnerships tend to be less stable, as is apparent from Japan’s and India’s economic relationships with China.

Through close strategic collaboration, Japan and India must lead the effort to build freedom, prosperity and stability in the Indo-Pacific region.

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

The Japan Times: Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2011. (c) All rights reserved.

China is the world's most "dammed" country, yet its future is drying up.

Striking facts:

• China boasts more dams than the rest of the world combined.

• Before the Communists came to power in 1949, there were only 22 dams of any significant size in China. But now China has more than half of the world’s almost 50,000 large dams.

• This feat means that China has completed on average at least one large dam per day since 1949. If dams of all sizes are counted, the number in China surpasses 85,000.

• According to Wen Jiabao, China has relocated a total of 22.9 million citizens since 1949 to make way for water projects. So, by official count alone, 1,035 citizens on average have been forcibly evicted daily in the past 62 years for water projects.

• China is also the global leader in exporting dams. Its state-run companies today are building more dams overseas than the other international dam builders put together.

Brahma Chellaney

  

Internationally syndicated column by Project Syndicate

China’s frenzied dam-building hit a wall recently in Burma (Myanmar), where the government’s bold decision to halt a controversial Chinese-led dam project helped to ease the path to the first visit by a US secretary of state to that country in more than a half-century.

The now-stalled $3.6 billion Myitsone Dam, located at the headwaters of Burma’s largest river, the Irrawaddy, was designed to pump electricity exclusively into China’s power grid, despite the fact that Burma suffers daily power outages. The State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of China’s State Council hailed Myitsone as a model overseas project serving Chinese interests. The Burmese decision thus shocked China’s government, which had begun treating Burma as a reliable client state (one where it still has significant interests, including the ongoing construction of a multibillion-dollar oil and natural-gas pipeline).

Despite that setback, China remains the world’s biggest dam builder at home and abroad. Indeed, no country in history has built more dams than China, which boasts more dams than the rest of the world combined.

Before the Communists came to power in 1949, China had only 22 dams of any significant size. Now the country has more than half of the world’s roughly 50,000 large dams, defined as having a height of at least 15 meters, or a storage capacity of more than three million cubic meters. Thus, China has completed, on average, at least one large dam per day since 1949. If dams of all sizes are counted, China’s total surpasses 85,000.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, China’s dams had the capacity to store 562.4 cubic kilometers of water in 2005, or 20% of the country’s total renewable water resources. Since then, China has built scores of new dams, including the world’s largest: the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.

China is also the global leader in exporting dams. Its state-run companies are building more dams overseas than all other international dam builders put together. Thirty-seven Chinese financial and corporate entities are involved in more than 100 major dam projects in the developing world. Some of these entities are very large and have multiple subsidiaries. For instance, Sinohydro Corporation — the world’s largest hydroelectric company — boasts 59 overseas branches.

Both the profit motive and a diplomatic effort to showcase its engineering prowess drive China’s overseas dam-building efforts. China’s declared policy of “noninterference in domestic affairs” actually serves as a virtual license to pursue dam projects that flood lands and forcibly uproot people — including, as with Myitsone, ethnic minorities — in other countries. But it is doing the same at home by shifting its focus from dam-saturated internal rivers to the international rivers that originate in the Tibetan plateau, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Manchuria.

China contends that its role as the global leader in exporting dams has created a “win-win” situation for host countries and its own companies. But evidence from a number of project sites shows that the dams are exacting a serious environmental toll on those hosts.

As a result, the overseas projects often serve to inflame anti-Chinese sentiment, reflected in grassroots protests at several sites in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Moreover, by using a Chinese workforce to build dams and other projects abroad — a practice that runs counter to its own “localization” requirement, adopted in 2006 — China reinforces a perception that it is engaged in exploitative practices.

As the world’s most dammed country, China is already the largest producer of hydropower globally, with a generating capacity of more than 170 gigawatts. Yet ambitious plans to boost its hydro-generating capacity significantly by damming international rivers have embroiled the country in water disputes with most neighbors, even North Korea.

More broadly, China’s dam-building passion has spawned two key developments. First, Chinese companies now dominate the global hydropower-equipment export market. Sinohydro alone, having eclipsed Western equipment suppliers like ABB, Alstom, General Electric, and Siemens, claims to control half the market.

Second, the state-run hydropower industry’s growing clout within China has led the government to campaign aggressively for overseas dam projects by offering low-interest loans to other governments. At home, it recently unveiled a mammoth new $635 billion investment program in water infrastructure over the next decade, more than a third of which will be channeled into building dams, reservoirs, and other supply structures.

China’s over-damming of rivers and its inter-river and inter-basin water transfers have already wreaked havoc on natural ecosystems, causing river fragmentation and depletion and promoting groundwater exploitation beyond the natural replenishment capacity.

The social costs have been even higher, a fact reflected in Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s stunning admission in 2007 that, since 1949, China has relocated a total of 22.9 million Chinese to make way for water projects — a figure larger than the populations of Australia, Romania, or Chile. Since then, another 350,000 residents — mostly poor villagers — have been uprooted.

So, by official count alone, 1,035 citizens on average have been forcibly evicted for water projects every day for more than six decades. With China now increasingly damming transnational rivers such as the Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra, Irtysh, Illy, and Amur, the new projects threaten to “export” the serious degradation haunting China’s internal rivers to those rivers. The time has come to exert concerted external pressure on China to rein in its dam frenzy and embrace international environmental standards.

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

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.
http://www.project-syndicate.org

With the 50th anniversary of the 1962 invasion approaching, history is in danger of repeating itself.

Brahma Chellaney
The writer is professor of strategic studies
at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi
GUEST COLUMN
India Today, November 7, 2011

From a military invasion and a cartographic aggression, China is
moving to a hydrological aggression and a strategic squeeze of India.

As the 50th anniversary of China’s invasion approaches, history is in danger of repeating itself, with Chinese military pressures and aggressive designs against India not only mirroring the pre-1962 war situation but also extending to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) and the oceans around India. China’s expanding axis of evil with Pakistan, including a new troop presence in PoK, heightens India’s vulnerability in Jammu and Kashmir, even as India has beefed up its defences in Arunachal Pradesh.

By muscling up to India, what is China seeking to achieve? The present situation, ominously, is no different in several key aspects from the one that prevailed in the run-up to the 1962 war.

● The aim of “Mao’s India war” in 1962, as Harvard scholar Roderick MacFarquhar has called it, was largely political: to cut India to size by demolishing what it represented—a democratic alternative to China’s autocracy. The swiftness and force with which Mao Zedong defeated India helped discredit the Indian model, boost China’s international image, and consolidate Mao’s internal power. The return of the China-India pairing decades later riles Beijing.

● Just as the Dalai Lama’s flight to India in 1959 set the stage for the Chinese military attack, the exiled Tibetan leader today has become a bigger challenge for China than ever. The continuing security clampdown across the Tibetan plateau since the March 2008 Tibetan uprising parallels the harsh Chinese crackdown in Tibet during 1959-62.

● The prevailing pattern of cross-frontier incursions and other border incidents is no different than the situation that led up to the 1962 war. Yet, India is repeating the same mistake by playing down the Chinese intrusions. Gratuitously stretching the truth, Indian officials say the incursions are the result of differing perceptions about the line of control. But which side has refused to define the line of control? It speaks for itself that China hasn’t offered this excuse. The fact is that Chinese forces are intruding even into Utttarakhand—the only sector where the line of control has been clarified by an exchange of maps—and into Sikkim, whose 206-km border with Tibet is recognised by Beijing.

● The 1962 war occurred against the backdrop of China instigating and arming insurgents in India’s northeast. Although such Chinese activities ceased after Mao’s death, China has come full circle today, with Chinese-made arms increasingly flowing into guerrilla ranks in northeast India via Burmese front organisations. In fact, Pakistan-based terrorists targeting India also rely on Chinese arms.

● China’s pre-1962 psychological war is returning. In recent years, Beijing has employed its state-run media and nationalistic websites to warn of another armed conflict. It is a throwback to the coarse rhetoric China had used in its build-up to the 1962 war. Its People’s Daily, for example, has warned India to weigh “the consequences of a potential confrontation with China.” China merrily builds strategic projects in an internationally disputed area like PoK but responds with crude threats when others explore just for oil in the South China Sea.

● Just as India in the early 1960s retreated to a defensive position in the border negotiations after having undermined its leverage through a formal acceptance of the “Tibet region of China,” the spotlight now is on China’s revived Tibet-linked claim to Arunachal rather than on the core issue, Tibet itself. India, with its focus on process than results, has remained locked in continuous border negotiations with China since 1981—the longest and the most-fruitless process between any two nations post-Second World War. This process has only aided China’s containment-with-engagement strategy.

● In the same way that India under Nehru unwittingly created the context to embolden Beijing to wage aggression, New Delhi is again staring at the consequences of a mismanagement of relations. The more China’s trade surplus with India has swelled—jumping from $2 billion in 2002 to more than $30 billion now—the greater has been its condescension toward India. To make matters worse, the insidious, V.K. Krishna Menon-style shadow has returned to haunt Indian defence management and policy. India has never had more clueless defence and foreign ministers or a weaker Prime Minister with a credibility problem than it does today.

In fact, as it aims to mould a Sino-centric Asia, China is hinting that its real geopolitical contest is more with India than with the distant United States. The countries around India have become battlegrounds for China’s moves to encircle India. From a military invasion in 1962 and a subsequent cartographic aggression, China is moving towards a hydrological aggression and a multipronged strategic squeeze of India. China’s damming of rivers flowing from Tibet to India are highlighting Indian vulnerability on the water front even before India has plugged its disadvantage on the nuclear front by building a credible but minimal deterrent.

Whether Beijing actually sets out to teach India “the final lesson” by launching a 1962-style attack will depend on several factors. They include India’s domestic political situation, its defence preparedness, and the availability for China of a propitious international timing of the type the Cuban missile crisis provided in 1962. If India does not want to be caught napping again, it has to come out of the present political paralysis and inject greater realism into its China policy, which today bears a close resemblance to a studied imitation of an ostrich burying its head in the sand.

(c) India Today, 2011.