Category Archives: Asian Security

Cyber-terrorism: War by other means

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A new war, a new frontier

India’s abilities to ward off attacks on its computer networks and other infrastructure are basic at best

Brahma Chellaney Mint, January 22, 2010

 

 

Even though India showcases its world-class information-technology and knowledge skills and civilian space assets, it lags far behind China’s cyberspace capabilities. Worse, it has developed no effective means to shield its rapidly expanding cyber infrastructure from the pervasive attacks that are now being carried out both in search of competitive intelligence and to unnerve the Indian establishment.

In peacetime, China is intimidating India through intermittent cyber warfare, even as it steps up military pressure along the Himalayan frontier. In a conflict, China could cripple major Indian systems through a wave of cyber attacks. With cyber intrusions against Indian government, defence and commercial targets ramping up since 2007, the protection of sensitive computer networks must become a national-security priority.

The cyber threat is at two levels. The first is national, as manifest from the attacks already carried out against India’s National Infomatics Centre (NIC) systems, the office of the national security adviser and the ministry of external affairs. By scanning and mapping some of India’s major official computer systems, China has demonstrated a capacity to steal secrets and gain an asymmetrical advantage. Cyber intrusion in peacetime allows China to read the content and understand the relative importance of different Indian networks so that it knows what to disable in a war situation.

The second level of cyber threat is against chosen individuals. Such targets in India range from functionaries of the Tibetan government-in-exile and Tibetan activists to Indian writers and others critical of China. The most-common type of intrusion is an attempt to hack into the e-mail accounts. The targets also can face the so-called Trojan horse attacks by e-mail that are intended to breach their computers and allow the infiltrators to remotely remove, corrupt or transfer files.

To be sure, it is not easy to identify the country from where a particular cyber attack originated if it is camouflaged. Through the use of so-called false flag espionage and other methods, attacks can be routed through the computers of a third country. Just as some Chinese pharmaceutical firms have exported to Africa spurious medicines with Made-in-India label — a fact admitted by Beijing — some Chinese hackers are known to have rerouted their cyber intrusion through computers in Russia, Iran, Cuba and other countries. But like their comrades in the pharmaceutical industry, such hackers tend to leave telltale signs that allow investigators in the victim countries to trace the origin of the disguised attacks to China. Then there are many cases where the attacks have directly originated in China.

So the reasonable supposition at the highest levels of the Indian government is that most cyber attacks have been carried out from China. That is also the conclusion Google reached when it reported “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China” and threatened to end “our business operations in China.” Cyber strikes are just the latest example of how China’s actions — from manipulation of the renminbi’s value to the large-scale dumping of artificially cheap goods — are beginning to rankle other nations, undercutting its claims of a “peaceful rise.”   

Let’s be clear: If China can carry out sophisticated cyber attacks on at least 34 U.S. companies, including Google, as part of a concerted effort to pilfer valuable intellectual property, it certainly has the capability to outwit the elementary safeguards found in most Indian computer systems. Google today is crying foul but it was instrumental is aiding online censorship controls in a country that is most fearful of the free flow of information. It custom-built for China a search engine that expurgates the search results of references and Web sites that Beijing considers inappropriate. Now, Google itself has become a victim of China’s growing cyber prowess, in the way the appeasement of Hitler had recoiled on France and Britain.

Hackers in China have been carefully studying different software programmes to exploit their flaws. For example, hackers have found openings that allow them to infect victims’ computers through booby-trapped documents stored in the Acrobat Reader format. Opening such a document allows the hackers to automatically scan and transfer computer-stored files to a digital storage facility in China as part of a vast surveillance system dubbed “Ghostnet” by Canadian researchers. This is what happened when computers of the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala were methodically attacked last year. Officials in Germany, Britain and the U.S. have acknowledged that their government and military networks also have been broken into by Chinese hackers.

It seems unlikely that the hackers, especially those engaged in systematic cyber espionage and intimidation, are private individuals with no links to the Chinese government. It is more likely that the hackers are tied to the People’s Liberation Army. In war, this irregular contingent of hackers would become the vanguard behind which the regular PLA divisions take on the enemy.

India already is on the frontlines of one mode of asymmetrical warfare: Terrorism. That type of warfare has traumatized and bled India for long, with the country exposing itself as a soft state through the absence of an effective response. Now a new frontier of asymmetrical warfare is being opened against India, not by state-sponsored non-state actors but by state actors. It cannot fight two asymmetrical wars simultaneously, one against terrorists and extremists and the other against a state flouting international norms and wedded to cybercrime. The two asymmetrical wars indeed are a reminder that unconventional threats cannot be defeated through conventional forces alone. That is why India should treat the growing cyber attacks as a wake-up call to plug its vulnerabilities by developing appropriate countermeasures on a priority basis.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. Comments are welcome at theirview@livemint.com

Strategic landscape in Asia

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THE ASIAN CENTURY

Asia’s Changing Power Dynamics

Brahma Chellaney

Project Syndicate

NEW DELHI – At a time when Asia is in transition, with the specter of a power imbalance looming large, it has become imperative to invest in institutionalized cooperation to reinforce the region’s strategic stability. After all, not only is Asia becoming the pivot of global geopolitical change, but Asian challenges are also playing into international strategic challenges.

Asia’s changing power dynamics are reflected in China’s increasingly assertive foreign policy, the new Japanese government’s demand for an “equal” relationship with the United States, and the sharpening Sino-Indian rivalry, which has led to renewed Himalayan border tensions.

All of this is highlighting America’s own challenges, which are being exacerbated by its eroding global economic preeminence and involvement in two overseas wars. Such challenges dictate greater US-China cooperation to ensure continued large capital inflows from China, as well as Chinese political support on difficult issues ranging from North Korea and Burma to Pakistan and Iran.

But, just when America’s Sino-centric Asia policy became noticeable, Japan put the US on notice that it cannot indefinitely remain a faithful servant of American policies. Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s government is seeking to realign foreign policy and rework a 2006 deal for the basing of US military personnel on Okinawa. It also announced an end to its eight-year-old Indian Ocean refueling mission in support of the US-led war in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, China’s resurrection of its long-dormant claim to the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, and its needling of India over Kashmir (one-fifth of which is under Chinese control), is testing the new US-India global strategic partnership.

The US has chartered a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal Pradesh issue — to the delight of China, which aims to leave an international question mark hanging over the legitimacy of India’s control of the Himalayan territory, which is almost three times as large as Taiwan. Indeed, the Obama administration has signaled its intent to abandon elements in its ties with India that could rile China, including a joint military exercise in Arunachal and any further joint naval maneuvers involving Japan or other parties, like Australia.

Yet, the recent Australia-India security agreement, signed during Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s visit to New Delhi, symbolizes the role of common political values in helping to forge an expanding strategic constellation of Asian-Pacific countries. The Indo-Australian agreement received little attention, but such is its significance that it mirrors key elements of Australia’s security accord with Japan – and that between India and Japan. All three of these accords, plus the 2005 US-India defense framework agreement, recognize a common commitment to democracy, freedom, human rights, and the rule of law, and obligate their signatories to work together to build security in Asia.

An Asian geopolitical divide centered on political values would, of course, carry significant implications. And, while Asia – with the world’s fastest-growing markets, fastest-rising military expenditures, and most-volatile hot spots – holds the key to the future global order, its major powers remain at loggerheads.

Central to Asia’s future is the strategic triangle made up of China, India, and Japan. Not since Japan rose to world-power status during the Meiji emperor’s reign in the second half of the nineteenth century has another non-Western power emerged with such potential to alter the world order as China today. Indeed, as the US intelligence community’s 2009 assessment predicted, China stands to affect global geopolitics more profoundly than any other country.

China’s ascent, however, is dividing Asia, and its future trajectory will depend on how its neighbors and other players, like the US, manage its rapidly accumulating power. At present, China’s rising power helps validate American forward military deployments in East Asia. The China factor also is coming handy in America’s efforts to win new allies in Asia.

But, as the US-China relationship deepens in the coming years, the strains in some of America’s existing partnerships could become pronounced. For example, building a stronger cooperative relationship with China is now taking precedence in US policy over the sale of advanced weaponry to Asian allies, lest the transfer of offensive arms provoke Chinese retaliation in another area.

While the European community was built among democracies, the political systems in Asia are so varied – and some so opaque – that building inter-state trust is not easy. In Europe, the bloody wars of the past century have made armed conflict unthinkable today. But in Asia, the wars since 1950 failed to resolve disputes. And, while Europe has built institutions to underpin peace, Asia has yet to begin such a process in earnest.

Never before have China, Japan, and India all been strong at the same time. Today, they need to find ways to reconcile their interests in Asia so that they can coexist peacefully and prosper.

But there can be no denying that these three leading Asian powers and the US have different playbooks: America wants a uni-polar world but a multi-polar Asia; China seeks a multi-polar world but a uni-polar Asia; and Japan and India desire a multi-polar Asia and a multi-polar world.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
http://www.project-syndicate.org

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Japan and India are natural allies

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The Japan-India partnership to power a multipolar Asia

Japan Times

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s India visit is part of Japan’s growing economic and strategic engagement with that country. Given that the balance of power in Asia will be determined by events as much in the Indian Ocean rim as in East Asia, Tokyo is keen to work with New Delhi to promote peace and stability and help safeguard vital sea lanes.

Japan and India indeed are natural allies because they have no conflict of strategic interest and share common goals to build institutionalized cooperation and stability in Asia. There is neither a negative historical legacy nor any outstanding political issue between them. If anything, each country enjoys a high positive rating with the public in the other state.

Hatoyama’s yearend visit, designed to fulfill a 2006 bilateral commitment to hold an annual summit meeting, shows he is keen to maintain the priority on closer engagement with India that started under his four predecessors — Junichiro Koizumi, Shinzo Abe, Yasuo Fukuda and Taro Aso of the Liberal Democratic Party. Hatoyama came to office vowing to reorient Japanese foreign policy and seek an "equal" relationship with the United States. But he and his Democratic Party of Japan had said little on India.

Today, Hatoyama’s government has put Washington on notice that Japan cannot indefinitely remain a faithful servant of U.S. policies. With Tokyo seeking to rework a 2006 basing deal with the U.S., besides announcing an end to the eight-year-old Indian Ocean refueling mission in support of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, Japan no longer can be regarded as a constant in America’s Asia policy.

This has been further highlighted by Hatoyama’s re-examination of a secret agreement between the LDP and the U.S. over a subject that is highly sensitive in the only country to fall victim to nuclear attack — the storage or transshipment of U.S. nuclear weapons in Japan.

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

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

The most far-reaching but least-noticed development in Asia in the new century has been Japan’s political resurgence — a trend set in motion by Koizumi and expected to be accelerated by Hatoyama’s efforts to realign the relationship with the U.S. With Japanese pride and assertiveness rising, the nationalist impulse has become conspicuous at a time when China is headed to overtake Japan as the world’s second largest economy by the end of 2010.

Long used to practicing passive, checkbook diplomacy, Tokyo now seems intent on influencing Asia’s power balance. A series of subtle moves has signaled Japan’s aim to break out of its postwar pacifist cocoon. One sign is the growing emphasis on defense modernization.

China’s rise may have prompted Japan to strengthen its military alliance with the U.S. But in the long run, Japan is likely to move to a more independent security posture.

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

Still, given China’s rapid economic strides, Japan has been readying itself for the day when it is eclipsed economically by its neighbor. Leading-edge technologies and a commitment to craftsmanship, however, are expected to power Japan’s future prosperity, just as they did its past growth.

India and Japan, although dissimilar economically, have a lot in common politically. They are Asia’s largest democracies, but with messy politics and endemic scandals. Hatoyama, in office for just three months, already has come under pressure following the indictment of two former secretaries over a funding scandal.

In both Japan and India, the prime minister is not the most powerful politician in his own party. Fractured politics in both countries crimps their ability to think and act long term. Yet, just as India has progressed from doctrinaire nonalignment to geopolitical pragmatism, Japan is moving toward greater realism in its economic and foreign policies.

Their growing congruence of strategic interests led to the 2008 Japan-India security agreement, a significant milestone in building Asian power stability. A constellation of Asian states linked by strategic cooperation and sharing common interests is becoming critical to ensuring equilibrium at a time when major shifts in economic and political power are accentuating Asia’s security challenges.

The Indo-Japanese security agreement, signed when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Tokyo in October 2008, was modeled on the March 2007 Australia-Japan defense accord. Now the Indo-Japanese security agreement has spawned a similar Indo-Australian accord, signed when Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd traveled to New Delhi last month.

The path has been opened to adding strategic content to the Indo-Japanese relationship, underscored by the growing number of bilateral visits by top defense and military officials. As part of their "strategic and global partnership," which was unveiled in 2006, India and Japan are working on joint initiatives on maritime security, counterterrorism, counter-proliferation, disaster management and energy security. But they need to go much further.

India and Japan, for example, must co-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 defense. There is no ban on weapon exports in the Japanese Constitution, only a long-standing Cabinet decision. That ban has been loosened, with Tokyo in recent years inserting elasticity to export weapons for peacekeeping operations, counterterrorism and anti-piracy. The original Cabinet decision, in any event, relates to weapons, not technologies.

As two legitimate aspirants to new permanent seats in the U.N. Security Council, India and Japan should work together to persuade existing veto holders to allow the Council’s long-pending reform. They must try to convince China in particular that Asian peace and stability would be better served if all the three major powers in Asia are in the Council as permanent members.

Never before have China, Japan and India all been strong at the same time. Today, they need to find ways to reconcile their interests in Asia so that they can coexist peacefully and prosper.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
The Japan Times: Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2009
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Hatoyama comes calling

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Powering a dynamic, multipolar Asia

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindu newspaper, December 30, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Copyright 2000 – 2009 The Hindu

New Australia-India security accord

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Asia’s new strategic partners
By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times, December 10, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."
The Japan Times: Thursday, Dec. 10, 2009
(C) All rights reserved

India’s little-known role in Sri Lankan conflict

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India’s dirty role in Sri Lankan war

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, November 1-4, 2009

Six months after Sri Lanka’s stunning military triumph in the 26-year-old civil war at the cost of thousands of
civilian lives in the final weeks alone, the peace dividend remains elusive, with President Mahinda Rajapaksa setting out — in the name of “eternal vigilance” — to expand by 50% an already-large military. China, clearly, was the decisive factor in helping end that war through its generous supply of offensive weapons
and its munificent bilateral aid. It even got its ally Pakistan actively involved in Rajapaksa’s war strategy.

India’s role, although it has received little international attention, was also deplorable. For years, India had pursued a hands-off approach toward Sri Lanka in response to two developments — a disastrous 1987-90 peacekeeping operation there; and the 1991 assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. But
having been outmanoeuvred by China’s success in extending strategic reach to Sri Lanka in recent years, New Delhi got sucked into providing major assistance to Colombo, lest it lose further ground in that island-nation.

From opening an unlimited line of military credit for Sri Lanka to extending critical naval and intelligence
assistance, India provided sustained war support in defiance of a deteriorating humanitarian
situation there.  A “major turning point” in the war, as Sri Lankan navy chief Admiral Wasantha Karannagoda acknowledged, came when the rebels’ supply ships were eliminated, one by one, with Indian naval intelligence inputs, cutting off all supplies to the rebel-held areas. That in turn allowed the Sri Lankan ground forces to make rapid advances and unravel the de facto state the Tigers had established in Sri Lanka’s north and east.

Indeed, Rajapaksa deftly played the China, India and Pakistan cards to maximize gains. After key Tamil Tiger leaders had been killed in the fighting, Rajapaksa — to New Delhi’s acute mortification — thanked China, India and Pakistan in the same breath for Sri Lanka’s victory. Today, India stands more marginalized than ever in Sri Lanka. Its natural constituency — the Tamils — feels not only betrayed, but also looks at India as a colluder in the bloodbath. India already had alienated the Sinhalese in the 1980s, when it first armed the Tamil Tigers and then sought to disarm them through an ill-starred peacekeeping foray that left almost three times as many Indian troops dead as the 1999 Kargil war with Pakistan.

India’s waning leverage over Sri Lanka is manifest from the way it now has to jostle for influence there with archrivals China and Pakistan. Hambantota — the billion-dollar port Beijing is building on Sri Lanka’s
southeast — symbolizes the Chinese strategic challenge to India from the oceans.

Even as some 250,000 displaced Tamils — equivalent to the population of Belfast — continue to be held incommunicado in miserable conditions in barbed-wire camps to this day, India has been unable to persuade Colombo to set them free. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said recently that India
has conveyed its “concerns in no uncertain terms to Sri Lanka on various occasions, stressing the need for them to focus on resettling and rehabilitating the displaced Tamil population at the earliest.” But India seems unable to make a difference even with messages delivered in “no uncertain terms.”

Yet, such has been the unstinted Indian support that even after the crushing of the Tigers, India went out the way to castigate the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, in June for shining a spotlight on the deplorable human-rights situation in Sri Lanka. India accused Ms. Pillay — a distinguished
South African judge of Indian descent who has sought an independent international investigation into alleged war crimes committed by all sides in Sri Lanka — of going beyond her brief, saying “the independence of the high commissioner cannot be presumed to exceed that of the UN Secretary General.”
Subsequently, India voted in the IMF for a $2.8 billion loan desperately needed by cash-strapped Colombo.

The costs for lending such support have been high. New Delhi today is groping to bring direction to its Sri
Lanka policy, even as it struggles to respond to the Chinese strategy to build maritime choke points in the Indian Ocean region. The current upsurge of Sinhalese chauvinism flows from the fact that the Sri Lankan military accomplished a task whose pursuit forced the mightier Indian army to make an ignominious exit 19 years ago. Consequently, Colombo is going to be even less inclined than before to listen to New
Delhi.

Against this background, the least India can do is to help improve the humanitarian situation in Sri Lanka. It cannot impotently watch as the Sri Lankan government continues to hold more than a quarter of a
million innocent Tamil refugees as prisoners in internment camps in the north. The arrival of the annual winter monsoon rains is causing a further deterioration of living conditions in these camps, threatening the health and safety of the internally displaced persons (IDPs). To make up for the sins of its policy, India — more than 100,000 Sri Lankan refugees camping in Tamil Nadu — can do quite a few things.

●First, India must start exerting open, intense pressure on Colombo to free the more than 250,000 IDPs from internment. They must be granted freedom of movement. Also, the 11,000 suspected rebels being separately detained at military sites should be identified and not denied access to legal
representation.

●Second, it has to insist the government resettle the IDPs in their hometowns and villages. As Walter Kaelin, the UN secretary-general’s representative on the human rights of IDPs, recently said: “It is imperative to immediately take all measures necessary to de-congest the overcrowded camps in northern Sri Lanka with their difficult and risky living conditions. The IDPs should be allowed to leave these camps voluntarily and in freedom, safety and dignity to their homes. If this is not possible in the near future, the displaced must be allowed to stay with host families or in open transit sites.”

●Three, India must warn Colombo of serious consequences if it seeks to change local demography by settling Sinhalese in Tamil areas. With overt official encouragement, thousands of Sinhalese already have flocked to the east to regain farming and other land from which they claim to have been driven out in the 1980s by the Tamil Tigers. Attempts to “Sinhalise” the north and east will not only deprive local Tamils and Muslims of their livelihood, but also sow the seeds of another cycle of conflict. Rajapaksa, post-victory, has not only rejected federalism and regional autonomy, but also — to the chagrin of Tamils — demerged the northern and eastern provinces.

●Four, India should demand that the IDP camps be opened up for effective monitoring through the grant of full access to humanitarian organizations, including the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and to the media.

●And five, India ought to join hands with the co-chairs of the so-called Friends of Sri Lanka — the US, European Union, Norway and Japan — to oppose further disbursement of the IMF loan until Colombo meets the commitments on IDP resettlement it made in its July letter of intent to the Fund. In the letter, it
pledged to resettle 70 to 80 per cent of the IDPs by the year-end — a further shift in its deadline. Democratic players must employ further disbursements as leverage to relieve a deteriorating humanitarian situation.

More broadly, India should lean on Rajapaksa to restore democratic freedoms. The wartime
suppression of a free press and curtailment of fundamental rights continues in peacetime, undermining democratic freedoms and creating a fear psychosis. Sweeping emergency regulations remain in place, arming the security forces with expansive powers of search, arrest and seizure of property. Individuals can
still be held in unacknowledged detention for up to 18 months.

For national reconciliation and healing to begin, it is essential the government shed its war-gained powers. Unfortunately, Colombo still seeks to hold onto its special powers while suppressing the truth. Peace sought to be achieved through the brutal humiliation of an ethnic community has always proven elusive in world history. If Sri Lanka is to go from making war to making peace, the present opportunity has to be
seized before there is a recrudescence of violence. That can happen only if Colombo is diplomatically nudged by an India that works in tandem with other important players. With its leverage undermined, New Delhi no longer can operate on its own.

 (c) Covert, 2009.

Tackling an assertive China: India’s options

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Insatiable dragon

As China continues with its provocations, India cannot pretend that all is well.

Brahma Chellaney
DNA newspaper, October 30, 2009

Although China invaded India in 1962, provoked a bloody clash at Nathu La in 1967 and triggered border skirmishes in 1986-87 by crossing the line of control in Samdurong Chu, this is the first time it has opened pressure points against India all along the Himalayan frontier in peacetime.

This pressure long predates the Dalai Lama’s plans to visit Arunachal Pradesh. Indeed, the pressure gradually has been building up since 2006, largely in reaction to the Indo-US strategic partnership, which was set in motion by the separate unveiling in 2005 of the nuclear deal and defence-framework accord. 

By muscling up to India, is China aiming to browbeat India or actually fashion an option to wage war?

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and other Indian officials have publicly sought to tamp down military tensions. But in contrast, the Chinese leadership has been mum on the Himalayan border situation even as the bellicose rhetoric in China’s state-run media has affected public opinion, with 90 per cent of respondents in a Global Times online poll citing India as the No. 1 threat to China’s security. The Communist Party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, after asking India to consider the costs of "a potential confrontation with China," ran another denunciatory editorial recently on New Delhi’s "recklessness and arrogance."

The current situation, in some aspects, parallels the one that prevailed in the run-up to the 1962 attack, which then Chinese premier Zhou En Lai declared was designed "to teach India a lesson."

Whether Beijing actually sets out to teach India "the final lesson" will, of course, depend on several calculations, including India’s defence preparedness, domestic factors within China and the availability of a propitious international timing of the type that the Cuban missile crisis provided in 1962. But why should New Delhi repeatedly and gratuitously offer explanations or justifications for the continuing Chinese cross-frontier incursions? If such intrusions are due to differing perceptions about the line of control, let the Chinese say that. But note: Beijing hasn’t proffered that excuse.

The issue up to 1962 was Aksai Chin. But having gobbled up Aksai China, an area almost as big as Switzerland, China now claims Arunachal, nearly three times as large as Taiwan, to help widen its annexation of resource-rich Tibet. Since ancient times, the Himalayas have been regarded as India’s northern frontiers. But China is laying claim to territories south of the Himalayan watershed. Having lost its outer buffer — Tibet — India cannot lose its inner buffer — the Himalayas — or else the enemy will arrive in its plains.

Yet, instead of putting the focus on the source of China’s claim — Tibet — and on Beijing’s attempt to territorially enlarge its Tibet annexation to what it calls "southern Tibet" since 2006, India fights shy of gently shining a spotlight on Tibet as the lingering core issue.

Both on strategy and capability, India is found wanting. Unable to define its own game-plan, it plays into China’s containment-behind-the-façade-of-engagement strategy by staying put in an unending, barren process of border talks going on since 1981, even though it realizes Beijing has no intent to reach a political settlement. Worse still, it agreed in August to let the border talks go off on a tangent and turn into an all-encompassing strategic dialogue, thereby arming Beijing with new leverage to condition a border settlement to the achievement of greater strategic congruence.

Now consider capability: More than 11 years after it gate-crashed the nuclear-weapons club, India conspicuously lacks even a barely minimal deterrent capability against China. Instead of giving topmost priority to building a credible deterrent against China — possible only through a major augmentation of indigenous nuclear and missile capabilities — India is focused on the spendthrift import of conventional weapons.

Let’s be clear: No amount of conventional arms can effectively deter a nuclear foe, that too an adversary that enjoys an inherent military advantage against India by being positioned on the commanding upper reaches of the Himalayas.

Although China is playing provoker, New Delhi helped create the context to embolden Beijing to up the ante. Can it be forgotten that New Delhi for long has indulged in ritualized happy talk about its relations with Beijing, brushing problems under the rug and hyping the outcome of every bilateral summit?

Even today, as New Delhi stares at the harvest of a mismanagement of relations with China by successive Indian governments that chose propitiation to leverage building, attempts are being made to pull the wool over public eyes by calling the Himalayan border "peaceful." Speaking honestly about a relationship fraught with major problems and lurking dangers is an essential first step to protect India’s interests.

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U.S. factor in Sino-Indian relations

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U.S. spurs China-India tensions

A need to dissuade Beijing from any resort to force

  • By Brahma Chellaney
  • Washington Times, October 28, 2009

The India-China relationship has entered choppy waters because of a perceptible hardening in the Chinese stance. Anti-India rhetoric in the state-run Chinese media has intensified, even as China has stepped up military pressure along the disputed Himalayan frontier through frequent cross-border incursions. Beijing also has resurrected its long-dormant claim to the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, nearly three times as large as Taiwan.

The more-muscular Chinese stance clearly is tied to the new U.S.-India strategic partnership, symbolized by the nuclear deal and deepening military cooperation. As President George W. Bush declared in his valedictory speech, "We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India."

The Obama administration, although committed to promoting that strategic partnership, has been reluctant to take New Delhi’s side in any of its disputes with Beijing. This has emboldened China to up the ante against India, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry employing language like "we demand" in a recent statement that labeled the Indian prime minister’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh a "disturbance." The Communist Party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, after asking India to consider the costs of "a potential confrontation with China," ran another denunciatory editorial recently on New Delhi’s "recklessness and arrogance."

New Delhi has hit back by permitting the Dalai Lama to tour Arunachal Pradesh and announcing an end to the practice of Chinese companies bringing thousands of workers from China to work on projects in India. And in a public riposte to Beijing’s raising of objections to multilateral funding of any project in Arunachal, India has asked China to cease its infrastructure and military projects in another disputed region – Pakistan-held Kashmir.

The present pattern of border provocations, new force deployments and mutual recriminations is redolent of the situation that prevailed 47 years ago, when China – taking advantage of the advent of the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of a nuclear Armageddon – routed the unprepared Indian military in a surprise two-front aggression. Today, amid rising tensions, the danger of border skirmishes, if not a limited war, looks real.

Such tensions have been rising since 2006. Until 2005, China was eschewing anti-India rhetoric and pursuing a policy of active engagement with India even as it continued to expand its strategic space in southern Asia, to New Delhi’s detriment. In fact, when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited India in April 2005, the two countries unveiled six broad principles to help settle their festering border dispute. But after the Indo-U.S. defense-framework accord and nuclear deal were unveiled in quick succession in subsequent months, the mood in Beijing changed perceptibly. That gave rise to a pattern that now has become commonplace: Chinese newspapers, individual bloggers, security think tanks and even officially blessed Web sites ratcheted up an "India threat" scenario.

A U.S.-India military alliance has always been a strategic nightmare for the Chinese, and the ballyhooed Indo-U.S. global strategic partnership triggered alarm bells in Beijing. The partnership, though, falls short of a formal military alliance. Still, the high-pitched Indian and American rhetoric that the new partnership represented a tectonic shift in geopolitical alignments apparently made Chinese policymakers believe India was being groomed as a new Japan or Australia to America – a perception reinforced by subsequent arrangements and Indian orders for U.S. arms worth $3.5 billion in just the past year.

Clearly, New Delhi failed to foresee that its rush to forge close strategic bonds with Washington could provoke greater Chinese pressure and that in such a situation, the United States actually would offer little comfort. Consequently, India finds itself in a spot.

For one thing, Beijing calculatedly has sought to pressure India on multiple fronts – military, diplomatic and multilateral. For another, the United States – far from coming to India’s support – has shied away from even cautioning Beijing against any attempt to forcibly change the territorial status quo. Indeed, on a host of issues – from the Dalai Lama to the Arunachal dispute – Washington has chosen not to antagonize Beijing. That, in effect, has left India on its own.

The spectacle of the president of the most powerful country in the world seeking to curry favor with a rights-abusing China by shunning the Dalai Lama during the Tibetan leader’s Washington visit cannot but embolden the Chinese leadership to step up pressure on India, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile. Mr. Obama also has signaled that America’s strategic relationship with India will not be at the expense of the fast-growing U.S. ties with Beijing.

The Obama team, after reviewing the Bush-era arrangements, intends to abjure elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including any joint military drill in Arunachal or a 2007-style naval exercise involving the United States, India, Australia, Japan and Singapore. Even trilateral U.S. naval maneuvers with India and Japan are being abandoned so as not to raise China’s hackles. As his secretary of state did in February, Mr. Obama is undertaking an Asia tour that begins in Japan and ends in China – the high spot – while skipping India. In fact, Washington is quietly charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal dispute.

Yet Beijing remains suspicious of the likely trajectory of U.S.-India strategic ties, including pre-1962-style CIA meddling in Tibet. This distrust found expression in the People’s Daily editorial that accused New Delhi of pursuing a foreign policy of "befriending the far and attacking the near."

Left to fend for itself, New Delhi has decided to steer clear of any confrontation with Beijing. As the prime minister of the Tibetan government in exile, Samdhong Rinpoche, has put it: "For the past few months, China has adopted an aggressive attitude and is indulging in many provocative activities, which are being tolerated by Indian government in a very passive manner."

Still, even as it seeks to tamp down tensions with Beijing, New Delhi cannot rule out the use of force by China at a time when hard-liners there seem to believe that a swift, 1962-style military victory can help fashion a Beijing-oriented Asia.

Having declared that America’s "most important bilateral relationship in the world" is with Beijing, the Obama team must caution China against crossing well-defined red lines or going against its self-touted gospel of China’s "peaceful rise."

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan" (HarperCollins 2006, with a new U.S. edition scheduled for release in January 2010).

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Copyright 2009 The Washington Times, LLC

Arunachal Pradesh in India-China relations

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China’s locus standi on Arunachal?

The basis of its territorial claim is laughable

The Economic Times, October 16, 2009

Does China have any locus standi in relation to the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh? A “yes” answer would be an invitation to India to assert its locus standi in the matter of Tibet, 

Brahma Chellaney, Strategic Affairs Expert

given that China’s claim to Arunachal is based not on any Han connection, but on alleged historical links with Tibet. In making that claim, Beijing indeed advertises that Tibet is the core issue and that it covets Arunachal as a cultural patio to Tibet — a classic attempt at incremental annexation. 

The Dalai Lama has publicly said that Arunachal historically was not part of Tibet. That is why, as he has explained, the 1914 Simla Agreement, of which the then-independent Tibet was a party, did not include present-day Arunachal Pradesh in Tibet. China does not recognise the McMahon Line because its acceptance of the 1914 border will be admission that Tibet was once independent, seriously undercutting the legitimacy of its control over an increasingly restive Tibet. 

Beijing thus fashioned its claim to Arunachal originally as a bargaining chip to compel India to recognise Chinese control over Aksai Chin. That was the reason why in the 1962 war, China withdrew from the Arunachal areas it invaded but retained its territorial gains in Ladakh. 

But as part of its hardening stance toward India, China has since 2006 publicly raked up the long-dormant Arunachal issue. The basis of its territorial claim, however, is laughable. Just because the 6th Dalai Lama was born in the 17th century in Arunachal’s Tawang district, Beijing claims that the state belongs to Tibet and thus is part of China. 

By that argument, it can also lay claim to Mongolia as the 4th Dalai Lama was born there in 1589. The traditional ecclesiastical links between Mongolia and Tibet actually have been closer than those between Arunachal and Tibet. In fact, as part of its cartographic dismemberment of Tibet, China has hived off the birthplaces of the 7th, 10th, 11th and present Dalai Lama from Tibet. 

The issue in India-China relations up to 1962 was Aksai Chin; the issue now is Arunachal. If history is not to repeat itself, India must put the spotlight on the source of China’s claim — Tibet.


(c) Economic Times, 2009.

How India lost out in Sri Lanka

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Behind The Sri Lankan Bloodbath

Brahma Chellaney, 10.09.09 Forbes

Colombo’s victory over the Tamils shows India’s power on the wane.


Thousands of noncombatants, according to the United Nations, were killed in the final phase of the Sri Lankan war this year as government forces overran the Tamil Tiger guerrillas. Nearly five months after Colombo’s stunning military triumph, the peace dividend remains elusive, with President Mahinda Rajapaksa setting out–in the name of "eternal vigilance"–to expand by 50% an already-large military. Little effort has been made to reach out to the Tamil minority and begin a process of national reconciliation.

China, clearly, was the decisive factor in ending the war through its generous supply of offensive weapons and its munificent aid. It even got its ally Pakistan to actively assist Rajapaksa in his war strategy. Today, China is the key factor in providing Colombo the diplomatic cover against the institution of a U.N. investigation into possible war crimes, or the appointment of a U.N. special envoy on Sri Lanka. In return for such support, Beijing has been able to make strategic inroads into a critically located country in India’s backyard.

Unlike China’s assistance, India’s role has received little international attention. But India, too, contributed to the Sri Lankan bloodbath through its military aid, except that it has ended up, strangely, with its leverage undermined.

For years, India had pursued a hands-off approach toward Sri Lanka in response to two developments–a disastrous 1987-1990 peacekeeping operation there; and the 1991 assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by a member of the Tamil Tigers. But having been outmaneuvered by China’s success in extending strategic reach to Sri Lanka in recent years, New Delhi got sucked into providing major assistance to Colombo, lest it lose further ground in Sri Lanka.

From opening an unlimited line of military credit for Sri Lanka to extending critical naval and intelligence assistance, India provided sustained war support despite a deteriorating humanitarian situation there. A "major turning point" in the war, as Sri Lankan navy chief Admiral Wasantha Karannagoda acknowledged, came when the rebels’ supply ships were eliminated, one by one, with input from Indian naval intelligence, cutting off all supplies to the rebel-held areas. That in turn allowed the Sri Lankan ground forces to make rapid advances and unravel the de facto state the Tigers had established in the island nation’s north and east.

Sri Lanka, for its part, practiced adroit but duplicitous diplomacy: It assured India it would approach other arms suppliers only if New Delhi couldn’t provide a particular weapon system it needed. Yet it quietly began buying arms from China and Pakistan without even letting India know. In doing so, Colombo mocked Indian appeals that it rely for its legitimate defense needs on India, the main regional power. It was only by turning to India’s adversaries for weapons, training and other aid that Colombo pulled off a startling military triumph. In any event, Colombo was emboldened by the fact that the more it chipped away at India’s traditional role, the more New Delhi seemed willing to pander to its needs.

Indeed, Rajapaksa deftly played the China, India and Pakistan cards to maximize gains. After key Tamil Tiger leaders had been killed in the fighting, Rajapaksa–to New Delhi’s mortification–thanked China, India and Pakistan in the same breath for Sri Lanka’s victory.

Today, India stands more marginalized than ever in Sri Lanka. Its natural constituency–the Tamils–feels not only betrayed, but also looks at India as a colluder in the bloodbath. India already had alienated the Sinhalese majority in the 1980s, when it first armed the Tamil Tigers and then sought to disarm them through an ill-starred peacekeeping foray that left almost three times as many Indian troops dead as the 1999 Kargil War with Pakistan.

India’s waning leverage over Sri Lanka is manifest from the way it now has to jostle for influence there with arch-rivals China and Pakistan. Hambantota–the billion-dollar port Beijing is building in Sri Lanka’s southeast–symbolizes the Chinese strategic challenge to India from the oceans.

Even as some 280,000 displaced Tamils–equivalent to the population of Belfast–continue to be held incommunicado in barbed-wire camps, India has been unable to persuade Colombo to set them free, with incidents being reported of security forces opening fire on those seeking to escape from the appalling conditions. One of the few persons allowed to visit some of these camps was U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who said after his tour in May: "I have traveled around the world and visited similar places, but these are by far the most appalling scenes I have seen …" Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said recently that India has conveyed its "concerns in no uncertain terms to Sri Lanka on various occasions, stressing the need for them to focus on resettling and rehabilitating the displaced Tamil population at the earliest." But India seems unable to make a difference even with messages delivered in "no uncertain terms."

The story of the loss of India’s preeminent role in Sri Lanka actually begins in 1987, when New Delhi made an abrupt U-turn in policy and demanded that the Tigers lay down their arms. Their refusal to bow to the diktat was viewed as treachery, and the Indian army was ordered to rout them.

Since then, Sri Lanka has served as a reminder of how India’s foreign policy is driven not by resolute, long-term goals, but by a meandering approach influenced by the personal caprice of those in power. The 1987 policy reversal occurred after then Sri Lankan President J.R. Jayewardene–a wily old fox–sold neophyte Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi the line that an "Eelam," or Tamil homeland, in Sri Lanka would be a dangerous precursor to a Greater Eelam uniting Tamils on both sides of the Palk Straits. In buying that myth, Gandhi did not consider a simple truth: If Bangladesh’s 1971 creation did not provoke an Indian Bengali nationalist demand for a Greater Bangladesh, why would an Eelam lead to a Greater Eelam?

Actually, the Tamils in India and Sri Lanka have pursued divergent identities since the fall of the Pandyan kingdom in the 14th century. While the Eelam struggle is rooted in the treatment of Tamils as second-class citizens in Sri Lanka–where affirmative action has been instituted for the majority Sinhalese and a mono-ethnic national identity sought to be shaped–the Tamils in India face no discrimination and have been fully integrated into the national mainstream.

Another personality driven shift in India’s Sri Lanka policy came after the 2004 change of government in New Delhi, when the desire to avenge Gandhi’s assassination trumped strategic considerations, with the hands-off approach being abandoned. That handily meshed with the hawkish agenda of Rajapaksa, who began chasing the military option soon after coming to power in 2005. "It is their duty to help us in this stage," Rajapaksa said about India. And Indian help came liberally.

In fact, such has been the unstinting Indian support that even after the crushing of the Tamil Tigers, India went out of the way to castigate the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, in June for shining a spotlight on the deplorable human-rights situation in Sri Lanka, including the continuing internment of internally displaced Tamils. India accused Pillay–a distinguished South African judge of Indian descent who has sought an independent international investigation into alleged war crimes committed by all sides in Sri Lanka–of going beyond her brief, saying "the independence of the high commissioner cannot be presumed to exceed that of the U.N. secretary-general."

The costs of lending such support have been high. New Delhi today is groping to bring direction to its Sri Lanka policy by defining its objectives more coherently, even as it struggles to respond to the Chinese strategy to build maritime choke points in the Indian Ocean region. Indeed, India has ceded strategic space in its regional backyard in such a manner that Bhutan now remains its sole pocket of influence. In Sri Lanka, India has allowed itself to become a marginal player despite its geostrategic advantage and trade and investment clout.

More fundamentally, the pernicious myth Jayewardene planted in Gandhi’s mind triggered a chain of events still exacting costs on Indian security and interests. In fact, nothing better illustrates the fallacy Jayewardene sold Gandhi than the absence of a Tamil backlash in India to the killings of thousands of countless Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka this year, and to the continued incarceration in tent camps of 280,000 Tamil refugees, including 80,000 children. In fact, even as the Sri Lankan war reached a gory culmination, India’s Tamil Nadu state voted in national elections for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) led by Gandhi’s widow, Sonia Gandhi, although that governing coalition had shied away from raising its voice over the Sri Lankan slaughter.

Today, the upsurge of Sinhalese chauvinism flows from the fact that the Sri Lankan military accomplished a task whose pursuit forced the mightier Indian army to make an ignominious exit 19 years ago. Consequently, Colombo is going to be even less inclined than before to listen to New Delhi. Indeed, the manner in which Colombo played the China and Pakistan cards in recent years to outsmart India is likely to remain an enduring feature of Sri Lankan diplomacy, making Sri Lanka a potential springboard for anti-India maneuvers.

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

(c) 2009 Forbes.com