Chinese navy aims to challenge India’s preeminence in Indian Ocean

Posted on December 30, 2008 by Chellaney

Dragon in India’s backyard

In its first deployment of battle-ready warships outside the Pacific, China is extending its maritime role to the Indian Ocean rim under the anti-piracy banner, thereby challenging India’s long-standing dominance there

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, December 31, 2008

While India has remained fixated on the “Jihadistan” to its west — with an indecisive Indian leadership’s addiction to empty rhetoric allowing an open-and-shut case against Pakistan over the Mumbai terrorist assaults to go by — Communist China has made its first-ever deployment of a naval task force beyond the Pacific by dispatching battle-ready warships to India’s backyard. The task force comprising two destroyers and a supply ship is starting escorts and patrols along the Indian Ocean rim in the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden.

This move, under the banner of internationalism, aims to extend China’s maritime role and presence far from its shores while demonstrating, under United Nations rules of engagement, a capability to conduct complex operations in distant waters where Indian, US, Iranian and Russian navies are already active. Earlier, the anti-piracy plank also came handy to Beijing to agree to joint patrols with Pakistan in the Arabian Sea and extend cooperation to ASEAN.

Significantly, Beijing is seeking to chip away at India’s maritime pre-eminence in the Indian Ocean — a theatre critical to fashioning a Sino-centric Asia, if China can assert naval power there to protect its commercial interests and to expand its influence over the regional waterways and states. As the state-run China Daily put it, quoting a military analyst, a “key goal” in battling pirates in Indian Ocean waters off Somalia “is to register the presence of the Chinese navy”.

Undergirding the deployment’s larger geopolitical motives was a separate announcement that China is “seriously considering” adding a first aircraft carrier to its navy fleet because, as a military spokesperson put it, aircraft carriers are “a reflection of a nation’s comprehensive power”. This is just the latest indication of China’s commitment to a blue-water navy. In the past, China bought four carriers (three ex-Soviet and one Australian) but, strangely, it inducted none in its fleet, preferring instead to learn from their design.

With President Hu Jintao publicly pressing for rapid naval modernization and the 2006 defence White Paper disclosing that “the navy aims to gradually extend its strategic depth”, naval expansion and greater missile prowess are now at the core of China’s force modernization. Since 2000 alone, China has built at least 60 warships. Its navy now has a fleet of 860 vessels, including at least 60 submarines.

China’s naval objectives are manifold, including to:

· safeguard its vast sea frontiers and a 877,020-square-kilometre exclusive economic zone (EEZ);

· help shift the balance of power in Asia in its favour;

· strengthen its deterrent capabilities;

· underpin political, commercial and energy interests through a sea-based power projection force capability;

· prevent the rise of peer competition from Japan and India, even as it seeks to position itself as a militarily strong and economically dynamic peer competitor to the US;

· thwart efforts by an outside power to set up new military bases or tie-ups around China’s periphery; and

· control vital sea-lanes of communication between the Indian and Pacific Oceans through a “string of pearls” strategy.

Rising naval power arms China with the heft to pursue mercantilist efforts to lock up long-term energy supplies, assert control over transport routes, and assemble a “string of pearls” in the form of listening posts and special naval-access arrangements along the great trade arteries. As India’s navy chief, Admiral Suresh Mehta, has said, “Each pearl in the string is a link in a chain of the Chinese maritime presence”.

In fact, a 2003 article in the Liberation Army Daily had asserted that the contiguous corridor from the Taiwan Straits to the Indian Ocean’s western rim constitutes China’s rightful offshore-defence perimeter. And a recent paper published by the Chinese Institute for International Strategic Studies points to the inevitability of Beijing setting up naval bases overseas, including in the Indian Ocean rim.

To the east, a rising frequency of Chinese naval patrols indicates that Beijing is seeking to extend its strategic perimeter deep into the Pacific Ocean. What is being subtly suggested by Chinese analysts today — that the Western Pacific is China’s maritime zone of influence — could set the stage for an intensifying strategic competition with another naval power, Japan.

Just as China’s land-combat strategy has evolved from “deep defence” (luring enemy forces into Chinese territory to help garrotte them) to “active defence” (a proactive posture designed to fight the enemy on enemy territory, including through the use of forces stationed in neighbouring lands or seas), a shift in its sea-warfare posture has emerged, with the emphasis on greater reach and depth and expeditionary capability.

And just as Beijing has used its energy investments in Central Asia as justification to set up at least two offensively configured, armour-heavy mechanized corps — with Xinjiang as their springboard — to fight deep inside adversarial territory and secure strategic assets, China’s growing oil imports from the Persian Gulf and Africa have come handy to rationalize its growing emphasis on the seas.

China is determined to build a blue-water naval force before 2025. Chinese warships inducted in recent years have already been geared for blue-sea fleet operations. As Beijing accelerates its construction of warships and begins to deploy naval assets far from its EEZ, Chinese naval power is set to grow exponentially.

China is also planning to deploy a fleet of nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines (known as SSBNs). It has already developed its new Jin-class (Type 094) SSBN prototype, with satellite pictures showing one such submarine berthed at the huge new Chinese naval base at Sanya, on the southern coast of Hainan Island. The Sino-Russian gap in nuclear naval forces is narrowing, but within the next 25 years, China could have more nuclear assets at sea than Russia.

Against this background, it is no surprise that the Chinese navy is extending its operations to the Indian Ocean — a crucial international passageway for oil deliveries and other trade. The extending role is also manifest from the projects China has launched in the Indian Ocean rim, including the building of a port at Hambantota in Sri Lanka, the modernization of Bangladesh’s Chittagong port, and the construction of a deep-water commercial port and naval base for Pakistan at Gwadar, situated at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz — the only exit route for Gulf oil. Beijing is eyeing Gwadar as a naval anchor.

In addition, the Irrawaddy Corridor between China’s Yunnan province and the Burmese ports on the Bay of Bengal is set to become a key economic and strategic passageway involving road, river, rail and harbour links. Commercial satellite imagery shows that China already operates signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection facility on the Great Coco Island.

India, with its enormous strategic depth in the Indian Ocean, is in a position to pursue a sea-denial strategy, if New Delhi were to adopt a more forward-thinking naval policy. Just the way India has come under a terrorist siege from Pakistan-based jihadists by doing little more than adopt defensive measures, it will confront — if it retreats to a defensive position — the Chinese navy in its backyard, completing the Chinese encirclement of the country.

To safeguard its long-term strategic interests, India has to start exerting naval power at critical chokepoints. That entails arming the Indian navy with the teeth and authority to guard the various “gates” to the Indian Ocean.

Dalai Lama: Taken for a ride

Posted on November 18, 2008 by Chellaney

Crunch time for the Tibetan movement

The Dalai Lama failed to capitalize on the largest, most-powerful Tibetan uprising since he was forced to flee Tibet in 1959. By resuming talks with Beijing after the March uprising, he actually came to the succour of a regime vilifying him. Now, dejected and lost, he is asking Tibetans to decide the future course of action.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, November 19, 2008

With the Tibetan movement at the crossroads as China tightens its vise on Tibet, the week-long conclave of exiles now in progress at the Dalai Lama’s initiative in Dharamsala offers an opportunity for a critical self-appraisal so as to find a more pragmatic and workable strategy for the coming years.

A good beginning has been provided by the Dalai Lama’s recent public admissions. He said this month that the path of negotiations with China has failed to yield any results even as the situation in Tibet deteriorates. And late last month, he said: “I have been sincerely pursuing the middle-way approach in dealing with China for a long time now, but there hasn’t been any positive response from the Chinese side”, adding: “As far as I’m concerned I have given up”.

Beijing has pursued the same negotiating strategy with the Dalai Lama that it has with India, which is to take the other side round and round the mulberry bush in never-ending talks aimed at changing the facts on the ground while projecting moderation. This approach also has been employed to try and wheedle out concessions by putting forth new demands at regular intervals and thereby placing the onus for progress on the other side — something China has skilfully practiced in its serial negotiations with India since 1981 on the border issue and with the Dalai Lama’s envoys since 2002.

As for the Dalai Lama’s “middle way”, the Tibetan leader admittedly has secured nothing from Beijing since he moved two decades ago from seeking Tibet’s independence to advocating its autonomy within China. In fact, no sooner had a lot of ballyhooing started about the “middle way” than Tibet witnessed a harsh martial-law crackdown in 1989 under the local communist party boss who today is China’s president.

The Dalai Lama, however, can hardly be faulted for seeking conciliation and accommodation with China. As the Tibetans are in no position to undo China’s conquest of their homeland, he has sagaciously sought a negotiated settlement to guarantee autonomy to Tibet within China, no more than what has been granted to Hong Kong and Macao. Had he not tested China’s sincerity for compromise, he would not have shown to the world that the autocrats in Beijing still prefer repression to reform in Tibet.

If the Dalai Lama has made any mistakes, they have not been strategic but tactical. This year, for example, he strikingly failed to capitalize on the largest, most-powerful Tibetan uprising since he was forced to flee Tibet in 1959. By resuming talks with Beijing after the March uprising, he actually came to the succour of a regime still vilifying him. The talks helped China to forestall a wide international boycott of the Beijing Olympics’ opening ceremony and to deflect criticism of the way it ruthlessly suppressed the Tibetan protests that flared in Lhasa and spread like wild fire even to the Tibetan areas merged in Han provinces.

Now, downcast and lost, the Dalai Lama is holding the conclave — the first of its kind since 1991 — and asking fellow Tibetans to decide the future course of action. He remains the greatest asset for the Tibetan cause — the iconic figure that internationally personifies the struggle against brutal Chinese rule over a vast, resource-rich plateau that historically served as the buffer between the Chinese and Indian civilizations. But he has also shown through some missteps that even a god-king is prone to human failings.

The Dalai Lama confronts a serious predicament. Buffeted by pressures from host India and weighed down by America’s reluctance to pay more than lip service to the Tibetan cause, the aging leader has seen his options crimp in the face of China’s emergence in one generation as a world power. America’s economic interlinks with China, including a growing reliance on Chinese capital inflows, have helped produce a succession of China-friendly US presidents. Barack Obama, saddled with the weakest US economy in 25 years, will be no different.

Other Western states have not been different. The biggest sinner, Britain, has only compounded its colonial-era machinations by its October 29 decision — on the eve of the last round of Chinese-Tibetan talks — to formally scrap the British Indian government’s recognition of China’s suzerainty relationship with Tibet embodied in the 1914 Simla Convention. This action, taken without consulting New Delhi, implies that London now recognizes China’s full sovereignty over Tibet.

India has a far greater stake in the future of Tibet than any other country. Yet its government leaders, far from playing India’s trump card against China — the Dalai Lama — are too shy to openly meet him, even as New Delhi continues to turn the other cheek to China’s provocations. Take the newest Chinese statement irately denouncing the Indian foreign minister’s sterile reassertion of a geographical fact for home audiences — that Arunachal Pradesh is an Indian state.

Beijing’s bizarre logic is that because it “has never recognized the illegal McMahon Line” — and “India knows this” — New Delhi has no business to say Arunachal is part of India. But how does a disputed boundary line justify China’s claim over an entire Indian state that is nearly three times the size of Taiwan — a state the Dalai Lama vouches was never part of Tibet? Tibet’s occupying power is silent on that issue. Yet, instead of summoning the Chinese ambassador the next day, New Delhi kept quiet over Beijing’s latest provocation.

Because China disputes with India the very 1914 boundary line it has accepted with Burma, should New Delhi also lay claim to large chunks of territory — to the north of the McMahon Line, on grounds of cultural links with Arunachal? New Delhi need not pay back Beijing in the same coin. But why has it retreated to a more and more defensive position by allowing Beijing to shift the focus from its annexation of Tibet to the supposed centrality of Arunachal’s future status?

If Beijing’s logic is wacky, New Delhi’s seems absent. Little surprise thus that the poor Dalai Lama appears at a loss to fathom India’s strategic thinking. He shouldn’t even try: As long as India continues to be governed by doddering old men whose only priority is survival in power, its policy will stay feckless. Nor should he ever take his cue from a host country that still mistakes stagecraft for statecraft. India has a track record of betraying friends but respecting enemies.

Clearly, this is crunch time for the Tibetan cause. Abandoning the path of non-violence cannot be a credible option. Violent means against a trigger-happy despotic regime will bring little more than misery to Tibetans. But staying put in a barren negotiating process only works to China’s strategic advantage.

It was overoptimistic to expect the “middle way” to sway rulers who have been proverbial extremists, lurching from one end of the pendulum (hardcore communists) to the other (unashamed capitalists). Whom they denounced as enemies earlier are the very states they zealously befriend today. Their policies have disregarded human costs in the past and environmental costs now.

Against such rulers, the Dalai Lama needs a more flexible, nuanced, reciprocity-tied and leverage-playing approach geared to finding and exploiting right opportunities. He also needs to clarify the rules for choosing his successor, lest a waiting Beijing anoint a puppet Dalai Lama.

Kashmir in U.S.-India Relations

Posted on November 8, 2008 by Chellaney

Obama’s epochal win and a defensive India

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, November 16-30, 2008

Barack Obama’s landslide victory in the presidential election symbolizes a non-violent revolution in U.S. politics. Despite the idle speculation in India that the president-elect may appoint ex-President Bill Clinton as his special envoy on Kashmir and step up non-proliferation pressures on New Delhi, the blunt fact is that India does not figure in his leading priorities.

For the next one year and more, Obama will be preoccupied with finding ways to extricate the U.S. from the economic recession at home and the military quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, devising more-workable American policies on Russia, Iran and North Korea, promoting an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, and helping nuclear-armed but quasi-failed Pakistan pull back from the brink of collapse. Notwithstanding an inflated sense in India of the country’s importance to U.S foreign policy, there was not even a passing reference to India in the foreign policy-centred first debate between Obama and his Republican opponent, John McCain.

In any case, the foreign-policy agenda, especially the skewed emphasis on some issues, including the pursuit of an idée fixe, is shaped by the personalities that form a U.S. presidential team. The Clinton administration’s obsession with Kashmir, for example, owed a lot to Robin L. Raphel (who helped engineer the formation of the Hurriyat) and Madeline Albright (who had been swayed by her father’s UN stint there). Obama has yet to assemble his foreign-policy team. It is thus too early to say that he will seek to play an interventionist role on Kashmir or mount greater non-proliferation pressure.

After the vaunted Indo-U.S. nuclear deal — which tethers India firmly to the U.S.-led non-proliferation regime and crimps the long-term credibility of the nascent Indian nuclear deterrent through eclectic fetters — there isn’t much non-proliferation room to keep badgering New Delhi. The deal was a bipartisan U.S. product, with Obama himself contributing to tightening its terms by successfully inserting two legislative amendments — one of which restricts India’s uranium imports to “reasonable reactor operating requirements”, while the other seeks to deter Indian testing by threatening a U.S.-led international nuclear-trade embargo.

As for Kashmir, the truth is that, from Harry Truman to George W. Bush, U.S. presidents have tried to pitchfork themselves as peacemakers between India and Pakistan to help advance American interests. Truman’s suggestions on Kashmir, for example, prompted then Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to complain that he was “tired of receiving moral advice from the U.S.”

Take another president, John F. Kennedy, perhaps the most India-friendly U.S. leader thus far. After China launched a surprise invasion in 1962, Nehru sent two frantic letters to Kennedy for help. But the U.S. began shipping arms only after the Chinese aggression had ceased and a weakened India had been made to agree to open Kashmir talks with Pakistan. In fact, when the People’s Liberation Army launched a second, more-vicious round of attacks after a gap of three weeks during that 32-day war, the U.S. carrier force, USS Enterprise, steamed not towards the East or South China Sea but toward the Bay of Bengal to serve as a mere psychological prop to besieged India.

The outgoing incumbent, with his strong interventionist impulse, may have attempted to play a more-activist role on Kashmir had the U.S. military not got bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan and had his pet dictator not come under siege at home and been eventually driven out of office by the Pakistani people. After all, repeated American attempts at Kashmir mediation or facilitation over the decades have helped the U.S. to leverage its Pakistan ties with India.

Let’s not forget it was the Bush White House that helped set up the 2001 Agra summit meeting between Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistani ruler General Pervez Musharraf. In fact, the U.S. let the cat out of the bag by revealing the summit dates before New Delhi and Islamabad had a chance to get their act together. On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sprung a nasty surprise on the nation by embracing Pakistan as a fellow victim of and joint partner against terror, he put forward a U.S.-designed proposal — joint anti-terror mechanism. That move helped embolden the Pakistani intelligence to step up attacks on Indian targets — from the Embassy in Kabul to public places in India’s northeast.

Singh made public his penchant for gabble when he waxed lyrical in January 2007: “I dream of a day when one can have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul”. But how fundamentally Singh had changed Indian policy under U.S. persuasion became known earlier when, returning from Havana, he declared: “The Indian stand was that the borders could not be redrawn, while Pakistan was not prepared to accept the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir as the permanent solution. The two agreed to find a via media to reconcile the two positions”. By peddling a LoC-plus compromise, he opened the path to inevitable concessions to Pakistan.

In fact, the Bush administration’s trumpeted “de-hyphenation” of India and Pakistan in U.S. policy was not a calculated shift but the product of Pakistan’s descent into shambles and India’s political and economic rise after 1998. But U.S. policymakers, making a virtue out of necessity, sought to take credit for the de-hyphenation. Hyphenating India with a country a fifth of its size in terms of territory and a seventh of its size in terms of population was an abnormality that had been perpetuated partly with the aid of India’s own irrational fixation on Pakistan.

Old policy habits, however, die hard. Under Bush, U.S. policy simply went from hyphenation to parallelism. That approach has involved following separate parallel tracks with India and Pakistan, thereby permitting America to advance its interests better. When Bush visited India and Pakistan in 2006, he touted the tour as aimed at building strategic partnerships with both countries for — believe it or not — “fighting terrorism” and “advancing democracy”. With a beaming Singh by his side in New Delhi, he publicly sought Indo-Pakistan “progress on all issues, including Kashmir”. Such is Bush’s legacy that the U.S. is now building parallel intelligence-sharing and defence-cooperation arrangements with India and Pakistan.

No sooner had Bush initiated the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP) with India than he designated Pakistan as a Major Non-Nato Ally (MNNA) under the 1961 U.S. Foreign Assistance Act. Bush’s rearming of Pakistan coincided with his push to sell weapons to India, thus allowing the U.S. to reap profits and gain leverage on both sides of the subcontinental divide. Indeed, the very day Bush announced his decision to sell F-16 fighter-jets to Pakistan, Washington patronizingly offered to “help India become a major world power in the 21st century”. Today, even as he readies to relinquish office, Bush has pushed for an $891-million upgrade of Pakistan’s India-directed F-16s at a time when Islamabad is struggling to avert an international-debt default.

Against this background, it is fair to ask: Why does India remain so defensive on Kashmir? Is it the aggressor state that now exports terror? Is it the irredentist party seeking to redraw frontiers in blood? Even if a special U.S. envoy is appointed, what can he seek that India has not already offered under the weak-kneed Singh — from “soft borders” and a “borderless” Kashmir, to the “sky is the limit” in negotiations and a LoC-plus compromise? It is the search for a solution to an intricate, irresolvable issue, including by some Indians, which has kept alive the problem and engendered more bloodshed.

Unlike the meandering nature of the Indian state, U.S. policy pursues its long-term goals with unflinching resolve, and a change of administration may change nuance but not intent. Continuity in objectives is ensured through a robust structure of institutionalized policymaking, a 77-day transition period before the president-elect is sworn in, and intelligence instruments like the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) that Obama started receiving no sooner than he had been elected. Any U.S. initiative, even with an altruistic core, is required to serve America’s national interest first and foremost.

Whatever may be the shape of Obama’s foreign policy, he has already acknowledged that Kashmir represents “a potential tar pit for American diplomacy”. In any event, Washington’s ability to intervene in Kashmir is tied to Indian acquiescence, however half-hearted or forced. Expressions of concern in India over the Obama administration playing an activist role on Kashmir thus reflect a lack of confidence in New Delhi not ceding space to U.S. diplomacy — a diffidence borne from the historical record.

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

What Obama’s election means for India

Posted on November 6, 2008 by Chellaney

After the blundering Bush, a cautious Obama suits India better

Brahma Chellaney

Strategic affairs expert

Economic Times, November 7, 2008

After a historic win, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama confronts problems of historic proportions. Given the unprecedented mess that occurred on his predecessor’s watch, Obama will find himself dealing with the baneful Bush legacy for years to come.

The challenges are made starker by the fact that Obama fashioned his triumph through the power of inspiration but without any executive experience. The team he assembles will reveal the kind of leadership and change the world can expect.

For India, an America that returns to playing a mainstream international role and renews its ability to inspire and lead is better than the rogue superpower that President George W. Bush helped create.

During the Bush presidency, India’s external security environment deteriorated. Thanks to misguided U.S. policies, an arc of contiguous volatility now lies to India’s west, stretching from Pakistan to Lebanon. The war on terror that Bush launched stands derailed, even as the level of terrorism emanating from the Pak-Afghan belt has escalated.

To India’s east, with Bush expanding the web of U.S.-led sanctions, Burma faces a looming humanitarian catastrophe. Even while waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush has longed to militarily take on Iran — a confrontation that would have a cascading effect on the Indian economy by disrupting oil imports.

Yet, underlining how power respects power, Bush mollycoddled the world’s largest and longest-surviving autocracy in China, to the extent that he ignored the brutal suppression of the Tibetan uprising and showed up at the Beijing Olympics.

In place of the blustering and blundering Bush, Obama will be a welcome change. In keeping with his personality, change under Obama will be cautious, calibrated and incremental, but packaged to convey a clean break from the Bush era.

Indian interests demand a new U.S. approach on challenges ranging from the Pak-Afghan shambles to the climate crisis. But new U.S. policies alone cannot be enough. The multiple crises India confronts underscore the need for change there, too.

When Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh shortly meets his buddy Bush — whose proffered nuclear deal undermines the long-term viability of India’s nuclear deterrent — it will be the coming together of waning stars.

Building Asian Power Stability

Posted on November 2, 2008 by Chellaney

Different playbooks aimed at balancing Asia’s powers

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times, November 3, 2008

The Japan-India security agreement signed recently marks a significant milestone in building Asian power equilibrium. A constellation of Asian states linked by strategic cooperation and with shared common interests is becoming critical to instituting stability at a time when major shifts in economic and political power are accentuating Asia’s security challenges.

What Tokyo and New Delhi have signed is a framework agreement that is to be followed by "an action plan with specific measures to advance security cooperation" in particular areas, ranging from sea-lane safety and defense collaboration to disaster management and counterterrorism. How momentous this Oct. 22 accord is can be seen from the fact that Japan has such a security agreement with only one other country — Australia.

Tokyo, of course, has been tied to the United States militarily since 1951 through a treaty designed to meet American demands that U.S. troops remain stationed in Japan even after the American occupation ended. Today that treaty — revised in 1960 — is a linchpin of the American forward-military deployment strategy in the Asian theater.

The Indo-Japanese defense accord adds another pillar to the idea of building quadrilateral strategic cooperation among the four major democracies in the Asia-Pacific region — Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. The only missing link in this quad is an Australia-India defense pact. The three states other than India are not only tied together through bilateral security arrangements, but also have a trilateral strategic-dialogue mechanism.

India, Japan and the U.S., for their part, held their first trilateral naval maneuvers near Tokyo in April 2007, and the three then teamed with Australia and Singapore for major war games in the Bay of Bengal five months later. Furthermore, the close coordination established among the Indian, Japanese, Australian and U.S. military contingents in rescue operations following the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami helped spawn a disaster-relief mission.

It is only a matter of time before Australia and India forge closer defense ties. Canberra actually took an important first step in that direction by initialing a memorandum of understanding on defense cooperation with New Delhi in 2006. This was followed by a bilateral arrangement to share classified information on maritime security, fragile states, counterterrorism and peacekeeping.

During a recent visit to India, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said: "Australia wants to further strengthen our defense links with India, and we are particularly pleased to have reached an agreement this year that our chiefs of defense forces will meet annually."

The Indo-Japanese security agreement, signed during Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Tokyo, is modeled on the March 2007 Japan-Australia defense accord. Both are in the form of a joint declaration on security cooperation. And both, while recognizing a common commitment to democracy, freedom, human rights and the rule of law, obligate the two sides to work together to build not just bilateral defense cooperation, but also security in the Asia-Pacific.

But unlike distant Australia with its relatively benign security environment, India and Japan are China’s next-door neighbors and worry that Beijing’s accumulating power and growing assertiveness could create a Sino-centric Asia. Canberra, in contrast, wishes to balance its relations with Tokyo and Beijing, and loves to cite the new reality that, for the first time, Australia’s largest trading partner (China) is no longer the same as its main security anchor (U.S.).

But there is nothing unique about this situation. It is a testament to Beijing’s rising global economic clout that China is also Japan’s largest trade partner and is poised to similarly become India’s in a couple of years. On the other hand, two of India’s most-important bilateral relationships — with Russia and Japan — suffer from hideously low trade volumes.

Trade in today’s market-driven world is not constrained by political differences — unless political barriers have been erected, as the U.S. has done against Cuba and Burma, for example. In fact, as world history testifies, booming trade is not a guarantee of moderation and restraint between states. The new global fault lines show that that it was a mistake to believe that greater economic interdependence by itself would improve international geopolitics. Better politics is as important as better economics.

Close security ties, however, serve as the bedrock of an economic partnership, as between America and Japan, and between the U.S. and Europe.

Canberra has consciously sought to downplay its defense accord with Tokyo to the extent that, nearly a year after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd took office, a visitor seeking to access the text of that agreement on the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) Web site is greeted by this message: "Sorry, the page you asked for has been temporarily removed from the site. . . . Following the recent Australian federal election, the content of this page is under review until further notice." Indeed, Rudd’s Labor Party, while in the opposition ranks, had openly cast doubt on the utility and wisdom of that agreement.

In that light, it is no surprise that beyond their similarly structured format, including the mirrored requirement for a followup action plan, the Japanese-Australian and Indo-Japanese agreements carry different strategic import. The one between Tokyo and New Delhi is plainly designed to contribute to Asian power equilibrium. The partnership, as the two prime ministers said in their separate Oct. 22 joint statement, forms an "essential pillar for the future architecture" of security in the Asia-Pacific.

By contrast, the Australian-Japanese agreement carries little potential to become an abiding element of a future Asia-Pacific security architecture, given the two parties’ contrasting strategic motivations and Canberra’s attempts from the outset to package it as a functional arrangement devoid of geopolitical aims.

Tellingly, the push for that accord had come from then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the architect of the Quadrilateral Initiative — founded on the concept of democratic peace. And it was the Mandarin-speaking Rudd who this year pulled the plug on that nascent initiative, which had held only one meeting.

In fact, the significance of the Indo-Japanese agreement truly parallels the 2005 Indo-U.S. defense framework accord, which signaled a major transformation of the once-estranged relationship between the world’s most-populous and most-powerful democracies. Both those agreements focus on counterterrorism, disaster response, safety of sea lanes, nonproliferation, bilateral and multilateral military exercises, peace operations, and defense dialogue and cooperation. But the former has not only been signed at a higher level — prime ministerial — but also comes with a key element: "policy coordination on regional affairs in the Asia-Pacific region and on long-term strategic and global issues."

This is an agreement between equals on enhancing mutual security. By contrast, the U.S.-India defense agreement, with its emphasis on U.S. arms sales, force interoperability and intelligence sharing, aims to build India as a new junior partner (or spoke) as part of a web of interlocking bilateral arrangements that mesh with America’s hub-and-spoke global alliance system undergirding U.S. interests.

It is doubtful, however, that the U.S., despite the defense accord and the subsequent nuclear deal, would succeed in roping in India as a new ally in a patron-client framework. In a fast-changing world characterized by a qualitative reordering of power — with even Tokyo and Berlin seeking to discreetly reclaim their foreign-policy autonomy — U.S. policymakers are unlikely to be able to mold India into a Japan or Germany to America.

The security agreement with Japan — still the world’s second-largest economic powerhouse after the U.S. — jibes well with India’s desire to pursue omnidirectional cooperation for mutual benefit with key players.

Japan and India indeed are natural allies, with no negative historical legacy and no conflict of strategic interest. Rather, they share common goals to build stability and institutionalized cooperation in Asia and make the 20th-century international institutions and rules more suitable for the 21st-century world. They are establishing a "strategic and global partnership" that is driven, as their new agreement states, "by converging long-term political, economic and strategic interests, aspirations and concerns."

Both countries are energy-poor and heavily dependent on oil imports by sea from the Persian Gulf region. They are seriously concerned by mercantilist efforts to assert control over energy supplies and transport routes.

Such is the fast-developing nature of their relationship that the two, besides holding a yearly summit meeting, have now instituted multiple strategic dialogues involving their foreign and defense ministers and national security advisers, as well as "service-to-service exchanges including bilateral and multilateral exercises." The Indian and Japanese space agencies are also to cooperate as part of capacity-building efforts in disaster management.

The proposed broad-based strategic collaboration makes sense because the balance of power in Asia will be determined as much by events along the Indian Ocean rim as in East Asia.

However, it will be simplistic to see such cooperation one-dimensionally as aimed at countervailing China’s growing might. Beijing itself is pursuing a range of bilateral and multilateral initiatives in Asia to underpin its strategic objectives and help shape Asian security trends — from weapon sales to countries from Iran to Indonesia and port-building along the Indian Ocean rim, to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and strategic corridors through Pakistan and Burma.

Given China’s territorial size, population (one-fifth of the human race) and economic dynamism, few can question or begrudge its right to be a world power. In fact, such is its sense of where it wishes to go that China cannot be dissuaded from the notion that it is destined to emerge, to quote then President Jiang Zemin, as "a world power second to none."

Yet at the core of the challenge that an opaque China poses to Asian stability is the need for like-minded states to engineer subtle limits that could help forestall Chinese power from sliding into arrogance or strategic confrontation. With U.S. clout in Asia beginning to erode and American interests getting increasingly intertwined with the Chinese economy, Japan and India are interested not in gaining pre-eminence in Asia but in thwarting ambitions of pre-eminence.

Against that background, why begrudge the efforts of Asia’s two largest and most-established democracies to work together to avert Asian power disequilibrium? Never before in history have China, India and Japan all been strong at the same time.

Today, they need to find ways to reconcile their interests in Asia so that they can peacefully coexist and prosper. But there can be no denying that these three leading Asian powers and the U.S. have different playbooks: America wants a unipolar world but a multipolar Asia; China seeks a multipolar world but a unipolar Asia; and India and Japan desire a multipolar Asia and multipolar world.

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

The Japan Times: Monday, Nov. 3, 2008

Japan, India sign landmark security agreement on October 22, 2008

Posted on November 1, 2008 by Chellaney

Toward Asian power equilibrium

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindu newspaper, November 1, 2008

Last week’s Indo-Japanese security accord is momentous, with Tokyo and New Delhi having concluded such an agreement with only one other country each — Australia and the U.S., respectively. Its significance actually parallels the 2005 Indo-U.S. defence framework accord. But while the latter seeks to mould India into America’s junior partner, the former is between equals to help contribute to Asian power stability.

The India-Japan security agreement signed last week marks a significant milestone in building Asian power equilibrium. A constellation of Asian states linked by strategic cooperation and sharing common interests is becoming critical to instituting power stability at a time when major shifts in economic and political power are accentuating Asia’s security challenges.

What Tokyo and New Delhi have signed is a framework agreement, to be followed up with “an action plan with specific measures to advance security cooperation” in particular areas, ranging from sea-lane safety and defence collaboration to disaster management and counterterrorism. How momentous this accord is can be seen from the fact that Japan has such a security agreement with only one other country — Australia.

Tokyo, of course, has been tied to the United States militarily since 1951 through a treaty that was designed to meet American demands that U.S. troops remain stationed in Japan even after the end of the American occupation of Japan. Today, that treaty — revised in 1960 — is the linchpin of the American forward-military deployment strategy in the Asian theatre.

The Indo-Japanese security agreement, signed during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit, is actually modelled on the March 2007 Japan-Australia defence accord. Both are in the form of a joint declaration on security cooperation. And both, while recognising a common commitment to democracy, freedom, human rights and the rule of law, obligate the two sides to work together to build not just bilateral defence cooperation but also security in the Asia-Pacific.

But unlike distant Australia with its relatively benign security environment, India and Japan are China’s next-door neighbours and worry that Beijing’s accumulating power could fashion a Sino-centric Asia. Canberra, quite the opposite, wishes to balance its relations with Tokyo and Beijing, and loves to cite the new reality that, for the first time, Australia’s largest trading partner (China) is no longer the same as its main security anchor (the U.S.).

But there is nothing unique about this situation. It is a testament to Beijing’s rising global economic clout that China is also Japan’s largest trade partner now and is poised to similarly become India’s in a couple of years. On the other hand, two of India’s most-important bilateral relationships — with Russia and Japan — suffer from hideously low trade volumes.

Canberra has consciously sought to downplay its defence accord with Tokyo to the extent that, nearly a year after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd took office, a visitor seeking to access the text of that agreement on the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) website is greeted by this message: “Sorry, the page you asked for has been temporarily removed from the site — Following the recent Australian federal election, the content of this page is under review until further notice.” Indeed, Mr. Rudd’s Labour Party, while in opposition ranks, had openly cast doubt on the diplomatic utility of that agreement.

In that light, it is no surprise that beyond their similarly structured format, including the mirrored requirement for a follow-up action plan, the Japanese-Australian and Indo-Japanese agreements carry different strategic import. The one between Tokyo and New Delhi is plainly designed to contribute to building Asian power equilibrium. The Indo-Japanese partnership, as the two Prime Ministers said in their separate joint statement, forms an “essential pillar for the future architecture” of security in the Asia-Pacific.

By contrast, the Australian-Japanese agreement carries little potential to become an abiding element of a future Asian-Pacific security architecture, given the two parties’ contrasting strategic motivations and Canberra’s attempts from the outset to package it as a functional arrangement devoid of geopolitical aims. Tellingly, the push for that accord had come from the then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the architect of the Quadrilateral Initiative. And it was Mr. Rudd who this year pulled the plug on that initiative, founded on the concept of democratic peace.

The significance of the Indo-Japanese agreement truly parallels the 2005 Indo-U.S. defence framework accord, which signalled a major transformation of the once-estranged relationship between the world’s most populous and most powerful democracies. Both those agreements focus on counterterrorism, disaster response, safety of sea-lanes of communications, non-proliferation, bilateral and multilateral military exercises, peace operations, and defence dialogue and cooperation. But the former has not only been signed at a higher level — prime ministerial — but also comes with a key element: “policy coordination on regional affairs in the Asia-Pacific region and on long-term strategic and global issues.”

This is an agreement between equals on enhancing mutual security. By contrast, the U.S.-India defence agreement, with its emphasis on U.S. arms sales, force interoperability and intelligence sharing, aims to build India as a new junior partner (or spoke) in a web of interlocking bilateral arrangements meshing with America’s hub-and-spoke alliance system, designed to undergird U.S. interests.

It is, however, doubtful that the U.S., despite the defence accord and the subsequent nuclear deal, would succeed in roping in India as a new ally in a patron-client framework. In a fast-changing world characterised by a qualitative reordering of power — with even Tokyo and Berlin seeking to discreetly reclaim their foreign policy autonomy — U.S. policymakers are unlikely to be able to mould India into a new Japan or Germany to America, notwithstanding the help from Indian neocons.

In keeping with its long-standing preference for strategic independence, India is likely to retain the option to forge different partnerships with varied players to pursue a variety of interests in diverse settings. That means that from being nonaligned, India is likely to become multialigned. The security agreement with Japan — still the world’s second largest economic powerhouse after the U.S. — jibes well with India’s desire to pursue omnidirectional cooperation for mutual benefit with key players.

Japan and India indeed are natural allies, with no negative historical legacy and no conflict of strategic interest. Rather, they share common goals to build stability and institutionalised cooperation in Asia and to make the 20th century international institutions and rules more suitable for the 21st century world. They are establishing a “strategic and global partnership” that is driven, as their new agreement states, “by converging long-term political, economic and strategic interests, aspirations and concerns.”

Such is the fast-developing nature of this relationship that the two, besides holding a yearly summit meeting, have instituted multiple strategic dialogues involving their Foreign and Defence Ministers and national security advisers, as well as “service-to-service exchanges including bilateral and multilateral exercises.” After all, the balance of power in Asia will be determined by events as much in the Indian Ocean rim as in East Asia. The Indian and Japanese space agencies are also to cooperate as part of capacity-building efforts in disaster management.

It will be simplistic to see such cooperation one-dimensionally, as aimed at countervailing China’s growing might. Beijing itself is pursuing a range of bilateral and multilateral initiatives in Asia to underpin its strategic objectives and help shape Asian security trends — from weapon sales to countries stretching from Iran to Indonesia and port building projects in the Indian Ocean rim, to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and north-south strategic corridors through Pakistan and Burma.

Given China’s territorial size, population (a fifth of the human race) and economic dynamism, few can question or grudge its right to be a world power. In fact, such is its sense of where it wishes to go that China cannot be dissuaded from the notion that it is destined to emerge, in the words of the then President Jiang Zemin, as “a world power second to none.”

Against that background, why begrudge the efforts of Asia’s two largest and most established democracies to work together to avert an Asian power disequilibrium? Never before in history have China, India and Japan been all strong at the same time. Today, they need to find ways to reconcile their interests in Asia so that they can peacefully coexist and prosper. But there can be no denying that these three leading Asian powers and the U.S. have different playbooks: the U.S. wants a unipolar world but a multipolar Asia; China seeks a multipolar world but a unipolar Asia; and India and Japan desire a multipolar Asia and multipolar world.

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

Lessons for today’s India from the 1962 Chinese invasion

Posted on September 21, 2008 by Chellaney

The Art of War

Jawaharlal Nehru blundered when it came to China. There are serious lessons to be learnt from him — especially today.

Review by Brahma Chellaney

The Hindustan Times, September 21, 2008

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Are We Deceiving Ourselves Again? Lessons the Chinese Taught Pandit Nehru But Which We Still Refuse to Learn

Arun Shourie

ASA/Rupa
Rs. 395, Pages 214

India and China are both adept at playing with numbers. While China invented the abacus, India conceived the binary and the decimal systems. But India, having forsaken the Kautilyan principles, has proven no match to China’s Sun Tzu-style statecraft. As a result, India has found itself repeatedly betrayed. Indeed, it wasn’t geography but guns — the sudden occupation of the traditional buffer, Tibet, soon after the communists seized power in Beijing — that made China India’s neighbour. Jawaharlal Nehru later admitted he didn’t anticipate the swiftness of the Chinese takeover of Tibet because he had been “led to believe by the Chinese foreign office that the Chinese would settle the future of Tibet in a peaceful manner”.

Shourie’s well-researched, powerfully written book — his 24^th in an extraordinary career that has spanned academics, journalism and politics — relies on Nehru’s letters, speeches, notes and other correspondence to bring out the significance, in Nehru’s own words, of the events from the 1950-51 fall of Tibet to China’s 1962 invasion. The author then draws 31 lessons from those developments for today’s India.

After all, there are important parallels, as Shourie points out, between the situation pre-1962 and the situation now. Border talks are regressing, Chinese claims on Indian territories are becoming publicly assertive, Chinese cross-border incursions are rising, and India’s China policy is becoming feckless. Indeed, what stands out in the history of Sino-Indian disputes is that India has always been on the defensive against a country that first moved its frontiers hundreds of miles south by annexing Tibet, then furtively nibbled at Indian territories before waging open war, and now lays claims to additional Indian territories. By contrast, on neuralgic subjects like Tibet, Beijing’s public language still matches the crudeness and callousness with which it sought in 1962, in Premier Zhou Enlai’s words, to “teach India a lesson”.

India’s crushing rout in 1962 hastened the death of Nehru, “a fervent patriot,” according to Shourie, who “misled himself and thereby brought severe trauma upon the country, a country that he loved and served with such ardour”. The defeat transformed Nehru from a world statesman to a beaten, shattered politician.

A classic example of Nehru’s self-delusion cited by the author is the following note he wrote on July 9, 1949, to the country’s top career diplomat: “Whatever may be the ultimate fate of Tibet in relation to China, I think there is practically no chance of any military danger to India arising from any change in Tibet. Geographically, this is very difficult and practically it would be a foolish adventure. If India is to be influenced or an attempt made to bring pressure on her, Tibet is not the route for it. I do not think there is any necessity for our defence ministry, or any part of it, to consider possible military repercussions on the India-Tibetan frontier. The event is remote and may not arise at all”.

What Nehru naively saw as a “foolish adventure” was mounted within months by China. What Nehru asserted was geographically impracticable became a geopolitical reality that has impacted on Indian security like no other development since the 20^th century.

Right up to 1949, Nehru kept referring to the “Tibetan government” and to Tibet and India as “our two countries”. But no sooner had China begun gobbling up Tibet than Nehru’s stance changed. He started advising Tibetan representatives, as Shourie brings out, to go to Beijing and plead for autonomy. By 1954, through the infamous “Panchsheel Agreement”, Nehru had not only surrendered India’s extra-territorial rights in Tibet but also recognized “the Tibet region of China” — without securing any quid pro quo, such as the Chinese acceptance of the McMahon Line.

From Nehru’s grudging acceptance of Chinese suzerainty to Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s blithe acceptance of full Chinese sovereignty, India has incrementally shed its main card — Tibet — and thereby allowed the aggressor state to shift the spotlight from its annexation of Tibet and Aksai Chin to its newly assertive claims on Arunachal Pradesh. The irony is that by laying claims to additional Indian territories on the basis of their purported ties to Tibet, China blatantly plays the Tibet card against India, going to the extent of citing the birth in Tawang of one of the earlier Dalai Lamas, a politico-religious institution it has systematically sought to destroy. Yet India remains coy to play the Tibet card against China.

The sum effect of failing to use Tibet as a bargaining chip has been that India first lost Aksai Chin, then more territory in 1962 and now is seeking to fend off Chinese claims to Arunachal Pradesh. And as Shourie reminds his readers, India has still to grasp that the Chinese modus operandi of promising a peaceful settlement and then employing force to change facts on the ground is an old practice. The lessons he paints — from not running policy on hope to ensuring peace by building capability to defend peace — are words of warning no leadership ought to ignore.

Shourie’s book is a call for a down-the-earth Indian policy which, without pushing any panic buttons, begins to build better Himalayan security and countervailing leverage to ensure that China’s growing power does not slide into arrogance and renewed aggression. After all, China’s dramatic rise as a world power in just one generation under authoritarian rule represents the first direct challenge to liberal democracy since the rise of fascism in the 1930s. But just as India has been battered by growing terrorism because of its location next to the global epicentre of terror, it could bear the brunt from its geographical proximity to an increasingly assertive China.

Brahma Chellaney is a political commentator

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=cecc03dd-2d15-417e-8817-16cb0ca4b7fa

Befriend China, Don’t Propitiate

Posted on August 11, 2008 by Chellaney

Sending A Wrong Signal

Sonia Gandhi’s Beijing visit is not good diplomacy

Brahma Chellaney, The Times of India, August 11, 2008

Vision, consistency and tenacity are critical to good diplomacy. Nothing can undermine foreign policy more than spur-of-the-moment initiatives or actions based on personal whims and fancies. Pragmatic foreign policy, as legendary French diplomat Charles-Maurice de Tellyrand-Périgord said, cannot display too much zeal. In that light, Sonia Gandhi’s sudden decision to go to the Beijing Olympics runs counter to the central precepts of sound diplomacy.

That this is her second visit to China in less than a year smacks not just of overzealousness but borders on indiscretion, coming as it does in the face of mounting Chinese assertiveness. Her previous visit last October, in the company of son Rahul Gandhi, was ill-timed because it followed several provocative Chinese actions, including Beijing publicly upping the ante on territorial disputes, compelling India to call off an IAS officers’ tour by denying a visa to an Arunachali officer, and repudiating a 2005 agreement that any border-related settlement should not disturb settled populations. Her latest visit, with members of her extended family, follows more Chinese provocations, including border incidents (like the demolition of makeshift Indian army bunkers at the Sikkim-Bhutan-Tibet trijunction) and the post-midnight summoning of the Indian ambassador.

Reciprocity is the first principle of diplomacy. While no senior Chinese official has visited India since President Hu Jintao’s late 2006 stopover, a steady stream of Indian functionaries have continued to go to Beijing, even as Defence Minister A.K. Anthony put on public record recently India’s concern over rising Chinese cross-border incursions. This year alone, China has played host first to the prime minister, then to the external affairs minister and now to Sonia Gandhi, with Manmohan Singh set to return to Beijing in October for the ASEM summit. Sonia’s visit comes shortly after China slighted External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee by cancelling his scheduled meeting with Premier Wen Jiabao and deputing a junior functionary to receive earthquake-related relief from him.

That was not the only diplomatic snub by China recently. It publicly extended an Olympic opening-ceremony invitation to the most powerful person in India but not to the Indian president or prime minister, although under International Olympic Committee rules such invitations are the prerogative of each participating country’s national Olympic committee. The message was clear: Beijing does not care much for the duly elected Indian government but knows where actual power resides and what strings to pull in India. It also correctly calculated that unlike Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown, Stephen Harper, Donald Tusk and other leaders who are staying away from the Games, Sonia Gandhi will not fuss about the continuing repression in Tibet or China and attend, even though the Tibet issue is much closer to India’s interests than to the boycotters’.

Sonia’s fascination with China, as this writer learned long ago in a one-to-one meeting with her, dates back to her 1988 Beijing visit with late husband Rajiv Gandhi. The Chinese leadership rolled out all the pomp and pageantry, although that visit followed the 1987 Sumdorong Chu military showdown that brought war clouds out of a clear blue sky. Beijing’s perception of Sonia as someone it can work with was reinforced by her visit last October, when it accorded her a welcome fit for a head of state.

Her latest visit, at a time when China has stepped up pressure on India, will only help engender more Chinese pressure. By sowing confusion in India’s China policy, it not only sends out a message incongruous with Indian interest, but also unconsciously plays into Beijing’s game-plan to belittle the elected government as ineffectual and rudderless and reach out to her. Beijing is content that the Indian officialdom has fallen into the Chinese trap of talking about talks in a never-ending process. That leaves China free to pursue “congagement” with India, a blend of containment symbolized by aggressive flanking manoeuvres and engagement aided through the instrumentality of Sonia Gandhi.

In a year in which Chinese security forces cracked down harshly on Tibetans, the Olympics have focused global attention on China’s poor human-rights record. Yet, given India’s stake in stable, peaceful ties with China, New Delhi was right not to boycott the Games ceremony, deputing the sports minister to represent India. Befriend, not propitiate, ought to be the thrust of Indian policy. Sonia’s visit, however, throws a spanner in the carefully calibrated Indian approach.

Her visit cannot be defended as personal or apolitical, for her presence at the Games ceremony sends out a potent political message. To go with children and grandchildren and treat the trip as all fun and games will be out of step with her political status. After all, she heads India’s ruling party and her son is its general secretary. A jaunt fraught with foreign-policy implications is irreconcilable with such standing.

Sonia Gandhi’s life story is like a fairy tale come true: an au pair who marries Prince Charming and rises to become the most powerful figure in a distant foreign land she makes her home. Her ascension from humble origins is as much a tribute to her grit as to the openness of her adopted country. But while India celebrates diversity, China honours homogeneity. Sonia has to realize she is dealing with a state that has replaced Maoism with nationalism as the legitimating credo of the 59-year-old communist rule. And the element of homogeny is implanted in both its institutional structures and popular thought.

Ad hoc, personality-driven approach is no way to deal with such a state that calculatedly plays to its national pride and resolutely pursues long-term strategic interests. To upstage your own government through presence at China’s coming-out party is no mean matter. Once the party is over, it may not be long before China takes its gloves off. Given its growing bellicosity, can anyone discount the possibility that it may try to give India a bloody nose through a lightening but localized military expedition?

Jawaharlal Nehru had advised that the 1962 invasion become “a permanent piece of education”. Today, not only have the lessons of 1962 been forgotten, but also the flurry of Indian officials visiting Beijing for the party shows the manner India’s self-esteem is ebbing.

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research.

To handle China, be a bit Chinese

Posted on July 31, 2008 by Chellaney

Beat them at their own game

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, July 30, 2008

As an extension of the truisms of politics, like sunny beats gloomy, Beijing has devised its own positive slogans that its diplomats love to recite, such as a “win-win situation” and “common goals”. Such sloganeering provides diplomatic cover for the assertive promotion of Chinese interests. India needs to similarly strike an upbeat note and emphasize positives like “constructive engagement” and “shared benefits”. And through such catchphrases, New Delhi ought to publicly encourage Beijing to have a more “forward-looking approach” and shed the current negatives in its approach.

For example, China’s harking back to the past — to the unfinished business of 1962 — by laying claim to additional Indian territories runs counter to the constructive spirit essential to a win-win situation. Its pressing of increasingly assertive territorial claims on the basis of Tibet’s putative historical ties to those areas shows a mindset anchored in the past. That is a loss-loss situation, not a win-win situation. Similarly, China’s reluctance, while stepping up cross-border intrusions, to define the frontline with India by hiding behind shibboleths like, “It’s a problem left over from history” and “We need time and patience”, needs to be openly challenged as unconstructive, uncooperative and downright negative, with the intent to keep India under pressure.

India’s use of positives to bring out China’s negatives has become imperative in view of the rising Chinese belligerence, manifest from the proliferation of incursions and other border-related incidents since 2006 along a once-tranquil line of actual control (LAC). Even Defence Minister A. K. Antony was constrained to admit on July 23 that India is “concerned” over the increasing frequency of Chinese incursions. “We don’t take these things lightly”, he said. Such military incidents are proof that China’s negatives do not sit well with its claims.

Beijing, not content that Han territorial power is at its pinnacle, still seeks a Greater China. With 60 per cent of its present landmass comprising homelands of ethnic minorities, modern China has come a long way in history since the time the Great Wall represented the Han empire’s outer security perimeter. Yet, driven by self-cultivated myths, the state fuels territorial nationalism, centred on issues like Tibet and Taiwan, and its claims in the East and South China Seas and on Arunachal Pradesh — a state nearly thrice the size of Taiwan. China’s insistence on further expanding its national frontiers stymies a forward-thinking approach essential to building peace and stability in Asia.

The challenge China poses emanates principally from the character of its regime, not of its people. After all, weapons don’t kill until those holding the reins of power employ them. The military machine has been repeatedly unleashed against China’s own residents. The Chinese regime fans ultra-nationalism because the central tenet of its philosophy is uniformity, with Hu Jintao’s slogan of a “harmonious society” designed to undergird the theme of conformity with the state. While India celebrates diversity, China honours homogeneity. This quality of being uniform is implanted not just in institutions but also in popular thought.

Building consensus in democratic states entails reaching out to political opponents. In China, consensus is contrived simply through censorship, which snuffs out dissent. To stay healthy and to improve, a society needs an open, vigorous debate of its failings. But when a regime blocks such discussion, it can mean trouble for its inhabitants (as the latest repression in Tibet shows) and for its neighbours (as underlined by Beijing’s increasingly muscular foreign policy). The greatest genocide in modern history was not the Holocaust but Mao’s so-called Great Leap Forward.

That record, coupled with the counterproductive approach toward Tibet and India, belies the myth that Chinese rulers are pragmatic and farsighted. Indeed, the record shows them as proverbial extremists, lurching from one end of the pendulum (hardcore communists) to the other extreme (unabashed capitalists). Whom they denounced as China’s enemies in the past are the very nations they zealously befriend today. They pursued policies previously that had no regard for human costs. Today, they pursue policies with little respect for the environment.

The secretive, suspicious and paternalistic culture in which Chinese leaders have been reared is reflected in their shadowy and shifty policy toward India. To tackle a regime wedded to nationalism as state religion and opacity as strategy, New Delhi needs greater clarity and resolve on the ends and means of its China policy. In fact, to outwit this regime at its own game, New Delhi should be willing to employ some of the Chinese tactics and tools. In order words, to handle China, emulate the Chinese.

While publicly speaking the language of conciliation, New Delhi has to brace up to the prospect that once the Olympics are over, Beijing may be tempted to provoke more military incidents, especially if India’s domestic politics remain murky and policy in disarray. A full-scale war will militate against the regime’s portrayal of China as a peaceful rising power. But can anyone discount the possibility that it may seek to achieve limited strategic objectives through short, swift, localized forays across a couple of points along the LAC that give India a bloody nose? A lightening Chinese military expedition may be designed to cut a peer rival down to size in the eyes of the world and help end the now-fashionable China-India pairing the regime viscerally detests.

Growing Chinese assertiveness against India

Posted on July 22, 2008 by Chellaney

China’s next India war

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, July 16-31, 2008

China’s rapidly accumulating power is emboldening Beijing to pursue a more muscular foreign policy. After having touted its “peaceful rise”, it has shown a creeping propensity to flex its muscles — a tendency that has become more pronounced since it surprised the world with an anti-satellite weapon test in January 2007. Once the Beijing Olympics are over, it may not be long before China takes its gloves off. In fact, over the past year, its actions have ranged from provocatively seeking to assert its jurisdiction over islets claimed by Vietnam and staging large-scale war games in the South and East China Seas, to showcasing its new nuclear submarine capability and whipping up diplomatic spats with countries that grant official hospitality to the Dalai Lama.

What stands out the most is the perceptible hardening of China’s stance towards India. This is manifest from the Chinese military assertiveness on the ground (reflected in rising cross-border incursions), the supply of Chinese arms to rebels in India’s northeast, the instigation of the Gorkhaland agitation via Nepal connections, and the waging of intermittent cyberwarfare by targeting official Indian Web sites. From Chinese forces in November 2007 destroying some makeshift Indian army bunkers near Doka La, at the Sikkim-Bhutan-Tibet trijunction, to the Chinese foreign minister’s May 2007 message that Beijing no longer was bound by a 2005 agreement that any border-related settlement should not disturb settled populations, bellicosity has been writ large.

Recent unfriendly actions include the post-midnight summoning of the Indian ambassador in Beijing, slighting visiting External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee by cancelling his scheduled meeting with Premier Wen Jiabao, and deputing a junior functionary to receive earthquake-related relief from Mukherjee. These and other actions run counter to the stated aim of the high-level visits between the two countries to build a stable Sino-Indian relationship based on equilibrium and forward thinking. The public statements coming out from such visits, of course, are deceptively all sweetness and light.

The big question is: What objectives is China seeking to achieve by hardening its position? Indeed, it has gone to the extent of warning India of another 1962-style invasion through one of its state-run institutes. In a recent Mandarin-language commentary posted on the Web site of the International Institute of Strategic Studies of China, http://www.chinaiiss.org/, the author, using an assumed name, cautioned an “arrogant India” not “to be evil” or else Chinese forces in war “will not pull back 30 kilometres” like in 1962. Such belligerence, which has led to more than three dozen Chinese military forays into Sikkim alone this year, has prompted India to redeploy forces by beefing up defences in the vulnerable Siliguri Corridor, stationing Sukhoi-30s in Tezpur and initiating moves to reactivate seven abandoned airstrips along the Himalayas.

China’s motives remain a puzzle. Yet there are several disturbing parallels between what is happening now and the events between 1959 and 1962 that led to the Chinese invasion. That aggression had been cleverly timed to coincide with the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of a nuclear Armageddon. Consider the following parallels:

■ Like in the pre-war period, it has now again become commonplace internationally to speak of India and China in the same breadth. The aim of “Mao’s India war” in 1962, as Harvard professor Roderick MacFarquhar has called it, was mainly political: to cut India to size by demolishing what it represented — a pluralistic, democratic model to China’s totalitarian political system. As Premier Zhou Enlai publicly admitted then, the war was intended “to teach India a lesson”. The swiftness and force with which Mao Zedong managed to teach India a lesson not only discredited the Indian model in the eyes of the world, but boosted China’s international image and consolidated the Chinese strongman’s internal power to the extent that he could go from his disastrous 1957-61 Great Leap Forward — the greatest genocide in modern history, surpassing even the Holocaust — to wreaking more damage in the name of the Cultural Revolution.

It has taken India more than 45 years to again be paired with China — a comparison Beijing viscerally loathes.

■ In the Mao years, China instigated and armed major insurgencies in India’s northeast. That included the Naga rebels, with the China-trained Thuingaleng Muivah still the military chief of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah faction); the Mizo guerrilla movement whose leader Laldenga was openly embraced by Chinese leaders; and Manipur’s so-called People’s Liberation Army. Such assistance ceased after Mao’s death. But today, China may be coming full circle, with Chinese-made arms increasingly flowing into guerrilla ranks in the northeast. Although an 11-year-old ceasefire between Naga militants and New Delhi has brought peace to Nagaland, several other parts of the northeast are today wracked by insurgencies, allowing Beijing to fish in troubled waters.

■ Like in the period up to 1962, there is a mismatch today between Indian talk and capability, offering a potential incentive to China to try and put India in its place. India’s power pretensions today are such that it believes it can punch above its weight. Yet the gaps in its defences make the parallel with the pre-1962 period glaring.

More than a decade after it went overtly nuclear, the country still lacks a barely minimal deterrent against China. To have peace with China, India needs to be able to defend peace. The advantages China has over India in military infrastructure and logistics, size of conventional forces and being on the upper heights can be neutralized only through an effective nuclear-missile capability. But India has still to deploy its first Beijing-reachable missile. Three decades after China tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile, India doesn’t have an ICBM programme even in the pipeline, although it is spending a staggering $3.4 billion on a lunar project bereft of security benefits. While Jawaharlal Nehru made the mistake of chasing romantic goals, the present prime minister has consciously chosen deal-making over deterrent-building.

■ Mirroring the confusion in New Delhi’s Beijing policy from the mid-1950s to 1962, India today lacks clarity on the ends and means of its strategy vis-à-vis China. Just as there was a propensity in the pre-war period to take Chinese statements at face value and condone furtive Chinese moves, including the nibbling at Indian territory, the Indian establishment today willingly makes allowances for China’s assertiveness. Nothing better illustrates this than army chief Gen. Deepak Kapoor’s public assertion that India is as culpable as China in committing cross-border intrusions. His shocking statement not only made light of the increasing number of Chinese incursions, but also implicitly condoned China’s calculated refusal to clarify the frontline. To say the “Chinese have a different perception” of the frontline, as he did, is to disregard the fact that it suits China not to clarify the line of control and keep India under military pressure.

Such wanton indulgence — reminiscent of India’s pre-war miscalculations — can only embolden China to step up intrusions. In another reminder of that era, New Delhi first sought to sweep under the rug the November 2007 Chinese military action near Doka La, only to sheepishly admit the truth four months later, with Pranab Mukherjee telling Parliament last March that although Beijing accepts the Sikkim-Tibet border “as settled in the Anglo-Sikkim Convention of 1890”, “some bunkers have been destroyed and some activities have taken place”.

■ Just as India retreated to a defensive position in the border negotiations with Beijing at the beginning of the 1960s after having undermined its leverage through its formal acceptance of the “Tibet region of China”, New Delhi today has drawn back to an untenable negotiating position. Instead of gently shining the spotlight on the core issue of Tibet and China’s continuing occupation of Aksai Chin, India is willing to discuss the newly assertive Chinese claim on Tawang. By contrast, Beijing sticks to its tested old line that what it occupies is Chinese territory and what it claims is also Chinese territory. So what it claims has to on the negotiating table — a cynical stance India meekly countenances.

As a consequence, the wounds of that 32-day war have been kept open by China’s claims to additional Indian areas even as it holds on to the territorial gains of that conflict.

The reality is that the trans-Himalayan military equations have been significantly changed by China’s July 2006 opening of the new railway to Lhasa. The railway, which is now being extended southward to Xigatse and then beyond to Nepal and to two separate points along the Indian border, arms Beijing with a rapid military deployment capability. It may not be a coincidence that China’s growing hardline approach has followed its infrastructure advances on the vast but sparsely populated Tibetan plateau, including the building of the railway and new airfields and highways. It is now constructing the world’s highest airport at Ngari, on the southwestern edge of Tibet.

India can expect little respite from the direct and surrogate pressure China is mounting. Through Burma, Bangladesh and Nepal, it will seek to destabilize the northeast. It will continue to prop up Pakistan militarily to help keep India boxed in on the subcontinent. In fact, it is now seeking to do a Burma in Sri Lanka by emerging as a key arms supplier to Colombo and building a billion-dollar port at Hambantota. More broadly, China has aggressively pursued port-related projects in the Indian Ocean rim countries. The symbols of such Chinese activity include Hambantota, Chittagong and Gwadar, now being expanded into a deepwater naval base.

China’s ravenous pursuit of resources, including in India’s periphery, is another factor New Delhi cannot ignore. Constraints on resources are likely to become pronounced as more and more Indians and Chinese gain income to embrace modern comforts. The global demand for resources is set to soar, along with their prices. Beijing’s energy-import needs have come handy to expand Chinese maritime presence along vital sea-lanes.

An imperial energy age indeed appears to be dawning as a result of China’s aggressive resources-related diplomacy. Consider the following developments:

● The emergence of a 21st-century, energy-related Great Game, with China outmanoeuvring India. Beijing has used its rising energy imports as justification for openly advancing military objectives. While conserving its own oil-and-gas reserves, it has stepped up imports — a strategy it is also pursuing on key minerals. For example, it has more iron-ore reserves than India, yet 52 per cent of Indian exports to China now consist of just one item — iron ore.

● Determined efforts to assert control over energy supplies and transport routes, including mercantilist moves to lock up long-term supplies. Such is China’s emphasis on legal ownership that it has been buying energy assets in faraway lands often at inflated prices.

The popular perception is that Chinese and Indian energy companies are engaged in fierce bidding wars to acquire overseas assets. But the cash-rich Chinese companies have easily beaten Indian competition everywhere. The only exception was the Akpo deepwater oil field in Nigeria, where India’s ONGC won the right to buy South Atlantic Petroleum’s 45 per cent stake. The irony, however, is that New Delhi blocked ONGC from picking up that stake on grounds that the $2-billion investment entailed unacceptable risks as the Nigerian majority stakeholder was a dubious, politically manipulated shell company. But no sooner had ONGC backed out from the deal than the state-run China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) Ltd., China’s largest offshore oil producer, signed an accord on January 9, 2006, to pay $2.27 billion for the same 45 per cent stake.

● China is actively pursuing access-gaining projects along the major trade arteries in the Indian Ocean rim. Consequently, it is beginning to position itself along the sea-lanes from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea.

With an increasingly assertive China to the north, a China-allied Pakistan on the west, a Chinese-influenced Burma to the east, and growing Chinese naval interest in the Indian Ocean, India has to foil its strategic encirclement. India’s energy-security interests, in fact, demand that its navy play a greater role in the Indian Ocean, a crucial international passageway for oil deliveries. In addition to safeguarding the sea-lanes, the navy has to protect the country’s large energy infrastructure of onshore and offshore oil and gas wells, liquefied natural gas terminals, refineries, pipeline grids and oil-exploration work within the vast Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

● The establishment of interstate energy corridors (which also double up as strategic corridors) through the planned construction of pipelines to transport oil or gas sourced from third countries. China is busily fashioning two such corridors on either side of India through which it would transfer Gulf and African oil for its consumption, reducing its reliance on U.S.-policed shipping lanes through the Malacca and Taiwan Straits and also cutting freight costs and supply time in the process.

One corridor extends northwards from the Chinese-built Pakistani port of Gwadar, which represents China’s first strategic foothold in the Arabian Sea. Located at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz, Gwadar is to link up with the Trans-Karakoram Strategic Corridor to western China.

The second is the Irrawaddy Corridor designed to connect Chinese-aided Burmese ports with China’s Yunnan, Sichuan and Chongqing provinces through road, river, rail and energy links.

● Strategic plans to assemble a “string of pearls” in the form of listening posts and special naval-access arrangements along the Indian Ocean sea-lanes. With its new blue-water navy and access arrangements around peninsula India, China is threatening to turn the Indian Ocean into the Chinese Ocean one day. As navy chief Adm. Suresh Mehta said in a speech last January, “Each pearl in the string is a link in the chain of Chinese maritime presence”. That presence is now being extended all the way to Mauritius, where China is opening a trade development zone at a cost of some $730 million, making it the largest foreign direct investment in that island-nation.

Add to this picture another resource issue, the one with the greatest strategic bearing on the long-term interests of India and China — water. Although India’s usable arable land is larger than China’s — 160.5 million hectares compared to 137.1 million hectares — the source of all the major Indian rivers except the Ganges is the Chinese-held Tibetan plateau. But even the two main tributaries of the Ganges flow in from the Tibetan plateau — the source of the great river systems of China, South-East and South Asia, including the Brahmaputra, Indus, Mekong, Salween, Yangzi and Yellow. These rivers, fed by Himalayan snowmelt, are a lifeline to the 1.4 billion people living in their basins.

Given China’s ambitious inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects in the Tibetan plateau and its upstream damming of the Brahmaputra, Sutlej and other rivers, water is likely to become a cause of Sino-Indian tensions. If President Hu Jintao — a hydrologist by training who has served as party secretary in Tibet — begins China’s long-pending project to divert the waters of the Brahmaputra northwards to the parched Yellow River, it would constitute the declaration of a water war on lower-riparian India and Bangladesh. Climate change, in any event, will have a significant impact on the availability and flow of river waters from the Himalayas and Tibetan highlands, making water a key element in the national-security calculus of China and India.

The centrality of the Tibet issue has been highlighted both by China’s Tibet-linked territorial claim to Arunachal Pradesh and by its hydro projects on the plateau. Through its water-transfer projects, Beijing is threatening to fashion water into a weapon against India. Also, given the clear link between Tibet’s fragile ecosystem and the climatic stability of the Indian subcontinent, China’s reckless exploitation of Tibet’s vast mineral resources and its large engineering works there are already playing havoc with the ecology.

India and China may be 5,000-year-old civilizations, but it is often forgotten that the two have been neighbours for only the past 58 years. After all, it wasn’t geography but guns — the sudden occupation of the traditional buffer, Tibet, soon after the communists came to power in Beijing — that made China India’s neighbour. Nehru later admitted he had not anticipated the swiftness and callousness with which China forcibly absorbed Tibet because he had been “led to believe by the Chinese foreign office that the Chinese would settle the future of Tibet in a peaceful manner by direct negotiation with the representatives of Tibet”.

Latest developments are a reminder that the 1962 war did not fully slake China’s geopolitical or territorial ambitions. In fact, instead of building a win-win relationship with India based on a constructive, forward-looking approach, China still harks back to the past, to the unfinished business of 1962, by assertively laying claim to additional Indian territories while blocking progress on defining the long line of control separating the two countries. Such intransigence and expansionist intent come even as it continues to occupy one-fifth of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir and steps up its cross-border incursions into India.

It is against this background that a key question emerges: what if China sets out to “teach India a lesson” again? This is a question that can no longer be brushed aside, considering China’s growing proclivity to up the ante against India. Henry Kissinger once said China is a closed society with an open mind, while India is an open society with a closed mind and a know-all attitude. It was that attitude — and the refusal to heed the warning signs — that caught India by surprise when the Chinese army poured in from two separate fronts in 1962.

Today, two words define India’s China policy: confusion and forbearance. Caution with prudence is desirable. But can India afford to be overcautious, clueless and indulgent? In the celebrated words of Edmund Burke, those who fail to learn from history are sure to repeat history. Whatever India learned from 1962 seems to have been forgotten, with the country now torn by internal squabbling and policy disarray.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

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