Brahma Chellaney, Mint, April 30, 2013

The same old scenario has unfolded again: China quietly occupies a strategic area and a diffident India is left preaching the virtues of diplomacy and peace. When China set out to eliminate the historical buffer with India by invading Tibet, New Delhi opposed Lhasa’s desperate plea for a discussion at the United Nations. And when China stealthily took control of the Switzerland-size Aksai Chin plateau and began building the Tibet-Xinjiang highway through it, New Delhi’s first response was to send a démarche asking Beijing naively as to how it despatched workers to Indian territory without seeking visas for them.

Whereas the People’s Republic of China was born in and built on blood, modern India was founded on a continuing myth—that it won independence by non-violence, not because Britain was in no position after the devastation wrought by World War II to hold on to its colonies. It was not until 1962 that India woke up reluctantly to Leon Trotsky’s warning: “You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you.”

But for the lesson of 1962, India’s leaders may still have mocked George Washington’s famous words: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” Even today, the ruling and opposition leadership remains largely clueless on statecraft and national security affairs. A dysfunctional foreign policy is holding back India’s own rise.

China now is working to alter the line of control bit-by-bit by employing novel methods—without having to fire a single shot. With India a mute spectator, the People’s Liberation Army has brought pastoralists to Uttarakhand’s Barahoti sector and given them cover to range across the line. Using pastoralists in the vanguard and troops in the rear has also been tried elsewhere to drive Indian herdsmen out of their traditional pasturelands and assert Chinese control over those places.

In this way, China is encroaching, little by little, on vantage Indian land in the Chip Chap and Skakjung regions of Ladakh. Chumar in Ladakh was raided last September by helicopter-borne PLA troops, who destroyed Indian bunkers before returning. Arunachal officials are tired of complaining about New Delhi’s nonchalant attitude to aggressive PLA activities along their state’s border.

Few thus should be surprised by India’s timorous response to the PLA’s occupation of a border site near the strategic Karakoram Pass linking China to Pakistan. But even by its own standards of appeasement, India has outdone itself with its grovelling reaction to the deepest Chinese incursion in more than a quarter-century.

India initially blacked out the incursion, in the way it has suppressed its own figures showing a rising pattern of Chinese cross-border military forays. A whole week went by before New Delhi said a word on record about the PLA’s furtive ingress. The first public word, tellingly, came after Beijing issued a bland denial of the incursion in response to Indian media reports quoting army sources. Another five days passed before New Delhi revealed the incursion’s true depth—19 kilometres.

The external affairs minister has stood out as the appeaser-in-chief. The incursion is just “one little spot” of acne in an otherwise “beautiful face” to be treated with “an ointment.” When not making such embarrassingly inane comments, he has grovelled, going to the extent of saying that saving Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s planned visit will take precedence over ending the incursion. He hastily announced his own trip to Beijing, as if paying obeisance at the Chinese foreign ministry—the weakest branch of China’s government—can get the intruders out.

It is a pity that India, instead of feeling insulted by Li’s plan to stop over in New Delhi on his way to his country’s “all-weather ally” Pakistan to bless the new government to be appointed there, is bending over backward at a time of aggression. Has an Indian prime minister dared to combine a Beijing stopover with a visit to China’s rival Japan?  In fact, Taiwan should be to India what Pakistan is to China.

The shocking irony of treating Li’s stopover as exceedingly important is that every high-level Chinese visit since 2006 has been preceded by a new aggressive Chinese move. The jarring revival of China’s claim to the Austria-size Arunachal came just before President Hu Jintao’s 2006 visit. Before Premier Wen Jiabao came calling in 2010, Beijing began questioning India’s sovereignty over Jammu and Kashmir through its stapled-visa policy.

Now Li’s impending visit has gifted a deep incursion, seemingly designed to convey China’s anger over India’s belated, often-fumbling efforts to fortify border defences. To facilitate its encroachments and safeguard its military advantages, China wants India to leave the border minimally guarded by agreeing to limit Indian troop deployments and infrastructure development and by dismantling even the temporary shelters built for Indian border patrols. And New Delhi—which atrociously deploys border police to ward off the aggressive PLA patrols—is publicly signalling that it is open to meeting some of the new Chinese demands in return for the intruders’ withdrawal. Put simply, it is ready to quietly reward aggression, even at the risk of increasing Indian vulnerability.

India’s leadership fails to distinguish between caution and pusillanimity: the former helps to avert problems, but the latter conveys weakness and invites more aggression. India today risks becoming the proverbial frog in the slowly warming pot, as described by the American scholar John Garver: “A Chinese fable tells of how a frog in a pot of lukewarm water feels quite comfortable and safe. He does not notice as the water temperature slowly rises until, at last, the frog dies and is thoroughly cooked. This homily, wen shui zhu qingwa in Chinese, describes fairly well China’s strategy for growing its influence in South Asia in the face of a deeply suspicious India: move forward slowly and carefully, rouse minimal suspicion, and don’t cause an attempt at escape by the intended victim.”

(c) Mint, 2013.

Brahma Chellaney, Japan Times, June 7, 2012

WASHINGTON — Was the U.S.-India strategic partnership oversold to the extent that it has failed to yield tangible benefits for the United States? Even as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has just held detailed discussions in New Delhi, an increasing number of analysts in Washington have already concluded that the overhyped relationship is losing momentum.

The skeptics cite two high-visibility issues in particular: India’s rejection of separate bids by Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. to sell 126 fighter-jets, and New Delhi’s reluctance to snap energy ties with Iran. The discussion over these issues, however, obscures key facts.

Take the aircraft deal.  Despite that setback, U.S. firms have clinched several other multibillion-dollar arms deals in recent years. These contracts have been secured on a government-to-government basis, without any competitive bidding.  But in the one case where India invited bids, American firms failed to make it beyond the competition’s first round because they did not match the price and other terms offered by the French manufacturer of the Rafale aircraft and the European consortium that makes the Eurofighter Typhoon.

The most-startling yet little-publicized fact is America’s quiet emergence as the largest arms seller to India. In the decade since President George W. Bush launched the vaunted U.S.-Indian strategic partnership, India has fundamentally reoriented its defense procurement, moving away from its traditional reliance on Russia. Indeed, nearly half of all Indian defense deals by value in recent years have been bagged by the U.S. alone, with Israel a distant second and Russia relegated to the third slot.

Given that India has become the world’s largest arms importer and the United States remains the biggest exporter, U.S. firms are set to secure more contracts in India, which plans to spend more than $100 billion over the next four years to upgrade its military capabilities, including by buying submarines, heavy lift and attack helicopters, howitzers, and tanks.

Now consider the Iran issue. Just as the Indian rejection of the Boeing’s F/A 18 and Lockheed-Martin’s F-16 bids has made big news but the U.S. landing of multiple arms contracts has received little notice, India’s reluctance to publicly support U.S. energy sanctions on Iran has been in the spotlight but not the quiet Indian strategy since the late 1990s to let the share of Iranian oil in India’s energy imports gradually decline — a trend that has seen the importance of Iranian oil supplies for India considerably weaken.

Few in India consider Iran a friend. But given India’s troubled neighborhood, with the country wedged in an arc of problematic states, New Delhi is reluctant to rupture its ties with Iran, its gateway to Afghanistan — the top recipient of Indian aid. India already has paid a heavy price for taking America’s side on some critical issues in its long-running battle against Iran, even though Washington doesn’t take India’s side in its disputes with China or Pakistan.

The Bush administration persuaded India not to conclude any new long-term energy contracts with Iran, and — in return for a civil nuclear deal with the U.S. — abandon its plan to build a gas pipeline from Iran. New Delhi, by voting against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s governing board in 2005 and 2006, invited Iranian reprisal in the form of cancellation of a 25-year, $22-billion liquefied natural gas deal which had terms highly favorable to India. That deal’s scrapping alone left India poorer by several billion dollars.

Now the U.S. energy embargo against Iran has pushed international oil prices higher, significantly increasing India’s oil bill. The embargo also threatens to undercut India’s import-diversification strategy by making it place most of its eggs in the basket of the Islamist-bankrolling, Saudi Arabia-led oil monarchies that continue to play a role in South Asia detrimental to Indian interests. In fact, thanks to the U.S. embargo against Iran, the swelling coffers of the iron-fisted oil sheikhdoms are set to overflow, increasing their leverage in the region and beyond.

Lost in the U.S. public discussion is an important fact — the declining share of Iranian crude in India’s total oil imports as part of a conscious Indian effort to reduce supply-disruption risks linked with the lurking potential for Iran-related conflict. Since 2008 alone, Iranian oil imports have swiftly fallen from 16.4 percent to 10.3 percent. Given India’s soaring oil imports and search for new sources of supply, the Iranian share is set to decline further, even without India’s participation in the U.S. embargo.

Make no mistake: India shares U.S. objectives on Iran but the exigencies of its regional situation compel it to toe a more cautious line.

The repositioning of the U.S.-India relationship was never intended to be transactional. Rather it was designed as an important geostrategic move to underpin Asian security and serve the long-term U.S. and Indian interests. But even if the relationship were viewed in transactional terms, the U.S. has reaped handsome dividends.

On Iran, the right course for U.S. policy would be to encourage India to continue reducing Iranian oil imports by granting it a waiver from American sanctions law — as Washington has to Japan and nine other countries — and by helping to finance the retrofitting of Indian refineries that presently have a technical capacity to process only Iranian oil.

More fundamentally, just as the Bush administration exaggerated the importance of a single deal with India, contending that the nuclear deal would be fundamentally transformative, it is an overstatement that the U.S.-India relationship today is losing momentum. The geostrategic direction of the relationship is irreversibly set — toward closer collaboration. Even trade between the countries has continued to grow impressively, from $9 billion in 1995 to $100 billion in 2011. While it is too much to expect a congruence of U.S. and Indian national-security objectives in all spheres, the two countries are likely to deepen their cooperation in areas where their interests converge, such as ensuring Asian power equilibrium.

Barack Obama had stroked India’s collective ego by inviting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for his presidency’s first state dinner, leading to the joke that while China gets a deferential America and Pakistan secures billions of dollars in U.S. aid periodically, India is easily won over with a sumptuous dinner and nice compliments.

The mutual optimism and excitement that characterized the blooming U.S.-Indian ties during the Bush years, admittedly, has given way to more realistic assessments as the relationship has matured. Geostrategic and economic forces, however, continue to drive the two countries closer. Indeed, Obama’s recent pivot to Asia has made closer U.S. strategic collaboration with India critical.

(c) The Japan Times, 2012.

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, March 30, 2012

BRICS represents the first important non-Western global initiative in the post-Cold War world. But despite the forward movement achieved at their New Delhi summit, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa remain in search of a common ground that can help turn BRICS into a weighty geopolitical alliance. Without clearly defined objectives and an agreed plan of action, BRICS will be weighed down by internal contradictions, as symbolized by its members’ starkly varying political systems, economies, and national ambitions.

The disparate nature of the group’s membership — bringing together the world’s largest autocracy and democracy, as well as commodity-exporting and resource-hungry economies — has prompted cynics to dismiss BRICS as an acronymic ingenuity without substance. To its protagonists, however, BRICS is a product of the ongoing global power shifts, and has the potential to evolve into a major instrument in shaping the architecture of global governance. As a unified grouping, BRICS could play midwife at a time the qualitative reordering of power symbolizes the birth-pangs of a new international order.

On burning international geopolitical issues like Iran and Syria, BRICS actually stands out as the voice of moderation and caution, seeking to provide the balance to the interventionist impulse of Western powers. But as the recent UN human-rights resolution on Sri Lanka showed, the grouping is badly split on other issues. The group’s main economic giant, China, is also the political outlier that rejects the very concept of national elections and is ever ready to advance its commercial and strategic interests by coming to the succour of a fellow human rights-abusing state.

Economically, BRICS is likely to remain the most-important source of global growth. The BRICS grouping, after all, represent more than a quarter of the Earth’s landmass, over 41 per cent of its population, almost 25 per cent of world GDP, and nearly half of all foreign-exchange and gold reserves. In a spectacular reversal of fortunes, the developing economies, with their large foreign-currency holdings, now finance the mounting deficits of the wealthy economies.

In this light, BRICS, with its members’ collective weight, can exercise significant global financial clout if it gets its act together.  BRICS indeed can be called the R-5, after the names of its members’ currencies — the real, rouble, rupee, renminbi, and rand.

Yet in the period since the Russia-India-China (RIC) initiative enlarged in 2008 to include Brazil and take the name of BRIC — a term coined by a Goldman Sachs economist in 2001 — the group has remained a loose, informal bloc. Last year’s expansion of BRIC into BRICS with South Africa’s addition has only accentuated the challenge to establish an institutional structure and a common plan of action, even as this enlargement threatens to make irrelevant yet another initiative — IBSA (India, Brazil, and South Africa).

For Brazil, South Africa, Russia, and India, BRICS serves as a forum to underscore their rising economic clout and showcase their emergence as global players. But for China, which needs no recognition as a rising world power, BRICS offers tangible — not just symbolic — benefits. China indeed has cast a lengthening shadow over the grouping, seeking, for example, to control the proposed common development bank — something India and Russia, in particular, are loath to accept.

At a time when China is under pressure for continuing to manipulate the value of the renminbi in order to artificially reduce the price of its goods and services abroad, the BRICS framework offers it a platform to expand its currency’s international role. As part of its quest to build the renminbi into an international currency, a cash-rich China is to extend renminbi loans to the other members of BRICS.

Lending and trading in renminbi will further boost China’s international status and clout. China’s undervalued currency and hidden export subsidies, however, have been systematically undermining manufacturing in other BRICS states, especially India and Brazil.

BRICS proponents still hope the group can serve as a catalyst for international institutional reforms. The global institutional structure has remained virtually static since the mid-20th century despite the rise of non-Western economic powers, and even the G-20’s formation was an improvisation designed to defer genuine reforms.

Yet, on international institutional reforms, China is hardly on the same page as the other BRICS members. It is a revisionist power concerning the global financial architecture, seeking an overhaul of the Bretton Woods system. But it is a status quo power with respect to the UN system, and unwaveringly opposes expansion of the Security Council’s permanent membership. It wishes to remain Asia’s sole country with a permanent seat — a position that illuminates its effort to regionally confine India.

BRICS can become a pressure group in international relations only if its members are able to agree on a common action-plan. The BRICS states, for example, are generally united in their frustration with — but not in their proposed response to — the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. Indeed, the most-important bilateral relationship each BRICS country has is with the US. As long as BRICS is unable to present itself as a unified bloc seeking to push specific changes in the present ailing international order, it will continue to be seen by the old powers as embodying an aspiration rather than a threat.

Despite the steps agreed upon at the New Delhi summit, it is uncertain whether BRICS will evolve into a cohesive grouping with defined goals and institutional mechanisms to help pluralize the global order or remain an initiative with a beguiling acronym that does little more than annually bring together its leaders for more discussions. If it is able to develop brick by brick, BRICS could find itself on the evolutionary path treaded by the now-supplanted G-7, which also began as a discussion platform before advancing to joint coordination and action among its members on key international issues.

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