Why the Australia-India-Japan-U.S. Quadrilateral Initiative makes sense

Posted on February 12, 2008 by Chellaney

The contours of a new geopolitical line-up in the
Asia-Pacific are becoming clearer

Differential
equations

The Hindustan Times, February 13, 2008

By Brahma Chellaney

At a time
when a qualitative
reordering of power is reshaping international equations, major players in the
Asia-Pacific are playing down the risk that contrasting political systems could
come to constitute the main geopolitical dividing line, potentially pitting a
China-led axis of autocracies against a constellation of democracies. The
refrain of the players is that pragmatism, not political values, would guide
their foreign-policy strategy. Yet the new Great Game under way plays up regime
character as a key element.

India has already faced such a values-based
geopolitical divide in its region, but singly. The Sino-Pakistan nexus against India is unique:
Never before in history has one country armed another with nuclear weapons and
missiles so as to contain a third nation with which the two share common
frontiers. Authoritarian bonds have also been employed in more recent years to
try and open a new Chinese flank against India
via Burma.

Indeed, the stated aim of the 1962 Chinese invasion — “to teach India
a lesson” — was rooted in a geopolitical divide centred on incompatible political
values. For Mao Zedong, that war was a means to humiliate and demolish India as an alternative democratic model to
totalitarian China.
The 32-day aggression, which Harvard professor Roderick MacFarquhar has dubbed "Mao’s India War", helped boost China’s image
at India’s
expense.

More
than 45 years later, the speed and scale of Asia’s economic rise is bringing
new players, including India,
into the world’s geopolitical marketplace. The eastward movement of power and
influence, once concentrated in the West, has been accompanied by a high-stakes
competition for new strategic tie-ups and greater access to resources, making
strategic stability a key concern in Asia.

In the absence of a common identity or institutional structures, one
challenge Asia faces is to develop shared
norms and values, without which no community can be built. Yet, with only 16 of
the 39 Asian countries free, according to Freedom House, creating common norms is a daunting
task, especially when some states still flout near-universal values.

A bigger Asian challenge is to banish the threat of hegemony by any single power (as Europe
has done) so that greater political understanding
and trust could be built. This challenge pits two competing
visions. On one side is the mythical ‘Middle Kingdom’
whose foreign policy seeks to make real the legend
that drives its official history — China’s
centrality in the world. Its
autocrats believe that in their calculus to make China
a “world power second to none”, gaining pre-eminence in
Asia is vital. On the other side
is the interest of many Asian nations and outside powers in a cooperative order
founded on power equilibrium.

Ordinarily, the readiness to play by international rules
ought to matter more than regime form. But regime character often makes playing
by the rules difficult. As a new book, China’s
Great Leap, edited by Minky Worden, reveals, China won the right to host the
2008 Olympics on the plea that awarding the Games would help improve its human-rights
record. Instead, it has let loose new repression. But just as the 1936 Berlin
Olympics set the stage for Nazi Germany’s collapse, the 2008 Games could help
trigger radical change in China.

Today, Beijing’s
best friends are fellow autocracies while those seeking to forestall power
disequilibrium happen to be on the other side of the value divide. Political
values thus could easily come to define a new geopolitical divide. What may
seem implausible globally, given America’s lingering tradition of
propping up dictators in the Muslim world, is conceivable in the Asia-Pacific
theatre as a natural corollary to the present geopolitics. But for the
divergent geopolitical interests at play, the differing political values would
not matter so much.

It was China
that took the lead in 2001 to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to
help unite it with the Eurasian strongmen in a geopolitical alliance. Designed
originally to bring the Central Asian nations — the so-called Stans — under the
Chinese sphere of influence, the SCO is shaping up as a potential ‘NATO of the
East’. Yet, when Australia, India, Japan
and the US last year started
the exploratory ‘Quadrilateral Initiative’, Beijing was quick to cry foul and see the
apparition of an ‘Asian NATO’. A Chinese demarche
to each Quad member followed.

Through sustained diplomatic pressure, mounted on the back of growing
economic clout, Beijing
has sought to wilt the Quad. A new opening has come with the Mandarin-speaking
Kevin Rudd being elected Australia’s
prime minister. With the Australian economic boom being driven by China’s ravenous resource imports, the previous
John Howard government wasn’t exactly enthused by the Quadrilateral Initiative,
as Beijing had already taken a dim view of Canberra’s US-backed bilateral and trilateral defence
tie-ups with Tokyo.
But the new Rudd government, as reflected in its foreign minister’s remarks
last week, is signalling a wish to turn its back on the Quad.

Australia’s growing wariness is no different
than India’s.
After having called liberal democracy “the natural order of social and
political organization in today’s world”, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh now says the Quad “never got going”. Even the
US
has downplayed the initiative, whose real architect, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe, was driven out of office last fall. Yet, the Quad staged week-long war games
in the Bay of Bengal, roping in Singapore.

Rudd, though, is so mesmerized by his Mandarin fluency that he feels an inexorable
itch to cosy up to Beijing.
In a strange spectacle, Canberra has proclaimed
it will sell uranium to Beijing (without fail-safe
safeguards against diversion to weapons use) but not to New
Delhi, even if the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group were to carve out an
exemption for India.
The reason proffered for overturning the Howard government’s decision is that “India has not
signed the NPT”. That rationale is flawed: While the NPT carries an Article I
prohibition on transfer of nuclear military technology outside the club of five
recognized nuclear powers, its state-parties are actually enjoined by Article
IV to pursue peaceful nuclear cooperation with all countries.

If Rudd has read the NPT, it probably was a Chinese translation, because
there is nothing in its official text that forbids civil cooperation under
safeguards with a non-signatory. But why blame Canberra for trotting out an indefensible
excuse when the Indian foreign minister is smitten by the same myth? Pranab
Mukherjee told Parliament in December that the Hyde Act was passed because “the
US
cannot enter into any civilian
nuclear cooperation with any country which is not a signatory to the NPT”.
Unknown to the minister, US
law does not condition cooperation to NPT membership.

The Quad was never intended to be a formal institution, although John
McCain has vowed to institutionalize it as US president. Founded on the
historically valid hypothesis of democratic peace, it is supposed to serve as
an initial framework to promote security dialogue and interlinked partnerships
among an expanding group of Pacific Rim
democracies. Such collaboration is already being built. As an idea, the Quad will
not only survive the current vicissitudes, but it also foreshadows the likely
geopolitical line-up in the years ahead. For India,
close strategic cooperation with Quad members plus Russia holds the key to Asian peace
and stability.

Global Power Shifts: The Larger Implications

Posted on February 5, 2008 by Chellaney

Geopolitical risks on the rise

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times, February 4, 2008

DAVOS, Switzerland — At the recent World Economic Forum meeting of top political, business, intellectual and civil-society leaders, the discussions centered on a range of major international challenges — from new threats to the growing strain on water and other resources.

The discussions brought home the point that at a time of ongoing shifts in economic and political power, greater international divisiveness is making it more difficult to build a consensual approach on the pressing challenges.

Indeed, new fault lines are emerging. The changing global equations are reflected in new realities: the eastward movement of power and influence; the lesser relevance of international structures the United States helped established after World War II; and Asia’s rise as the world’s main creditor and economic locomotive. While the world is not yet multipolar, it is no longer unipolar, as it had been after the end of the Cold War.

Tectonic power shifts, as history testifies, are rarely quiet. They usually create volatility in the international system, even if the instability is relatively short-lived. The new international divisiveness may reflect such a reality.

But unlike in past history, the qualitative reordering of power now under way is due not to battlefield victories or military realignments but to a peaceful factor unique to the modern world: rapid economic growth.

The power shifts are linked to Asia’s phenomenal economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history. After making up 60 percent of the world’s GDP in 1820, Asia went into sharp decline over the next 125 years. Now, it is bouncing back and already accounts for 40 percent of global production — a figure likely to rise to 60 percent well within the next quarter-century. This development is helping alter international equations, with the International Monetary Fund in perceptible decline and troubled U.S. and European financial institutions turning to sovereign wealth funds in Asia and the Middle East for bailouts.

Another factor has also contributed to the divisiveness: While we know the world is in transition, we still do not know what the new order will look like. The ongoing shifts signify not only a world characterized by greater distribution of power, but also new uncertainties. Technological forces today are playing a greater role in shaping geopolitics than at any other time in history.

The more the world changes, however, the more it remains the same in some critical aspects. The information age and globalization, despite spurring profound changes in polity, economy and security, have not altered the nature of international relations. In fact, the rapid pace of technological and economic change is itself a consequence of nations competing fiercely and seeking relative advantage in an international system based largely on national security.

The fact is that we live in a Hobbesian world, with power coterminous with national security and success. The present global power structure reflects this reality: Only countries armed with intercontinental-range weaponry, for example, are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. However, once the economic power structure changes internationally, shifts in military power will follow, even if slowly.

At present, however, the new fault lines signal rising geopolitical risks.

The tensions between internationalism and nationalism in an era of the supposed single "global village," for instance, raise troubling questions about international peace and stability. With greater public awareness from advances in information and communications technologies encouraging individuals and even some states to more clearly define their identity in terms of religion and ethnicity, a divide is emerging between multiculturalism and artificially enforced monoculturalism. The rise of international terrorism indeed shows that the information age is both an integrating and dividing force. The emerging political, economic and security divides are no less invidious.

The world is moving beyond the North-South divide to a four-tier economic division: The prosperous West; rapidly growing economies like those in Asia; countries that have run into stagnation after reaching middle-income nation status; and a forgotten billion people living on the margins of globalization in sub-Saharan Africa.

There is also a resource divide, with the resource-hungry employing aid and arms exports as a diplomatic instrument for commodity outreach. As the specter of resource conflict has grown, the contours of a 21st-century version of the Great Game have emerged in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Also, with the rise of unconventional transnational challenges, a new security divide is mirrored both in the failure to fashion a concerted and effective international response to such threats, including transnational terrorism, and the divisiveness on issues like climate change.

There is clearly a need to improve global geopolitics by building cooperative political approaches that transcend institutions whose structure is rooted in a world that no longer exists. The reality is that just as the Group of Eight, to stay relevant, has initiated the so-called Outreach for dialogue with the emerging powers, the five unelected yet permanent members of the U.N. Security Council can no longer dictate terms to the rest of the world and need to share executive authority with new powers.

Better politics is as important as better economics. That in turn calls for several major steps whose initiation so far has been frustrated: institutional reforms; greater transparency in strategic doctrines and military expenditures; and cooperative approaches on shared concerns. No international mission today can yield enduring results unless it comes with consistency and credibility and is backed by consensus — the three crucial Cs.

Seen against the significant shifts in power and influence, the world order of the past 60 years will have to give way to a truly international order. The new order, unlike the current one founded on the ruins of a world war, will have to be established in an era of international peace and thus be designed to reinforce that peace. That means it will need to be more reflective of the consensual needs of today and have a democratic decision-making structure.

With Davos attracting 27 heads of state, 113 Cabinet ministers, 74 of the top 100 global companies’ CEOs and 2,300 other delegates, this unique forum seems best placed to promote innovative, out-of-box thinking. The central message from Davos is that silo thinking can only increase global geopolitical risks at a time of greater international fluidity and financial volatility.

Brahma Chellaney was on the faculty of the recent World Economic Forum meeting.

The Japan Times: Monday, Feb. 4, 2008

Need for India to Reclaim Leverage Against China

Posted on February 5, 2008 by Chellaney

Mixed Signals

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, February 6, 2008

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1149345

The periodic summit meetings between India and China are deceptively all sweetness
and light. During Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent visit, there was no
forward meeting on any contentious issue, but the accent was on the positive.
That should surprise no one. Although
the underlying wariness and suspicions remain, the two giants, for
different reasons, feel the need to publicly play down the competitive dynamics of their
relationship and emphasize cooperation.

Yet, the
conciliatory words that come out from the bilateral summitry are a poor
substitute to the glaring lack of progress on the issues that divide IndiaChina, like the territorial
disputes. If anything, the rhetoric at times is a painful reminder of the empty
slogans of the 1950s that helped blind India
to China’s furtive
territorial encroachments and subsequent surprise invasion in 1962, which Jawaharlal
Nehru characterized as Beijing’s
return of “evil for good”.

The wounds of that 32-day war have
been kept open by Beijing’s assertive claims to Indian
areas, even as it holds on to the territorial gains
of that conflict. China’s
unwillingness to settle the border
dispute on the basis of the status quo has drawn further strength from then Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s 2003 recognition of Tibet
as “part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China”.
Emboldened by that recognition, which stripped India
of diplomatic leverage, Beijing has become
publicly assertive on its claim to Arunachal Pradesh, a state more than twice
the size of Taiwan.
Now it insists that India
cede at least the Tawang valley
— a critical corridor between Lhasa and Assam of immense military import because it
overlooks the chicken-neck that connects India with its northeast.

In that
light, Dr. Singh has done well to visit Arunachal, becoming the first PM in 12 years to tour that isolated but strategically located state. But he would
have strengthened his hands had he visited Arunachal, “the land of the rising
sun”, before going to Beijing,
rather than upon his return. Also, instead of having omitted Tawang from his
tour of Arunachal, the PM ought to have made a stop there to send out a needed
signal to Beijing.

Employing
the doctrine of incremental territorial annexation, Beijing
has laid claim to Tawang on the basis of that area’s putative historical ties
to Tibet.
By 1951, China had fully
occupied the Tibetan plateau, yet no Chinese
set foot in Tawang until the invading Chinese
army in 1962 poured through the NamkhaValley,
close to the tri-junction of Tibet,
India and Bhutan. In pouring forces into Tawang, China
scoffed at India’s
contention that, in conformity with
the McMahon Line, the border in that region ran along the high Thagla Ridge.
Still, after halting its aggression, Beijing
withdrew from Tawang, as it did from the rest of Arunachal (then NEFA), while
keeping its territorial gains in Ladakh. That was in line with the punitive aim
of its aggression, which Premier
Zhou Enlai had admitted was “to teach India a lesson”.

Significantly, Dr. Singh is the
first Indian PM to return from Beijing without
making any unwarranted reference to Tibet to please his hosts. The ‘T’
word is conspicuously missing from the joint communiqué — a key point the media
failed to catch. Contrast that with the last joint communiqué issued when
President Hu Jintao visited New Delhi: “The Indian side
reiterates that it has recognized the Tibet Autonomous Region as part of the
territory of the People’s Republic of China, and that it does not
allow Tibetans to engage in anti-China political activities in
India.
The Chinese side expresses its
appreciation for the Indian position”.

The only way India can build counter-leverage against Beijing
is to gently shine a spotlight on the Tibet
issue and China’s
failure to grant promised autonomy to the Tibetans. This can be done by India in a way that is neither provocative nor
confrontational. New Delhi ought to make the point
that China’s security will be
enhanced if it reached out to Tibetans and concluded a deal that helped bring back the Dalai Lama from his long exile in India.

A first step for India to help reclaim leverage and stop being
overtly defensive is to cease gratuitously referring to Tibet as part of China. In doing just that, Dr.
Singh has shown good judgement. He even sent the foreign secretary to
Dharamsala last Sunday to brief the Dalai Lama on his Beijing discussions. That the Dalai Lama
remains an invaluable asset for India
can be seen from his public repudiation of China’s
claim that Arunachal, including Tawang, were traditionally part of Tibet.

The writer is a strategic affairs expert.

© DNA, 2008

New fault lines in international relations

Posted on January 29, 2008 by Chellaney

Bridge Global Divides

New fault lines signal rising geopolitical risks

Brahma Chellaney

Times of India, January 28, 2008

Davos: In the World Economic Forum meeting of top political, business, intellectual and civil-society leaders, the discussions centred on a range of major international challenges — from new threats to the growing strains on water and other resources. But the discussions also brought home the point that at a time of ongoing shifts in economic and political power, greater international divisiveness is making it more difficult to build a consensual approach on the pressing challenges.

Indeed, new fault lines and global divides are emerging. Major shifts in power, as history testifies, are rarely quiet. They usually create volatility in the international system, even if the instability is relatively short-lived. The new divisiveness may reflect such a reality. But unlike in past history, the qualitative reordering of power now underway is due not to battlefield victories or military realignments but to a factor unique to the modern world: rapid economic growth.

The power shifts are linked to Asia’s phenomenal economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in history. Asia already has emerged as the world’s main creditor and economic locomotive. That development is helping alter equations, with the IMF in perceptible decline and troubled US and European financial institutions turning to Asia and the Middle East for bailouts.

While we know the world is in transition, we still do not know what the new order would look like. That has also contributed to the divisiveness. The ongoing shifts signify not only a world characterized by greater distribution of power, but also new uncertainties. Technological forces today are playing a greater role in shaping geopolitics than at any other time in history.

For example, the tensions between internationalism and nationalism in an era of a supposed single “global village” raise troubling questions about international peace and stability. With greater public awareness from advances in information and communications technologies encouraging individuals and even some states to more clearly define their identity in terms of religion and ethnicity, a divide is emerging between multiculturalism and artificially enforced monoculturalism. The rise of international terrorism indeed shows that the information age is both an integrating and dividing force.

The emerging political, economic and security divides are no less invidious. The world is moving beyond the North-South divide to a four-tier economic division: the prosperous West; rapidly growing economies like those in Asia; countries that have run into stagnation after reaching middle-income nation status; and a forgotten billion people living on the margins of globalization in sub-Saharan Africa. There is also a resource divide, with the resource-hungry employing aid and arms exports as a diplomatic instrument for commodity outreach. As the spectre of resource conflict has grown, the contours of a 21st-century version of the Great Game have emerged.

In modern history, the fault line between democrats and autocrats has at times been papered over through a common geopolitical interest. But today the failure to build greater political homogeneity by defining shared international objectives carries the risk that, in the years ahead, political values could become the main geopolitical dividing line. Also, with the rise of unconventional transnational challenges, a new security divide is mirrored both in the failure to fashion a concerted and effective international response to such threats, including terrorism, and the divisiveness on issues like climate change.

There is clearly a need to improve global geopolitics by building cooperative political approaches that transcend institutions whose structure is rooted in a world that no longer exists. The reality is that just as the G-8, to stay relevant, has initiated the so-called Outreach for dialogue with the emerging powers, the five unelected yet permanent members of the Security Council can no longer dictate terms to the rest of the world and need to share executive authority with new powers.

It was a mistake to believe that greater economic interdependence by itself would improve geopolitics. In today’s market-driven world, trade is not constrained by political differences, nor is booming trade a guarantee of moderation and restraint between states. Better politics is as important as better economics. That in turn calls for several major steps whose initiation so far has sought to be frustrated: institutional reforms, greater transparency in strategic doctrines and military expenditures, and cooperative approaches on shared concerns. No international mission today can yield enduring results unless it comes with consistency and credibility and is backed by consensus — the three crucial Cs.

With Davos attracting 27 heads of state, 113 cabinet ministers, 74 of the top 100 global companies’ CEOs and 2,300 other delegates this year, the unique forum can help promote innovative thinking. Davos’s central message is that silo thinking can only increase global geopolitical risks at a time of greater fluidity and financial volatility.

The writer was on the faculty of the just-concluded World Economic Forum meeting.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Editorial/LEADER_ARTICLE_Bridge_Global_Divides/articleshow/2735918.cms

Burma and Tibet: At the Core of India-China Relations

Posted on January 19, 2008 by Chellaney

Counter China’s Designs

Burma and Tibet
are pivotal to Indian strategy

Brahma
Chellaney

Times of India, January 16, 2008

One issue emblematic of the Sino-Indian
strategic dissonance is Burma.
Indeed, there are several important parallels between Burma and the vast
territory whose annexation brought Han forces to India’s borders for the first
time in history — Tibet. India
and China may be
5,000-year-old civilizations but the two had no experience in dealing with each
other politically until Tibet’s
forcible absorption made them neighbours. In contrast, India has had close historical ties with Tibet and with Burma, part of the British Indian
empire until 1937. The majority people of Burma, the Burmans, are of Tibetan
stock, and the Burman script, like the Tibetan one, was taken from Sanskrit.

Today, Tibet
and Burma
are at the centre of the India-China relationship. Having lost the
traditionally neutral buffer of Tibet,
India sees Burma as a hedge against China’s
authoritarian rise. It is significant that the resistance against repressive
rule in both Tibet and Burma is led by iconic Nobel laureates, one
living in exile in India and
the other with close ties to India
but under house arrest in Rangoon.
Equally remarkable is that the Dalai Lama and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi received the Nobel peace prize in quick
succession for the same reason: For leading a non-violent struggle, in the
style of Mahatma Gandhi.

Yet another parallel is that heavy repression
has failed to break the resistance to autocratic rule in both Tibet and Burma. More than half a century
after Tibet’s
annexation, the Tibetan struggle ranks as one of the longest and most-powerful
resistance movements in modern world history. With no links to violence or
terror, it actually stands out as a model. Similarly, despite detaining Suu Kyi
for nearly 13 of the past 19 years, the junta has failed to suppress the
democracy movement, as last September’s monk-led mass protests showed.

For the autocrats in Beijing, who value Burma
as an entryway to the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean,
the demonstration of people’s power in a next-door state was troubling news
because such grassroots protests could inspire popular challenge to their own
authoritarianism. Having strategically penetrated resource-rich Burma, Beijing is
busy completing the Irrawaddy Corridor involving road, river, rail and
energy-transport links between Burmese ports and Yunnan.

For India,
such links constitute strategic pressure on the eastern flank. China is already
building another north-south strategic corridor to the west of India — the
Trans-Karakoram Corridor stretching right up to Pakistan’s Chinese-built Gwadar
port, at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz — as well as an east-west
strategic corridor in Tibet across India’s northern frontiers. In Burma, Beijing
is also helping construct a 1,500-km highway leading to Arunachal Pradesh.

Such links hold serious implications for India
because they allow Beijing to strategically
meddle in India’s
restive northeast and step up indirect military pressure. Operating through the
plains of Burma in India’s northeast is much easier than having to
operate across the mighty Himalayas. In 1962,
Indian forces found themselves outflanked by the invading People’s Liberation
Army at certain points in Arunachal (then NEFA), spurring speculation that some
Chinese units quietly entered via the Burmese plains, not by climbing the
Himalayas.

The potential for Chinese strategic mischief has to be viewed against
the background that the original tribal insurgencies in the northeast were
instigated by Mao’s China,
which trained and armed the rebels, be it Naga or Mizo guerrillas, partly by
exploiting the Burma
route. During World War II, the allied and axis powers had classified Burma as a “backdoor to India”. Today, India shares a porous 1,378-km border with Burma, with
insurgents operating on both sides through shared ethnicity.

Tibet and Burma are going to stay pivotal to
Indian security. The centrality of the
Tibet issue has been highlighted both by China’s Tibet-linked territorial claim
to Arunachal and by its major inter-basin and inter-river water transfer
projects in the Tibetan plateau, the source of all of Asia’s major rivers
except the Ganges. By damming the Brahmaputra and Sutlej and toying with the
idea of diverting the Brahmaputra waters to the parched Yellow River, Beijing is threatening to fashion water into a weapon
against India.

The junta has run Burma
for 46 years, while the communist party has ruled China for 59 years. Neither model
is sustainable. The longest any autocratic system has survived in modern
history was 74 years in the Soviet Union. But
while Burma has faced
stringent sanctions since the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, the post-Tiananmen
sanctions against China did
not last long on the argument that engagement was a better way to bring about
political change — a principle not applied to impoverished Burma.

India cannot afford to shut itself out of
Burma, or else — 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
— it will get encircled. Just as India has not abandoned the Tibetan cause and
indeed remains the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile despite doing
business with China, India will continue to support the Burmese democracy
movement and remain home to large numbers of refugees and dissidents despite a
carefully calibrated engagement with the junta aimed at promoting political
reconciliation and stemming the growing Chinese clout.

•
The writer is a strategic affairs analyst.

India-China Ties: Hype and Reality

Posted on January 13, 2008 by Chellaney

The Three Ts of India-China Relations

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, January 15, 2008

No Indian prime minister has ever returned from China without the visit being hailed by his spinmeisters as path-breaking. Yet despite all the touted “breakthroughs” over the decades, China has steadily become a bigger strategic challenge for India, opening new fronts by tenaciously pursuing congagement, or engagement with containment. Sardar Patel’s words still ring true: “Even though we regard ourselves as friends of China, the Chinese do not regard us as friends.” The wooden slogans China today mouths on its relations with India are as empty as the ones at home behind which its communist rulers shelter, such as President Hu Jintao’s catchphrase, “harmonious society.”

Just as Beijing is haunted by three Ts domestically — Tiananmen, Taiwan and Tibet — its relationship with New Delhi is defined by three Ts — territorial disputes, Tibet and trade, with the first two issues stuck and the third booming to China’s heavy advantage. Mirroring its exploitative commerce with Africa, Beijing primarily buys iron ore and other raw materials from India and sells industrial goods while reaping a ballooning trade surplus. Yet some in India innocently see this embarrassing and unsustainable pattern of trade as proof of progress in bilateral ties.

If growing trade signified political warmth, Japan and China, with at least eight times higher trade, would be the best of friends. Trade between any two states in today’s market-driven world is not constrained by political differences, unless political barriers have been erected. Flourishing economic ties indeed do not guarantee moderation and restraint in the absence of progress on bridging political differences, as shown by the increasing Chinese military incursions across the border into India and China’s muscular diplomacy toward Japan and Vietnam.

While India and China have built a stake in maintaining the peaceful diplomatic environment on which their continued economic modernization and security depend, they have made little progress in resolving their political differences and building strategic congruence. That is why the proclaimed “India-China strategic and cooperative partnership for peace and prosperity” remains devoid of content. The two sides can only showcase their fast-growing trade and high-level visits, such as President Hu’s November 2006 India tour and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Beijing trip this week.

Yet a careful examination of what is being showcased reveals disconcerting trends.

Let us start with the summit-level meetings. The promises incorporated in the joint declaration signed with much fanfare at the end of each prime ministerial or presidential visit are quickly forgotten. Take the following pledge in the joint declaration that was signed when Hu visited New Delhi: “Along with the talks between the Special Representatives, the Joint Working Group (JWG) on the India-China boundary question shall expedite their work, including on the clarification and confirmation of the line of actual control (LAC) and the implementation of confidence-building measures. It was agreed to complete the process of exchanging maps indicating their respective perceptions of the entire alignment of the LAC on the basis of already agreed parameters as soon as possible.” Nearly 14 months have gone by without any success to revive the dormant JWG, let alone to begin exchanging maps of the eastern sector (Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh) and the western sector (Jammu and Kashmir).

The harsh reality is that Beijing is loath to clarify the frontline because such an action would relieve military pressure on India. So, despite 27 years of continuous border negotiations, India and China remain the only neighbours in the world not separated even by a mutually defined line of control. Indeed, it took two full decades of negotiations before Beijing exchanged maps with India of just one sector — the least-disputed middle segment (Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh). But having done that in 2001, it quickly broke its word to exchange maps of the other two sectors.

A first step to a settlement of any dispute is clarity on a line of control or at least appreciation of the “no go” areas so that provocative or unfriendly actions can be eschewed. Exchanging maps showing each other’s military positions, without prejudice to rival territorial claims, is a preliminary step to first define, then delineate and finally demarcate a frontline. Beijing’s disinclination to trade maps underlines its aversion to clinch an overall border settlement or even to remove the ambiguities plaguing the long, rugged LAC.

In fact, the real reason the two countries are locked in what is already the longest and most-barren negotiating process between any two countries in modern world history is that China — not content with the one-fifth of the original state of J&K it occupies — seeks to further redraw its frontiers with India, coveting above all Tawang, a strategic doorway to the Assam Valley. Seeking to territorially extend the gains from its annexation of Tibet, Beijing unabashedly follows the principle that what it occupies is Chinese territory beyond question and what it claims should be on the negotiating table for barter.

Is it thus any surprise that new strains have appeared in Sino-Indian ties even as the old disputes remain unresolved? The hoopla accompanying Singh’s visit can hardly obscure recent developments that call attention to the underlying tensions between Asia’s two continental-sized powers that are rising at the same time in history.

The developments include about 300 Chinese military incursions across the LAC in the past 24 months alone — or more than three a week; the Chinese military action two months ago in provocatively demolishing some unmanned Indian forward posts near three disputed bunkers at the Bhutan-Sikkim-Sikkim trijunction; and the Chinese foreign minister’s message to his Indian counterpart last May that Beijing no longer felt bound by a 2005 agreement on “guiding principles” that any border-related settlement should not disturb settled populations.

This hard line appears tied to two factors. First, rising economic and military power is encouraging Beijing to pursue a more muscular foreign policy. And second, China has acquired a capability to rapidly deploy forces against India by significantly expanding its infrastructure in Tibet, with roads built right up to the LAC and the new railway to Lhasa being extended southwards.

Now let us turn to the galloping trade, which officially jumped 10-fold from $2.5 billion in 2000-01 to $25 billion in 2006-07, catapulting China in six years from the ninth largest to the second largest trading partner of India. According to provisional figures released by China, the two-way trade actually surpassed $38 billion in calendar 2007.

All that seems very impressive until one looks at the trade pattern, which disturbingly shows India as a raw-material appendage to China’s rising industrial might. At the end of fiscal 2006-07, more than 50 per cent of Indian exports to China comprised just one item — iron ore. When other primary commodities were added, that figure totalled 85 per cent of the exports. In return, India has been importing more and more Chinese processed goods, to the extent that it has become import-dependent on China for steel tubes and pipes.

The fact is that Beijing is conserving its own non-renewable resources by encouraging its industry to meet production needs through imports. China, for example, has substantial reserves of iron ore, yet it has emerged the world’s largest iron importer, accounting for a third of all global imports. A quarter of China’s iron-ore imports come alone from India, to which it then sells finished tubes and pipes.

India’s estimated iron-ore reserves of 18 billion metric tons will last between 30 and 50 years, if the country were to boost its per capita iron-ore consumption from the present 30 kilograms to the developed world’s 300- to 400-kilogram level. China, on the other hand, has estimated iron-ore reserves of 472 billion metric tons, although the average iron content in its deposits is only 32.1 per cent. It was industrialist Ratan Tata who publicly contended that if China, with larger deposits, could treat iron ore as a strategic resource, India ought to do the same.

Add to the inequitable trade pattern the galloping imbalance, with China enjoying a trade surplus of $10.7 billion in calendar 2007, due in part to its cryptic barriers that have left even world-class Indian software and pharmaceutical companies out in the cold. China’s trade surpluses are with the United States, Europe and India. With the rest of the world, it actually has a trade deficit.

Even if China-India trade overtakes US-India trade — a likely scenario — political issues will continue to divide Beijing and New Delhi.

Had China pursued political progress with India even at half the speed at which it has pushed its exports, the relationship today would have looked less unpredictable. Instead, as if to underscore its mercantilist approach, it has sought to enlarge its one-sided advantages by pressing India to enter into a free-trade agreement with it. It is like asking New Delhi to reward it for its political intransigence and muscle-flexing.

China’s growing assertiveness comes at a time when a high-stakes geopolitical competition is sweeping Asia, centred on building new alliances, ensuring power equilibrium, and securing a larger share of energy and mineral resources. That Asia is big enough to accommodate the ambitions of both China and India is a bromide you will hear only from Indian leaders; for Beijing, Asia has to be China-oriented.

The challenge arising from Beijing’s determination to emerge as Asia’s unchallenged power cannot be addressed if India simplistically believes it has just two options: Pursue a feckless policy toward China or brace up for confrontation. That is a false choice that can only stifle the several options India has between those two extremes. While keeping cooperation as the public leitmotif of its relations with Beijing, New Delhi has to start reclaiming lost leverage in order to fashion a more result-oriented, realpolitik policy.

Indian prime minister visits China January 13-15, 2008

Posted on January 6, 2008 by Chellaney

The PM’s China
visit comes when Beijing has hardened its stance
on territorial disputes

Dragooned
by the dragon

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Hindustan Times, January 7, 2008

At
a time when Beijing is pursuing a more muscular policy — from provocatively
seeking to assert its jurisdiction over islets claimed by Vietnam to whipping up spats
with Germany, Canada and the US over the Dalai Lama — Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh is embarking on a New
Year visit to China as part of an agreement reached during
President Hu Jintao’s November 2006
trip “to hold regular summit-level meetings”.
But
while Hu clubbed his India trip with a visit to “all-weather ally” Pakistan —
just as his Premier Wen Jiabao did in
2005 — Singh will pay his respect by
going only to China, instead
of travelling also to, say, Japan or
Vietnam.

Singh’s
visit is to follow more than a year of assertive Chinese
moves that have run counter to efforts to build a stable Sino-Indian
relationship based on equilibrium and forward thinking. Two things
have happened. One, China has hardened its stance on
territorial disputes with India
— a reality the very small, largely symbolic joint
anti-terrorist army exercise in Yunnan cannot obscure.
And two, as the Dalai Lama pointed
out in a recent address in Rome, Beijing is taking an increasingly harsh position on Tibet, pretending there is no Tibetan issue to resolve.

The
Tibet issue is at the core of the India-China
divide, and without Beijing beginning a
process of reconciliation and healing
in Tibet and coming to terms with history, there is little prospect
of Sino-Indian differences being
bridged. Beijing
itself highlights the centrality of the Tibet issue by laying claim to Indian territories on the basis of
alleged Tibetan ecclesial or tutelary links
to them, not any professed Han connection.

But with the Dalai Lama having publicly repudiated such claims, a discomfited Beijing has
sought to persuade his representatives in
the ongoing dialogue process that the
Tibetan government-in-exile support China’s
position that Arunachal Pradesh is part of traditional Tibet. The fact is that with China’s
own claim to Tibet
being historically dubious, its
claims to Indian territories are doubly suspect, underlining its attempts at incremental annexation.

The
tough, uncompromising Chinese approach contrasts sharply with the forbearing positions of the Indian government and the Dalai
Lama. New Delhi,
for instance, has bent over backwards
to play down aggressive Chinese
military moves along the still ill-defined
line of control. The Dalai Lama, for
his part, is beginning to face muted criticism from restive Tibetans
for having secured nothing from Beijing two decades after changing the struggle for liberation from Chinese imperial conquest to a struggle for autonomy
within the framework of the People’s
Republic. As the Dalai Lama himself admitted in
Rome, “Our
right hand has always reached out to the Chinese
government. That hand has remained
empty…”

Examples
of China’s increasing hardline
stance on India range from its ambassador’s Beijing-supported
bellicose public statement on Arunachal on the eve of Hu’s visit, to its foreign minister’s May
2007 message to his Indian counterpart that China
no longer felt bound by the 2005 agreement that any border-related settlement
should not disturb settled populations. Add to that the October admission by
the Indo-Tibetan Border Police chief that there had been 141 Chinese military incursions
in the preceding
12 months alone — or about three incursions a week on average.

Beijing’s
strategy is to interminably drag out its separate negotiating processes with India and the Dalai Lama’s envoys in order to wheedle out more and more concessions. In
line with that, China’s
negotiators have been in full
foot-dragging mode, seeking to keep the discussions merely at the level of
enunciating principles,
positions and frameworks — something
they have done splendidly in
negotiations with India
since 1981 and with the Dalai Lama’s
envoys since 2002.

As
several Chinese scholars have acknowledged,
Beijing
is not as keen as New Delhi
to resolve the territorial disputes. Having
got what it wanted either by military aggression or furtive encroachment, Beijing values
its claims on additional Indian territories as vital leverage to keep India under
pressure. Similarly, not content with the Dalai Lama’s abandonment of the
demand for independence, Beijing
continues to publicly vilify him and
portray his envoys’ visits for negotiations as personal trips. It has further tightened
its vise on Tibet
by ordering that all lama reincarnations
get its approval, renewing political repression, and encouraging the ‘Go West’ Han-migration
campaign.

Gratuitously,
New Delhi has
downplayed instances of belligerent activity by the People’s Liberation Army, denying at times even the undeniable — like the PLA’s destruction
of a few unmanned Indian forward posts at the Sikkim-Bhutan-Tibet trijunction
in November. Army Chief General Deepak Kapoor has called PLA cross-border forays
into Bhutan
“a matter between” Bhutan
and China,
as if India
is not responsible for Bhutanese defence.

It
is not accidental that China’s hardline approach has followed its infrastructure
advances on the Tibetan plateau, including the opening of a new railway,
airfields and highways. The railway, by arming Beijing
with a rapid military-deployment capability, is transforming the
trans-Himalayan military equations.

Beijing has also been emboldened by a couple
of major Indian missteps. During Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee’s June 2003 visit,
it wrung the concession it always wanted from India
— a clear and unambiguous recognition of Tibet
as part of China. Vajpayee not
only inexcusably linked troubled Tibet with a non-issue, Sikkim, but also his
kowtowing on Tibet stripped India of leverage on the larger territorial
disputes with China. Little
surprise, therefore, that Beijing now presents Arunachal as
an outstanding issue that demands
‘give and take’, cleverly putting
the onus on India
to achieve progress. It aims to dragoon New
Delhi into ceding at least Tawang, populated
not by Tibetans, but by Monpas, a distinct
tribe.

This
line of attack has been further bolstered
by the 2005 ‘guiding principles’, one of which calls for “meaningful
and mutually acceptable adjustments” to respective positions. India was craven enough to
agree to this principle, although it
is negotiating with an aggressor
state that aims to keep it off balance and prevent a settlement by seeking to extend its territorial gains.

Having conceded the Tibet
card, what “meaningful and mutually
acceptable adjustments” can India
demand from China? Such
adjustments, as Beijing
insists, have to be primarily on India’s part.
The new Chinese assertiveness on
Arunachal since 2006 thus is not
unplanned but the cumulative result of Indian missteps.

India can expect no respite from
Chinese pressure, given Beijing’s growing propensity to flex its muscles, as
underscored by its anti-satellite weapon test last January, its recent
large-scale war game in the South and East China Seas, its public showcasing of
new military hardware like the Jin-class, nuclear-capable submarine, its
strategic moves around India, and its last-minute cancellation of a
long-planned Hong Kong visit by the US carrier, Kitty Hawk. If anything, China is likely to further up the ante against India.

New Delhi thus cannot stay caught in a
double-bind. To blur the line between diplomacy and appeasement, and to
emphasize show over substance, is only to play into Beijing’s gameplan. It is past time India injected
greater policy realism by shedding deluding platitudes and placing premium on
substance and leveraged diplomacy.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=ff9aae5c-8c75-4c83-9090-83ea113eea22&MatchID1=4617&TeamID1=3&TeamID2=4&MatchType1=1&SeriesID1=1163&PrimaryID=4617&Headline=Dragooned+by+the+dragon

China adds muscle to its foreign policy

Posted on January 6, 2008 by Chellaney

China’s muscle-flexing diplomacy

Beijing is beginning to take its gloves off, says Brahma
Chellaney

India Abroad, January 4, 2008

Indian Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh’s forthcoming visit to China, close on the heels of a small anti-terrorist
exercise between Chinese and Indian soldiers, cannot obscure a larger reality:
Rising economic and military power is emboldening Beijing to pursue a more
muscular foreign policy. Having earlier preached the gospel of
its “peaceful
rise,” China
is now beginning to take the gloves off, confident of the muscle it has
acquired.

From provocatively seeking
to assert its jurisdiction over islets claimed by Vietnam in the Spratly and Paracel archipelagos, to
whipping up diplomatic spats with Germany,
Canada and the United States over their hospitality to the
Dalai Lama, Beijing
is now demonstrating an increasing propensity to flex its muscles.

Other recent
instances of China’s growing assertiveness include its demolition of a few
unmanned Indian forward posts at the Tibet-Bhutan-Sikkim tri-junction, its
large-scale war game in the South and East China Seas, its public showcasing of
new military hardware like the Jin-class, nuclear-capable submarine, its
strategic moves around India, and its last-minute cancellation of a long-planned
Hong Kong visit by the U.S. carrier, Kitty
Hawk.

Ever since it
surprised the world by successfully carrying out an anti-satellite weapon test
in January 2007, China’s
Communist leadership has been less coy to project national power. It seems
unconcerned that such muscle-flexing has triggered anti-China demonstrations in
Hanoi and Ho
Chi Minh City and spurred unease in other neighboring
states.

For more than a year, Beijing has been signaling a tougher stance on its
territorial disputes with India.
Examples of China’s increasing
hardline stance on India range from
the Chinese ambassador’s Beijing-supported bellicose public statement on
Arunachal Pradesh on the eve of President Hu Jintao’s November 2007 New Delhi visit,
to the Chinese foreign minister’s May 2007 message to his Indian counterpart
that China no longer felt bound by a
2005 agreement that any border-related settlement should not disturb settled
populations. Add to that the October 2007 admission by the chief of India’s
Indo-Tibetan Border Police that there had been 141 Chinese
military incursions in the preceding
12-month period alone.

In that
light, the recent five-day Sino-Indian anti-terrorist maneuver in Yunnan province was
largely symbolic. In fact, barely 100 soldiers from each side were involved in this
practice of urban counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism drills. Yet, given
the new strains in the relationship, the joint exercise was viewed as a welcome
step.

Codenamed
“Hand in Hand,” this exercise was the first between the Indian Army and the
People’s Liberation Army. A Sino-Indian naval maneuver was held last spring, as
part of an Indian effort to placate Beijing over
the first Japan-U.S.-India trilateral naval exercises off the Tokyo Bay.

During Dr. Singh’s
impending visit to Beijing, little progress can
be expected toward resolving the territorial disputes that divide India and China. Yet, if the Sino-Indian
relationship is to become stable, a settlement of those disputes is necessary.

A first step to a settlement of any dispute is clarity on
a line of control or appreciation of
the “no go” areas so that provocative or unfriendly actions can be eschewed.
Protracted India-China negotiations over the past 26 years, however, have
failed to remove the ambiguities plaguing their long line of control. Beijing, seeking to keep India under strategic pressure, has
been loath to clearly define the frontline.

It is often overlooked that India
and China
are old civilizations but new neighbors. It was the 1951 Chinese annexation of the historical buffer, Tibet, that
brought Chinese troops to what is
now the Sino-Indian frontier. Just
11 years later, China
invaded India. Today, both countries have
built a stake in maintaining the peaceful diplomatic environment on which
their economic modernization and security depend. Yet the wounds of the 1962
war have been kept open by China’s publicly
assertive claims to additional Indian territories.

That
China is not a status quo power, at
least territorially, is evident from the way it has placed Taiwan under a
permanent threat of force and asserted land and maritime claims vis-à-vis other
neighbors. Its claims on India,
however, involve the largest chunks
of territory. Arunachal alone is more than double the size of Taiwan.

Through its forceful claims, Beijing
itself highlights that at the core of its disputes with India is Tibet. Having
gobbled up Tibet, Beijing
now lays claim to Indian territories, on the basis not of any purported Han
connection, but of Tibetan Buddhist ecclesiastical influence
or alleged longstanding tutelary
relations with them. Therefore, to focus on Arunachal or even Tawang is not
only to miss the wood for the trees, but also to play into
China’s
attempts at incremental territorial
annexation.

Yet India
has needlessly retreated to a more and more defensive position, bringing
itself under greater Chinese
pressure. Rather than gain leverage
by adopting a nuanced position on Tibet, India
continues to be overcautious in its diplomacy, even when Beijing
acts antagonistically. In recent weeks, for example, New Delhi has bent over backward to play down
aggressive PLA moves along the line of control.

Indeed, New Delhi’s acquiescence to China’s
annexation of Tibet has come to haunt it, as Beijing today seeks to extend the
territorial gains from its Tibet
occupation by pushing a bald principle
in the border negotiations with India: What is ours is ours to keep, but what
is yours must be shared with us. It insists that India
at least cede Tawang, a critical corridor between Lhasa
and the Assam Valley
of immense military import because it overlooks the chicken-neck that connects India with its
northeast.

The
reality is that the trans-Himalayan military equations have altered ever since China opened the railway to Lhasa in July 2006. The railway, which is now being extended southward to Xigatse and then beyond to
the Indian border, not only strengthens China’s hold over Tibet, but also arms Beijing with a rapid military deployment
capability against India. It may
not be a coincidence that China’s
growing hardline
approach has followed its infrastructure
advances on the Tibetan plateau, in the form of the railway and new airfields
and highways. It is now building the
world’s highest airport at Ngari, on the southwestern edge of Tibet.

Given
the creeping conventional military
asymmetry, India’s
need for a reliable nuclear-deterrent capability has never been greater. Not
only are conventional weapons far more expensive, but also India is
heavily dependent on their imports. Yet, through the insidious
nuclear deal with the United States,
New Delhi is willing
to accept fetters on the full-fledged development of its indigenous deterrent,
with the external affairs minister
unabashedly telling Parliament
recently that his government and party are a “strong believer in total nuclear disarmament” and “we do not believe
in nuclear weaponization in a massive way.” This assertion comes when India has yet to build and deploy even a barely
minimal deterrent against China.

In
fact, in his meandering replies in the two Houses of India’s parliament to the
nuclear-deal debate, Pranab Mukherjee actually castigated the predecessor
government for exercising the
nuclear option, claiming that, “When
in 1974 Shrimati Indira Gandhi went
for the nuclear explosion, it was not for indulging in
weaponization… She categorically mentioned: ‘I wanted to have the
technology. I wanted to test the
competence of the Indian scientists, Indian technicians and Indian engineers.’ The purpose was the peaceful use of the
civilian nuclear programme.” Further criticizing the exercise of the option, he
said: “We used to have a pledge from 1974 till 1998, almost quarter of a
century, that we shall keep our options open.”

Mukherjee
also turned India’s publicly enunciated “credible minimal
deterrent” on its head by calling it
“minimum credible deterrent,” which
implies that the deterrent’s credibility would be kept to a minimum — as it has been. “We want minimum credible deterrent, from our security
perspective,” he declared in the
Rajya Sabha, the upper House, on December 5.

While
China
calculatedly bolsters its political and military leverage, Indian leaders continue to send out counterproductive signals. In his
November 29 reply in the Lok Sabha —
the lower House — to the parliamentary debate on the same subject, Mukherjee
was ecstatic about Sonia Gandhi’s visit to China
in late October: “During the visit of chairperson of UPA [United Progressive Alliance], the type
of warmth she felt … is envy of anybody, any world statesman… She was the first
person from outside to visit People’s Republic of China”
after the Chinese Communist Party’s 17th National Congress.

So what if she was the first? The
CPC’s National Congress had no bearing
on Chinese policy toward India. All it
did was to reinforce China’s
totalitarian political system, even as President Hu used the word “democracy”
61 times in his speech to the
Congress. Should she have gone to China at a time when Beijing had
hardened its policy toward India?
After all, she went there not as a private citizen but as the power behind Prime Minister
Singh. The pomp and ceremony with
which she was received reflected her status as India’s most powerful politician.

Such a symbolically potent visit to
an adversarial state cannot be undertaken for personal image-building, or other egotistical purposes, or to promote
politically partisan interests.
Criticism of her party and government for being
pro-U.S. may have prodded her to demonstrate balance by visiting China. But given
the visible toughening of the Chinese stance, the visit was ill-timed. Indeed,
through her visit, she only played into
the hands of Beijing,
whose India
diplomacy emphasizes show over substance so as to provide cover for exerting strategic pressure.

It
is not just New Delhi’s diffidence that
encourages Beijing
to up the ante. Too often in the
past, the personal image-building of
an Indian leader has taken precedence over the unflinching pursuit of the country’s long-term interests.

A
more egregious case than Sonia Gandhi was the sphinx-like
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whose June 2003 official visit to Beijing
was designed for Machiavellian partisan interests.
By mid-2003, Prime Minister Vajpayee was getting
ready for early national elections, which he wanted to contest on the “India Shining”
plank of having made peace with both
China
and Pakistan.
Having turned his Pakistan policy on its head in April 2003 by publicly extending “a hand of friendship” to the very country he
had isolated since the terrorist
attack on India’s parliament,
he set out less than three months later to befriend Beijing.

His
mollycoddling cost India dear. Beijing wrung
the concession it always wanted from India
— a clear and unambiguous recognition of Tibet
as part of China. To justify
his yielding to the Chinese demand, Vajpayee claimed credit for beginning
“the process by which Sikkim
will cease to be an issue in
India-China relations.” But while he
formally recognized Tibet as
“part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China,” Beijing to this day has not officially
acknowledged Sikkim to be
part of the territory of the Republic
of India. It has only
ceased its cartographic mischief in
depicting Sikkim
as an independent kingdom — a mischief of little consequence for India, as the people of Sikkim, along with the rest of the world, had
accepted Sikkim’s
1975 merger.

Not only was Vajpayee’s linking of troubled Tibet
with a non-issue, Sikkim, inexcusable, but it also stripped India of leverage on the larger territorial
disputes with China. It is no
wonder that Beijing now presents Arunachal as
an outstanding issue that demands
“give and take,” ingeniously putting
the onus on India
to achieve progress.

While one can expect to
hear the same empty platitudes on Sino-Indian relations during Singh’s visit, India can
ill-afford another misstep. In fact, the challenge for Indian diplomacy is to
retrieve lost leverage by gently shining a spotlight on the central issue, Tibet, and building a web of strategic
partnerships with other important democracies in Asia
and elsewhere.

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

_____________________________

This is an official PRC map, showing Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin as part of China and historical Tibet gerrymandered:

Why India’s Powerful Anti-Deterrent Lobby Supports Nuclear Deal With The U.S.

Posted on January 5, 2008 by Chellaney

Pro-Deal But Anti-Deterrent

None of today’s deal pushers wanted India to go overtly nuclear. They are thus not concerned that the nuclear deal will adversely affect the still-nascent deterrent.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, Saturday, January 5, 2008

With the Indian team now in Vienna for further safeguards-related negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency, one remarkable fact has escaped attention in the national debate over the divisive nuclear deal with the United States. Those in the political establishment and outside who are stridently pushing the deal may be a varied lot but share one common trait: None had advocated or desired that India go overtly nuclear. This lot thus is unabashedly blasé about the deal’s fetters on a still-nascent deterrent whose development it didn’t support in the first place.

Check their backgrounds and you will find that the deal pushers — whether they are political leaders, bureaucrats, analysts or simply drum-beaters — did not favour testing in the period between 1994 and 1998 when a succession of five Indian governments wrestled with the issue of whether the window of opportunity was closing for India to exercise its long-held nuclear option. In fact, today’s most-ardent deal peddlers — without exception — worked hard within the government or outside in those critical years to stop India from breaking out of its nuclear straitjacket.

A fresh reminder that those for the deal remain against a credible deterrent came during the recent Parliament debate on the subject when the external affairs minister, speaking in place of a loath-to-reply prime minister, repeatedly castigated the predecessor government for crossing the nuclear Rubicon, saying that action breached the long-standing official policy to retain the nuclear option, not to exercise it. As Pranab Mukherjee put it, “We used to have a pledge from 1974 till 1998, almost quarter of a century, that we shall keep our options open.”

Given the growing conventional military asymmetry with China, India’s need for a reliable nuclear deterrent that can survive a first strike has never been greater. Not only are conventional weapons far more expensive, but also India is heavily dependent on their imports. Yet, through the insidious deal with the US, New Delhi is accepting constraints on its indigenous deterrent’s development, with Mukherjee bluntly telling Parliament that his government and party were a “strong believer in total nuclear disarmament” and did not want India to emerge as a major nuclear power. “That is the foreign policy, that is the philosophy,” he proclaimed.

Oddly, such an assertion comes when India has yet to build and deploy even a barely minimal deterrent against China. No government leader has claimed, or can assert, that the country today can effectively deter China, its primary challenge. Indeed, the key task India faces today is to build a stout deterrent, however small, that can help deter an increasingly assertive China that has gone from preaching the gospel of its “peaceful rise” to taking its gloves off.

From provocatively demolishing some unmanned Indian forward posts at the Tibet-Bhutan-Sikkim tri-junction, to aggressively asserting its jurisdiction over islets claimed by Vietnam in the the Spratly and Paracel archipelagos, and to sparking diplomatic spats with Germany, Canada and America over the official hospitality or honour they extended the Dalai Lama, Beijing of late has shown an increasing propensity to flex its muscles.

By sheltering behind calcinatory and delusional rhetoric, New Delhi overlooks a central reality: In today’s world, a country can impose its demands on another not necessarily by employing direct force but by building such asymmetric capabilities that a credible threat crimps the other side’s room for manoeuvre. Nothing better illustrates this danger than New Delhi’s own action in pulling the wool over public eyes by denying the Chinese demolition of the Indian forward posts, lest questions be asked at home as to what it has done in response to the provocation. It even goes to the extent of needlessly downplaying the increasing cross-border Chinese military incursions.

The more India falls behind its minimum-deterrence needs, the more likely it will pursue a feckless China policy.

Unlike conventional weapons, systems of nuclear deterrence have to be developed indigenously and without the lure of illicit kickbacks. A decade after declaring itself a nuclear-weapons state, India’s primary focus today is more on buying high-priced conventional weapons from overseas (reflected in its emergence as a top arms importer in the world) than on plugging gaps in its deterrence. Consequently, India’s goal of erecting a credible and survivable nuclear deterrent, as the private intelligence service Stratfor put it, is at least a decade away.

Yet the government pooh-poohs the deal-related implications but flaunts its “firm commitment on disarmament, firm commitment on non-proliferation, which [is] embedded in our civilization and in our history,” to quote the irrepressible Mukherjee. Only powers with surplus or obsolescent weapons needing disposal trumpet their interest in arms control and disarmament, not a nation dependent on others to meet its basic defence needs.

To concerns that the deal impeded India’s deterrent plans and eliminated the leeway the country enjoyed in 1974 and 1998 to test, the minister responded with derision. “Shri Advani also pointed out that there will be no tests. Do you not want Programme III [Pokhran III]?” he taunted the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha who had walked out with his party MPs before the speech.

In the other House, a less-mocking Mukherjee had this to say: “If India considers it necessary, it will undertake the test. As we did it in 1974, as we did in 1998, and the consequences will also follow. It is as simple as that.” The minister did not elaborate on what those consequences would be, although they have been spelled out unambiguously by America — the termination of all cooperation, the right to seek the return of what has been supplied, and getting other supplier-states to also cut off cooperation.

Consider this: Those in office today are willing to enter into nuclear cooperation with the US on the explicit understanding that if a future government tested, fuel and spare-part supplies and other cooperation would cease. They are also willing to saddle the country with a host of legally irrevocable obligations — from accepting permanent international inspections on all its civilian facilities to adhering to US-led cartels from which India has been excluded.

There were no such conditions, not even an implied test ban, when India first entered into civil nuclear cooperation with the US in 1963, at a time when it had been militarily humiliated by China and was strapped for cash. Generous low-interest US credit persuaded India to drop its preference for a natural uranium-fuelled power plant and accept a Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) station dependent on external fuel supply, in keeping with US policy to sell only such leverage-gaining reactors. Yet when America unilaterally walked out of its 123 Agreement with India in 1978, why did New Delhi not exercise its right to terminate IAEA inspections at Tarapur, the sole plant set up under the accord?

Declassified US documents show that the CIA had correctly assessed that India would not end its obligations even after America had broken its word, but instead would seek US help to find a substitute fuel supplier to keep electricity flowing to the Bombay region. That is exactly what happened. But in return, to this day, India has exacerbated its spent-fuel problem at Tarapur by granting the US a right it didn’t have even if it had not walked out of that accord — a veto on Indian reprocessing of the accumulating discharged fuel.

In that light, ask yourself: Having invested tens of billions of dollars in importing several new nuclear-power plants and having created electricity dependency, would India be able to test, when the basis of new cooperation is an explicit test prohibition written into Hyde Act’s Section 106, an unequivocal US “right of return” enshrined in the 123 Agreement’s Article 14(4), and the recourse to an alternative fuel supplier foreclosed by US law? Even Mukherjee could only waffle.

Still, Mukherjee turned India’s publicly enunciated doctrine of a “credible minimal deterrent” on its head by calling it “minimum credible deterrent,” which implies that the deterrent’s credibility would be kept to a minimum — as it has been. “We want minimum credible deterrent, from our security perspective,” he declared in the Rajya Sabha. This came after he confessed, “I was a little confused when Shri Yashwant Sinha tried to play with the words ‘credible minimum deterrent,’ whether it is minimal or whether it is minimum or whether it is credible. I then asked my officers to brief me on this.”

As defence minister, Mukherjee was down-to-earth and focused on national interest. But as EAM, he risks becoming external to national interests, unless he chooses his briefers more carefully.

This was underlined during the debate not only by the factually incorrect statements he made (highlighted in my last column) but also by the troubling sense of history he articulated: “When in 1974 Shrimati Indira Gandhi went for the nuclear explosion, it was not for indulging in weaponization… She categorically mentioned, ‘I wanted to have the technology. I wanted to test the competence of the Indian scientists, Indian technicians and Indian engineers’.” Here is a senior minister telling the Lok Sabha in earnest that the onerous technology sanctions India still confronts were triggered by a test whose sole purpose was the then PM’s itching but aimless desire to test the competence of scientists and engineers!

Indira Gandhi, India’s only strategically minded PM, was definitely not part of the sizable constituency opposed to nuclear weaponization that the country has had for long. This constituency has always comprised two groups — those anti-nuclear on honest ideological grounds, including many Gandhians and leftists; and those disingenuously citing pragmatism but being rank ideologues in giving primacy to economics over larger strategic considerations or wanting a nuclear policy that paid obeisance to the nuclear Pope, the US.

Faced with a fait accompli following the surprise 1998 tests, many in the second group were quick to embrace the new reality and some to even welcome it. That matched the nimbleness with which American policy shifted its own goal — from dissuading India from crossing the nuclear threshold to preventing its emergence as a full-fledged nuclear-weapons state by bringing it into the US-fashioned non-proliferation regime. It is that revised goal that today serves as the foundation of a deal whose embedded constraints, in the words Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Joseph Biden, “will limit the size and sophistication of India’s nuclear-weapons programme.”

Yet there has been no dearth of reminders since the abortive 1999-2000 attempt to get India into the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that the powerful anti-deterrent lobby has not fully reconciled to the country’s overt nuclearization. Unable to undo India’s nuclear-weapons-state status, this lot has sought to do the next best it can: Sell India’s nuclear soul. The deal, whose vaunted energy benefits now stand thoroughly discredited, mortgages India’s future security at the altar of US non-proliferation interests.

Time to compel Musharraf to go into exile

Posted on January 3, 2008 by Chellaney

The Jihad Culture of Pakistan

Though ruling under the pretext of preventing instability, Pakistan’s military regime is a threat to national and international security.

Brahma Chellaney

Japan Times, January 3, 2008

After having fretted over a rising pro-democracy tide, Pakistan’s ruling military can expect to be the main gainer from former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s killing at the very public park where the 1951 assassination of the country’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, helped smother a fledging democracy and open the way to the military’s entry into politics.

Just as Pakistan become increasingly Islamized following the 1979 execution of Bhutto’s father — Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto — by the general who deposed him, the daughter’s assassination will help reinforce Islamist radicalization under continued military rule.

In fact, Bhutto — the first woman in modern world history to be democratically elected to govern an Islamic state — met her violent end three kilometers from where her father was hanged. Add to the family tragedy the separate killings of her two brothers, one poisoned in 1985 in the French Riviera and the other fatally shot in 1996, with both cases still unsolved.

With Pakistan’s politics today teetering on a knife’s edge, the main loser is likely to be President Pervez Musharraf, who is widely perceived to have done too little to protect Bhutto or to rein in the jihadists, some with cozy ties to his establishment. The official move to deflect public suspicion of regime involvement in the assassination by meretriciously laying the blame on the amorphous Al Qaeda has only highlighted the need for an independent international investigation along the lines of the United Nations probe into ex-Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s killing.

Given that Pakistan identified the two December 2003 assassination attempts on Musharraf as an inside job by charging four junior army officers and six air force men, suspicion is bound to linger that elements within an ever-more radicalized establishment bumped off Benazir — an outspoken critic of the jihadists who had emerged as the leader most likely to bring about political change in a country tired of its present military ruler.

Just days before her assassination, Bhutto said in a Washington Post interview that she was concerned that some of the people around Musharraf have sympathy for the militants and was “shocked to see how embedded” the state system of support for extremists is.

Musharraf’s credibility was in tatters even before the murder, but now his days in power appear more numbered than ever. In its 60-year history, Pakistan has already had four military takeovers and four Constitutions. With the assassination dimming the possibility of a democratic transition in a country of 165 million citizens where governments have always been booted out but never been voted out, a new military face could easily take over power on the pretext of saving an imploding state. Such a takeover will be inevitable if violent protests persist, the two main political parties shun Musharraf, and the U.S. (a key party in Pakistani politics) distances itself from the dictator it has propped up for long.

The likely perpetuation of military rule is not good news for international or regional security or for Pakistan’s own future, given how the country has sunk deeper in fundamentalism, extremism and militarism since the last coup in 1999. While the military will continue to defend its holding the reins of power as a necessary evil in the service of a greater good, its political role will only keep Pakistan on the boil.

For more than eight years, Musharraf has justified his dictatorship as vital for bringing stability to Pakistan even as his rule has taken it to the brink of disaster. “The country is paying a very heavy price for the many unpardonable actions of one man — Pervez Musharraf,” as former Prime Minister Mohammad Nawaz Sharif put it. “These are the darkest days in Pakistan’s history. And such are the wages of dictatorship.” Today, a nuclear-armed, terror-exporting Pakistan has become a problem not just regionally but globally, with almost every major international terror attack since 9/11 being traced back to Pakistani territory. Pakistan has also been the source of the greatest leakage of nuclear secrets.

It is the military that created and nurtured the forces of jihad and helped Islamist groups gain political space at the expense of mainstream parties. Musharraf’s record is glaring: He welcomed with open arms the three jihadists India freed in late 1999 to end the hijacking of Flight IC-814, helping one to form the terrorist Jaish-e-Mohammed group and harboring another until his subsequent role in the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl could no longer be hidden. Musharraf has filled Pakistani jails more with democracy activists than with jihadists, even as he has used the threat from the latter to cling on to power.

Without the military’s vise on power being broken and the rogue Inter-Services Intelligence agency being tamed, Pakistan will continue to menace regional and international security. What steaming Pakistan needs is a safety valve in the form of democratic empowerment of its restive masses. But what military rule has created is a pressure-cooker society congenial to the continued growth of extremism.

Getting the military to return to the barracks, admittedly, has become more difficult. The generous spoils of power under Musharraf’s prolonged rule have fattened the military, which now controls fields as varied as agriculture and education and runs businesses ranging from banks to bakeries.

Add to that the new draconian powers that have been retained despite Musharraf’s lifting of the six-week emergency rule — declared to engineer his “reelection” as president. These powers allow Musharraf to continue muzzling the judiciary and media without attracting the odium of continued emergency rule. But the more powers Musharraf has usurped over the years, the more dependent he has become on his military and intelligence and, therefore, less able to sever their ties with extremist elements.

Yet another factor helping to keep the military in power is U.S. aid. Indeed, all Pakistani military rulers since the 1950s have oiled their dictatorships with copious aid from America, whose foreign policy has allowed narrow geopolitical objectives to override long-term interests. Since 2001 alone, the U.S. aid has totaled $11 billion, most of it in military hardware and cash support for Pakistan’s operating budget. So munificent has the aid been that the Pakistan military — the world’s fifth largest — now relies on Washington for a quarter of its entire budget.

Such aid, far from producing counterterrorist successes, has enabled Pakistan to become the main sanctuary of transnational terrorists, with U.S. officials admitting that much of the American money has been diverted to fund acquisition of large weapon systems against India. As the country next-door, India will be affected the most by any surge in Pakistani terrorism. In fact, the Al Qaeda network is now increasingly made up not of Arab and Afghan fighters but of homegrown Pakistani extremists.

Washington, however, still values the Pakistan military as a key instrument to advance its regional interests. Just as it helped keep the jihad-spewing General Zia ul-Haq in power for a decade to take on Soviet forces in Afghanistan, the U.S. seeks a pliant ruler in Islamabad today because it employs Pakistan as a gateway to military operations in Afghanistan, a base for clandestine missions into Iran and a vehicle for other geopolitical interests.

Consequently, the U.S. has neither leaned too heavily on Pakistan to achieve enduring antiterrorist results nor exposed its military’s complicity in the sale of nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. It also has shied away from pressing Musharraf to make renegade nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan available for international questioning.

Today, President George W. Bush’s preoccupation with a self-created mess in Iraq cannot obscure a larger reality: Pakistan, not Iraq, is the central front in the global battle against terrorism. But before a disastrous U.S. policy on Pakistan starts to match the Iraq folly, Bush ought to end America’s reliance on the Pakistan military and his own misbegotten effort to help find a civilian mask for the Pakistani dictator.

Bhutto’s murder is a horrific reminder that unraveling Pakistan’s jihad culture won’t be easy but is essential. The battle against international terrorism cannot be won without demilitarizing Pakistan’s blood-soaked polity and de-radicalizing its society. Otherwise, Pakistan (which its founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah bewailed was a “moth-eaten travesty”) could itself unravel.

Before yet another general makes a power-grab, the international community under U.S. leadership needs to step in to get the present ruler to cede power to an all-party government that inspires public trust and can hold free and fair elections. Musharraf is terminally unpopular and highly vulnerable at this juncture, and to let go of this opportunity would be to allow Pakistan to descend into an abyss of endless violence and terrorism. Having exiled others in the past, Musharraf — now the main font of discord in Pakistan — should be made to go into exile himself.

• Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.