Tackling an assertive China: India’s options

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Insatiable dragon

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

Brahma Chellaney
DNA newspaper, October 30, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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U.S. factor in Sino-Indian relations

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U.S. spurs China-India tensions

A need to dissuade Beijing from any resort to force

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tensions in the China-India-U.S. triangle

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Wrong move in Sino-Indian chess

The Indo-US strategic tie-up has served as the key instigation in China’s hardening stance towards India

Brahma Chellaney Mint October 26, 2009

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

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

The Barack Obama administration, although committed to promoting that strategic partnership, has been reluctant to take New Delhi’s side in any of its disputes with Beijing. This has emboldened China to up the ante against India.

Indeed, the present pattern of border provocations, new force deployments and mutual recriminations is redolent of the situation that prevailed 47 years ago when China—taking advantage of the advent of the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of a nuclear Armageddon—routed the unprepared Indian military in a surprise two-front aggression.

The new tensions are of recent origin. Until mid-2005, China was eschewing anti-India rhetoric and pursuing a policy of active engagement with India, even as it continued to expand its strategic space in southern Asia, to New Delhi’s detriment. In fact, when Premier Wen Jiabao visited India in April 2005, the two countries unveiled an important agreement identifying six broad principles to govern a border settlement.

But after the separate unveiling of the Indo-US defence framework accord and nuclear deal in 2005, the mood in Beijing perceptibly changed. That gave rise to a pattern that has become commonplace since: Chinese newspapers, individual bloggers, security think tanks and even officially blessed websites ratcheting up an “India threat” scenario.

A US-India military alliance has always been a strategic nightmare for the Chinese, and the ballyhooed Indo-US global strategic partnership, although it falls short of a formal military alliance, triggered alarm bells in Beijing. That raises the question whether New Delhi helped create the context, however inadvertently, for the new Chinese assertiveness by agreeing to participate in US-led “multinational operations”, share intelligence and build military-to-military interoperability (key elements of the defence framework accord) and to become the US’ partner on a new “global democracy initiative”—a commitment found in the nuclear agreement-in-principle.

While Beijing cannot hold a veto over New Delhi’s diplomatic or strategic initiatives, couldn’t India have avoided creating an impression that it was potentially being primed as a new junior partner (or spoke) in the US’ hub-and-spoke global alliance system?

India—with its hallowed traditions of policy independence—is an unlikely candidate to be a US ally in a patron-client framework. But the high-pitched Indian and American rhetoric that the new partnership represented a tectonic shift in geopolitical alignments apparently made Chinese policymakers believe that India was being groomed as a new Japan or Australia to the US—a perception reinforced by subsequent arrangements and defence transactions.

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

For one, Beijing calculatedly has sought to badger India on multiple fronts: military—Chinese cross-border incursions nearly doubled in one year, from 140 in 2007 to 270 in 2008, according to Indian defence officials, with “no significant increase”, to quote the foreign secretary, in the 2009 level; diplomatic—for instance, strongly protesting a prime ministerial visit to Arunachal Pradesh and issuing visas on a separate sheet to Jammu and Kashmir residents; and multilateral—launching a diplomatic offensive to undercut Indian sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh, as at the Asian Development Bank. For another, the US—far from coming to India’s support—has shied away from even cautioning Beijing against any attempt to forcibly change the existing territorial status quo. Indeed, on a host of issues—from the Dalai Lama to the Arunachal Pradesh issue—Washington has chosen not to antagonize Beijing.

That, in effect, has left India on its own. The Obama administration isn’t unfriendly to India. It just doesn’t see India as able to make an important difference to US geopolitical interests. As his secretary of state Hillary Clinton did in February, US President Obama is undertaking an Asia tour that begins in Japan and ends in China—the high spot—while skipping India.

But playing to India’s weakness for flattery, Obama is to massage its ego by honouring it with his presidency’s first state dinner. Such a glitzy affair jibes with Washington’s current business focus on India: Promoting big-ticket export items such as nuclear power reactors and conventional weapons, while prodding New Delhi to be helpful on the Af-Pak (Afghanistan-Pakistan) front.

To be sure, Obama wants to advance the Indo-US partnership, as part of which New Delhi has placed arms purchase orders, according to the Indian ambassador to the US, worth a staggering $3.5 billion just last year. But he also has signalled that such a relationship with India will not be at the expense of Washington’s fast-growing ties with Beijing. The US needs Chinese capital inflows as much as China needs US consumers—an economic interdependence of such import that snapping it would amount to mutually assured destruction (MAD). Even politically, China, with its international leverage, counts for more in US policy than New Delhi or Tokyo. Indeed, as the US-China relationship acquires a wider and deeper base in the coming years, the strains in some of the US’ existing military or strategic tie-ups in Asia will become pronounced.

Against that background, it is no surprise that Washington now intends to abjure elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including any joint military drill in Arunachal Pradesh or trilateral naval manoeuvres with India and Japan. In fact, Washington is quietly charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal Pradesh issue, just as its ally Australia has done rather publicly.

Left to fend for itself both on the China and Af-Pak fronts, New Delhi has decided to steer clear of any potential aggravation or confrontation with Beijing. Discretion, after all, is the better part of valour. India, however, cannot afford to be out on a limb. The Indo-US partnership has turned into a great opportunity for Washington to win multi-billion dollar Indian contracts and co-opt India in strategic arrangements, without a concomitant obligation to be on India’s side or to extend political help on regional and international issues.

Joint military exercises indeed have become a basis to make India buy increasing quantities of US arms so as to build compatibility and interoperability between the two militaries. Even counterterrorism is emerging as a major area of defence sales to India, despite the US doing little to help dismantle Pakistan’s state-run terror complex against India or bring the real masterminds of the Mumbai attacks to justice.

With Obama pursuing a Sino-centric Asia policy, and with China-friendly heads of government ensconced in Australia, Japan and Taiwan, it is apparent that New Delhi’s diplomatic calculations have gone terribly wrong. In its exuberance, the government had convinced itself that the way for India to carve out a larger international role was to bandwagon with the US, instead of following China’s example and rapidly developing comprehensive national power.

Yet the present muscular Chinese approach, paradoxically, reinforces the very line of Indian thinking that engendered greater Chinese assertiveness—that India has little option other than to align with the US. Such thinking blithely ignores the limitations of the Indo-US partnership arising from the vicissitudes and compulsions of US policy. Washington indeed is showing through its growing strategic cooperation with China and Pakistan that it does not believe in exclusive strategic partnership in any region.

India can wield international power only through the accretion of its own economic and military strength. In fact, the only way China can be deterred from making a land grab across the line of control or nibbling further at Indian territories is for India to have sufficient nuclear and missile capability. So, augmenting India’s deterrent capabilities to credible but minimal levels has to be priority No. 1. A stable, mutually beneficial equation with China is more likely to be realized if there is no trans-Himalayan military imbalance or Indian security dependency on a third party.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research, is the author, most recently, of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan (2006). Comment at theirview@livemint.com

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Winning peace in Sri Lanka

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Sri Lanka’s Elusive Peace Dividend

by Brahma Chellaney

Far Eastern Economic Review (October 2009)

Such is the misfortune of war-scarred Sri Lanka that even after military victory in the civil war, the island nation is unable to find peace. Months after the Tamil Tiger guerrillas were crushed and their top leadership eliminated, Sri Lanka has done little to begin addressing the root causes of conflict or to outline a possible answer to the longstanding cultural and political grievances of the Tamil minority, which makes up 12% of the 21.3 million population. Consequently, the government risks squandering the hard-won peace. It will be a double tragedy for Sri Lanka if winning peace proves more difficult than winning the war.

From being a self-proclaimed “island of paradise” in the early 1980s, Sri Lanka became an island of tremendous bloodshed for more than a quarter of a century. But even by the country’s gory record, the bloodletting this year was unparalleled as the Asia’s longest civil war built to a bloody crescendo. Thousands of noncombatants, according to the United Nations, were killed in the final months of the war as government forces overran the Tamil Tigers, who had established a de facto state in Sri Lanka’s north and east. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon acknowledged that civilian casualties were “unacceptably high.”

Ignoring international calls to suspend offensive military operations to help save lives of trapped civilians, President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, a naturalized United States citizen, pressed ahead with their military campaign, under the command of General Sarath Fonseka, a U.S. green card holder. The offensive actually bore a distinct family imprint, with another brother, Basil Rajapaksa, the president’s special adviser and architect of the political strategy. A third brother, Ports and Civil Aviation Minister Chamal Rajapaksa, awarded China a contract to build Sri Lanka’s billion-dollar Hambantota port, which Beijing today values as a prized jewel in its “string of pearls” strategy in this region—the thoroughfare for much of the international oil-export supply and nearly half of all global seaborne trade. An increasingly sea-minded China, instead of competing with the U.S. in the Pacific, has turned its attention to the Indian Ocean, employing its rising oil exports as justification.

Such is Sri Lanka’s vantage location that it sits astride vital sea lanes of communication. Beijing, in return for being allowed to make strategic inroads, provided Sri Lanka with offensive weapon systems that helped break the long-pending military stalemate on the island. Chinese Jian-7 fighter-jets, antiaircraft guns, JY-11 3D air surveillance radars and other weapons played a central role in helping government forces unravel the Tigers’ de facto state. Chinese weapons began pouring in from 2007 when, in response to a daring 2007 raid by the Tigers’ air wing that wrecked 10 government military aircraft, Beijing quickly supplied six warplanes on long-term credit.

China also came to the rescue of a tottering Sri Lankan economy, increasing its bilateral aid fivefold in one year to $1 billion in 2008 to emerge as Sri Lanka’s largest donor. It even got Pakistan, its ally, actively involved. With Chinese encouragement, Pakistan—despite its own faltering economy and rising Islamist challenge—boosted its annual military assistance loans to Sri Lanka to nearly $100 million last year while supplying Chinese-origin small arms and training Sri Lankan air force personnel in precision-guided attacks.

Put simply, China gave Sri Lanka the military and economic power as well as the diplomatic cover to prosecute the war as it wished in defiance of international condemnation. As in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Uzbekistan, North Korea, Burma and elsewhere, Chinese support directly contributed to the Sri Lankan bloodbath. In fact, Sri Lanka is just the latest case illustrating how China aggressively pursues strategic interests by employing its U.N. Security Council veto power to provide political protection to a human-rights abusing government.

India’s role also has been deplorable. For years, India had pursued a hands-off approach toward Sri Lanka in response to two developments: a disastrous 1987-90 peacekeeping operation and the 1991 assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Having been outmaneuvered by China’s success in extending its strategic reach into the Indian Ocean, New Delhi got sucked into providing major assistance to Colombo over the last few years, lest it lose further ground. From opening an unlimited line of military credit for Sri Lanka to extending naval and intelligence cooperation, India provided important war-relevant support in a deteriorating humanitarian situation.

President Rajapaksa deftly played the China, India and Pakistan cards to maximum advantage for his war strategy. After key Tamil Tiger leaders had been killed in the fighting, including some who committed suicide by cyanide poisoning to avoid capture, President Rajapaksa—to New Delhi’s acute mortification—thanked China, India and Pakistan in the same breath for the victory. With its leverage undermined, India today is groping to bring direction to its Sri Lanka policy by defining its objectives more coherently, even as it struggles to respond to the apparent Chinese strategy to control naval choke points in the region. Indeed, the extent to which India has ceded strategic space in its backyard is evident from the fact that Bhutan remains its sole main pocket of influence. In Sri Lanka, India has become a marginal player despite its geostrategic advantage and trade and investment clout.

President Rajapaksa has been basking in the glory of his military triumph, lionized by nationalists as a modern-day incarnation of Dutugemunu, a Sinhalese ruler who according to legend vanquished an invading Tamil army led by Kind Elara some 2,000 years ago. His real test, however, begins now. As more evidence trickles out from Sri Lanka about the brutal military campaign he directed, allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity are likely to dog President Rajapaksa unless he decides to emulate the ancient Sinhalese king’s post-victory action in making honorable peace with the Tamils. So far, though, President Rajapaksa has had difficulty coming out of war mode.

How elusive the peace dividend remains can be seen from his decision to press ahead with the further expansion of an already-large military. The Sri Lankan military is bigger in troop strength than the British and Israeli armed forces, having been expanded fivefold since the late 1980s to some 200,000 regular soldiers today. In victory, that strength is being raised by 50% to 300,000 troops in the name of “eternal vigilance.” After the May 2009 victory, the government announced a drive to recruit 50,000 new troops to help control the northern areas captured from the rebels. The expansion would make the Sri Lankan military larger than those of major powers such as France, Japan and Germany.

Indeed, by citing a continuing danger of guerrilla remnants reviving the insurgency, President Rajapaksa seems determined to keep a hypermilitarized Sri Lanka on a war footing. Since he came to power, he has sought to frenetically swell the ranks of the military and establish village-level civil militias, especially in conflict-hit areas. With an ever-larger war machine, civil society has been the main loser.

Stable peace can be built only through genuine interethnic equality. Sri Lanka needs to transition from a unitary state to a federation that grants provincial and local autonomy. After all, the issues that triggered the 26-year civil war were rooted in the nation’s post-independence moves to fashion a monoethnic national identity, best illustrated by the 1956 “Sinhalese only” language policy and the 1972 Constitution that eliminated a provision against minority discrimination. Beside Malaysia, Sri Lanka is the only state in the world with affirmative action for a majority ethnic community.

The air of martial triumph pervading Sri Lanka is making it difficult to heal the wounds of war through three essential “R’s”: relief, recovery and, most importantly, reconciliation. A process of national reconciliation anchored in federalism and multiculturalism can succeed only if human-rights abuses by all parties are independently investigated, including claims that Sri Lankan troops indiscriminately shelled civilians caught up in the fighting.

The danger of renewed conflict in Sri Lanka cannot be dismissed. The killing of hundreds of civilians, possibly up to 3,000, in the still-uninvestigated 1983 anti-Tamil riots triggered a quarter-century cycle of bloody conflict. The killing of countless thousands this year could engender another cycle of violence unless there is genuine reconciliation.

This was a war with no witnesses, with the government having barred independent journalists and observers from the war zone. In that light, as Navi Pillay, the U.N. human-rights commissioner, has said, “a new future for the country, the prospect of meaningful reconciliation and lasting peace” all hinge on “an independent and credible international investigation … to ascertain the occurrence, nature and scale of violations of international human-rights and international humanitarian law” by all sides during the conflict. Such a probe, however, seems a long way off, with Prime Minister Rajapaksa rejecting even regional autonomy and, to the chagrin of Tamils, demerging the northern and eastern provinces.

Another issue of concern is the manner in which the government still holds some 280,000 Tamil civilians in barbed-wire camps where, in the recent words of Ms. Pillay, the “internally displaced persons are effectively detained under conditions of internment.” Such detention, including of 80,000 children, risks causing more resentment among the Tamils and sowing the seeds of future unrest. The internment was officially justified as necessary to help weed out rebels. But authorities have had months to identify such suspects, and those that have been singled out already have been transferred to undisclosed military sites.

Those in the evacuee camps are the victims and survivors of the deadly war. To confine them in the camps against their will is to further victimize and traumatize them. While the government has promised to resettle 80% of those in the camps by mid-November, it has yet to state a clear resettlement plan. One person allowed to visit some of these camps was Ban Ki-moon, who said after his tour last May: “I have traveled round the world and visited similar places, but these are by far the most appalling scenes I have seen.” Sri Lanka’s interests would be better served through greater transparency. It should grant the U.N., International Red Cross and nongovernmental organizations at home and abroad unfettered access to care for and protect the civilians in these camps, allowing those who wish to leave the camps to stay with relatives and friends.

There also is the issue of thousands of missing people, mainly Tamils. Given that many are still searching for missing loved ones, the government ought to publish a list of all those it is holding in evacuee camps, prisons, military sites and other security centers. Even suspected rebels in state custody should be identified and not denied access to legal representation. More than 4,000 rebels reportedly surrendered in the final days of the war. Authorities should disclose the names of those they know to be dead—civilians and insurgents—and the possible circumstances of their death.

Yet such are the costs of victory that Sri Lankan civil society stands badly weakened and civil liberties curbed. The wartime suppression of a free press and curtailment of fundamental rights continues in peacetime, undermining democratic freedoms and creating a fear psychosis. Sweeping emergency regulations remain in place, arming the security forces with expansive powers of search, arrest and seizure of property. Public meetings cannot be held without advance government permission. Individuals can still be held in unacknowledged detention for up to 18 months. On Aug. 7, Colombo announced that the Tigers’ new chief, Selvarasa Pathmanathan (known as “kp”), was in its custody, after he reportedly was abducted by Sri Lankan intelligence from a Kuala Lumpur hotel. The Thailand-based “KP”—the self-designated interim successor to Velupillai Prabhakaran, who died with his son and daughter on the battlefield—has yet to be produced before a magistrate or judge.

The Road Not Taken

For the process of reconciliation and healing to begin in earnest, it is essential the government shed its war-gained powers. Unfortunately, Colombo still seeks to hold onto its special powers and hold back the truth. Those who speak up are labeled “traitors” (if they are Sinhalese) or accused of being on the Tamil diaspora’s payroll. Last year, a Sri Lankan minister accused John Holmes, U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, of being on the rebels’ payroll after Mr. Holmes called Sri Lanka one of the world’s most dangerous places for aid workers. Recently, a well-known astrologer who predicted the president’s ouster from power was arrested. The U.N. Children’s Fund communications chief was ordered to leave Sri Lanka after he discussed the plight of children caught up in the government campaign. All this has made U.N. officials in Sri Lanka wary of saying anything critical of the handling of the situation.

In fact, the media remains muzzled. Journalists have been beaten up, abducted, imprisoned or killed. According to international organizations, at least 16 journalists have been murdered in Sri Lanka since 2004. Lawyers who dare take up sensitive cases face threats, so it is difficult for relatives of those missing to file habeas corpus petitions.

Another factor at play is the postvictory upsurge of Sinhalese chauvinism. Rather than begin a political dialogue on creating a more level-playing field for Tamils in education and government jobs, the government has seen its space get constricted by such chauvinism that is opposed to the devolution of powers to the minorities. This has compelled President Rajapaksa to declare, “Federalism is out of the question.” The hard-line constituency argues that the Tamils in defeat shouldn’t get what they couldn’t secure through three decades of unrest and violence. Indeed, such chauvinism tars federalism as a forerunner to secession, although the Tamil insurgency sprang from the state’s rejection of decentralization and power-sharing. The looming parliamentary and presidential elections also make devolution difficult, even though the opposition is fragmented and President Rajapaksa seems set to win a second term.

Yet, reversing the state-driven militarization of society, ending the control of information as an instrument of state policy and promoting political and ethnic reconciliation are crucial to postconflict peace-building and to furthering the interests of all Sri Lankans—Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims. So also is the need to discard the almost monoethnic character of the security forces by recruiting more Tamils. Colombo has to stop dragging its feet on implementing the Constitution’s 13th amendment, which requires the ceding of some powers to the provincial level. But even if the process of devolution were to begin, it cannot succeed without an end to the present pattern of regular violations of human rights.

Sadly, there is little international pressure on Colombo, despite the leverage offered by a cash-strapped Sri Lankan economy’s need for external credit. The United States enjoys a one-country veto in the International Monetary Fund, yet it chose to abstain from the recent IMF vote approving a $2.8 billion loan that Sri Lanka desperately needed. In the face of China’s stonewalling in the U.N., Mr. Ban has been unable to appoint a U.N. special envoy on Sri Lanka, let alone order a probe into possible war crimes. The best the U.N. has been able to do is to send a political official to Colombo in September to discuss resettlement of the detained Tamil refugees. Indeed, in the absence of international pressure, there is a lurking danger that the government may seek to change demography by returning to its old policy of settling Sinhalese in Tamil areas.

It is thus important for the democratic players, including the U.S., the European Union, Japan and Norway—co-chairs of the so-called Friends of Sri Lanka—and India, to coordinate their policies on Sri Lanka, even though these players were remiss in discharging their responsibilities while the war raged. If President Rajapaksa continues to shun true reconciliation, these countries should ratchet up pressure on Colombo. The International Criminal Court has opened an initial inquiry into Sri Lankan rights-abuse cases; donor nations could lend support to calls for an international investigation into the thousands of civilian deaths and allegations of extrajudicial killings.

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

http://www.feer.com/essays/2009/october/sri-lankas-elusive-peace-dividend

Arunachal Pradesh in India-China relations

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China’s locus standi on Arunachal?

The basis of its territorial claim is laughable

The Economic Times, October 16, 2009

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

Brahma Chellaney, Strategic Affairs Expert

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

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

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

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

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

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


(c) Economic Times, 2009.

Can China make a political soft landing?

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Challenges for China concern political future, not economics


Japan Times http://ow.ly/tA57

Six decades after it was founded, the People’s Republic of China has made some remarkable achievements. A backward, impoverished state in 1949, it has risen dramatically to now command respect and awe — but such success has come at great cost to its own people.

In fact, China’s future remains more uncertain than ever. It faces a worrisome paradox: Because of an opaque, repressive political system, the more it globalizes, the more vulnerable it becomes internally. At the core of its internal challenges is how to make a political soft landing.

Unlike its Asian peers, Japan and India, China first concentrated on acquiring military muscle. By the time Deng Xiaoping launched his economic- modernization program in 1978, China already had tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile, the 12,000-km DF-5, and developed thermonuclear weaponry. The military muscle gave Beijing the much-needed security to focus on civilian modernization, helping it to fuel its remarkable economic rise that, in turn, has armed it with ever greater resources to sharpen its claws.

China’s economy has expanded 13-fold over the last 30 years. Consequently, China has arrived as a global economic player, with its state-owned corporate behemoths frenetically buying foreign firms, technologies and resources.

Add to the picture its rapidly swelling foreign-exchange coffers, already the world’s largest, and Beijing is well-positioned geopolitically to further expand its influence.

Its defense strategy since the Mao Zedong era has been founded on a simple premise — that the capacity to defend oneself with one’s own resources is the first test a nation has to pass on the way to becoming a great power. So, even when China was poor, it consciously put the accent on building comprehensive national power.

Today, its rapidly accumulating power raises concerns because, even when it was backward and internally troubled, it employed brute force to annex Xinjiang (1949) and Tibet (1950), to raid South Korea (1950), to invade India (1962), to initiate a border conflict with the Soviet Union through a military ambush (1969), and to attack Vietnam (1979). A prosperous, militarily strong China cannot but be a threat to its neighbors, especially if there are no constraints on the exercise of Chinese power.

Communist China actually began as an international pariah state. Today, it is courted by the world. Its rise in one generation as a world power under authoritarian rule has come to epitomize the qualitative reordering of international power.

As the latest U.S. intelligence assessment predicts, China is "poised to have more impact on the world over the next 20 years than any other country." A long-term strategic vision and unflinching pursuit of goals have been key drivers. But China’s rise also has been aided by good fortune on several fronts. Deng’s reform process, for instance, benefited from good timing, coinciding with the start of globalization.

The Soviet Union’s sudden collapse also came as a great strategic boon, eliminating a menacing empire and opening the way for Beijing to rapidly increase strategic space globally. A succession of China-friendly U.S. presidents in the past two decades also has helped. China’s rise indeed owes a lot to the West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, but instead to integrate Beijing with global institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign investment and trade.

Although China has come a long way since Tiananmen Square, with its citizens now enjoying property rights, overseas travel and other entitlements that were unthinkable two decades ago, political power still rests with the same party responsible for millions of deaths in state-induced disasters like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

That the communist party continues to monopolize power despite its past horrific excesses indeed is astonishing. This is now the oldest autocracy in the world. And it is hard to believe that it can survive for another 60 years. The longest any autocratic system has survived in modern history was 74 years in the Soviet Union.

The threat to the communist dictatorship extends beyond ethnic and social unrest. Reported incidents of grassroots violence have grown at about the same rate as China’s GDP. The ethnic challenges — best symbolized by the 2008 Tibetan uprising and this year’s Uighur revolt — won’t go away unless Beijing stops imposing cultural homogeneity and abandons ethnic drowning as state strategy in minority lands. Given the regime’s entrenched cultural chauvinism and tight centralized control, that is unlikely to happen. After all, President Hu Jintao’s slogan of a "harmonious society" is designed to undergird the theme of conformity with the state.

China’s challenges actually center on its political future. Although China has moved from being a totalitarian state to being an authoritarian state, some things haven’t changed since the Mao years. Some others indeed have changed for the worse, such as the whipping up of ultranationalism as the legitimizing credo of continued communist rule. Unremitting attempts to bend reality to the dangerous illusions the state propagates through information control and online censors risk turning China into a modern-day Potemkin state.

More fundamentally, if China manages to resolve the stark contradictions between its two systems — market capitalism and political monocracy — just as the Asian "tigers" South Korea and Taiwan were able to make the transition to democracy without crippling turbulence at home, China could emerge as a peer competitor to the United States.

Political modernization, not economic modernization, thus is the central challenge staring at China. But it won’t be easy for the communist leadership to open up politically without unraveling a system that now survives on a mix of crony capitalism and calibrated, state-dispensed patronage.

Internationally, China’s trajectory will depend on how its neighbors and other key players such as the U.S. manage its growing power. Such management — independently and in partnership — will determine if China stays on the positive side of the ledger, without its power sliding into arrogance.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Center for Policy Research, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."
The Japan Times: October 6, 2009
(C) All rights reserved

Why shoot the messenger?

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To China’s
delight, India
reins in its media

The Indian government doesn’t deny recurrent Chinese cross-frontier
border incursions, yet it has unfairly accused the media of overplaying such
border provocations, says Brahma Chellaney

India Abroad and Rediff.com
http://ow.ly/tzWe

At a time
when border tensions with China
have risen, the Indian government has tried to pull the veil over the
Himalayan-frontier situation by targeting the media for allegedly overplaying
Chinese cross-border incursions. Note: No one in the government has denied such
incursions are occurring. Yet the media is being accused of hyping such
incursions, even as a tight-lipped government remains reluctant to come clean
on the actual extent and frequency of the Chinese intrusions.

To
the delight of the autocrats in Beijing, who
tightly control the flow of information in their country, including through
online censors, New Delhi
has reined in its home media. In response to the governmental intervention at the highest level,
Indian news organizations essentially have clamped down on further reporting of
the Chinese incursions. The message this sends to Beijing, however
inadvertently, is that when the world’s biggest autocracy builds up pressure,
the world’s largest democracy is willing to tame its media coverage, even if it
entails dispensing half-truths and flogging distortions.

Beijing is sure to be emboldened by the precedent that
has been set. Next time when it is unhappy with Indian media coverage of another
issue sensitive to its interests, it simply will issue a diplomatic demarche to
New Delhi to
discipline its media the way it did on the border tensions.

Given Beijing’s
growing hardline stance towards India
since 2006, New Delhi’s
attempt to sweep serious issues under the rug is baffling. The facts, even if unpalatable, should be allowed to
speak for themselves. New Delhi’s
oft-repeated line in recent weeks has been that Chinese incursions are at last
year’s level, so there is no need to worry. But 2008 brought a record number of
incursions, with the Indian defence establishment reporting that the number of
such intrusions went from 140 in 2007 to 270 last year, or almost double. In
addition, there were 2,285 reported instances of “aggressive border patrolling”
by Chinese forces in 2008. This summer, as the army chief publicly said, there were “21
incursions in June, 20 in July and 24 in August.”

The key point to note is that
China has opened pressure points against India across the Himalayas, with border incidents occurring in all the four sectors — Ladakh,
Uttarakhand-Himachal, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. Yet, such is the Indian government’s continuing
opacity that it is loath to clarify the actual border situation, even as it
conveniently blames the media for overplaying the incursions, although the
information about them has been coming from official channels.

If the threat from an increasingly assertive and ambitious China is to be contained, India must have
an honest and open debate on its diplomatic and military options, including how
gaps in its defenses can be plugged and what it will take to build a credible
deterrent. The media has a crucial role to play in such a debate, both by
bringing out the facts and providing a platform for discussion.

Still,
New Delhi has
sought to make its home media the scapegoat. Even more odd is that it has taken
its cue from Beijing.
It was the Chinese foreign ministry which first accused Indian media of
stirring up tensions. “I have noted that some Indian media are
releasing inaccurate information; I wonder what their aim is,” spokeswoman
Jiang Yu had said. Soon thereafter, Beijing
discreetly began exerting diplomatic pressure on New Delhi to domesticate its media.

In response, Indian
government functionaries have rushed, one by one, to make light of the Chinese
incursions, although the Chinese leadership has
studiously kept mum on border-related developments. Not a word has come from
any Chinese leader. By contrast, the almost entire Indian security leadership from
the prime minister down has gone public — not to clarify what is happening
along the border, but to claim there is no cause for alarm. But by being
disturbingly opaque, New Delhi
only adds to the public unease.

The Indian public
indeed has been offered mostly one-line statements from government
functionaries. Here’s a sample:

■ In
September’s first week, the neophyte external affairs minister offered this
one-liner: ‘‘Let me go on record to say that this
has been one of the most peaceful boundaries that we have had as compared to
boundary lines with other countries.” From the Maurya Sheraton’s presidential
suite, where S.M. Krishna was ensconced for more than 100 days, everything
looks “most peaceful,” not just the India-China border.

■ In the
following week, the foreign secretary claimed there has been “no significant
increase” in Chinese incursions. That suggests the incursions have increased
but not significantly. But who is to judge whether any increase is significant
or insignificant if those in authority divulge no information?

■ The foreign secretary was followed by the prime
minister, who laconically indicated he was in touch with the “highest levels”
of the Chinese government while implicitly acknowledging that a better flow of
government information was necessary to improve media reporting.

■ A day
later, the army chief was asked to speak up. “The
Prime Minister has just made a statement that there has not been any more
incursions or transgressions as compared to last year. They are at the same
level. So there is no cause of worry or concern,” Gen. Deepak Kapoor declared
on September 19. If the level of intrusions remains at last year’s level, that
should be a cause for concern because it shows China
is keeping India
under unremitting pressure.

■ Then came
the national security adviser, who was loquacious but not enlightening in a TV
interview. “Almost all the so-called incursions
which have taken place have taken place in areas which in a sense are viewed as
being disputed by one side or the other,” said M.K. Narayanan. Really? What
about Sikkim, whose border
with Tibet is formally
recognized by China?
And what about Uttarakhand —  the middle
sector — where the line of control was clarified through an exchange of maps
with China
in 2001? More fundamentally, why should New Delhi offer explanations or
justifications for the Chinese incursions? If such intrusions really are due to
differing perceptions about the line of control, let the Chinese say that. But
note: Beijing
hasn’t proffered that excuse.

Significantly, the NSA admitted the Chinese have started intruding a
“little deeper” than before, even as he maintained the government’s
now-familiar line that there has been “hardly any increase” in Chinese
cross-frontier forays. He went on to say, “China certainly sees us as a rival. They wish to be numero uno in this part of the world.”
Yet he complacently concluded, “I don’t think there is any reason for us to
feel particularly concerned as to what’s happening.” Didn’t such smugness bring
the surprise 1962 invasion?

Unfortunately, even while denying any media
report, New Delhi
tends to be so economical with words that it leaves questions hanging. For
example, the government has yet to categorically deny that Chinese forces
opened fire across the settled Sikkim
border in late August. It merely described as “factually inaccurate” a
September 15 newspaper report that two Indo-Tibetan Border Police soldiers were
wounded in such firing. But another national newspaper had earlier front-paged
on August 28 the trading of cross-border fire in the same Sikkim area — Kerang.

If New Delhi
wants to ensure Himalayan peace, pulling the wool on public eyes is certainly not the way. It is the government’s responsibility to keep the public
informed through media of new security threats and the steps it is taking to
effectively defend the borders.

Journalists seeking
information from the government on the Himalayan frontier complain they get the
runaround. Rather than stonewall or obfuscate, the
government ought to readily disseminate information. Not all information
released in the public domain can be venomous to diplomacy.

Good public diplomacy, at home and abroad,
indeed can complement official diplomacy and defense preparedness. Indian
opacity on Chinese-triggered border incidents only helps bolster China’s projection of its “peaceful
rise."

By trying to mask the actual border situation, New Delhi seriously risks playing into Beijing’s hands and spurring on greater
Chinese belligerence.

Brahma Chellaney,
professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Centre for
Policy Research, is the author, most recently, of “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise
of China, India and Japan.”

How India lost out in Sri Lanka

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Commentary

Behind The Sri Lankan Bloodbath

Brahma Chellaney, 10.09.09 Forbes

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(c) 2009 Forbes.com

The lessons the U.S.-India nuclear deal holds

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Counting the costs of a vaunted deal

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindu newspaper, October 9, 2009

On the first anniversary of its coming to fruition, the much-trumpeted Indo-U.S. nuclear deal stands out as an overrated initiative whose conclusion through patent political partisanship holds sobering lessons for India.

For United States President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the nuclear deal was a prized legacy-building issue. Mr. Bush ensured the deal wasn’t a divisive subject at home by forging an impressive bipartisan consensus. By contrast, Dr. Singh’s polarising single-mindedness on the ballyhooed deal and refusal to permit parliamentary scrutiny injected intense partisan rancour into the debate. Given that India may have to assume new international legal obligations on other fronts too — from climate change to the Doha Round of world-trade talks — the noxious precedent set by the deal must be corrected in national interest.

The deal indeed was a milestone, symbolising the deepening ties between the world’s oldest democracy and largest democracy. But on the first anniversary of its coming to fruition, the deal stands out as an overvalued venture whose larger benefits remain distant for India, including an end to dual-use technology controls and greater U.S. support in regional and global matters. The deal offers more tangible benefits to the U.S. While significantly advancing U.S. non-proliferation interests, the deal — embedded in a larger strategic framework — fashions an instrumentality to help co-opt India in a “soft alliance.” It also carries attractive commercial benefits for the U.S. in sectors extending from commercial nuclear power to arms trade.

To be sure, the deal-making was a tortuous, three-year process, involving multiple stages and difficult-to-achieve compromises. At its core, the deal-making centred on India’s resolve to safeguard its nuclear military autonomy and America’s insistence on imposing stringent non-proliferation conditions, including a quantifiable cap on Indian weapons-related capabilities. Eventually, a deal was sealed that gave India the semblance of autonomy and America some Indian commitments to flaunt, best epitomised by the decision to shut down Cirus — one of India’s two research reactors producing weapons-grade plutonium. No sooner had Congress ratified the deal package than the White House made clear the deal was predicated on India not testing again, with “serious consequences” to follow a breach of that understanding.

The more recent G-8 action barring the transfer of enrichment and reprocessing (ENR) equipment or technology to non-NPT signatories even under safeguards is a fresh reminder that while New Delhi is taking on legally irrevocable obligations that tie the hands of future Indian generations, America’s own obligations under the deal are unequivocally anchored in the primacy of its domestic law and thus mutable. If there were any doubts on that score, they were set at rest by the American ratification legislation that gave effect to the deal, the U.S.-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Non-Proliferation Enhancement Act of 2008, or NCANEA. This Hyde Act-plus legislation unabashedly declares that the bilateral 123 Agreement is subservient to existing U.S. law and “any other applicable United States law” enacted henceforth.

That the U.S. has used the G-8 mechanism to deny India the “full” cooperation it bilaterally pledged shouldn’t come as a surprise because the NCANEA obligates Washington to spearhead a Nuclear Suppliers Group ban on ENR transfers. Having formally proposed such a ban in the NSG, Washington got the G-8 to act first — a move that puts pressure on the NSG to follow suit and, more importantly, brings on board in advance all potential ENR-technology suppliers to India. Even on the unrelated and unresolved issue of granting India an operational right to reprocess U.S.-origin spent fuel, the U.S. government has notified Congress that such permission, while subject to congressional approval, would be revocable.

For years to come, the deal will generate eclectic controversies because it is rife with unsettled issues, ambiguities and the avowed supremacy of one party’s variable domestic law. To help the beleaguered Indian government save face, some issues — ranging from a test prohibition to the political nature of fuel-supply assurances — were spelled out not in the bilateral 123 Agreement but in the subsequent U.S. presidential statements and NCANEA. As a result, the final deal gives America specific rights while saddling India with onerous obligations.

Politically, the deal was oversold as the centrepiece, if not the touchstone, of the new Indo-U.S. partnership to the extent that, a year later, New Delhi seems genuinely concerned about India’s declining profile in American policy. Clearly, New Delhi had over-expectations about what the deal would deliver.

Still, there are some key lessons New Delhi must draw from the way it handled the deal. The first is the importance of building political bipartisanship on critical national matters. Had the Prime Minister done what he repeatedly promised — “build a broad national consensus” — India would have strengthened its negotiating leverage and forestalled political acrimony. Dr. Singh’s approach was to play his cards close to his chest and rely on a few chosen bureaucrats. Not a single all-party meeting was called. Consequently, the government presented itself as deal-desperate on whom additional conditions could be thrust.

A second lesson relates to Parliament’s role. Even if there is a lacuna in the Indian Constitution that allows the executive branch to sign and ratify an international agreement without any legislative scrutiny, a forward-looking course would be to plug that gap by introducing a constitutional amendment in Parliament, rather than seek to exploit that weakness.

Sadly, the government chose not to place the final deal before Parliament even for a no-vote debate before it rushed to sign the 123 Agreement on September 10, 2008, just two days after Mr. Bush signed NCANEA into law. This extraordinary haste occurred despite Dr. Singh’s July 22, 2008 assurance in the Lok Sabha that after the entire process was complete, he would bring the final deal to Parliament and “abide” by its decision. But no sooner had the process been over than the government proceeded to sign the 123 Agreement without involving Parliament, although the deal imposes external inspections in perpetuity and leaves no leeway for succeeding governments. A year later, Dr. Singh has yet to make a single statement in Parliament on the terms of the concluded deal, lest he face questions on the promises he couldn’t keep, including the elaborate benchmarks he had defined on August 17, 2006.

In the future, Parliament must not be reduced to being a mere spectator on India’s accession to another international agreement, even as the same pact is subject to rigorous legislative examination elsewhere. In fact, when the government tables the nuclear-accident liability bill, Parliament ought to seize that opportunity to examine the nuclear deal and its subsidiary arrangements. The bill — intended to provide cover mainly to American firms, which, unlike France’s Areva and Russia’s Atomstroyexport, are in the private sector — seeks to cap foreign vendors’ maximum accident liability to a mere $62 million, although each nuclear power station is to cost several billion dollars.

Yet another lesson is to stem the creeping politicisation of top scientists. This trend has drawn encouragement from two successive governments’ short-sighted use of topmost scientists for political purpose. Such politicisation was on full display during the nuclear deal process. The top atomic leadership made scripted political statements in support of deal-related moves, only to be rewarded with special post-superannuation extensions beyond established norms. The current unsavoury controversy among scientists over India’s sole thermonuclear test in 1998 — and the atomic establishment’s frustration over the attention dissenting views are receiving — is a reflection of the damage to official scientific credibility wrought by the deal politics. All this only underscores the need to bring the cosseted nuclear programme under oversight.

If truth be told, national institutions have been the main losers from the partisan approach and divisive politics that the deal came to embody. The deal divided the country like no other strategic issue since Indian independence, with the deteriorating national discourse reaching a new low. Such divisiveness, in turn, seriously weakened India’s hand in the deal-related diplomacy. A new brand of post-partisan politics must define India’s approach in Copenhagen and the Doha Round.

A final sobering lesson: Key national decisions must flow from professional inputs and institutional deliberations, not from gut opinions in which near-term considerations or personal feelings and predilections of those in office prevail over the long view of national interest. The lodestar to avoid disconnect between perception and reality is to ensure that any agreement bears the imprint of institutional thinking, not personal fancy.

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


© Copyright 2000 – 2009 The Hindu

Sri Lanka’s continuing tragedy: Unable to be at peace even in victory

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Sri Lanka’s double tragedy 

By Brahma Chellaney

The New Indian Express, October 7, 2009

If
war-scarred Sri Lanka
is to re-emerge as a tropical paradise, it has to build enduring peace through
genuine inter-ethnic equality and by making the transition from being a unitary
state to being a federation that grants local autonomy. Yet even in victory,
the Sri Lankan government seems unable to define peace or outline a political
solution to the long-standing grievances of the Tamil minority.

A process
of national reconciliation anchored in federalism and multiculturalism indeed
can succeed only if possible war crimes and other human-rights abuses by all
parties are independently and credibly investigated. United Nations
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has acknowledged that civilian casualties were
“unacceptably high,” especially as the war built to a bloody crescendo. The
continuing air of martial triumph in Sri Lanka,
though, is making it difficult to heal the wounds of
war through three essential “Rs”: Relief, recovery and reconciliation.

Months after the Tamil
Tigers were crushed, it is clear the demands of peace extend far beyond the
battlefield. What is needed is a fundamental shift in government policies to
help create greater inter-ethnic equality, regional autonomy and a reversal of
the state-driven militarization of society. But President Mahinda Rajapaksa already
has declared: “Federalism is out of the question.”

How elusive
the peace dividend remains can be seen from Sri Lanka’s decision to press ahead
with a further expansion of its military. Not content with increasing the
military’s size fivefold since the late 1980s to more than 200,000 troops
today, Colombo
is raising the strength further to 300,000, in the name of “eternal vigilance.”
The Sri Lankan military already is bigger than that of Britain and Israel. The planned further
expansion would make the military in tiny Sri
Lanka larger than the militaries of major powers like France, Japan
and Germany.
By citing a continuing danger of guerrilla remnants reviving the insurgency,
Rajapaksa is determined to keep a hyper-militarized Sri Lanka on something of a war
footing.

Yet another issue of
concern is the manner the government still holds nearly 300,000 civilians in
camps where, in the recent words of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, the “internally
displaced persons are effectively detained under conditions of internment.”
Such detention risks causing more resentment among the Tamils and sowing
the seeds of future unrest. The internment was
intended to help weed out rebels, many of whom already have been identified and
transferred to military sites.

Those in the evacuee camps
are the victims and survivors of the deadly war. To confine them in the camps
against their will is to further victimize and traumatize them. Sri Lanka’s
interests would be better served through greater transparency. It should grant
the UN,
International Red Cross and nongovernmental organizations at home and abroad
unfettered access to care for and protect the civilians in these camps,
allowing those who wish to leave the camps to stay with relatives and friends.

Then
there is the issue of thousands of missing people, mostly Tamils. Given that
many families are still searching for missing members, the government ought to
publish a list of all those it is holding — in evacuee camps, prisons, military
sites and other security centres. Even suspected rebels in state custody ought
to be identified and not denied access to legal representation. Bearing in
mind that thousands of civilians were killed just in the final months of the
war, authorities should disclose the names of those they know to be dead —
civilians and insurgents — and the possible circumstances of their death.

The way to fill the power
vacuum in the Tamil-dominated north is not by dispatching additional army
troops in tens of thousands, but by setting up a credible local administration
to keep the peace and initiate rehabilitation and reconstruction after more
than a quarter of a century of war. Yet there is a lurking danger that the
government may seek to change demography by returning to its old policy of settling
Sinhalese in Tamil areas.

More fundamentally, such
have been the costs of victory that Sri Lankan civil society stands badly
weakened. The wartime suppression of a free press and curtailment of
fundamental rights continues in peacetime, undermining democratic freedoms and
creating a fear psychosis. Sweeping emergency regulations remain in place,
arming the security forces with expansive powers of search, arrest and seizure
of property. Public meetings cannot be held without government permission. Individuals
can still be held in unacknowledged detention for up to 18 months.

For the process of reconciliation
and healing to begin in earnest, it is essential the government give up wartime
powers and accept, as the UN human-rights
commissioner has sought, “an independent and credible international
investigation … to ascertain the occurrence, nature and scale of violations of
international human-rights and international humanitarian law” by all parties
during the conflict. Rather than begin a political dialogue on regional
autonomy and a more level-playing field for the Tamils in education and
government jobs, the government has seen its space get constricted by the
post-victory upsurge of Sinhalese chauvinism opposed to the devolution of
powers to the minorities. The hardline constituency argues that the Tamils in
defeat shouldn’t get what they couldn’t secure through three decades of unrest
and violence.

Indeed, such chauvinism seeks to tar
federalism as a potential forerunner to secession, although the Tamil
insurgency sprang from the state’s rejection of decentralization and
power-sharing. The looming parliamentary and presidential elections also make
devolution difficult, even though the opposition is splintered and Rajapaksa
seems set to win a second term.

Add to the picture the
absence of international pressure, despite the leverage provided by a
cash-strapped Sri Lankan economy. The United
States enjoys a one-country veto in the International
Monetary Fund, yet it chose to abstain from the recent IMF vote approving a
desperately needed $2.8-billion loan to Sri Lanka. In the face of China’s stonewalling in the UN, Ban Ki-moon has
been unable to appoint a UN special envoy on Sri Lanka, let alone order a probe
into possible war crimes there. Beijing provided Colombo not only the weapons
that decisively titled the military balance in its favour, but also the diplomatic cover to
prosecute the war in defiance of international calls to cease
offensive operations to help stanch rising civilian casualties. Through such
support, China has succeeded
in extending its strategic reach to a critically located country in India’s backyard that sits astride vital
sea-lanes of communication in the Indian Ocean
region.

Today, reversing the
militarization of society, ending the control of information as an instrument
of state policy and promoting political and ethnic reconciliation are crucial
to post-conflict peace-building. So also is the need to discard the almost
mono-ethnic character of the security forces.

As world history attests,
peace sought to be achieved through the suppression and humiliation of an
ethnic community has proven elusive. It will be a double tragedy for Sri Lanka if
making peace proves more difficult than making war. 

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

(c) New Indian Express, 2009.