India’s Growing China Angst

Largely unknown to the rest of the world, China-India border tensions have escalated in recent months, raising the specter of armed conflict along the Himalayas

By Brahma Chellaney

Far Eastern Economic Review (September 2009)

At a time when the global power structure is qualitatively being transformed, the economic rise of China and India draws ever more attention. But the world has taken little notice of the rising border tensions and sharpening geopolitical rivalry between the two giants that represent competing political and social models of development.

China and India have had little political experience historically in dealing with each other. After all, China became India’s neighbor not owing to geography but guns — by forcibly occupying buffer Tibet in 1950. As new neighbors, India and China have been on a learning curve. Their 32-day war in 1962 did not settle matters because China’s dramatic triumph only sowed the seeds of greater rivalry.

In recent months, hopes of a politically negotiated settlement of the lingering territorial disputes have dissipated amid muscle-flexing along the long, 4,057-kilometer Himalayan frontier. A clear indication that the 28-year-old border talks now are deadlocked came when the most-recent round in August turned into a sweeping strategic dialogue on regional and international issues. The escalation in border tensions, though, has prompted an agreement to set up a direct hotline between the two prime ministers. A hotline, however welcome, may not be enough to defuse a situation marked by rising military incursions and other border-related incidents as well as by new force deployments.

A perceptible hardening of China’s stance toward India is at the hub of the bilateral tensions. This hardening became apparent almost three years ago when the Chinese ambassador to India publicly raked up the issue of Arunachal Pradesh, the northeastern Indian state that Beijing calls “Southern Tibet” and claims as its own. For his undiplomatic act on the eve of President Hu Jintao’s New Delhi visit, the ambassador actually received Beijing’s public support. Since then, the Indian army has seen Chinese military incursions increase in frequency across the post-1962 line of control. According to Indian defense officials, there were 270 line-of-control violations by the People’s Liberation Army and 2,285 instances of “aggressive border patrolling” by it last year alone. Other border incidents also are being reported, such as the PLA demolition of some unmanned Indian forward posts at the Tibet-Bhutan-Sikkim trijunction and Chinese attempts to encroach on Indian-held land in Ladakh.

As a result, the India-China frontier has become more “hot” than the India-Pakistan border, but without rival troops trading fire. Indeed, Sino-Indian border tensions now are at their worst since 1986-87, when local military skirmishes broke out after PLA troops moved south of a rivulet marking the line of control in the Sumdorong Chu sector in Arunachal Pradesh. Those skirmishes brought war clouds over the horizon before the two countries moved quickly to defuse the crisis. Today, PLA forays into Indian-held territory are occurring even in the only area where Beijing does not dispute the frontier — Sikkim’s 206-kilometer border with Tibet. Chinese troops repeatedly have attempted to gain control of Sikkim’s evocatively named Finger Area, a tiny but key strategic location.

In response, India has been beefing up its defensive deployments in Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Ladakh to prevent any Chinese land-grab. Besides bringing in tanks to reinforce its defenses in mountainous Sikkim, it is deploying two additional army mountain divisions and two squadrons of the advanced Sukhoi-30 MKI bomber-aircraft in its northeastern state of Assam, backed by three airborne warning and control systems. To improve its logistical capabilities, it has launched a crash program involving new roads, airstrips and advanced landing stations along the Himalayas. None of these steps, however, can materially alter the fact that China holds the military advantage on the ground. Its forces control the heights along the frontier, with the Indian troops perched largely on the lower levels. Furthermore, by building modern railroads, airports and highways in Tibet, China is now in a position to rapidly move large additional forces to the border to potentially strike at India at a time of Beijing’s choosing.

Diplomatically, China is content, long having occupied land at will — principally the Aksai Chin plateau, which is almost the size of Switzerland. Aksai Chin, an integral part of Kashmir long before Xinjiang became a province of China under Manchu rule, provides the only accessible Tibet-Xinjiang route through the Karakoram passes of the Kunlun Mountains. Yet Beijing chooses to press claims on additional Indian territories as part of a grand strategy to keep India under military and diplomatic pressure.

Since ancient times, the Himalayas have universally been regarded as the northern frontiers of India. But having annexed Tibet, China has laid claim to areas far to the south of this Himalayan watershed, as underscored by its claim to Arunachal Pradesh — a state nearly three times the size of Taiwan. That Tibet remains at the core of the India-China divide is being underlined by Beijing itself as its claim to additional Indian territories is based on alleged Tibetan ecclesial or tutelary links to them, not any professed Han connection. Such attempts at incremental annexation actually draw encouragement from India’s self-injurious acceptance of Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China.

At the center of the Chinese strategy is an overt refusal to accept the territorial status quo. In not hiding its intent to further redraw the frontiers, Beijing only highlights the futility of political negotiations. After all, the status quo can be changed not through political talks but by further military conquest. Yet, paradoxically, the political process remains important for Beijing to provide the façade of engagement while trying to change the realities on the ground. Keeping India engaged in endless, fruitless border talks while stepping up direct and surrogate pressure also chimes with China’s projection of its “peaceful rise.”

But as border tensions have escalated, vituperative attacks on India in the Chinese media have mounted. The Communist Party’s mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, taunted India in a June editorial for lagging behind China in all indices of power and asked it to consider “the consequences of a potential confrontation with China.” Criticizing the Indian moves to strengthen defenses, it peremptorily declared: “China won’t make any compromises in its border disputes with India.” A subsequent commentary in the paper warned India to stop playing into the hands of “some Western powers” by raising the bogey of a “China threat.”

The most-provocative Chinese essay, however, appeared on China International Strategy Net, a quasi-official Web site that enjoys the Communist Party’s backing and is run by an individual who made his name by hacking into United States” government Web sites in retaliation to the 1999 American bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Posted on August 8, the essay called for a Chinese strategy to dismember multiethnic India into 20 to 30 fragments. This is an old, failed project China launched in the Mao years when it trained and armed Naga, Mizo and other tribal guerrillas in India’s restive northeast.

The strains in Sino-Indian relations also have resulted from sharpening geopolitical rivalry. This was evident from China’s botched 2008 effort to stymie the U.S.-India nuclear deal by blocking the Nuclear Suppliers Group from opening civilian nuclear trade with New Delhi. In the NSG, China landed itself in a position it avoids in any international body — as the last holdout. Recently, there has been an outcry in India over attempts to undermine the Indian brand through exports from China of fake pharmaceutical products labeled “Made in India.”

The unsettled border, however, remains at the core of the bilateral tensions. Indeed, 47 years later, the wounds of the 1962 war have been kept open by China’s aggressive claims to additional Indian territories. Even as China has emerged as India’s largest trading partner, the Sino-Indian strategic dissonance and border disputes have become more pronounced. New Delhi has sought to retaliate against Beijing’s growing antagonism by banning Chinese toys and cell phones that do not meet international standards. But such modest trade actions can do little to persuade Beijing to abandon its moves to strategically encircle and squeeze India by employing China’s rising clout in Pakistan, Burma, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.

In fact, the question that needs to be asked is whether New Delhi helped create the context to embolden Beijing to be assertive and bellicose. For long, New Delhi has indulged in ritualized happy talk about the state of its relationship with Beijing, brushing under the rug both long-standing and new problems and hyping the outcome of any bilateral summit meeting. New Delhi now is staring at the harvest of a mismanagement of relations with China over the past two decades by successive governments that chose propitiation to leverage building. New Delhi is so slow to correct its course that mistakes only get compounded. For example: India is to observe 2010 — the 60th anniversary of China becoming India’s neighbor by gobbling up Tibet — as the “Year of Friendship with China.”

Yet another question relates to China’s intention. In muscling up to India, is China seeking to intimidate India or actually fashion an option to wage war on India? In other words, are China’s present-day autocrats itching to see a repeat of 1962? The present situation, in several key aspects, is no different from the one that prevailed in the run-up to the 1962 invasion of India, which then Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai declared was designed “to teach India a lesson.” Consider the numerous parallels:

First, like ike in the pre-1962 war period, it has become commonplace internationally to speak of India and China in the same breadth. The aim of “Mao’s India war,” as Harvard scholar Roderick MacFarquhar has called it, was large political: To cut India to size by demolishing what it represented — a democratic alternative to the Chinese autocracy. The swiftness and force with which Mao Zedong defeated India helped discredit the Indian model, boost China’s international image and consolidate Mao’s internal power. The return of the China-India pairing decades later is something Beijing viscerally detests.

The Dalai Lama’s flight to India in 1959 — and the ready sanctuary he got there — paved the way for the Chinese military attack. Today, 50 years after his escape, the exiled Tibetan leader stands as a bigger challenge than ever for China, as underscored by Beijing’s stepped-up vilification campaign against him and its admission that it is now locked in a “life and death struggle” over Tibet. With Beijing now treating the Dalai Lama as its Enemy No. 1, India has come under greater Chinese pressure to curb his activities and those of his government-in-exile. The continuing security clampdown in Tibet since the March 2008 Tibetan uprising parallels the harsh Chinese crackdown in Tibet during 1959-62.

In addition, the present pattern of crossfrontier incursions and other border incidents, as well as new force deployments and mutual recriminations, is redolent of the situation that prevailed before the 1962 war. When the PLA marched hundreds of miles south to occupy the then-independent Tibet and later nibble at Indian territories, this supposedly was neither an expansionist strategy nor a forward policy. But when the ill-equipped and short-staffed Indian army belatedly sought to set up posts along India’s unmanned Himalayan frontier to try and stop further Chinese encroachments, Beijing and its friends dubbed it a provocative “forward policy.” In the same vein, the present Indian efforts to beef up defenses in the face of growing PLA crossborder forays are being labeled “new forward policy” by Beijing.

Moreover, the 1962 war occurred against the backdrop of China instigating and arming insurgents in India’s northeast. Though such activities ceased after Mao’s 1976 death, China seems to be coming full circle today, with Chinese-made arms increasingly flowing into guerrilla ranks in northeastern India, including via Burmese front organizations. India says it has taken up this matter with Beijing at the foreign minister-level. While a continuing 12-year-old ceasefire has brought peace to Nagaland, some other Indian states like Assam and Manipur are racked by multiple insurgencies, allowing Beijing to fish in troubled waters.

Finally, just as India had retreated to a defensive position in the border negotiations with Beijing in the early 1960s after having undermined its leverage through a formal acceptance of the “Tibet region of China,” New Delhi similarly has been left in the unenviable position today of having to fend off Chinese territorial demands. Whatever leverage India still had on the Tibet issue was surrendered in 2003 when it shifted its position from Tibet being an “autonomous” region within China to it being “part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China.” Little surprise the spotlight now is on China’s Tibet-linked claim to Arunachal Pradesh than on Tibet’s status itself.

This is why Beijing invested so much political capital over the years in getting India to gradually accept Tibet as part of China. Its success on that score has helped narrow the dispute to what it claims. That neatly meshes with China’s long-standing negotiating stance: What it occupies is Chinese territory, and what it claims must be shared — or as it puts it in reasonably sounding terms, though a settlement based on “mutual accommodation and mutual understanding.” So, while publicly laying claim to the whole of Arunachal Pradesh, China in private is asking India to cede at least that state’s strategic Tawang Valley — a critical corridor between Lhasa and Assam of immense military import because it overlooks the chicken-neck that connects India’s northeast with the rest of the country.

In fact, with the Dalai Lama having publicly repudiated Chinese claims that Arunachal Pradesh, or even just Tawang, was part of Tibet, a discomfited Beijing sought to impress upon his representatives in the now-suspended dialogue process that for any larger political deal to emerge, the Tibetan government-in-exile must support China’s position that Arunachal has been part of traditional Tibet. The plain fact is that with China’s own claim to Tibet being historically dubious, its claims to Indian territories are doubly suspect.

Today, as India gets sucked into a pre-1962-style trap, history is in danger of repeating itself. The issue then was Aksai Chin; the issue now is Arunachal. But India is still reluctant to shine a spotlight on Tibet as the lingering core issue. Even though Tibet has ceased to be the political buffer between India and China, it needs to become the political bridge between the world’s two most-populous countries. For that to happen, Beijing has to begin a process of reconciliation and healing in Tibet.

Internationally, there are several factors contributing to China’s greater assertiveness toward India as part of an apparent strategy to prevent the rise of a peer rival in Asia. First, India’s growing strategic ties with the United States are more than offset by America’s own rising interdependence with China, to the extent that U.S. policy now gives Beijing a pass on its human-rights abuses, frenetic military buildup at home and reckless strategic opportunism abroad. America’s Asia policy is no longer guided by an overarching geopolitical framework as it had been under President George W. Bush, a fact reflected by the Obama administration’s silence on the China-India border tensions.

In addition, the significant improvement in China’s own relations with Taiwan and Japan since last year has given Beijing more space against India. A third factor is the weakening of China’s Pakistan card against India. Pakistan’s descent into chaos has robbed China of its premier surrogate instrument against India, necessitating the exercise of direct pressure.

Against this background, India can expect no respite from Chinese pressure. Whether Beijing actually sets out to teach India “the final lesson” by launching a 1962-style surprise war will depend on several calculations, including India’s defense preparedness to repel such an attack, domestic factors within China and the availability of a propitious international timing of the type the Cuban missile crisis provided 47 years ago. But if India is not to be caught napping again, it has to inject greater realism into its China policy by shedding self-deluding shibboleths, shoring up its deterrent capabilities and putting premium on leveraged diplomacy.

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

A Fruitless Dialogue 

Brahma Chellaney

The New Indian Express, August 17, 2009

The broadening of the Sino-Indian border talks into an all-encompassing
strategic dialogue is an unmistakable reminder that the negotiations stand
deadlocked. Yet neither side wants to abandon the fruitless process.

In the period since the border negotiations began
nearly three decades ago, the world has changed fundamentally. Indeed, with its
rapidly accumulating military and economic power, China itself has emerged as a great
power in the making. The longer the negotiating process continues without
yielding results, the greater the space Beijing
will have to mount strategic pressure on India and leverage its position. After
all, China
already holds the military advantage on the ground. Its forces control the
heights along the long 4.057-kilometer Himalayan frontier. Furthermore, by
building new railroads, airports and highways in Tibet,
China is now in a position
to rapidly move additional forces to the border to potentially strike at India at a time
of its choosing.

Diplomatically, China
is a contented party, having occupied what it wanted — the Aksai Chin plateau,
which is almost the size of Switzerland
and provides the only accessible Tibet-Xinjiang route through the Karakoram passes of the Kunlun Mountains.
Yet it
chooses to press claims on additional Indian territories as part of a grand
strategy to gain leverage in bilateral relations and, more importantly, to keep
India
under military and diplomatic pressure.

At the core of its strategy is an apparent resolve to indefinitely hold off
on a border settlement with India
through an overt refusal to accept the territorial status quo. In not hiding
its intent to further redraw the Himalayan frontiers, Beijing only helps highlight the futility of
the ongoing process of political negotiations. After all, the territorial
status quo can be changed not through political talks but by further military
conquest. Yet, paradoxically, the political process remains important for Beijing to provide the façade of engagement behind which
to seek India’s
containment.

Keeping India
engaged in endless talks is a key Chinese objective so that Beijing can continue its work on changing the
Himalayan balance decisively in its favor through a greater build-up of
military power and logistical capabilities. That is why China has sought to shield the negotiating
process from the perceptible hardening of its stance towards New Delhi.

Let’s be clear: Chinese negotiating tactics have shifted markedly over
the decades. Beijing originally floated the swap idea — giving up its claims in
India’s northeast in return for Indian acceptance of the Chinese control over a
part of Ladakh — to legalize its occupation of Aksai Chin. It then sang the
mantra of putting the territorial disputes on the backburner so that the two
countries could concentrate on building close, mutually beneficial relations. But
in more recent years, in keeping with its rising strength, China has escalated border tensions
and military incursions while assertively laying claim to Arunachal Pradesh.
According to a recent report in Ming Pao, a Hong Kong paper with close ties to the
establishment in Beijing, China is seeking “just” 28 percent
of Arunachal. That means an area nearly the size of Taiwan.

In that light, can the border talks be kept going
indefinitely? Consider two important facts.

First, the present border negotiations have been going on continuously
since 1981, making them already the longest and the most-barren process between
any two countries in modern history. It seems
the only progress in this process is that India’s
choice of words in public is now the same as China’s. “Both countries
have agreed to seek a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable settlement of
this issue,” Indian External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna told Parliament on
July 31. “The matter, of course, is complex and requires time and lots of
patience.” It was as if the Chinese foreign minister was speaking. Isn’t it odd
for India
to plead for more time and patience after nearly three decades of negotiations?

Second, the authoritative People’s Daily — the
Communist Party mouthpiece that reflects official thinking — made it clear in a
June 11, 2009 editorial: “China
won’t make any compromises in its border disputes with India.” That reflects the Chinese
position in the negotiations. But when Beijing
is advertising its uncompromising stance, doesn’t New Delhi get the message?

So the key question is: What does India
gain by staying put in an interminably barren negotiating process with China? By
persisting with this process, isn’t India
aiding the Chinese engagement-with-containment strategy by providing Beijing the cover it
needs? While Beijing’s strategy and tactics are
apparent, India
has had difficulty to define a game-plan and resolutely pursue clearly laid-out
objectives. Still, staying put in a barren process cannot be an end in itself
for India.

India indeed has retreated to an
increasingly defensive position territorially, with the spotlight now on China’s Tibet-linked claim to Arunachal Pradesh than
on Tibet’s
status itself. Now you know why Beijing invested so much
political capital over the years in getting India
to gradually accept Tibet
as part of the territory of the People’s Republic. Its success on that score
has helped narrow the dispute to what it claims. That neatly meshes with China’s
long-standing negotiating stance: What it occupies is Chinese territory, and
what it claims must be on the table to be settled on the basis of give-and-take
— or as it puts it in reasonably sounding terms, on the basis of “mutual
accommodation and mutual understanding.”

As a result, India
has been left in the unenviable position of having to fend off Chinese territorial
demands. In fact, history is in danger of repeating itself as India gets sucked into a
1950s-style trap. The issue then was Aksai Chin; the issue now
is Arunachal. But rather than put the focus on the source of China’s claim —
Tibet — and Beijing’s attempt to territorially enlarge its Tibet annexation to
what it calls “southern Tibet,” India is willing to be taken ad infinitum
around the mulberry bush.

Take the period since the border talks were “elevated” to
the level of special representatives in 2003. India
first got into an extended exercise with Beijing
to define general principles to govern a border settlement, despite China’s
egregious record of flouting the Panchsheel principles and committing naked
aggression in 1962. But no sooner had the border-related principles been
unveiled in 2005 with fanfare than Beijing
jettisoned the do-not-disturb-the-settled-populations principle to buttress its
claim to Arunachal.

Yet, as the most-recent round of talks highlighted this
month, India has agreed to
let the negotiations go off at a tangent by broadening them into a diffused strategic
dialogue — to the delight of Beijing.
This not only opens yet another chapter in an increasingly directionless
process, but also lets China
condition a border settlement to the achievement of greater Sino-Indian strategic
congruence. Worse still, New Delhi is to observe
2010 — the 60th anniversary of China
becoming India’s neighbor by
gobbling up Tibet — as the
“Year of Friendship with China”
in India.

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

http://bit.ly/1n3vYW

Dangerous fallacies

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, August 5, 2009

By appreciatively citing the example set by his sphinx-like
predecessor, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who reversed India’s
Pakistan policy at least
half a dozen times during his six years in office, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
is seeking to take India
on a similar roller-coaster ride. In fact, Singh’s latest statements in
Parliament reveal eight dangerous misconceptions on Pakistan.

One, political geography is unalterable. “We
cannot wish away the fact that Pakistan
is our neighbor,” Singh says. But political maps
are not carved in stone. Didn’t Indira Gandhi change political geography in
1971? The most-profound global events in recent history have been the
fragmentation of several states, including the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. When
Pakistan looks increasingly decrepit, Singh
says “a stable, peaceful and prosperous Pakistan”
is in India’s
“own interest.”

Two, India and Pakistan are locked by a shared
destiny. Therefore, “our objective must be a permanent peace with Pakistan,
where we are bound together by a shared future and a common prosperity.” How can
a plural, inclusive and democratic India share a common future with a theocratic,
militarized and radicalized Pakistan?
In fact, Pakistan, with its
“war of a thousand cuts,” poses an existential threat to the very principles
and values on which India
is founded.

Three, the alternative
to a policy seeking to placate a terror-exporting adversary is war. “There
is no other way unless we go to war.” That draws on the classic argument of
appeasers that the only alternative to appeasement is provocation or conflict.
The simple truth is that between bending backwards and waging aggression lie a
hundred different options.

Four, India
cannot emerge as a great power without making peace with Pakistan. “It is in our vital interest, therefore, to try again to
make peace with Pakistan.”
By linking India’s global
rise to the placation of Pakistan,
Singh has hyphenated India
with that country even more strikingly than any international actor. Actually,
to say that the country cannot emerge as a major power without making peace
with an adversary wedded to waging war by terror is to go against the grain of
world history and to encourage the foe to hold India’s progress hostage. Does
Singh wish to egg on Pakistan
to have its cake and eat it too — wage unconventional war while enjoying the
comfort offered by Indian-initiated conciliation and peace talks? While India should
make efforts to build better relations with its regional foes on the basis of
“verify and trust” (not “trust and verify,” as Singh wants), its own global
rise is not dependent on adversarial goodwill.

Five, as India has nothing to hide and indeed “our
conduct is an open book,” it can let Pakistan include any issue in the bilateral
agenda. It was such logic that encouraged Pakistan
to turn its terror target, India,
into an accused on Baluchistan. Singh’s
attempt to rationalize that blunder, though, threatens to exacerbate matters.
Not “afraid of discussing any issue”
extends an invitation to Pakistan
to place on the bilateral agenda any subject it wants, including a matter
internal to India.

Six, if Pakistan merely acknowledges what is
incontrovertible, that is enough for India to change policy course. The
policy change at Sharm-el-Sheikh, according to Singh, was prompted by Pakistan’s submission of a dossier in response
to India’s
dossier. That Pakistan has
yet to begin dismantling its state-run terror complex against India was
overlooked. Indeed, an enthusiastic Singh even agreed that India will “share real-time, credible and
actionable” intelligence with Pakistan
on future terrorist threats. In other words, India
is to alert Pakistan
in time to the terror actions being planned by its state institutions and their
front organizations, given that the Pakistani Army, the ISI, the
Lashkar-ei-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Muhammad constitute a seamless jihad web.

Seven, high-level
dialogue and “meaningful” dialogue can be delinked. “We can have a meaningful dialogue with Pakistan
only if they fulfill their commitment, in letter and spirit.” However, at the
level of prime minister, foreign minister and foreign secretary, India will
continue its dialogue with Pakistan on “all outstanding issues,” irrespective
of whether Pakistan demonstrates its anti-terror bona fides or not.

Eight, diplomacy of
hope and prayer makes sense. “I hope and pray that the leadership in Pakistan will have the strength and the courage
to defeat those who want to destroy, not just peace between India and Pakistan,
but the future of South Asia.” Wishful
thinking has long hobbled Indian foreign policy. Now, in the glaring absence of
holistic, institutionalized decision-making, prayers are being added to the
wishes.

India needs a major cleanup 

Brahma
Chellaney

The Economic Times, July 31, 2009

From
castigating the government for frenetically importing weapons without any
long-term vision to pointing out that gaps in India’s
defences remain unplugged, the reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General
(CAG) of India
have helped highlight the rot that has set in. India is the only large country
that relies on imports to meet basic defence needs, to the extent that it has
become the world’s biggest arms buyer. But despite the ever-growing arms
imports — a money-spinning business for many Indian politicians, civil servants
and defence officers — India pursues an increasingly feckless policy towards
China and has seen its military edge against quasi-failed Pakistan erode to the
point that recurring cross-border terror strikes are met with terror-emboldening
inaction.

Instead of remaining
incorrigibly dependent on imports and serving as a dumping ground for
obsolescent weapons, shouldn’t India
build a military with the strategic reach and combat edge to deter regional
adversaries? Consider some disturbing examples.

No sooner
had the first batch of the British Hawk jet trainers been inducted — an
antiquated system in which India
invested $1.7 billion ostensibly to help minimize crashes — than a Hawk
crashes. The 2007 induction of a 1971-vintage amphibious transport ship junked
by the US navy and sold to India for $50
million kills an Indian officer and five sailors due to a gas leak on board. The
CAG says the 2005 contract for six Scorpenes saddled India with a questionable
submarine-design system and resulted in $72 million in “undue financial
advantage” to the French vendor, plus “other unquantifiable benefits”. Now, at
a price “60% more expensive than for a new one”, according to the CAG, India is buying from Moscow a refurbished Soviet-era aircraft
carrier that had been rusting since a mid-1990s boiler-room explosion.

The defence of India is becoming an unremitting scandal.
Clearly, India
needs a major cleanup. To facilitate that, a three-year import moratorium is a
must. In the process, without compromising India’s defence, some $20 billion
will be saved in that period.

(c) Economic Times, 2009.