Thursday 24 October 2019


HINDU INDIA: THE SECURITY DIMENSION

AN ARTICLE PENNED IN 2003

Two popular views on China’s future contradict each other. To some, Chinese power will rise to end the current unipolar moment. To others, including China watchers in the CIA who periodically release their scare mongering reports to the press, China will fall apart under the weight of its own contradictions, the foremost of which is capitalism in a communist state. Like crystal gazing has seldom been done with respect to India. India is seen reflexively as a Great Power on the make, with a growing economy enabling it to expand its military capabilities. The under-articulated contrary view is that such a future is not axiomatic, but is predicated on continuing social cohesion of India as a nation. This article analyses the dangers attending the rise of Indian national power in conjunction with a decline in its social stability.

Such a scenario is not far fetched given the ascendance of the political right on a divisive platform over the recent past. The run up to the next national elections may witness further communal polarization, the election worthiness of the issue being manifest in the Gujarat elections. In the event of national elections returning the ruling party to power unmitigated by its present coalitional constraints, the hindutva agenda to create a Hindu India is likely to be unleashed overtly. The implications of this for national cohesiveness are apparent. Thus the future of advancing Indian economic and military power, accompanied with internal instability, will be realized. Reflecting on the security dimensions of such a future indicates that the current movement towards realization of Hindu India of hindutvavadi dreams is not an unmixed blessing.

Rising Indian power will not go uncontested by its perennial adversary, Pakistan. Indian strategy of replicating US strategy towards the Soviet Union of the early eighties to push Pakistan into being a ‘failed’ state, would further corner it. To counter India’s hawkish approach, two options are open to Pakistan. One is the expansion in scope of its proxy war to include other parts of India in collusion with minority elements influenced both by their own fundamentalist inclination and by the broader communalization in the polity. This would complete the vicious circle, for it will be taken as evidence of the fifth column status of the minority, in keeping with the premises of hindutva philosophy of marginalisation of the minority. Secondly, it would lower its nuclear threshold so as to negate the expanding difference between the conventional capabilities of the two states. Indian flexibility in resorting to force, furnished by its expanding capabilities and by the incentive to use them being provided by provocative Pakistan, would thus be constrained, further emboldening Pakistan. Thus Hindu India will not be able to transcend the subcontinent to play a major role on the world stage in keeping with its power trajectory.

The Huntingtonian logic of ‘clash of civilizations’ will be on display in relations with China, for India would no longer be a state pursuing its legitimate interests, but a state representing 5000 years of hindu civilization finally coming of age. The undercurrents of antipathy towards China are evident in Indian representations to the US President on Indian motivations for going overtly nuclear. There is also prevalent the determinist understanding in realist security circles that competition with China for space under the Asian sun may turn military over the middle term. The very notion of equating itself with China has an ego-boosting component to it. Arming itself with long-range missiles and pursuing strategic nuclear weapon program puts India into the big league. These tangible security assets supplement the false pride that the other philosophical tenets of hindutva provide. The preparation against the perceived Chinese threat over the long term can only result in materializing the threat. Thus a Hindu India would open yet another front, as also the certainty that its two adversaries so created would collaborate to further threaten it.

Bangladesh is a state that bears watching, for there are positive trends in its human development index that will have a bearing on its national power over the long term. This, along with the issues of Bangladeshi ‘immigrants’ into India, makes it necessary to give it separate treatment, rather than club it along with the other smaller Indian neighbors as is routinely done. It is already implicated in providing a base for ISI activities targeting eastern India. Since rival fanaticisms feeds on each other, fundamentalism in Bangladesh and its anti-Indian tendency will only deepen with the saffronisation of India. The use of the ‘immigrant’ issue by the right wing in India will be handy for leveraging itself into power through a campaign of vilifying the minority as a readily available ‘Other’. Corresponding treatment of the hindu minority in Bangladesh will be taken as further justification, since Hindu India would represent not mere citizens but hindus. Therefore, India’s soft underbelly will be even more exposed, even as Hindu India rings itself with neighbors in league with each other.

Smaller Indian neighbors will be the sites of contestation of Indian power with the combined power of its larger neighbors. While Bhutan and Maldives may band wagon readily with India, Nepal and Sri Lanka can be expected to balance Indian preponderance with an inclination away from it in at least some issue areas. In Sri Lanka, Buddhist fundamentalism could gain impetus, particularly if Hindu India feels inclined to take a religiously inspired position on a persisting Tamil question. Nepal, already taken as an ISI base, may continue as one if the Maoist insurgency grows. India’s interest in a stable Nepal are particularly acute owing to a proportion of its army being of Nepalese ethnicity and to contiguity of Nepal to India’s nexalite ‘badlands’ stretching from Bihar to Telangana. The status quo in the evolution of the SAARC would continue to deepen. Growing Indian economic power would compel these countries to seal off their economies to preserve them against Indian economic preponderance. Unilateral Indian concessions, though making sound economic and political sense, may be less forthcoming from adrenalin charged Hindu India. Thus, while regions coalesce into economic blocs for greater competitiveness in a globalised world elsewhere, South Asia will miss what shall turn out the most critical trend as the century unfolds. 

In its relations with the sole superpower, India has already revealed a disturbing initiative towards being the ‘most allied ally’. There are two fronts along which this association may be boomerang on India. One is that India may lend itself to the ends of a policy of containment of China, thereby enmeshing itself in Great Power games. While this may help the saffron leadership for adopting attitudes of statesmanship, it bears recounting that there is no region that has been left unscathed after having been embraced by the USA.

Second is that in trying to gain American attention India has been presenting itself as a similar victim of pan-islamic terrorism. One end of the muslim terrorist arc stretching from Chechenya is deemed to be ending in Kashmir. By projecting its understanding with USA as ‘natural’, India is associating itself with the reactionary reassertion of neo-colonial control of the energy resources, in league with its friend of recent vintage, Israel. Thus, India is opening itself to targeting by partially quasi-nationalist forces, presently deservingly designated ‘terrorist’. The restive minority in a Hindu India could find tactical allies amongst these terrorist forces, quite like the disaffected muslim underworld elements in Bombay who turned to the ISI for engineering the retaliatory Bombay blasts in 1993. Thus ‘islam’s bloody borders’, to use a huntingtonian expression borrowed by Mr. Vajpayee for his controversial anti-minority speech in Goa, would be imported into India. The future may find India on the wrong side of history.

The contradiction is that though Indian economic and military power will continue to grow, it will be proportionately less able to cope with the worsening security situation. Economic priorities will leave considerable angst within the vulnerable sections of society. The ‘experiment’ in the ‘hindutva laboratory’ of making the lower classes and tribals participate in anti-minority pogroms would help in psychological projection as also distraction in the short term. Over the long term, the limitations in neo-liberal agenda will surface to compound the internal security problematic. The kind of military power invested in, to include high profile missiles and nuclear weapons; and technology intensive and mechanized armed forces, will be the least appropriate to address the security problems that will arise in Hindu India. The police, in the tradition established by the Bombay police of abnegating professional responsibility, or worse, in determining it to be the service of the hindutva philosophy, will exacerbate the law and order situation. A reversion to the days of the Emergency when a ‘committed’ civil service was thought desirable will occur with similar results, only this time the commitment to hindutva line will rob the Indian state of its traditional neutrality and credibility in intervening in intra-societal conflict. Thus Hindu India will be its own gravest enemy.

While the Gujarat electorate has bought the line that the minority ‘threat’ in its midst can best be met by hindutva inspired governance, it would be tragic were this to be replicated at the national scale as is the endeavor of rightist formations. Their effort will be to emulate the resounding victory of Rajiv’s Congress of 1984 in both substance and result. This strategy will have to be combated first conceptually in intellectual discourse and then physically at the hustings. The Geobblesian ‘hindus and hinduism in danger’ line has to be revealed as true, not from the directions pointed out by those crying wolf, but from the scare mongers themselves. Hindu India will not only endanger India, but also will constitute its own greatest threat. Hindu India will not only menace minorities, but also hinduism and hindus.




Thursday 17 October 2019

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/kashmir/politics-how-will-new-delhi-react-to-the-civil-disobedience-in-kashmir-4543111.html

How will New Delhi react to the civil disobedience in Kashmir?

Two recently-released civil society activist reports indicate the onset of civil disobedience in Kashmir. Their early warning stands vindicated by the arrests of former Chief Minister and Union minister Farooq Abdullah’s sister and daughter as part of a protesting group of Kashmiri women in Srinagar on October 15, though released the following day after submission of a bond against pursuing their protest activity. Security forces need to think up a coping strategy in real time, lest they end up bracketed with their predecessors who once served a colonial master.
New Delhi appears to have won the first round. National Security Adviser Ajit Doval’s meticulous planning and intimate supervision yielded the desired results, with a negligible number of Kashmiri dead over the last two months. Yet, the state administration has begun the second round on the back-foot, best illustrated by its advertisement beseeching Kashmiris to resume their usual, even if not quite normal, routine.
Clearly, the Amit Shah-Ajit Doval strategy for the first round has had costs. Besides the humiliation from the voiding of Article 370 without consultation, Doval’s masterminding of the communication cut-off and lock down cannot but have long-term repercussions.
Compounding these have been allegations of high handedness in affecting detentions in nightly raids, detaining of juveniles, possible torture, lock down and the ubiquitous and privacy-sapping deployment of troopers have generated disaffection of untold magnitude.
For its part, the state administration is trying to get a modicum of normalcy going. Restoring communications, calling for a return of tourists and assisting with apple harvesting and marketing cannot cover for the lost ground. Deputing magistrates to oversee start of schools and announcing an exam schedule to lure students back are stratagems. It will also keep the leadership and foot soldiers incarcerated for longer, lest the wellspring of anger find focus, a plan and a leader.
Quite like the first intifada that broke out in Palestinian areas unbidden in 1987 end as an ad hoc peoples’ initiative, taking about two months thereafter into posing a significant challenge to the Israeli State, the incipient ‘satyagraha’ in Kashmir may take as long to gather steam. As to whether it gains traction would depend on the State gathering its wits and strategising suitably.
For now, the State is evidently witless. Reflecting on how the situation will shape up, Doval has it that it would depend on what Pakistan cooks and serves up. The army chief has indicated that with some 500 terrorist ready in launch pads for infiltration, this is mostly along well-known lines: more proxy war.
This has not been unleashed as yet since Pakistani pro-activism is checked by the ongoing scrutiny of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on its terror financing record. The orchestration of deterrence signalling by successive statements by Indian ministers and its brass has left Pakistan with only its Prime Minister Imran Khan’s war rhetoric and nuclear scaremongering as fig leaf for its inaction thus far.
Even so, in round two, Pakistan is a step ahead by appropriating the civil disobedience. Absent indigenous leadership, locked away in a lakeside hotel and as far away as Agra, its dictate will speedily fill the vacuum. Killings targeting the apple industry and of shop keepers wanting to resume sales suggest its proxies are already acting as enforcers of the citizens’ curfew.
While such operatives will no doubt be taken care of by the resumption of counter insurgency operations with the communication ban lifted and the intelligence flow restarted, the disabling of the messaging function of mobiles will help interdict a means for gatherings, central to ‘satyagraha’.
As in the first round, India’s ‘success’ in the second will be predicated on the number of Kashmiri dead. Negligible casualty figures owed to stone throwers being far removed. In the second round, paramilitary troopers have to adopt uncharacteristic non-violent means for coping with crowds preponderantly comprising women. As a first step, pellet guns need stowing away.
However, their borrowing from India’s freedom movement by the Kashmiris has opened up an unbridgeable gap. Not only are ‘strategic corporals’ — trooper action having strategic fallout — significant to India’s showing, but equally what the Supreme Court has to say in its hearing beginning mid-November on the Article 370 petitions. Round Two can be expected to last till the Supreme Court rules on the case.
That Round Three will probably follow can easily be speculated, not least because of its incomprehensible postponing of the hearings, but also its short shrift to the human rights issues, such as in habeas corpus cases brought to its attention, from the undeclared emergency in Kashmir.
New Delhi’s frantic preparations for Round Three suggest as much. The army has operationalised the cold start doctrine some 15 years after thinking it up and also tested it in mountains, though in the eastern sector. The air force has acquired its first Rafale, with the defence minister personally ensuring its auspicious entry into the inventory. India’s ‘success’ in this round will be how it manages to avoid war even as it prosecutes the promised proactive response to proxy war.

Tuesday 1 October 2019

http://kashmirtimes.com/newsdet.aspx?q=95062



Nuclear winter before this winter?

Back triumphantly from New York, the prime minister’s adhoc speech making at the airport reception by his bhakts led to massive traffic snarls across western Delhi. The road show was justified by Narendra Modi getting the better of Imran Khan ‘Niazi’. Khan’s full name was eked out by a young Indian diplomat preparing her rejoinder to Khan’s ‘rant’ on Kashmir at his turn at the podium at the General Assembly.
While in the United States (US), Modi had instead expended his ammunition at the Rs. 1.4 lakh crore Howdy Modi show. (Disclosure: this author could not work out the number of zeros in that figure. Evidently, Rahul Gandhi, who dug up the dirt, knows better.) The highlight was his overtly interfering in the elections of the host country by endorsing the bid for reelection of its sitting president, currently under impeachment proceedings. That bit of personal diplomacy was taken as getting the US alongside, though Trump carefully pointed out that talks were the way forward for both sides.
The easy-to-manufacture consensus in India is that India has won. However, India’s national security minders know better. National Security Adviser Ajit Doval was over in Srinagar yet again last week keeping up the vigil. He best knows – hopefully – that only the first round is over. He informed on the second round when he spotted several hundred jihadis across the Line of Control (LC). The army chief, obediently on cue, got himself photographed peering through a telescope across the LC. The bell for the second round tolled with kinetic operations in the hinterland taking a toll of six militants.
Round One extracted a reputational price internationally - which the Indian media’s ostrich act has kept from the public. So it was not a walkover. As for Round Two, there are two dimensions. The first is the eruption in Kashmir. The continuing lock down is a dead give-away. If Amit Shah is to be believed there is no such lock down any more. But then to Amit Shah till only recently Farooque Abdullah was a free man. The second is the manner Pakistan lobs the Kashmir ball back into India’s court.
Pakistan’s army appears to have instructed its puppet and purported civilian political master, Imran Khan, to create the conditions for their actions in Round Two. Khan led the diplomatic offensive with as much vigour as he had brought to the cricketing oval when his team won the world cup. India did well not to shoot itself in the foot by shooting up Kashmiris, preferring instead to take the hit over a lock down. Even so, Imran Khan has given the Pakistan military an alibi. He has warned the international community adequately and if it has not taken vigourous preventive action, then it would have to be goaded into action with development of a threat to international peace and security in Round Two.
There are three possibilities. One is resumption of proxy war with gusto, and, second, to up the ante with a conventional show of force. The third is Pakistan going Gandhian.
The first possibility is apparently already in the works. The second may be necessary as overlay since the Indian military is ready and waiting. The Pakistan army would reckon that military force is to be used to protect and further its national interest. Since Kashmir is equated with the national interest – the military reputedly controls Pakistan’s Kashmir, India, Afghanistan and nuclear policies – it cannot be that it would go Gandhian at the crunch. On returning from New York, Imran Khan more or less conceded defeat, acknowledging that the jihad doctrine required standing by Kashmiris, giving the green light for possibilities one and two.
Instead, India appears to have betted on a third possibility: Pakistan, overawed by surgical strikes, going Gandhian. Strategic good sense would indeed be to survey the preparedness and power equations and step back, using proxies to face the music – as has largely been the case thus far. It could do this and get away earlier since it could justify proxy war as pressure to get India to talk. By India closing the option of talks decisively – saying talks will be over terror and Pakistan occupied Kashmir and making Kashmir inaccessible through (un)constitutional ‘integration’ – proxy war loses its earlier rationale. India has forced Pakistan to do more, foregrounding the second possibility.
As for the third, for India to expect a cake walk in Round Two is not unreasonable. Pakistan should know that its economy cannot sustain the ten day war India’s military preparedness can – even if India’s economic down turn precludes India sustaining a war of any duration. Pakistan is also on the cusp of black listing on its terror financing record. Pakistan could also lose the war and its army its position on the top of Pakistan’s power heap.
By winter, Round Two would have either finished or fizzled. It would be apparent what risk India has had to run over implementing a manifesto promise of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Such promises are to be checked by instruments of state by providing a reality check. Those institutions on the front rank of national security have to temper, deter and push back on policy missteps. If the government was warned of the risk of war is not known. That no one has resigned indicates group think.
Since there are no inducements to Pakistan on offer as part of a deterrence-reassurance strategy, it is not self-evident how the first two possibilities will be avoided. The army chief in his interview yesterday is out justifying a policy which - even if disaster is avoided in the short term - is not going to see a let up in the situation for another generation. He suggests that the shift to surgical strikes will ensure the third possibility, and if it does not, India will be at it till it does. It is anyone guess how long will that be, at what risk and with what efficacy. This is evidence that just as with other national institutions the Indian military is also hollowed out – unable to stand up to the media-built strategic reputation of their political master, the unelected Ajit Doval.
To highlight this here is not to reprise Im-the-dim Khan. India’s actions speak of an agreement with Imran Khan that it is running an undue risk. The lock down – self-inflicted clampdown according to General Rawat - in Kashmir is set to continue through winter as rumours of the paramilitary inducted in additional numbers is now seeking winter accommodation indicate. India has put out several deterrent gambits, such as, its defence minister reminding Pakistan of its past losses in wars and its standing to lose Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. His reference to a shaky nuclear first use pledge is proof of India’s concurrence with Khan that there is a more than just a nuclear backdrop to war today.
In a book, India’s Habituation with the Bomb, released at a Pakistani security think tank last week, I make the case in my book chapter contribution, ‘India’s Nuclear Doctrine: Dynamism or Stasis’, that India’s is now a warfighting nuclear doctrine – how so ever much its declaratory nuclear doctrine dissimulates to the contrary. This makes India more war prone than during its years of strategic restraint. It permits the shift to strategic proactivism of late. Ability and intent to match Pakistani nuclear use in war with its own at an early and low threshold mode makes India venturesome. Others have it that India may even preempt Pakistani nuclear use. This explains the military’s confidence in backing of the constitutional jugglery over Kashmir and belief that it can face down Pakistan. With a more usable Indian nuclear arsenal on call, Pakistan would be better deterred from going nuclear. Without the nuclear assurance behind it, the Pakistani army would be less liable to be adventurous over the Kashmir fait accompli. Any Pakistani poser over Kashmir can then be check mated by Indian conventional resort. Any Pakistan nuclear proclivity can be met with proportionate nuclear riposte. In short, a fightable nuclear war keeps Pakistan in better check.
In the present situation, the Indian assessment is that the worst case – of nuclear exchange(s) - can be ridden out. It’s a risk worth running for the national interest of a quiescent Kashmir. Since there can be no more fraught a situation than the current on over Kashmir, the hope is General Rawat is proven right. He has it that Pakistan cannot rely on its nuclear deterrent since doing so would be against the tenets of strategic weapons use. Hope General Rawat does not believe his deterrence propaganda. In case he is proven wrong, the only silver lining is that accountability shall catch up with the trio – Modi-Shah-Doval - that pushed South Asia into such a situation in first place.