This piece will seek to analyze and examine India’s
strategic position vis-à-vis its neighbours and its broader engagement with the
world over different issues.
The simultaneous rise of India and China over the last two
decades has completely altered the strategic landscape of the region and
brought the Indian Ocean Region(IOR) countries into sharp focus. Asia today has
some of the most dangerous flashpoints of the world. It is the battleground for
struggle against Jihadi forces and the centre of some of the bitterest ethnic
conflicts. It has a number of nuclear powers living in close proximity with
relations between them perennially on the edge. Add to it the intense conflict
of interest over resources- oil, metals, minerals and now water- to meet the
voraciously growing appetite of prospering populations and one finds oneself
caught in a vortex difficult to escape.
India and China:
The rising prosperity of the world’s two most populous
nations, India and China, has led to a manifold spurt in demand for raw
materials to feed the growth engine. Both countries have sought to secure
energy supplies for the long-term by investing in oil-fields and oil companies
abroad- whether in Central Asia or Africa. The fight for coal has intensified
after China turned a net importer of the commodity, both countries slugging it
out in Indonesia, South Africa and Australia. Coal is desperately needed to
feed the thermal power plants which are still the main vehicles for power
generation owing to their cost-effectiveness. Chinese companies have been
aggressively buying stakes in the biggest mines and mining companies themselves
the world over. The state-backed behemoths with the full backing of government
funds are more than a match for any private company the world over and have
leveraged this advantage to the hilt by outbidding the latter everywhere. The
biggest oil companies in the West find themselves unable to compete with
Chinese companies, which sweeten the deal by offering cheap Chinese state-backed
credit, soft loans and investment in the host country’s infrastructure
development. The Western companies are further constrained by law to not engage
in business with pariah states and autocratic rulers whereas the Chinese with
their policy of “non-interference in a sovereign country’s affairs” hardly
blink an eye in sealing deals with them. India on the other hand, has so far
chosen to rely on soft power to gain influence, seeking to gather the goodwill
of the general populace rather than the benevolence of rulers.
For all its might, China still sees India as a potential and
the only threat in the region to its great power status. It has sought to
checkmate India through its now well-known “String-of-Pearls” strategy under
which it is building a string of ports and bases in the Indian Ocean region to
surround India. Gwadar in Baluchistan(Pakistan), Hambantota in Sri Lanka,
Chittagong in Bangladesh, bases around the Andamans and a newly-announced naval
base in the Seychelles are a cause of great alarm for India. As Robert Kaplan
points out in his book “Monsoon”, Gwadar on the Makran Coast of Pakistan will
allow China to keep a check on security of oil supplies coming through the
Strait of Hormuz, Hambantota will allow it to keep an eye as the oil moves
through the Indian Ocean sea lanes towards the Strait of Malacca and the
Seychelles naval base will allow it to pre-empt any naval blockades in the
Malacca Strait, undoubtedly the most vulnerable chokepoint in the route.
Chittagong port in Bangladesh and the Sittwe port in Myanmar will secure the
supplies coming from Africa through the Bay of Bengal to Myanmar from where
they will be transported via long pipelines to China. Gwadar is also rumored to
have a listening post to keep track of Indian activities in the Arabian Sea.
The growing might of the Chinese navy with the establishment of an underground
nuclear submarine base in the Hainan province and the recently launched
aircraft-carrier don’t do anything to inspire confidence, further deepening
Indian suspicions of Chinese intentions. The Chinese navy has begun flexing its
might in the region by engaging in tense stand-offs with Indian naval vessels,
engaging in a high-level diplomatic spat with Japan over Senkaku (Diayou for
the Chinese) islands(and thereby cutting off supplies of rare-earth metals for
a long period) and claiming rights over vast swathes of the South China Sea by
defining it as a “core-interest” all of a sudden. The audacious attempt to warn India against
signing an off-shore oil-and-gas exploration agreement with Vietnam by defining
the territory as “disputed” underscores its seriousness in making these claims.
As noted defense expert Brahma Chellaney points out in his
new book, water is another potential area of conflict in the coming decades.
The rising demand for food and growing populations in India and China have
brought freshwater supplies under tremendous pressure. With surface-water
supplies dwindling owing to damming, pollution and receding of glaciers,
groundwater resources are being tapped at a rate exponentially higher than
replenishment rates. Water tables have gone down, making it increasingly
difficult and energy-intensive to extract further. Also, at these depths, replenishment
doesn’t take place so it’s a permanent loss. China is in a unique position
whereby control over Tibet gives it control over origins of almost all the
major rivers in the region that represent a big chunk of total freshwater
supplies in the region. Its obsession with building large dams over these
rivers(like Brahmaputra) has left lower-riparian states like India at a
significant disadvantage owing to reduced flows, besides resulting in adverse
environmental consequences for China itself. Its Three Gorges Dam, touted as
the biggest engineering achievement since the Great Wall, is a case in point.
The renewed Chinese claims over Arunachal Pradesh have been made with an eye on
its bountiful freshwater reserves.
Militarily speaking, there is hardly any parity between
India and China. The latter has the world’s largest standing army, a fleet of
over 70 submarines- most of them nuclear-powered, a superior number of fighter
aircraft, inter-continental ballistic missiles, a nuclear arsenal whose size
can only be guesstimated and most importantly mind-boggling infrastructural and
logistical capabilities that enable it to transfer almost 4.5 lakh troops(thus
outstripping Indian forces 3:1) to the border in double quick time than
India. More significantly, its defense
spending is assumed to be almost double of what it officially declares every
year, the declared amount itself being twice the Indian expenditure.
The struggle for resources, aggressive Chinese moves in the
region coupled with its unwillingness to come to the negotiating table to
resolve contentious issues including
those related to borders, provocative moves such as stationing of troops
in the PoK region and issuance of stapled visas to Kashmir residents make
co-operation between the two countries difficult. In absence of a proper
dispute resolution mechanism, friction is bound to increase. Heavens forbid, if
this leads to military exchange in future, the consequences could be
catastrophic given the nuclear armed status of the two nations. It is therefore
in the interest of both countries to seek a common minimum ground, engage in
diplomatic exchanges, refrain from whipping up nationalistic rhetoric and make
co-operation rather than competition the lynchpin of their relationship in the
foreseeable future.
India and Pakistan:
Any amount of writing space would be insufficient to do
justice to the intricate relationship these arch-rivals share. However, I shall
try my best to touch upon broad contours and the plausible way ahead.
Pakistan till date hasn’t brought 26/11 perpetrators to book
and continues to shield, fund and encourage them. Extremism has become a
Frankenstein’s Monster over which the military establishment exerts only
partial control now. Some of the groups have turned against the government and
the Army there in retaliation to the perceived co-operation they give to the
US. Nevertheless, the terror infrastructure is still intact, terrorists
continue to be pushed across the border and efforts are being made to set up
indigenous terror groups in India by indoctrinating and misguiding youth
through propaganda. The latter, Pakistan hopes, would give it room for
deniability whenever a terror strike takes place. Even with its own economy in
shambles and on a lifeline of US-supplied aid, the maverick Generals continue
to harp on the India threat. Alarmed by Indian efforts in Afghanistan to
improve infrastructure, it has repeatedly tried to sabotage such efforts for
fear of losing influence in a region it relies on for “strategic depth” in its
war doctrine. Even though nearly bankrupt, it continues to grow its nuclear
arsenal at an astonishing rate. Amusingly, it seeks to blame India and the US
for all its ills. It accuses India of funding, aiding and abetting separatist movements in
Balochistan while shamelessly seeking to fan insurgency in Assam and supplying
money and arms to Naxalites. India is blamed for depriving Pakistan of its
rightful share of water under the Indus Water Treaty which is in-fact, perhaps
the most generous treaty ever formulated between an upper and a lower riparian
state. All of this when its own former foreign minister admits that the problem
is one of inefficient use and large-scale wastage than that of availability.
A country where the Army is the only properly functioning
institution, democracy has never been given a real chance, feudal landlords
control the economy and dominate the political space and where blasts are the
norm rather than an exception, cannot be but a tinderbox case. The civilian
government has no real authority to negotiate on vital contentious issues and
its Army shies away from direct engagement to keep up the façade of democracy.
Platitudes apart, making any real progress has thus proved impossible.
To hedge its bets against India, Pakistan has continued to
draw closer to its “all-weather” friend China. The latter helped Pakistan
achieve nuclear capability, transferred blueprints of ballistic missile systems
and continues to supply a large chunk of its military hardware including
fighter jets. It has even been audacious enough to disregard Nuclear Suppliers’
Group(NSG) rules in supplying additional nuclear reactors ostensibly for
nuclear power generation. In order to checkmate Indian in the Arabian Sea,
Pakistan has invited China to formally set up a naval base at Gwadar. Given the
closeness of this relationship, one finds it quite curious that China provided
only a pittance in the form of aid to Pakistan when it got ravaged by floods
last year. On the other hand, western nations including the US pitched in
generously almost instantaneously.
With US forces slated to withdraw completely from
Afghanistan by end of 2014, competition for influence in Afghanistan is only
set to intensify further. India and Pakistan apart, China and Iran too are
jostling for space. China has already won lucrative mining contracts for the
new found Afghan mineral wealth and rides piggyback on the security provided by
international forces. To deter India, it’s only to be expected that Pakistan
will indulge in more attacks in Afghanistan as well as inside India. Pakistan
perceives that a strong Afghan National Army trained by India is not in its
interest and it would like to do everything in its power to become the training
provider itself.
All in all, predicting the trajectory of India-Pakistan
relations for anytime beyond the visible horizon would be foolhardy. Since the
tide of terrorism is not expected to abate anytime soon, the major factors for
deviation from the predictable are likely to be the domestic political
situation in Pakistan, the relations between the Army and the government and
the way the Afghan end-game plays out over the next couple of years. The
challenge would be keep the relations from deteriorating beyond a point in
order to avoid an all-out war. An attack on the lines of 26/11 would constrict
political space for leaders on both sides who’ll not only find peace a
difficult proposition to sell to their people, but may be obliged to give in to
nationalistic demands to teach the adversary a lesson. Civilian led efforts to
promote ties in the area of culture, arts and music may be the best bet ahead
in order to keep emotions and tempers in check.
India and the Rest of the World:
The Indo-Russian partnership has stood the test of time even
after momentous events such as the break-up of the Soviet Union. Occasional
friction on account of poor quality of military hardware or the Russian
propensity to go back on contracts to negotiate for better terms mid-way
through a deal have not deterred leaders from both sides. Joint projects such
as the design, development and production of the fifth generation fighter
aircraft, the PAK T-50, and the joint development of cruise missile BrahMos are
two examples of ongoing collaboration. Indian companies have also acquired
significant stakes in the development of oil and gas fields in Siberia with an
eye on energy security. Relations are likely to be cordial in the foreseeable
future.
The evolution of the India-US partnership over the last
decade, underpinned by the Nuclear Deal, has been a seminal event. The growing
unease with Chinese intentions in the region has brought the two nations
closer, both of whom have an interest in maintaining the freedom of navigation
in international waters. Countries in the Asia-Pacific region such as Vietnam,
Indonesia and Philippines, intimidated by China, have sought to come closer to
India and US. India and US continue to iron out differences, even as India
seeks to avoid being counted as an outright ally of the latter, for fear of
inviting China’s displeasure.
Although India has repeatedly sought to stake a claim over
permanent membership of the Security Council at the UN, it would first have to
demonstrate an ability to take unambiguous stands over critical issues rather
than choosing to sit on the fence. Without it, few would be ready to consider
India’s candidature seriously. India has adopted an incoherent approach to the
Iran issue and maintained silence on the Arab Spring and the Libyan affair. It
has also shown little spine in dealing with the Chinese, giving in to
unreasonable demands to clamp down on the Tibetan protests and Dalai Lama’s
activities. Chinese provocations in the form of issuance of stapled visas and
its protests over the Indian PM’s Arunachal visit have not been responded to in
a tit-for-tat manner despite ample existence of diplomatic vulnerabilities at
the Chinese end such as its annexation of and atrocities in Tibet and Xinjiang.
A nation unwilling to stand up for itself can earn little respect from others,
let alone be entrusted with the responsibility of protecting the security
interests of weaker countries. India has rejected the notion of a permanent
membership without the veto power but it needs to ask itself whether it has
demonstrated enough spine and leadership capabilities to earn this privilege.
