The ushering in, with the 2009 elections, of a democratic government led by the Awami League opened up a window of opportunity for both sides to address issues of genuine mutual concern in a purposeful and focused manner. It may be a cliché to speak of the historical and traditional bonds of friendship the two countries share, but there is no doubt that the cliché is a cliché because it is true. It helps that Bangladesh, once again since 2009 under the leadership of Sheikh Hasina Wajed, daughter of Bangladesh’s pro-Indian founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, seems to understand that its own prospects for prosperity are closely tied to India’s.

Soon after coming to power, the government of Sheikh Hasina arrested and handed over a pair of wanted terrorists who had previously enjoyed sanctuary on Bangladeshi soil. The hostility of Bangladesh’s few, but vociferous, anti-Indian Islamist politicians has been curbed by firm governmental action. India’s decision to permit duty-free access to the exports of the Least Developed Countries has benefited Bangladeshi trade with India, which has burgeoned dramatically, with Bangladesh’s exports to India recently crossing the $1 billion mark in a 12-month period. Issues of road and rail connectivity are on the table, trade is being given a new impetus and both nations are cooperating on combating terrorism.

Most strikingly, a seemingly intractable territorial irritant — the existence of small enclaves of each country within the other’s borders — was settled in principle during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Dhaka in September 2011 on terms that even Bangladeshis found generous on India’s part. It is a pity that parliamentary ratification of the land transfer (which requires a two-thirds majority in both Houses that the UPA government does not have) has not yet happened. It will require an effort to persuade the Opposition parties to co-operate, but the effort is well worth making; otherwise the perception that “India does not deliver on its promises” will gain ground.

Of even greater long-term significance is a $10-billion project to provide transit through Bangladesh to India’s north-eastern states, the so-called Seven Sisters, long the stepchildren of Indian development because of their geographical remoteness from India’s booming economy. In 1947, the Northeast had a higher per capita income than most of the rest of India, but it has languished since Independence because Partition cut it off from the Indian heartland. Greater integration with India will be a huge asset to Bangladesh as well, helping develop roads, railways and trade and lifting the country’s economic growth by an estimated two per cent additionally. While transit through Bangladesh would also have security benefits for India (it would simplify the military’s task of bringing supplies and reinforcements to combat insurgencies in the Northeast and to shore up our border defences against China), the economic benefits have clearly been uppermost in both countries’ minds.

The two countries’ closer engagement has embraced areas as diverse as joint water resources management, land boundary demarcation, trade, power, connectivity, infrastructure development, cultural and educational exchange and poverty alleviation. While it may have been true that, for some years, Bangladesh was reluctant to sell natural gas to India for fear of being seen domestically as submitting to Indian “exploitation”, public opinion has shifted significantly. Polls conducted by both Bangladeshi and foreign researchers have confirmed that hostility towards India is now expressed only by a tiny minority and that regard for India, as well as support for its rise as a significant power, is a widespread sentiment. This is a welcome change, and augurs well for the future.

This is not to suggest that all is sweetness and light between the two countries. Bangladesh has, in the not-so-distant past, served as a haven for Islamist fanatic groups and even terrorists, and has provided a sanctuary for Indian insurgents in the Northeast. It has also been a source of illegal migration into India — some 20 million Bangladeshis are reliably estimated to have slipped into the country over the last two decades and disappeared into the Indian woodwork.

There are also lingering issues of border management and transit-related questions, as well as the controversy over water-sharing which erupted when the chief minister of Paschimbanga, Mamata Banerjee, vetoed a proposed agreement in 2011 on the river Teesta, claiming it would deprive her farmers of adequate water. This was widely seen as a setback for a relationship that was once again beginning to blossom after a long freeze. It is clear that co-operation on sharing the Teesta waters is indispensable for Sheikh Hasina to be able to claim that Bangladesh has gained from her friendship with India; and we must all help persuade the Paschimbanga leadership that these waters are not “ours” to “give,” but a shared natural resource (as we accepted in the case of the Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan) which we should use responsibly and equitably.

One project that could unite us — in the sort of shared endeavour that could yet define a better future for the subcontinent — is a sub-regional joint water resources management project involving Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and India, intended primarily for flood control but going beyond it. The project, which has now begun to take off from the proverbial drawing-board, envisages achieving both the mitigation and the augmentation of the dry season flows of the rivers that flow through the four countries. An added objective will be to harness the same rivers to generate hydroelectricity in a region where power shortages are perhaps the biggest obstacle to economic growth. If it happens, such a mutually beneficial project could offer a template for the rest of South Asia, helping change a narrative of hostility and stagnation into one of cooperation and dynamism.

We have a helpful and friendly government in Bangladesh. If because of our own sins of omission, we weaken it politically before the next election there in 2013, the alternatives will not be pleasant for us, and we will have only ourselves to blame.

Source: Deccan Chronicle

There is something particularly special about the sadhu and his cell phone, because it is in communications that India’s transformation in recent years has been most dramatic.

CommentsWhen I left India in 1975 to go to the United States for graduate studies, there were perhaps 600 million Indians and just two million land-line telephones. Having a telephone was a rare privilege: if you were not an important government official, a doctor, or a journalist, you might languish on a long waiting list and never receive a phone. Members of parliament had among their privileges the right to allocate 15 telephone connections to whomever they deemed worthy.

CommentsMoreover, a phone, if you had one, was not necessarily a blessing. I spent my high school years in Calcutta, and I remember that if you picked up your phone, there was no guarantee that you would get a dial tone; if you got a dial tone and dialed a number, there was no guarantee that you would reach the number you sought, and you heard an exasperated “wrong number!” more often than a friendly “hello.”

CommentsIf you wanted to call another city, say, Delhi, you had to book a “trunk call,” and then sit by the telephone all day waiting for it to come through. Or you could pay eight times the going rate for a “lightning call” – but even lightning struck slowly in India in those days, so a lightning call took a half-hour instead of the usual three or four (or more) to be connected.

CommentsAs late as 1984, when an MP rose to protest the frequent telephone breakdowns and the generally woeful performance by a public-sector monopoly, the then communications minister replied in a lordly manner. In a developing country, he declared, telephones are a luxury, not a right; the government had no obligation to provide better service; and any Indian who was not satisfied with his telephone service could return his phone since there was an eight-year waiting list for telephones.

CommentsNow fast-forward to today. In the first edition of my book The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone, I reported that, in April 2007, India set a new world record by selling seven million cellphones that month, more telephone connections than any country had ever established in one month. By the time the book was printed, bound, and distributed to bookstores, that figure was already out of date. And in 2010, India sold 20 million cellphones three months in a row.

CommentsIndia has now overtaken the US as the world’s second-largest telephone market, with 857 million SIM cards in circulation and an estimated 600 million individual users. China has more, but India is ahead in phones per capita, is adding them faster, and is projected to overtake China before the end of 2012.

CommentsI am not merely celebrating a triumph for India’s capitalists. What is wonderful about the “mobile miracle” (I am not embarrassed to call it that) is that it has accomplished something that our socialist policies proclaimed but did little to achieve – it empowered the less fortunate. The beneficiaries are not just the affluent, but people who in the old days would not have dreamed even of joining the dreaded waiting lists.

CommentsIt is a source of constant delight to me to find cellphones in the hands of the unlikeliest of my fellow citizens: taxi drivers, paan wallahs (betel vendors), farmers, and fishermen. If one visits a friend in a Delhi suburb, one will notice on the side streets an istri wallah with a wooden cart that looks like it was designed in the sixteenth century, using a coal-fired steam iron that looks like it was invented in the eighteenth century, to press clothes from the neighborhood. These days, however, he has a twenty-first-century instrument in his pocket; incoming calls in India are free under most calling plans, so it costs him nothing to find out where his services are needed.

CommentsRecently, I visited the country farm of a friend in Kerala. He asked if I wanted fresh coconut water; I said yes, and he pulled out his cellphone and dialed the local toddy tapper. A voice replied “I’m here;” we looked up, and there he was, on top of the nearest coconut tree, with his lungi tied up at his knees, a hatchet in one hand and a cellphone in the other.

CommentsFishermen take cellphones out to sea to call the market towns on the coast on the way back to shore to see where they can get the best prices for their catch. Farmers used to have to send an able-bodied relative – perhaps a ten year-old boy – on a grueling walk to town in the hot sun to find out whether the market was open, whether their harvest could be sold, and, if so, at what price. Now they save a half-day’s time with a two-minute call.

CommentsThe cellphone has empowered the Indian underclass in ways that 45 years of talk about socialism singularly failed to do. In the new India, communications has become the great leveler.

Source: Project Syndicate

Farida Pedder was a joyous gazelle of a woman, an actress, model and dancer, long and lithe, with luminous eyes through which her intelligence shone as brightly as her humanity. I didn’t know her when we shared a city; we both grew up in Mumbai in the 1 960s, a few miles apart, and never met.

But years later, in Singapore, we did connect, and established an instant rapport. My wife Minu and I became good friends of Farida and her travel executive husband Jamshyd Sethna, making it a point to spend evenings with them whenever we visited Mumbai. Farida and I had, at different times, been proteges of the indefatigable doyenne of Mumbai’s English-language theatre, Pearl Padamsee; other friendships and mutual interests strengthened our bonds.

We discussed theatre, of course, but also literature and photography, Gujarati food and Chinese culture; we exchanged books and gifts, and always parted richly satisfied with the conversation, the company, the meal, the paan. And we promised to pick up the threads again the next time, whether a year later or two, as if nothing would change in the interim.

But as too often happens in this fast-moving world, the ‘next time’ stopped coming. My peripatetic life took me across the oceans; my parents’ departure from Mumbai meant we had less reason to visit the city; addresses and phone numbers changed, and we lost track of each other. I was sure we would connect again, at some point, somewhere; the cliche, ‘it’s a small world’, had proven itself over and over so many times in my life that I never really considered the friendship lost, merely in suspended animation, waiting to be revived at some unforeseeable moment.

And then one day, in New York, at dinner with an old friend, Pearl Padamsee’s son, the actor Ranjit Chowdhury, I asked casually, “What news of Farida?” “Which Farida?” Ranjit asked. “Farida Pedder?” And when I nodded, he said, “You mean you don’t know?” From his expression, I realised that I didn’t want to hear what I didn’t know, but I asked anyway. And the truth came tumbling out of Ranjit like a rock in a landslide, shattering in its impact: “She died six months ago. Cancer.”

Just like that. Dead, six months earlier, from a disease that announces its murderous intent and makes you watch it carrying you away. Dead in her mid-30s, at the proverbial prime of her life. I grieved. Grieved for the friend I had liked so much and known so little, whom I had last bid farewell to a few years ago, after a laughter-filled pau-bhaji meal near Chowpatty. Grieved for her intense and sensitive husband, and for her mother, who had to suffer the greatest loss any parent can possibly endure. Grieved, above all, for her bereaved daughter, whom we had seen as an impossibly tiny baby in Mumbai soon after she was born. Maia. Jamshyd and Farida had been very particular about the spelling: this was going to be no common-or-garden Maya, no Sanskritic illusion. I wondered what had become of Maia, and what would become of her.

And now I have seen part of the answer, and my grief has given way to joy and excitement. Little Maia Sethna, barely ten years old, with her mother’s eyes and her mother’s grace, is the star of Deepa Mehta’s magnificent new film, Earth. She plays the polio-riddIed child, Lenny, through whose eyes we witness the personal and social ruptures and dislocations that tore her world apart as the country broke into two in 1947.

The part is an impossibly demanding one, for Lenny is the linchpin of Bapsi Sidhwa’s powerful novel, Ice-Candy Man (published in the US under the evocative title, Cracking India), on which the film is based. The child has to sustain the narrative: capricious and curious, perceptive and petty, Lenny is alternately loving and insensitive, a mere kid watching adults destroy the basic assumptions of the world she has always taken for granted.

Her complacency and her bewilderment are crucial to the story, as is her realisation, at the film’s shattering climax, that the old rules of love and trust have been swept aside in the frenzy, and that in her innocence she has betrayed her closest companion.

Few accomplished actresses could have pulled off such a part with such ease. Yet here, a child in her first film. A child, moreover, coping with the unbearable grief of the loss of her young mother, has done it so triumphantly. Maia Sethna is perfect in the part; Bapsi Sidhwa says she could not have imagined so ideal a Lenny. In a star-studded cast, featuring the talents of a subtle Aamir Khan, an exquisite Nandita Das, a mercurial Rajive Khanna, Maia Sethna has stolen the show.

And so, Farida, I want to say to the friend I cannot reach, I have seen the future and your daughter owns it. I feel like a cricket fan watching Sachin Tendulkar as a schoolboy, knowing that I am beholding a talent mature beyond its years, watching a gift that truly is limitless. I wish you could be here, Farida, to rejoice in Maia’s success. But you are here, because those acting genes you have passed on live in your daughter’s every gesture, in the naturalness with which she breathes life into the fiction of her part, in the depth of the gaze with which she faces the camera.

SA friend is gone, but a star has arrived.

Source: CSCS Archive

India, whose relations with France have been blossoming in recent years, will have to adjust to a new, not noticeably internationalist, leader with no previous ministerial track record.

Hollande’s focus is likely to be largely internal, since France has been no exception to the rising tide of economic discontent that has swept across Europe, and that is likely to sweep President Sarkozy out of office as well.

But he will preside over a relationship that has begun to acquire increasing importance in both Paris and New Delhi.
France enjoys a limited historical basis for its relationship with India, since its colonial presence was limited to a few enclaves and left no lasting mark on the society as a whole.

But our two countries’ bilateral relationship has never been stronger. Our ties with France have featured increasingly close military co-operation and intelligence sharing, creating a level of trust that may also have played a role in the decision to award Dassault’s Rafale the multi-billion dollar fighter plane contract which the entire world seemed to want to bid for.

France’s willingness to offer India an unprecedentedly generous level of ‘offsets’ in exchange for its decision, as well as to transfer technology, suggests the basis for the kind of close partnership that India is yet to enjoy with the United States.

There is also active bilateral engagement on specialised defence-related fields such as counterterrorism – the Indo-French Working Group on Terrorism has met every year since 2001 – as well as on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.

France has also developed an important level of energy co-operation with India, especially following a 2008 agreement between the two countries that has paved the way for the sale of nuclear reactors to India. Nor is the interest purely economic.

French interest in Indian culture and a sustained level of scholarship on the country, as reflected by the impressive work of its Centre de Sciences Humaines in New Delhi and the prestigious Institut Francais de Pondichery, testify to the intellectual depth of the engagement. (This has only modestly been reciprocated by India, which has for the last couple of decades posted a succession of non-Francophone Ambassadors to Paris.)

But there is something a little more indefinable that brings the two countries closer together. Both France and India are contentious democracies which are better at talk than action. Both are fiercely proud of their culture, their cuisine, their secularism and their exceptional place in the world. Both believe their virtues to be self-evident.

And both are sustained by a larger idea of themselves: the ‘idea of India’, in Tagore’s famous phrase, is mirrored by a sense of French nationhood that is both anchored in the finest traditions of Western civilisation and yet somehow apart from it.

France is a nation and a society that preserved a sense of its own worth through periods of remarkable adversity: it is typical of the French that their response to the humiliation of being thrashed in war by Prussia in 1870 was to create the Alliance Francaise to take French culture around the world. You can defeat us militarily, they were saying to their Germanic victors, but you can never conquer the French spirit.

The result is that France has always had an idiosyncratic view of world affairs. It is a member of NATO but dissented more often from Washington than it agreed with it; indeed, between 1959 and 1966 President de Gaulle progressively withdrew French participation in NATO’s military operations while remaining a member of the alliance, culminating in a rejection of NATO’s integrated military command, a state of affairs that continued till President Sarkozy rejoined the alliance fully only in 2009.

France’s posture, whether under conservative governments or socialist ones, has been that of an independent power within the Western fold. Its disagreement with the Bush Administration over the U.S.’ push to war in Iraq led to fury in Washington (and the petulant renaming of ‘French fries’ in the Congressional canteen on Capitol Hill as ‘freedom fries’).

In this respect it is very different from Britain, which has stayed loyal to the U.S. even at the price of swallowing its own views on certain global issues.

As they like to say in France, Vive (long live) la difference! This independent, even idiosyncratic, worldview makes France a natural partner for an India that has outgrown its old Third Worldism but is not entirely comfortable pledging itself to making common cause with the Western democracies.

India does not agree with France all the time – the two had sharply differing views on the NATO intervention in Libya, for instance – but the two countries are comfortable in their occasional disagreements.

This fundamental level of concordance is likely to persist under a Socialist government in Paris, since it reflects national policy rather than party political preference.

New Delhi should aim to send a special envoy to the new President soon after his inauguration – ideally one speaking French, since Mr Hollande’s English is limited – to affirm India’s interest in working with him to develop a relationship that can increasingly be characterised as special.

The defence of pluralist and secular societies is a cause both nations hold dear, and offers an important basis for international co-operation, particularly on counter-terrorism.

At the same time both countries, as hosts to significant Muslim minorities, have a sophisticated view of the Islamic world and will not fall prey to simplistic Islamophobia. France’s defence industry is already proving a vital asset for India’s national security as we broaden our traditional sources of supply. Nuclear co-operation – France has no hang-ups over India’s nuclear liability legislation – is also blossoming and has great potential for further growth.

We can watch the results come in on Sunday night confident that, whoever wins, India will have a partner in the Elysee we can do business with.

Source: Daily Mail

It was with great foresight and idealism that the founder of the modern Turkish state, Kemal Ataturk, declared a Muslim country a secular state, and brought in Western civil codes and institutions. Turkey is remarkably well-oriented towards the West and its culture and values, while retaining the traditional faith of its people. The ascent to power of the avowedly Islamic AK Party under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan momentarily created anxieties for Turkey’s secular credentials, but its nearly 10 years in power have been reassuring: the ruling party is credibly Islamic in orientation without being Islamist in its politics. The AK Party has almost become a Muslim version of the Christian Democratic parties that dominated European politics a few decades ago.

Turkey’s domestic politics are a classic case of the tussle between democratic secularism on the one hand and conservative traditionalism on the other, and so far democratic secularism is doing rather well. The successful blend of Islam and democracy has made Turkey, in the words of the US state department, the “most successful example in the world today of a secular democracy within a Muslim society” which can “inspire reformers in the greater Middle East and beyond”.

Turkey has only recently, in fact, realised the great role it can play in the Middle East and, consequently, in the world. God and geography have placed it in a strategically important location between Europe and the Middle East: it shares borders with eight countries, Greece, Bulgaria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. It has the largest military strength in Europe and the second largest within the Nato, of which it is a member. Turkey is, almost by default, a major player in maintaining stability in its region. In addition, the image of Turkey as a moderate, democratic state has given it a comfortable place in the minds of the West, while its Islamic roots appeal to all those countries the West is less comfortable with. The combination has been remarkably successful: Turkey has the ear of both sides in a host of international disputes and crises.

In recent years, Turkey’s impressive foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu has led an activist foreign policy in which Turkey is seen as a moderate influence in an otherwise worrying area and has been acting as mediator in many international situations. Following the Russia-Georgia crisis, it acted as a third-party conciliator; it has been hosting meetings between Israel and the Palestinians (it is the only major Muslim country that maintains full diplomatic relations with Israel); it has facilitated talks between Israel and Syria; and just last week it hosted talks between Iran and the “Permanent Five plus one” (the US, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany) on the contentious nuclear issue. It has also been helping promote international understanding on the future of Afghanistan.

Turkey has also benefited from the flourishing of its soft power. Turkish material and cultural goods (especially Turkish soap operas, which are wildly popular throughout the Arab world) are now found throughout the Middle East and much of the investment in the country is being channelled in from the Gulf. The West, for its part, however, is only slowly welcoming Turkey. It applied first to join the European Economic Community in 1959 but has still not succeeded in fully integrating itself with Europe, having knocked on the closed door of the EU for decades.

The reasons that prevent it from securing membership of the EU include European (especially French and German) prejudices against a Muslim population entering Europe, a call for greater internal Western-style reforms at a pace that Turkey does not agree with, and finally contention over its relations with some of its neighbours, particularly Cyprus, where Turkish troops have created a de facto partition since 1974. Despite Europe’s reluctance to admit Turkey into the EU, the West has been largely prepared to listen to Turkey and see it as a model worth promoting, especially in a region vulnerable to Islamic fundamentalism.

Economically too, the country is progressing. The Turkish economy has rebounded ferociously from recession to cross 10 per cent growth in each of the last two fiscal years. Its economy is the 17th largest in the world. Far from the image of the impoverished land from which hundreds of thousands of “guest workers” flocked to Germany, Istanbul today gleams with prosperity. India shares a satisfactory relationship with Turkey but there is considerable scope for improvement, since neither side has reached out to the other fully.

Military regimes in Turkey and Pakistan were close to each other, and secular Ankara made common cause with the supposedly kindred spirits in Islamabad, leading to a certain distance between New Delhi and Ankara. The volume of bilateral trade stands at a meagre $7.6 billion. There has been an FTA deal in the offing for quite some time now, but negotiations have dragged on for a while and are far from nearing completion. High-level visits had not occurred for nearly a decade when President Gul came calling last year; the last time a Turkish PM visited India was in 2003. Turkey is therefore undeniably a land of unexplored potential.

The question that comes to mind, in a month which has shown us the increasing prospects of Brics emerging as a body with an alternative view of the world, is: could Turkey, a Nato member with a mind of its own, join them? There are no signs yet, but no country offers a more natural fit with the incipient new grouping than Turkey. Bricst won’t be easy to pronounce, but the entry of Turkey would fill a hole in the geographical centre and enhance the group’s geopolitical potential. It’s well worth thinking about.

The writer is a member of Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram.

Source: Deccan Chronicle

Just a couple of years ago, in 2010, India’s National Security Annual Review unnecessarily averred that India was now the world’s fifth most powerful country, outranking traditional powers such as the UK, France and Germany.

Citing the country’s population, military capabilities and economic growth, the Review, issued by the MEA, placed India behind only the U.S., China, Japan and Russia in a ranking of global power.
For a country still excessively focused on problems in its own neighbourhood, distracted (if not obsessed) with Pakistan and kept off balance by China, this had even then seemed a somewhat farfetched claim. In the wake of the Army Chief’s letter to the PM on defence preparedness, it bears re-examination. India’s military capabilities are real and their quality has been demonstrated time and again both on the battlefield and in a large number of challenging United Nations peace-keeping operations.

But whether in terms of structure, equipment and training the Indian military establishment could yet measure up to the European powers the Review said it had supplanted, remains to be proven. Security in the most fundamental sense is one area where our military cannot be faulted: they have done all that we have asked of them to keep our nation safe.

But the Ministry of Defence also needs to be able to engage other countries on international security issues. As the Indian-American scholar Ashley Tellis has pointed out, 90 per cent of the MoD’s personnel is focused on acquisition and there is only one Joint Secretary entrusted with the task of handling global security cooperation.

The resultant lack of capacity has been embarrassing: as Tellis tells it, a number of training exercises scheduled in recent years between the Indian and foreign militaries have had to be called off at the last moment since India simply could not get its act together.

This has, inevitably, led to a serious loss of credibility for the country. Few countries face quite the range and variety of security threats that India does – from the ever-present risk, however farfetched, of nuclear war with Pakistan or China, with both of whom we have unresolved territorial disputes, to Maoist movements in 165 of our 602 districts, secessionist insurgency in the north-east, and terrorist bombs set off by Islamist militants in metropolitan markets.

And yet we have not yet evolved a comprehensive national security strategy to cover this entire spectrum of threats. As a democracy, India needs to undertake a strategic defence review that brings in all elements of the security services, the public at large and elected representatives in parliament, to produce a national security strategy.

But such an exercise has not even been attempted. With the government not yet having formally approved the long-term integrated perspective plan (LTIPP 2007-22) formulated by the Headquarters Integrated Defence Staff, there is little systematic effort to align India’s defence expenditure and purchases with any systematic strategy to modernise and enhance India’s combat capacity.

Instead, defence procurement – when it is not delayed by a political reluctance to make potentially controversial decisions involving large sums of money – is being undertaken through ad hoc annual procurement plans, in the absence of long-term policy.

Whereas China spends 3.5 per cent of its GDP on defence and Pakistan officially spends 4.5 per cent (not counting US military aid and vast sums allotted to intelligence and counter-terrorism operations, which would take the figure well above 6 per cent of GDP), India’s defence budget clocks in at the very modest level of less than two per cent of GDP.

At these levels, any meaningful modernisation that will substantially enhance India’s combat capabilities remains a chimera, and the money at the disposal of the military remains inadequate even to replace the ageing and obsolete weapons systems with which the Indian defence services, armed police and para-military forces are replete.

As the eminent strategist K. Subrahmanyam observed, ‘India has lacked an ability to formulate future-oriented defence policies, managing only because of short-term measures, blunders by its adversaries, and force superiority in its favour’.

The structure of the armed forces and the nature of defence policy-making, planning and training leave much to be desired; there is little co-ordination amongst the three services, and proposals to create either a Chief of Defence Staff or a US-style position of Chairman of a Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee have never been implemented. There are both a National Security Council and National Security Advisory Board, but neither can point to a stellar record in promoting policy coherence and strengthening strategic planning.

The services lack serious intelligence capacity and world-class area studies expertise; even issues of nuclear policy and strategy do not bear a significant military stamp, partly a reflection of the strong civilian desire to keep the armed forces out of the nuclear area.

The absence of a Chief of Defence Staff or a permanent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs – which means there is no single point of military advice to the government on defence strategy – is compounded by the lack of any tri-service integrated theatre commands in such vital areas as the management of air space and cyber-warfare.

Serious morale issues have also arisen over such issues as the welfare of ex-servicemen, whose campaign for ‘one rank-one pension’ has not met with a satisfactory response, the embarrassing absence of a National War Memorial to honour the sacrifices of India’s military men and women, and the needless controversy over the date of birth of the Army Chief.

The role of the Indian armed forces is principally to constitute a credible deterrent in itself; in Subrahmanyam’s words, ‘preventing wars from breaking out through appropriate weapons acquisitions, force deployment patterns, the development of infrastructure, military exercises, and defence diplomacy’.

This is a far more demanding task than conducting routine peacetime operations would normally have been, because with unsettled borders on two sides, the security of the country lies in a credible conventional military capacity that can serve as a deterrent against any adventurism from a possible adversary across the borders.

We can be proud of our armed forces, which have distinguished themselves in a number of conflict situations, but we still have a long way to go before we can boast of the kind of integrated and well-resourced defence structure that warrants any claim of a higher standing in the ranks of global powers.

Source: The Daily Mail

India and Pakistan are enjoying one of the better periods in their turbulent relationship. Recent months have witnessed no terrorist incidents, no escalating rhetoric, and no diplomatic flashpoints. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari just made a successful, if brief, personal visit to India (mainly to visit a famous shrine, but with a lunch with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh thrown in). Sixteen years after India granted Pakistan most-favored-nation (MFN) trading status, Pakistan is on the verge of reciprocating. The peace process is resuming, and the two sides are talking to each other cordially at all levels.

And yet it is important to understand that the problems that have long beset the bilateral relationship will not be resolved overnight. Even if, by some miracle, the Pakistani civilian and military establishment suddenly saw the light, concluded that terrorism was bad for them, and decided to make common cause with India in eradicating it, the task would not be accomplished with a snap of the fingers. Extremism is not a tap that can be turned off at will. ­­­The proliferation of extremist ideologies, militant organizations, and training camps has acquired a momentum of its own. As Satyabrata Pal, a former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan, put it:

“These jihadi groups recruit from the millions of young Pakistanis who emerge from vernacular schools and madrassas, imbued with a hatred for the modern world, in which they do not have the skills to work. So while young Indians go to Silicon Valley and make a bomb for themselves, young Pakistanis go to the Swat Valley and make a bomb of themselves, the meanness of their lives justifying the end. Pakistan has betrayed its youth, which is its tragedy.”

This is not a counsel of despair. It is, instead, an argument to offer a helping hand. A neighboring country full of desperate young men without hope or prospects, led by a malicious and self-aggrandizing military, is a permanent threat to India. If India can help Pakistan transcend these circumstances and develop a stake in mutually beneficial progress, it will be helping itself as well. Therein lies the slender hope of persuading Pakistan that India’s success can benefit it, too – that, rather than trying to undercut India and thwart its growth, Pakistan should recognize the advantages that might accrue to it in partnership with an increasingly prosperous India.

Such an India can build on the generosity that it has often shown – for example, with its unilateral assignment of MFN status to Pakistan – by offering a market for Pakistani traders and industrialists, a creative umbrella for its artists and singers, and a home away from home for those seeking refuge from the realities of Pakistani life. Creating more points of contact – back-channel diplomacy conducted by special envoys (a formula used effectively by Singh and former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf), direct contact between the two militaries (of which there is little), and extensive people-to-people contact – is indispensable to the peace effort.

Unfortunately, India responded to the November 2008 Mumbai attacks and other Pakistani provocations by tightening its visa restrictions and restricting other possibilities for cultural and social contact. This might be an area in which risks are worth taking, since the advantages of enhancing opportunities for Pakistanis in India outweigh the dangers; after all, the Mumbai terrorists did not apply for Indian visas before sneaking ashore with their guns and bombs.

I strongly favor a liberal visa regime, which would require India to remove its current restrictions on which points of entry and exit Pakistani visa-holders can use, the number of places that may be visited, and onerous police reporting requirements. For starters, prominent Pakistanis in business, entertainment, and media could be made eligible for more rapid processing and multiple-entry visas.

Some would argue that Pakistan will not reciprocate such one-sided generosity. That might be true, but India should not care. Parity with Pakistan would lower India’s standards. India should show a generosity of spirit that might persuade Pakistanis to rethink their attitude towards Indians.

Concessions might also be made on issues that do not involve vital national interests. Specific problems like trade, the military standoff on the Siachen glacier, the territorial boundary at Sir Creek, the dispute over water flows through the Wullar Barrage, and many other disagreements are amenable to resolution through dialogue. It seems silly that public passions in Pakistan are being stirred by false claims that India is diverting water from the Indus River; candid and open talk to the Pakistani public by Indian officials would help dispel such suspicions.

More immediately, India should seize upon Pakistan’s newfound willingness to reciprocate India’s grant of MFN trade status by taking concrete steps to reduce non-tariff barriers, such as security inspections and clearances, that have limited Pakistani exports to India. India’s financial-services industry and its software professionals could offer their skills to Pakistani clients. They would gain a next-door market, while providing services that Pakistan could use to develop its own economy. These are all “easy wins” waiting to be pursued.

The big questions – the Kashmir dispute and Pakistan’s use of terrorism as an instrument of policy – will require much more groundwork and step-by-step action for progress to be achieved. By adopting a position of accommodation, sensitivity, and pragmatic generosity, India might be able to shift the bilateral narrative away from its 65-year-old logic of intractable hostility.

Source: CNN World

Nothing went according to script. The Congress party was expected to come to power in Punjab, where chronic “anti-incumbency” has traditionally precluded the re-election of any state government. Instead, the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal won convincingly. By contrast, in the northeastern state of Manipur, Congress was expected to yield ground to critics of its long-serving chief minister, Okram Ibobi Singh, who instead pulled off an overwhelming victory.

In the tourist paradise of Goa, the Congress government expected to be re-elected, but was trounced by a resurgent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Meanwhile, the two parties found themselves neck-and-neck in the hill state of Uttarakhand, with neither claiming a majority, though Congress had been heavily favored in the polls.

But the greatest surprise was in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh (with a population of 200 million), where 402 legislators were elected to its massive state assembly. The incumbent chief minister, Mayawati, whose Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) won an absolute majority last time by forging a “rainbow coalition” composed of her Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) constituency and upper castes, was summarily ousted. Neither of the national parties, however, benefited from the BSP’s demise. Congress limped to the finish line with just 27 seats, and the BJP fared little better. Instead, a local socialist group, the Samajwadi Party, claimed a convincing 221 seats.

What does all of this portend for India? The obvious fear is that the apparent weakening of both major national parties (Congress and the BJP) will lead to political instability. But India takes electoral convulsions in its stride, and the results triggered no turmoil in financial markets. Thanks to the vagaries of the parliamentary system and the country’s sprawling size, elections seem to take place somewhere every six months, and investors and political analysts are rarely perturbed by even the most unpredictable outcomes.

In the short term, some worry that the ruling Congress will be enfeebled by the results, and that India might soon face an early general election, which is not due until 2014. Congress depends on the support of a number of coalition partners, as well as backing from non-government parties like Samajwadi that do not support the BJP-led opposition, to pass the annual budget and survive parliamentary confidence votes. But recent electoral successes for at least two of the regional parties – the Trinamool Congress, which rules West Bengal, and now Samajwadi – have fueled speculation that they might be tempted to bring down the central government in order to emerge stronger after early polls.

But, even if an early general election cannot be ruled out completely, it seems implausible that either party will feel it has much to gain from precipitating the collapse of the national government. On the contrary, both Trinamool and Samajwadi stand to benefit from having a government in New Delhi that is dependent on their goodwill. Why, with the central government in thrall to them, should they venture into the unknown perils of an early election?

It might seem that India has too much democracy – elections in one state or another every few months, a fragmented political establishment (with more than 40 parties represented in Parliament), and electoral processes that do little to strengthen a stable system built on two dominant parties. Indeed, some look with envy across the Himalayas at India’s giant neighbor, China, which, untroubled by the vagaries of democratic politics, is in the process of stage-managing a long-planned leadership change completely from above.

By contrast, India strikes many as maddening, chaotic, divided, and seemingly directionless as it muddles its way through the second decade of the twenty-first century. Another view, though, is that India is a country that has found in democracy the most effective way to manage its immense contradictions. This should be exciting, not alarming.

“India,” wrote the late British historian E.P. Thompson, “is perhaps the most important country for the future of the world. All the convergent influences of the world run through this society…. There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East that is not active in some Indian mind.”

India expresses itself in many ways. Its strength is that it has preserved an idea of itself as one land embracing many – a country that endures differences of caste, creed, color, culture, conviction, costume, and custom, yet still rallies around a democratic consensus.

That consensus is the simple principle that, in a democracy, it is not necessary to agree – except in terms of how to disagree. The reason that India, despite predictions of its imminent disintegration, has survived the stresses that have beset it during more than six decades of independence, is that it has maintained a consensus on how to manage without consensus. This is the India that Mahatma Gandhi fought to free, and its turbulent politics is well worth celebrating.

Source: Project Syndicate

The recent kerfuffle over British aid to India is now off the news pages, which may be a good time to look at the broader context.

During an earlier elimination round for India’s multi-billion dollar multi-role combat aircraft deal, the Americans and the Russians were miffed that we didn’t favour their planes; the Russians even cancelled some long-scheduled defence exercises to signal their displeasure. Now it’s the Brits’ turn to be upset with us, for the same reason. Our Air Force Chief must feel like the casting director of a play at a girls’ high school.

But it was Britain’s unhappiness that took a particularly pointed twist. Unlike the other countries, the rejection became a public issue. The UK media rose in uproar that India could dare to turn down Britain’s proffered hand when it was the recipient of some $400 million of aid each year. Ingratitude was bad enough, the tabloids screamed; but look at the profligacy of a government that spent billions on a fighter aircraft when it was taking British taxpayers’ money to feed its poor.

It then got even messier. One journalist resurrected a two-year-old statement by Indian finance minister Pranab Mukherjee that British aid was “peanuts” that New Delhi could do without. The UK’s minister for overseas development was grilled on why he was spending money on India that the Indians clearly didn’t need.

There’s no easy answer, of course. Our overall relationship with Britain is a complicated one. The kingdom was India’s colonial master for two centuries and the source of both our Westminster-style parliamentary democracy and our obsession with cricket, not to mention the provenance of the English language that has been India’s calling-card to the world.

India’s relations with Britain come with an extraordinary amount of historical baggage, compounded by the presence of some three million immigrants of Indian origin in the United Kingdom (numbers comparable to those of Indians in the US, but representing both a higher proportion of the population — some five per cent, as against one per cent in the US — and a very different demographic profile).

Recent developments — India’s economic boom, its emergence as a global powerhouse to be reckoned with, and Europe’s concomitant decline — appear, however, to have reversed the historical pattern. It is now Britain that is seen as the supplicant, seeking to please an often-indifferent India.

The importance given to India in the foreign policy priorities of British Prime Minister David Cameron is striking: he visited the country to burnish his international credentials soon after being elected leader of the Conservative Party, and India became the second country (after the US) that he made an official visit to upon becoming Prime Minister.

Barely eight weeks after taking office, Mr Cameron travelled to India with an unusually-large delegation of key ministers, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer, several well-heeled businessmen and a motley crew of MPs and academics in his entourage. His homage to the new India began with his arrival in Bengaluru, at the headquarters of Infosys Technologies, the shining example of India’s success in conquering world markets, where he also took the opportunity to lecture Pakistan on the need to abjure terrorism against India.

Apart from pleasing his hosts, Mr Cameron was signalling a departure from what Indians had too-often seen in the past as a patronising and arrogant tone about India from British political leaders. He could not have begun his journey better.

At the same time, the substance of the relationship had been stagnating for some time, with trade showing little improvement from a plateau of $11 billion in 2008-2009. Mr Cameron’s visit signalled a spurt of some 20 per cent in the next fiscal year, which has led to talk of bilateral trade heading to $20 billion by 2015. Other areas also show both progress and setbacks.

Despite the signing, also in Bengaluru, of an $800 million deal between British Aerospace and Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd for 57 advanced jet trainers, the potential for stronger defence ties remains largely unexplored. The operationalisation of the civilian nuclear agreement signed during Mr Cameron’s visit also remains to be tested in practice.

The media outcry in early 2012 over Britain’s modest development aid, which broke out when the fighter deal was announced, reflected many of the complexities that still bedevil the relationship. After two centuries of presiding over the systematic impoverishment of the Indian people, Britain arguably has a historical and moral responsibility towards the well-being of its former subjects.

So the fact that it provides India annually with some $400 million of developmental assistance, mainly targeting beneficiaries in three of India’s poorest states, is perfectly reasonable: if the UK is to have an aid programme, it would make little sense not to aid poor Indians.

When India picked the Rafale over the British-backed Eurofighter, however, the British media made it an issue of Indian “ingratitude”, not to mention profligacy, thereby conflating the poor Indians, whom its tax money was aiding, with the Government of India. Even sober commentators saw the decision as a setback to Mr Cameron’s efforts to establish Britain as a “partner of choice for India”.

This is where a distinction would be worth drawing. Don’t aid the Indian government — the cumulative aid it receives amounts to little over half of one per cent of the country’s GDP, and Pranab-da is not alone in wishing it away. But do aid poor Indians; they need it, because however much the Government of India is doing for them, their poverty is so dire that it can never be enough.

So don’t give the aid to the same people who are buying fighter aircraft; channel it instead through charitable non-governmental organisations, British or Indian, working directly with the poor. That would not only help people in need; it would avoid a revival of this invidious debate.

One footnote. Given our history, things are always likely to be blown out of proportion. It did not help that India had dawdled for over six months in replacing its retiring high commissioner to the UK, suggesting that London figured low in New Delhi’s strategic priorities. Whatever the sins of his forebears, David Cameron’s Britain deserved better.

Source: Deccan Chronicle