Kung-Fu master's Indian friends

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

The US civil society is riled no end by the alleged Russian intervention in last year’s presidential election, with an eye on seeing Hillary Clinton defeated. The fact that she lost the election, and Donald Trump won, is read by a good section of the American media and public as the outcome of machinations by Russian president Vladimir Putin.

If true, it is unprecedented for the world’s biggest power to have its internal affairs remote-controlled by another country. However, for India, an even larger democracy than America, the “foreign hand” nudging domestic policy is an old chestnut. India under the late Indira Gandhi was regarded as ‘client state’ of the former USSR, with the government orchestrating its domestic and foreign policy in step with Moscow’s diktat. Similarly, there were tell-tale signs of American intervention in several key events in the nation’s life that shaped its destiny, like the allegedly CIA-sponsored air crash leading to the death of Homi J. Bhabha, father of India’s nuclear programme. If he were alive, India would possibly have achieved its present nuclear capabilities several decades earlier, with cheap power triggering Asia’s industrial revolution not on the eastern coast of China but on Indian soil.

And now, it seems to be China’s turn to do its bit. In this space last week, I described China as  India’s “dangerous” neighbour. Dangerous, because it poses serious security risk. It is building roads that can bring its artillery right up to the border of the Indian state of Sikkim, with its bulldozers that were at work in the territory of Bhutan, a tiny mountainous country that depends on India for its foreign relations and external security. In China’s perception, India is a weakling, a perception born out of its 1962 experience, yet India cuts a profile high enough for a hit on it to reverberate across the world as a demonstration of the Dragon’s might. 

However, China, like America and Russia in the past, has also emerged as a player on the chequerboard of India’s internal politics. Apparently, it is rattled by the rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the global stage, as a decisive leader of India’s 130 million people who carries no ideological baggage that hamstrung the country’s previous rulers. And, like the USSR in the past, it has kept a close watch not just on Modi but the entire political spectrum, and must have observed the extent of antipathy towards him that some of the opposition leaders, notably the top leaders of the Congress party, harbour against him. There are reasons for China to be soft towards the Congress as, under its leadership, India resolutely desisted from crossing the red line in response to various urgings from America to be a party to the mission to contain China.

But India under Modi has shown more spunk than what makes Beijing’s tolerance limit. It has joined in strategic partnership with Japan, Australia, Vietnam and the US—countries that are worried by China’s flexing of naval muscle on the maritime rights of all over South China Sea. In 2008, the US gave India the legal right to build on its civilian nuclear capabilities despite being a nuclear nation and a non-signatory to NPT. But it was an ineffective largesse as India was not a member of the exclusive Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG); without its nod, it is not possible to obtain either nuclear fuel or technology. For over two years now, China, as an NSG member, has made it its mission to stall India’s entry into the all-important nuclear marketplace.

Differences arose even on issues related to terror as China, as member of the 15-strong UNSC, flatly refused to ban Masood Azhar, head of terror group Jaish-e-Muhammad, which had attacked Indian parliament in 2001 and the Air Force base at Pathankot in 2016. It was China’s gift to Pakistan in exchange of the latter’s help in mobilising members of the Organisation of Islamic Nations (OIC) in support of China. And of course for gleefully offering China land to build rail and road communication from Kashgar, the oasis city in Xinjiang, to Gwadar port in Pakistan’s Baluchistan. Interestingly, the more Modi sought to befriend the US, the more China began putting pressure on him. It multiplied as Modi’s global image got enlarged, the latest being his historic red-carpet reception in Israel as the first Indian PM in that country. The irritation of his critics at home rose in direct proportion to China’s hostility. It was as if some of them were enjoying India’s humiliation. This is enigmatic, because Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Congress PM, was a victim of China's deliberate betrayal: he had taken China as friend, but was betrayed by an aggression of unmatched ferocity. Unable to bear the shock, he died within two years. However, in what remains of his family, there are elements making money by exporting handicraft and other objects to China against unrealistically high invoice, and some party leaders close to the family have strong Chinese links.

It is likely that the recent Chinese hostility north of Sikkim had a bearing on the Congress-led move to unite the opposition parties in India against Modi. And, as the opposition unity effort tends to fizzle out, it is a Chinese gambit that looks like having gone for a toss. The stand off in the Doklam area, therefore, may end sooner than expected. No wonder Modi and Chinese president X Jinping, in their meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg last Friday, held a brief talk on the side line, disproving Beijing’s hawkish bureaucrats who’d discounted the chance of a meeting. But everyone was happy as they shook hands. The only unhappy soul was Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi who snarled: “Why is Modi silent on China?”

A surgery long overdue

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

By giving a nod to a swift and target-based military retaliation in the early morning of September 28, Prime Minister Naraendra Modi has turned inside out India's long-established set of responses to provocations from Pakistan. The upending of the familiar Indian strategy is even more pronounced by India taking the initiative in declaring the authorship of the "surgical strike" on the terrorists' staging camps. The Indian Special Forces also inflicted "huge casualties" including killing "two Pakistani soldiers" who had come to the terrorists' rescue. If there were low-key line-of-control crossing episodes in the past, India never went public. Whether it was Operation Parakram in 2002 or India retaliating to the beheading of the soldier in 2013, the government never claimed that its forces crossed the LoC. India always treated armed reprisal as the last resort. It waited for 24 years till 1998 to turn its tested nuclear capability into a weapons programme. In 2008, following the most daring attack in Mumbai by Pakistan Army's proxies, resulting in the loss of 164 lives, public outcry for a retaliatory attack on Pakistan was at its shrillest pitch. Yet India did not budge from its commitment to "strategic restraint".

That Modi has finally moved away from that doctrine is consistent with his pre-election commitment of giving a "fitting reply" to Pakistan. Following terrorist attacks in Gurudaspur, Pathankot and finally Uri, failure to live up to his promise would have haunted him like albatross around his neck. It was a risk he could ill-afford, with the manufacturing struggling to pick up, unemployment haunting and elections to Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Goa & Manipur round the corner. His Man-Friday and BJP president Amit Shah is a hawk and played a key role in formulating political decision making. Even beyond electoral politics, inaction after the Uri attack would have put at stake his identity as someone "different" from the Nehruvian "peaceniks". His rating as a man of iron would have fallen even below that of his predecessor from BJP, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who, despite his reputed fondness for 'biriyani diplomacy' with Pakistan, had actually fought a costly and difficult war with it on the peaks and slopes of Kargil in 1999.

That Modi would choose the tough path was evident from his choice of Ajit Doval as his National Security Advisor. Doval is the bureaucratic architect of the current policy shift from strategic restraint to "offensive defence'. As early as October 2014, he summoned the BSF chief and advised him to respond to cross-border firing from Pakistan with "higher than proportionate" intensity. The BSF was also advised by Doval to desist from holding the usual flag meetings with Pakistan Rangers after such incidents. The policy shift began paying dividends in an indirect but purposeful way, by boosting morale of the armed forces after a decade of despondency and despair caused by the regular cycle of aggression from the Pakistan side and mere hot words from Indian politicians. The September 29 surgical strike by Indian Special Forces should be seen in this context. India desperately needed to come out of morass of helplessness against a bullying neighbour, and its territory being used, in the words of one of our diplomats in the UN, Eenam Gambhir, as the "Ivy Leagure of terrorism". In the past, such forceful phrases would have sounded hollow without any concrete action on the ground. But, after the 29 September reprisal, our DGMO was the first to declare that our forces had indeed penetrated inside PoK territory to carry out attacks. India was at last walking the talk. 

Pakistan has so far refused to accept the incident, or its nature, brushing it aside as just another cross-border episode. But such reticence may be a ruse to buy time and collect strategic thoughts to deal with a more determined India which is no longer shy to step on the escalation ladder. It now seems that Prime Minister Modi and his security team led by Doval have seen through Pakistan's decades-long practice of military and nuclear blackmail, and they have decided to call the bluff. Though the flow of bluster from Pakistan is as usual—and India is battle-ready with strike forces and other units fully mobilized—the civil leaders of the neighbouring nation, and their military bosses, are certainly finding severe limits on their choices. The Indian action has shown that Pakistan cannot hide behind its plea that the terrorists on the prowl are "non-state actors", so it must remain prepared for full-scale military retribution for every mischief committed by the UN-designated terror groups it trains, arms and harbours. As a strategic expert in Delhi was explaining to me, "the next Mumbai attack from Pakistan may trigger a combined naval and air attack on Karachi on an epic scale".

The source of Pakistan’s confidence so far is two-fold: first, the belief that China, its “iron brother”, will do all it takes on India’s northern and eastern frontiers to force India to scale down; and the US will exercise its influence to de-escalate the confrontation before it reaches the nuclear ignition point. However, Pakistan’s recent lessons from responses from Beijing and Washington are disappointing. China, on its part, did not go beyond expressing concern about the confrontation and said “both nations should exercise restraint”. The US pinpointed the Uri terrorist attack as the “cause of escalation” and reiterated that Pakistan must de-legitimise the UN-designated terror outfits. Besides, Pakistan found itself bereft of friends in South Asia as it was compelled to cancel the scheduled November SAARC summit in Islamabad following unequivocal condemnation of terror by Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Sri Lanka.

Modi is inarguably a controversial leader, but, in the third year of his rule, his diplomatic and military gambits are paying off. Except an electorally defunct CPI(M) and politicians like Mamata Banerjee and Lalu Yadav, wedded to minority vote bank, every opposition leader, including Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, complimented Modi for his bold move.

Modi's poker

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

A general consensus now seems to be emerging in India that the "new year" attack on the Indian Air Force's Pathankot base was aimed at nothing but derailing, by the Pakistan Army, the India-Pakistan peace negotiations begun on the Christmas last year at the initiative of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. There is no major glitch in this line of thinking, except that the operation seems too daring and too complex to be executed in the course of just six days—from December 25 when Modi made a detour to Lahore on his way back from Kabul, to December 31, when the Pathankot attackers belonging to Jaish-e-Mohammed reportedly crossed into the Indian Punjab. It is common knowledge that the terror groups acting from Pakistan, like JeM or Lashkar-e-Toyieba, are free to act independently as long as they carry out routine attacks in the territory of Jammu and Kashmir, but the army's seal of approval is a must for operations outside Kashmir.

The recent Pakistani fidayeen attacks in Punjab is also a way by the Pakistan Army expressing its "anger" at too much of hobnobbing of their civilian chief with his Indian counterpart. It's a signal that the Pak generals have by now perfected a terror machinery along the border that can strike at the shortest possible notice. If Modi can give a short notice to visit Lahore, they can also strike back at a short notice too. It was on July 11 last year that Modi grabbed Sharif on the sidelines of the Ufa summit in Russia. Within a fortnight, a team of LeT commandos sneaked into Gurudaspur to kill seven people, before two were caught alive. Interestingly, the Ufa meeting was the prelude to a peace process, while Modi's unscheduled stop-over in Lahore, and attending Sharif's grand-niece's wedding, was an intense dramatic passage in the same unfolding peace narrative.

The similarities between the two attacks are striking. Both involve the men in khaki in Rawalpindi telling India that efforts to bypass them for any composite dialogue between the two neighbours would lead to cross-border attacks escalating way beyond the traditional theatre of Kashmir. In both Gurudaspur and Pathankot, the men who handle the terrorists' handlers sought to make the hits prohibitively costly for India. The fact that they made little dent in both of these adventures is purely accidental. In Gurudaspur, the RDX packs wired to the railway track along the Amtritsar-Pathankot line were detected in the nick of time; a jam-packed passenger train stopped only 200 meters away. If the bombs were not detected, hundreds of lives could be lost. In Pathankot, the four lead attackers, who'd covered 400 meters towards the aircraft hangars, and had another 700 meters left, were challenged by Indian soldiers. If the JeM men were smarter and quicker, India would have faced its worst.

Between 2006 and 2008, the period in which the then prime minister Manmohan Singh had invested so much of his time and attention on a bilateral dialogue, the Pakistan Army was in fact gearing up to make an LeT squad under Hafiz Syed battle-ready for a naval attack on Mumbai, which took place on 26 November 2008. On Indo-Pak matters, Dr Singh was an incurable optimist. He kept his hope of peace with Pakistan alive even after the brutal attack in Mumbai in which about two hundred people were killed. The very next year, he was nudging the Pakistan president again at Sharm-el-Sheikh, the Egyptian resort and venue of that year's Non-Aligned Nations' Meet to continue with the dialogue process. Some of Dr Singh's own party were sceptical about his optimism. In the BJP, Modi was bitterly critical.

But it is a new Modi now. Much like Dr Singh, he seems to have come to realize that India cannot remain in permanent hostility with Pakistan, nor is there any option to dialogue if one is serious about putting the enmity behind. At the time of writing this article, it is not clear if Modi will stick to the schedule of foreign secretary level talks without getting any firm action against the attackers. Outwardly at least, Sharif seems keen to keep the talks on.

It is no wonder that the civilian leaders of Pakistan understand the necessity to give peace with India a chance. And the feeling is shared by Modi. Just recently, he has okayed a massive gas pipeline project from Turkmenistan and across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the bustling marketplace of India (TAPI). Apart from being useful to India, it will enormously benefit an energy-starved country like Pakistan. But Pakistan's military leaders have a different mind-set. Being in a state of permanent hostility with India, it helps them appropriate from the exchequer an unconscionably large share. Expectedly, their hackles are up whenever there is a possibility of peace, particularly a resolution of the Kashmir problem. For as long as Kashmir remains the thorn in Pakistan's flesh, the men in uniform will rule the roost, so emotive is the K-word.

Between India and Pakistan, a long war is unsustainable, both being nuclear powers. In short-term war, Pakistan has decided superiority. Its armed forces, trained under the tutelage of US Army to combat the Soviet occupation of Agfhanistan in the Eighties, has acquired the agility and flexibility required in wars that are localised and do not last beyond a week or ten days. India, on the other hand, has an army typical of the last century, with too many people, too many command chains and too heavy equipment. There is not  even a synchronized command for its three defence services. But Pakistan has a single chief of staff.

Having inherited a rather anachronistic defence establishment, it may not be possible for Modi to go on hot pursuit, or such surgical operations, against Pakistan any time soon. A practical man, Modi understands India’s military limitations, something that he didn’t when he criticised Dr. Singh. When his aircraft landed in Lahore on December 25 as a Christmas surprise, there was also a lurking feeling of a backlash. But still he accepted the risk as the possibility of peace between India and Pakistan is too tempting. But that is expected as Modi is a compulsive risk-taker.