Arriving at a new normal in India-China relations

This article was first published in The Hindustan Times.The ongoing stand-off between the Indian and Chinese forces in eastern Ladakh is a fork in the road, fundamentally reshaping the direction of the bilateral relationship. Over the last few years, the architects of the gradual thaw and developing partnership between the two sides, which began in 1988, had been warning about the withering of old mechanisms that had kept the peace on the disputed boundary.Despite the pageantry of informal summitry, the strategic guidance provided by the leaders to their respective militaries has clearly not succeeded in stemming incidents. In November 2019, the minister of state for defence, Shripad Naik, told Parliament that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had transgressed into Indian territory 1,025 times between 2016 and 2018. Roughly a third of these incidents took place in 2018. In April that year, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping held the first of their two informal summits. Recent reports suggest that the number of transgressions across the Line of Actual Control (LAC) increased significantly in 2019.

Modi govt’s silence on China gave ‘satellite warriors’ a free run. India will rue the damages

The Ladakh stand-off has boosted transparency, for it has given greater visibility to a species of information soldiers who could be described as ‘Satellite Warriors’. These individuals, who are mostly housed in either think tanks or media, are increasingly the main sources of satellite imagery, informing the Indian and international public about China’s military moves. Their interpretations based on commercially available satellite imagery often vary from the official descriptions of the situation on the ground. Without any official interpretations contradicting their claim, the satellite warriors are having a free run while Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statements, even if they refer only to Galwan, are increasingly looking like lies attempting to hide in plain sight. You can find the article here

Is China's Western Theatre Command Confident Enough to Challenge India?

In 2013, during the Third Plenum of the18th Central Committee, it was announced by Xi Jinping that China would introduce widespread military reforms. This shift in policy came a year after Xi Jinping had succeeded Hu Jintao as General Secretary and at the beginning of his program of consolidating his faction’s hold over the Chinese Communist Party. Amid other reforms, including announcements on the economy, the Third Plenum specifically identified the People’s Liberation Army leadership, command and force structures, institutions, and civil-military integration as key areas for major reforms.

Xi initiated the reform process two years later in 2015 with the ambitious goal to make the PLA a fully mechanised force by 2020, informatised by 2035 with the key aim of turning it into a world-class army by 2050. These reforms included changes to the Central Military Commission’s bureaucratic structure, the creation of newer forces like the PLA Strategic Support Force (SSF) and the PLA Joint Logistic Support Force (JLSF), and the formation of theatre commands for improving effectiveness between the various branches. Alongside these institutional reforms, Xi Jinping also prioritised weapons modernisation with the deployment of newer weapon systems.

The formation of the PLA’s Western Theatre Command (WTC) in 2016 saw the replacement of the old Chengdu and Lanzhou Military Regions and established a single unified command structure across Xinjiang, Tibet, and along the border of key states from Afghanistan and India. The impetus to modernise the PLA was accelerated after the 2017 Doklam stand-off which saw Indian and Chinese troops face-off in Bhutan. This along with amplified military training has helped the People’s Liberation Army to improve its firepower and develop its combat readiness, making it now more confident to challenge India along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

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India can resist China by acting in concert with its adversaries

At an emergency cabinet meeting, the Prime Minister indicated that the border fighting did not constitute a threat to India. The strategic Chinese threat, he maintained, lies in the rapidly increasing industrial power base of China as well as the building of military bases in Tibet. The only Indian answer, he continued, is the most rapid possible development of the Indian economy to provide a national power base capable of resisting a possible eventual Chinese military move." Arthur Cohen of the United States’s Central Intelligence Agency wrote this in his 1963 study of border skirmishes that occurred in Ladakh in 1959. The Prime Minister he refers to was Jawaharlal Nehru.Read moreThis is part 1 of a 3-part series of essays for Livemint. You can read the entire series at:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

The global upheaval caused by China’s premature power games

As a sign of its arrival as a major power, global developments this decade have largely been shaped by China’s acts of commission and omission, and by the world’s response to it. Although Beijing’s exercises of power took a sharper turn after the global economic crisis of 2007-08, China’s leaders had been preparing their country to assume the mantle of great power at least a decade before that. In 2003, the very first year of his term as party leader, Hu Jintao organised a “collective study session" of the entire Politburo for a historical investigation into the world’s great powers. His government then commissioned a slickly produced 12-part documentary, aired on state-run TV from 2006, that got a star cast of scholars to discuss the rise of great powers from Spain and Portugal in the 15th century to the US and Soviet Union in the 20th. One of the most important lessons they must have drawn is that great power status does not just settle on you, and must be fought for and won.

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This is part 1 of a 3-part series of essays for Livemint. You can read the entire series at:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

Indian unpredictability could make China rethink its game

The South China Sea is thousands of miles away from the Indian heartland. Very few people in our country pay attention to developments in that part of the world, and although it has a bearing on India’s national interest, it barely figures in our self-centred public discourse. There, over the past decade, China has incrementally occupied islands disputed by several South East Asian countries, built military infrastructure on several of them, imposed its political administration, and is on the verge of declaring an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) over the entire region, threatening military force against any aircraft that overflies without its permission. Read more

COVID-19 and Inter Service Cooperation

The COVID-19’s relentless journey has already covered 213 countries and territories. In Indian official circles, there is growing acceptance of the reality, that we will have to learn to live with it. The Indian economy has taken a massive blow and is reflected in the decision of a 20% cut across the board including the defence budget, for the first quarter. India’s national development process has suffered a severe setback and so will our capacity for military modernisation.You can find the article here

Human Capital for the Department of Military Affairs

The creation of the Department of Military Affairs (DMA) in the Ministry of Defence portends better civil-military cooperation. That India’s civil-military cooperation was in need of structural reform was never doubted. Yet, the implementation of such reform lacked political will, faced bureaucratic resistance, and was stymied by elements within the armed services.You can find the article here

Joint/Theatre Commands

The dawn of 2020 heralded, three simultaneous, path-breaking and long-awaited steps in India’s defence reforms – the institution of the posts of the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) and Permanent Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee (PC-COSC) and the concurrent creation of the Department of Military Affairs (DMA) in the MoD with the CDS as the Head of Department (HoD). The Group of Ministers’ (GOM) Report of 2002 had recommended the CDS and in 2012, the Naresh Chandra Committee had recommended the PC-COSC.

Role of Political Guidance for Self-Reliance in Defence

During his address to the nation on May 12, the Prime Minister called for a ‘Self-Reliant India’ as the pathway to be adopted as India confronts the COVID-19 pandemic. For the defence sector, ‘self-reliance’ has remained elusive for seven decades and India remains the second largest arms importer on the global stage.

Reimagining the Mountain Corps

The Ladakh crisis has triggered calls for a resurrection of the Mountain Strike Corps (MSC), whose raising had been put on hold in 2018, due to lack of finances. Freezing the raising, was no surprise as it was always gasping for financial support, starting from 2011, when the case was first forwarded for consideration of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS). The proposal was rightly justified as a major measure for countering the increased threat from China. It involved adding 90000 personnel and projected to cost approximately Rs 65000 crores. This figure did not consider the cost of infrastructure at that time and therefore underestimated the total costs. However, there was a need for reviewing the very idea of raising the MSC. The main issue that was contested was whether the final product, the MSC will serve its purpose of deterring China. You can find the article here

On Trump's Offer to Mediate Between India and China

The Print’s daily roundtable TalkPoint posed a question connected to the US President Donald Trump's offer to mediate between India and China over the “raging border dispute": Does Trump help or harm India’s interests when he offers to mediate with China, Pakistan?My response:

US President Donald Trump’s offer to mediate is a needless distraction in the grand scheme of things.Assessing what the US foreign policy would be like based on Trump’s offer to mediate on Twitter is a risky exercise. Often, there is a considerable gap between the two, like in the case of Afghanistan.Officially, the White House released a report on 20 May that said in no uncertain terms that Beijing “flouts its commitments to its neighbours by engaging in provocative and coercive military and paramilitary activities in the Yellow Sea, the East and South China Seas, the Taiwan Strait, and Sino-Indian border areas.” We can only guess whether Trump’s latest offer to mediate follows as a result of this understanding.Nevertheless, India’s position on such offers has been consistent — it intends to solve such disputes bilaterally and not through third party mediation. China is not likely to accept any such offers of mediation either. Hence, it would help the Indian and American interests both, a lot more if the US and India work together to build capacity to resist Beijing’s coercive and arrogant approach to border disputes.The case with Pakistan is also similar. The border dispute there is just one issue in a consistently strained India-Pakistan relationship. In fact, the US support to the Pakistani military-jihadi complex over the years has made this problem even more difficult. Here again, it would help the Indian and the US interests a lot more if the US adopts an overall strategic stance that sees Pakistan as a part of the problem.

You can read the full conversation on ThePrint. here. 

Flashpoints on the Periphery: Understanding China’s Neighborhood Opportunism

How is China taking advantage of the pandemic to pursue its foreign policy goals?

Tensions in China’s periphery have increased dramatically over the past few months as Beijing stepped up the use of military and diplomatic tools within its neighborhood. The frequency of the events involving Chinese actors, especially in the second half of March, increased as normalcy started returning to the mainland after the COVID-19 pandemic’s outbreak.This raises a few questions. First, is this evidence of China’s opportunism at a time when the United States is struggling to maintain its presence in the East and Southeast Asian regions? Second, has Beijing adopted a more aggressive approach for the post-pandemic period? Third, would the recent spike in activities impact the regional order?Read more

This article was originally published in The Diplomat.

India’s Bargaining Power with China and US will Grow in Post Covid World

Covid-19 is likely to accelerate the competition and confrontation between the US and China, and simultaneously reduce the global authority of both by eroding their absolute power and legitimacy. The relative power scale can tilt in either direction. India and other middle powers are likely to enjoy greater bargaining capabilities with both US and China. Smaller powers are likely to fall in line with any side that provides them with the required capital. India’s geopolitical stance depends on actioning key domestic reforms, failing which India’s leverage will reduce and it will be forced to ally with a major power on less favourable terms. If India’s relative power vis-a-vis China and the US improves, India can become a swing power for both the US and China led groupings. If India’s relative power declines, India will have to align itself more closely with the US. Read the full op-ed on The Print here.

COVID-19 Operations: Role of the Armed Forces

The metaphor of war has been universally invoked to describe the conditions under which ‘victory’ over COVID-19 is sought. The metaphor is certainly useful to galvanize a nation and harness its capacities that can be directed towards the ‘enemy’. The challenge in the fight is that the enemy can spread invisibly even through hosts who are unaware, as the individual can transmit the virus even during the incubation period when the individual is asymptomatic. Its detection requires testing but is not as yet known as a killer of the magnitude of previous pandemics, even though there is no cure nor vaccine. The most vulnerable are people over 60 years of age and those who are already nursing other ailments. It is obvious that if lives have to be saved then this war must be fought by the young while the old are specially protected. You can find the link to the full article here

Use the oil price crash to boost India’s strategic reserves

One area in which India can definitely use the lower oil prices to its advantage is to stock up on the commodity for future use. Like many other countries, India maintains strategic petroleum reserves (SPR), which is an inventory of oil for emergency purposes. To mitigate supply-side risks and cover for vulnerability to external oil shocks, India holds an emergency oil stockpile in underground salt caverns, which can provide around 4.5 days of import cover. There is additional capacity for five days of oil import cover, which must be filled up at this time when oil prices are at historic lows. Indian petroleum refineries hold an additional 65 days of import cover.India has been delaying the start of phase two of its SPR plans, which was to add another 12 days of oil storage capacity. This was to be done in partnership with either ADNOC (Abu Dhabi) or Saudi Arabia’s Aramco. It is probably the right time now to get this off the drawing board.Alternatively, we can also look at options outside India. We could persuade the Sri Lanka government to kick-start the utilisation of oil storage facilities at Trincomalee. This could be done in a mutually beneficial manner. We could also shop around for storage space in Oman (Ras Markaz) or the United Arab Emirates (Fujairah). Right now, we are in a bizarre situation where the storage space is more expensive than the commodity itself, but things will revert, and any investments now will help India in the long run when oil prices rise again.Finally, the private sector should look at this as an opportunity to lock into long-term contracts with oil suppliers based at current prices. The government can help the struggling Indian airline industry, for instance, by providing it lines of credit to enter into or renegotiate oil contracts.Here's the full article 

Let's make the most of dirt cheap oil

In a dramatic and unprecedented turn of events on Monday, crude oil began trading in negative territory for the first time since records began. The price on a futures contract for West Texas crude that was due to expire on 21 April crashed to minus $37.63 a barrel. This is a direct result of the market mayhem caused by covid-19, which has resulted in lockdowns around the world, brought economies to a screeching halt, and crushed demand for transport fuel. Reports say there is so much unused oil in the US that there is no space left to store fresh supplies. Storage costs money. Thus, oil producers had to pay to offload their stock.The sudden fall in oil prices is tied not just to a demand crunch, but also tensions among the world’s major suppliers. The global effort to contain the pandemic, international pressure, oversupply, and still-sluggish demand seem to have struck both Russia and Saudi Arabia hard. Though a production cut has since been agreed to, demand is estimated to have fallen far more than that.The best way to turn this situation to India’s advantage, therefore, is to grab this chance to fill up the country’s strategic petroleum reserves (SPRs). We should move quickly to boost our strategic petroleum reserves and strike long-term supply contracts with global oil suppliers.Read the full article here

Coronavirus economic crisis squeezes China’s plans to expand its navy as it marks 71st anniversary

China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy marks its 71st anniversary today. It comes amid intensified drills in the near seas and Western Pacific, along with deepening tensions in the South China Sea. The navy has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s military reforms.Driven by great power ambitions, Chinese naval shipbuilders have been churning out warships at a record pace over the past few years. Consequently, the Chinese navy today has the world’s largest deployable fleet of vessels. The irony, however, is that in the post-Covid-19 world, this expansion could prove to be the navy’s Achilles' heel.Read the full article in South China Morning Post

A new space race in the offing?

As the world is grappling with the coronavirus pandemic and the United States is ina precarious situation, President Donald Trump has passed an executive orderallowing Americans ‘the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, anduse of resources in outer space.’All major spacefaring nations, including the United States of America and India, aresignatories of the Outer Space Treaty 1967. Article II of The Outer Space Treaty,1967, states, ‘Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is notsubject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use oroccupation, or by any other means.’ The Moon Agreement 1979, although ratified byonly 18 countries, the US not being one of them, also prohibits the exploration ofthe moon. The order highlights that US doesn’t consider space as ‘global commons’and further states that the US is not a party to the 1979 Moon Agreement anddoesn’t recognise the Agreement to ‘be an effective or necessary instrument toguide nation-states regarding the promotion of commercial participation in thelong-term exploration, scientific discovery, and use of the Moon, Mars, or othercelestial bodies.’While the legal opinion on the legitimacy of exploiting outer space by the USA isdivided, the intent of commercial exploration is not entirely new. Over the pastcouple of years, we are seeing increasing interest in asteroid mining andexploitation of space by nation-states. The US Congress had passed the‘Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act’ in 2015 giving its citizens the rightto ‘possess, own, transport, use, and sell the asteroid resource or space resourceobtained.’ NASA’s Artemis Lunar Exploration programme plans to develop a basecamp at the south pole of the moon and build other infrastructure to facilitatelong-term exploration of the moon. Billionaire explorers like Jeff Bezos and ElonMusk, are also looking to reach Mars and other celestial bodies and take advantageof the resources found.Luxembourg, a small European nation, has implemented an even more liberalregime than the US for asteroid mining and harvesting of other resources fromspace. Trump’s executive order is an endorsement of the growing global sentimentand formal recognition of the property rights of private players from the US.Russia has heavily criticised the US, and Trump for the order, stating, ‘attempts toexpropriate outer space and aggressive plans to actually seize territories of otherplanets hardly set the countries (on course for) fruitful cooperation.’ However, weneed to trust actions, not words when we observe sovereign nation-states in theinternational arena. Russia’s space agency Roscosmos has announced plans for a2024 orbiter, a 2028 sample-return mission, and human flights by 2029-30, Chinahas an ambitious lunar programme with its Chang’e missions. Russia and China arealso planning to build a shared data centre for lunar and deep-sea research. It willbe interesting to see whether all these missions are only towards the pursuit ofscience or are there other strategic and economic interests that the countries willundertake.Setting up bases and exploiting and trading resources found in space is also a wayof asserting power in space. Most states now acknowledge space as a new domainof security, and thus are building capabilities to safeguard their interests andproject power. While building defensive capabilities through specialised defencespace agencies is one way, establishing economic avenues through the exploitationof resources and trade is the other way to gain primacy.The Outer Space Treaty, enacted in 1967, in the wake of the cold war and the heightof the space race, has done well to prevent exploitation of space so far. As spaceexploration and travel is becoming cheaper, and there is increased participationfrom private players, we are likely to see new strains in the international order. Wewould observe an increased interest in property rights in space and countriestrying to enable, if not encourage, their private players to harvest resources inspace.The executive order says that the US is looking to negotiate multilateralagreements with foreign states for sustainable operations for the recovery of spaceresources. India needs to be cognisant of the developments in this new ‘space race’.While the Moon Agreement which India has signed but not ratified may prove to bea thorn, India must take prudent measures to ensure that its citizens can reap theeconomic dividends of space exploration while India can safeguard its strategicinterests.(This article was published in the Deccan Herald. The views are of the author's own.)

COVID-19 and Geo-political Implications

It is perhaps too early to judge the scope and long-term impact of COVID-19 on the geopolitical landscape. What is not in doubt, however, is the certainty that there will be global political and strategic effects. Presently, the dominant emotion that runs across the global population is the ascendant fear that stems from the known and unknown aspects relating to the coronavirus. While it is known how the virus spreads and what its symptoms are, no known cure has been discovered nor is a vaccine likely before 12-18 months, if at all. One of the major challenges in containing its spread though is its ability to transmit, even during the incubation period. Herd immunity1 is said to theoretically provide the best available defence against the virus, but it comes at a major cost in terms of human lives and the infection quantum. You can find the full article here