March 3, 2015 — drsubrotoroy
Preface: This paper culminates my line of argument since our University of Hawaii Pakistan book in the mid 1980s, through my work on the Kashmir problem in the 1990s, published in The Statesman in 2005/2006 etc and in my undelivered Lahore lectures of 2011. https://independentindian.com/2011/10/13/my-seventy-one-notes-at-facebook-etc-on-kashmir-pakistan-and-of-course-india-listed-thanks-to-jd/ The paper has faced resistance from both Indian and Pakistani newspapers for obvious reasons. I would like to especially thank Beena Sarwar and Gita Sahgal in recent weeks for helpful comments. (And Frank Hahn, immediately saw when I mentioned it to him in 2004 that my solution was Pareto-improving…etc)
The *Bulletin of Atomic Scientists* recently reported an Urdu book *Taqat ka Sarab* (‘*Illusion of Power*) published in Pakistan in December 2014 edited by the physicist Dr AH Nayyar. The book “aims to educate Pakistanis about the attitudes of their leadership toward nuclear weapons”. It says “Pakistan’s people have come to believe that the successful acquisition of nuclear capability means that their nation’s security is forever ensured”. Pakistani politicians, scientists and officials who created these weapons have used them to justify a “right to unlimited authority for ruling over Pakistan”. “Consequently, free discussion and honest opinion about nuclear weapons have been nearly prohibited, under the premise that any such talk poses a basic threat to national security.”
“Hindu-dominated India wants to occupy us and destroy the Pakistan Principle for which our martyrs died” has been the constantly heard Pakistani refrain. After 1965 it did not take long for Pakistan, via the ignominy of the 1971 surrender in Dhaka, to acquire by any means the technology to develop its own nuclear weapons, even under the noses of its American friends.
Now Pakistan is said to have some 110 nuclear warheads, mostly in a disassembled state but with a few on fighter-jets in hidden air-bases in Balochistan (made by the USA decades ago) always at the ready, waiting for that Indian attack that will never come. It may all have been psychotic delusion.
India has never initiated hostilities against Pakistan. Not once. Not in 1947, 1965, 1971, 1999, 2008.
In 1971 India undoubtedly supported the Mukti Bahini, and I myself, as a schoolboy distributing supplies to refugees from East Pakistan/Bangladesh, was personally witness to Indian military involvement as of August 1971. Even so, hostilities between the countries formally began on 3 December 1971 with the surprise Pakistani air attack on Indian bases in Punjab and UP.
Though India has never attacked first, the myth continues in Pakistan that wicked Hindu-dominated India wants to attack and suppress their country. What is closer to the truth is that the New Delhi elite is barely able to run New Delhi, and the last place on earth they would want to run is Pakistan.
On our Indian side, the Indian military has been allowed a budgetary carte blanche for decades, especially with foreign exchange resources. (Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on 28 February 2015 has allocated some 2,467 billion INR to the military.)
Despite our vast spending, a band of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba terrorists tyrannized Mumbai for days on end while we seem perpetually without strategy against the People’s Republic of China’s recurrent provocations.
The two world powers with traditional interests in India — Russia and Britain — place their long-term agents in Delhi’s high politics and places with impunity, getting done all they need to in particular cases. The USA, France, Israel and others follow suit – all mainly to do with selling India very expensive military weapons, aircraft etc. that they have in excess inventory. India now has the notorious distinction of being the world’s largest weapons’ importer.
Yet we are hardly a trading or monetary superpower. We have large current account and budgetary deficits, and we are essentially buying whatever weapons, aircraft, shopping malls etc. that we do on foreign credit that we may or may not have. (Pakistan does the same.)
India’s illusions of power have to do with boasting a very large military that can take on the imperialists. We do not realize the New Imperialism that may control Delhi is not of a Clive or Dupleix but of clandestine or open foreign lobbyists and agents who get done what their masters need to have done on a case-by-case basis. The result is a corrosion of Indian power, sovereignty, and credit, little by little, and may lead to a collapse or grave crisis in the future. Even the BJP/RSS Government of Mr Modi (let aside the Sonia-Manmohan Congress and official Communists) may not realize how it all came about.
The way forward for both Pakistan and India is to seek to break the impasse between ourselves.
And there is no doubt the root problem remains Kashmir, and the hysteria and terrorism it has spawned over the years. A resolution of these fundamental issues calls for some hard scholarship, political vision and guts. The vapid gassing of stray bureaucrats, journalists, diplomats or generals has gotten everyone precisely nowhere thus far.
I have argued at length in previous publications that the *de facto* boundary that was the Ceasefire Line in 1949, and was later renamed the Line of Control in 1972, is indeed also the *de jure* boundary between India and Pakistan.
Jammu & Kashmir came into existence as a legal entity on 16 March 1846 under the Dogra Gulab Singh, friend of the British during the Sikh wars, and a protégé earlier of the great Sikh Ranjit Singh.
Dogra J&K ended its existence as an entity recognized in international law on 15 August 1947. (Hari Singh, the fourth and last Dogra ruler where Gulab Singh had been the first, desperately sought Clement Attlee’s recognition but did not get it.) Thanks to British legal confusion, negligence or cunning, the territory of what had been known as Dogra Jammu & Kashmir became sovereign-less or ownerless territory in international law on that date, with the creation of the new Pakistan and new India.
The new Pakistan as of August-September 1947 immediately started to plan to take the territory by force, and sought to implement that plan as of 22 October. Had the Pakistani attackers not stopped to indulge in the Rape of Baramullah, they would have taken Srinagar airport by 26 October, and there would have been no Indian defence of the territory possible. As matters turned out, the ownerless territory of what had been Dogra Jammu & Kashmir came to be divided by “military decision” (to use the UN’s term) between the new Pakistan and new India. Kargil and Drass were taken by Pakistan and then lost. Skardu was held by India and later lost. Neither military ever since is going to permit the other to take an inch from itself either by war or by diplomacy.
The *de facto* boundary over ownerless territory divided by military force is the *de jure* boundary in the Roman law that underlies all international law. Once both sides recognize that properly, we may proceed to the next stages.
On the Pakistani side, recognizing Indian sovereignty over Indian territory in what had been J&K requires stamping out the LeT etc – perhaps not so much by force as by explaining to them that the fight is over, permanently. There is no jihad against India now or ever. Indian territory is not dar-ul-harb but dar-ul-aman: where more than one hundred million Muslim citizens of India freely and peacefully practice their faith.
On the Indian side, if, say, SAS Geelani and friends, under conditions of individual privacy, security and full information, wish to renounce Indian nationality, become stateless, and apply for some other nationality (like Pakistani or Afghan or Iranian) while continuing to live lawfully and law-abidingly on Indian territory, do we have a problem with that? We can’t really. The expatriate children of the Indian elite have renounced Indian nationality in America, Britain, Australia etc upon far weaker principles or beliefs. India has many foreign nationals living permanently on its territory peacefully and law-abidingly (Sir Mark Tully perhaps the most notable) and can add a few more.
The road would be gradually opened for an exchange of consulates between India and Pakistan in Srinagar and Muzaffarabad (leave aside vice-consulates or tourist offices in Jammu, Gilgit, Skardu, Leh). And the remaining Hurriyat, as new Pakistani nationals living in India, can visit the Pakistani consul in Srinagar for tea every day if they wish, to discuss Pakistani matters like Afridi’s cricket or Bilawal’s politics or whatever.
The militaries and potentially powerful economies on both sides could then proceed towards real strength and cooperation, having dispelled their current illusions of power.
May 29, 2009 — drsubrotoroy
Cabinet Government has become far too unwieldy and impractical in India, and the new Cabinet chosen by Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh over almost a fortnight — of some 79 Ministers, almost certainly the largest number in the world — may be destined to be so as well. If there is going to be “fiscal prudence” as the PM and Finance Minister have declared, it really needs to start at the top with the Union Government itself. Remember we also have more than two dozen State Governments plus Union Territories and myriad local governments too.
Here then is an example of a better-designed Cabinet for the Government of India with Cabinet Ministers in bold-face, others not so:
– Parliamentary Affairs
– Intra-Government Liaison
Defence War/Forces ( Raksha, Yudh/Fauj)
– Navy & Coast Guard
– Air Force & Strategic Forces
– Money & Banking
– Accountant General
– Law & Justice
– Internal Security
– Disaster Management & Civil Defence
– Archaeology, Art & Culture
– Commerce & Tourism
– Overseas Indians
– International Organisations
– Roads & Highways
– Shipping & Waterways
– Civil Aviation
– Urban Development
Agriculture & Food
– Rural Development
– Water, Flood Control & Irrigation
– Forestry & Tribal Affairs
– Competition and Monopoly-Control
– Petroleum and Energy
– Chemicals & Fertilizers
– Coal and Mines
– Communications and IT
– Higher Education
– Vocational Education
– Science and Technology
Labour & Employment
Health and Human Services
– Women and Child Development
– Social Security
There are just eleven Cabinet Ministers (in bold-face above) including the PM, so, along with the Cabinet Secretary, they could sit with ease around a normal table which should help the process of deliberation.
This document has arisen out of one during my work as an adviser to Rajiv Gandhi in his last months in 1990-1991 though the latter never reached him; I had intended to talk to him about its contents but it was not to be.
It may be profitably read alongside my “Distribution of Government Expenditure in India”, which is part of my ongoing research and was released in the public interest last year.
Subroto Roy, Kolkata
December 4, 2007 — drsubrotoroy
Surrender or fight?
War is not a cricket match or Bollywood movie. Can India fight China if it must?
By Subroto Roy
First published in The Statesman, Dec 4 2007, Editorial Page Special Article
Armies of the subcontinent, all deriving from rather antiquated British military traditions, have only once since 1947 fought an external army ~ when China’s Communists, using Lin Biao’s military doctrines, attacked India in 1962 and India lost territory, soldiers and self-respect, gaining ignominy for half a century instead. India and Pakistan have fought wars against each other, India’s army has fought Kashmiri, Naga and other rebels, Pakistan’s army has brutalised Bangladeshi and Baluchi civilians and fought Pashtuns in Waziristan, Bangladeshi soldiers have brutalised tribal minorities and shot at Indian border guards, Sri Lanka’s military has fought Tamil rebels, Nepal has fought communist rebels, etc. Other than the 1962 Chinese attack, all warfare in the subcontinent has been domestic and internecine.
Official 1962 history
The official Government of India history of the 1962 war frankly says: “The Indian Army trained and fought like the British Army, unimaginative, elephantine, rule-bound and road-bound. Armies of Germany, Japan, USSR or China were vastly better war machines, and patterned very differently.” During the 1962 war, the US Ambassador JK Galbraith wrote to President Kennedy: “The great question is what the Chinese intend…. The Indians have consistently underestimated Chinese intentions…. the Indian Army in its command, organisation, tactics and equipment is extremely old-fashioned. The individual soldiers carry personal arms that are sixty years old and this can hardly give them the feeling of equality with opponents carrying modern light automatic weapons. The tactics are stuffy and rigid… Some of the commanders are very good. More still are the amiable frauds that rise to the top in any peacetime Army… ”
When diplomacy is exhausted and international conflict arises, there is always an option of surrendering or yielding sovereignty instead of standing up to fight, e.g. Vichy France yielding before Nazi Germany. There is always a choice between submission and fighting. Pakistan’s military has geared itself over decades only to fight India, and chosen to serve the West and China as desired towards that end. Whatever America wants in Pakistan, America gets, e.g., if American missiles need to enter Pakistani airspace to hit Afghan targets, the US Government does not seek Pakistani permission but merely informs them not to think offensive missiles have been sent from India, and they say okay.
India’s Army may be under some suspicion of being similarly geared to fight only Pakistan ~ and when India and Pakistan are armed and obsessed only with fighting one another, they can hardly think of taking on other adversaries. “India’s soldiers now stand sentinel along India’s frontiers; but they perform guard-duties and are not spear-heads for her advancing armies”, Peter Lyon in FS Northedge (ed), Foreign Policies of the Powers, 1973.
Certainly India’s military has not seemed keen to have anything but a highly defensive posture against Communist China. On 23 March 1991, Rajiv Gandhi at his residence released a fat book by a retired Army Chief on Indian military defence titled Prepare or Perish. The book’s author and the present author had been working together for Rajiv, and the former was asked why in the hundreds of pages of the book there was barely a mention of Indian military preparation against China. He replied that our strategy against China would have to be a defensive holding action which relied on the international community’s intervention before matters escalated ~ revealing a rather wild optimism about the efficacy of international relations. Another Army Chief years before him, General Thimayya himself, is reported to have said “as a soldier he could not think of a total war with China and would leave the dispute to be settled by the diplomats” (BN Mullick, The Chinese Betrayal, p. 318).
Thimayya realised India was weak after World War II facing Mao’s Communists who had two and a half million armed men, had acquired large stocks of American and Japanese weapons after defeating Chiang Kaishek, and were aggressive and experienced after decades of fighting culminating in the Korean war. (Three divisions were trained in India by the Americans and sent for Chiang in 1942-45 with supplies along the Stilwell Road or flown across the “hump”.) Indian soldiers had fought mostly under British or American commanders; in 1947, they disintegrated in chaos into the new armies of India and Pakistan who went to war with one another immediately over J&K.
Not only was India militarily weak until 1962, our political and diplomatic policies since 1949 had been consistently ones of flattery and appeasement, betraying our interests as well as our relationships with Chiang’s Nationalist Chinese and, most cruelly of all, with the Tibetans who shared India’s culture. Our first Ambassador to Beijing was a communist sympathiser, his son-in-law a leading Indian communist. India was the first country outside the Soviet bloc to recognise Communist China, the first to help Mao diplomatically in the Korean war, the pioneer of many UN resolutions to have Communist China admitted as a veto-holding Security Council member in place of Chiang’s Nationalists. We bent over backwards to accommodate and appease them over Tibet. All this got us less than nothing ~ Communist China soon enough joined hands with Pakistan’s greedy generals against us.
Zhou Enlai was said to be “one of those men who never tell the truth and never tell a lie. For them there is no distinction between the two. The speaker says what is appropriate to the circumstances. Zhou Enlai was a perfect gentleman; he was also a perfect Communist” (Father Laszlo Ladany, The Communist Party of China and Marxism, 1921-1985, Stanford 1988). Zhou enforced India’s political and diplomatic surrender, and then we failed to fight adequately on the military front. Communist China thus established its dominance over India. After Nixon and Kissinger made their devious opening to Mao and Zhou using Pakistan, American policy changed too, almost betraying Taiwan and certainly stamping American approval on the idea that between Communist China and India, China shall be seen as dominant.
For recent Chinese Ambassadors to New Delhi to brazenly use today the same language as Zhou did half a century ago is not a good sign but an indication of Communist China’s wish not to have a relationship with modern India on the basis of sovereign equality. For them to say Tawang must be theirs because the monastery there was where the sixth Dalai Lama was born and the Dalai Lama is Chinese and not Indian, is to reveal an aggressive subconscious against us. We may next hear it said Buddha himself was Chinese since he was probably born in Nepal, as an excuse for further Communist encroachment.
The last time China’s Communists attacked India the world was distracted by the Cuban missile crisis just as it is distracted today with Iran and Iraq. The Tawang monastery issue today is symbolic of India’s entire relationship with China since 1949. There is no economic reason why bilateral trade in goods and services cannot continue but it may be high time India gathers some remaining self-respect and downgrades and then considers ending diplomatic relations with this aggressive dictatorship, awaiting instead the development of democracy and a free society for all of China’s great people, perhaps on the Taiwan-model. The Dalai Lama was greeted with great warmth in Taiwan and there is no doubt a free democratic China will seek a healthy new relationship with Tibet as befits great cultures. Militarily, India must indeed prepare for the next Communist aggression or perish, which requires real modernisation and efficiency in the armed forces and an end to corruption, indiscipline and incompetence.
April 16, 2006 — drsubrotoroy
A Modern Military
First published in The Statesman
Editorial Page Special Article
April 16 2006
THE first line of defence in a major modern war is the air force, and any air force is only as good as its pilots. A small number of determined pilots once beat Goering’s Nazi armada in the skies over the English Channel. The good, indeed excellent, news for Indians is that our air force’s fighter pilots and frontline military aircraft now have been internationally benchmarked and are being recognised as first-class. Objective assessments are becoming available of the joint exercises the IAF held with the United States Air Force in 2004 and 2005 in Alaska, Gwalior and Kalaikunda. Though there were mixed Indo-US teams during several exercises, on balance the Americans admitted being surprised and even defeated by the IAF’s aircraft, technical skills and tactics. The IAF literally “defeated” the USAF in the sense Indian “gun cameras” shot pictures of their opponents far more often than vice-versa thus indicating “hits”; and the IAF certainly destroyed for all time all the expectations the Americans may have had about exercising with an inferior fighting force. To be sure, American apologists have made several political and technical points since then. One of the cheapest is that the American squadrons sent were not top frontline squadrons whereas the IAF had sent its best. Another has been that the USAF literally wished to “throw” a fight because they have wanted American legislators to fund the super-advanced F-22, and one way to help do that was by getting the IAF’s Russian aircraft to “beat” American F-16s. Of more substance is the point that the IAF imposed a requirement of “old-fashioned dogfights”, which in this missile age means aircraft being within “visual range” of one another. Current USAF strategy relies more on “Beyond Visual Range” (BVR) capabilities where aircraft never get to see the enemy but launch their air-to-air weapons based on instructions, for example from advanced on-board instrumentation or from airborne controllers in Airborne Warning and Control (AWAC) aircraft. The Americans also use “fire-and-forget” missiles in this BVR warfare which they did not bring to the joint exercises with India. Lastly, American AWACs did operate in the Indo-US exercises but as a neutral party assigning targets to pilots from both air forces; this was the first experience Indian pilots had of working with AWACs and by American accounts they outperformed their counterparts despite lack of familiarity with the technology. However, in an actual war, the AWACs and other devices would have been used to jam or destroy an adversary’s communications, and India has no capability in that.
Even so, in most encounters between the USAF’s F-16s and F-15 C/D Eagles, and the IAF’s Sukhoi-30 MKIs, MiG-27s, MiG-29s, and even the refurbished MiG-21 Bisons, Indian pilots apparently came out winners. One American commander said: “We try to replicate how these aircraft perform in the air, and I think we’re good at doing that in our Air Force, but what we can’t replicate is what’s going on in their minds. They’ve challenged our traditional way of thinking on how an adversary, from whichever country, would fight.” And the USAF’s Chief of Air Combat Command, General Hal M. Hornburg told USA Today that as a result of defeats in the mock combat exercises with the Indians he felt: “We may not be as far ahead of the rest of the world as we thought we were”. As in case of the Bofors gun, despite the corruption scams surrounding the deal-making, the Sukhoi-30 has apparently been a sound military purchase.
If the competence of our pilots and their aircraft is the good news, the bad news has been their failure of morale. The IAF’s pilots in droves have wished to quit because of “poor working and living conditions”, family-separation, and a “culture of sycophancy” promoted by the top brass which has made it difficult for them to work or even to stay motivated. In 2002-2004, 263 pilots were allowed to seek premature retirement; in 2005, only 8 out of some 200 have been allowed (one of whom got an MP to support him). The High Court has ruled in favour of the Air Force that when the nation spends untold millions in each pilot’s training, he/she is required to fulfil his/her obligations in turn. Premature retirement cannot be given by the Air Force on “compassionate grounds” to everyone who might ask for it. The new commercial airlines also seem very alluring to both young pilots and older commanders Perhaps an exit strategy needs to be devised whereby Air Force pilots wanting to quit and join the private sector may be allowed to do so ~ once they have agreed to repay the Air Force a reasonable fraction of the millions that have been invested by the country in their training. If we extrapolate these kinds of facts in different directions, a modern picture of desirable Indian weaponry, armed forces and doctrine can begin to be sketched. The first step must be an objective assessment of military threats faced by the country. We have only one declared adversary with aggressive intent against us, and that is the military and political elite that has ruled over Pakistan for almost 60 years. For sake of argument, let us ask if we have any other identifiable external enemies. We might imagine China to be an enemy because of the border war decades ago but there is in fact no plausible war scenario with China today. There may be conceivable threats but hardly any large ones from Bangladesh, Nepal, Burma, the Tamil Tigers, Indonesia, or Iran. As for Afghanistan, we have our Pakistani cousins to thank for having unwittingly buffered us from the turmoil there over three decades, although of course the Pakistani establishment tried to use that chaos to its advantage against India. There are some traditional threats of a special nature from insurgencies in the North-east but these too are amenable to political and diplomatic resolution. If we are vulnerable anywhere from an unknown quarter it is to a modern air-sea attack of the kind launched against Iraq twice recently and being threatened upon Iran now. Indeed our new American friends had themselves “gamed” a scenario as early as 1990-1991 of such an air-sea assault taking place upon India. Assuming we come to resolve our difficulties with Pakistan over Jammu & Kashmir reasonably (cf. Solving Kashmir, The Statesman 1-3 Dec. 2005 republished here), what India comes to need from a military standpoint is a compact, first-rate airforce, a defensive naval capacity based on nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed submarines (the era of grandiose vulnerable aircraft carrier battle groups is over), and some short and intermediate-range missile capacity of the kind we have in fact been developing. Jungle warfare, counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism may be the new specialised areas required from ground troops, though of course traditional artillery and armoured corps will likely have to be developed and retained indefinitely until such a time as Pakistan becomes a peaceful and healthy nation-state, which may be a long time yet.
Most important of all though, we need a supply of young fighter pilots of the kind who defeated the Americans in the war-games, young submariners willing to go to sea for ever, young soldiers like Batra, Hanifuddin, Kalia and the other heroes of Kargil who are prepared to dedicate their minds, bodies and souls for their compatriots if the need ever arises. For that to happen, the Army, Navy and Air Force must not merely cut all the corruption, sycophancy, fat, waste and moral turpitude in the senior ranks of their organisational structures, but political statesmen must arise to lead and motivate the whole polity itself with an inspiring yet realistic vision of India’s future, and one which remains consistent with our national ethos of ahimsa. A paradox has come to be revealed in our young warriors being excellent and yet their morale and motivation being low. The fault lies not with them but with those who purport to lead them.