Staggering forward - Narendra Modi and India's global ambition (Bharat Karnad) - Highlights

PREFACE

Narendra Damodardas Modi was elected with a thumping majority in 2014 in part because the people believed he would make the country progress on all these fronts. But he was sidetracked; his government got mired in the Hindu fringe politics of cow worship, beef-eating, ‘love jihad’ and the Ayodhya Ram Temple instead, and failed to initiate any kind of system transformation.

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Where the situation has changed for the worse is on the domestic scene. Social peace has a tincture of violence against Muslims and Dalits in it, with Hindu extremist groups interpreting the fact of Modi and the BJP in power as licence to create mayhem, fray the social fabric and exacerbate societal fault lines. Modi has tried to douse communal passions, but only half-heartedly, because the ruling party benefits electorally from religious polarization of the heterogeneous Indian society that is immune to other means of political mobilization. This is so because the majority Hindu community is divided into too many sects and diverse traditions to form a coherent political whole.

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All these strongmen (Trump, Modi, Xi, Erdogan) are prize winning in domestic political battles at any cost but are careful when competing with other strongmen. But because there can be no certainty of victory in the international sphere, they have weighted the odds in their favour by picking on weak targets to burnish their image and assure a higher probability of success. Thus, Putin exerted himself against Ukraine by annexing Crimea, Xi flexed his muscles against the littoral states on the South China Sea, Erdogan moved forcefully against the Kurds, and Trump bombed Syria and now picks on Iran and North Korea. Similarly, Modi is concentrating on the smaller, weaker Pakistan while giving the more dangerous and challenging China a free pass. Modi has disappointed because he has failed to articulate a national vision, fully unshackle the economy and incentivize the private sector to lead it. His Make in India programme to make the country self-sufficient in arms is stillborn. His unambitious foreign and military policies, by being restricted to small steps and reinforcing India’s supposed reputation as a ‘responsible state’, have missed out on the huge strategic benefits of being assertive and disruptive.

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I was struck then, as I am now, by how inept the Government of India seems to be other than in consistently misreading the strategic geography and threats, avoiding significant action, making the wrong choices and shying away from securing decisive military wherewithal, which in the present day are tested and proven thermonuclear weapons of medium to high yields atop tested intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and long-range cruise missiles. And in addition, hankering to join the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) as a permanent member without veto power and going along with technology denial regimes that victimized India, such as the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) and the Wassenaar Arrangement, and then not on our own terms. The other ways India shot itself in the foot was by cueing to lesser dangers, emphasizing the wrong security issues and switching from relying on the ex-Soviet Union/Russia as main military supplier to leaning on the US when history suggests that for a would-be great power like India it is folly to depend on any foreign country for arms and any big power for deliverance.

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Just as dispiriting to see was the spectacle of a supposedly ‘nationalist’ BJP dispensation, this time under Modi, compounding the existing problem of arms imports with the fundamentally flawed Make in India programme—Modi’s flagship policy to promote manufacturing, spread technological innovation and generate employment—that has had no economic impact and made not the slightest dent in arms imports. This is so because of the confusion about its concept and its stuttering implementation, the unwillingness to take hard measures and to integrate the resources and capacities of the public sector and the private sector to form a core cost-efficient national defence industry, and the absence of political will to promote self-sufficiency if necessary by compelling the armed services to induct successful indigenous weapons systems (Tejas light combat aircraft [LCA] and Arjun main battle tank [MBT]) in large numbers to achieve economies of scale and fire up a nascent industry.

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It is hardly to be wondered then that in the eighth decade of its existence as an independent nation, India is emerging as something of an anachronism: a hefty economic power (per macro indices) that politically, diplomatically and militarily is pulling itself down to the second rank and is widely perceived as ‘all mouth and no trousers’.

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Modi's long-term political ambition to cement a Hindu-majority support base has led to the ruling party’s discreet support for Hindu extremist groups to polarize domestic politics along communal lines. The BJP government has failed on the socioeconomic front, including to generate employment, expand skilling programmes and incentivize the manufacturing sector into leading the charge on sustained doubledigit GDP growth. It would have spread prosperity and a sense of well-being in the country and realized Modi’s promise of ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas’ (with everybody, and for everybody’s progress). His mix of personalized diplomacy, showmanship and bonhomie with foreign leaders, while an asset, has failed to achieve much, attempt anything new or embark the country on anything really big. It has been mostly more of the same, except the attitude towards Pakistan has become shriller, making India lose out on the greater strategic benefits that would accrue from pacifying the neighbourhood. It has only helped China consolidate its foothold in the subcontinent.

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CHAPTER 1: ‘ALPHA MALE’ LEADERS AND ‘COUNTRY FIRST’ POWER POLITICS

Even with so much physicality on show, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit in May 2017 was extraordinary for the display of Trump’s boorishness, when he physically shoved aside Dusko Markovic, the prime minister of Montenegro, to get to the front for a group photograph, an incident captured on TV. French President Macron was going to have none of this, so when he met his American counterpart for the first time, the seventy-year-old Trump and the thirty-nine-year-old Macron clasped each other’s hands in a hard, knuckle-whitening grip from which the older man pulled out. The Frenchman later confided to the French press that this was no ‘innocent’ gesture but was meant to convey to the American leader that unlike Markovic he was no pushover. ‘Donald Trump, the Turkish president [Erdogan] or the Russian president [Putin],’ Macron explained, ‘see relationships in terms of power. That doesn’t bother me. I don’t believe in diplomacy by public abuse, but in my bilateral dialogues I won’t let anything pass [or] make small concessions, even symbolic ones.’ It was a warning to strongman leaders everywhere that should any of them get physical in a way that was not nice, they’d get a taste of the same medicine in return.

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The evidence suggests that high labour and manufacturing costs in advanced societies have led to the relocation of jobs and factories abroad, leaving large sections of the working class that had moved to the middle class without employment. This propelled right-wing populism and politics of discontent. It led, for instance, to Brexit—the British decision via a referendum to leave the EU—the election of Trump in the US and the nearly successful electoral campaigns by Marine Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. Fuelling the social discontent was also the unhindered demand-driven movement of skilled and unskilled labour across borders. The resultant influx of foreign workers has led to a watering down of host country cultures and the forced homogenization of societal values and norms. It has flattened national identities, erased territorial distinctions, disturbed local economies, destabilized social orders and run smack into nativist reaction and resistance. People do want to continue receiving the benefits they are accustomed to, the national borders to be protected and national identities to be preserved. This leads to the demand that governments exercise the sovereign imperative to advance their particular economic, political and national security interests rather than some vague universal or corporate good in the guise of free trade. From this has sprung the India First, America First and Japan First kind of thinking.

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India cannot, unfortunately, follow the China model of a centralized command economy run on capitalist lines, which is replicated by a host of ‘small dragon economies’ in Asia. The path it has to follow is the more onerous one of becoming economically efficient. But to make headway will require catching up in areas like ease of doing business. It will also need to make arrangements for a smooth and corruption-free interface with the host government and society, easily accessible pool of skilled and relatively cheap manpower, simple rules, effective laws, fair regulatory mechanisms, strong protection for intellectual property rights, efficient infrastructure, ready availability of land, and other basics such as water and electricity and a conducive investment and labour milieu. This is the evolutionary approach Modi, like his immediate predecessors, has adopted. Evolutionary progress, alas, is slow, and the country’s inability to muster up these attributes fast enough means it cannot rise economically and race with the best. This exacerbates India’s internal contradictions, resulting in growing economic unrest and social turmoil and the consequent falling of its political and diplomatic stock.

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Trump’s America First set of policies has turned the US isolationist with a vengeance. His administration is committed, says a document released by the White House, to ‘a foreign policy focused on American interests and American national security’ in pursuing which, the paper states, ‘we will embrace diplomacy. The world must know... that we are always happy when old enemies become friends and when old friends become allies.’20 This suggests that Trump will try and improve relations with Putin’s Russia despite the US policy establishment’s hesitation on this count, and should any friendly country, such as India, choose to come to America, Trump will demand, as he did of NATO partners, that they contribute their fair share and pay up for such security as provided them by the US military.

Elsewhere, the US has already pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and Trump has warned that unless ‘American workers get a fair deal’ the US will also withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), ‘crackdown’ on nations violating trade accords and fight ‘for fair but tough trade deals [to] bring jobs back to America’s shores, increase wages, and support US manufacturing’. On this issue, Trump has fired the first shots in what could become a fullfledged trade war. He imposed a 10 to 25 per cent tax on imported steel and aluminium. While Canada, Mexico, the EU and Japan were subsequently exempted from these taxes, the same was not true for India, which retaliated with duties on US goods. And China retaliated against the $50 billion worth of tariffs on Chinese technology companies by cutting down on imports of American agricultural commodities, like soya. Defence-wise, the US president says he will ‘not allow other nations to surpass’ the US military capability, and to prove the point he signed a $1.3 trillion budget. Trump is committed to achieving ‘energy independence’ by tapping ‘the estimated $50 trillion’ in shale oil and gas reserves within the country and by ‘reviving America’s coal industry’—the reason for his yanking the US out of the Paris Climate Accord.

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Trump has followed up his excoriation of FTAs and alliances with policies and executive action to upend them. It fits in with the ‘leave us alone’ backwoods Protestant belief of the American evangelical right that majorly supported Trump and ensured his success in the presidential elections. But it doesn’t quite explain how ‘a thrice married, biblically illiterate sexual predator hijacked the religious right’. Writing in the New Republic, Sarah Posner explains that this was because Trump mixed ethno-religious solidarity, attitudinal belligerence and embedded racism in white evangelical circles, especially in the American south, and alt-right revisionist politics to advantageous effect, highlighting the fact that the postmodern societies of the West are just as vulnerable to religious appeals as any country in the developing world. Does it really matter that in one case religious prejudices are used to milk votes and in the other to rouse people for jihad? Both instances reflect the limited reach of international liberal norms and values.

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In the end stage of his first term as prime minister, Modi, the sole fount of all policy ideas in the BJP government, has done nothing very meaningful in meeting the India First metrics. In early May 2017, he defined his foreign policy priorities to an assembly of the country’s ambassadors as follows: increasing India’s economic profile in the newer, untapped markets of the world, enhancing its security in a difficult neighbourhood and building it into a leading power and net security provider. These are unexceptionable goals, not the stuff to vault India into the heaving scrum of international power politics. The impression of Modi’s small-time objectives is backed by the fact that there is no mention anywhere in his many pronouncements of the inherent strengths and resources of the nation and how he means to harness them. More troublingly, there’s no hint, much less a detailed articulation, of a national vision, of the preferred global order and rising India’s place in it, the timeframe in which he expects the country to achieve it and with what effect on the Asian region and the world and, most significantly, utilizing what plan and strategy. Indeed, there has been nothing from Modi by way of a national vision, game plan or strategy. Nor has there been a public mustering of the iron resolve and political will necessary to signal to the people his intentions, just a series of mostly alliterative slogans and, in practice, staying with the foreign and military policies charted by his predecessors, Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh. It doesn’t come close to fleshing out a genuinely ‘new India’, much less an India First attitude and policies.

Consider in this respect what Modi sees as constituting a ‘new India’: A more efficient apparatus of state (better coordination between government agencies, distribution of LED bulbs, etc.), speeded up governmental processes (less time to get passports, income tax refunds), streamlined delivery of social benefits (farmer insurance, free gas connections, rural electrification, bank accounts for the poor), more effective implementation of infrastructure programmes (rail projects, increased electricity generation), and accelerated creation of jobs (extending shop hours). The impression one has of these markers is that of a list of ingredients and tools a car designer may crave without an inkling of what he is supposed to create. The result could be a Rolls-Royce or a Tata Nano. If all Modi’s vision for the country is a bagful of relatively small achievements, meagre economic accomplishments and unspecified but timid objectives in the external realm dressed up in acronyms (such as SAGAR—Security and Growth for All in the Region), his ‘new India’ is much like the old India he inherited. It’s the ‘same old, same old’ with Modi’s ministrations, producing only marginal changes because he is relying on the existing rickety government system and the old way of doing things to deliver new, different and dazzling outcomes. So, India continues to lag way behind the South East Asian states to go no farther out than that and, where China is concerned, remains overmatched.

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Of the six major alpha male leaders considered here, three are impulsive: Trump, Erdogan and Modi. Xi and Putin are system-trained apparatchiks focused on achieving what they set out to accomplish with careful preparation and long-term plans. And Abe teeters between abrasively taking on adversaries such as China and North Korea and hesitation owing to the uncertain political and military backing by Washington. Trump is the least predictable, acting on his hunches, which means policies that can change by the hour or the minute as his fancy strikes him, prompted by the next incident, Twitter response or television comment. It makes for potentially mercurial policies that keep international relations permanently on the boil. Trump can afford such recklessness because of the very large margin of error afforded the US President by America’s wealth, trading heft and military prowess, making him virtually mistake-proof. Hence, Trump’s lies and misstatements that would have cost the leaders of lesser states dear are passed off with a shrug.

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Modi is impetuous with his decisions-as-announcements. Whether or not these are designed to surprise and cause consternation all round, the fact is they have done just that. His impromptu decision when visiting Paris in April 2015 to acquire thirty-six Rafale combat aircraft from French firm Dassault Aviation caught the host President, Francois Hollande, off guard as much as it did the Indian foreign secretary accompanying him. While France and the Indian Air Force (IAF) were elated, the numbers didn’t add up and the deal made no economic sense. It was too small a buy of an inordinately expensive weapons platform to be justified in terms of augmenting the fighting strength of the country’s air arm and too costly to dismiss as a mistake.

The medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) sweepstakes won by Rafale was for 126 aircraft with transfer of technology (TOT) with the 2012 price tag of $12.4 billion. The Modi announcement means India will pay only marginally less: `63,000 crore or $9.88 billion (at the 9 August 2017 rate of `63.77 to the US dollar) without TOT and lifetime spares and servicing support for less than a third as many aircraft bought off the shelf with minimal first and second line sets of spares and the barest minimum stock of weapons such as the Meteor air-to-air missile. The then defence minister Manohar Parrikar made it plain that this was a one-off purchase to meet the ‘urgent requirement’ and not the proverbial wedge as the IAF had hoped it would be to ease 200 more of this make of fighter plane into its fleet. The demonetization initiated on 8 November 2016 was another such move sprung on the nation which unhinged the country to a far greater extent. It was an action the governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had no prior notice of, and was taken despite expert advice against it, including from the Vivekananda International Foundation (VIF), the think tank that supplied Modi with his NSA, Ajit Doval, and other staffers in the PMO. Supposed to unearth black money and end corruption, which it did to some extent, this measure also slowed down the economy, hurting cash transactions, which account for 87 per cent of commerce at all levels.

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Other than a few lapses, such as his repeated mention during the 2014 general election campaign of the ‘pink economy’, referring to the nearly $4 billion bovine meat exports industry, which, owing to the cultural aversion of Hindus, is dominated by and employs millions of Muslims, Modi has been nowhere as divisive in his polemic as Trump. The marked Hindutva undertow, if not in his personal politics, then in that of the Hindu fringe and the RSS the BJP is associated with, is problematical, however. Comprising some 14 per cent of the Indian population of almost 1.3 billion, Indian Muslims constitute in theory a large enough electoral mass for the BJP to be mindful of it. But with the polarizing of society, the ruling party finds it can do without Muslim support and, therefore, that it need not be overly sensitive to minority sentiments. But Modi has cleverly used a ‘Muslim issue’ such as ‘triple talaq’ to create a gender rift in the Muslim community. This together with social welfare schemes such as the Ujjwala programme that has fairly and equitably distributed free cooking gas canisters among the poor has created goodwill for Modi and the BJP among Muslim women, thus splitting to a degree the Muslim vote in elections.

Xi, heading a country that is population-wise 92 per cent Han, would, on paper, appear to have no reason to worry about a minority problem. Except among minorities, the Tibetans in Tibet and the Muslim Uyghurs of Xinjiang inhabiting the vast tracts of land that make up much of the landmass of China are seriously disaffected and agitating for freedom for a long time. They are dealt with by Xi in the manner Chinese rulers have historically done, a solution endorsed by Sun Yat-sen, the founding president of the Chinese Republic in 1911. This involves physically rubbing out the minorities with a programme of Han-ization or forcible assimilation. In his famous ‘San Min Chu I’ lectures of the 1920s, Sun Yat-sen justified violence against minorities, telescoping in the bargain the issues of territory, ethnic diversity, state building and cultural homogenization, saying, ‘In simple terms the race or nationality has developed through natural forces, while the State has developed through force of arms.’71 Curiously, it is a justification that converges in part with the RSS view of Hindus and Indian Muslims being of the same racial and ethnic stock and nationality. Whence in the Indian context it follows that the need for forced or even voluntary Hinduization or, to use Hindutva jargon, ‘ghar wapsi’ (homecoming), is obviated at least in theory, making for a society at peace with itself.

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Trump, because he was elected President without the Republican Party’s help, owes nothing to precedents set by the previous Republican Party, leave alone the Democratic Party presidents of the United States. As a true outsider, he has no track record as an elected official, never having been previously elected to any office, and feels completely free to follow his whims and fancies and, is therefore, the most unpredictable of the lot. Because he heads a country that is very wealthy and militarily the most powerful, the vocabulary-challenged Trump is also the most dangerous, as his inexperience with international diplomacy and use of force can lead to a crisis where none exists or escalating them. Such as the one he needlessly precipitated in early August 2017 by warning North Korea of ‘fire and fury’—a synonym for nuclear weapons use, presumably, if it again threatened the US. It prompted the practised provocateur in President Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang to do just that, calling Trump names and his bluff by issuing a threat of nuclear destruction of Guam, the US island territory in the mid-Pacific and major American military base. It left Washington red-faced and Trump’s aides scrambling for face-saving excuses.

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In the context of the prophecy by Samuel Huntington of civilizational clashes in the future, what will the big power scene look like? The great fault line in global society today is the division between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds exacerbated by Islamist terrorism. While there is ‘secular’ terrorism, if you will, of liberation wars and separatist/secessionist movements, it is the diehard Islamist variety represented by the Al-Qaeda organization that in the years since its founding by Osama bin Laden in 1988 has spawned many offshoots. The most barbaric and ruthless among these is the Islamic State group in Iraq and parts of Syria that before its decimation caused huge concern. The fact that most of the major countries, including the US, Russia, China and even India have for reasons of realpolitik often materially helped and assisted terrorist organizations has complicated international relations. There’s no country that is, in this respect, clean. Even so, Al- Qaeda and Islamic State propagating worldwide the harsh fundamentalist values of Wahhabi desert Islam, financed by the so-called Arab ‘Islamic charities’ in Saudi Arabia and the wealthy Gulf states, are the locus genesis of extremist Islam and terrorism but are not held to account owing to the crosscutting big power stakes in their petroleum sector.

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In India, which has a Muslim population that will by 2050 be the largest of any country in the world, the consequences of Islamic radicalization could be devastating. Muslim extremism in Pakistan and Bangladesh and the activity in Kashmir of jihadi terrorist groups patronized by Islamabad are spurring parallel Hindu extremist outlier outfits in India, which are encouraged by the apparent laxity of the Modi regime in dealing with them, and thus widening the Hindu–Muslim rift in society. In the Philippines, relations have soured between the Christians and Muslims of Mindanao, and in southern Thailand between Buddhists and Muslims. Islam and Muslims have thus emerged the world over as the bugbear of most countries and regional and global powers. In Huntingtonian terms, the potential for large-scale clashes between militant Islam on the one hand and all the other major religions—Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, etc.—on the other, is real. Further, with terrorism being the asymmetric means of choice of the weaker Muslim states to deploy against stronger states, it is easy to see why it is the preferred mode of the minority to make a splash, and also why anything lslamic is universally in bad odour.

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The differing national and vested interests mean that countries will join to fight extremist Islam and jihadi terrorism if and when it suits them and will individually prosecute military actions to wipe out this menace within their own bailiwicks without fear of international moral sanction. This is why India has drawn so little international criticism for its tough methods to subdue the militancy in Jammu and Kashmir of the Hizbul Mujahideen with mostly Srinagar Valley recruits, and the Pakistan based LeT and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM). It has occasioned consternation and even frustration in the Pakistan policy establishment, which banks on the international hullabaloo against Indian humanitarian outrages to further its case for plebiscite. But the time for a referendum is long gone as Pakistan did not meet the pre-condition of vacating its police and military presence from the part of Jammu and Kashmir it occupied as mandated by UN Security Council Resolution Number 47. Seventy years later, it is unrealistic to expect the situation in that erstwhile princely state can be returned to that old start point.

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CHAPTER 2: IMPACT OF MODI’S PERSONA ON GOVERNMENT

Year 2014: The popular discontent with the Congress party and its corruption-ridden decade-long government, combined with the socially potent ideology of change and the symbolism of a backward-caste person as the agent of it, were factors that afforded Modi near-absolute sanction to radically restructure the system of governance and take an axe to the deadwood that is the administrative apparatus of the Indian state. He had led the people to believe that this was his priority given another of his oftrepeated slogans: ‘maximum governance, minimum government’. Other than Jawaharlal Nehru in the first years of the republic, no prime minister had entered office riding such a wave of public anticipation and vested with so comprehensive a popular mandate to take on the establishment and entrenched interests, roll out drastic reforms, and do whatever was necessary to fast-forward the country into the 21st century and prosperity. Modi was in a position to realize a revolution and overhaul the government to make it a lean and efficient instrument to implement effective policies. He squandered that opportunity by relying on the very same hidebound bureaucracy that has been the main barrier to progress all along. He fiddled with some administrative procedures but has left much of the decrepit, dysfunctional and corrupt machinery of state he inherited intact. This notwithstanding nearly seven decades of evidence showing that a government run on colonial-era conventions, regulations, norms and ‘rules of business’ is inherently incapable of good governance in the digital age and verily an unbearable burden.

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Inside of seven years, Modi graduated from menial work in the local RSS office to the covert task of resisting the Indira Gandhi–era Emergency — pamphleteering, arranging the distribution of anti-Emergency literature, setting up safe houses for resistors, adopting disguises (activity that instilled in him deep dislike of the Congress)—to appointment in 1978 as the Sangh organizer for the Surat–Vadodara region. A year later, he was transferred to the Delhi office of the RSS, returning some five years later to Gujarat on attachment to the BJP. As poll manager, he ensured that the party handily won the 1985 Ahmedabad municipal elections. With L.K. Advani, former deputy prime minister in the first BJP government at the centre, taking over as party president, Modi was shifted to the party’s national election committee. He successfully organized Advani’s 1990 Rath Yatra and, a couple of years later, the new party president Murli Manohar Joshi’s Ekta Yatra, creating in the process powerful mentors and racking up valuable IOUs up and down the party chain.

His rise thereafter was swifter still. Modi’s habit of mastering organizational details, working the levers of power and achieving results confirmed his reputation as a go-getter in the RSS and later the BJP, resulting in his being tasked with progressively bigger jobs. Persuaded by Advani to manage the poll campaign in the 1995 state elections, Modi’s electoral strategy won Gujarat for the BJP, which success was repeated in the 2000 elections. In 2001, when failing health necessitated the removal of Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel, the BJP prime minister Vajpayee and Advani offered Modi the deputy chief minister’s job which, as the story goes, he declined, saying he was ‘going to be fully responsible for Gujarat or not at all’, whereupon he was installed in Patel’s place as chief minister. Modi by then had taken care to eliminate his main rival in the party, Shankersinh Vaghela, forcing him out of the BJP, eventuating in the latter’s defection to the Congress. It showed a politician with ruthless instincts, strategizing ability and foresight, and a knack for engineering situations that advanced his personal aims and ambition, illustrating the fact that a mix of talent, keen political antennae, drive, luck and systemic factors usually spells success in politics.

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James David Barber, a political scientist at Duke University, created a stir in the early 1970s with his book on ‘presidential character’. Based on his research he categorized US presidents into one of four phenotypes that he had conceived: active-positive, passive-positive, active-negative and passive-negative. According to Barber, those falling into the active-positive bracket (Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter) are distinguished by their optimism, readiness to act, and appreciation of the high post they hold; the passive-positives (Ronald Reagan, William Taft, Warren Harding) suffer from low self-esteem compensated by attempts to please everybody and are shallowly optimistic; the active-negative persons (Richard Nixon, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover) are aggressive, carry out their tasks joylessly, are rigid in their thoughts and in functioning, and view power as means of self-realization; and the passive-negatives (Dwight D. Eisenhower, Calvin Coolidge) try to avoid power but have a strong sense of duty, low self-esteem made up by public service, and aversion to political give-and-take. Transposed to the Indian scene, these Barber phenotypes can be easily matched with Indian prime ministers. Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi fit the active-positive mould; Lal Bahadur Shastri, Vajpayee and P.V. Narasimha Rao are passive-positives; Morarji Desai, Charan Singh and V.P. Singh fit the active-negative category; and Manmohan Singh falls in the passive-negative slot. Gulzari Lal Nanda, Chandrashekhar, I.K. Gujral and H.D. Deve Gowda were prime ministers for too short a time to matter.

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The late James MacGregor Burns, a Harvard University political scientist, in his 1978 tract had defined ‘Leadership’ as ‘power governed by principle, directed toward raising people to their highest levels of personal motive and social morality’. It is different from ‘power’, he argued, in that ‘Power manipulates people as they are; leadership as they could be. Power manages; leadership mobilizes. Power impacts, leadership engages. Power tends to corrupt, leadership to create.’ He elaborated further, saying leadership is the ability ‘to engage followers, not merely to activate them, to commingle needs and aspirations and goals in common enterprise, and in the process to make better citizens of both leaders and followers’. Burns then distilled these aspects of leadership and the quest for power into two separate streams: ‘transformational leadership’ and ‘transactional leadership’. Transformational leaders, Burns contends, are agents of change who help their followers to better themselves. However, ‘Truly great and creative leaders do something more,’ he wrote. ‘They arouse people’s hopes and aspirations and expectations, convert social needs into political demands, and rise to higher levels of leadership as they respond to those demands.’ Transactional leaders, on the other hand, often resort to ‘a short-term approach’ using ‘negotiations and compromise’, because achieving goals matters more to them.

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‘The Dera offered free education to its members [the bulk of them lower-caste Sikhs] and their children and free food for the hungry. It kept the faithful off drugs, and provided employment in its enterprises, offering not only a livelihood, but also a sense of meaning and purpose,’ explained Shashi Tharoor, the erudite Congress party member of Parliament. ‘[W]here government and civil society failed, an apparent charlatan succeeded.’ It is these fundamental deficiencies of the Indian state that Modi promised to correct, but well into his term, the system, by and large, remains as it was, principally because of the methods he has adopted.

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American psychiatrist David Rosen lists six types: narcissist, obsessive-compulsive, Machiavellian, authoritarian, paranoid and totalitarian. All politicians are some combination of these types. According to Rosen, narcissists are charismatic, ‘attention-seeking... extremely convincing liars and are the ultimate users [of people]—demanding loyalty from others they seldom give in return, and don’t always make the best decisions but... [they] generally make the best leaders.’ Modi seems naturally to slip into this category. A person who wears an expensive coat with his name weaved in gold thread into the pinstripes, as the prime minister did during his one-on-one meeting with the more modestly clad US President Barack Obama during the latter’s trip to Delhi as chief guest at the 2015 Republic Day celebrations, is, arguably, not someone who values humility. But there’s a story to Modi’s sartorial fastidiousness related to an early life of deprivation. The shortsleeved ‘Modi kurta’ that has become a fashion statement was originally ‘designed’ by him by simply lopping off the sleeves at the elbow of a kurta he possessed to make it easier to wear, wash and carry in his bag during his wide-ranging travels all over the country in early adult life.
The prime minister no doubt believes in the adage of clothes making a man, and has done so from his childhood days when straitened family circumstances limited him to a single set of clothes, despite which he took care at all times to wear clean, look clean. It is an attribute manifested in his quick-change artistry in later life—the frequent change of stylishly cut clothes at home as well as during his frequent trips abroad. Narcissists attract a loyal following, but loyalty in politics may sometimes be a liability. As a loner and doer, Modi has marched to his own drumbeat, with his eye always on the political main chance. He has gathered followers by the millions but also won the admiration of his seniors for his work ethic.

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Psychologists consider narcissism a personality disorder, which the Mayo Clinic, a highly regarded research hospital in the US, perceives as a ‘mental [condition] in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others’. But many caution that there’s a very thin line separating a certifiable narcissist from someone with, as American neurosurgeon Bobby Azarian put it, ‘a healthy amount of confidence and a burning desire to achieve great goals’. With Trump firmly in mind, Azarian said, ‘Beneath the surface layer of overwhelming arrogance lies a delicate self-esteem that is easily injured’ and presciently wondered if ‘World War III’ will follow if Trump, ‘a loose cannon’, confronted the ‘notoriously Anti-American dictators’ such as Kim Jong-un who won’t ‘kiss his ass’ as [Trump] expects everyone to. A delicate self-esteem may be Modi’s problem as well considering how he doesn’t brook criticism nor tolerate dissent. Obsessive-compulsives are identified by Rosen as ‘hardworking, conscientious, and ethical personalities driven by a need for accuracy... [whose] professional capabilities outshine their personalities... [whose] deliberative decision-making and love of complexity makes them extraordinarily good at policymaking, but terrible at leading—particularly in crises when quick decisions have to be made with limited and often ambiguous information’, and who avoid actions that rock the boat. Modi is hardworking, has an abstemious lifestyle bereft of frivolous pastimes and is demanding as a boss. These are attributes he apparently cultivated in his youth under the guidance of the local RSS head, Laxmanrao Inamdar—‘Vakil Sahab’—a father figure and early RSS mentor. 
Unbidden, Modi would go off after school to help his father in his tea stall at the Vadnagar railway station, and then repair to the local RSS shakha, to which he was drawn when still in his adolescence to help out with petty tasks. It showed his appetite for toil. And Modi’s conscientiousness was apparent when, as a youngster he suggested to his teachers to their great annoyance ways of improving their teaching methods and showed his mother better ways of doing chores at home. ‘Narendra’s enthusiasm for changing and improving things, his need to align the world to the way he saw things,’ writes a biographer, ‘gives additional weight to the idea that [he felt constricted and] wanted more than Vadnagar could offer.’

***

Machiavellians, Rosen suggests, are ‘master manipulators [who] focus on the game more than the outcomes... cool and calculating, [they] are not... burdened by the ethical qualms... Winning is everything [to them], the rest is negotiable.’ All successful politicians are Machiavellians to a lesser or greater degree. Manipulating people without being overly burdened by ethical concerns are, in a sense, the requirements of the job, these being routine attributes of the trade to ensure survival and success. Certainly what is plain from the twists and turns in Modi’s personal life and political career is that there is a Machiavelli, or Chanakya if you will, in him. The steadiness of intent, the single-minded focus on realizing goals and the manner in which he has negotiated the shoals and currents of Indian politics is an indication of a ‘political man’ at work. There’s more to this than is perceptible. Should Modi succeed in replicating on a national scale the success of his economic policies in Gujarat, for example, he will end up doing more for India’s democracy in terms of strengthening it than most of his predecessors. So his success matters. That he did it all his own way in Gandhinagar and is trying to repeat it in Delhi is something to be marvelled at. Except Modi has not quite garnered the success on the national stage as prime minister that he did as Gujarat chief minister.

***

In an interview to the New York Times, he had this exchange: When asked what he had done for Muslims, Modi replied, ‘Nothing.’ ‘So you admit it?’ the reporter said. Modi then suggested the reporter ask him what he had ‘done for Hindus’. ‘What have you done for Hindus?’ the reporter demanded obediently. ‘Nothing,’ Modi said. ‘Everything I have done has been for Gujaratis.’ On the national stage, he can likewise claim that his policies have not benefited any specific section of the Indian society, but all Indians. He elaborated his ‘no appeasement’ view thus: ‘If one of your hands is perfect but the other weak then you cannot be considered healthy. There can be no discrimination. But this does not mean that there is any advantage in appeasement. The path of appeasement is damaging the nation and it has become a part of the politics of vote banks. I want to... put an end to the politics of vote banks.’

***

Winning is everything in politics and so it is for Modi as well—the reason, perhaps, why he thinks that there is no political premium in being an ideologue of any kind. ‘People often confuse ideology with programmes. The programme is not ideology, and ideology is not programme,’ he said, and added, ‘Programmes are made at particular moments depending on the situation prevailing at that time.’ So does that mean he has no ideology whatsoever? It turns out that if he has one, it is of the secular variety. ‘Our ideology,’ Modi averred, ‘is simple—India First. Rest are all projects, programmes.’

***

The Authoritarians, according to Rosen, are ‘quintessentially hierarchical, sycophantic towards superiors, competitive toward peers, and domineering toward subordinates. They value toughness, believe might makes right and have contempt for mercy. They also tend to be conservative, sexually prudish, rule-oriented and prejudiced—projecting their own flaws and insecurities on to low status groups.’ The next category, the Paranoids, are ‘Secretive and suspicious’, believe in conspiracies, ‘harbor doubts about the loyalty of even close confidants’, and hold grudges. The paranoia, Rosen says, is ‘compensation for deep feelings of inferiority, often mixed with anger and resentment.’ And, finally, there is the Totalitarian type; they ‘demand absolute obedience from underlings, believe in their own infallibility and wield power through a combination of awe, terror and the gullibility of their supporters’, foster ‘the cult of personality’ and reject ‘facts that contradict goals and fanaticism’. Modi’s public life has not revealed any signs of paranoia in him, though some like the sociologist Ashis Nandy contend he is a ‘fascist’ and has ‘clear paranoid and obsessive’ traits. Fascist is a strong word, but there is no doubt about the authoritarian streaks in his personality. 

***

‘Conservatives tend to be higher in a personality trait called orderliness and lower in openness,’ writes a researcher in psychology from the University of Toronto, almost as if he were describing Modi. ‘This means that they’re more concerned about a sense of order and tradition, expressing a deep psychological motive to preserve the current social structure.’64 It explains why Modi as prime minister is so into preserving the extant system of government, into making it work and against dismantling it or even radically changing it, let alone transforming it. As he rose in the RSS and saw how seniority was respected in the organization, and the higher-ups in the hierarchy given deference with their views considered the last word on the subject, Modi too expected that as he ascended his view would be deferred to by all. As chief minister in Gujarat and now prime minister, he has arranged the already hierarchical decision-making and administrative structure into the still steeper top-down system that he was familiar with from his time in the RSS, where only the top person gives orders and everybody else buckles down to implementing them in earnest. Except, first in Gandhinagar and then in Delhi, Modi went a step further and set himself up as an overarching authority figure, and not only in government. Gordhan Zadafia, a former minister in the Gujarat government, said of Modi that he ‘thinks of himself as above the organization whether it is Parivar or the BJP—he has a very autocratic style of functioning’.

***

The esteem shown by Modi to Western, usually white, leaders—Obama was the exception—stands out in contrast to how he carries himself with Third World leaders, especially from Africa, whom he meets but not with his trademark hugs. This may have something to do with that old but resilient Hindu affliction of social differentiation by skin colour, varna, that the RSS has not disavowed and Modi may be unconsciously manifesting. In the Hindu social universe, the lighter-skinned people are at the top and the darker-skinned people at the bottom. Necessarily, in this social schemata, the persons at the top have power and exercise it. The colour consciousness in Indian society is something to marvel at—it manifests everywhere in India, from ‘whitening creams’ to the demand for fair-skinned brides to the awful discrimination faced by African students in Indian universities. The ramifications of this, albeit indirect, varna-effected diplomacy are serious, for instance, with regard to Indian policies vis-à-vis African countries, where diplomatic posts are vacant because few in the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) want to serve there.

***

Lacking serious formal education, he has made the most, by his own account, of his ‘god-given’ intellectual gifts to gauge, study and understand the world around him. From this it may be deduced that he is a keen observer of human nature, quick on the uptake and a fast and motivated learner, soaking up snippets of information, insights and factoids from where he can find them and from his experiences peregrinating in India and abroad. These are then stored in his memory bank. All this material apparently simmers and stews in his head before congealing into slogans and policy parameters. Former prime ministers Nehru and Narasimha Rao, for example, patronized talented people because they were secure enough in their own intellects and abilities. Modi is known neither to seek the advice of domain specialists or even his cabinet colleagues, nor does he consult senior officials in government before approving policies. In the foreign policy area, therefore, the MEA is ‘sidelined’. A senior IFS officer backing this view said a bit acerbically, ‘How many people do you need to make policy? Two? Three? And that’s done by the prime minister.’ And so what work remains for the MEA to do is that of ‘glorified peons’.

***

Everyone is aware that Modi has ‘strong’ personal views and a reputation fostered during his career of being rebellious and a leader willing to brave the odds. Very little of this supposed risk-taking proclivity of the prime minister is evident, however, in the external realm. (More on this in the next two chapters.) Modi is a self-contained leader in that he works inside his own bubble and is so certain about his views and what he wants to do with them, it is natural for him to abhor too great a diversity of views within his setup. It has resulted in the higher reaches of the ruling party, the PMO, the cabinet and the government being peopled by ‘yes-men’. Psychologists call this ‘the doppelganger effect’ of political leaders tending to surround themselves with people who think and act like them.

***

The Hindu fringe RSS has belief in the ‘crony spiritualism’ of the BJP regime that has convinced the mostly lumpen-populated outlier groups that they have the licence violently to enforce restrictive norms and behaviour in the culturally pluralistic Indian society. There’s a still more regressive side to the over-the-top glorification of Hinduism and everything Hindu that tends towards absurdity. Prime Minister Modi has repeatedly indulged in it. A stunned audience of doctors and medical researchers at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in October 2014 were told by him that ancient India was advanced in many branches of science including genetics and plastic surgery and as proof offered the elephant-headed Hindu god, Ganesha. ‘We worship Lord Ganesha,’ he said. ‘There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.’ He then mentioned the great Kaurava warrior Karna who is described in the Mahabharata as being born outside his mother’s womb. This episode was adduced by Modi as evidence of prehistoric India’s competence in genetics. Such forays by Modi into India’s mythical scientific achievements are not new. As Gujarat chief minister he wrote a foreword to a book that claimed that ancient India featured radar-equipped aeroplanes and stem cell research. 

The fusing of mythology with science has time and again got scientists’ goat. The 2009 Nobel Prize winner, the University of Cambridge biochemist, Venkataraman Ramakrishnan, for example, dismissed the 103rd Indian Science Congress in 2016 as a ‘circus’ and vowed never to attend another one after hearing Lord Shiva being extolled as a great environmentalist, and having the audience’s senses assaulted by the ceaseless blowing of a conch shell by someone who claimed its curative powers. But what does this say about Modi that he actually believes such nonsense is science? It has exposed him to ridicule. More such incidents and what international credibility he has mustered will begin to erode to his detriment and the country’s. He may end up as exotica, like Prime Minister Morarji Desai who is remembered, if at all, in the West for drinking his own liquid waste as part of ‘auto-urine therapy’.

***

Political capital, psychologists researching leadership claim, is an aggregate of three sets of resources: skills, relations and reputation. Skills can be ‘hard’—transactional expertise in cutting political deals, transmitting his views to the people and tackling the power centres and vested interests—or they can be ‘soft’: providing a compelling vision or inspiration to the people. Here the leadership style assumes importance. One style of leadership is repressive, the other more successful style is associated with bargaining and accommodation. In Modi’s case, he switched from the latter style used during his years when he was learning the political ropes and rising in the RSS and BJP hierarchies to the former, when having attained a high position, he tended to use fear in his method of governance, as many even in his own party allege. 

‘Relations’ refers to a politician’s ability to gather and grow a following among the masses and the personal connection he is able to establish with them. Hard work may help a politician climb the greasy pole but it is his ability to sway voters that keeps him at the top.

‘Reputation’ is a factor that is a politician’s biggest vulnerability. And the source of his credibility, whence the need to carefully nurse and protect it; Modi has kept it unsullied, eliminating the usual source of corruption—family, by having no truck with his mother, wife or brothers, all of whom continue to lead their normal, smalltown, lower-middle class lives. Modi obviously scores high on all these counts.

***

CHAPTER 3: CREEPER-VINE FOREIGN POLICY

‘After decades of American internationalism,’ said former foreign secretary Subrahmanyam Jaishankar at the 2017 Raisina Dialogue, ‘we are finally face to face with its nationalism. Now it is true that Russia and Europe too became less internationalist in their outlook. Emerging powers, including regional ones, have shown little inclinations in that direction. India actually is an exception. So, is nationalism the new normal and can India make a difference—by being different?’ This would suggest that Modi’s foreign policy is prepared to swim against the international current of nationalism with the big fish—the US, Russia and China—in the van. It is a tack that does not hold out much hope, considering Delhi mismanaged the country’s affairs in terms of setting India on the course to great power when the milieu was helpful. With the conditions turning less conducive, its chances of getting things right are negligible, unless Modi is happy to see India as a second-rate power in thrall to the US, Russia, China or some other passing big power.

There is a certain poignancy to Jaishankar’s question, however, because, post-Nehru, India has been the perennial latecomer and laggard in almost every sector because its government, elected rulers, policy establishment and military have proved especially inept in trend-spotting. Always late and damagingly low and slow on the learning curve, progress has inevitably been fitful in every field. So the Modi government is embarking on economic interlinks with the US and the world just when the era of geoeconomics is ending. Worse, geopolitics-wise, it is shifting from ‘strategic autonomy’ and relying mainly on Russia for critical assistance in the strategic military field to wrapping itself around the US for security, technology and political support. It is doing so at a time when America, unwilling any longer to exhaust its resources—already stretched by unending wars in distant locales—is, under Trump, calling it a day. Moreover, the axiom attending on Washington’s unwillingness to any longer permit free-riding by its friends means that India will have to continue paying the price demanded by Trump for such security and security-related measures that Delhi hopes to avail of, just as US NATO allies and Japan and South Korea are asked to do.

***

India’s institutional habit of respecting the letter and, even more, the spirit, of agreements it signs with foreign countries is something that no great power or would-be great power ever does. Indeed, bilateral and international agreements are respected by big powers only to the extent it suits their national interest. Thus, the US, the pillar of the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, conveniently ignored it and was purposely blind to Beijing’s missile-arming Pakistan in the late 1970s because it needed Pakistan as the CIA base to stage Afghan Mujahideen actions against the Soviet military in Afghanistan. And China pays lip service to UNCLOS but flouts its provisions in the South China Sea. What the Indian government seems not to appreciate is that international agreements are to be followed only if it serves its purposes and should not be seen as a constraint on any policy or action in support of its sovereign national interest. The trouble is that Indian leaders are seduced by Western praise for India’s ‘responsible state’ behaviour and show of restraint when these same traits are not exhibited by the powers themselves. It is a policy liability that has convinced Washington that it can thus prevail on Delhi to not do anything it doesn’t want India to do.

***

Moreover, with the certainty of what Pyongyang perfects with Chinese technical and material help today being in Islamabad’s hands tomorrow, the Pakistani strategic arsenal too will inevitably progress fast towards thermonuclearization even as the Indian government twiddles its thumbs with its ‘do-nothing nuclear policy’. India, armed with just the puny 20 kiloton fission device—its only reliable, tested, and proven weapon—will be the ‘odd’ country out in the triangular India-China- Pakistan deterrence game. An unscrupulous China, having previously armed Pakistan with nuclear missiles, will use the North Korean channel to upgrade the Pakistani deterrent to the fusion level against India, which acts unmindful of the danger heading its way.

***

In an international system that involves sovereign states competing for power and slivers of advantage, the natural tendency in case any one country becomes too powerful and throws its weight about is for the other nations to automatically band together and balance its power and prevent its excesses. If China is that power everybody fears, countries around it are naturally going to gang up to stop it. So that’s a ready solution for neutralizing the would-be Asian hegemon, in which situation no special advantages accrue to India from siding prominently with America—an unreliable, extraterritorial power that can withdraw to its fortress behind the moats of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans whenever it chooses to do so or, in the case of Trump, on his whim, and especially if it stands to lose much in a live-fire confrontation with China. It is an option not available to Asian states that have to deal with the putative hegemon on their land and maritime borders the best they can with the resources they are able singly or jointly to muster.

***

The modernity, material plenty, intellectual wealth, technological advancement and civic order in that country must have dazzled Modi with his impoverished mofussil background. It perhaps did four things: instil in him an abiding love and respect for America and all things American, mould his thinking of technology and free market as possible engines of change, shape his brand of aspirational politics, which won him state elections for over a decade in Gujarat and the 2014 national elections, and awaken in him an appreciation of NRIs as a socioeconomic–cultural bridge between India and the countries they resided in and who could be mobilized as a political–diplomatic tool for India. It meshes, for instance, with the priority his regime has accorded the retention and enlargement of the H1B/L1 visa quota by the US government as a means of winning the vote of the aspiring Indian middle class at home even if, unfortunately, it results in a still bigger Indian ‘brain drain’. Liberal values such as religious diversity and freedom of expression and of the press—also supposedly American attributes—did not, however, leave as big an impress on Modi, resulting in his ‘good friend Barack’ lecturing him, in light of the murders of Muslims on the cow issue, on the virtues of religious tolerance and the need to be nice to Indian Muslims.

***

Modi is a self-taught, self-made man and is cocky about the views he holds, confident of the conclusions he has reached, presumably, after cogitating mostly with himself and on the basis that he has seen the world, knows how it works and is confirmed by whatever selective material is put up by his staff in the PMO for his perusal. He is also convinced that he needs no ‘experts’ to tutor him on foreign policy or anything else for that matter. Nor is he afraid to make his personal likes and dislikes (such as his pro-US, anti-Pakistan bias) and his assessment of his own ability to strike deals with difficult foreign leaders (Xi and Trump, for instance) the basis of his foreign policy. On the evidence of much of his first term, Modi appears, from many angles to be what American psychoanalyst Michael Maccoby calls a ‘true narcissist’. Such a person, he argues, (1) ‘doesn’t listen to anyone else when he believes in doing something’, (2) ‘has a precise vision of how things should be’, (3) has ‘the charisma and drive to convince others to buy into [his] vision or embrace a common purpose’ and (4) ‘communicate[s] a sense of meaning that inspires others to follow [him]’.

***

The other singularly Indian conceit that has harmed the national interest is that India is a ‘responsible’ state that trusts mostly in its soft power to have international impact. This is centrally a part of Modi’s rhetoric and an attribute that meshes with the other qualities that define his government’s approach which, in great power terms, is unambitious, cautious, passive, reactive, defensive and, military-wise, minimalist. Delhi keeps ballyhooing India’s being a ‘responsible’ country as a tremendous national virtue. Predictably, aware of the Indian leaders’ susceptibility to flattery, Washington has firmed up such thinking by heaping praise to ensure Delhi stays ‘responsible’, meaning doesn’t stray from the laid-down line and suddenly do something disruptive that may hurt US interests. Thus, Obama’s Defense Secretary, Ashton Carter, praised India’s ‘responsible’ behaviour because, he said, it hasn’t peddled or transferred its indigenously developed nuclear civilian and military technologies to anyone.

***

Beijing kept away from these self-limiting groups and deigned to join them only after it had masterfully set up the ‘rogue nuclear triad’ with itself at the centre, assisting Pakistan and North Korea to become proud owners of nuclear weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems. It is this habit of the Indian government to casually circumscribe India’s policy freedom and foreclose its options that has hobbled India strategically over the years, gladdened Washington’s heart and reassured Beijing that India is its own worst enemy. The BJP regime (like the predecessor governments) sought these memberships mainly to win the approval of the US and the West and for Modi, perhaps, to bolster his personal cachet in Western capitals. Voluntarily ceding policy ground, not leveraging India’s capabilities, resources and indigenous technologies to secure advantage, and not getting something equally substantive in exchange for giving away so much seems to be an appalling way for the Indian government to conduct business. It is so far distanced from the realpolitik strategies pursued by every other major country that it merits a separate category of politicking—timidpolitik, which is not all that new, considering timidity is an Indian characteristic that foreign powers have historically used to subjugate India.

***

First, based on his reading of international power politics, Modi believes that the US is in decline, China is shaky, and hence that India has a chance to become leader by default if it plays its cards well. This doesn’t explain why, in the event, Modi’s policy is pivoting to the US. Secondly, take his formula for India to gain power, which he calls ‘panchamrit’—a mix of five elements—‘samman’ (dignity and honour), ‘samvaad’ (greater engagement and dialogue), ‘samriddhi’ (shared prosperity), ‘suraksha’ (regional and international security) and ‘sanskriti evam sabhyata’ (cultural and civilizational linkages). One can see why this seems attractive—it alludes to great power coming easily to India’s hand as long as it keeps out of confrontations and trouble with more powerful countries, with ‘suraksha’ also implying that security is not just a sovereign and singular concern of the country but a public good that can be obtained collectively or in concert with the other powers.

***

Variations on Modi’s thinking have been around since P.V. Narasimha Rao’s time. Rao changed the direction of Indian foreign policy by veering gradually away from Russia for two reasons. As the sole superpower standing after the Cold War, he hoped and expected that Washington would put out for a democratic India as it had done for Deng Xiaoping’s communist China and pave the way for its comparable rise as a manufacturing and economic power. It was a policy slant seconded by Vajpayee who, as per Washington’s wishes, disavowed nuclear testing and long-range missiles, and got himself the NSSP. Manmohan Singh followed up by cementing the nuclear deal, even if these understandings have left India stranded with a non-credible strategic arsenal. Modi, on his part, is more fully orientating Indian policy in Washington’s direction. The US government, meanwhile, has been diligent in observing India’s weaknesses and, over the last seven decades, has exploited them, subtly and not so subtly. A prime weakness is a set of Indian conceits that have been turned into foreign policy gold by the US. Among them that India is a naturally pacifist nation uninterested in acquiring power. To the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s offer to make India ‘a great power’, Foreign Minister Natwar Singh airily replied: ‘We are not in the game of becoming a great power. Our job is to eradicate poverty.’ Prime Minister Manmohan Singh put it a little differently: ‘Foreign policies are not just empty struggles on a chessboard . . . Ultimately, foreign policy is the outcome of economic policy.’ Combine such political thinking with Indian diplomats’ abhorrence for nationalism and their love of ‘practical pragmatism’, and foreign governments find Indian interlocuters perfect pliable dupes.

***

In 1998, before ordering the limited nuclear tests, Vajpayee asked the finance ministry to assess the likely effects of economic and other sanctions. Because the ministry bureaucrats were aware that the prime minister was determined on the explosions and did not want to fall afoul of him, they produced a report saying the consequences would be manageable. Had the civil servants sensed a weaker resolve on the part of the leadership, they would likely have played safe and advised against the tests. Indeed, the Vajpayee government stopped further tests that would have obtained certifiable high-yield thermonuclear weapons and instead announced a ‘voluntary [testing] moratorium’ because the same finance ministry officials then turned around and counselled that India would be able to inflict ‘serious costs’ on any sanctions-imposing countries only after the hard currency reserves were built up to the $100 billion mark and India became a trillion-dollar economy.

Twenty years later, India is a trillion-plus-dollar economy and has a foreign exchange hoard of nearly half a trillion dollars but there’s no sign of any guts on Delhi’s part to resume nuclear testing. And finally, how to make sense of the Manmohan Singh regime not reacting at all to the 26/11 Pakistan-sponsored terrorist attack on Mumbai in 2008? It was a virtual replay of the inaction of the BJP government of Vajpayee to the December 2001 terrorist attack on Parliament. The NSA at the time of the 2008 incident, Shivshankar Menon, confesses to have ‘pressed at the time for immediate visible retaliation of some sort’ which, he writes, ‘would have been emotionally satisfying and gone some way toward erasing the shame of the incompetence that India’s police and security agencies displayed’. But on ‘sober reflection and in hindsight’ he writes that the decision to do nothing was correct, reasoning that a retaliatory strike would have (1) ‘obscured’ official Pakistani involvement in the attack, (2) ‘united Pakistan behind the Pakistan Army’ weakening, in the process, the Pakistan People’s Party government of Asif Zardari, (3) ‘limited practical utility’ and no lasting effect, (4) dimmed the prospect of bringing the perpetrators of this terrorist action to justice, and (5) started a war that... [would have] imposed ‘heavy costs and set back the progress of the Indian economy’. The reason none of this is convincing is because it is a permanent justification to neither act preemptively nor react strongly no matter what the provocation. 

***

From the practical foreign policy point of view, however, it is the senior members of the IFS, IAS and armed forces who have always provided both the float and the ballast for the US-friendly outlook and approach of the government. Exposed to the US since 1947, Indian diplomats were the first bridgehead (after the waves of Sikh immigrants to the west coast of North America in the 1920s). By the early 1960s it became fairly routine for Indian diplomats to have their progeny settle down in the US. The former IFS officer and the Congress’s agent provocateur, Mani Shankar Aiyar, who joined the service in 1963, discovered to his surprise that in his batch ‘not a single officer’s child is in India’. Since then the senior officers of the other Indian civil services too have cadged resident US visas for their children. By Aiyar’s estimate, 98 per cent of all officers joint secretary and above in the Government of India and in the MEA are thus compromised. ‘And don’t forget,’ he added, for good measure, ‘the guys in the military and in other areas.’

***

Still another important part of the ecosystem or the trellis for the creeper-vine Indian policy to wind itself around is the Indian presence in US academia which complements a new phenomenon— the Delhi chapters of Washington think tanks established with Indian corporate monies. Old Indian money as well as newly rich IT billionaires alike have in the last two decades endowed numerous multimillion-dollar ‘chairs’ in prestigious universities in America (Narayana Murthy at Harvard, Nandan Nilekani at Yale, Ratan Tata at Cornell, etc.) and in Washington think tanks (Ratan Tata at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) and funded whole buildings (Mukesh Ambani at Wharton, Ratan Tata at the Harvard Business School). These are enormous resources that could have financed the founding of half a dozen world-class academic and research institutions in India. That’s not, however, the priority of these Indian benefactors who’d prefer to pad their reputations in America with their largesse.

***

The Indian bureaucrats and military men who are exposed to America are the Trojan Horse within the government. As far as is known, there has been no official examination of the consequences for the national interest and prospects of an independent Indian foreign policy owing to the personal payoffs in kind to Indian civilian and uniformed officers by the US, and the role of the India-based Washington think tanks in legitimating a pronounced listing of Indian policy towards the US, nor about the role of the Indian corporate sector in rendering Indian policy subservient to American interests through direct and indirect means via these think tanks. It is not that other countries are not active in trying to shape the Indian government’s attitude and policies by similar means—the UK with its British Council, Russia with its Indo-Russian Cultural Centres, France with its Alliance Francaise. Rather, it is to point out that no other country possesses the sort of allure and resources or can offer the kind of inducements that Indians in government, military, universities and media find irresistible. This makes the United States unique in that it is a dangerous friendly state because of this ready ‘Fifth Column’ available to it within the Indian government and society.

The corrective lies with the Indian government. It needs to institutionalize the prohibition against anyone on the public payroll consorting with foreign officials in any way at any time for any reason other than the prescribed one, and in the prescribed manner. Special units of the intelligence services need to be established with the mandate to track and monitor all official and ‘unofficial’ interactions, and then see if children of senior Indian government, intelligence and military officers are beneficiaries of ‘scholarships’ to famous American universities by checking up on the basis of such largesse and to impose serious deterrent punishment—long jail sentences and career-ending penalties for guilty or culpable officers—and real-time monitoring of the activity of susceptible officials and potential targets. All major countries without exception police and punish wrongdoing of this sort.

The Criminal and Enforcement Divisions in the US Department of Justice, for example, mount comprehensive surveillance of US government officers dealing with foreign states to make sure American public servants are on the level and do not do things at the behest of foreign capitals and get remunerated for it in any way. Wiretaps are maintained, as also regular but covert checking of bank accounts, property purchases and any unusual events like expensive holidays, etc. In India, in contrast, there’s virtually no surveillance of this kind, with R&AW officers, including in its counterintelligence wing, being found to have been ‘turned’ while in service and now residing in comfortable retirement in the US. Something has to be done to arrest this trend of Indian government employees being easy pickings for foreign governments and to be mindful of the working of the various foreign state–friendly, policy-influencing think tanks and similar influence-peddling organizations that are active in Delhi and elsewhere in the country.

***

Since the economic reforms and the surfacing of the Indian information technology industry as a high revenue earner for the country and as the site for back office operations for the postmodern economies of the US and western Europe and the growing intake by them of Indian doctors, engineers and financial managers, the entire Indian socioeconomic system underwent a sea change starting in the late 1990s. With the aspirational middle class in the forefront, the US became for large sections of Indian society the glittering city on the hill where ambitious youth would go to seek fame and fortune and, at the very least, a higher standard of living. This was done on the basis of professional degrees earned by them at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management, institutions subsidized by the Indian taxpayer that Nehru had founded in the hope, ironically, of producing the skilled manpower to run the India of tomorrow. Modi, with a different perspective, sees such outward rush of professionals to the West as a good thing because it sets up India as a bountiful supplier of skilled and employable youth which the ageing societies of the West lack. ‘The world has money and industries but no youth to run them,’ said Modi when laying the foundation stone of the Indian Institute of Information Technology in Guwahati. ‘After 2030, India can globally supply manpower for running the industries. That day is not far off.’

***

Trump’s unreceptive attitude in the face of strong lobbying by US business circles to keep the H1B visa system open and repeated pleadings by Modi and his cabinet colleagues about it being the lifeline of the burgeoning Indian technology industry—one of the few bright spots in a generally hohum Indian economy—is proof that Washington is prepared to throw the US’s strategic partners and their interests under the bus to protect its own interests. It is coercing Indian IT companies into doing what Trump wants: invest in the US, create jobs for Americans and sell to the world. This leaves Modi and the Indian government in sackcloth and ashes. 

Delhi should retaliate by playing hardball but of this there’s not the faintest sign, what with the USsupportive policy ecosystem working overtime to convince the Indian government to stay on course and, in effect, play second fiddle to America. The larger point Trump’s inflexibility should drive home to Delhi is the fact that while the revenue gains to the US from so taxing and disadvantaging the Indian IT sector is small, the impact on India is disproportionately large and could hurt Modi’s political prospects. If Modi, the supreme political animal, fails to reverse this trend and is content with India making adjustments as per Washington’s whims, then Trump will be quick to see this as a weakness to cash in on and ratchet up the hard-line and the pressure on other issues to push Modi into making more concessions. This is a foreign policy defeat for Modi.

***

Islamabad realizes that closeness to China and Russia balances US influence in the country and helps it resist excessive American demands to ‘do more’ in Afghanistan. This means that India will have to take care of the danger posed by Pakistan-based terrorist gangs by itself, and that the US government will do nothing other than mouth displeasure and issue empty threats. Trump announced the fact of his withholding $225 million in aid to Pakistan as an anti-terrorism measure to please India, except it was only a slap on the wrist for providing sanctuaries to the Afghan Taliban and in no way targeted the Pakistan-based terrorist mujahideen active in Kashmir. But it did help a gullible Delhi to crow that the punitive American action validated its position.

***

So how does Trump propose to handle China? His NSS significantly says little other than engaging with China and Russia in ‘competitive diplomacy’ and makes fairly innocuous references about China aspiring ‘to project power worldwide’ while conceding that the US seeks ‘to continue to cooperate with China’. As regards the Pakistan bone thrown for the Modi regime to gnaw on, the NSS says that the US ‘will press Pakistan to intensify its counterterrorism efforts’ but—and very plainly—only against the Taliban operating against the US forces in Afghanistan, not the LeT and JeM that are bothering India in Jammu and Kashmir. The NSS, geared exclusively to enhancing American interests, confirms that India will have no respite on issues ranging from military security to trade to technology to H1B visas. It, in effect, highlights the US’s historical record as an unreliable friend and partner. It is for good reason that even a US-friendly diplomat such as Shivshankar Menon was careful to write that Indian and US interests were ‘contiguous’, not convergent. Contiguous is a word, it may be noted, that suggests spatial differentiation and is open to interpretation; the word convergent is not.

***

The US’s financial muscle may be gauged by the fact that America’s wars (in Iraq and Afghanistan) just in the two decades of this century have already cost the US exchequer some $5 trillion, or almost a third of the current GDP of $17 trillion, with no end to the Afghan war and similar expenditure in sight. 

Where India is concerned, Washington does not have to exert itself much at all because, as discussed, it can simply hand out Green Cards, H1B visas and ‘scholarships’ and jobs in US companies to progeny of the nomenklatura in Delhi. It is a nice, clean and easy solution to resolve any of its India-related problems. Thus, even inflexibly strong positions taken by Modi on bilateral issues can suffer because Indian officials susceptible to allurements can implement strong policies weakly. The formal US strategy, however, is one of playing to the Indian establishment’s frailties, or as the former US ambassador who had numerous postings in South Asia, Teresita Schaffer said, of ‘playing to India’s uniqueness’. ‘Uniqueness’ here is seemingly a code-phrase for Delhi’s concern for preserving India’s ‘image’ even at the cost of its sovereignty. Washington has learned that Indian negotiators can be persuaded to concede anything just so long as the ‘image words’ they desire find mention in the agreement under negotiation to, presumably, provide them with political cover, and because ultimately the Indian government has been shown to wilt under sustained pressure.

***

Modi may be convinced that his Gujarati small trader’s commercial instincts will stand him in good stead when tackling Trump, but he will discover soon enough, if he hasn’t already, that he is overmatched because the billionaire US President brings his rich-brat-who-always-has-his-way steamroller mentality to the table. He can, quite literally, trump the Indian prime minister at every turn by combining the enormous resources of the US with his patent whimsicality that can turn the situation from friendly to adversarial in a trice. This is not the stuff most democratic heads of government can handle with aplomb—the reason why West European regimes find themselves all at sea in conducting bilateral and G7 relations with the US. Is Modi better placed? He may call upon the brazenness of a commercial-minded Gujarati in response, but this will fetch him little. Trump approaches allies and partners as a superior with a sense of entitlement and privilege; what he says, he thinks, should go. Would this be acceptable to the Indian prime minister? The fact that Trump played along with Modi in their first meeting in the White House in the summer of 2017 should not lead the prime minister to believe that hugging the US President will translate into anything other than US policies being thrust down his throat, which is what subsequent developments (on the H1B visa, technology transfer, trade, etc.) have proved.

***

The meta-problem for India is this: With Indian governments for a long time now tending to undervalue India’s inherent strengths, strategic options and capabilities and overvalue the US’s (or any other big power’s) potential contribution and role in making India a prosperous/great/major power or, in the phrase used by the NSS, ‘leading global power’—the kind of ‘image words’ that makes the Indian government and media go weak in the knee—India’s creeper-vine policy of clinging to the US to rise may have a bad ending. A creeper vine, after all, has to cling to a pole or a trellis, and can fall down in a heap should this support be removed, in which case, the threat of such removal itself becomes a pressure point and provides the US incomparable political leverage. It is a danger Modi did not contemplate before staying with the policy tilt Vajpayee initiated and which Manmohan Singh consolidated. American influence spreaders in Indian society, seeing the direction in which Modi is headed, are cheering him on, urging him to compromise India’s national interest and bring it in line with US economic interests because, as one of them put it, that’s ‘the key to an enduring and productive bilateral partnership’, which he avers, could fetch India a reprieve on the H1B visa count, as if the H1B visa is the pivot for India’s strategic interests.

***

CHAPTER 4: ADVERSARIAL GEOPOLITICS: BRIS AND MOD QUAD

Modi may not be entirely bereft of foreign policy ideas. It may even be that what Lord Palmerston supposedly said about Napoleon that ‘ideas proliferated in his head like rabbits in a hutch’ applies to Modi. The trouble where the French emperor was concerned, says Kissinger, was that ‘these ideas did not relate to any over-riding concept’. Unfortunately, in Modi’s case as well, there’s no discernible ‘over-riding concept’ knitting his ideas into a comprehensive national vision and strategy that do not stray into vaporous abstractions. As a result, Indian foreign policy appears a mish-mash of concepts laced with helter-skelter foreign visits and attendant activity—denoting the absence of a single, overarching, strategic game plan, which is a debilitating flaw. More serious still is Modi’s near emphasis on the country’s soft power as a means of reaching out to, and making it, in the world. He and the MEA seem unaware that soft power, as Joseph S. Nye Jr, the originator of this concept, has written, because ‘it is not controllable, it cannot be directed with precision—and, indeed, sometimes, it cannot be directed at all’. At best then, it is an unpredictable foreign policy instrument that will not always produce the desired results, and is an unreliable diplomatic instrument in a fundamental way that hard power of the state is not. Whence the US President Teddy Roosevelt’s annoyance with what he called ‘high-sounding principles backed by neither the power nor the will to implement them’, a charge that can be safely directed at Modi’s foreign policy.

If Modi’s time as prime minister is not to be written off as a lot of hot air and fluff, he will have to insert some steel into his foreign policy—less against Pakistan, his government’s favourite whipping boy, than China—and to instil in the MEA and Indian diplomats an appreciation for the hard power of the state and the willingness to call on it to advance the national interest. Diplomacy, howsoever adroit, cannot, as Eliot A. Cohen, George W. Bush’s counsellor in the US State Department, has argued, substitute for ‘real power’ represented by military force. Were Modi to recognize the potential utility of the Indian military, he can see to it that the MEA amalgamates it into a new approach that the thinking behind it is fully ingested by the Foreign Office and the people manning it, and that it becomes the Indian diplomats’ second nature. Alas, in this respect, Modi’s first term has been a waste

***

Beijing has grown its footprint in all of southern Asia at India’s expense. Delhi has been too much the passive onlooker—quiet and obliging, happy to play a minor role assigned it by Beijing as potential ‘loser’ in the Chinese strategic game of Wei Qi that is underway, which Indian foreign policymakers know nothing about, nor have shown interest or competence in playing. The aim in Wei Qi, translated as ‘encirclement game’ (or ‘Go’), is to occupy more and more squares on the board, dominate the geographic expanse, crowd out adversaries and restrict their freedom of physical movement and policy manoeuvre and, while doing this, to also balance ‘the need to expand with the need to build protected clusters’.
‘Go features multiple battles over a wide front rather than a single decisive encounter,’ writes Keith Johnson, summarizing the views of David Lai, who as professor at the US Army War College has tried to familiarize American strategists with this game and its ramifications for tackling China. ‘It emphasizes long-term planning over quick tactical advantage.’ It is the geopolitical Wei Qi setting that India needs to turn inside out. Selective exclusion of rivals and proto-hegemonic powers —the US and China—from coalitions it features in is central to this geopolitical great game. This is the strategic underpinning for the BRIS (Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa) and for the Mod Quad (India, Japan, Australia, South East Asian states). The TPP formalized in February 2016, for instance, was notable for precisely such exclusion—keeping China out of this free trade pact which Trump torpedoed by withdrawing America from it and jeopardizing, in the process, ‘the possibility for a trade pact in the Pacific to exist free of Chinese influence’.

***

To highlight the tendency of the US and China to monopolize the organizations they are part of, let’s first consider BRICS and, because this group has an essentially economic raison d’etre, the BRICS trading patterns. According to the latest figures available, in 2015 the intra-BRICS imports as percentage of the group’s global imports was 6 per cent for China versus 6.8 per cent for India, 10.2 per cent for Russia, 13.9 per cent for South Africa and 22.5 per cent for Brazil; in other words, imports-wise China had the smallest stake. However, in terms of intra-BRICS exports it was predominant with 56.3 per cent (compared to 17.7 per cent for Brazil, 15.5 per cent for Russia, 7.5 per cent for India and 4.5 per cent for South Africa). More generally, China is the number one source of imports for Russia (19.3 per cent), South Africa (18.3 per cent), Brazil (17.9 per cent) and India (15.8 per cent). No other BRIS member makes it as a top ten import partner for any of them. Among BRIS states, moreover, Brazil is the top exporter to China, being the ninth largest, Russia is tenth and India is eleventh.  

If the export and import numbers of each BRIS state are seen as a percentage of global trade, they are even more skewed in favour of China. All of these statistics are topped by the huge BRIS states’ trade imbalances with China. In 2015–16, India’s trade deficit was a whopping $52.7 billion. Brazil and South Africa too have balance of payments deficits. Only Russia, because of its exports of oil and gas, minerals and military hardware and technology, is in a relatively good place vis-à-vis China but finds itself unable to cope with the scale of resources Beijing can bring to bear to gain its strategic ends. The conclusion is not hard to reach that because China so outpaces every other group member as a trading partner Beijing has the upper hand. It uses this to both preserve its top economic status within BRICS and, owing to the uniquely Chinese concept of state capitalism with its complex skein of hidden tariffs and subsidies to its manufacturing sector, prevents other member states in the group from competing with it. It makes ample sense, therefore, for BRIS states to get together on their own and develop a preferential trading regime to build up their individual and collective trade-driven economic power than to continue having China in their midst and help it to become richer and more powerful at their expense.

***

To ponder the US’s credibility as strategic partner, let’s mull over the state of the American military in Asia. In the Indo-Pacific region, the US Indo-Pacific Command controls the US 8th Army in Japan, the Pacific Army in Hawaii, the US Army in Alaska, which can reportedly get its units to any Asian trouble spot inside of eighteen hours, and I Corps out of the American West Coast. These are the US fighting forces on call for contingencies in Asia. Three carrier strike groups with reserve forces constitute the US 7th Fleet based in Yokosuka, Japan, policing the eastern Pacific, and the US 5th, 7th and 11th Air Forces, based respectively in Yokota, Japan, Osan, South Korea and Elmendorf, Alaska, maintain aerial watch. They are not only the lead US elements in the region, but tasked in a crisis with coordinating with the militaries of allies—Japan, Australia, South Korea and the Philippines. This force disposition may look good on paper but owing to the ‘sequestration’ of defence funding during the Obama years there are doubts about whether the US military in Europe and in East Asia can adequately ‘counter’ what a US Congressional Research Service report of June 2017 calls ‘hybrid warfare and gray-zone tactics’ involving intense cyber warfare onslaughts by Russia in Europe or China’s ‘salami-slicing tactics in the East and South China Seas’. It calls into question whether the deployed US forces in these theatres even have ‘appropriate and sufficient’ capabilities for ‘high-end warfare’ considering the continuing ‘constraints on defense funding’ and uncertainty about making ‘tradeoffs’ between ‘balancing capabilities for high end warfare’ and ‘other [US Department of Defense] priorities’.

According to an American legislator and former one-star general, Don Bacon, the US Air Force cannot even conduct electronic warfare against radio and radar in Afghanistan and Iraq or carry out ‘standoff jamming’ to pave the way for attack aircraft against Russia and China, what to speak of more complex warfare. For option-less allies and partners, relying on a thus handicapped US armed presence entails a lot of grumbling, showing of defiance, falling in line with American policy and taking chances. An additional point for Delhi to ponder: of the ten nuclear-powered aircraft carriers of the eleven available at any given time, the US Navy is struggling to farm out these assets between four live theatres: NATO or the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean and the Far East.

***

Notwithstanding its $2.5 trillion economy, India, a typical Third World state not that far removed from Pakistan, looks, in the memorable words of the development economists Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze, ‘more and more like islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa’.

***

There’s a sociocultural issue that could explode the bilateral ties between the India and the US. However liberal the environment in big cities, off-duty American military personnel will socialize and, as happened in Saigon and the larger towns of South Vietnam, and in nearby countries, such as Thailand during the Vietnam War, a whole economy will spring up to service the ‘Yankees’ with women, alcohol and drugs. The RSS will likely lead the campaign against the consequent breakdown of local norms and social values with Indian women fraternizing with American soldiers. Serious law and order problems could be engendered especially if the agreement also puts US military miscreants outside the pale of Indian law. This is a pattern evidenced in all the countries (including NATO states) where America has had military presence that could be replicated here. Delhi would do well to give such aspects careful thought before taking the plunge.

***

When the US, in the aftermath of the North Korean thermonuclear test of 280 kiloton yield on 3 September 2017 flew a strike sortie headed by two US Air Force B-1B long-range bombers over South Korea as a warning to Jong-un, Russia, as it had done in the past, reacted by sending a brace of Tu-95MS nuclear bombers to the Korean peninsula as well to caution Washington against rash action. If Beijing decides to stay out, the fact of Moscow entering the lists on the side of Pyongyang for reasons of realpolitik permanently takes the option of armed coercion off the American table. In that sense, it is a return to the Cold War–type scenario—when one protagonist enters the scene, the other inevitably follows but on the other side, and an impasse follows. With the situation tense, Washington marshalled a bit of psychology. As an antidote to both Beijing and Pyongyang, Trump resurrected the bogeyman from the Second World War days of a militarized ‘warrior nation’— Japan. But a nuclear-weaponized Japan, because it is feared by a China psychologically scarred by the wartime Japanese atrocities (such as the ‘Nanjing massacre’), will also scramble Sino-US relations which may be no bad thing from India’s perspective.

A single test of a thermonuclear-warheaded ICBM was enough for Kim Jong-un to make Trump eat his words about raining ‘fire and fury’ on North Korea and bring him to the negotiating table.

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CHAPTER 5: AFFIRMATIVE INACTION

The psyches of political leaders develop along different lines (as we have seen in the first two chapters). This matters because their likes and dislikes, which have jelled early in life for reasons as diverse as events that had a scarring effect, personal slights and socialization in milieus where social biases and ways of thinking are imbibed, end up shaping the policies of countries. Two wars impacted Modi. He recalled to a biographer that the 1962 war with China was the first time that he had patriotic feelings and how he plied Indian soldiers in trains rushing to the warfront with tea and biscuits at the Vadnagar railway station. The humiliation India suffered in that conflict apparently played on Modi’s mind in terms of the lack of strong leadership which the country desperately needed. In that context, Nehru paled in Modi’s estimation in comparison to Vallabhbhai Patel—the Gujarati leader, chief organizer of the Congress party and a rival of Nehru’s for the prime minister’s post. But Modi’s patriotism, by his own account, took off during the 1965 war with Pakistan when it comingled with the indoctrination of the RSS that he had by then been exposed to. He became ultrapatriotic, the heightened patriotism making him, a biographer noted, voluble about the need to destroy all Pakistanis. While the China war served to emphasize the need for a strong national leadership for Modi, the 1965 war apparently had the effect of solidifying Pakistan as India’s chief adversary. Conveniently, tensions in relations with Pakistan were easy to conflate with the Hindu–Muslim tensions in the country and the subcontinent at large, which was mirrored in the Gujarati society he grew up in where communal frictions are endemic.

The conflict with Pakistan had a more lasting effect, perhaps, also because he was older and the anti-Muslim prejudices inherent in the Sangh’s Hindutva ideology congealed in his mind in a manner his antipathy to China didn’t when he was younger. It may have firmed up a tilt of attitude which says that Indian and Chinese culture and ethos are ultimately flexible and, whatever the differences, India and China can do business with each other but that, for reasons of the rigid, exclusionist Islamic religion and ideology, normal and reasonable transactions with Pakistan are more difficult to obtain. Whence as pointed out in earlier chapters, his unwillingness as Gujarat chief minister and prime minister to treat Muslims as a minority requiring special consideration. And once he became chief minister and conversant with international affairs, Modi may have noticed the similarities between the Indian concepts of ‘unity in diversity’ and ‘cooperative pluralism’ or ‘multi-polar world order’ with the traditional Chinese principle of ‘divergence in harmony’. This apparent resonance in Indian and Chinese values and ways of dealing with the world has, perhaps, led to the Modi regime’s anomalous behaviour.

The BJP government will happily face off with China in Doklam, react to frequent military incidents triggered by the Chinese PLA along the LAC, say nothing about the PLA build-up in Tibet, suffer China’s safe-havening of India’s north-eastern rebels, tolerate its damming and diverting the Brahmaputra river in Tibet that could gradually lay waste the downstream estuarine economies of Assam and Bangladesh, which, according to international law, is casus belli (cause for war), smile through the procedural barriers erected by Beijing to mar India’s progress in international forums, bear the China trade deficit burden, and still engage in interminable border talks and in normal cultural and other exchanges. But where Pakistan is concerned, he demands that as precondition for resuming ‘composite’ talks, Islamabad first swear off terrorism when, by his own public disclosure, Indian agencies have had a hand in the troubles in Balochistan. This doesn’t make sense except in terms of the long-ingrained Indian (and South Asian) historical and cultural (caste-induced?) habit of bowing to the powerful and bullying the weak.

***

The grand aim of a geopolitical design to restore to the subcontinent its strategic unitariness depends on Delhi’s display of ‘strategic generosity’. This may entail impressing the Pakistani Army by unilaterally restructuring the Indian land forces with a diluted armoured component as discussed earlier and pulling back nuclear missiles from the border with Pakistan. Simultaneously, the Pakistani trading and agricultural communities and industry can likewise be enticed with free and open access to the Indian market, allowing Pakistan-sourced and produced goods of any kind, including light manufactures, entry to the vast Indian market. If the Indian economy is big enough, rich enough, to bear the costs of unbalanced trade with China, it can surely absorb the infinitely smaller costs of even one-way free trade not just with Pakistan but with all other South Asian states. The substantive strategic benefits to India will outweigh any economic imposition. As it is, the informal Indian exports to Pakistan of some $13 billion to $14 billion via the ‘switch trade’—goods ostensibly bound for Dubai offloaded from ships off Karachi or smuggled across the Thar desert—dwarfs the formal Indo-Pakistan trade of $3 billion. Good India–Pakistan relations boil down to, the former Pakistani commerce secretary Zafar Mahmood said, ‘dominant’ India showing ‘large-heartedness’ and being ‘more accommodating toward its neighbors’, wrote Zafar Mahmood, former Pakistan commerce secretary. ‘Granting trade concessions to its smaller neighbors would not hurt it economically. It would not only earn goodwill and respect for India in the region, but would also contribute to the economic integration of South Asia.’ This is more possible now, he concludes, with the previously reluctant private sector in Pakistan becoming growingly receptive to economic intercourse with India.

***

Delhi’s success in rendering Pakistan a friend despite a difficult history will impress and reassure other Asian states about India’s bonafides and good faith, and its determination to take on China will, in turn, inspire confidence about India’s leadership and its willingness to be the backstop for their security against a China grown too powerful too fast and being too aggressive to boot to be trusted not to do wrong by them. It is one thing to talk of India’s age-old civilizational links with fellow Asian states, quite another for them to have living proof of India’s comportment and the ease with which it generates goodwill and spreads a sense of well-being while at the same time displaying steel where it matters. These are no bad virtues for India to cultivate in a time of raging uncertainty and unpredictability precipitated worldwide by impulsive Trump and unreliable America and rampaging China.

Except, Modi is considered by many Pakistanis to be the archetypal Hindu extremist. But it is precisely the reason why he is well positioned politically to make a breakthrough in relations with Pakistan if he chooses to do so (and, per chance, share a Nobel Peace Prize in the process?). After all, it was the arch anti-communist US President Richard Nixon who broke through the bamboo curtain to establish path-breaking relations with Mao’s China in 1972. But will Modi do it? Highly unlikely because, unlike Nixon who had a realistic view of the world and its possibilities, Modi seems too dogmatic, too set in his views to seek a basic change in Indian foreign policy that he believes is not required. This is affirmative inaction at its starkest.

***

India’s ongoing role in Afghanistan means that Washington has, in a sense, safely outsourced to India ‘nation-building’ activity, which traditionally was the facesaving rationale of US military interventions abroad and which role Trump has foresworn. As far as Washington is concerned, this division of labour has three benefits. It saves the US money— something Trump is big on; two, it helps Washington refute Islamabad’s charge of India’s anti- Pakistan actions on Afghan soil by pointing to India’s funding and implementing manifestly peaceful and development-oriented programmes. That these fortify the historically close cultural and economic links between the two countries is a bonus. And three, it permits the US to gain from the spillover of goodwill from partnering India to offset the bad vibes generated by US operations, such as encouraging Islamic State to enter Afghanistan via Pakistan, terrorize the Afghan people and wrongly target Afghan villages in Nangarhar province with fuel air explosives (the so-called Massive Ordnance Air Blast, the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in the US inventory). Afghanistan may end up being the graveyard for Trump’s policy as it has been for the empires of yore, but India’s proximity and connections mean that Delhi will always remain a player in Afghanistan.

***

And there are the religio-cultural reasons for India’s close ties to Iran that cannot be victimized by Washington’s policy whims. India’s Shia population is the second largest in the world after Iran and this makes India a player in the Sunni–Shia tussle which Delhi, if it plays its cards right, can utilize to advance the country’s strategic interests. The Indian Shia community and especially the clergy maintains close links with their Iranian counterparts, and are cued into the theological debates and pronouncements emanating from the Iranian religious centre in Qom. It is a live Indo-Iranian link and a direct means by which Iran influences the Indian Shia community, which Tehran has wielded with much discretion and dexterity. A considerable amount of Iranian diplomatic effort is expended in cultivating Indian Shia religious institutions, politicians and intelligentsia, which gets translated into political clout that ruling parties at the centre have always been aware of. It can block any Indian policy hurtful of Iran. This is democracy at work.

There is no such restraint operating on the US or any other Western government, whence very different calculi are at work in their Iran policies. Moreover, unlike Shia Islam that looks to Qom for religious guidance, the Sunni variety in the subcontinent has evolved around the seminaries in Deoband and Bareilly and recognized in the Islamic world as representing serious schools of Islamic thought, discourse and jurisprudence. The Shia–Sunni differences in India have resulted in the smaller Shia community being conciliatory and desirous of joining the mainstream. The attitude of the majority Sunnis (comprising 75 per cent of the Indian Muslim population), on the other hand, is more abrasive. The Shia clergy, for instance, have consistently supported Hindu causes, such as the Ram Temple in Ayodhya. Politically, this has made Shias pals of the ruling BJP dispensation and Hindu organizations. It is a closeness that’s mirrored in Delhi’s official attitude to Iran. In spring 2016, in response to President Hassan Rouhani’s assurances that Iran will be a ‘reliable partner’ for energy, the visiting External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj indicated not just increasing the offtake of Iranian oil from the current level of 3,50,000 barrels a day but revealed that $20 billion had been firmed up as investment in Iran’s oil/gas and fertilizer sectors. ‘In the West Asia region, India and Iran are two decisive powers,’ said Mohammed Haghbin Ghomi, the Iranian consul general in Hyderabad, ‘that can cooperate in various fields complementarily.’

***

The obstinate attitude of the bureaucracy is because, a senior civil servant noted, bureaucrats see themselves as ‘landlords’ who have to look after the assets and permanent interests of the state, and political leaders as ‘often unruly tenants who are here today, gone tomorrow’ who have by whatever means to be reined in. Juxtaposed against Japanese Prime Minister Abe’s get-go attitude and removal of corporate and procedural obstructions at the Tokyo end, Modi’s inability to get the Indian defence ministry to play ball is a sad commentary as much on his limitations as mover and shaker as the dysfunctional Indian bureaucracy. So, the country is stuck with a seemingly unalterable reality: Its leaders are all affirmative and the bureaucracy is all inaction. 

***

CHAPTER 6: PERENNIAL SECURITY MUDDLE

The capacity to think big, act strategic, and create, innovate and apply the latest technologies, with the aim of becoming an unmatchable military power, is enabling China to become one. It showed no scruples, and still doesn’t, in the initial stages of its defence industrial growth to pilfer systems and technologies wholesale from Russia and the West and reverse engineer them—an activity facilitated by a massive infrastructure set up for the purpose. Having thus reached a scientific, engineering and industrial threshold, China is channelling huge funds to attain leadership in these and other frontier areas of science and technology, such as unhackable quantum communications, satellites and computers. It is an astonishing achievement for modern China, one vouched for by the US National Science Foundation. China, it may be recalled with some wonder, was economically and technologically on par with India in 1979 and, forty years later, is global technology leader with a GDP four times India’s and second only to the US.

***

The litmus test of an armed force being truly nationalist is its eagerness to develop and rely on home-made weapons. Since 1947, the Indian armed services have been equipped exclusively with imported weaponry—bought off the shelf or licence-produced locally. In historical contrast, consider the armies under Hyder Ali and later his son Tipu Sultan who fought for their king and country against the British. They invented the first practical battlefield rocket system in history and used it to telling effect in the Anglo-Carnatic wars of the late eighteenth century. Indeed, it was a stockpile of these unused ‘Mysorean rockets’ shipped after the 1799 Battle of Seringapatam to Woolwich Arsenal in Britain that seeded that organization’s first R&D project: the reverse-engineered ‘Congreve rocket’. This Hyder–Tipu military innovation was, however, an exceptional occurrence. The more normal Indian historical experience resonating with the present conditions is typified by Vasco da Gama’s crewmen jumping ship and setting themselves up in business as gunmakers to the Zamorin of Calicut. Inside of a year they had sold 400 canons to the Zamorin. In 1521, the Portuguese reached China and sold guns. By 1524, they discovered Chinese craftsmen making their own artillery pieces. The Chinese pattern was repeated in Japan which the Portuguese reached in 1542. They sold their stateof- the-art muskets to the Japanese only to find local metalworkers making guns as good as any made in Europe by the 1560s.

The Indian government and armed services’ record with regard to armaments is more Zamorin than Hyder Ali or Tipu Sultan. When the history of India is compared with that of China and Japan, one can readily see that the ability of the latter to quickly learn and replicate modern arms was one of the reasons why neither of these two Asian countries were ever enslaved and have always been world powers in technology. This raises the issue of culture. War, it has been reasoned, is ‘a cultural act... How people fight reflects who they are’ and ‘strategic culture’ as ‘the sum total of ideas, conditioned emotional responses, patterns of habitual behaviour that members of a national strategic community have acquired through instruction or imitation’. Between these two views and the record since 1947, one can get a fix on the Indian government’s attitude to the Indian military as no more than an instrument of a tertiary state activity, namely, protecting Indian territory—in other words, as glorified chowkidars or watchmen. One can also sense the Indian military’s attitude to war as something that can be managed wholly by imitation—with imported weapons, tactics and strategy.

***

Arms dependency leads to political dependency and, at a minimum, manipulation by supplier states. Denial of spares on some excuse or the other is a powerful tool to keep a customer state in line, something the country has time and again experienced without learning from it. Modi’s Make in India policy was supposed to alleviate this condition but hasn’t because of the inherent confusion in the concept and in the guidelines of the Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) 2016—now in its sixth version, describing a supposedly simplified and streamlined process of acquiring arms and incentivizing indigenous weapons design, development and manufacture. It may well be that as the prime minister first visualized it, it is merely an invitation to international companies of all kinds to make India the workshop of the world, the preferred manufacturing hub over China. ‘To my entrepreneur friends from across the globe, I would like to say “Come, Make in India, Invest in India —for India, and for the world”,’ Modi averred at the Global Investment Entrepreneurship Summit in Hyderabad in November 2017, a line he had repeated previously. ‘I invite each one of you to become a partner in India’s growth story. And once again assure you of our whole-hearted support.’

So, what’s wrong with that? Plenty. The basis for this policy is the belief that owing to the lower comparative cost of skilled manpower, foreign companies will be able to manufacture almost anything at a lower price and higher profit. The prerequisites for attracting international manufacturing industries to India, however, is that firstly they shouldn’t face the usual insurmountable difficulties (related to land, water, power and the complicated regulatory maze) in setting up new ventures in India, that all the bureaucratic-procedural impedimenta are removed and the country competes with the best in terms of ‘ease of doing business’, and that there is surplus trained manpower available for the asking.

None of these pre-conditions exist in India today. Assuming they had existed, Modi’s expectation that foreign arms makers would rush to set up factories in India to produce their top-of-the-line goods would still not have been met because their governments would forbid them from doing so. In the present age, cutting-edge military technology is highly prized as the source of ‘general purpose technologies’ in society, as the spur for sustained economic growth, and as endowing the nation with the decisive edge in war, and is, therefore, highly protected. Which is why despite the assurances by the Indian government and insistent demands for advanced implements of war by the Indian armed services, no foreign company has set up a factory or brought in FDI. 

***

According to Balaji, the ‘strength’ of the indigenous Tejas LCA is that India owns 100 per cent intelligence of the aircraft. ‘We can have aggregates from all over the place. But the intelligence of the flight control software as well as of avionics software is something special,’ he declared. ‘There are thirty-eight computers on the aircraft and their intelligence is 100 per cent with us. That’s our pride both in terms of the software writing and the software quality. That’s where the pilot sitting in the simulator and fine-tuning the symbologies and so on finds the aircraft intuitive.’ He pointed out that any change in symbology can cost tens of millions of dollars and that’s what the country ends up paying for when buying foreign aircraft and the recurring costs of the upgraded software every six months in addition to its lifecycle costs by way of software maintenance in foreign aircraft. ‘On the LCA,’ he said, ‘the costs are minimal, because the intelligence and software is all ours, and we make it the way the Indian pilots want it.’ But an indigenous combat aircraft with a foreign jet engine powering it would be anomalous.

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The chief of the Turkmenistan Air Force in mid-2016 flew the plane and the Bangladesh Air Force chief had a serious interaction with the LCA team. French air chief General Andre Lanata has gone up in a Tejas, as have US Air Force head General David L. Goldfein and Singapore Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen. Ng compared his experience in flying on the LCA to being driven around in a car and praised the IAF pilots for being ‘superbly confident, supremely professional and really at the top of the game and I can imagine why my pilots find so much value in training with IAF pilots’. The combination of Tejas and Indian pilots is eliciting a good response and would be a great advertisement for selling the Tejas abroad. Whether this interest translates into worldwide sales will depend on the strength and quality of the after-sale product support system, which requires professional, world-class sales and servicing infrastructure and an export ecosystem and cannot be an extension of HAL’s prevailing low-quality product support system that has caused bad blood with the IAF.

In the production aspects, Parrikar pushed a reluctant HAL into becoming the prime integrator of aircraft, divesting it of its manufacturing role. Thus, the major production modules of the LCA have been transferred to the private sector. L&T, Coimbatore, produces Tejas’s entire wing assembly, the fuselage is sourced to VEM Technologies, Hyderabad, and the fin and rudder assembly earlier produced at the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) is now supplied by Tata Advanced Materials. So from outsourcing parts, the process has transited into outsourcing whole assemblies with HAL as prime integrator and testing done at the Bangalore-based CEMILAC (Centre for Military Airworthiness and Certification). That is how Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus and European Aeronautic Defence and Space work—they get aggregates from various places and integrate them.

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It makes more strategic, technological and economic sense and to turbocharge the Make in India policy if Tata, Reliance, the Adani Group and HAL are all financially incentivized to become stakeholders in the Tejas programme in its entirety, and have the ADA and DRDO transfer to them full technology, including source codes and system algorithms, with HAL already sharing the process/production technology in its possession. This will, on a war-footing, establish a number of competing LCA-seeded combat aircraft design and development bureaus and production facilities, in effect, several combat aircraft complexes. As it is, HAL’s bad work culture and low annual aircraft production rate of only sixteen to eighteen Tejas LCA in its two assembly lines only feeds the military’s case for buying Western aircraft, and pre-empts the capacity for accelerated production of different variants (Mk-2, naval) of the LCA and the AMCA under development, and the advanced utility and light combat helicopters (LCH) that HAL is on the verge of rolling out to meet the future needs of the three services. The phenomenal savings of hard currency from buying only indigenous military hardware cannot be underestimated in terms of its potential to grow a world-class defence industry and millions of jobs that are presently harvested by foreign countries. Were the Indian government to terminate imports and the private and public sector companies assigned the task to synergize their resources and efforts and granted the permission to export a portion of their Tejas production from the word go, an Indian aerospace industry, driven by the profit motive, would be off and running in next to no time.

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MSMEs are the foundation of most successful defence high-technology industries. The MSMEs attached to all the defence R&D and industrial programmes and projects in the public and private sectors can be integrated into a production complex and constitute an embryonic Indian mittelstand— a large group of small technology creating and innovating enterprises. In Germany MSMEs provide, The Economist says, ‘the backbone for the world’s fourth largest economy’, and which concept President Macron hopes to replicate in France, believing it will generate advanced technologies and millions of jobs. Even though comparatively underdeveloped, the MSME sector in India nevertheless contributes nearly 45 per cent to the manufacturing sector and about 40 per cent to Indian exports. Its contribution to the Indian GDP is 8 per cent with this sector registering a 10.8 per cent growth rate. MSMEs with some 60 million people are the biggest employers in the country, after agriculture, and responsible—and this is a most heartening feature—for 17 per cent (versus 42 per cent for big firms) of ‘new to the world’ innovations during the course of their business, according to a National Knowledge Commission of India study. The MSMEs would benefit hugely as will the industry as a whole if skilling and vocational training programmes, particularly in smart technologies like artificial intelligence, cyber and robotics were greatly enlarged and more youth persuaded to enrol in them. Some 12.8 million youth enter the job market every year but only 3.5 million avail of the vocational training programmes (versus the capacity of 4.3 million in the country), when the corresponding annual figure for China is 90 million youth undergoing vocational training. The failure of skilling programmes to draw youth and the consequent shortages of trained manpower is a continuing worry.

MSME: Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises

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There is no dearth of such stories illustrating the extraordinary waste of time and resources by DPSUs and their collusion with the MoD and DDP officials. The standard operating procedure of the DPSUs is underscored by the following example retailed by an industry insider. Bharat Electricals Limited (BEL) was tasked to build an electro-optics facility. It was allotted ₹300 crore and 500 acres of land. The first thing it did with the money was lay out an officer’s colony complete with a clubhouse and swimming pool and parks, etc. before turning to the government for funds to buy the actual manufacturing paraphernalia. In reality, this source said, a smart electro-optics production unit would cost no more than ₹50 crore and require only about an acre of land. He contrasted the DPSUs’ spendthrift ways with a project proposal, he says he had once made to a Tata company to produce the short (25 km) range Akash surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) at the rate of two missiles every three days in a factory on 4 acres of land with an outlay of ₹83 crore, which the company board rejected as a cost-inefficient scheme. In comparison, the premier missile production DPSU, BDL, was budgeted ₹1500 crore and given 500 acres of land, and it produces only six Akash missiles per year. Such appallingly low levels of labour productivity is normal for DPSUs and ordnance factories. A recent NITI Aayog study found that the value produced per worker in OFB units is only ₹6 lakh per year, when the minimum value a worker has to produce is ₹40 lakh to ₹50 lakh annually for an MSME to be economically viable. The total amount spent on R&D and production of the Akash SAM over the years now stands at ₹30,000 crore. Given the differentials in the price and cost of their products and in the lethargic functioning of BDL, why wasn’t the production of the Akash missile, powered by a ramjet engine, and the development of its longer range variants, handed over to the private sector? Because, as this person put it pithily: ‘There is a khali sthan [empty space] between the ears of the MoD and Department of Defence Production (DDP) officials. That the country’s resources are wasted this way is not their worry.’66

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Pondering the egregiously wasteful practices of the Indian military and the MoD, a West European military attache once wryly commented that ‘India is a very rich country; it can afford to do things in a way we can’t afford to.’

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The Indian government, habitually fearful and fainthearted and eager to respect the strategic sensitivities of the US and China, did nothing. When juxtaposed against Kim Jong-un’s airy dismissal of threats by US President Trump as the ranting of a ‘mentally deranged . . . hard-of-hearing dotard’, his unveiling of a plan to nuke Guam, the US military’s gigantic mid-Pacific island base and, nearer home, Pakistan Foreign Minister Khwaja Asif’s gumption in replying to Trump’s demand for Islamabad to ‘do more’ in Afghanistan with a statement that ‘We will not do more’, has shown India up as too diffident and weak-willed to matter. North Korea’s showing steel and Pakistan cheekiness signal a sea change in the strategic picture of Asia, not that it has even been noticed by Delhi, with Modi intoning such banalities at the 2018 Shangri La Conference in Singapore as ‘Asia of rivalry will hold us back. Asia of cooperation will shape this century.’

For one thing, the US nuclear security umbrella counts for a lot less to its Asian treaty allies— Japan, South Korea and the Philippines—because such security guarantees are much less credible now that Pyongyang can take out any city in the continental United States. If Los Angeles is the price to pay for corralling North Korea, Kim Jong-un may be right in calculating that Washington would be unwilling to pay it. The US is unlikely to put itself in danger if Kim Jong-un starts firing his nuclear ordnance. This is at the heart of the problem of the ‘extended deterrence’ concept, which breaks down when the provider finds itself in the nuclear crosshairs of the very country it is providing security against. It is for these and other reasons that I had argued in 2008 that in the face of China, an unrestrained nuclear proliferator, and pliable nuclear client state, North Korea the chain reaction of Asian states going nuclear is inevitable. And that a nuclear weapons–armed Japan would be quickly followed by a nuclear weaponized South Korea and Taiwan—all countries with highly developed nuclear weapons programmes that were forced to shut down by America. I had also concluded that such a situation would help India because Asian states on the Chinese periphery bristling with nuclear weapons would automatically void China’s strivings for hegemony. In the rapidly changing nuclear context, what should India do? What is its best nuclear strategy?

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In the last ten years Pakistan has commissioned four Chinese-designed bomb-grade plutoniumproducing reactors in Khushab, operationalized a plutonium separation unit and has the fastestgrowing nuclear weapons stockpile in the world. In the same time-frame, North Korea conducted six tests and emerged as a thermonuclear military with ICBMs and miniaturized hydrogen warheads. The result is that these two nuclear outlier states have fortified their security, improved their negotiating position and retained their freedom of action. India, meanwhile, has stayed mired in an unnuanced minimum deterrence stance armed with untested and unproven high-yield fusion weapons, which will be the goad in a serious strategic crisis for China, or even Pakistan, to call Delhi’s bluff.

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Countries consider war viable if they stand to gain more from engaging in it than by not doing so. In the modern era of conflict when war can prove fatal to the weaker party instigating it, the ‘exchange ratio’ (ER) is the metric to decide whether or not to go to war. ER is the ratio of the amount of destruction caused to the adversary to the amount of destruction absorbed by one’s own country. If the ER is assessed to be bearable, military action follows, but this ratio will always tilt against Pakistan, the smaller, weaker, state. Despite Islamabad’s rapidly enlarging weapons holdings, in any conceivable nuclear war scenario Pakistan will face certain extinction, meaning it will disappear in the Herbert Spencerian sense as a social organism. The destruction of parts of Indian metropolitan areas, say, of Delhi and Mumbai will be horrible but, in the larger scheme of things, these are losses India, with its extensive land mass, can absorb. In exchange the Pakistani state will be terminated. Pakistan’s major problem is that it is vulnerable and offers easy target sets. The economic and demographic distribution in that country is such that all its major population centres and wealthproducing areas—Gujranwala, Sialkot, Lahore, Bahawalpur, Rahim Yar Khan and Mirpur Khas—are arrayed in a north-south line not far from the Indian border and within short reach of India’s weapons. In fact, in a post-mortem of the 1965 war, General Ayub Khan pointed out to his divisional commanders that this highly vulnerable ‘strategic corridor’ was Pakistan’s fatal weakness.

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Pakistan has one huge advantage: It holds its nerves better in crisis. India, on the other hand, is rarely calm and collected. Cases in point: the aftermath of the 2001 attack on Parliament and the 26/11 attack on Mumbai in 2008. Delhi did not, in the first instance, order instantaneous retaliation by air strikes after the terrorist attack on Parliament, but a general mobilization for war and then was unwilling to wage it. In the latter episode, again there was no instant retribution but a whole lot of frenzied helter-skelter. Pakistan has learned not to be intimidated, highlighting in the process that country’s success in making much out of what realistically is militarily little and India, in contrast, routinely fluffing it when it comes to exercising hard power even when amply provoked. The only consequential threat India faces is China, but Delhi seems too squeamish to take it on, or even to seriously prepare for it. Would the Deep State in Pakistan not be emboldened by the almost comic Indian response to ISI-managed terrorist incidents to arrange a terrorist strike in an Indian metropolis with a radiation diffusion device or ‘dirty bomb’?

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If Delhi and the Indian armed services paid as much attention to the long-standing and comprehensive threat posed by China as they do the minimal danger from Pakistan (which can be effectively neutralized with appropriate means such as the use of Special Forces for sustained countersubconventional warfare, for instance), India would not dissipate its military resources the way it has been doing for the sixty-odd years, the 1962 war having taught the government and military nothing.

In 1979, China and India were at the same economic level, with their militaries too qualitatively on par. Since then, like its economy that has grown five times as large, the Chinese military, fuelled by a hyperactive defence industry, has leapfrogged to become a peer competitor to the US, even conceiving novel armaments to meet specific needs, such as the anti-ship ballistic missile system. There’s not a genus of weaponry PLA forces use that China has not designed and developed itself or reverse-engineered from foreign technology that it has bought, stolen or otherwise contrived to lay its hands on. And unlike India, Beijing has been diligent in continually modernizing its strategic arsenal with simulations of thermonuclear tests whose frequency have far exceeded those by the US. Between September 2014 and December 2017, China carried out over 200 nuclear test simulations at its Mianyang facility in south-western Sichuan compared to fifty by the US in the period 2012 to 2017. It has developed a ‘multi-stage gas gun’ for the purpose. The new more usable thermonuclear weapons being perfected combined with the hypersonic glide weapons—a field China is the leader in —will eventuate in weapons capable of precise destruction with little radioactivity.

This is in the context of $1.2 trillion that President Trump has set aside for modernizing its nuclear weapons inventory, and Russia developing a nuclear torpedo to devastate coastal cities and unveiling new strategic bomber, nuclear-powered submarines, and the 6800 mile range RS-28 Sarmat MIRV missile able to carry fifteen warheads, the RS-26 Rubezh hypersonic missile, and the Kinzhal airlaunched cruise missile. To the extent that any Asian country has the potential to take on China, it is India but, sadly, it has shown neither the spirit nor the mettle for such a role.

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China’s cyber warfare designs can be thwarted, according to Dean Cheng, a leading expert on China’s cyber prowess, by (1) preventing China from collecting information in peacetime, thereby sowing doubts in Beijing about the quality of its capacity to conduct cyber operations, (2) preparing for cyber hostilities by implanting electronic worms, Trojan horses, and other kinds of bugs into Chinese information systems and networks in peacetime, and (3) exacerbating Beijing’s fear of loss of internal control, something that the country’s communist rulers most dread. But China is the largest seller of Huawei, Xiaomi and Oppo cellphones in India and of the Lenovo family of computers and laptops, all of which have likely embedded malware that can be remotely activated and can transmit to master control information on the communications traffic. With India not fabricating semi-conductors/integrated chips and using imported computer hardware and operating systems, it is as it is immensely vulnerable to Western sources of these machines and software. The Indian government has been extraordinarily lax and complacent about the security threat from these Chinese and Western electronic and computer products, doing next to nothing to reduce the threat.

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CHAPTER: CONCLUSION

The Indian government is no METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry), which as the Ministry of International Trade and Industry enabled Japan’s rapid post-war recovery on the backs of the huge industrial conglomerates, the zaibatsu (Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Sumitomo, Suzuki, Furukawa, et al.), to produce the ‘Japanese miracle’. Nor is it the far-sighted South Korean state that followed the Japanese model to create its own slate of big companies, the chaebols, (Samsung, Hyundai, Daewoo, LG, SsangYong, et al.) and chart as startling a path to economic success. Instead of encouraging and incentivizing and relying on individual enterprise, the profit motive and the private sector to provide the impetus for economic growth, the well-meaning Bloomsbury socialist Jawaharlal Nehru created gigantic public sector enterprises on the Soviet Russian model, which by their very nature not so much competed with as sidelined private companies.

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Then again, Modi has proved he is no Shinzo Abe, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip, Erdogan, Donald Trump or even Emmanuel Macron in that he didn’t even try radically to reform the system he inherited. Modi failed to follow up his muscular talk of the election campaign with matching action, to advance India’s interests in the world or realize any of his slogan-promises for domestic rejuvenation that could only have been done by downsizing and reorganizing the government, restructuring the decision-making processes, bringing in outside experts and fundamentally reforming the decision- and policy-making systems as his ‘alpha male’ counterparts have done elsewhere. Abe amended Japan’s ‘peace Constitution’, Putin revitalized the military and revived Russia, Erdogan succeeded in ramming a referendum for a strong presidential system in his ‘new Turkey’, Trump cut the flab and trimmed procedures to end bureaucratic gridlock in Washington, and Macron, the youngest, freshly minted President of France, in his very first year utilized his executive powers to pare the public payroll and tame the powerful, traditionally mollycoddled government sector labour unions by replacing the system of lifetime job security with contractual work. What Modi has done in comparison is decidedly small bore. He has implemented his Gujarat governance model with indifferent results. It features (1) centralization of decision-making, (2) adoption of IT solutions, (3) improvement in the performance of PSUs, (4) empowerment of senior bureaucrats to make them ‘more accountable’, and (5) inculcation of pride in civil servants in working for the state. In the event, ‘minimum government, maximum governance’, explained Rajiv Kumar, vice chairman of NITI Aayog, ‘has to be understood as raising the efficiency levels in the delivery of public services, and not the withdrawal of the state’.

Modi’s vision for Gujarat, moreover, was by these means to emulate and compete with China. Presumably, it also forms some part of his ‘vision’ for India. Except, Xi Jinping and his cohort running China, appreciating the limitations of the state, are assigning the private sector a role to even remake the PLA into a slimmer, smarter ‘global tier fighting force’ by 2050. It is an objective Xi spelled out at the 19th Party Congress in October 2017, for which purpose government research and development organizations expeditiously released to private firms 3000 patents as a first step towards what Xi called ‘military-civilian integration’. So, even as Xi—leader of the ultimate Big Brother state—seeks individual drive and private sector initiative to cement China’s place as a leading comprehensive power in the world, Modi sees India’s deliverance in oiling the creaky colonial-era apparatus of government in the hope of perking up the public sector performance and making the bureaucracy less sclerotic. The pity is that no country in the world has so much talent outside government and so little inside of it.

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‘India is a story of private success and public failure—its rise is due to its enterprising people rather than the state. Our red tape and bureaucracy breaks the spirit of small and medium enterprises that create the most jobs,’ writes Gurcharan Das, corporate guru and public intellectual. ‘The World Bank has been pointing this out for fifteen years but every Indian government till now has ignored [its findings], preferring instead to pick holes in its methodology.’ The prime minister seems not to sense the contempt the people and the private sector have for politicians, the government and government servants, or to listen to constructive criticism. Modi appears detached from the reality of an India with half its population below the poverty line and having to daily contend with a venal and rapacious, typically Third World administration and government that is responsible for social welfare indices so miserable that the economists Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen felt constrained to point out in 2013 that the country looks ‘more and more like islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa’.

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At the heart of the failure of India’s foreign policy after Jawaharlal Nehru is that a succession of prime ministers, including Modi, have viewed international politics from the vantage point, as Ashley Tellis has written, of ‘a subordinate state’. In the present day, the ‘subordinate state’ notion has melded with Modi’s own personal subaltern social status (as a former chaiwala) to inflict a low ceiling on India’s ambition. Elected to rule with the boundless support of the Indian people and an impressive majority in Parliament he could have turbo-charged the economy by unshackling it from government control and revolutionized the government by making it over. All Modi has done in his first term is tinker around at the edges and achieved little. Perhaps the expectations attending on Modi were too high or maybe the people were taken in by his take-charge demeanour, mistaking it for Bismarckian will and a desire to truly transform the country and genuinely raise its stock in the world. Narendra Modi, unfortunately, has turned out to be just another Herbert Kitchener, the British minister for war during the First World War and former commander-in-chief, India, of whom Prime Minister Arthur Balfour said that ‘he is only great when he has little things to accomplish’.

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