South China Sea Verdict is a Blow to Beijing, It Must Now Find a Way to Back Down

The Permanent Court of Arbitration’s arbitral tribunal in its verdict on the South China Sea issue has decisively held against China’s expansive maritime claims in those waters. China has already denounced the verdict and declared that it has no intention of honouring it and the global community has no means of enforcing the judgment.
Indeed, the only legal mechanism that exists is a move under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. But, as we know, such enforcement moves can only be made by the UN Security Council (UNSC), of which China is a permanent, veto-holding member.
The biggest issue arising from the verdict is the question of the rule-based international system. Since 1971, the world community has made an effort to bring China into the international system. It has since then become a member of the UNSC, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Wold Trade Organisation and other such regimes. By ratifying UNCLOS and accepting its provisions, China has made a solemn treaty commitment, which it is duty-bound to uphold.
By insisting that it had the right to judge whether or not it was party to a compulsory dispute-settlement mechanism, China undermined more than 50 UN conventions that allow a party to a convention to insist on arbitration if disputes cannot be resolved through negotiation. This has implications not just for international agreements, but everyday business dealings where some form of arbitration are part of agreements.
In ratifying UNCLOS, China has voluntarily and freely accepted the agreement as a whole, which means an acceptance of its compulsory dispute resolution mechanism. Last October, the arbitral tribunal actually looked at the issue as to whether or not it had jurisdiction and concluded that it did indeed have jurisdiction under Article 288(4) of UNCLOS.
China has to accept the tribunal’s decision because UNCLOS rules say that it is the tribunal that decides whether the exclusions claimed by a state apply in a particular case, not the state itself. The tribunal’s award is final and without appeal. This is not unique but normal international practice in cases of arbitration.

Map depicting the U-shaped 9-dash line in green, representing China’s claim to the waters within. Credit: Wikimedia

However, realpolitik, and indeed the immediate Chinese reaction would suggest that the decision of the tribunal is unlikely by itself to persuade China that its claims in the South China Sea lack the ‘historic’ basis it insists on. But educating China is just one aspect of the situation. The other is the fact that the South China Sea issue will be grist for China’s nationalistic mill. It remains to be seen whether Beijing whips up nationalistic rhetoric beyond the high it is already at.
China could further aggravate the situation by evicting the Philippines from the Scarborough Shoal and building an artificial structure on it. Or, it could station fighter aircraft on the artificial islands and declare an air defence identification zone (ADIZ) over the South China Sea.
Does China really think that it can trash UNCLOS and have normal relations with it South-east Asian neighbours? These countries now have a document – the arbitral tribunal verdict – that questions Beijing’s more alarming claims on the South China Sea. After the verdict, any effort to consolidate Chinese positions in the Scarborough reef will be treated as a hostile action by the Philippines. Likewise, an ADIZ or more aggressive patrolling would be seen as bullying by the smaller states of the region like Vietnam and Malaysia. China may be able to consolidate its military supremacy in the South China Sea, but it will be at the cost of huge reputational damage and the hostility of its maritime neighbours whose sense of grievance will be aggravated by the verdict.
The verdict will not stop China, neither will the freedom of navigation patrols and diplomatic démarches. What is needed is a diplomatic deal through which China can be aided in getting off its untenable perch. The problem is in figuring out what China’s goals are. If it is looking at the South China Sea as a means of pressuring the US into its concept of a ‘new type of great power relations’ in which both sides recognise their respective core interests, then things may not work out.
On the other hand, there could be regional solutions to reverse the course in certain key areas and shelve the disputes, especially in the light of the unambiguous verdict of the UNCLOS tribunal, which in a sense has questioned not just China but other states that are seeking an expansive interpretation of UNCLOS to advance their respective claims. For instance, China could once again permit Filipino fishermen to access Scarborough Shoal and in exchange, the Philippines could withdraw its military contingent from the Second Thomas Shoal. Both can agree to demilitarise the fishing areas. Likewise, the disputant states could quietly agree to pull back from the many features they have occupied and which the tribunal says in themselves cannot support “habitation by a stable community”, nor are worthy of getting their own maritime zones.
Thus, the challenge is to convert China from being a problem to be a part of the solution. This is something that can only be done through the diplomatic process and in the coming days, the international community and in particular big powers like the US, EU and Russia, must speak with a clear and firm voice, even while looking for face-saving means of aiding China to discreetly back off. Any other course will only be fraught with consequences that are difficult to predict.
Perhaps the biggest role here is for the United States.
Let us be clear that while regional states like the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia may be the disputants with China, there is another order of quarrel between the United States and China which is aggravating the South China Sea situation. This relates as much to the differences in their interpretations of UNCLOS, which the US has not ratified, but claims to uphold, as to geopolitics. As the world’s sole superpower, the US uses international law to maintain forward deployments of its military forces, something that the rising power China resents. Many of the clashes and near clashes that have taken place have been related to US military movements in China’s adjacent seas. The US therefore can be as much part of the solution as China can be.
The Wire July 12, 2016

Chilcot Report Has Ample Lessons for India – and Modi – Too

As in Blair’s Britain, the official culture in India is for the military, bureaucracy and intelligence community to tailor their views to those they believe the political leadership wants.

The milestone at Kargil is full of derring do but in 1999 a series of intelligence and military failures led to the death of several hundred Indian soldiers who fought hard in difficult terrain to repulse invading troops from Pakistan. Credit: Shome Basu

The Chilcot inquiry  has given us a documentary record of the abject manner in which the British government tailed the United States in making war in Iraq in 2003. It has detailed the failure of those in positions of responsibility – fromTony Blair, who was prime minister, downward to the cabinet, parliament, the bureaucracy, intelligence chiefs, military commanders and even the attorney general – to do their duty in the run-up to the war and through its course.
The consequences of this were bad enough for the 150-odd British servicemen killed in Iraq, but they have been catastrophic for Iraq itself which has seen an endless wave of death and destruction that shows no sign of ending. Worse, there can be no doubt that the war transmuted the dreaded Al Qaeda into the evil Islamic State.
In typically understated British style, the report says the 2003 invasion was not a “last resort” and all the alternatives to war had not been exhausted. It decisively lays to rest the perception that somehow Blair and his government were “misled” by bad intelligence, making it clear that they, knowingly, put forward a case that the intelligence data  did not support. It does not quite twist the knife by condemning Blair and his associates, but there should be no doubt that it has destroyed their reputations forever.
Sadly, the Americans who were the prime movers in all this – George W. Bush, vice president Dick Cheney, secretary of state Colin Powell, the chief of the CIA, George Tenet – and other assorted functionaries remain out of the reach of any inquiry and even historical accountability of the kind put forward by the Chilcot process.
The report has raised important questions about what it means to be an American ally. Britain, is, of course, no ordinary ally. It is the closest of close allies, part of the UKUSA agreement which even permits intelligence officers to serve in each other’s services.

All systems failure
From the  outset, Blair assured Bush that he was as committed to the enterprise of making war on Iraq as the Americans. This was undoubtedly with the view of showing British loyalty to the US. Considering that the UK is a nation of considerable standing, an economic powerhouse and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, this desire to please the Americans unconditionally and uncritically is strange.  As a result of this, in Chilcot’s dry recounting, “the UK chose to join the invasion before the peaceful options had been exhausted.”
In the process, Blair may have bypassed his cabinet and lied to parliament about the dangers of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to justify a decision he had already taken. The mendacity with which fictional Iraqi WMDs were used to stoke the flames of war have convinced many that  Iraq is a fit case for the prosecution of a number of leaders, including Bush and Blair, for war crimes including the crime of aggression.
Indeed, the whole system may have been complicit. Civil servants failed to take notes of key meetings, cabinet committees were bypassed and even cabinet ministers were not told what was happening by Blair, who knew better that the case for WMDs in Iraq stood on flimsy legs. The same is true of the military chiefs, who encouraged British participation even if it turned out later that their forces were poorly equipped for the campaign in which they played, at best, a subsidiary role. The British performance in Basra and subsequently in the Helmand province of Afghanistan graphically brought out these weaknesses.
The same mentality of playing fast and loose with facts, ignoring ground realities and being quick on the trigger, led to the subsequent western interventions in Libya and Syria – leading to the destruction or weakening of state systems in these two countries with consequences which are yet to clearly unfold.

Lessons from Kargil
The Chilcot report, of course, has no direct relevance to India, except that there were some important voices in the government and public sphere who wanted India to join the American venture in Iraq.  There was a great deal of American pressure, to be sure, but fortunately, we had a level-headed prime minister – Atal Bihari Vajpayee – who nixed the proposal.

In this file photograph from 1999, defence minister George Fernandes, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and army chief General V.P. Malik survey the battlezone from above. Credit: PIB

India, too, has conducted  national security-related inquiries. The Henderson-Brooks report on the 1962 debacle is yet to be officially released. In any case, its principal findings have been leaked and they reveal that the inquiry was limited and that its authors did not have access to Army HQ documents, leave alone those of the prime minister’s office and the ministry of defence.
The Kargil Review Commission of 1999 was, again,  carefully structured to avoid throwing too much light into the murky darkness of decision-making that allowed the Kargil incursion to take place. Even so, the sanitised version of the report that was published made some trenchant observations, while self-consciously steering clear of apportioning any individual blame. It resulted in the first major reform in the national security system through what is known as the Group of Ministers (GOM) report of 2002.
Compared to Iraq, the Kargil affair was trivial, even though many more Indian soldiers died in pushing back the Pakistani intruders, as compared to the British casualties in Iraq.
But there were some similarities, principally the failure of the intelligence services, both at the apex and tactical levels. Despite his best efforts, commission chairman K. Subrahmanyam was unable to persuade the government to publish the annexures of the report dealing with the specifics of the failures. As a result, the head of the Research & Analysis Wing, responsible for the principal failure of intelligence, was actually promoted and appointed governor of Arunachal Pradesh after retirement.
This refusal to apportion blame at the top led to several junior officers being punished for the episode, while people at the higher level who were more culpable got away. Because the Pakistanis had to beat a hasty retreat, an aura of great achievement and sacrifice was created which shielded the system from criticism.  Yet the reality is that more than 500 young men died in retrieving a situation that need not have arisen in the first place.
The importance of the Chilcot inquiry to India arises from the fact that we work on a political system which was fashioned by the British. The institutions that failed the UK in the Iraq affair have a familiar ring –  prime minister, cabinet, parliament, the civil service, the external intelligence service, JIC, and military services. Can we, with all honesty, say that all these institutions work in harmony to take key national security decisions?
This has particular salience since we know that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is uncommonly powerful, and that the cabinet committee system does not probably work in the way it should. Can you imagine any of the members of the cabinet committee on security (CCS) standing up to Modi, or even expressing a contrary view on any issue ? As for the parliament, the less said, the better.
The same would apply to the professional bureaucracy, the intelligence services and the armed forces. In any case, the official culture of today is to tailor your views to those you believe the government wants, and to acquiesce and even support whatever the leader comes up with so that you are assured of a post retirement sinecure.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee is presented with theKargil Review Committee report by K. Subrahmanyam and other committee members, in New Delhi on January 7, 2000.Credit: PIB

Cautionary tale on US alliance
 A related question arises out of  India’s  desire to play the role of a US ally. Historically, New Delhi has steered clear of this somewhat dubious distinction. But in recent years, India’s failures in the area of economic growth and defence modernisation have persuaded New Delhi that the only option of countering a rising China is an American alliance. The Chilcot inquiry lays out in brutal detail the possible consequences of such a course, especially when you have non-functional institutions like the CCS and parliament, and your bureaucratic and military leadership is supine.
War is serious business, especially in the age of nuclear weapons. Professional advice and decisions need to be carefully weighed. Politicians like Modi and his cabinet cannot be expected to be familiar with the nitty gritty of international politics and national security issues. What they deserve and need is unfettered, high quality advice from their aides. However, as political leaders, it is their duty to foster a system where such recommendations can be made without fear or favour.
This is especially important  when one of the elements in the equation – the “free” media – is always ready to push the government to the brink of war as a first option, and so-called veterans tom-tom a “can do” approach to issues that led the Anglo-Americans to disaster in Iraq.
The Wire July 8, 2016

Modi’s African Safari May Yield Major Economic Gains for India

At first sight, it may appear that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s African safari that begins on 7 July is yet another manifestation of his itch to travel. But a closer analysis will reveal that it is an important building block of a larger thrust towards Africa, visible since the government took office in 2014. Significantly, the visit will be the first by an Indian PM to Mozambique since 1982 and the first to Kenya since 1981.
However, we need to look at the visit through the prism of the Modi government’s Africa policy which was manifested in the third India-Africa summit in 2015, attended by the leaders of 51 of 54 African nations. Previous summits in 2008 and 2011 had attracted 14-15 heads of state of governments.

Reaching Out to Africa

In the past two years, India has also welcomed an unprecedented number of African leaders in New Delhi, including the heads of all four states Modi is now visiting.  President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete of Tanzania paid a state visit to New Delhi in June 2015, the Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta led his delegation to the 2015 India-Africa summit, President Filipe Nyusi of Mozambique visited India in August 2015 on a state visit and President Jacob Zuma of South Africa was delegation leader for the 2015 India-Africa summit.
The Modi government has been active in using President Pranab Mukherjee and Vice President Hamid Ansari to reach out to Africa as well. The former visited three nations, Ghana, Cote d’Ivorie and Namibia in June while the latter made path-breaking visits to Morocco and Tunisia in May.
Modi’s visit to the four Indian Ocean littoral countries has three components—the first related to economy and trade, the second to security and the third to the Indian diaspora.

Exploring Opportunities for Trade and Investment

India has significant relations with all four countries in terms of trade as well as investment of Indian private and public sector companies. ONGC, Tata, Bharti, Mahindra, Essar and almost all Indian pharma majors have a presence there. Indian companies and groups are also involved in oil and gas industry, automobile, textiles, telecommunications, engineering products and medicine. One of the emerging areas of interest is that of floriculture and agriculture, because of the agriculture investment-friendly attitude of many of the states.
For example, Karuturi Global Ltd, originally a floriculture company from  Bengaluru, now owns a vast land bank, the size of Goa in Ethiopia and Kenya where it is involved in floricuture, as well as commercial farming of sugarcane, palm oil and coffee. Indian companies are also interested in moving to Madagascar as well. On the eve of the PM’s visit, the Cabinet has approved of an MoU with Mozambique to double the import of pulses to 2,00,000 tonnes by 2020. Africa offers a good option because of its proximity and the availability of land to deal with India’s perennial shortage of pulses.
 


Security Ties

Proximity has made India a major destination for students from the region and the government of India does its bit by providing a clutch of scholarships and training programmes for the nationals of these countries. This is something that needs to be stepped up dramatically, along with possibilities of expanding Indian IT education and medical tourism. The key binder for Indian interests is the diaspora which is spread across the Indian Ocean islands of Seychelles, Reunion, Mauritius, as well as the littoral states like Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa which were part of the British Empire. 
There is an unstated Indian goal of incorporating the vast region from India to South Africa as part of its security sphere. New Delhi has had old ties with the Indian Ocean states of Seychelles and Mauritius on the security front. India reportedly also maintains a listening post in Madagascar and Oman. At one level, they are part of India’s maritime domain awareness project, but they also link the Indian Ocean states in a closer security framework.


Boosting Maritime Security Cooperation

In this context, the outreach to the littoral states like Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa are crucial. India does have naval exercises with the largest regional power, South Africa and its navy conducts regular port visits to these countries, but in the main, its defence ties mainly relate to training. In 2013, it supplied nearly 700 motor vehicles to Tanzania to be used for military and peacekeeping operations. The most intriguing relations are with Mozambique.

In 2003, the Indian Navy deployed its ships off Maputo to provide security for the African Union summit at the invitation of the Mozambican government. This was repeated in 2004 for the World Economic Forum. Since then, the two sides are coming closer on a platform which could see India emerge as a maritime security provider in East Africa and build up a regular naval presence in the strategic Mozambique channel.

Diaspora Factor
In fact, a 2012 agreement provides for anti-piracy patrols by the Indian Navy in the Channel and in Mozambican waters. An important catalyst for this was the rise of piracy in the eastern Arabian Sea, following the collapse of the central government in Somalia in the mid-2000s. It is easy to see India’s activism as motivated by the inroads China has made in Africa. That would be an error. China has long had its own African policy going back to the 1960s. Its current thrust has been to use Africa’s natural resources to its advantage. India, on the other hand, stresses all-round relations which includes business, investment, education and training.
 As for security, the region is far more important for India, than for China, especially because of the diaspora. But what is important is that, more often than not, Indian policy arises from requests of the governments rather than any unilateral quest. In other words, India is a trusted security partner. What it now needs to do is to step up its economic game.
The Quint July 7, 2016

Heroism in the face of terror

Joseph Conrad dug deep in trying to understand moral courage and in Lord Jim, his great novel, he seemed to suggest that the difference between heroism and cowardice was often paper-thin. In a different milieu, Ernest Hemingway described heroism as “grace under pressure.” For both writers, what made the difference was the display of character by the protagonist when confronted with death. Conrad and Hemingway dealt with fiction, but in Dhaka on Saturday, two human beings, Ishrat Akhond and Faraz Hossain, showed that reality is often far more powerful than fiction.
 





Possibly there were other acts of heroism in the terrible hours in which 20 persons were held hostage and then systematically tortured and executed by 6 terrorists in Dhaka. But the world has come to learn of the story of Akhond and Hossain.
We will never know what would have gone through their minds when they were confronted by the choices put before them by the terrorists — there must have been fear, hesitation and confusion. But we do know that when the time came to choose, they made an unambiguous decision. It would have been understandable, and indeed even human, to have decided otherwise. But then, that is exactly the difference between heroes and ordinary folk.
Strangely, it is their killers who saw themselves as heroes — ghazis or mujahideen — holy warriors. Dressed as faux Arabs and armed with weapons, they appear to be both despicable and delusional. Where was the heroism in slaughtering defenceless men and women after taking them hostage?
The larger lesson of the heroism of Akhond and Hossain is the rebuff to those who would seek to use the instrument of death to compel people to accept their twisted version of their religion. This is not something unique to Islamists — in the 1980s, it was not unusual for Khalistani terrorists to separate Hindus and Sikhs before executing the former. The Khalistani movement collapsed, as much because of the police and army action, as by the rejection of their tactics by the Sikhs themselves. Likewise, the battle against Islamism and jihadist violence will have to eventually be fought in the minds of the Muslim communities across the world.
Terrorism is, at the end of the day, a mind game. By itself, it cannot offer an existential threat to society, but by shocking acts of violence it seeks to overawe and frighten people to acquiescence. Most people are not heroes and they are more likely to quietly submit before the threat However, in their own way, people do resist.
This is where the role of the state comes in.
In the coming months and years, the challenge before the Bangladeshi state is to get its act together. Individuals will play a major role in the process. But the state needs to effectively marshal its own instrumentalities and resources to tackle terrorism. Unfortunately, prolonged political strife in the country has weakened its governmental fabric. In such circumstances, the campaign of assassinations of secular writers, poets, bloggers, the attacks on Hindu priests and temples accompanied by spectacular terrorist acts are aimed at creating anarchy and chaos in which the perpetrators believe they can advance their agenda. For the Islamists, the agenda is about an Islamic state or a Caliphate. But operating within their ambit are also other forces being directed by Pakistan’s ISI.
In the days of erstwhile East Pakistan, the ISI used the territory to support an assortment of Mizo, Naga and Assamese separatists. Beginning in the 1990s, support was extended to groups like the Harkat-ul-jihad Islami and the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba to perpetrate acts of violence in India. Old links with the Jamaat-e-Islami have been useful here, especially since many of the leaders of the outfit have more than once advocated the reunification of Bangladesh with Pakistan. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, headed by Begum Khaleda Zia, has cynically allied itself to the Islamists to take on the Awami League and this is a major factor in destabilising Bangladeshi society.
Stabilising Bangladesh requires the efforts of not just the people of the country and its government, but also its neighbours like India and the international community. India’s role is important not only because the country is ‘India-locked’ in terms of its land boundary, but given the nature of that boundary, people, goods and ideas flow back and forth easily, notwithstanding efforts to restrict their movement.
The battle is complex because terrorism is just a technique. What is important is the need to combat and defeat the ideas that motivate the terrorist. Individuals matter, but despite their heroism, they can be overwhelmed. What is needed is the collective will of the people to defeat those who seek to use violence to further their political and ideological ends.
Mid-Day July 5, 2016

Chilcot Report Has Ample Lessons for India – and Modi – Too

As in Blair’s Britain, the official culture in India is for the military, bureaucracy and intelligence community to tailor their views to those they believe the political leadership wants.

The milestone at Kargil is full of derring do but in 1999 a series of intelligence and military failures led to the death of several hundred Indian soldiers who fought hard in difficult terrain to repulse invading troops from Pakistan. Credit: Shome Basu

The Chilcot inquiry  has given us a documentary record of the abject manner in which the British government tailed the United States in making war in Iraq in 2003. It has detailed the failure of those in positions of responsibility – fromTony Blair, who was prime minister, downward to the cabinet, parliament, the bureaucracy, intelligence chiefs, military commanders and even the attorney general – to do their duty in the run-up to the war and through its course.
The consequences of this were bad enough for the 150-odd British servicemen killed in Iraq, but they have been catastrophic for Iraq itself which has seen an endless wave of death and destruction that shows no sign of ending. Worse, there can be no doubt that the war transmuted the dreaded Al Qaeda into the evil Islamic State.
In typically understated British style, the report says the 2003 invasion was not a “last resort” and all the alternatives to war had not been exhausted. It decisively lays to rest the perception that somehow Blair and his government were “misled” by bad intelligence, making it clear that they, knowingly, put forward a case that the intelligence data  did not support. It does not quite twist the knife by condemning Blair and his associates, but there should be no doubt that it has destroyed their reputations forever.
Sadly, the Americans who were the prime movers in all this – George W. Bush, vice president Dick Cheney, secretary of state Colin Powell, the chief of the CIA, George Tenet – and other assorted functionaries remain out of the reach of any inquiry and even historical accountability of the kind put forward by the Chilcot process.
The report has raised important questions about what it means to be an American ally. Britain, is, of course, no ordinary ally. It is the closest of close allies, part of the UKUSA agreement which even permits intelligence officers to serve in each other’s services.

All systems failure
From the  outset, Blair assured Bush that he was as committed to the enterprise of making war on Iraq as the Americans. This was undoubtedly with the view of showing British loyalty to the US. Considering that the UK is a nation of considerable standing, an economic powerhouse and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, this desire to please the Americans unconditionally and uncritically is strange.  As a result of this, in Chilcot’s dry recounting, “the UK chose to join the invasion before the peaceful options had been exhausted.”
In the process, Blair may have bypassed his cabinet and lied to parliament about the dangers of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to justify a decision he had already taken. The mendacity with which fictional Iraqi WMDs were used to stoke the flames of war have convinced many that  Iraq is a fit case for the prosecution of a number of leaders, including Bush and Blair, for war crimes including the crime of aggression.
Indeed, the whole system may have been complicit. Civil servants failed to take notes of key meetings, cabinet committees were bypassed and even cabinet ministers were not told what was happening by Blair, who knew better that the case for WMDs in Iraq stood on flimsy legs. The same is true of the military chiefs, who encouraged British participation even if it turned out later that their forces were poorly equipped for the campaign in which they played, at best, a subsidiary role. The British performance in Basra and subsequently in the Helmand province of Afghanistan graphically brought out these weaknesses.
The same mentality of playing fast and loose with facts, ignoring ground realities and being quick on the trigger, led to the subsequent western interventions in Libya and Syria – leading to the destruction or weakening of state systems in these two countries with consequences which are yet to clearly unfold.

Lessons from Kargil
The Chilcot report, of course, has no direct relevance to India, except that there were some important voices in the government and public sphere who wanted India to join the American venture in Iraq.  There was a great deal of American pressure, to be sure, but fortunately, we had a level-headed prime minister – Atal Bihari Vajpayee – who nixed the proposal.

In this file photograph from 1999, defence minister George Fernandes, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and army chief General V.P. Malik survey the battlezone from above. Credit: PIB

India, too, has conducted  national security-related inquiries. The Henderson-Brooks report on the 1962 debacle is yet to be officially released. In any case, its principal findings have been leaked and they reveal that the inquiry was limited and that its authors did not have access to Army HQ documents, leave alone those of the prime minister’s office and the ministry of defence.
The Kargil Review Commission of 1999 was, again,  carefully structured to avoid throwing too much light into the murky darkness of decision-making that allowed the Kargil incursion to take place. Even so, the sanitised version of the report that was published made some trenchant observations, while self-consciously steering clear of apportioning any individual blame. It resulted in the first major reform in the national security system through what is known as the Group of Ministers (GOM) report of 2002.
Compared to Iraq, the Kargil affair was trivial, even though many more Indian soldiers died in pushing back the Pakistani intruders, as compared to the British casualties in Iraq.
But there were some similarities, principally the failure of the intelligence services, both at the apex and tactical levels. Despite his best efforts, commission chairman K. Subrahmanyam was unable to persuade the government to publish the annexures of the report dealing with the specifics of the failures. As a result, the head of the Research & Analysis Wing, responsible for the principal failure of intelligence, was actually promoted and appointed governor of Arunachal Pradesh after retirement.
This refusal to apportion blame at the top led to several junior officers being punished for the episode, while people at the higher level who were more culpable got away. Because the Pakistanis had to beat a hasty retreat, an aura of great achievement and sacrifice was created which shielded the system from criticism.  Yet the reality is that more than 500 young men died in retrieving a situation that need not have arisen in the first place.
The importance of the Chilcot inquiry to India arises from the fact that we work on a political system which was fashioned by the British. The institutions that failed the UK in the Iraq affair have a familiar ring –  prime minister, cabinet, parliament, the civil service, the external intelligence service, JIC, and military services. Can we, with all honesty, say that all these institutions work in harmony to take key national security decisions?
This has particular salience since we know that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is uncommonly powerful, and that the cabinet committee system does not probably work in the way it should. Can you imagine any of the members of the cabinet committee on security (CCS) standing up to Modi, or even expressing a contrary view on any issue ? As for the parliament, the less said, the better.
The same would apply to the professional bureaucracy, the intelligence services and the armed forces. In any case, the official culture of today is to tailor your views to those you believe the government wants, and to acquiesce and even support whatever the leader comes up with so that you are assured of a post retirement sinecure.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee is presented with theKargil Review Committee report by K. Subrahmanyam and other committee members, in New Delhi on January 7, 2000.Credit: PIB

 Cautionary tale on US alliance

A related question arises out of  India’s  desire to play the role of a US ally. Historically, New Delhi has steered clear of this somewhat dubious distinction. But in recent years, India’s failures in the area of economic growth and defence modernisation have persuaded New Delhi that the only option of countering a rising China is an American alliance. The Chilcot inquiry lays out in brutal detail the possible consequences of such a course, especially when you have non-functional institutions like the CCS and parliament, and your bureaucratic and military leadership is supine.
War is serious business, especially in the age of nuclear weapons. Professional advice and decisions need to be carefully weighed. Politicians like Modi and his cabinet cannot be expected to be familiar with the nitty gritty of international politics and national security issues. What they deserve and need is unfettered, high quality advice from their aides. However, as political leaders, it is their duty to foster a system where such recommendations can be made without fear or favour.
This is especially important  when one of the elements in the equation – the “free” media – is always ready to push the government to the brink of war as a first option, and so-called veterans tom-tom a “can do” approach to issues that led the Anglo-Americans to disaster in Iraq.
The Wire July 8, 2016

The Legacy of Mao’s Cultural Revolution is Still With Us

Frank Dikotter maps the prolonged paroxysm of that figure who tormented China and sought to perpetuate his political legacy by destroying what he had himself created.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

A person born in China in the year the People’s Republic was declared in October 1949 has seen the best of times and the worst of times. If things look very good today, they were very, very bad yesterday.  In the first 30 years of the PRC, the country saw prolonged political campaigns helmed by then Chairman Mao Zedong sometimes aimed at transforming China, at other times to preserve his own power which succeeded in uprooting the old society, killing tens of millions, destroying careers and families, and creating civil war conditions.

Frank Dikotter
The Cultural Revolution: A people’s history, 1962-76
Bloomsbury, 2016

Frank Dikotter, chair professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong is one person who has meticulously chronicled this. This is the third book in an outstanding trilogy, the  previous volumes being Mao’s Great Famine about the 1950s famine that took upward of 40 million lives, and The Tragedy of Liberation, which told the story of how the revolution’s roots lay as much in popular assent as the extreme violence with which it dealt its perceived opponents. In The Cultural Revolution, Dikotter maps the prolonged paroxysm of that monstrous figure who tormented China and sought to perpetuate his political legacy by destroying what he had himself created.
These outstanding books are a necessary read for anyone seeking to understand the People’s Republic and the people who lead it. Many of them, like President Xi Jinping, were victims of the Cultural Revolution and no one, but no one who lived through it, remained untouched by it.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) targeted the very party that had perpetrated the first two events – the revolution and the Great Famine. The people who had ruled the country with an iron hand suddenly became the victims of a brutal purge which put not only comrade against comrade, worker against worker, but often children against their parents. Formal education was suspended, all knowledge was distilled in the Little Red Book that was carried by Red Guards who rampaged across the land, destroying anything they thought smacked of bourgeois culture, burnt libraries and books. In actual practice, the man manipulating them, Mao Zedong, had but one aim, purging the party, political system and the military of his enemies.


The GPCR moved in various phases – from the point following the Great Famine and Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin, when Mao worried about his own political mortality, to the formal launch of the attack on the party and the army in 1966, thence to its control by largely military officers under Lin Biao in 1968, ending in his mysterious death in 1971, and finally the phase of slow recovery  that culminated in the death of Mao in 1976.
Throughout, and virtually till his death, Mao was the master manipulator: cold, calculating, seemingly whimsical, always willing to betray his closest confidantes, but in the driver’s seat, even in the periods when the vehicle of the People’s Republic was careening out of control.
Simultaneously with the “Red Phase” that began with the May 16, 1966 circular declaring that the party and the army had been infiltrated by “representatives of the bourgeoise”, students began an attack on their administrators in Peking University through the use of “big character wall posters”. By the end of the month, the Cultural Revolution Group – Mao’s attack squad – had been established, comprising of Chen Boda, as the secretary of the group, and the quartet that became later known as the ‘Gang of Four’ – Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, public security chief Kang Sheng, Yao Wenyuan and Zhang Chunqiao.
The principal targets of the campaign were former defence minister Marshal Peng Dehuai, President Liu Shaoqi and Communist Party of China (CPC) general secretary Deng Xiaoping. Liu and Deng sought to pre-empt the chairman by sending work-teams into educational institutions to take charge of the movement, but the Cultural Revolution Group unleashed the more radical elements against them, terming them “rightists”.
By July, following his swim in the Yangtse and the slogan “Bombard the Headquarters”, Mao’s hand became clearer and Liu and Deng’s star began to fade. In an August rally, Mao reviewed a million-man Red Guard rally and in ensuing months over ten million of them had passed through Beijing. As these Red Guards fanned out, the country descended to civil war conditions, with radical workers seizing power from the party in places like Shanghai. Clashes took place across the country between the radicals and party officials, with the military entering the fray.
By mid-1967, efforts by the old guard, especially old marshals like Chen Yi, Ye Jianying and Xu Xiangqian pushed Lin Biao to let the army restore order. By mid-1968, the Red Guards were slowly brought to heel by the army.
But the end of the “Red” phase brought on an even worse “Black” phase of the GPCR which was nothing but a bitter struggle of various factions to take control of the country and the CPC. In this second phase, where Lin Biao was designated the heir apparent of the chairman in 1969, a systematic purge of the party was carried out and the party organisation handed over to new “revolutionary committees”. Peng and Liu were imprisoned and tortured to death, whereas Deng was exiled to a distant province to work in a tractor factory. Along with them, tens of thousands suffered a similar fate or internal exile, torture and imprisonment.
Then came a new turn: the very students who had led the GPCR were targeted and sent off to the countryside to be re-educated. Beginning  in 1968, millions of students, including the present president, Xi Jinping, were sent off to the countryside and had to live under conditions of great deprivation for years. The educational system had virtually collapsed by now, as had civil society and the government.
Now there were new twists and turns with campaigns targeting “counter-revolutionaries”, but essentially the continuing struggle to gain dominance. The end of the Red Guards did not end the upheaval. Lin Biao sought to take charge by conducting vicious purges across the country that led to a fresh round of persecution, torture and death. Simultaneously, the Sino-Soviet clashes of 1969 led to a war fever, with the chairman ordering the country to prepare for war. This was the phase of more economic experimentation, which proved as disastrous as the Great Leap.
By and large, in contrast to the revolution itself and the Great Famine, the GPCR tended to be an urban phenomenon, despite the millions of young people who were exiled to the villages as part of the process. However, as the chaos subsided in 1968, there were efforts at pushing more radical ideas of collectivisation under the rubric “Learn from Dazhai”, a Potemkin-village-like effort to show off the revolution’s success.

An ongoing internal struggle
What is fascinating about the process that unfolded in 1962 was that, unlike Stalin, who  simply shot or imprisoned those who he thought were against him, the Chinese drama was more elaborate. It was fought out in party committees, campuses, as well as the street, with the People’s Liberation Army preventing the worst and Mao himself manipulating organisations and individuals to ensure that the country did not collapse. This is what led to the slow fall of Liu from 1962 till his death in 1969. Likewise, Deng was purged three times before he resurfaced to take charge of the party following Mao’s death. The one steady hand right through was that of Zhou Enlai, who retained Mao’s trust and was never purged despite the efforts of the Gang of Four. Indeed, it was he who protected Deng and a number of others of the old guard, to the extent he could, given Mao’s mendacity, but he cannot escape indictment for playing the role as Mao’s instrument and spokesman in the persecution of many others.
Into this equation came the new American outreach, a cynical ploy by Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon to use the Chinese to undermine the Soviet Union. But that is another story.
What makes Dikotter’s work important is the evolution of the CPC. Many believed that eventually, the PRC would imbibe Western liberalism and evolve slowly but surely to a Western-style democracy. Those hopes were belied by the events at Tienanmen in 1989. Despite talk of the inevitability of democracy by former premier Wen Jiabao in 2010, the CPC under Xi Jinping has begun adopting a harder line. Indeed, Xi’s anti-corruption campaign is taking on the character of the purges of the days of yore.
The CPC was both perpetrator and victim in the GPCR. For that reason, Deng Xiaoping absolved Mao by adopting Mao’s own formulation for Stalin –  he was 70% right and 30% wrong – for the chairman as well. He also institutionalised the inner party democracy that has ensured an orderly transfer of power every decade.
It remains to be seen as to how long the CPC can continue this way. It has a major challenge in maintaining its legitimacy in the era when social media has created a de facto “opposition” in China and the nature of its economy compels the country to open up to the world. So far, however, it has been successful, quarantining the country from the liberating effects of the world wide web and using an iron hand to stamp out  political dissent. However, as the anti-corruption campaign has revealed, unchecked power corrupts. Societies have learnt that the best way to manage power is to have a system of checks and balances. But that is difficult to create in a one-party state where the party is the executive, judiciary and the legislature.
What the party leadership has been trying to do for the past decade is to modify this system to meet the demands of  a modern state. So they talk about a quasi-Confucian system “with Chinese characteristics” where the CPC channels the best and brightest into a meritocracy and hopes they will enable the party to maintain its pre-eminence. Whether it succeeds or not, only the future will tell, but the portents are not particularly good.
The Wire July 3, 2016