Changing the power equations

Indian President K R Naraynan's forthcoming visit to China may turn out to be more than purely ceremonial. But only if Narayanan, as an old China hand, does actually try and put Sino-Indian relations on a more rational footing, and seeks answers from Beijing, that the latter has evaded ever since Rajiv Gandhi fully normalised relations with the People's Republic in 1988.

Visits by Indian leaders to China have, in recent years, been often marred by controversies. The last Indian presidential visit was in 1992, when the Chinese almost disrupted President R Venkatraman's travels by conducting a nuclear test while he was there.

Earlier, Foreign Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's visit in 1979 had to be cut short after China announced its invasion of Vietnam during the visit. Incidentally, it was President Narayanan who was ambassador to Beijing during the ill-fated Vajpayee visit.

Narayanan had been appointed ambassador to China in 1976, fourteen years after ambassadorial relations were withdrawn. While China has "officially" described these incidents as pure coincidences, we shall have to wait and see if similar accidents happen during the Narayanan visit.

In any case, it is time that Narayanan, with his newly acquired bluntness (on particular display during the recent banquet speech in honor of US President Clinton) decided to ask China some hard questions.

First, what is the state of Chinese nuclear cooperation with Pakistan? From the perspective of India, the most serious concern vis-�-vis China is about the help provided by Beijing to Pakistan's nuclear programme. The true extent of the Beijing-Islamabad nuclear collusion may never be revealed, but it is clear that Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme has relied enormously on China's help, and Chinese nuclear engineers too may have designed Islamabad's nuclear weapons. Nuclear cooperation of this kind is unprecedented in the history of international relations since 1945; indeed, not even the US and Britain shared such a relationship.

Why would China want to help Pakistan to become a nuclear weapon state? India's elite feels that Beijing has consistently regarded a nuclear-armed Pakistan as a crucial regional ally and as a vital counterweight to India's growing capabilities. Is this true? And is cooperation continuing despite the nuclear tests by Pakistan? Are the reports, that Pakistani nuclear scientists are still being trained in various academies in China, false?

Narayanan must also ask his hosts: What accounts for Chinese unwillingness to settle any of the bilateral irritants to which India attaches importance? Despite repeated promises, Beijing has still not recognised Arunachal Pradesh or Sikkim as a part of India. This, despite the number of Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) introduced , largely based on unilateral Indian concessions. And why has China continued to violate the letter and spirit of the bilateral CBMs in the last few years, especially but not only, in the Ladakh sector?

Third, should India not be concerned about Chinese inroads into Myanmar, including the reported construction of a Chinese naval facility on the Coco islands, which could be used to monitor missile launches by India? Why is Beijing, in any case, seeking to establish such a large military presence in Myanmar?

Fourth, what really is the story behind the departure of the 14-year-old Ugyen Thinley Dorje, the 17th Karmapa of the Kagyupa sect of Tibetan Buddhism - from his monastery in Tsurphu near Lhasa in Tibet to the capital-in-exile of the Dalai Lama near Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh? Is it part of a Chinese plot to subvert the Tibetan movement in India? Or is it one more proof of the scale of Chinese atrocities in the region? And what does China really expect New Delhi to do with the Tibetans?

Fifth, is it not a fact that China has deployed nuclear missiles in Tibet that clearly have one target: India. Admittedly, Chinese inter-continental ballistic missiles elsewhere could also target India, but the potential political and psychological impact of these missiles - literally a few miles from India's border - during a future conflict cannot be underestimated. If China sees India as neither a rival nor an enemy, where is the need to deploy these missiles?

Sixth, why is China the only nuclear-weapon-state that continues to adopt a hard line toward India's nuclear policy? While the other nuclear states have, more or less, come to terms with India's new nuclear status, following the nuclear tests of 1998, why is it that Beijing alone keeps on harping on UN Security Resolutions? Indeed, why is it that the seniormost Chinese official, dealing with nuclear-related issues, Ambassador Sha, takes such a belligerent stand against India in international forums?

Seven, what is the Chinese stand on terrorism, especially the kind inspired by Islamic militants? Is China not facing problems related to Islamic terrorism in its northern province of Xinjiang, and which seems to have been rooted in Pakistan? If so, why is it that Chinese officials are not willing to condemn this terrorism on Indian soil? And why is it that while India spearheads the moves to prevent the adoption of resolutions, in the UN Commission on Human Rights, that condemn Chinese human rights record, Beijing is unwilling to adopt a clearer stand on Kashmir?

Eight, what is the Chinese view of multi-polarity, and what place does India occupy in Chinese cosmology? Does China see India as a partner in a united quest for a more equitable multi-polar international system? Or does it view New Delhi as a rival for influence in Asia? If the former is the case, why is Beijing not willing to openly and forthrightly support India's bid for membership of the UN Security Council? Has it so easily forgotten how India, sometimes totally alone, fought for Beijing's membership of the Security Council?

If President Narayanan were to ask these questions, and hopefully get some reasonable answers, he will do a greater service to Sino-Indian relations than can be performed by the number of toasts that will most surely be raised during his visit to the 'inscrutable' land. 

The success story of LTTE

The LTTE's dream of an independent "Eelam" may not be easily realized, but it is clear that the Sri Lankan army too will find it very difficult to militarily defeat the LTTE. Not surprisingly, Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga revealed recently that she had offered to hold talks with LTTE leader V Prabhakaran at least three times during the last two years, but he had rejected all efforts at a peaceful negotiated settlement of the ethnic war. Indeed, despite the LTTE being declared a terrorist organization by virtually every important state in the international system, it still continues to be the most powerful Tamil political organization in the world with supporters in virtually every part of the globe. It is believed that LTTE raises more funds overseas, especially in Europe and North America, than any militant organization in South Asia.

What accounts for the Tigers' success and the failure of successive Sri Lankan governments to combat them effectively? There are at least three reasons for the LTTE's continued strength. First, the Tamil Tigers have a formidable military presence. Estimates about numbers vary, but it is generally believed that the organization has a cadre of at least 5,000 men and women. The LTTE consists of four wings: army, navy, anti-aircraft wing, and Black Tiger wing, which consists of members who sacrifice their own lives in suicide attacks on major military installations and political leaders. It was a member of the Black Tiger wing who was responsible for the suicide attack that killed Rajiv Gandhi.

The Tigers' military strength is also rooted in the fact that they have, over time, been trained by some of the most effective intelligence agencies in the world, including Israel's Mossad, India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Pakistan's ISI. Indeed, at one stage in 1989, they were supplied with arms and information even by the Sri Lankan army, which wanted them to defeat the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) that had been deployed there. This was revealed recently by Sri Lankan army officer Lt Priyalal Wishwakumar, who claimed that he had personally delivered four truckloads of T-56 automatic rifles to the Tigers on the instructions of then President Premadasa. However, once the IPKF had moved out, the same weapons were used to slaughter members of the Sri Lankan armed forces.

Quite clearly, Prabhakaran's leadership has been extremely important in the success of the Tigers. While the world views him as a fascist dictator, to the Tigers he is the "supremo," the elder brother in whom they have reposed complete faith.

Prabhakaran's heroes include Alexander, Napoleon, Subhash Chandra Bose, Bhagat Singh and Bal Gangadhara Tilak. By all accounts, he is a brilliant military strategist, as well as deeply feared and respected by the cadre. Ruthless and temperamental, Prabhakaran is totally uncompromising in his demand for an independent sovereign Eelam. 

Finally, whether we like it or not, the LTTE still seems to speak for many Tamils, especially those who have, over the years, faced discrimination and persecution at the hands of the Sri Lankan state. Most other Tamil organizations are inactive or dead. Recall that Prabhakaran set up LTTE, also known as the Tamil National Army, in May 1976 after growing Tamil anger and frustration with the policies of the Sri Lankan government. Indeed, the Tamils' alienation goes back to the late 1950s after the government led by Solomon Bandaranaike, father of the present president, enacted the "Sinhala only" law, making, with one stroke of the pen, the significant Tamil-speaking minority, concentrated mostly in the North and the East, second class citizens.Asia.

But it was legislation which was designed to cut the number of Tamils in universities, and which gave Buddhism the foremost place in the country in the 1970s, that led to the deep political and social discontent within the Tamils. This was compounded by the anti-Tamil riots of the late 1970s and the massive human rights violations that were inflicted by the Sri Lankan army in the 1980s. Hundreds of thousands of Tamils fled the country, many as refugees to India, and countless others were killed.

The LTTE has successfully snuffed out most moderate Tamil voices. Dissent is rarely tolerated and any Tamil organization or leader who participates in electoral politics becomes an automatic target. One of the recent victims was charismatic lawyer Neelan Tiruchelvam. The Sri Lankan government may have only contempt for it, the world may despise it, but there unfortunately is no alternative to dealing with the Tigers if sustainable peace has to be achieved in Sri Lanka.

India's policy must be predicated on three critical elements: First, a firm pledge to the unity and integrity of Sri Lanka; second, a commitment to minority rights, pluralism and secular democracy in the state; and opposition to external intervention in the island. If India has to play a role, it must primarily aim at getting the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government together at the negotiating table.


(Source: indiainfo.com)

Behind The Buddha's Mask

India's Nuclear Bomb, George Perkovich, OUP

It is hard to believe that an American policy analyst, who directs a Virginia-based foundation that's explicitly geared to promote non-proliferation and disarmament, would produce the most masterly account of India's nuclear policy. India's Nuclear Bomb by George Perkovich, director of the Secure World Programme of the W. Alton Jones Foundation, is a scholarly tour de force. While Perkovich's conclusions are debatable and his theoretical premises more than a little shaky, his story of India's nuclear programme is the most complete and nuanced account ever written. No other book on the subject comes close to this compelling and illuminating narrative that traces the history of the nuclear programme from its modest beginnings in the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in '45, to the dramatic nuclear tests at Pokhran in '98.

India's Nuclear Bomb reinforces the thesis that there is a greater deal of continuity to India's present nuclear policy than is usually imagined. In other words, India's nuclear weapons programme and policy must not be seen as the product of the BJP's right-wing agenda, but is rooted in a process that goes back to that usually unassailable champion of disarmament, Jawaharlal Nehru. Perkovich ably documents Nehru's contradictory statements which revealed, at the very least, that he recognised the potential security benefits of India's civilian nuclear programme even while New Delhi led the cause of nuclear elimination in multilateral fora. While Shastri and Indira Gandhi's inputs into India's nuclear programme are well known, Perkovich reveals with rare insight the role played by Rajiv Gandhi and V.P. Singh in furthering weaponisation. In 1985, Gandhi and in 1990, Singh set up secret committees on the nuclear issue. The 1985 committee, which included General Sundarji, Vice Admiral K.K. Nayyar and the Atomic Energy Commission's R. Chidambaram recommended that India build a minimum deterrent force, "guided by a strict doctrine of no-first-use and dedicated only to retaliating against a nuclear attack on India". A doctrine not very different from the one drafted by the National Security Advisory Board last year. And in 1990, a committee which included Sundarji, K. Subrahmanyam, Arun Singh and representatives from the AEC and DRDO developed plans to "ensuring that in the event of a nuclear attack on India, the government would continue to function and be able to deliver nuclear retaliation". Among its conclusions, the group called for "designating air force units to receive nuclear devices and deliver them according to previously prepared orders".

In short, by 1990 India had a rudimentary nuclear deterrent in place, and every successive government, including the United Front government that included parties from the Left, has at least approved of the programme. Thus, the 1998 tests were only a dramatic manifestation of nearly a decade-old reality. While Perkovich's narrative is superb, it is while trying to locate his account within the theoretical debates of international relations that he falters. In asserting the importance of the 'strategic enclave' (a loose grouping of scientists, analysts and engineers) and other domestic reasons in furthering India's nuclear weapons policy, and underplaying the importance of national security reasons, he misses the wood for the trees. Domestic reasons do play a role in the formulation of any policy, but to not recognise sufficiently the deep impact of the Chinese and Pakistani nuclear programmes in advancing Indian weaponisation is surely reductio ad absurdum.

Similarly, Perkovich suggests that "open, democratic debate may inhibit decisions to make nuclear weapons, but democracy as it is practiced today appears to obstruct efforts to control and eliminate nuclear weapons once they have been acquired". This is a controversial thesis that will be challenged by all those who believe that democracy and peace are intrinsically linked, but it is undoubtedly a subject worthy of further research. For, all the countries that have given up nuclear weapons were non-democratic: South Africa, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. If Perkovich's argument is accepted, the prospects of nuclear disarmament are indeed bleak. Because today seven of the eight recognised or threshold nuclear weapon states are democracies.

However, Perkovich's strength does not lie in the theoretical conclusions which are at best tentative but the manner in which he has been able to blend recently declassified American material with extensive interviews, off and on the record, with top Indian sources. It is a strange irony, however, that Indians who make the loudest noises about nuclear apartheid and colonialism did not shy away from providing a Western scholar with the most intimate details of India's nuclear programme. Sadly, we have to rely on George Perkovich rather than a 'swadeshi' scholar for the most detailed and authentic account of India's nuclear policy. But then this is a country which, through some unidentified mole, allowed the British journalist, Neville Maxwell, access to the official Henderson Brooks report on the disastrous 1962 war against China, but still does not allow its own citizens to read the report. Tragically, not even the possession of nuclear weapons will allow us to deter our worst enemy: colonialism of the mind.

(Source: Outlook, 03/04/00)

Kashmir As Paradox

The Crisis In Kashmir, Sumit Ganguly, Woodrow Wilson Center Press & Cambridge University Press

KASHMIR is a bloody conflict. It is also big business. More than 10,000 Kashmiris have been killed since 1989 and several lakhs displaced from the Valley. But, for many, Kashmir is a source of profit; a commodity that has been successfully packaged, marketed and sold across the world. According to one survey, more than 1,000 books have been published on Kashmir since 1990 in India alone. And nearly every major city in the West, from Bilbao to Boston, has hosted a seminar on Kashmir. The World Wide Web has several dozen sites devoted to some aspect of the so-called Kashmir question.

In Delhi alone, there are half-a-dozen NGOs apparently studying Kashmir (although the members are usually seen in Geneva), and quite a few newspapers or journals devoted to dissecting every facet of the troubled Valley.

The first casualty of the com-modification of Kashmir is truth and scholarship. Propaganda and sloganeering seem to have substituted objectivity and quality research. Even academic writings display mediocrity. In Double Betrayal: Repress -ion and Insurgency in Kashmir, the otherwise well-respected academic Paula Newburg made the outrageous suggestion that Kashmiri Pandits "liken themselves to Afrikaners who they mistakenly believe were the 'original' inhabitants of South Africa." Similarly, recent books by the usually scholarly Alast-air Lamb display an obvious bias.

And that is just one reason why Sumit Ganguly's The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace comes as such a pleasant surprise. Both as an old fashioned narrative and as a rigorous theoretical endeavour it is outstanding. It is arguably the most thoughtful book on Kashmir since the late Sisir Gupta's masterly Kashmir: A Study in India-Pakistan Relations written in the 1960s.

The principal question that the book seeks to answer is the obvious: what factors explain the rise of violent ethnoreligious sentiment in Kashmir in 1989? Ganguly first convincingly refutes traditional explanations. According to him, the crisis in Kashmir is not simply a product of the machinations of Pakistan, or a reaction to India's 'betrayal' of its plebiscite promise or a result of the breakdown of the ethos of Kashmiriyat. Instead, he offers a powerful alternative thesis which is intuitively and intellectually satisfying. In his words, "Kashmir is the result of a fundamental paradox of Indian democracy: Kashmir represents both the mobilizational success and, simultaneously the institutional failure of Indian democracy."

According to Ganguly, Indian policies and programmes produced political mobilisation on an unprecedented scale in Kashmir. Yet, simultaneously successive national governments with varying degrees of commitment to democracy did little to promote the strengthening of institutional politics in Jammu and Kashmir. It is this dichotomy—the increase in political mobilisation against a background of institutional decay—that explains the origins of the secessionist insurgency. As Prof Jack Synder of Columbia University put it, "the ironies of modernization" have produced the endemic conflict.

The only weak link in Ganguly's otherwise rock-solid book is the chapter on strategies and options for resolving the crisis. While Ganguly himself is clearly in favour of the "politically realistic" option of giving Kashmir pre-1952 autonomy, he gives little play to more creative alternative solutions. Given, however, the political situation, it does not seem likely that any acceptable package of autonomy can be easily worked out. And while Ganguly may convincingly argue that Kashmir isn't Punjab, for the powers that be, the Amritsar model seems to be working even in Srinagar.

(Source: Outlook, 13/10/1997)