Kids Corner

Current Events

The India Myth:
Part II

RAJAN MENON

 

 

 

Continued From Yesterday …

PART II

During the past two decades in particular, Indian leaders have looked beyond their immediate neighborhood and adopted a more ambitious strategy.

The “Look East” policy, a case in point, seeks to expand and deepen India’s presence in East Asia so that China does not have a free hand in shaping the strategic and institutional landscape there.

More to the point, it is designed to strengthen security ties with the Asian countries located around China’s perimeter, particularly those unnerved by the prospect of a Pax Sinica and anxious about America’s staying power and the narrowing gap in power between the United States and China.

India has been active on a variety of fronts in East Asia. It has been training Myanmar’s naval officers and selling the country maritime surveillance aircraft. It has provided Vietnam loans for buying Indian arms and has signed a deal, despite profuse Chinese protests, to tap Vietnamese oil deposits in the South China Sea, adjacent to islands claimed by Beijing. It has been engaged in regular security consultations with Japan, Israel, Australia, Indonesia and the United States, and has participated in naval exercises in the Pacific alongside America, Japan, Singapore and Australia. It also signed a free-trade agreement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 2009.

While specialists on Indian foreign policy tally these and other triumphs with care, what’s sometimes missing from their analyses is a comparative perspective, which would show that China’s presence in East Asia, and the resources it has deployed to gain influence there, far exceed India’s on every dimension that matters, and by a wide margin.

Another part of India’s strategy has been expanding the power and reach of its armed forces. Much has been accomplished, and the balance between India and China is a far cry from what it was in 1962, when a military rout that revealed Indian troops’ lack of basic equipment created a political firestorm at home. The Chinese would find it considerably harder now to prevail swiftly in a war along the border.

Still, India trails China in military power, and a quick comparison makes the disparity evident.

Though the two countries have populations of comparable size, India’s GDP is a mere 22.5 percent of China’s. This gap gives Beijing a big advantage in mobilizing and applying various power-relevant resources -- and one that is likely to widen given that China’s rate of growth, though it has slowed of late, still exceeds India’s.

India and China have devoted a comparable proportion of GDP to defense in recent years: about 2.5 percent and 2.0 percent between 2008 and 2013, respectively. Yet because of the GDP disparity China can, with a smaller burden on its economy, spend far more on its military machine than India: $188 billion compared to $47 billion in 2013. The actual gap is likely even larger, as China’s official figures probably understate its true level of defense spending.

Nor is it just a matter of the spending mismatch: whether it’s armor, airpower, cyberwarfare, air-defense systems or power-projection capacity, China retains a significant advantage over India, in qualitative and quantitative terms. Some numerical comparisons of major categories of armament make this evident. In combat aircraft, attack helicopters, submarines and destroyers, China’s lead ranges from 2:1 to 4:1.

Some strategists, Indian and Western, aver that the Indian navy now has the wherewithal to establish dominance over its Chinese counterpart and to block the lifeblood of the Chinese economy by controlling maritime passageways that provide China egress from East Asia.

Leaving aside the fact that this scenario assumes a full-blown war in which the naval balance would be but one factor, the difficulty New Delhi faces is that China has far more economic resources than India to devote to sea-power in the coming years. Besides, in 2013, the Indian navy received only 18 percent of the military budget, compared to 49 percent for the army and 28 percent for the air force, and a reallocation of resources, certain to be contentious, would be required to ensure maritime dominance over China.

That’s possible in principle -- leaving aside the inevitable interservice budget battles -- but not easily accomplished given the threats India faces from the land and air forces of China and Pakistan, who continue to be aligned.

Even if one concedes the claim about Indian naval superiority, Beijing can apply counter-pressure in various ways, particularly by bolstering Pakistani military capabilities, using its well-developed strengths in cyber-warfare and striking across the Sino-Indian border.

Even with India’s recent move to further strengthen its border defenses by creating a “mountain strike corps” of fifty thousand troops, the Chinese are likely to retain the advantage in numbers, mobility and firepower -- and thus the wherewithal to mount offensive operations across the three main sections of the border: Ladakh-Xinjiang, Tibet-Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh-Sikkim.

Modi has his work cut out for him. He will doubtless seek to reform India’s defense industries but will have to continue relying mainly on external suppliers.

Russia, whose armaments dominate India’s army, navy and air force, will retain a natural advantage. But in recent years India has been dissatisfied by cost overruns in Russian armaments, the unreliability in the supply and quality of spare parts, and accidents aboard Russian-built submarines, and so it has sought to reduce its dependence on Moscow. Modi won’t burn bridges with Russia, but he will open the door more widely to American, European and Israeli suppliers.

While Israel will remain a niche supplier for India, since the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1992, trade between the two countries has grown (it totaled $6 billion in 2012); so have Israel’s military sales, which cover radars, missiles of various sorts and reconnaissance aircraft. India has become Israel’s leading market for its arms exports, the annual worldwide total value of which is $7.5 billion, with India accounting for as much as $1.5 billion.

Such transactions, which include intelligence sharing related to counter-terrorism, are no longer controversial within India; Modi, who visited Israel while running Gujarat and attracted billions of dollars of Israeli investment in his state, has voiced his admiration of Israel’s economic and technological achievements and his desire to boost cooperation.

New Delhi’s strategy toward China goes beyond strengthening India’s armed forces. Since the bilateral military balance heavily favors Beijing, India has turned to a classic coalition strategy aimed at dispersing China’s military strength across what, given the size of the Chinese landmass, are far-flung fronts.

This gambit, already well under way, will gain momentum. For reasons rooted in history and geography, India’s natural partners will be Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam and the United States, countries with which India’s military ties have grown during the last two decades.

The increasing security cooperation between New Delhi and Tokyo in recent years is particularly significant and will increase because of their shared apprehensions about China. Given Japan’s economic and technological prowess, it could -- if the increasing threat from China trumps domestic opposition -- boost its military strength in fairly short order. With a GDP approaching $5 trillion, barely 1 percent of which it devotes to defense, this would only require a minimal increase in the defense burden.

While East Asian states have been rattled by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s efforts to revise Japan’s “peace constitution” and to increase its military capabilities, India has welcomed them and embraces Japan as a strategic partner. In 2014, Japan and India decided to begin regular consultations between the two countries’ national-security leaders.

This decision followed the initiation of yearly trilateral meetings among India, Japan and the United States in 2011. There is more involved in this than talk. Japan has participated in three -- in 2007, 2009 and 2014 -- of the annual U.S.-Indian “Malabar” naval exercises, which were initiated in 1992 (they were suspended following India’s nuclear test in 1998).

What bears watching is whether Japan’s 2014 decision to lift the ban -- which dates back to 1967 -- on the export of military technology and arms leads to purchases by India as part of its push for military modernization and diversification. Tokyo’s 2013 offer to sell India the ShinMaywa US-2 amphibious aircraft, and India’s interest in buying fifteen of them, may represent a harbinger.

Already, Japan and Australia have been in discussions over the latter’s purchase of ten Soryu-class Japanese submarines (worth $20 billion), a development that points to the potential for larger arms sales by Japan to India, especially given their shared concern about China’s expanding power.

*   *   *   *   *

Using diplomatic and economic means, India is also establishing a presence on China’s western and southwestern flank, in Afghanistan and Central Asia. It has positioned itself to play a major role in post-American Afghanistan by training Afghan security forces, building road networks and acquiring natural-resource deposits.

But China has also been purchasing economic assets in Afghanistan, notably in energy and mining, and once the United States and its allies depart, Beijing will have to develop a strategy to defend these gains, which means that its presence in that country will grow, adding a new front to Sino-Indian competition.

China has overshadowed India in Central Asia, despite the emphasis the region receives from Indian strategists and New Delhi’s efforts to strengthen its position.

India remains an observer rather than a full member in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, among the many sources of Chinese influence in Central Asia.

Indian energy companies have been bested by their Chinese counterparts in bids for shares in Kazakh companies and energy fields, most recently in the giant Kashagan offshore field, among the largest in the world. Pipelines recently built by China are drawing increasing volumes of Kazakh and Turkmen energy eastward. Trade and investment trends show that Beijing’s economic presence is fast overshadowing Russia’s, to say nothing of India’s, in what has been a Russian sphere of influence since the nineteenth century.

India’s position is even weaker in the military sphere.

Unlike China and Russia, it lacks direct access to the region. Its quest for access to the Ayni air base in Tajikistan, its first attempt to gain a military toehold, ran into Russian opposition -- no matter that New Delhi had spent some $70 million to renovate it -- and so Ayni’s operational value to India as a combat-aircraft platform remains uncertain.

The United States will be the key partner in India’s coalition strategy because it has more power to bring to the grouping than any other country and because Sino-American competition seems likely to intensify.

Developments such as the 2005 U.S.-Indian nuclear deal -- which effectively marked Washington’s recognition of India as a nuclear-weapons state and an abandonment of its punitive anti-proliferation approach to New Delhi -- have produced predictions of an alliance in the making.

This forecast is faulty.

For one thing, it makes light of the political obstacles within India, which are a legacy of Cold War frictions and the abiding suspicion, even animus, toward the United States within India’s left wing and on the nationalist right. It also underestimates India’s apprehensions about the loss of autonomy that could follow an alliance with the United States, a sentiment that persists in a country that has prided itself on hewing to nonalignment.

These are among the reasons New Delhi has opted for a flexible, ambiguous position, one that’s unlikely to change under Modi, even as he expands the security cooperation with the United States that’s already in place.

India has forged multiple ties with the United States and Europe, but it also has continued high-level political exchanges with China and is seeking to increase Sino-Indian trade. (China has become India’s biggest trade partner.) Moreover, during Chinese president Xi Jinping’s September 2014 visit to India -- the first by a Chinese president in eight years -- the two leaders signed a deal providing for $20 billion in Chinese investment in India’s infrastructure, especially railways, over five years.

This was despite the controversy created by Chinese soldiers’ encroachment across the (still undemarcated) border, which coincided with Xi’s trip.

This multifaceted strategy is New Delhi’s likely course for the future. It gives India greater flexibility than would an alliance with the United States and provides two attendant advantages.

First, India can expand ties with the United States on all fronts, calculating that Beijing will be forced to take account of America’s likely reaction should China contemplate coercive action against it.

Second, India can improve its bargaining position against China, which will want to forestall the tightening of military bonds between India and the United States. A definitive alliance with America would deprive New Delhi of that strategic flexibility. As his predecessors did, Modi will continue to see China as India’s main security threat, but it’s simplistic to see him as a mere Sinophobe. He has expressed admiration on several occasions for China’s economic achievements and, while governing Gujarat, visited China and succeeded in attracting more Chinese investment than the chief minister of any other Indian state.

*   *   *   *   *

If China presents problems for India, then Pakistan remains an even more acute one. The nature of India’s Pakistan predicament has changed in three fundamental and unprecedented ways.

First, India’s conventional military advantage will be harder to use to good effect, because threats of war will be less credible now that the specter of nuclear escalation looms. This risk will be present in any war in which Pakistan suffers heavy losses, and will even constrain what India can do in response to another major terrorist attack that it traces to Pakistan.

Stated differently, the greater the conventional military advantage India acquires over Pakistan, the more dangerous it may be to employ it. That’s something that Modi will have to reckon with, even as his tough-guy image will put him under pressure to respond forcefully to Pakistan-based terrorism.

Second, Pakistan’s weakness is also starting to worry Indian strategists. Should Pakistan, which is beset by internal violence, fragment, India will face serious problems. Refugees will flow east. Jihadist groups will be able to operate with greater leeway in Kashmir, and even the rest of India, in the absence of a robust Pakistani state that can be pressured to hold them in harness. It’s not clear how such threats can be managed by utilizing India’s economic and military superiority.

Third, nuclear weapons, by raising the risks involved in waging conventional war, provide Pakistan more opportunities to support extremist Islamist groups whose targets now extend beyond Indian-controlled Kashmir and include, as the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament and the 2008 attack on Mumbai showed, the Indian heartland.

India has about as many Muslims as Pakistan does, and the repression of Indian Muslims, or a popular backlash against them following terrorist attacks inside India, could generate domestic violence and upheaval that alienate an important and substantial segment of Indian society while empowering India’s radical nationalist forces.

The result would be a vicious circle of violence that begets more violence and proves disastrous for India’s future.

It’s unclear whether Modi will be able to overcome these problems. Despite his smashing electoral victory, his success in office is anything but assured.

The BJP, while generally seen as more favorable to private enterprise than the Congress Party (notwithstanding that it was on the latter’s watch that many of India’s market-friendly economic reforms were adopted), still contains constituencies committed to economic nationalism. They view globalization as a recipe for deindustrialization, foreign domination over key economic sectors, and impoverishment for small businesses and farmers. Their views, though sidelined in the 2014 campaign, could regain influence if Modi’s economic policies falter or cause pain without producing visible gains for ordinary Indians.

India the superpower? Don’t bet on it.


CONCLUDED

[The author is Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of Political Science at the Colin Powell School of the City College of New York/City University of New York, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a senior research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace at Columbia University.]


[Courtesy: The National Interest]
October 26, 2014


 

Conversation about this article

1: Dr Birinder Singh Ahluwalia (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), October 26, 2014, 9:57 AM.

As the human race with more advanced thinking and analytical capacities than any other species inhabiting this beautiful planet, we can do much more and significantly different to create and live in a wonderful loving, caring and nourishing world than what we have currently created for ourselves and abide in. The details of certain interactions between many nations in this article (USA, Russia, India, Indonesia, Singapore, China, Veitnam, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Afganistan, Kyrgystan, Israel ...), besides being intriguing, are profoundly troubling. Why does humanity have to live in such a manner? Let us toil hard to leave this world a better place and in a better shape to live in for our children and grandchildren. I know humanity can do better and does not need to direct all of its energies and resources towards building another Noah's Ark ... while, at the same time, starting a flood! My best wishes remain with all world leaders in this regard including Mr. Modi to lead humanity into the light ... of dignity and responsible progress.

2: Harnam Singh (Ludhiana, Punjab), October 26, 2014, 10:07 AM.

A pox on all these people who go around buying and selling weapons of mass destruction while children starve at home!

3: Kaala Singh (Punjab), October 26, 2014, 3:07 PM.

India would do well not to confront China again otherwise it will meet the same fate as in 1962 and the US may not come to its rescue as it did in 1962! The people of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh still taunt India about how they were abandoned to the mercy of the invading Chinese. All countries in India's immediate neighbourhood - Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and even Nepal are under a strong Chinese influence as India has played dirty games will all of them. Pakistan and China operate in unison and their combined military power far exceeds India's. Lastly, it's the man behind the machine that really matters, the Chinese have even defeated the mighty US in the Korean war and also the Russians and forced them to secede territory. Talking of India's so-called military achievements, the lesser said the better. They have only been able to massacre unarmed and defenceless minorities until now, time will tell if they can achieve something with the billions of dollars worth of weapons they have bought. Last but not least, they have also lost passionate allies like the Sikhs, Gorkhas and Tamils who supported them in the past conflicts, as India has played mischief with all of them. It would be really interesting to see how they fare in the next conflict!

4: Roger Yarrow (New Jersey, USA), October 26, 2014, 3:35 PM.

Any military force is only as good as the persons that man it. India? If you take the Sikhs, Muslims and Christians out of the equation, you are left with a bunch of nitwits, if you ask me. All these arms purchases? They are merely vehicles for bribes and under-the-table deals which only help stockpile personal wealth for a select, crooked few; the actual arms land in the usual dust-heap. I should know -- I've had personal dealings with some of the players in the armament industry ...

5: Rup Singh (Canada), October 26, 2014, 5:20 PM.

The first priority of Indians should be not to elect to office those who have been convicted or have criminal cases pending.

6: Gurteg Singh (New York, USA), October 27, 2014, 8:56 AM.

The Hindu fascist party that now rules India is a dangerous combination of Hindu nationalism and fanaticism. The entire structure of India is being filled with RSS operatives whose stated goal is Hindu, Hindi, Hindustan. While all minorities are under attack, Sikhs should be worried the most since they are the completely vulnerable and leaderless. RSS chief Bhagwat has visited Punjab 5 times in less than 5 months. They have held large number of camps where armed training is being given to RSS parcharaks who are being deputed to infiltrate every nook and corner of rural Punjab to indoctrinate Sikhs into the Hindutava fold. Last week Advani specially visited Dera Radhasoami and stayed overnight to hold important consultations with the dera head. All cases against the Sirsa Dera thug Ram Rahim have been widhdrawn and Modi personally heaped praises on him during recent elections. Former MP Navjot Sidhu and his wife who is an MLA has built a temple in his home and openly meditates on "Shivling and does havans and pooja to please his Hindu masters who are now projecting him as the next chief minister of Punjab. Corrupt and double faced Badal who is at the mercy of the RSS has announced building of a Ram Tirath temple in Amritsar which will match or surpass the glory of Harmandir Sahib. Just yesterday in an unprecedented move, which could be a prelude to taking control of Sikh Gurdwaras, Prime Minister Modi himself will appoint the next commissioner of SGPC elections.

7: Kaala Singh (Punjab), October 27, 2014, 1:11 PM.

@6: Here is something about the "great" Sikh leadership of today. Badal family has huge commercial interests in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh and is at the mercy of BJP/RSS for survival. They are more worried about their business interests then anything else, so nothing can be expected of them. The same goes for the former royal family of Patiala. As for Sidhu, he is a clown who has made his fortune by "laughing" endlessly and without reason on Indian TV and is now performing Hindu rituals to please his masters. BJP/RSS is teaming up with the fake babas like the Radhasoami and Sacha Sauda to undermine the Sikhs. The RSS chief is definitely up to some mischief in Punjab and the RSS has opened a new office in Ludhiana. Sad but true, we are being encircled for complete subjugation.

8: Harvinder Singh (London, United Kingdom), October 27, 2014, 3:56 PM.

Both comments #6 and #7 lucidly report on how the current Sikh leadership has conclusively and abjectly failed. It is commonly stated and usually accepted that 'You get the leaders you deserve.' Our cherished Sikh Gurus were lions. Their followers were also lions. We had a lion leading an army of lions -- and an army of lions led by a lion will be victorious. If we behave like sheep, we will get sheepish leaders -- meek, weak quislings -- or wolfish ones who will lead us to the slaughter. If WE are like lions -- then we will get leaders who are lions. So, the thirty million Sikhs of India, what say you?

9: Sunny Grewal (Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada), October 27, 2014, 6:17 PM.

In regards to the few comments before mine addressing the state of the RSS and Hindu fascism in Punjab: I started thinking about Punjabi Hindus in the ugly brown khakis and stupid little hats brandishing latthis and trishuls and fake swords. I do not think I could imagine a funnier sight! They will never be lions, never. One does not undo a thousand years of cowardice and ignorance with a few marches and rallies.

10: Harvinder Singh (London, United Kingdom), October 27, 2014, 8:23 PM.

After reading comment #9, Sunny Grewal ji, I had a sudden vision of these Punjabi Hindu RSS types, soiling their khaki short-pants at the manifestation of another Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.

Comment on "The India Myth:
Part II"









To help us distinguish between comments submitted by individuals and those automatically entered by software robots, please complete the following.

Please note: your email address will not be shown on the site, this is for contact and follow-up purposes only. All information will be handled in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Sikhchic reserves the right to edit or remove content at any time.