📰 India-China dialogue to focus on three areas
Lieutenant-Generals to aim at return to pre-May 5 positions
•The first-ever talks between Indian and Chinese Lieutenant-Generals over the weekend to ease the tension on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) will focus on eastern Ladakh with the aim of moving back to the earlier positions, sources said on Thursday.
•“The focus of the talks will be on the Galwan area, Pangong Tso and Gogra. The agenda will focus on the recent use of force, getting back to the positions before May 5 and subsequent de-induction of troops by China,” defence sources said.
•The General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the Leh-headquartered 14 Corps will lead the Indian delegation at the talks to be held at the Chushul-Moldo border meeting point on the Chinese side. The delegation would also include officers of the rank of Major-General and Brigadier of that area and a translator.
•These are the first-ever talks at the level of Lieutenant-Generals, which shows how critical the discussions are, an official said.
•Pangong Tso is an important focus area as Chinese troops have taken positions in large numbers at the Finger 4 area. India holds one-third of the 135 km boomerang-shaped lake. India has always held areas in Finger 4, while it claims areas so far as Finger 8.
•Major scuffles have broken out in this area in the past and on May 5, which were acknowledged by the Army. There was at least one more major scuffle later in this area, the sources said.
•Galwan has never been an area of contention, and sources said this would be strongly conveyed to the Chinese delegation. India and China have identified 23 “disputed and sensitive” areas along the LAC and both Galwan in Ladakh and Naku La in Sikkim do not figure on the list.
•In the month-long stand-off at several areas along the LAC in Ladakh and Sikkim, Chinese troops have moved in large numbers into Indian territory at points in Pangong Tso, Galwan and Gogra in Ladakh and Naku La in Sikkim, besides the massive build-up on its side.
Women and rural workers showed the most improvement, says Periodic Labour Force Survey
•India’s unemployment rate improved from the 45-year high of 6.1% in 2017-18 to 5.8% in 2018-19, says the latest Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation on Thursday.
•The labour force participation rate also improved marginally, from 36.9% in 2017-18 to 37.5% in 2018-19. The labour force is defined as people who are working, or seeking work or available for work.
•The report shows the dip came across all categories, though women and rural workers showed the most improvement.
•Women’s unemployment fell from 5.7% to 5.2%, while male unemployment only fell from 6.2% to 6%. Urban unemployment was still at a high of 7.7% in 2018-19, a marginal drop from 7.8% in 2017-18, while rural unemployment fell from 5.3% to 5%.
📰 India-Australia meet strengthens ties
Modi, Morrison take relationship to a ‘Comprehensive Strategic Partnership’ at virtual summit
•India and Australia raised their relationship to a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” after a ‘virtual’ summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who concluded nine agreements including a Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (MLSA) and issued a joint declaration on a “Shared Vision for Maritime Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific.”
•The two countries also agreed to increase the frequency of meetings between the two Prime Ministers, and took the “2+2” format of bilateral meetings to the level of Foreign and Defence Ministers, who will meet to “discuss strategic issues” at least every two years. The two leaders, who are expected to meet in person at the extended G-7 summit to be held in the United States later this year, spoke for more than an hour over a video link, a first for a bilateral summit for India.
•“Both India and Australia share a vision of a free, open, inclusive and rules-based Indo-Pacific region to support the freedom of navigation, overflight and peaceful and cooperative use of the seas by adherence of all nations to international law including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and peaceful resolution of disputes rather than through unilateral or coercive actions,” said the statement issued in New Delhi and Canberra.
‘No talks on China’
•The summit came amidst tensions between India and China over the stand-off at the Line of Actual Control, and Australia-China tensions over trade issues and differences over handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Ministry of External Affairs officials said there had been “no discussion” on China, and the two leaders had not discussed including Australia for “Malabar” or quadrilateral maritime exercises that would include India, Australia, U.S. and Japan, something that China has opposed in the past.
•“Both sides agreed to continue to deepen and broaden defence cooperation by enhancing the scope and complexity of their military exercises and engagement activities to develop new ways to address shared security challenges,” the joint statement added, referring to the MLSA which will allow both militaries the reciprocal use of bases, humanitarian and disaster relief cooperation, port exercises, and passage exercises. Other agreements announced included a framework arrangement on cyber technology, an MoU on mining and processing critical and strategic minerals including Australian rare earth metals used for electronics, governance, vocational training and water management.
•Mr. Modi said the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (CSP) took on new meaning at the time of the global pandemic. “The world needs a coordinated and collaborative approach to come out of the economic and social side effects of this pandemic. Our government has decided to view this crisis as an opportunity,” he told Mr. Morrison.
•Mr. Morrison said the CSP would raise the level of “trust” required to improve the “trade and investment flows” between India and Australia.
📰 Disasters displace lakhs: study
50 lakh international displacements in India in 2019, says CSE report
•India had one in five of all internal displacements caused by disasters across the world in 2019, mostly caused by floods, cyclones and drought, according to the State of India’s Environment in Figures 2020 report released on Thursday. Also, 19 major extreme weather events claimed 1,357 lives last year.
•There were more than 50 lakh internal displacements in India last year, the highest in the world. This refers to the number of movements, not people, as individuals can be displaced several times, said research and advocacy organisation Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), which published the report.
•Flooding caused by the southwest monsoon led to 26 lakh displacements, while Cyclone Fani alone led to 18 lakh displacements, followed by cyclones Vayu and Bulbul. On the other hand, drought conditions in 19 States led to another 63,000 displacements.
•Apart from such forced migrations, many move for work. With migrant workers in the news due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, the report also broke down 2011 census data on migrant populations. There were over 45 crore migrants in the country at the time, with the vast majority migrating within their own State. In 2011, over 1.7 crore new migrants had moved for employment purposes, mostly from rural to urban areas.
Shrinking forests
•The compilation also offers a snapshot of data on forests, water, waste, air, land, wildlife and other natural resources. It notes that there were 747 more tigers in 2018 than in 2014. However, the net area meant for tiger conservation shrunk by 179 sq.km. Forest cover has shrunk in 38% of districts, while five out of 21 river basins are now in a state of absolute water scarcity.
•CSE also publishes the environment magazine Down to Earth . Its managing editor Richard Mahapatra, in a foreword to the report, said, “Each data is a story. It will raise your curiosity towards a development and will help you understand its impact better.”
📰 A chill in U.S.-China relations
A binary choice between the U.S. and China is likely to test India’s capacity to maintain strategic and decisional autonomy
•A slew of recent announcements on China by U.S. President Donald Trump is a clear indication that the competition between the U.S. and China is likely to sharpen in the post-COVID world. On May 29, the Trump administration said it would revoke Hong Kong’s special trade status under U.S. law. The administration also passed an order limiting the entry of certain Chinese graduate students and researchers who may have ties to the People’s Liberation Army. The U.S. President has also ordered financial regulators to closely examine Chinese firms listed in U.S. stock markets, and warned those that do not comply with U.S. laws could be delisted.
Complicit in China’s rise
•Americans have had a strange fascination for China ever since the early 1900s when Protestant missionaries decided that it was God’s work to bring salvation to the Chinese. Books like The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck and Red Star Over China by Edgar Snow in the 1930s romanticised the country. Even after the Chinese communists seized power, the Americans hoped to cohabit with Mao Zedong in a world under U.S. hegemony. The Chinese allowed them to believe this and extracted their price. U.S. President Richard Nixon gave China the international acceptability it craved in return for being admitted to Mao’s presence in 1972; President Jimmy Carter terminated diplomatic relations with Taiwan in order to normalise relations with China in 1978; President George H.W. Bush washed away the sins of Tiananmen in 1989 for ephemeral geopolitical gain; and Bill Clinton, who as a presidential candidate had criticised Bush for indulging the Chinese, proceeded as President to usher the country into the World Trade Organization at the expense of American business. All American administrations since the 1960s have been complicit in China’s rise in the unrealised hope that it will become a ‘responsible stakeholder’ under Pax Americana.
Disguising its real purpose
•The Chinese are hard-nosed and unsentimental about the U.S. They have always pursued America with a selfish purpose, albeit couched in high principle. They have spoken words that the Americans wanted to hear — anti-Soviet rhetoric during the Cold War and market principles thereafter — to disguise their real purpose of thwarting U.S. hegemony. Ever since Cold Warrior John Foster Dulles spoke in 1958 of weaning China and other “satellites” away from the Soviets through regime change, known as “peaceful evolution”, every Chinese leader from Chairman Mao to President Xi Jinping has been clear-eyed that the U.S. represents an existential threat to the continued supremacy of the communist regime. Mao put it best, when he told high-ranking leaders in November 1959, that the “U.S. is attempting to carry out its aggression and expansion with a much more deceptive tactic… In other words, it wants to keep its order and change our system.” (Memoirs, Chinese leader Bo Yibo). The collapse of the Soviet Union only reinforced this view and strengthened China’s resolve to resist by creating its own parallel universe. China is building an alternate trading system (the Belt and Road Initiative); a multilateral banking system under its control (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, New Development Bank); its own global positioning system (BeiDou); digital payment platforms (WeChat Pay and Alipay); a world-class digital network (Huawei 5G); cutting-edge technological processes in sunrise industries; and a modern military force. It is doing this under the noses of the Americans and some of it with the financial and technological resources of the West.
•Voices of caution have been few and far between, among them political scientist John Mearsheimer, who wrote in 2005 that the rise of China would not be peaceful at all, but the world chose to believe General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Hu Jintao’s assurances about “peaceful rise”. When satellite evidence showed that China was building military installations in the South China Sea, China’s Southeast Asian neighbours and the U.S. preferred to believe assurances to the contrary given by Mr. Xi on the lawns of the White House in 2015.
•It is only under Mr. Trump that the Americans are finally acknowledging the uneasy fact that the Chinese are not graven in their image. He has called China out on trade practices. He has called China out on 5G. It was Mr. Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy document that, perhaps for the first time, clubbed China along with Russia as a challenge to American power, influence and interests. His recent China-specific restrictions on trade and legal migration are, possibly, only the beginning of a serious re-adjustment.
•A full-spectrum debate on China is now raging across the U.S. Former White House Chief of Staff Steve Bannon declared that the U.S. is already at war with China. Others like diplomat Richard Haass and former president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, warn that a new Cold War will be a mistake. Scholar Julian Gewirtz, in his brilliant essay, ‘The Chinese Reassessment of Interdependence’, talks about a similar process under way in Beijing. Both sides are acutely aware how closely their economies are tied together: from farm to factory, the U.S. is heavily dependent on supply chains in China and the Chinese have been unable to break free of the dollar. If Mr. Trump’s wish is to disentangle China’s supply chains, Mr. Xi is equally determined to escape from the U.S. ‘chokehold’ on technology. To what extent the de-coupling is possible is yet to be determined, but one thing is inevitable, India will become part of the collateral damage.
The Hong Kong question
•Will Hong Kong become a game-changer in the post-COVID world? China’s decision to enact the new national security law for Hong Kong has been condemned in unison by the U.S. and its Western allies as an assault on human freedoms. Why is this significant? The points of divergence, even dispute, between them have so far been in the material realm. With Hong Kong, the U.S.-China rivalry may, possibly, be entering the ideological domain. For some time now there are reports about Chinese interference in the internal affairs of democracies. Countries in the West have tackled this individually, always mindful of not jeopardising their trade with China. Hong Kong may be different. It is not only a bastion for Western capitalism in the East, but more importantly the torch-bearer of Western democratic ideals. Think of it as a sort of Statue of Liberty; it holds aloft the torch of freedom and democracy for all those who pass through Hong Kong en route to China. This is an assault on beliefs, so to speak.
•This comes on the back of not unreasonable demands that China should come clean on its errors of omission in the early days of COVID-19, when greater transparency and quicker action might have prevented, or at least mitigated, the pandemic. In the months ahead, more information may become public, from sources inside China itself, about the shortcomings of the regime, that will further fuel a debate on the superiority of the Chinese Model as an alternative to democracy. Will this form the ideological underpinning for the birth of a new Cold War? That will depend on who wins in Washington in November; on whether profit will again trump politics in Europe; and on how skilfully the Wolf Warriors of China can manipulate global public opinion. The lines are beginning to be drawn between the Americans on the one side and China on the other. A binary choice is likely to test to the limit India’s capacity to maintain strategic and decisional autonomy.
📰 Swiss cheese and defence reforms
The holes in the three cheese slices comprising the defence set-up must align for a nation to be prepared militarily
•The Swiss cheese model is associated with accident investigation in an organisation or a system. A system consists of multiple domains or layers, each having some shortcomings. These layers are visualised in the model as slices of Swiss cheese, with the holes in them being the imperfections. Normally, weaknesses get nullified, other than when, at some point, the holes in every slice align to let a hazard pass through and cause an accident.
Three slices in defence set-up
•When applied to a nation’s defence preparedness, the Swiss cheese model, in its simplest form, works the reverse way. The slices represent the major constituents in a nation’s war-making potential, while the holes are pathways through which the domains interact. At the macro level, there are only three slices with holes in each. These must align to ensure that a nation’s defence posture is in tune with its political objectives; any mismatch may turn out to be detrimental to the nation’s aatma samman (self-respect) when the balloon goes up. In these days of the Aatmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan, a clinical analysis is necessary to obviate any missteps that may prove costly a few years or decades down the line.
•In the Indian defence set-up, the three slices are: one, the policymaking apparatus comprising the Department of Military Affairs (DMA) and Ministry of Defence (MoD); two, the defence research and development (R&D) establishment and domestic manufacturing industry; and three, the three services. When the MoD alone existed, a certain relationship between the three layers saw India prosecute four major wars since independence. The holes in the three slices were aligned to different degrees and hence the results were varied in each conflict; that the system required an overhaul would be an understatement.
•With technology progressing exponentially, a single service prosecution of war was no longer tenable, because the advent of smart munitions, computer processing, networking capabilities and the skyrocketing cost of equipment brought in the concept of parallel warfare. Synergised application of tools of national power became an imperative. Thus, it became essential for militaries to be joint to apply violence in an economical way — economical in terms of time, casualties, costs incurred, and political gains achieved. The setting up of the DMA and the creation of the post of Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) to achieve synergy are the most fundamental changes; as further modifications and tweaking take place in the way the services prepare to go to war, it is imperative that the transformation be thought through with clinical analysis, without any external, emotional, political or rhetorical pressure.
Access to the right equipment
•India’s security managers have to factor in the increasingly belligerent posture of the country’s two adversaries. Terrorist activities have not reduced in Jammu and Kashmir, ongoing incidents along the northern border with China do not foretell a peaceful future, and the China-Pakistan nexus can only be expected to get stronger and portentous. Such a security environment demands that capability accretion of the three services proceed unhindered. To elaborate, the Indian Air Force at a minimum requires 300 fighters to bolster its squadron strength; the Army needs guns of all types; and the Navy wants ships, helicopters, etc. The requirements are worth billions of dollars but with COVID-19-induced cuts in defence spending, and their diversion to the social sector, getting all of them is a joint mirage. Enter the well-meaning government diktat for buying indigenous only, but for that, in-house R&D and manufacturing entities have to play ball. Hindustan Aeronautics Limited can, at best, produce just eight Tejas fighters per year presently; the Army has had to import rifles due to the failure of the Defence Research and Development Organisation to produce them; and the Navy has earnest hopes that the hull designs that its internal R&D makes get the vital innards for going to war. So, the Swiss cheese slice representing indigenous R&D and a manufacturing supply chain that ensures quality war-fighting equipment, at the right time and in required quantities, is still some years away. Wars cannot be fought and won on well-meaning policy intentions and nationalist rhetoric; wars are won when war fighters have access to the right equipment to prosecute them.
Creating theatre commands
•The forthcoming reform of creating theatre commands is the most talked about result of jointness expected from the Swiss cheese slice in which lie the DMA and a restructured MoD. Doing so would be a shake-up of huge proportions as it strikes at the very foundation of the war-fighting structure of the services. The three-year deadline spoken about by the CDS must take into account the not-so-comfortable state of assets of each service which would need to be carved up for each theatre. The Chinese announced their ‘theaterisation’ concept in 2015; it is still work in progress. The U.S. had a bruising debate for decades before the Goldwater-Nichols Act came into force in 1986. Turf wars are not a patent of any one nation. New relationships take time to smooth out, and in the arena of defence policymaking, which is where the DMA and MoD lie, the element of time has a value of its own: any ramming through, just to meet a publicly declared timeline, could result in creating a not-so-optimal war-fighting organisation to our detriment.
•So, the three services that constitute the third Swiss cheese slice have to contend with the other two slices being in a state of flux for some time to come. It’s a no-brainer that this disruption requires level-headed non-parochial handling. The political, civil and military leadership must have their feet firmly on ground to ensure that the holes in their Swiss cheese continue to stay aligned; impractical timelines and pressures of public pronouncements must not be the drivers in such a fundamental overhaul of our defence apparatus. To paraphrase Deng Xiaoping, shun publicity and build capability first.
