The Peninsula Foundation

Category: Democracy & Governance

  • India’s war on the Mughal Empire

    India’s war on the Mughal Empire

    The profound legacies of the Mughal Empire, forged through a remarkable fusion of Persian and Sanskrit worlds, are now under siege from a mythical vision of India’s past.

    On every 15 August since 1947, India’s Independence Day, the country’s prime minister unintentionally acknowledges the Mughals’ political legacy by delivering a nationwide address from the parapets of the mightiest symbol of Mughal power – Delhi’s massive Red Fort, built in 1648.

    ‘As is true of autocracies everywhere’, wrote David Remnick last April, ‘this Administration demands a mystical view of an imagined past.’  Although Remnick was referring to Trump’s America, something of the same sort could be said of India today. Informed by Hindutva (Hindu-centric) ideals, the country’s governing BJP party imagines a Hindu ‘golden age’ abruptly cut short when Muslim outsiders invaded and occupied an imagined sacred realm, opening a long and dreary ‘dark age’ of anti-Hindu violence and tyranny. In 2014, India’s prime minister declared that India had experienced 1,200 years of ‘slavery’ (ghulami), referring to ten centuries of Muslim rule and two of the British Raj. But whereas the British, in this view, had the good sense to go home, Muslims never left the land they had presumably violated and plundered. To say the least, India’s history has become a political minefield.

    Today’s India would be unrecognisable without the imprint the Mughals had made, and continue to make, on its society and culture. It was they who, for the first time, unified most of South Asia politically.

    Between the early 16th and the mid-18th century, towards the end of those 12 centuries of alleged ‘slavery’, most of South Asia was dominated by the Mughal Empire, a dazzling polity that, governed by a dynasty of Muslims, was for a while the world’s richest and most powerful state. Although it declined precipitously during the century before its liquidation by Queen Victoria in 1858, today’s India would be unrecognisable without the imprint the Mughals had made, and continue to make, on its society and culture. It was they who, for the first time, unified most of South Asia politically. On every 15 August since 1947, India’s Independence Day, the country’s prime minister unintentionally acknowledges the Mughals’ political legacy by delivering a nationwide address from the parapets of the mightiest symbol of Mughal power – Delhi’s massive Red Fort, built in 1648. Much of modern India’s administrative and legal infrastructure was inherited from Mughal practices and procedures. The basis of India’s currency system today, the rupee, was standardised by the Mughals. Indian dress, architecture, languages, art, and speech are all permeated by Mughal practices and sensibilities. It’s hard to imagine Indian music without the sitar, the tabla, or the sarod. Almost any Indian restaurant, whether in India or beyond, will have its tandoori chicken, kebab, biryani, or shahi paneer. One can hardly utter a sentence in a north Indian language without using words borrowed from Persian, the Mughals’ official language. India’s most popular entertainment medium – Bollywood cinema – is saturated with dialogue and songs delivered in Urdu, a language that, rooted in the vernacular tongue of the Mughal court, diffused throughout India thanks to its association with imperial patronage and the prestige of the dynasty’s principal capital, Delhi.

    Yet, despite all this, and notwithstanding the prime minister’s national address at Delhi’s Red Fort, India’s government is engaged in a determined drive to erase the Mughals from public consciousness, to the extent possible. In recent years, it has severely curtailed or even abolished the teaching of Mughal history in all schools that follow the national curriculum. Coverage of the Mughals has been entirely eliminated in Class Seven (for students about 12 years old), a little of it appears in Class Eight, none at all in Classes Nine to 11, and a shortened version survives in Class 12. In 2017, a government tourism brochure omitted any mention of the Taj Mahal, the acme of Mughal architecture and one of the world’s most glorious treasures, completed in 1653. Lawyers in Agra, the monument’s site, have even petitioned the courts to have it declared a Hindu temple.

    Although such radical measures have failed to gain traction, the national government has made more subtle efforts to dissociate the monument from the Mughals and identify it with Hindu sensibilities. For example, authorities have eliminated the initial ‘a’ from the name of one of its surrounding gardens, so that what had been Aram Bagh, the ‘Garden of Tranquility’, is now Ram Bagh, the ‘Garden of Ram’, the popular Hindu deity. This is the same deity to which India’s current government recently dedicated an extravagant temple complex on the site of the Babri Masjid, the mosque in eastern India that the Mughal Empire’s founder had built in 1528, but which a mob of Hindu activists tore down brick by brick in 1992.

    All of this prompts two related questions: how did a rich, Persian-inflected Mughal culture sink such deep roots in today’s India in the first place? And why in recent years has the memory of that culture come under siege?

    Ever since the early 13th century, a series of dynastic houses, known collectively as the Delhi sultanate, had dominated the north Indian plain. The last of these houses, the ethnically Afghan Lodis, was dislodged by one of the most vivid figures in early modern history, Zahir al-Din Babur(1483-1530). In 1526, Babur led an army of mostly free-born Turkish retainers from his base in Kabul, down through the Khyber Pass and onto the wide Indo-Gangetic plain, thereby launching what would become the Mughal Empire.

    As was true for the Delhi sultans, the new polity’s success lay in controlling access to ancient trade routes connecting Delhi and Lahore with Kabul, Balkh, and Central Asian markets, such as Samarkand and Bukhara. For centuries, cotton and other Indian goods moved northwards along this route, while horses – more than a hundred thousand annually, by Babur’s day – moved southwards to markets across South Asia. War horses had long formed the basis of power for Indian states, together with native war elephants. But the larger and stronger horses preferred by Indian rulers had to be continually imported from abroad, especially from Central Asia’s vast, long-feathered grasslands where native herds roamed freely.

    Having established a fledgling kingdom centred on Delhi, Agra and Lahore, Babur bequeathed to his descendants a durable connection to the cosmopolitan world of Timurid Central Asia, a refined aesthetic sensibility, a love of the natural world reflected in his delightful memoir, the Baburnama, and a passion for gardens. Aiming to recreate in India the refreshing paradisiac spaces that he knew from his Central Asian homeland, Babur built gardens across his realm, a practice his descendants would continue, culminating in the Taj Mahal.

    Since he died only four years after reaching India, Babur’s new kingdom merely continued many institutions of the defeated Lodis, such as giving his most trusted retainers land assignments, from which they collected taxes and maintained specified numbers of cavalry for state use. It was Babur’s son Humayun (r. 1530-40, 1555-56) who took the first steps to deepen the roots of Mughal legitimacy in Indian soil, as when he married the daughter of an Indian Muslim landholder rather than a Central Asian Turk, a practice he encouraged his nobles to follow. More importantly, while seated in a raised pavilion (jharokha) that projected from his palace’s outer walls, he would greet the morning’s rising sun and show his face to the public, just as the sun showed itself to him. This followed an ancient practice of Indian rajas that subtly conflated the image of a seated monarch with the icon of a Brahmanical deity, before whom one pays respectful devotion through mutual eye contact (darshan).

    The Mughals became further Indianised during the long reign of Humayun’s son Akbar (r. 1556-1605). Whereas for three centuries the Delhi sultans had struggled to defeat the Rajput warrior clans that dominated north India’s politics, Akbar adopted the opposite policy of absorbing them into his empire as subordinate kings. Nearly all Rajput kings accepted this arrangement, for by doing so they could retain rulership over their ancestral lands while simultaneously receiving high-ranking positions in Akbar’s newly created ruling class – the imperial mansabdars. Their new status also allowed them to operate on an all-India political stage instead of remaining provincial notables. Moreover, they were granted religious freedom, including the right to build and patronise Hindu temples. Over time, there emerged a warrior ethos common to both Mughals and Rajputs that superseded religious identities, allowing the latter to understand Muslim warriors as fellow Rajputs, and even to equate Akbar himself with the deity Rama. For their part, Akbar and his successors, as the Rajputs’ sovereign overlords, acquired regular tribute payments from subordinate dynastic houses, the service of north India’s finest cavalry, access to the sea through Rajasthani trade routes leading to Gujarat’s lucrative markets, and the incorporation of Rajput princesses in the imperial harem.

    Moreover, since Rajput women could become legal wives of the emperor, from Akbar’s time onwards, an emperor’s child by a Rajput mother was eligible for the throne. As a result, Akbar’s son Jahangir (r. 1605-23) was half Rajput, as his mother was a Rajput princess. Jahangir, in turn, married seven daughters of Rajput rulers, one of whom was the mother of his imperial successor Shah Jahan, making the latter biologically three-quarters Rajput.

    This last point proved especially consequential. As more Rajput states submitted to Mughal overlordship, the imperial court swelled into a huge, multi-ethnic and women-centred world in which the Rajput element steadily gained influence over other ethnicities. Moreover, since Rajput women could become legal wives of the emperor, from Akbar’s time onwards, an emperor’s child by a Rajput mother was eligible for the throne. As a result, Akbar’s son Jahangir (r. 1605-23) was half Rajput, as his mother was a Rajput princess. Jahangir, in turn, married seven daughters of Rajput rulers, one of whom was the mother of his imperial successor Shah Jahan, making the latter biologically three-quarters Rajput.

    Inevitably, Rajput mothers in the imperial harem imparted their culture to their offspring, who were raised in the harem world. This allowed Indian sensibilities and values to seep deeply into Mughal imperial culture, reflected in imperial art, architecture, language, and cuisine. At the same time, the absorption of Rajput cavalry in the imperial system allowed native military practices to diffuse throughout the empire’s military culture.

    The Mughals engaged with Sanskrit literary traditions and welcomed Brahmin and Jain scholars to their courts. From the 1580s on, Akbar sponsored Persian translations of the great Sanskrit epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, effectively accommodating Indian thought to Mughal notions of statecraft.

    Like all authentically Indian emperors, moreover, the Mughals engaged with Sanskrit literary traditions and welcomed Brahmin and Jain scholars to their courts. From the 1580s on, Akbar sponsored Persian translations of the great Sanskrit epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, effectively accommodating Indian thought to Mughal notions of statecraft. Whereas the Sanskrit Mahabharata stressed cosmic and social order (dharma), its Persian translation stressed the proper virtues of the king. Similarly, the Sanskrit Ramayana was subtly refashioned into a meditation on Mughal sovereignty, while the epic’s hero, Rama, was associated with Akbar himself, as though the emperor were an avatar of Vishnu.

    Beginning with Akbar, the Mughals also fostered cultural fusions in the domains of medicine and astronomy.  By the mid-17th century, the Mughals’ Greco-Arab (Yunani) medical tradition had become thoroughly Indianised, as Indo-Persian scholars engaged with Indian (Ayurvedic) works on pharmacology and the use of native Indian plants.

    Similarly, from the late 16th century on, Persian-Sanskrit dictionaries allowed Sanskrit scholars to absorb Arabo-Persian ideas that had derived from ancient Greek understandings of the uniformity of nature and laws of motion. That knowledge, together with astronomical tables patronised by Shah Jahan that enabled the prediction of planetary movements, then spread among the Mughal-Rajput ruling class at large.

    The most telling indication of the public’s acceptance of the Mughals as authentically Indian is that in both the 18th and 19th centuries, when the empire faced existential threats from outside, native forces rallied around the Mughal emperor as the country’s sole legitimate sovereign. In 1739, the Persian warlord Nadir Shah invaded India, routed a much larger Mughal army, sacked Delhi, and marched back to Iran with enormous loot, including the symbolically charged Peacock Throne. At this moment, the Marathas, who for decades had fiercely resisted the imposition of Mughal hegemony over the Indian peninsula, realised that the Mughals represented the ultimate symbol of Indian sovereignty and must be preserved at all costs. The Marathas’ chief minister Baji Rao (1700-40) even proposed that all of north India’s political stakeholders form a confederation to support and defend the weakened Mughal dynasty from foreign invaders.

    Similarly, by the mid-19th century, the English East India Company had acquired de facto control over much of the subcontinent, while the reigning Mughal ruler, Bahadur II (r. 1837-57), had been reduced to a virtual prisoner in Delhi’s Red Fort, an emperor in name only. But in 1857, a rebellion broke out when a disaffected detachment of the Company’s own Indian troops massacred their English officers in the north Indian cantonment of Meerut. Seeking support for what they hoped would become an India-wide rebellion, the mutineers then galloped down to Delhi and enthusiastically rallied around a rather bewildered Bahadur II.  Notwithstanding his own and his empire’s decrepit condition, to the rebels, this feeble remnant of the house of Babur still represented India’s legitimate sovereign.

    Through the Mughals’ twilight years, spanning the two incidents mentioned above, one emperor was especially revered in public memory – ‘Alamgir (r. 1658-1707), widely known today by his princely name, Aurangzeb. Upon his death, large and reverential crowds watched his coffin move 75 miles across the Deccan plateau to Khuldabad, a saintly cemetery in present-day Maharashtra. There, the emperor’s body was placed, at his own request, in a humble gravesite open to the sky, quite unlike the imposing monuments built to glorify the memory of his dynastic predecessors (excepting Babur). That simple tomb soon became an object of intense popular devotion. For years, crowds thronged his gravesite, beseeching ‘Alamgir’s intercession with the unseen world, for his saintly charisma (baraka) was believed to cling to his gravesite, just as in life it had clung to his person. For, during his lifetime, the emperor was popularly known as ‘Alamgir zinda-pir, or ‘Alamgir, the living saint’, one whose invisible powers could work magic.

    ‘Alamgir’s status as a saintly monarch continued to grow after his death in 1707. Already in 1709, Bhimsen Saksena, a former imperial official, praised ‘Alamgir for his pious character and his ability to mobilise supernatural power in the empire’s cause. In 1730, another retired noble, Ishwar Das Nagar, credited ‘Alamgir for the exceptional peace, security, and justice that had characterised his long reign. Nagar’s account followed a spate of histories that praised the emperor as a dedicated, even heroic administrator, and his half-century reign as a ‘golden age’ of governmental efficiency.

    Further contributing to ‘Alamgir’s cult was the appearance of hundreds of images depicting the emperor engaged in administration, military activity, or religious devotion. Reflecting the extent of the ‘Alamgir cult, many of these post-1707 paintings were produced not at the imperial court but in north India’s Hindu courts, including those of the Mughals’ former enemies. No other Mughal emperor was so venerated, and for so long a period, as ‘Alamgir.

    Over time, however, Indians gradually came to see the Mughal period – and especially ‘Alamgir’s reign – in an increasingly negative light. As the East India Company attained control over South Asia in the late 18th century, British administrators, being unable as foreigners to deploy a nativist rationale to justify their rule, cited the efficiency, justice, peace and stability that they had brought to their Indian colony. And because the Mughals had immediately preceded the advent of Company rule, those rulers were necessarily construed as having been inefficient and unjust despots in a war-torn and unstable land. The colonial understanding of Muslims and Hindus as homogeneous and mutually antagonistic communities also facilitated aligning colonial policies with the old Roman strategy of divide et impera. More perniciously, the colonial view of the Mughals as alien ‘Mahomedans’ who had oppressed a mainly non-Muslim population reinforced the notion of a native Hindu ‘self’ and a non-native Muslim ‘other’ – constructions that would bear bitter fruit.

    Although originating from within the colonial regime, such ideas gradually percolated into the public domain as the 19th century progressed and Indians became increasingly absorbed in the Raj’s educational and administrative institutions. It was not until the 1880s, with the first stirrings of Indian nationalist sentiment, however, that such colonial tropes became widely politicised. As the possibility of an independent nation took root, Indian nationalists began to look to their own past for models that might inspire and mobilise mass support for their cause. The writing of history soon became a political endeavour, ultimately degenerating into a black-and-white morality play that clearly distinguished heroes from villains. In short, India’s precolonial past became a screen onto which many – though not all – Hindu nationalists projected the tropes of the Hindu self and the Muslim other.

    Between 1912 and 1924, one of India’s most esteemed historians, Jadunath Sarkar, published his five-volume History of Aurangzib, the princely name of ‘Alamgir, who would soon become the most controversial – and ultimately the most hated – ruler of the Mughal dynasty. Sarkar’s study was so detailed, so thoroughly researched, and so authoritative that, in the century following its publication, no other historian even attempted a thorough survey of ‘Alamgir’s reign.

    Importantly, Sarkar wrote against the backdrop of the Great War and a nationalist movement that was just then reaching a fever pitch. In 1905, Lord Curzon, the Viceroy for India, had partitioned Sarkar’s native province of Bengal in half, a cynical divide-and-rule measure that ‘awarded’ Bengali Muslims with their own Muslim-majority province of eastern Bengal. The very next year, there appeared the All-India Muslim League, a political party committed to protecting the interests of India’s Muslims. Meanwhile, the partition of Bengal had provoked a furious protest by Bengali Hindus, leading to India-wide boycotts against British-made goods. Ultimately, the government gave in to Hindu demands and, in 1911, annulled the partition, which only intensified fear and anxiety within India’s Muslim minority community.

    It was in this highly charged political atmosphere that Sarkar worked on his biography of ‘Alamgir. With each successive volume of his study, the emperor was portrayed in darker colours, as were Muslims generally. In the end, Sarkar blamed ‘Alamgir for destroying Hindu schools and temples, thereby depriving Hindus of the ‘light of knowledge’ and the ‘consolations of religion’, and for exposing Hindus to ‘constant public humiliation and political disabilities’. Writing amid the gathering agitation for an independent Indian nation, Sarkar maintained that ‘no fusion between the two classes [Hindus and Muslims] was possible’, adding that while a Muslim might feel that he was in India, he could not feel of India, and that ‘Alamgir ‘deliberately undid the beginnings of a national and rational policy which Akbar [had] set on foot.’

    Perhaps more than any other factor, Sarkar’s negative assessment of ‘Alamgir has shaped how millions have thought about that emperor’s place in Indian history. Since the publication of History of Aurangzib, professional historians have generally shied away from writing about the emperor, as though he were politically radioactive. This, in turn, opened up space in India’s popular culture for demagogues to demonise the Mughal emperor. For millions today, ‘Alamgir is the principal villain in a rogues’ gallery of premodern Indo-Muslim rulers, a bigoted fanatic who allegedly ruined the communal harmony established by Akbar and set India on a headlong course that, many believe, in 1947, culminated in the creation of a separate Muslim state, Pakistan. In today’s vast, anything-goes blogosphere, in social media posts, and in movie theatres, he has been reduced to a cardboard cutout, a grotesque caricature serving as a historical punching bag. A recent example is the film Chhaava, a Bollywood blockbuster that was released on February 14, 2025 and has since rocketed to superstar status. Among films in only their sixth week since release, already by late March, it had grossed the second-largest earnings in Indian cinema history.

    Loosely based on a Marathi novel of the same title, Chhaava purports to tell the story of a pivotal moment in ‘Alamgir’s 25-year campaign to conquer the undefeated states of the Deccan plateau. These included two venerable sultanates, Bijapur and Golkonda, and the newly formed Maratha kingdom, launched in 1674 by an intrepid chieftain and the Mughals’ arch-enemy, Shivaji (r. 1674-80). The film concerns the reign of Shivaji’s elder son and ruling successor, Sambhaji (r. 1680-89), his struggles with Mughal armies, and finally his capture, torture, and execution at ‘Alamgir’s order in 1689.

    The film is not subtle. With its non-stop violence, gratuitous blood and gore, overwrought plot, and black-and-white worldview, the movie turns the contest between Sambhaji and ‘Alamgir into a cartoonish spectacle, like a Marvel Comics struggle between Spiderman and Doctor Doom. Whereas Sambhaji single-handedly vanquishes an entire Mughal army, ‘Alamgir is pure, menacing evil. Mughal armies display over-the-top brutality toward civilians: innocent Indians are hanged from trees, women are sexually assaulted, a shepherdess is burned to death, and so forth.

    In reality, ‘Alamgir is not known to have plundered Indian villages or attacked civilians (unlike the Marathas themselves, whose raids in Bengal alone caused the deaths of some 400,000 civilians in the 1740s). On the other hand, contemporary sources record Sambhaji’s administrative mismanagement, his abandonment by leading Maratha officers inherited from his father reign, his weakness for alcohol and merry-making, and how, instead of resisting Mughal forces sent to capture him, he hid in a hole in his minister’s house, from which he was dragged by his long hair before being taken to ‘Alamgir.

    Historical accuracy is not Chhaava’s strength, nor its purpose. More important are its consequences. Within weeks of its release, the film whipped up public fury against ‘Alamgir and the Mughals. In one venue where the movie was showing, a viewer wearing medieval warrior attire rode into the theatre on horseback; in another, a viewer became so frenzied during the film’s protracted scene of Sambhaji’s torture that he leapt to the stage and began tearing the screen apart.

    Politicians swiftly joined the fray. In early March, a member of India’s ruling BJP party demanded that ‘Alamgir’s grave be removed from Maharashtra, the heartland of the Maratha kingdom. On 16 March, another party member went further, demanding that the emperor’s tomb be bulldozed. The next day, a riot broke out in Nagpur, headquarters for the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, India’s paramilitary Hindu supremacist organisation. It began when around 100 activists who supported bulldozing ‘Alamgir’s grave burned an effigy of the emperor. In response, a group of the city’s Muslims staged a counter-protest, culminating in violence, personal injuries, the destruction of property, and many arrests. The fevered demand for bulldozing ‘Alamgir’s final resting place, however, is deeply ironic. In 1707, Sambhaji’s son and eventual successor to the Maratha throne, Shahu, travelled 75 miles on foot to pay his pious respects to ‘Alamgir’s tomb.

    In the end, the furore over ‘Alamgir’s gravesite illustrates the temptation to adjust the historical past to conform to present-day political priorities. Indicating the Indian government’s support for Chhaava’s version of history, in late March, India’s governing party scheduled a special screening of the film in New Delhi’s Parliament building for the prime minister, Cabinet ministers, and members of parliament.

    Nor is it only the historical past that is being adjusted to accord with present-day imagination. So is territory. In 2015, the Indian government officially renamed New Delhi’s Aurangzeb Road – so-named when the British had established the city – after a former Indian president. Eight years later, the city of Aurangabad, which Prince Aurangzeb named for himself while governor of the Deccan in 1653, was renamed Sambhaji Nagar, honouring the man the emperor had executed in 1689.

    Such measures align with the government’s broader agenda to scrub from Indian maps place names associated with the Mughals or Islam and replace them with names bearing Hindu associations, or simply to Sanskritise place-names containing Arabic or Persian lexical elements. Examples include: Mustafabad to Saraswati Nagar (2016), Allahabad to Prayagraj (2018), Hoshangabad to Narmadapuram (2021), Ahmednagar to Ahilyanagar (2023), and Karimgunj to Sribhumi (2024). Many more such changes have been proposed – at least 14 in the state of Uttar Pradesh alone – but not yet officially authorised.

    It is said that the past is a foreign country. Truly, one can never fully enter the mindset of earlier generations. But if history is not carefully reconstructed using contemporary evidence and logical reasoning, and if it is not responsibly presented to the public, we risk forever living with a ‘mystical view of an imagined past’ with all its attendant dangers, as Remnick warns.

     

    This essay was published earlier on www.engelsbergideas.com

    Feature Image Credit: www.engelsbergideas.com

     

  • A P J Abdul Kalam – People’s President

    A P J Abdul Kalam – People’s President

    The country remembers President A P J Abdul Kalam, the people’s president on his 10th death anniversary. APJ Abdul Kalam captured the imagination of young people like no other president had before. He made us believe in ourselves and think the sky was never too high. He dreamed of things that never were and wondered why not? As a nation, we constantly come up short, but that did not deter Kalam. He made it his life mission to exhort the young to greatness. India’s young will miss him.
    July 27th is the death anniversary of former President APJ ABDUL KALAM. He died this day seven years ago. He died on his feet while delivering a lecture at the Indian Institute of Management, Shillong, exhorting young people to a new vision of India to the end.
    Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam had little in common with his predecessors. He did not have the educational attainments of Radhakrishnan, Zakir Hussain and Sharma, who were genuine PhDs from top-notch institutions. Kalam just had a science degree and an aeronautical engineering diploma from Madras University. He did not have the political training of Presidents like Rajendra Prasad, VV Giri and Pranab Mukherjee, whose political and constitutional understanding was tested in politically uncertain times. His entire professional lifetime was spent in the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).
    The DRDO has not exactly distinguished itself in any great way. The sum of its failures is far greater than its achievements. Some its failures are most notable. The Arjun main battle tank is still bumbling along. The nuclear submarine project, delivered decades too late, still faces uncertainty. The Light Combat Aircraft is just the late combat aircraft; so late that it will be obsolete when it enters service in the next decade. Even the 5.56 mm basic infantry combat weapon is a bit of a dud, requiring the frequent import of AK-47 rifles, much to the delight of Delhi’s arms agents.
    Kalam had earned a reputation as the father of India’s missile program. That might be so, but the offspring are nothing worth writing home about. Our missile program is so far behind times that even the North Koreans, a woebegone and desolate country where people still die of starvation, are ahead of us. Like the Pakistanis, even we would have been better off buying North Korean missiles like the Nodong (Pak name Ghauri), like the Pakistanis have. Many also credit Kalam as being the father of India’s nuclear weapons program. That program has, mercifully, had little to do with the DRDO and is almost entirely an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) show.
    There is much that is admirable about Kalam. He was honest to the core. He was erudite. He knew Sanskrit. He translated the Thirukural from Tamil into English. He was a nationalist with few peers. He only lived for India.
    What then was Kalam’s kamaal? Clearly, Kalam was no Werner von Braun, who designed the Nazi V-1 and V-2 rockets and then led America’s manned flight foray into space with Alan Shepard’s sub-orbital flight. He most certainly is no Kurchatkov, who pioneered the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons program. But he inspired by his sense of hope and ambition.
    Yet he is clearly among the best of the Presidents we have had, particularly in recent times. I had the pleasure of being invited by him a few times for one-on-one discussions on Bihar, a state with which he was particularly concerned. He publicly asked several times: “How can India move forward, leaving behind Bihar?” There is much that is admirable about Kalam. He was honest to the core. He was erudite. He knew Sanskrit. He translated the Thirukural from Tamil into English. He was a nationalist with few peers. He only lived for India.
    He was also a bachelor and so with no offspring like Zail Singh’s grandson, who shot pigeons in the Rashtrapati Bhavan, or R.Venkatraman’s NRI daughter, who plonked herself there to collect money for her NGO, or like Shankar Dayal Sharma’s grandson, Manu Sharma, who stands convicted of murdering Jessica Lal. The less said for Pratibha Patil, the better. Ramnath Kovind and Draupadi Murmu carry the burden of millennia of oppression and ostracism with quiet dignity, but little more.
    But for a modest man with mostly modest achievements, APJ Abdul Kalam captured the imagination of young people like no other president had before. He made us believe in ourselves and think the sky was never too high. He dreamed of things that never were and wondered why not? As a nation, we constantly come up short, but that did not deter Kalam. He made it his life mission to exhort the young to greatness. India’s young will miss him.
    Opinions expressed are the author’s own.
  • Study Abroad Surge: Why More Indian Students are Choosing Foreign Universities over Domestic Education

    Study Abroad Surge: Why More Indian Students are Choosing Foreign Universities over Domestic Education

    For decades, our education sector has been underfunded and has had restrictions; millions of brilliant minds have left the country to pursue quality education.

    Introduction

     The number of Indian students moving abroad for higher education has increased significantly in the past decade, and the number of students studying overseas reached over 1.3 million by 2024. The most popular countries are the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Germany, and each has different study options, worldwide recognition, and post-study work authorisations.

    This holds true despite the plethora of premier Indian institutions such as the IITs, IIMs, and AIIMS, as it mirrors the increased demand for international qualifications, load-bearing or multidisciplinary education, and better career opportunities. This migration has several implications. Economically, we export the skills and capacities of our family units by sending many overseas for education. Meanwhile, the information and remittances of returnees from the diaspora can have a beneficial impact on India’s economy.

    However, the ongoing “brain drain” could cripple India’s knowledge pool, particularly in sensitive areas like healthcare, research, and technology. This drain also pushes Indian institutions to upgrade infrastructure, curricula, and global competition. There is only so much national gain in overseas exposure; the actual long-term national problem is how to value, sell, and buy global aspirations and hold on to skilled talent at home.

    Quality, Opportunities and Global Exposure

    Indian students are now opting to study in foreign universities because of the quality of education, the global accreditation they provide, and the fact that they will be exposed to different cultures and lifestyles. Universities in countries like the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Germany offer top-class education, have state-of-the-art research facilities, and provide students with experience and learning that is more in line with what is required in the industries of today.

    Many Indian students go for niche fields such as artificial intelligence, space policy, and international law where Indian colleges and universities do not have much infrastructure or faculties to provide proper guidance. For example, in the case of medical students, many students opt for foreign countries such as Russia, Ukraine, and the Philippines to do MBBS as the cost is relatively less, there is less competition like the NEET exam in India, and the chances of getting a medical seat are much easier.

    Career Prospects and Immigration Incentives

    The global labour market, especially the STEM and healthcare sectors, attracts Indian students who further look to get a post-study visa, and many may eventually immigrate to a foreign country. Moreover, countries such as Canada and Australia are actively seeking skilled immigrants from other countries; thus, there is a high demand for foreign students. Students are attracted by the opportunities to earn high salaries, develop their careers, and gain international exposure, which are typically difficult to find in India due to a lack of research funds, local political classes, and a disconnect between studies and market requirements.

    In addition, many of the best Indian students may not even want to work in India because they have suffered through the Indian education system and do not wish to experience the same issues when working. Consequently, they prefer to work in foreign countries. Despite having world-class institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Indian Institute of Management (IIM), and the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Indian students prefer going abroad for higher education.

    National Education Policy (NEP)

    The National Education Policy 2020 is important for India, as it aims to make our education system global and imbibe an indigenous knowledge system that can benefit the local economy. India has taken different approaches by globalising through international collaborations, dual degree programs, and student exchanges, whereby Indian students can study abroad for a semester, and vice versa.

    The policy also discusses increasing research and innovation by increasing funding, providing more autonomy to educational institutions, and becoming more interdisciplinary. India is considered to be underdeveloped in these areas. However, it is unclear whether this is the right time to introduce these initiatives and whether it is sufficient. For decades, our education sector has been underfunded and has had restrictions; millions of brilliant minds have left the country to pursue quality education.

    The NEP aims to reverse this situation. But, unless the policy is implemented with a difference; unless the policy is implemented in all regions, taking into account all socio-economic groups, the reforms will be too late. Education should have been the fundamental building block of our nation post-independence, but we left it as a lesser priority. NEP 2020 may bring hope, but the change will depend on our political will and weeding out vested interests to provide quality education to every Indian, while also being global at the same time, which is important.

    Characteristics Traditional NEP 2020
    Structure Traditional Academic learning and Teaching New updated academic structure that differentiates curricular and extracurricular activities
    Phases 2 Phases 4 Phases
    Age Group Between 6 and 18 years Between 3 and 18 years
    Duration Complete 12 years of schooling 15 years (3 years for pre-schooling and 12 years for complete schooling)
    Focus To pass the knowledge from the previous generation to the next. Universal access to school education for all at all levels

    Comparison of traditional education policy and NEP 2020.

    Bringing back talent home

    India has provided many prestigious scholarships in academic education. They include the Inlaks Scholarship, Commonwealth Scholarship, Chevening Awards, Fulbright-Nehru Fellowships, and Rhodes Scholarship. This enables beneficiaries to study at the world’s best institutions, as well as imbibe leadership and global values.

    To encourage their return and contribution to nation-building, India can introduce a policy where recipients of such scholarships who come back and work in academia, research, or public service may get benefits such as fast-track jobs, grants for research, tax incentives, and the like. This helps not only in cutting down the brain drain but also in ensuring that the knowledge and expertise gained from the world’s best institutions are applied in the country.

    Conclusion

    The retention of talent and India’s education deficit can only be addressed by a strategy that aligns education with foreign policy. While the new education policy opens its door to internationalisation, India lacks a comprehensive agreement on the mobility of students between it and other countries like the EU. Furthermore, the Ministry of Education and the MEA are not in complete alignment.

    For instance, the UK and Australia use educational diplomacy to attract Indian students. Private universities overseas are preparing for the new wave of Indian students by attracting them with extensive marketing, making agreements with Indian agencies, and in the case of a couple of universities, setting up shops in Gujarat and Hyderabad to allow Indian students to acquire foreign degrees without leaving the country.

    Nonetheless, the Indian government’s reaction to the exodus has been more reactive than proactive. The administration has taken measures, including expanding scholarships, making international collaborations easier, and starting the Study in India program, but they are typically small scale. The rise in the outflow is an indication of the government’s failure to provide sufficient quality seats, research opportunities, and a curriculum that emphasises employment. If India does not make a significant investment and collaborates with other ministries, it risks becoming a feeder nation rather than a scientific hub. A proactive education-foreign policy interface is required to retain talent and deepen India’s global academic influence.

     

  • An Outside View of the US 2024 Presidential Election

    An Outside View of the US 2024 Presidential Election

    What was the voter turnout?

    The big change is that Harris, so far, has lost 9 million voters since 2020, while Trump has gained only 1.2 million. Harris’s count of lost votes will decline as the final votes come in, but the bigger story remains that Harris lost more votes than Trump gained.

    Voter turnout is NOT final, but it is likely between 153 and 156 million, down from 2020 but still the second-highest percentage turnout in 100 years. At a minimum, 107 million adults did not vote (88 million of whom are “eligible” to vote). Thus, 41% or more of the adult population and 36% of the eligible voters did not vote.

    Using the percentage of voter groups who voted for Trump is misleading.  The news remains that the significant change is the loss of Harris voters.

    What were the economic issues?

    Daily survival has become a serious problem for the bottom 65% due, specifically, to the inflation of grocery items and increasing mortgage payments and rent. Aggregate figures don’t reflect this reality.

    Workers’ actual standard of living was worse under Biden than under Trump.

    Real wages in the US remain lower than they were a half-century ago.

    Are there differences between Democrats and Republicans?

    US electoral parties are NOT like those in Europe – they have always been a different version of bourgeois electoral systems. Both major US parties are corporations, not parties with memberships, ideologies, and programs. They are designed like a marketplace of individuals preening for the Presidency, much like the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, but only held every four years.

    The Democrats turned over their foreign policy to the CNAS group of neo-con warmongers who will now be displaced.

    The Republicans are also not an actual party; Trump proved this, and what is next for Republicans post-Trump is also uncertain.

    What are the class shifts in the US?

    There is a new stratification of the bourgeoisie, with billionaires as a new factor. The increasingly dominant discourse amongst the capitalist class has the wherewithal to exert its influence.

    Fifty Billionaires put 2.5 billion US dollars, 45% of the 5.5 billion total, into the Presidential election. Of this, 1.6 billion went to the Republicans, 750 million to the Democrats, and the rest to both. The total spent on the election, in all races, was 16 billion, a sign of a kleptocracy, not a thriving democracy.

    washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2024/biggest-campaign-donors-election-2024

    There is a concerted effort by a section of libertarian tech billionaires, including Thiel and Musk, to have their hands directly on the levers of the state to control the race for global domination of AI. They believe that they alone should control the advances in the AI space for the world and that the initial next step is what is called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). These megalomaniacs believe this will begin the control of humans by machine intelligence and, perhaps, in their perverse dreams, the end of humanity.

    A growing number of lesser capitalists, such as multimillionaires, are now being lumped into the upper middle class and the wealthiest one-third of voters. One very important trend to note is that in the last fifteen years, the richest one-third have switched allegiance from Republicans to Democrats.

    Why did Harris lose 6 to 9 million votes?

    Workers were worse off, wages did not keep up, and inflation left a long, lingering impact.  Some of the youth vote left for economic reasons. Others were disillusioned and demoralised by the full-throated support of the genocidal war in Gaza by the Democratic Party. Muslims, while a small group, voted for a third party or Trump.

    Despite the fabrications of the Democratic Party corporate handlers, Harris was, in fact, inauthentic, unlikeable, shallow, and could not mask her history as a prosecutor who spent her life attacking the rights of the poor.

    Dissatisfaction with many Western elected parties is growing – Conservative in the UK, Centre Right in France, right-wing in Germany – all thrown out. Biden left a demoralised Democratic Party and left too late.

    Fear-mongering about fascism was core to the rhetoric of the Democrats, even though no one knows what the term means.  Some voters became annoyed at the harassment by the liberals to vote for them since they were the last rail of defence against fascism. Many people did not believe Trump was, in fact, a fascist, nor did they believe that every one of their family members who listened to Trump was a fascist.

    Apathy is growing and remains a real issue.

    Probably over a million stayed at home as they could not stomach the Democratic Party’s gleeful support for Genocide. Trump’s victory in Michigan was certainly due to this issue.

    Harris played to and fawned over the war criminal Dick Cheney, the architect of the invasion of Iraq and a historic right-wing enemy of the Democrats.  We don’t know how many voters left in disgust. 

    Why did Trump gain votes?

    Trump took advantage of working-class dissatisfaction. Even so, he only gained less than 2 million total new votes. There is no evidence of a widescale shift of working-class votes to the Republicans in this election.

    Working-class women voted for local candidates supporting abortion but voted for Trump for economic and other reasons. Others voted on local issues important to them and then voted for Trump as they felt that despite his unsavoury behaviours, he was more committed to “shaking things up”.

    The billionaire class made sure that Trump had ample funds. Elon Musk’s America Pac spent $118 million handling field operations for the Trump campaign, an unusual role for a super PAC.

    From 2008 to 2020, there was a decline in the percentage of voters supporting the Democrats amongst the bottom 1/3 of income earners in the US.

    ft.com/content/6de668c7-64e9-4196-b2c5-9ceca966fe3f

     

    Too little data is available now to provide a detailed answer about the relatively insignificant number of voters who voted Democrat in 2020 and Republican in 2024.

    What is the assessment of the new cabinet positions announced?

    Trump’s sixteen appointments to date are all vocal supporters of genocide in Palestine. In the United States, there are both Jewish and Christian Zionists. Trump has appointed several Christian Zionists. The majority are China hawks.

    When analysed from a US statecraft point of view, many are extremely underwhelming candidates. These include:

    • Secretary of State: Senator Marco Rubio: He is a rigid, fierce anti-communist.
    • Secretary of Defense: Pete Hegseth, an Army National Guard veteran and Fox News host: He is divisive and has no high-level military experience.
    • Attorney General: Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida: He has no experience in the Department of Justice and has had past legal controversies.
    • Director of National Intelligence: Former Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. She has no intelligence background but is perhaps less rigid on international issues, a non-interventionist, and has a friendship with Indian Prime Minister Modi.
    • Ambassador to the United Nations: Representative Elise Stefanik of New York. She is an extreme Zionist, has near zero diplomatic experience, and has focused only on domestic issues, but is loyal to Trump.
    • Secretary of Homeland Security: South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. She lacks national government experience, and her actions have veered toward radical anti-federalism.

    Due to some of these appointments, US stature in international affairs will likely diminish.

    Trump has brilliantly dismissed the extremely dangerous Pompeo. He has made it clear that few from the first inner group of his cabinet and advisors will return. The world will not miss them. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that Trump has the capacity to lead any group successfully for even an intermediate period. He is known for turning on people and turning them against each other.

    How do we interpret the vote?

    A significant section of the working class understandably abandoned the Democrats in this election.

    There is not a major right-wing shift in US attitudes, but there is a real base for the right.

    The Democratic Party elite is completely divorced from the masses. Parading the loyal royal cultural elite like Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Bruce Springsteen reeked of wealth, opulence, and tone-deafness.

    Apathy should not be understated. At least 88 million didn’t vote, with a further 19 million disenfranchised.

    Third parties are structurally prevented from winning even a single state in a presidential election. They are structurally locked out of Congress. The United States has locked in a two-party system. Most voters have been captured by this belief.

    Small exceptions to this are wealthy candidates like Ross Perot in 1992 and Robert Kennedy Junior.

    There was huge intimidation at the end against supporters of third-party candidates, which depressed their vote even more than usual. In this just-held election, the Party for Liberation and Socialism Candidate Claudia Cruz received 134,348 votes so far.  Claudia Cruz’s 134 thousand votes is the highest number of votes for an explicit communist in American history. It exceeds the CPUSA’s William Z. Foster’s previous record of 120,000 votes in 1932. The 1932 vote was a higher percentage of the population as the US was smaller in 1932. These facts are a reminder of the long-term campaign of anti-communism within the US.

    Capital is clearly happy with Trump’s win, as evidenced by the November 6th celebration rally on Wall Street. They disagree with the liberal hype that he will bring an end to American society.

    Despite the lies of the liberals, the facts are that Trump formally initiated the New Cold War on China. His inner team are more fiercely anti-China than the Democrats, who are more bound to the Ukraine War.

    Trump has fewer restraints, controlling the Senate, House, Supreme Court, and Presidency.

    He could well launch a Third World War.  It would be a mistake to underestimate this danger.

    Other things people outside the US should know

    There is a tendency in some parts of the Global South to have a simplistic and false analysis that any enemy of the liberals is a friend of the Global South. This is a severely flawed argument. The imperialist far-right is not a good guy, a cultural conservative who wants to protect families and cultural life. Inside the US, conservative culture is tightly tied to slavery and genocide. It is misogynistic, racist, militaristic, and reactionary. We should not confuse the histories of Iran, Turkey, India, Ghana, and China with those of the US.

    Welcoming divisions in the enemy camp is often entirely correct. But Communists, socialists, and true democrats do not support reactionary views and always side with the people, not the far-right ideologues.

    There is also great confusion about MAGA and MAGA-Communism. First, Make America Great Again (MAGA) means returning (the second “A” in MAGA) to the full glory of the US industrial past. But what was that past? It was, in fact, the total economic, political, military, and racial subordination of the peoples of the Global South states to the US. It was the century of humiliation in China. This is not a return to be welcomed by history. MAGA is a profoundly reactionary, unacceptable outcome and concept.

    One of the greatest poets in the United States is Langston Hughes. One of his poems was called “Let America Be America Again.” But this was a parody as the actual statement was made in the refrain, “America Never Was America to Me”. The meaning of this poem was the false portrayal of the United States as ever having a glorious past, which was never true for the slaves or the working class.

    Second, there are a handful of personalities in the US who have taken the great word communism and sullied it with the idea of returning to this falsely idealised America. The old “strong” American industry was built on the backs of low-paid workers in the mines in Africa and elsewhere.

    Desiring a real communist path is a good thing. But tying it to an imperialist past, a past of violence, with reactionary views is the opposite path taken by Lenin, Mao, and Fidel.

    There is also a dangerous tendency to simply reject the liberal concepts of identity politics and embrace the values of far-right conservatism while lacking scientific thinking about the plight of women and other vulnerable groups.

    The CPC led the country in the first national Soviets in Ruijin in the struggle to abolish the prejudices of feudalism and emancipate women and national minorities in China. However, these rights have not yet been achieved in many countries, as there has been no communist revolution.

    True Communism is the path to advancing the overall interests of the working class in all countries, including women, national minorities, and other vulnerable groups.

    The Republican voter base in class-terms is the lower-middle class, which is overwhelmingly white, suburban, rural. It is amplified by fundamentalist Christians and the Republican regional strongholds.

    There are six “ideological” trends, all extreme right, in the Republican camp:

    1. Populist demagogues
    2. Extreme Libertarians
    3. Fanatical Christian-Zionists
    4. Virulent anti-communists
    5. Dangerous AI-obsessed Tech billionaires
    6. Complex conservatives

    The US economy will continue to perform poorly but better than the rest of the West. It will continue to use its dollar hegemony, reinforced with sanctions, to remove hundreds of billions from the Global South and to force Europe, Australia, and Japan to subordinate their economic interests to those of the US.

    The actual US budget for the military was $1.8 trillion last year. Significant cuts seem improbable.

    There is now a permanent Black upper middle class that produces a Black mis-leadership. This mis-leadership group has created two decades of Black war criminals and apologists for empire. The rise of this mis-leadership gang, however, should not overshadow the fact that most blacks remain oppressed and exploited.

    The anti-immigrant politics in the U.S. is directed primarily at undocumented immigrants from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

    But there is a false belief that all immigrants in the US are working class and progressive – it is just not true. An important stratum of non-working-class immigrants in the US are amongst the most virulent defenders of US atrocities in the world.

    There is a belief that there is a conspiracy of some secret group of members of the military and government that decide most things, which they call the Deep State. This is a lazy concept. It denies that all states have a class character and permanent army. In the US, it has been estimated that over 5 million people have security clearance, and many have near-lifetime employment. There is no need for conspiracy theories. The US does have an advanced state that functions on behalf of capital. This state manages the affairs of the often-competing large capitalists and is now increasingly primarily favouring the billionaires amongst the capitalist class. Thus, a better way to see the US State is through the lens of Mao, Lenin, and Marx and not as some inexplicable conspiracy.

    There is a special relationship between the US and Israel, both extreme white-settler states. In the US alone, over 30 House, Senate, and cabinet members are dual citizens of the US and Israel. Israel does not control the US, BUT they are socially a duopoly.

    They are the CORE of Ring 1 of the Global North, the core of the imperialist bloc, along with the UK, Canada, and Australia.

    The long-term trend is clear – bourgeois liberal democracy is failing globally.

    What is the domestic consequence of the vote?

    Since 2016, the very top of the capitalist class has led and mobilised a neo-fascist movement. Increasing levels of force and lawfare will now be used internally inside the US.

    Trump himself is not a fascist per se. He is super-egoistic and believes he can act with near absolute impunity.

    But he is riding on, and a beneficiary of changing class phenomena.

    Fascism is not so much an ideology as a structural class relationship in which the lower-middle class, which has a revanchist ideology, is mobilized by big capital during a period of internal and external disequilibrium.

    The New York Times and Financial Times use the word fascism as a scare tactic to maintain their role and influence in the state. Neo-fascism is a more precise word than fascism at this moment to describe the changes in the US.

    Historically, there are a few things that are necessary to define a fully fascist state in imperialist countries. One is that the state uses methods of control it would typically use only for its colonies and neo-colonies, i.e., extreme widespread violence and force.  The other is that they resort to the overthrow of the constitution.

    The Constitution is unlikely to be changed directly. However, the original Constitution, an eighteenth-century document, has many gaps that can be exploited.

    Radical and extreme legal changes are thus probable. There will be a reversal of 70 years of civil rights.

    Overall, it remains to be seen how far the capitalist class is willing to go.

    State capacity in many areas other than defence and border police will be diminished. Trump 1 saw big cuts in the State Department.  Even with Rubio present, it is unlikely to be refunded to its old level.

    The Billionaires will play a direct role in key tasks, from meeting Zelensky to chain-sawing government departments. Some departments, like Agriculture, Education, and Health and Human Services, are, in fact, decrepit, corrupt and dysfunctional. But a billionaire-led revamp will result in an unsavoury privatized equally dysfunctional capitalist state bureaucracy.

    Trump is committed to a long-term isolationist strategy.  But the US has over 900 military bases abroad. It has fully supported the expansion of Israel’s War in the Middle East, building up its military in the process.

    Trump will not block the infrastructure projects that were voted in during Biden. The US recognises that its lost manufacturing capacity is a strategic deficit in military supply.

    The brunt of the cutbacks will still increase the suffering of the 150 million working-class poor in the US.

    The Left will be even more subjected to severe repression. Rubio is salivating.

    What are the possible international consequences?

    Despite the recent Zelensky meeting, the US will probably push a cease-fire and curtail the Ukraine war. Crimea is off the table. The current military lines will be the starting point. Doing this could reduce the immediate danger of a nuclear war. In April of this year, both Vance and Rubio voted against the 95-billion-dollar US military aid bill for Ukraine.

    With Israel, there are three main possibilities:

    1. Trump curtails Netanyahu and calls for an end to Lebanon, no regime change in Iran, and an unjust peace agreement.
    2. He falls prey to the Christian Zionists and continues Genocide against Palestine.
    3. He goes against his no-war statements and approves an escalation with Iran.

    We don’t know, but option one is not impossible. Trump wants a deal with Saudi Arabia.

    A few days ago, MBS was forced to call it a Genocide, a rare statement from a long-term US ally.

    With China, there are also three possibilities:

    1. Trump says tariffs are his favourite word in the English language and wants to increase them and eliminate domestic taxes.
    2. Rubio and other super China-hating cabinet members push him to escalate.
    3. US national security elements and US tech moguls like Peter Thiel push US military preparations.

    On the question of Taiwan, some in the Global South fall for the liberal messaging soundbite in the West that Trump, the dealmaker, will sell Taiwan for a fee. This would bring strong resistance from the US military and large sections of the anti-communist members of his core group. This is a very unlikely case.

    The world should not be confused if Trump does initiate a ceasefire in Ukraine and pressures Netanyahu to curtail the Genocide. Neither of these actions reverses the long-term trend of the US towards militarization against China. Nothing Trump does will turn around anaemic long-term US economic growth.

    China is still on target to surpass the US in current exchange rate GDP within 10 years.

    The US state is still on a long-term course to use its self-perceived military supremacy to destroy what it perceives as the Eurasian threat. It remains committed to dismembering the Russian Federation and overthrowing the CPC. The imperialists believe this is the path to a thousand-year reign of unilateral power.

    The US will continue, unabated, its strategy of seeking nuclear primacy and what is called the “counterforce” strategy, which plans on the use of a first strike or launch of nuclear weapons. Evidence of these dangerous changes in US military strategy can be seen by their unilateral withdrawal from the following treaties:

    • 2002 (Bush): the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty.
    • 2019 (Trump): the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty
    • 2020 (Trump): the Open Skies treaty

    Tucker Carlson has Trump’s ear for now and is not a proponent of military conflict.

    In 2023, a four-star general, Minihan, claimed that the US would be in a hot war with China in 2025. These are not accidental statements.

    It is unknown if Rubio, some of the far-right libertarians, and CNAS-influenced military forces can overcome Trump’s dislike of military conflict.

    The US is likely to increase its attention on Latin America and increase support for the far right like Bolsonaro and Milei.

    Large-scale aid to Africa is not likely to happen. The Angola railway project is now improbable.

    Final comments

    The US state is still on a long-term course to use its self-perceived military supremacy to destroy the Eurasian threat.

    The US has adopted counterforce and nuclear supremacy as its prime military strategy.

    The threat of war has not changed due to a new administration. Only, perhaps, the speed at which it will be accomplished.

    The economic and political assaults against the US working class will escalate, especially against progressives.

    The state will continue to tighten its grip on the so-called bourgeois democratic freedoms by further restricting voting rights, civil rights, and freedom of speech.

     

    This article was published earlier on MRonline 
    The article is republished underCreative Commons  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

    Creative Commons License

     

     

  • Why Nations succeed or fail: a Nobel cause

    Why Nations succeed or fail: a Nobel cause

    Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A Robinson have been awarded the Nobel (really the Riksbank prize) in economics “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” Daron Acemoglu is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Simon Johnson is a professor at the same university. And James Robinson is a professor at the University of Chicago.

    Here is what the Nobel judges say was the reason for winning:

    Today, the richest 20 percent of countries are around 30 times wealthier than the poorest 20 percent of countries. The income gaps across countries have been highly persistent over the past 75 years.39 The available data also show that between-country disparities in income have grown over the past 200 years. Why are the income differences across countries so large and so persistent?

    This year’s Laureates have pioneered a new approach to providing credible, quantitative answers to this crucial question for humanity. By empirically examining the impact and persistence of colonial strategies on subsequent economic development, they have identified historical roots for the extractive institutional environments that characterize many low-income countries. Their emphasis on using natural experiments and historical data has initiated a new research tradition that continues to help uncover the historical drivers of prosperity, or lack thereof.

    Their research centers on the idea that political institutions fundamentally shape the wealth of nations. But what shapes these institutions? By integrating existing political science theories on democratic reform into a game-theoretic framework, Acemoglu and Robinson developed a dynamic model in which the ruling elite make strategic decisions about political institutions—particularly whether to extend the electoral franchise—in response to periodic threats. This framework is now standard for analyzing political institutional reform and has significantly impacted the research literature. And evidence is mounting in support of one of the model’s core implications: more inclusive governments promote economic development.

    Over the years (or is it decades?) I have posted on the work of various Nobel winners in economics.

    What I have found is that, whatever the quality of the winner’s work, he or she (occasionally) usually got the prize for their worst piece of research, namely work that confirmed the mainstream view of the economic world, while not actually taking us further into understanding its contradictions.

    This conclusion I think applies to the latest winners. The work for which they received the $1m prize is for research that purports to show that those countries that achieve prosperity and end poverty are those that adopt ‘democracy’ (and by that is meant Western-style liberal democracy where people can speak out (mostly), can vote for officials every so often and expect the law to protect their lives and property (hopefully). Societies that are controlled by elites without any democratic accountability are ‘extractive’ of resources, do not respect property and value and so over time do not prosper. In a series of papers applying some empirical analysis (ie correlating democracy (as defined) with levels of prosperity), the Nobel winners claim to show this.

    Indeed, the Nobel winners argue that colonisation of the Global South in the 18th and 19thcenturies could be ‘inclusive’ and so turn the likes of North America into prosperous nations (forgetting the indigenous population) or ‘extractive’ and so keep countries in dire poverty (Africa). It all depends. Such is the theory.

    This sort of economics is what is called institutional, namely that it is not so much the blind forces of the market and capital accumulation that drives growth (and inequalities), but the decisions and structures set up by humans. Supporting this model, the winners assert that revolutions precede economic changes and not that economic changes (or the lack thereof before a new economic environment) precede revolutions.

    Two points follow from this. First, if growth and prosperity go hand in hand with ‘democracy’ and the likes of the Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam are considered to have elites that are ‘extractive’ or undemocratic, how do our Nobellists explain their undoubted economic performance? Apparently, it is explained by the fact they started out poor and had a lot of ‘catching up’ to do, but soon their extractive character will catch up with them and China’s hyper-growth will run out of steam. Perhaps now?

    Second, is it correct to say that revolutions or political reforms are necessary to set things on the path to prosperity? Well, there may be some truth in that: would Russia in the early 20thcentury be where it is today without the 1917 revolution or China be where it is in 2024 without the revolution of 1949? But our Nobellists do not present us with those examples: theirs are getting the vote in Britain in the 19th century or independence for the American colonies in the 1770s.

    But surely, the state of the economy, the way it functions, the investment and productivity of the workforce also have an effect? The emergence of capitalism and the industrial revolution in Britain preceded the move to universal suffrage. The English Civil War of the 1640s laid the political basis for the hegemony of the capitalist class in Britain, but it was the expansion of trade (including in slaves) and colonisation in the following century that took the economy forward.

    The irony of this award is that the best work of Acemoglu and Johnson has come much more recently than in the past works that the Nobel judges have focused on. Only last year, the authors published Power and Progress , where they pose the contradiction in modern economies between technology driving up the productivity of labour but also with the likelihood of increased inequality and poverty. Of course, their policy solutions do not touch on the question of a change in property relations, except to call for a greater balance between capital and labour.

    What you can say in favour of this year’s winners is that at least their research is about trying to understand the world and its development, instead of some arcane theorem of equilibrium in markets that many past winners have been honoured for. It’s just that their theory of ‘catching up’ is vague (or ‘contingent’ as they put it) and unconvincing.

    I think we have a much better and more convincing explanation of the processes of catching up (or not) from the recent book by Brazilian Marxist economists Adalmir Antonio Marquetti, Alessandro Miebach and Henrique Morrone who have produced an important and insightful book on global capitalist development, with an innovative new way of measuring the progress for the majority of humanity in the so-called Global South in ‘catching up’ on living standards with the ‘Global North’. This book deals with all the things that the Nobel winners ignore: productivity, capital accumulation, unequal exchange, exploitation—as well as the key institutional factor of who controls the surplus.

     

  • “And Now to some serious Governance”

    “And Now to some serious Governance”

    A time comes for each leader and government to rise above pettiness, discarding ill will and hatred towards all. For the BJP, now uniquely in its third term, this is the time to show the nation that it is a party with a difference. For the opposition equally, this is the time to cooperate with the government on critical issues impacting the country.  

     

    Since my retirement from active service, I have avoided politics and political writings like the plague, but the avoidable happenings of the past few months have caused me, like am sanguine would have to millions of our countrymen, pain and a sense of despair.

    India has conducted over 18   general elections to its Parliament since 1952 with a lot of fury and vibrancy, but the Lok Sabha 2024 general elections were indeed an example of abysmally low-level politics transcending our better senses.

            How the world’s largest democracy indulged in its Lok Sabha 2024 elections was hardly complimenting to it considering the unquestionable fact that among the emerging nations in the world, call it from the Global South, the conduct of our elections showed some among those participating in poor light. Between competing political parties, enlightened debates and mutual civility were sadly lacking.   India has conducted over 18   general elections to its Parliament since 1952 with a lot of fury and vibrancy, but the Lok Sabha 2024 general elections were indeed an example of abysmally low-level politics transcending our better senses. India, which carries a fair amount of moral authority and is considered an example of a true and vibrant democracy, cannot let its hallowed image be sullied attributable to the selfish electoral games of some of its political leaders. The party in power at the Centre, the principal Opposition party and all those regional parties at the helm in the states have to display adequate maturity and a modicum of propriety and civility towards each other and not politicize each and every aspect of governance or national issues impacting India. The opposition, as it shows the mirror to the government on critical issues of governance, must not criticise each and every act of the government as a matter of routine.

             With the outcome of the general elections now done and dusted and the previous BJP government back in power, albeit with a clear reduction in its seats tally from 303 down to 240, it must get down to the exacting business of good governance from the Centre. That the same government, with its experience of the last ten continuous years in power, fielding more or less the same faces in the Cabinet in critical ministries and importantly serviced by the same bureaucrats should have, relatively speaking, not such an arduous task in governance. However, the thrust for fair, equitable, and sensitive handling of all critical matters across the nation has to come from the top political leadership. All our states must never feel discrimination by the Centre, especially in financial allocations urgently required for developmental works and disaster management. Additionally, the new government must take stern measures to keep rising inflation and unnecessary governmental expenditure under check before the economy takes a severe nose-dive.

             The Modi government, with the continuous experience of the last ten years, will have more than a good idea of the systemic improvements required and about areas needing additional financial resources and effort. It is unnecessary to worry too much about criticisms from the opposition but to carry on regardless in developmental works, without fear or favour, and with impartiality towards all the states in the true spirit of federalism. A time comes for each leader and government to rise above pettiness, discarding ill will and hatred towards all. For the BJP, now uniquely in its third term, this is the time to show the nation that it is a party with a difference. For the opposition equally, this is the time to cooperate with the government on critical issues impacting the country.

             New Delhi’s hands will be full of the nation’s diverse and formidable challenges, requiring attention and effectiveness. On the foreign policy front, India will have to walk the tightrope of maintaining strategic autonomy and sustaining its good relations with both the US and Russia. However, as it determinedly confronts an overly assertive China, India needs to use its economic clout and sophisticated diplomacy to get its South Asian neighbourhood closer to it and each other, avoiding the debt trap diplomacy and financial machinations of China.

    The number of terror-related incidents in J&K has gone up substantially in the last three months, and Pakistan will have to be kinetically chastened.

          India must, at the appropriate level, convey to China that their confrontationist attitude towards us will be harmful to the Chinese, too and may propel India to rethink its existing Tibet policy. Nevertheless, India must maintain the utmost vigil along the 3485 km Line of Actual Control/ IB, which it shares with  China. Meanwhile, Pakistan once again needs to be cautioned against stepping up terror activities in J&K  or elsewhere in the Indian hinterland. India is in full knowledge of Pakistan’s many fault lines. Still, it has refrained from exploiting these, and Pakistan must also cooperate in ensuring a peaceful and prosperous South Asian neighbourhood independent of China’s wily stratagems. The number of terror-related incidents in J&K has gone up substantially in the last three months, and Pakistan will have to be kinetically chastened.

    Meanwhile, India’s preparations to successfully improve its security capabilities to confront a two-front war must go ahead with realism and an unfailing determination. Measures to augment capital expenditure for major defence acquisitions must be identified. Transformative defence reforms like the introduction of integrated theatre commands will need the attention of the Centre. In addition, India must take all steps to restore peace in our restive NE states.

             The Modi government has come in for some criticism abroad on its human rights record and dealings with its Muslim population. This unjust criticism must be dealt with judiciously and with maturity. India’s overall inclusiveness and celebration of its diversity are unique examples for the entire world, especially the nations of the Global South. We must never deviate or be even seen to shift from this noble orientation.

    Reduction of the yawning gap between the countless ultra-rich and those millions in abject poverty is essential as we boast of becoming the 5th largest economy in the world. The many human indices where we are faltering also need to be addressed.

             As economic strength is the pillar that propels and sustains progress, the Modi government must take measures to improve our economic health. Reduction of the yawning gap between the countless ultra-rich and those millions in abject poverty is essential as we boast of becoming the 5th largest economy in the world. The many human indices where we are faltering also need to be addressed.

             By all yardsticks, India is deservingly on the cusp of acquiring a seat on the global high table. Let us not squander away this golden opportunity by internal squabbling but instead work together in addressing crucial issues that affect our nation; we must seize this opportunity.

    Feature Image Credit:  vskbharat.com    

    Cartoon Credit: Times of India

  • The catastrophe of modern capitalism: Inequality as an aim in Neo-Liberal-Ideology

    The catastrophe of modern capitalism: Inequality as an aim in Neo-Liberal-Ideology

    Neoliberalism is the dominant form of capitalism that began in the 1980s as a way to promote global trade and grow all economies. That was a false promise, whereas in essence it supported individuals amassing massive wealth in the name of market forces, at the expense of common man by ensuring states minimise their role and eliminate welfare economics. It ensured least-developed and developing economies remained resource providers to developed economies, exemplifying extraction and exploitation. Neoliberalism is a top down economic policy that does not benefit those who are impoverished. The inequality we see on a global scale is mind-numbing. In 2006, the world’s richest 497 people were worth 3.5 trillion US dollars representing 7% of the world’s GDP. That same year, the world’s lowest income countries that housed 2.4 billion people were worth just 1.4 trillion US dollars, which only represents 3.3% of the world’s GDP. The situation today is far worse as Andreas Herberg-Rothe explains in his critical analysis below. The world is in urgent need of freeing itself from the clutches of neoliberal capitalism. 

     

    ..neoliberalism contains a general tendency towards an extensive economisation of society. Thus, inequality transcends the economy and becomes the dominant trend in society, as in racism, radical extremism, and hate ideologies in general: Us against the rest, whoever the rest may be.

     

    Following on from the initial question about Hannah Arendt’s thesis that equality must be confined to the political sphere, we must ask how democracy and human rights can be preserved in the face of social inequality on an extraordinary scale. By the end of this century, 1% of the world’s population will own as much as the “rest” of the other 99%. And already today, only 6 people own more property than 3.6 billion. Let us take a closer look at some of the ideas of the currently dominant neo-liberalism, which sheds some light on the acceptance of these current obscene inequalities. For this ideology, social inequality is a means to greater wealth. However, since it sets no limits on social inequality, it can be used to legitimize even obscene inequalities. We argue that neoliberalism as an ideology is the result of the spread of a specific approach to economic thought that has its roots in the first half of the twentieth century, when Walter Lippmann’s seminal book “An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society” (1937), followed by Friedrich August von Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” (1944), gave rise to neoliberalism. During the Cold War period, neoliberals gained more and more ground in establishing a global system. With the support of Milton Friedman and his “Chicago Boys,” the first attempt to establish a pure neoliberal economic system took place in Chile under the military dictatorship of General Pinochet in the 1970s. In the last decade of the Cold War, neoliberal architects such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan began to impose the new economic model. Since the end of the Cold War, the final development was that neoliberalism became THE hegemonic economic system, as capitalism was de jure allowed to spread unhindered worldwide, and neoliberalism continued on its way to becoming the dominant belief system.

    The critical message in this sense is the following: This process is not limited to an economic dimension – neoliberalism contains a general tendency towards an extensive economisation of society. Thus, inequality transcends the economy and becomes the dominant trend in society, as in racism, radical extremism, and hate ideologies in general: Us against the rest, whoever the rest may be.

    When we talk about global inequality in the era of neoliberalism, we are referring to two other major developments: To this day, inequality between the global North and South persists. While the total amount of poverty has decreased, as seen in the World Bank’s report (2016), there is still a considerable gap between those countries that benefit from the global economy and those that serve as cheap production or commodity areas. The second development takes place in countries that are more exposed to the neoliberal project. In this sense, societies are turning into fragmented communities where the “losers of neoliberalism” are threatened by long-term unemployment, a life of poverty, social and economic degeneration.

    After three decades of intense global neo-liberalism, the result has been a significant increase in social inequalities, polarization and fragmentation of societies (if not the entire world society), not to mention a global financial crisis in 2008 caused by escalating casino capitalism and the policies of a powerful global financial elite.

    We are witnessing a global and drastic discontent of peoples, fears and anger, feelings of marginalization, helplessness, insecurity and injustice. After three decades of intense global neo-liberalism, the result has been a significant increase in social inequalities, polarization and fragmentation of societies (if not the entire world society), not to mention a global financial crisis in 2008 caused by escalating casino capitalism and the policies of a powerful global financial elite. We witness a global and drastic dissatisfaction of the peoples, fears, and anger, the feelings of marginalization, helplessness, insecurity, and injustice. After three decades of intense worldwide Neo-Liberalism, the result significantly intensified social inequalities, polarization, and fragmentation of societies (if not the entire world society), not to mention a global financial crisis in 2008 caused by escalating casino capitalism and the policy of a powerful global finance elite.

    The central critique is that neoliberalism includes social inequality as part of its basic theory. Such capitalism emphasizes the strongest/fittest (parts of society) and uses inequality as a means to achieve more wealth.

    Remarkably and frighteningly, the situation outlined does not provoke the oppressed, marginalised, and disadvantaged populations to turn against their oppressors and their exploitation. These people tend to sympathize with ideological alternatives, either with more triumphant (right-wing) populist movements and parties or are attracted by radical/fundamentalist religious groups such as the Islamic State. The result is an increase in polarization and violence, and even more protracted wars and religious-ideological disputes. Europe is not exempt from the trend toward obscene social inequality. We also find a polarization between rich and poor, between those who have good starting conditions and those who have little chance of prosperity, between those who are included and those who feel excluded. The fact that Europe has so far largely avoided populist parties gaining administrative power (although we have already witnessed this process in France, Hungary and Poland) may be due to the remnants of the welfare state. In this respect, at least a minimum of financial security remains and limits the neoliberal trend. In the United States, on the other hand, a flawless populist could reach the highest office. The people, stuck in their misery, fear and insecurity, voted for a supposed alternative to the neoliberal establishment, but above all against other social outcasts whom they blamed for their misery. This brings us to the central critique of neoliberalism, a system that has caused fundamental social oddities, the impact of which as an ideology has been highlighted above. The central critique is that neo-liberalism includes social inequality as part of its basic theory. Such capitalism emphasizes the strongest/fittest (parts of society) and uses inequality as a means to achieve more wealth.

    In an interview with the German magazine Wirtschaftswoche, Hayek spoke bluntly about the neoliberal value system: He emphasizes that social inequality, in his view, is not at all unfortunate, but rather pleasant. He describes inequality as something simply necessary (Hayek, 1981). In addition, he defines the foundations of neo-liberalism as the “dethronement of politics” (1981). First, he points out the importance of protecting freedom at all costs (against state control and the political pressure that comes with it). The neoliberals see even a serious increase in inequality as a fundamental prerequisite for more economic growth and the progress of their project. One of the most renowned critics of neoliberalism in Germany, Christoph Butterwegge (2007), sees in this logic a perfidious reversal of the original intentions of Smith’s (reproduced in 2013) inquiry into the wealth of nations in the current precarious global situation. The real capitalism of our time – neoliberalism – sees inequality as a necessity for the functioning of the system. It emphasizes this statement: The more inequality, the better the system works. The hardworking, successful, and productive parts of society (or rather the economy) deserve their wealth, status, and visible advantage over the rest (the part of society that is seen as less strong or less ambitious). The deliberate production of inequality sets in motion a fatal cycle that leads to the current tense global situation and contributes to several intra-societal conflicts.

    The market alone is the regulating mechanism of development and decision-making processes within a society dominated by neo-liberalism, and as such is not politics at all. This brings us closer to the relationship between neoliberalism and democracy. The understanding of democracy in neoliberal theory is, so to speak, different. Principles such as equality or self-determination, which are prominent in the classical understanding of democracy, are rejected. Neo-liberalism strives for a capitalist system without any limits set by the welfare state and even the state as such, in order to shape, enforce and legitimize a society dominated only by the market economy. Meanwhile there are precarious tendencies recognizable, where others than the politically legitimized decision-makers dictate the actual political and social direction (e.g. the extraordinarily strong automobile lobby with VW, BMW and Mercedes in Germany or big global players in the financial sector like the investment company BlackRock). Neoliberalism only seemingly embraces democracy. The elementary democratic goals (protection of fundamental and civil rights and respect for human rights) can no longer be fully realized. Democracy cannot defend itself against neo-liberalism if political decision-makers do not resolutely oppose the neo-liberal zeal for expansion into all areas of society. The dramatic increase in inequality coincides with the failure of the state as an authority of social compensation and adjustment, as neoliberalism eliminates the state as an institution that mediates conflicts in society. To put it in a nutshell: Whereas in classical economic liberalism the state’s role is to protect and guarantee the functioning of the market economy, in neoliberalism the state must submit to the market system.

    Our discussion of neoliberalism here is not about this conceptualization and its history, which would require a separate article. Nevertheless, we want to emphasize that in neo-liberalism, social inequality is a means to achieve more wealth for the few. Therefore, we argue that there must be a flexible but specific limit to social inequality in order to achieve this goal, while excessive inequality is counterproductive.

    As noted above, moderate levels of inequality are not necessarily wrong per se. In a modern understanding, it also contributes to a just society in which merit, better qualifications, greater responsibility, etc. are rewarded. The principle of allowing differences, as used in the theory of the social market economy, is a remarkably positive one when such differentiation leads to the well-being of the majority of people in need. However, neo-liberalism adopts a differentiation that intensifies inequality to a very critical dimension. The current level of social inequality attacks our system of values, endangers essential democracy, and destroys the social fabric of societies. Even if we consider a “healthy” level of inequality to be a valuable instrument for a functioning market society, what has become the neoliberal reality has nothing to do with such an ideal. Neoliberalism implies an antisocial state of a system in which inequality is embedded in society as its driving mechanism. Consequently, we witness a division between rich and poor in times of feudalism. A certain degree of social equalization through the welfare state and a minimum of social security is no longer guaranteed. The typical prerequisites today are flexibility, performance, competitiveness, etc. – In general, we see the total domination of individualism within neo-liberalism, leading to the disintegration of society. In one part of the world, mainly in the Global South, we observe the decline of entire population groups. In contrast, in other parts of the world we see fragmented societies in hybrid globalization and increasing tendencies towards radical (religious) ideologies, violence and war.

    It must be acknowledged that neoliberalism was one of the causes of the rise of the newly industrialized nations, but the overemphasis on individual property also contributes to obscene inequality and thus to the decline of civilized norms.

    The Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman summed up this problem by comparing it to the slogan of the French Revolution: “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”. According to the proponents of the time, each element could only be realized if all three remained firmly together and became like a body with different organs. The logic was as follows: “Liberté could produce Fraternité only in company with Egalité; cut off this medium/mediating postulate from the triad – and Liberté will most likely lead to inequality, and in fact to division and mutual enmity and strife, instead of unity and solidarity. Only the triad in its entirety is capable of ensuring a peaceful and prosperous society, well integrated and imbued with the spirit of cooperation. Equality is therefore necessary as a mediating element of this triad in Bauman’s approach. What he embraces is nothing less than a floating balance between freedom and equality. It must be acknowledged that neoliberalism was one of the causes of the rise of the newly industrialized nations, but the overemphasis on individual property also contributes to obscene inequality and thus to the decline of civilized norms. When real socialism passed into history in 1989 (and rightly so), the obscene global level of social inequality could be the beginning of the end (Bee Gees) of neo-liberalism, centered on the primacy of individual property, which is destroying the social fabric of societies as well as the prospects for democratic development. Individual property is a human right, but it must be balanced with the needs of communities, otherwise it would destroy them in the end.

     

    Feature Image Credit: cultursmag.com

    Cartoon Image Credit: ‘Your greed is hurting the economy’ economicsocialogy.org

  • Can a Muscular Response deter Chinese Aggression?

    Can a Muscular Response deter Chinese Aggression?

    The Sino-Indian War of 1962, which is seen as a humiliating defeat for India, continues to rankle all Indians. Clearly, it is seen as a result of poor leadership both at the political and military levels. In hindsight, many believe that the PLA could have been routed had India regrouped its Army and used the IAF in a massive counterattack. It was November, and with the onset of winter and the closing of the Himalayan passes, the PLA could have been demolished completely. That we didn’t even think of it shows the serious vacuum in strategic thinking. More than half a century later, and with the Indian military much stronger and battle-hardened, it is inexplicable why India’s leadership is shy of following an aggressive strategy, including the use of force proactively against China. Brigadier Deepak Sinha, a vetran and TPF’s Senior Fellow, raises this question while correlating the current situation with that of 1962.

    There is an urgent need for us all to shed our divisive politics, long-held dogmas and skewed perceptions, forget fanciful visions and face reality, especially when it comes to the question of national security. The last thing we need is for petty politics and fragile egos to control our nation’s destiny. Nothing can be more consequential, traumatic or shameful than being bested by a rival on the battlefield. The consequences of our “defeat” in the Sino-Indian Conflict of 1962 continue to rankle and haunt us to this day.

    Quite clearly, the fear psychosis that permeates our higher military and political leadership is palpable.

    Indeed, our reluctance, for fear of escalation, to launch a quid-pro-quo riposte and grab disputed territory elsewhere as a bargaining chip following the PLA’s blatant land grab of disputed territory in Eastern Ladakh is a clear indication of this. This was reinforced by an earlier interview with ANI by our Foreign Minister, who stated, “Look, they (China) are the bigger economy. What am I going to do? As a smaller economy, I am going to pick up a fight with the bigger economy? It is not a question of being reactionary, it’s a question of common sense….” Quite clearly, the fear psychosis that permeates our higher military and political leadership is palpable.

    On the other hand, the Chinese leadership has a very different perception of our capabilities as was reflected back in 1959 following the Longju incident. A declassified United States document of that time points out that “the late August clashes point to a mode of thought which has remained an ingredient in the Chinese leaders’ calculations on the border dispute: ‘When the Indians show a temperament to advance on the ground, we must alter their frame of mind by letting military action take over political caution. Besides, military risk itself is negligible because we are the stronger side.” Obviously, over the years, they have been given no reason to believe otherwise. In order to understand what ails us, it is worth briefly examining the course of the 1962 conflict to get a clearer idea of the extent of our loss at the hands of the Chinese. That should help us understand why, over fifty years later, we continue to remain so traumatised and fearful.

    The opening skirmish of that conflict occurred in the North East with the capture, on 8th Sept, of the isolated Assam Rifles post at Dhola, on the southern slopes of the Thag La ridgeline. This post was surrounded and completely dominated by PLA positions on higher ground, and its loss was a foregone conclusion. The actual conflict commenced at approximately 0500 hours on 20th October, when the PLA launched a massive infantry attack, supported by artillery, on the 7 Infantry Brigade positions. The Brigade was deployed in a tactically unsound manner on direct orders of GOC 4 Corps, Lt Gen B M Kaul, along the Southern banks of the Namka Chu River over a 20 Km frontage instead of on the heights overlooking the river.

    The battalions were deployed in platoon penny pockets, lacking mutual support, in temporary positions with no overhead cover. Artillery support was restricted to just one battery of Heavy Mortars and a troop of two field guns with limited ammunition. No intelligence was available to the Brigade Headquarters or any of the other higher headquarters as to PLA force levels or their intentions. The assault came as a surprise and just four hours later, by 0900 Hours, the Brigade ceased to exist as a fighting force. Within just another 96 Hours, the strategic border town of Tawang, approximately 100 Km in-depth, held by an understrength battalion, was attacked and captured without a fight.

    Almost simultaneously in the Northern Theatre, isolated forward positions at Aksai Chin and the Pangong Tso area were also cleared after a brief skirmish. After an administrative pause of approximately a month, the PLA launched the next phase of its offensive with its assault on the Walong positions on 16th Nov and on the main defences of the 4 Infantry Division at Bomdi La, Se La and on the Division Headquarters at Dirang Dzong. Simultaneously, on 20th Nov, Chushul came under attack by an Infantry Divison. On 21st Nov the Chinese announced a unilateral ceasefire and subsequently withdrew to positions occupied by them prior to the commencement of the conflict.

    There are three main deductions that can be drawn from an examination of the facts. Firstly, that the conflict was, in essence, extremely limited in terms of time, space and force levels involved. From an army of 550,000 personnel, approximately 20,000 personnel were committed into this conflict, primarily due to our limited logistical capabilities. The conflict was primarily restricted to the tactical level only, at battalion level and below. While the conflict itself was spread over one month, the tactical engagements themselves lasted a few hours at best, and on one or two occasions where stiffer resistance was put up, extending to 48-72 Hours. Unfortunately, given the terrain, lack of field fortifications, etc, casualties suffered were relatively high, with approximately fifteen hundred killed, similar numbers wounded, two thousand missing and another 4000 taken prisoner. The Air Force, which could have played a critical role in blunting the PLA attacks and destroying their lines of communications, was deliberately confined to the logistics role for reasons that are still not clear, while the Navy remained a bystander.

    Sadly, our military and political leadership exhibited an utter lack of moral courage, determination and willpower by quietly acquiescing to the unilateral ceasefire, thereby kicking the main irritant of the demarcation of borders further up the road, where it has once again come to bite us on our posteriors.

    Secondly, far from being a major defeat, as has been commonly made out, it was at best a temporary reverse that could, and should, have been countered with the use of fresh troops under a more determined and professional leadership. More importantly, the PLA understood this fact and, therefore, undertook a unilateral withdrawal to its earlier pre-war line of defences. It must have been fully cognisant that if hostilities were to continue, it would find itself in an increasingly untenable position with its supply lines already badly stretched and being further impacted with the onset of winter. It would only have been a matter of time before the Indian Army got over its shock, regrouped and reorganised itself and launched a counter-offensive to recapture lost territory. Sadly, our military and political leadership exhibited an utter lack of moral courage, determination and willpower by quietly acquiescing to the unilateral ceasefire, thereby kicking the main irritant of the demarcation of borders further up the road, where it has once again come to bite us on our posteriors.

    Thirdly, what continues to remain totally inexplicable is the reasons why our military and political leadership continue to remain so traumatised and scared to this day. The truth is that the narrative that emanated following the reverses was set by officers and men belonging to units that, for the most part, had withdrawn before coming in contact with the PLA. They were low on morale and had come to believe the Chinese were supermen who could not be stopped by mere mortals. It was from amongst the experience and perception of these personnel that pamphlets on the tactics and capabilities of the PLA were subsequently formulated that continue to be relied on to this day, thereby giving further credence to that distorted narrative.

    The fact of the matter is that in any future conflict, the PLA will be fighting over 2000 Kms away from its home bases, supported along communication lines that run over some of the most difficult and inhospitable terrain in the world. They are also easily susceptible to interdiction, given the nature of the terrain. In addition, they would have to contend with a hostile and badly oppressed population not just within Tibet but in Xingjian as well, which could revolt if a suitable opportunity arose. This would require the PLA to deploy additional forces for rear area security to prevent disruption of the lines of communication.

    Moreover, while there are sizeable disparities in aspects such as force levels and capabilities, infrastructure development and economic strength, one needs to be cognizant of the fact that we have also made tremendous strides with regard to infrastructure development, logistics and offensive capabilities. Our forces still hold the edge vis-à-vis combat experience and operating in mountains, while the Air Force continues to hold the upper hand in the TAR purely on account of terrain profile and radius of action. Most importantly, the availability of two Mountain Strike Corps gives us immense flexibility, if properly utilized, to grab the initiative and force a decision dilemma on the PLA. In the circumstances, the reason for our extreme reluctance to stand up against the Chinese bully must lie elsewhere. One distinct possibility is that our political leadership lacks faith in the military leadership and its ability to fight and win.

    This will seem at odds with the fact that the military has a splendid history of having always successfully completing any task given to it. If anything, it has been grossly misused by the Central and State Governments to carry out tasks that are not in their ambit, whether these be organizing the Commonwealth Games or construction of railway over-bridges, because the concerned departments and agencies have been unable to produce the requisite results. Clearly, this mistrust, primarily in the sphere of civil-military relations, has more pernicious roots and is very deeply embedded in the politico-bureaucratic psyche.

     Interestingly, in the Official History of the 1962 Conflict with China, available in the public domain but yet to be published, the Chief Editor, Dr S N Prasad, concludes that the chief reason for our defeat was that the political establishment was unable to avoid war while it was in the process of transforming the military establishment. Given Prime Minister Nehru’s apprehensions about the military taking control, he wanted to change it from being, as Mr Prasad puts it, a “close-knit professional body, deliberately isolated from the citizen. Its predominant motive force remained esprit de corps and not identification with the people… Perhaps he wanted to model it after the People’s Liberation Army of China, more egalitarian, flexible, closer to the people………Such basic changes required a committed, or at least a pliant, band of army officers in key positions. So mediocre Thapar was selected instead of the doughty Thorat as Army Chief, and Bijji Kaul was made CGS……. “

      He further goes on to add that “To carry out this transformation of the national defence set up, a decade of peace was absolutely essential. For establishing indigenous weapons manufacture, money had to be found by cutting arms imports. The armed forces would be short of equipment and stores for several years till the new arms factories started producing. The officer cadre was a house divided within itself till the new breed fully took over. A period of transition was inevitable, during which the fighting machine would not be fully efficient and would be vulnerable………Therein seems to lie the basic cause of the debacle of 1962. India failed to avoid a war during the transition period. Lulled by faulty political assessment and wrong intelligence forecasts, the country got caught in a war when it was least prepared.”

    With Mr Modi’s ascension to power, we came a full circle as he took it upon himself to steer it away from its apolitical and secular character towards a more ideologically compatible institution that would be in sync with his Party’s long-held vision of making India into a Hindu Rashtra.

    Fortuitously for the country, Nehru’s vision for a transformed military was stymied by the 1962 Conflict and the most important lesson that his successors assimilated quickly was to stay away from interfering in the internal affairs of the military as that could gravely damage internal cohesion and morale. With Mr Modi’s ascension to power, we came a full circle as he took it upon himself to steer it away from its apolitical and secular character towards a more ideologically compatible institution that would be in sync with his Party’s long-held vision of making India into a Hindu Rashtra.

    Towards this end Mr Modi has smartly used the concept of “deep selection” to ensure key senior appointments were filled by officers displaying an affinity for his government’s ideology, regardless of existing rules, seniority or merit. This, in turn, made them personally beholden to him, and he was thus able to use them to take ownership and deflect criticism from initiatives that were pushed through by his government regardless of their adverse impact on long-standing and cherished customs and traditions or on the operational capabilities of the Services. This has led to schisms within the institution, damaged the integrity and cohesion of the chain of command and cast a big question mark on the apolitical and secular character of the Services.

    In this context, a politically compromised Chief of Defence Staff and other senior officers shamefully endorsed the PMO, thrusting down the ill-conceived Agnipath Scheme on the military with not a single objection being raised. This scheme has all but destroyed the basic ethos of our fighting arms, ensuring that the deeply entrenched and effective Regimental System has been severed at the roots. Given their ignorance of matters military, they would have been ignorant of Winston Churchill’s wise advice that “Regiments are not like houses. They cannot be pulled down and altered structurally to suit the convenience of the occupier or the caprice of the owner. They are more like plants; they grow slowly if they are to grow strong…and if they are blighted or transplanted, they are apt to wither.”

    And wither they have, the resulting adverse impact on morale is not difficult to gauge. This is undoubtedly being further exacerbated by the considerable voids in manpower, with combat units reportedly functioning at less than 75% of their authorised strength, and truncated peace tenures to fill up operational voids in Eastern Ladakh, Manipur and Jammu & Kashmir. In addition, the government’s emphasis on the ‘Atman Nirbhar Abhiyan’ and ‘Make in India Scheme’ has resulted in deficiencies, even if temporary, in the holdings of weapons systems, ammunition and other warlike stores. Given all these factors, the military obviously finds itself in an extremely precarious situation, committed to its fullest capacity with limited options available. Ironically, a government that lays such a great emphasis on our Hindu origins, culture and history has managed to display a profound ignorance of statecraft and warfare, as brought out in Kautilya’s Arthashastra. In this classic, Chanakya points to the necessity for a strong army because, for all nation-states, there are only two states of being: either conquer or be conquered.

    …at the present time, we are once again confronted with an extremely turbulent geopolitical situation, with the world’s attention on the ongoing crises in Europe and the Middle East. The situation today, in many ways, is clearly reminiscent of the period on the eve of the 1962 Conflict. For reasons not very different from then, the Indian Military finds itself in a very similar situation as well.In these circumstances, the real question that we should be asking ourselves is not whether we can overcome our past traumas and face down the PLA, but more importantly, whether China will seize this opportunity to recalibrate the Sino-Indian relationship through the use of force.

    Interestingly, in 1962, China launched major operations against us at the end of the campaigning season, which could have been jeopardised by unseasonal snow. Obviously, this was because, at that time, the world’s attention was riveted to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Similarly, at the present time, we are once again confronted with an extremely turbulent geopolitical situation, with the world’s attention on the ongoing crises in Europe and the Middle East. In addition, the United States is deeply immersed in its own internal problems with presidential elections just around the corner and with little time for other matters.

    The situation today, in many ways, is clearly reminiscent of the period on the eve of the 1962 Conflict. Moreover, at that time, Chairman Mao was under intense pressure as his Great Leap Forward experiment had failed, and he had been removed from his appointment as State President. Today, President Xi also finds himself under similar pressure following his disastrous Zero Covid and hard-line economic policies that have tanked the economy. For reasons not very different from then, the Indian Military finds itself in a very similar situation as well.

    Undoubtedly, the political leadership and the military top brass must be fully cognizant of this state of affairs. Clearly, they are in no position to stare down the PLA. What makes matters worse is that following the General Elections, Mr. Modi’s authority and standing have been greatly diminished. Where does this leave those senior officers who have progressed by hanging on to his ideological coat-tails? Has the authority and credibility of the CDS, an out-and-out political appointee and loyalist, been affected within the Chiefs of Staff Committee of which he is the Chairman? What will be its impact on the move towards the establishment of theatre commands? In these circumstances, the real question that we should be asking ourselves is not whether we can overcome our past traumas and face down the PLA, but more importantly, whether China will seize this opportunity to recalibrate the Sino-Indian relationship through the use of force.

     

    Feature Image Credit: Border Clashes between India and China ‘regularly covered up’  The Telegraph

    Namka Chu and Dhola Post Picture credit: www.indiasentinels.com

  • The Centre is notional, the States the real entities

    The Centre is notional, the States the real entities

    Utilisation of the country’s resources needs to be decided jointly by the Centre and the States. The changed political situation after the general election makes this feasible.

    The results of the general election 2024 have thrown up a surprise. They portend greater democratisation in the country, with the regional parties doing well. These parties will share space on the ruling party benches as well as on the Opposition side in Parliament. This will help strengthen federalism, which is so crucial for a diverse nation such as India. It was badly fraying until recently.
    Centre-State relations became contentious during the general election campaign. The idea of’ 400 par’, ‘one nation, one election’, and the Prime Minister threatening that the corrupt (i.e., Opposition leaders) would soon be in jail were perceived as threats to the Opposition-ruled States.
    The Opposition-ruled States have been complaining about step-motherly treatment by the Centre. Protests have been held in Delhi and the State capitals. The Supreme Court of India has said that ‘a steady stream of States are compelled to approach it against the Centre’. Kerala has complained about the inadequate transfer of resources, Karnataka about drought relief and West Bengal about funds for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). The attempt seems to be to show the Opposition-ruled States in a bad light.
    The Supreme Court, expressing its helplessness, recently said that Centre-State issues need to be sorted out amicably. When the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014, it had talked of cooperative federalism. The introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in 2017 was an example of this when some States that had reservations about it eventually agreed to its rollout. But that was the last of it. With federalism fraying, discord has grown between the Centre and the Opposition-ruled States.
    There is huge diversity among the States—Assam is unlike Gujarat, and Himachal Pradesh is very different from Tamil Nadu. A common approach is not conducive to the progress of such diverse States. They need greater autonomy to address their issues in their own unique ways. This is both democracy and federalism. So, a dominant Centre forcing its will on the States, leading to the deterioration in Centre-State relations, does not augur well for India.

    Financing and conflict is one issue
    States face three broad kinds of issues. Some of them can be dealt with by each State without impacting other States, such as education, health, and social services. But infrastructure and water sharing require States to come to an agreement. Issues such as currency and defence require a common approach. The last two kinds of issues require a higher authority, in the form of the Centre, to bring about coordination and optimality.
    Expenditures have to be financed to achieve goals, and that results in conflict. Revenue has to be raised through taxes, non-tax sources and borrowings. The Centre has been given a predominant role in raising resources due to its efficiency in collecting taxes centrally. Among the major taxes, personal income tax (PIT), corporation tax, customs duty and excise duty are collected by the Centre. GST is collected by both the Centre and the States and shared. So, the Centre controls most of the resources, and they have to be devolved to the States to enable them to fulfil their responsibilities.

    The Centre sets up the Commission and has mostly set its terms of reference. This introduces a bias in favour of the Centre and becomes a source of conflict between the Centre and the States.

    A Finance Commission is appointed to decide on the devolution of funds from the Centre to the States and the share of each State. The Centre sets up the Commission and has mostly set its terms of reference. This introduces a bias in favour of the Centre and becomes a source of conflict between the Centre and the States. Further, there has been an implicit bias in the Commissions that the States are not fiscally responsible. This reflects the Centre’s bias — that the States are not doing what they should and that they make undue demands on the Centre.
    The States also pitch their demands high to try and get a larger share of the revenues. They tend to show lower revenue collection and higher expenditures in the hope that there will be a greater allocation from the Commission. The Commission becomes an arbiter, and the States the supplicants.

    Inter-State tussles, Centre-State relations
    The States cannot have a common position as they are at different stages of development and with vastly different resource positions. The rich States have more resources, while the poor ones need more resources in order to develop faster and also play catch up. So, the Finance Commission is supposed to devolve proportionately more funds to the poorer States. Unfortunately, despite the efforts of the 15 Finance Commissions so far, the gap still remains wide.
    The rich States, which contribute more and get proportionately less, have resented this. What they forget is that the poorer States provide them the market, which enables them to grow faster. The poorer States also lose much of their savings which leak out to the rich States, accelerating their development. It is often said that as Mumbai contributes a bulk of the corporate and income taxes, it should get more. But this is because Mumbai is the financial capital. So, the big corporations are based there and pay their tax in Mumbai. More revenue is contributed in an accounting sense, and not that production is taking place in Mumbai.
    The Centre allocates resources to the States in two ways. First, on account of the Finance Commission award. Second, the Centre is notional, while the States are real. So, all expenditures by the Centre are in some State. The amount spent in each State is also a transfer. This becomes another source of conflict. Expenditures lead to jobs and prosperity in a State. Benefits accrue in proportion to the funds spent. As a result, each State wants more expenditure in its territory. The Centre can play politics in the allocation of schemes and projects. For instance, it is accused of favouring Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh. The Opposition-ruled States have for long complained of step-motherly treatment.
    To get more resources, the States have to fall in line with the Centre’s diktat. This has taken a new form when the call is for a ‘double engine ki sarkar’, i.e. for the same political party to be governing at the Centre and the States. It is an admission that the Opposition-ruled States will be at a disadvantage. This undermines the autonomy of the States and also weakens federalism.

    State autonomy is not to be confused with freedom to do anything. It is circumscribed by the need to function within a national framework for the wider good. It implies a fine balance between the common and the diverse.

    Issues in federalism
    The Sixteenth Finance Commission has begun work. It should try to reverse fraying federalism and strengthen the spirit of India as a ‘Union of States’. This is not only a political task but also an economic one. The Commission could suggest that there is even-handed treatment of all the States by the Centre and also less friction among the rich and poor States when proportionately more resources are transferred to poor States so as to keep rising inequality in check.
    The issue of governance, both at the Centre and in the States, needs to be flagged. It determines investment productivity and the pace of development. Corruption and cronyism lead to resources being wasted and a loss of social welfare.
    To reduce the domination of the Centre over the States, the devolution of resources from the Centre to the States could be raised substantially from its current level of 41%. The Centre’s role could be curtailed. For instance, the Public Distribution System and MGNREG Scheme are joint schemes, but the Centre asserts that it be given credit. It has penalised States that have not done so.

    The Centre is notional and constitutionally created, while States and local bodies are the real entities where economic activity occurs and resources are generated.

    The Centre’s undue assertiveness undermines federalism. Funds with the Centre are public funds collected from the States and spent in the States. The Centre is notional and constitutionally created, while States and local bodies are the real entities where economic activity occurs and resources are generated. The States have agreed to the Centre’s constitutional position, but that does not make them supplicants for their own funds.

    It is time that the utilisation of the country’s resources is jointly decided by the Centre and the States on the basis of being equal partners. This has become more feasible with the changed political situation after the results of the 2024 general election.

     

    This article was published earlier in The Hindu.

    Feature Image Credit: rediff.com

     

  • Between the Devil & the Deep Blue Sea: Tackling India’s Internal Security Challenges

    Between the Devil & the Deep Blue Sea: Tackling India’s Internal Security Challenges

    Our ability to develop and prosper, both as a society and a nation, are wholly dependent on the smooth functioning of our democratic institutions and their ability to faithfully uphold the tenets laid down in our Constitution.

    Our progress since Independence has not been without bumps along the road. Not only has the detritus of Partition haunted us, but we have also had to confront antagonistic neighbours intent on grabbing territory, creating divisions and curtailing our economic development and influence around the world. They have tried to do this by resorting to conventional operations, grey zone warfare, including using terrorist groups. In addition, we’ve had to overcome our internal troubles as well, what V.S. Naipaul referred to as a “million mutinies”, rebellions and insurgencies, for the most part, along our border regions. Undertaken by our disaffected citizens, in most cases with external support, aspiring to establish their own independent homelands because of ideological or religious motivations or out of a sense of frustration at being treated as second-class citizens within their own country.

    The response of the State and Central Governments to these internal challenges has invariably been to initially attempt some sort of half-hearted political accommodation or initiative aimed at preserving the status quo and giving themselves political advantage. Once this fails, as it is bound to, the Central Armed Police Forces or the Army are brought in, depending on the levels of violence, to neutralise the insurgency and regain political and administrative control. This can take anywhere from a decade to three or more. The Mizoram Insurgency, for example, commenced in 1966 and was successfully terminated with the agreement being signed between opposing sides in 1986, while the Punjab Insurgency lasted from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, though there are efforts to restart it.

    Unfettered exploitation of natural resources and minerals from those resource-rich regions by large corporations and their political acolytes has led to the displacement of tribals from their homelands and added to their economic woes. Given that the political, security and administrative establishments are wholly compromised and corrupt, the tribals have alleged that they have had little choice but to take up arms in an effort to break the nexus and get their rightful dues.

    We’ve had similar problems in our North-eastern States of Assam, Nagaland, Manipur and Tripura, which continue to persist in fits and starts, aided, and abetted by China. We have also faced a long-running Maoist rebellion in our hinterland, organised and conducted by tribals from those regions. Unfettered exploitation of natural resources and minerals from those resource-rich regions by large corporations and their political acolytes has led to the displacement of tribals from their homelands and added to their economic woes. Given that the political, security and administrative establishments are wholly compromised and corrupt, the tribals have alleged that they have had little choice but to take up arms in an effort to break the nexus and get their rightful dues.

    The issue we seem to have failed to comprehend is the transformation that has taken place in understanding what constitutes the basic elements of national security.

    Fortunately, good sense prevailed within the political and security establishment, and the military, other than limited support in casualty evacuation and surveillance by the Air Force was completely kept out of ant-Maoist operations. The military’s job is not to protect marauding corporates but our sovereignty from the depredations of inimical elements, both internal and external. The dynamics of the Military’s involvement in countering the Maoist insurgency would have undoubtedly had serious repercussions within the military’s functioning, and over a period of time, would have adversely impacted our existing governance structures, much in the manner that some of our neighbours have been so affected. The issue we seem to have failed to comprehend is the transformation that has taken place in understanding what constitutes the basic elements of national security. Until the end of the Cold War and before the advent of globalisation, national security had purely military and economic connotations with the stress on territorial control. This was achieved by controlling the flow of information, goods and services and the movement of people through various means, including physical barriers. The advent of the Info-Tech revolution and the consequent move towards globalisation made it increasingly difficult for governments to control access to and the free flow of information, ideas, digital services, and finances.

    As Professors, Wilson and Donan, note in their book, ‘Border Identities: Nation and State at the International Frontiers’ (UK, Cambridge: University Press, 1998), “International borders are becoming so porous that they no longer fulfil their historical role as barriers to the movement of goods, ideas and people and as markers of the extent of the power of the state.”

    Perforce, governments the world over have been forced into the realisation, for many at great cost, that it has become impossible to lock up people or ideas and isolate them from the global discourse. Thus, in the context of the security of the state, more than just ensuring territorial integrity, it is the security of the people through sustainable human development that is non-negotiable. We are today at a stage where, while traditional physical threats continue to pose serious challenges, especially from China and Pakistan, it is the non-military threats that are more dominant. These arise, on one side, from the host of cross-border insurgencies that afflict us because of ethnic, ideological, economic or religious conflicts, and on the other side, because of policies that emanate from politics of exclusion and economic exploitation. In both cases endemic corruption due to the nexus between the political-bureaucracy-security establishment and criminal elements involved in the smuggling of drugs and weapons and human trafficking remains the common thread. As a result, we not only face the threat of violence but also have to confront the increasing spread of religious radicalization.

    For example, in the Northeast, as my colleagues, Lt Gen J S Bajwa (Retd), Maj Gen N G George (Retd) and I, have pointed out in our paper, ‘Makeover of Rainbow Country: Border Security and connecting the Northeast’ (Manekshaw Paper No 62, Centre for Land Warfare Studies, 2016), “we are faced with a trans-border insurgency affecting our states that has metamorphosed into a serious law and order issue due to trans-national criminal syndicates having established linkages with armed gangs that are opposed to the existing political status-quo. This has also been accentuated with these groups being used by China and Pakistan for meeting their own nefarious designs…. Criminal syndicates have extended their reach to include complete control and dominance over all smuggling activities, be it of small arms, psychotropic drugs, livestock, or human trafficking. This economic clout has enabled them to subvert elements within the political parties, the bureaucracy, and the security establishment….”. Thus, it appears that the defining characteristic of on-going insurgencies is that they are nothing more than “businesses”, using all means at their disposal to make a profit. Thus, we see that has been that they have never crossed the threshold of violence or mass mobilisation that would lead to the next logical phase; from insurgency to civil war, where insurgent forces take on the military in conventional operations. These regions are further adversely impacted by poor governance, ineffective policing, agonisingly slow judicial processes, and unchecked criminal activity. The ability of the local populace to oppose the injustices heaped on them has been very subtly neutralised using the Security Forces and Police with wide ranging powers, including in some regions the use of AFSPA, to maintain the status quo. Our ability to develop and prosper, both as a society and a nation, are wholly dependent on the smooth functioning of our democratic institutions and their ability to faithfully uphold the tenets laid down in our Constitution. This is not feasible without sustained focus on providing high quality of universal education, emphasis on social justice and inclusion and an unvarying commitment to ensuring accountability and the rule of law. Focus on infrastructure development in border areas as well as ensuring free and fair elections, greater accountability and breaking the existing nexus between criminal groups and the local political and administrative establishment and unethical corporate houses. Clearly, all stakeholders have to accept that resorting to the use of force in order to ensure a stable security environment is an unviable option with very limited positives.

    The ability of the local populace to oppose the injustices heaped on them has been very subtly neutralised using the Security Forces and Police with wide ranging powers, including in some regions the use of AFSPA, to maintain the status quo.

    Finally, a word with regard to countering terrorist actions such as the one that targeted Mumbai on 26 November 2008. Much has changed since then with our major cites becoming far less vulnerable thanks to a quantum enhancement of the coastal surveillance infrastructure as well as better coordination, integration and demarcation of responsibilities amongst the stakeholders such as the Indian Navy, Coast Guard, local police and the intelligence agencies. In addition, the establishment of integrated National Security Guards (NSG) hubs in Mumbai and other metropolises ensures much speedier response as well as better coordination with local police and their Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) Teams. Efforts have also been directed to enhancing training of personnel and upgrading technical capabilities.

    Unfortunately, politics has played a major spoilsport and two important initiatives planned in the aftermath of the Mumbai attack, the establishment of the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) and its intelligence data exchange architecture (NATGRID) have not fully fructified. There can be little doubt that these initiatives, if pushed through as visualised, would have been of immense utility in ensuring our ability to prevent and respond to terror threats in a timely and effective manner. To conclude, it would be fair to suggest that we face an extremely difficult and challenging internal security environment that is deeply entwined in, and impacted by, our external threat perceptions. Of necessity, we must adopt robust policies, with the requisite capabilities, to be able to respond appropriately so as to be perceived as a ‘hard state’ by our neighbours. This would give us the necessary space andenvironment to push through policies focussing on sustainable human development, which is the only feasible option to ameliorate our internal security challenges.

     

    Feature Image Credit: the diplomat