Indian foreign policy - Hard questions

India wants to be a power in the region 

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ONE day India will be a great power. Its demography, nukes and growing economy make that almost inevitable. Outsiders, especially in the West, promote its heft so it can serve as an emerging rival to China. Look at the itineraries of world leaders, such as Barack Obama late in 2010, who troop to Delhi to say India deserves a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, and it may seem the country has already arrived.

 Yet, as David Malone clearly sets out in his brisk survey of its foreign policy, there is a long way to go before the Indian elephant is really dancing. Its international policy is still mostly reactive, incremental and without any grand vision. Its few diplomats are good, but terribly overstretched. The world’s biggest democracy is coy to the point of feebleness in promoting its values abroad. And its big but ill-equipped armed forces, perhaps the navy aside, trouble no military planners outside of South Asia.

It is easy to see why. India’s long history of being invaded, and its preoccupation with holding itself together as a viable, democratic state, have left it little scope for acting overseas. Indians, like Americans, can be insular, believing that their huge country is the centre of the world. Its few leaders who bothered seriously with foreign matters, notably Jawaharlal Nehru, the brilliant and charismatic first prime minister, fell into moralising about others’ wicked deeds and tried to avoid being embroiled in the cold war, but he did little to promote national interests. India still rues his baffling early decision to reject an offer of a permanent Security Council seat.

Yet India’s biggest weakness, as Mr Malone rightly sets out, is in its own region. The trauma of partition ensured that relations with Pakistan would long be dreadful, and India has shown admirable restraint in the face of bloody provocations from across the border. But as the local hegemon it should be doing much more to foster economic ties and stability all over its back yard. Instead relations with all its neighbours, with the exception of a couple of minnows like Bhutan and the Maldives, are mostly sour, and regional trade is pitiful. Until India shows more charm—or strength—to those nearby, distant powers are unlikely to take its global pretensions very seriously.

The author, until recently Canada’s high commissioner to Delhi, has a breadth of knowledge and makes his case well. He might have heeded his own advice and spent more time on India’s biggest headache next door. The section on Pakistan, just six of 425 pages, is too slight for that troubling relationship. He might have done more, too, to justify his optimism that war between Pakistan and India is now less likely “than ever”. After all, violent confrontation between the two nuclear powers flares repeatedly. The shifting relations with an increasingly radicalised and troubled Pakistan—American feeling is certainly cooling towards the powers in Islamabad—will also affect India’s foreign policy in time.

Mr Malone concludes that India will develop no grand foreign-policy vision, opting instead for pragmatism guided by economic interest. The hunt for oil and other energy, in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, mean a greater international reach and more competition with China. India will resist Western pressure to be any sort of counterweight to the much bigger power to its east, while at the same time expanding its trade with the rest of Asia. As for promoting values, India will try to show itself as a model of rapid economic growth and tolerant democracy. The elephant’s dance will, in the end, be the great power of its example.


Source : http://www.economist.com/node/18802750

Chinese takeaway kitchen

Three articles look at China’s influence in South-East Asia: first; resentment in Myanmar; second, Cambodian rivalries; third, Banyan on the strategic implications 

WAIST-DEEP in the muddy water, hundreds of people swirl their pans, scouring the black sediment for the sparkle of gold dust. They have come from all over Myanmar to Kachin state, where the N’Mai and Mali rivers merge to form the mighty Irrawaddy, knowing that a good day may yield $1,000-worth of gold—and that time for gold-panning is running out.

Across the river, the corrugated-iron roofs of a prefabricated barracks glint in the midday sun. They house hundreds of Chinese labourers working on the Myitsone hydropower project. This, according to Myanmar’s government, will be the sixth highest dam in the world, and generate 6,000MW of electricity a year. On completion in 2019, the dam will flood the gold-prospecting area and displace more than 10,000 people. All the electricity will be exported to China. All the revenue will go to Myanmar’s government. If an environmental and social impact study was conducted at all, it did not involve consulting the affected villagers.

A local Catholic priest who led prayers against the dam says his parishioners were moved to a “model” village, into tiny houses on plots too small for cultivation. The letters of concern he sent to Myanmar’s leaders went unanswered. He says he will stay in his historic church “till the waters rise over the doorstep”. 

Those displaced are not the only ones worrying about the project. The project abuts territory controlled by the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO), one of a plethora of ethnic insurgencies that have battled the central government for decades. Last year several bombs exploded at the dam site and in May the KIO warned that if the dam were not stopped it would lead to civil war. The KIO’s armed wing recently engaged in skirmishes with government forces, despite a notional ceasefire.

The KIO was banned from last year’s election in Myanmar because it refused to let its fighters join the government’s “border security force”. Its threat came as Myanmar’s newly installed “civilian” president, Thein Sein, a former general, embarked on a state visit to China.

China has a big stake in Myanmar. It is the country’s leading foreign investor. Myitsone is one of many hydropower, mining and infrastructure projects there. China’s most ambitious undertaking is a new deep-sea port for oil tankers. Due for completion in 2013, it will take gas from Myanmar’s offshore Shwe field and will have the capacity to satisfy 10% of China’s oil-import needs.

These close ties are not entirely comfortable for either side. Between 1m and 2m Chinese citizens have moved into northern Myanmar. They dominate the jade-and-gem trade, push up land prices and flaunt their wealth in Mandalay and Myitkyina, where all the posh cars have Chinese number plates. Local resentment is growing. Church leaders in Myitkyina say Chinese people make up more than half the population. Many Burmese say their northern states are like a Chinese province.

China, for its part, worries about the security of its investments and people. In the past it has leaned on Myanmar’s leaders to prevent fighting between the army and the ethnic insurgencies. When conflict broke out in 2009 with the Kokang, an ethnic-Han-Chinese minority, 37,000 people fled to China, provoking sharp criticism of the Burmese junta.

As its economic interests have grown, China has pressed for more access to Myanmar’s harbours and territorial waters, to monitor the security of the new port and pipelines, and to keep an eye out for pirates. But this is a neuralgic issue for a country with a deep-seated suspicion of its powerful northern neighbour.
Myanmar’s xenophobic leaders are trying to reduce their dependence on China by playing it off against India and the West. But India has been slow in trying to gain a toehold, while America and the European Union have recently extended sanctions on Myanmar. These include America’s embargo on backing loans from the World Bank, which would impose higher environmental and other standards on big infrastructure projects such as Myitsone.

So the regime is being drawn into China’s orbit as much from necessity as choice. That does not make China any more popular. In the words of an old Burmese monk: “We are China’s kitchen. They take what they like and leave us with the rubbish.”

Source : http://www.economist.com/node/18806782

China and opposition to dams - Choking on the Three Gorges

China’s government at last owns up to problems at its monster dam

RAIN along the middle and lower Yangzi River this week has helped alleviate the region’s worst drought in 50 years. But it has not doused a storm of criticism of the Three Gorges dam upriver, including allegations that it contributed to the disaster. Opponents of the colossal edifice have been emboldened by rare government admissions of environmental and other “urgent” problems caused by the dam.


In private, officials have worried about the project for some time and occasionally their doubts have surfaced in the official media. But the government itself has refused to acknowledge them. When the project was approved by the rubber-stamp parliament in 1992, debate was stifled by the oppressive political atmosphere of the time, following the Tiananmen Square massacre three years earlier. Last July, with the dam facing its biggest flood crest since completion in 2006, officials hinted that they might have overstated its ability to control flooding. On May 18th, with the dam again in the spotlight because of the drought, a cabinet meeting chaired by the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, went further in acknowledging drawbacks.


Having called the dam “hugely beneficial overall”, the cabinet’s statement said there were problems relating to the resettlement of 1.4m people, to the environment and to the “prevention of geological disasters” that urgently needed addressing. The dam, it said, had had “a certain impact” on navigation, irrigation and water-supply downstream. Some of these problems had been forecast at the design stage or spotted during construction. But they had been “difficult to resolve effectively because of limitations imposed by conditions at the time.” It did not elaborate.


The confession has triggered a flurry of articles in official newspapers about the dam’s deficiencies. Some recalled a warning given by one of China’s most famous critics, Huang Wanli, before his death ten years ago that the dam would silt up the reservoir basin and sooner or later have to be blown up. The Oriental Morning Post even filled its front page with a picture of Mr Huang, who was persecuted by Mao Zedong for his criticism of the Sanmenxia dam on the Yellow River. Sanmenxia was the nation’s pride until its reservoir silted up. On June 7th Shanghai Daily, an English-language paper, called the Three Gorges “that monstrous damming project”.


Its effect on the drought is difficult to prove. Officials deny assertions that the dam and its more than 600-km (370-mile) reservoir might have affected the regional climate. But one official, Wang Jingquan of the Yangzi’s Water Resources Committee, conceded that the dam had lowered water levels in two of the country’s biggest freshwater lakes, making the impact worse. The rapid lowering of the reservoir’s level has also raised fears of landslides and earthquakes. Probe International, a Canadian NGO, published a report on June 1st by Chinese government experts saying the dam had caused “significantly increased” seismic activity.


This debate has erupted at a time of heightened political uncertainty as the Communist Party prepares for sweeping leadership changes next year. The government’s decision to be open about doubts that had previously been harboured in private could reflect struggles between outgoing leaders and their still-influential predecessors. The earlier generation had been responsible for getting the project started in the 1990s. But President Hu Jintao and Mr Wen did not attend the dam’s completion ceremony in May 2006.


For liberal intellectuals, the furore has provided an opportunity to push back against hardliners (who tend to favour grandiose displays of state power). One liberal newspaper published an interview with Mao Yushi, a prominent economist who has been fiercely denounced recently by hardliners because of an article he wrote attacking Mao Zedong. Mr Mao (the economist rather than the Helmsman) contributed to a book criticising the Three Gorges dam which was published in 1989, shortly before the Tiananmen protests. It was later banned.


In the interview Mr Mao accused the government of shuffling off responsibility for the dam 20 years ago by ignoring anti-dam experts and then getting the legislature to approve the project. “If there are any problems in future, you won’t be able to find anyone. There is nobody taking real responsibility,” he said.

Source : http://www.economist.com/node/18806177

Indian might met with Chinese threats

By Sudha Ramachandran 

Show of Strength

A series of steps taken by India in recent months to build up its defenses along its disputed frontier with China has prompted an angry response from the latter.

In June, General J J Singh, governor of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and former chief of army staff, announced that India would be deploying two army divisions of around 25,000 to 30,000 soldiers each along its boundary with China in Arunachal. A few days later, four Sukhoi Su-30MIK combat aircraft landed at the Indian Air Force (IAF) base in Tezpur. The IAF announced plans to increase this to a squadron strength of 18 aircraft.

The recent moves along the Sino-Indian Line of Actual Control at Arunachal "have no aggressive intent" but are simply aimed at "putting in place credible active deterrence against a vastly better-armed giant neighbor", a Defense Ministry official told Asia Times Online. It was intended to meet "future security challenges" posed by China, Singh said.

Although relations between India and China have improved in recent years - China is now India’s largest trading partner - the dispute over their 4,057-kilometer-long boundary remains unresolved. In 1962, the two countries fought a short border war, which India lost.

In that war, China occupied 38,000 square kilometers of territory in Aksai Chin in the northeastern corner of Jammu and Kashmir. This territory remains under its control. Besides, Beijing is also holding 5,180 square kilometers of land in Kashmir ceded to it by Pakistan in 1963.

In the 1962 war, Chinese troops also advanced into territory in India’s northeast but retreated subsequently. Beijing continues to lay claim to around 90,000 square kilometers of territory here, roughly approximating Arunachal Pradesh or what it refers to as "Southern Tibet".

China has repeatedly indicated that the boundary along Arunachal is not a closed chapter and that Arunachal is disputed territory. Any Indian move to assert control over Arunachal has raised hackles in China. When India conferred statehood on Arunachal in 1986, for instance, a serious skirmish broke out at Sumdurong Chu.

The response from China to the recent augmentation of forces at Arunachal was swift. An editorial in Global Times, a tabloid of the People’s Daily group, a mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China, said that India seemed to believe that China would "defer to it on territorial disputes". Dismissing this as "wishful thinking", it stressed that “China won’t make any compromises in its border disputes with India”.

The editorial went on to warn that India’s "dispatch of 60,000 troops" to its border with China would lead to "a rivalry between the two countries" and asked the Indian government to consider "whether or not it can afford the consequences of a potential confrontation with China".

That threat was followed up with a reminder that India could not match China’s might. "China is seen in India as both a potential threat and a competitor to surpass. But India can’t actually compete with China in a number of areas, like international influence, overall national power and economic scale. India apparently has not yet realized this."

Indian military experts have argued that Arunachal’s importance to China lies in its geography. Control over Arunachal will enable the Chinese to militarily overrun the Brahmaputra Valley and the rest of northeastern India.

Others have claimed that China seeks control over Arunachal, and specifically Tawang, to consolidate its hold over Tibet. Tawang is the birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama and the monastery there is Tibetan Buddhism’s second largest after the Potola Palace in Lhasa. The Tawang Monastery is "a virtual treasure trove of Tibetan Buddhist religion and culture" and is seen by Tibetans as the repository of perhaps the last remnants of a Tibet submerged by Han Chinese culture.

Chinese scholars have argued that control over Tawang is essential for China "to win the hearts of the Tibetans".

China’s assertion of its claims over Arunachal has grown in recent years. Indian diplomats say that the Chinese are intransigent on Tawang. In November 2006, Beijing’s ambassador to India, Sun Yuxi told an Indian television station "the whole of the state of Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese territory". A few months later, China refused to issue an Indian civil servant from Arunachal a visa on the grounds that he was from Chinese territory and hence didn't require a visa. Visits by Indian political leaders to Arunachal have ruffled feathers in Beijing.

Recently, China sought to block an Indian application for a US$2.9 billion loan from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), which included funding for a $60 million water management project in Arunachal. China’s objection to the loan was that it was for projects in "disputed territory". When the ADB subsequently approved the loan to India, the Chinese foreign office expressed its "strong dissatisfaction to the move".

Indian officials say that there has been a four-fold increase in Chinese intrusions into Indian territory over the past year, most of them along the border in Arunachal.

A year ago, India acted to improve its defenses in the western sector of the Sino-Indian border. It reopened airfields in Daulat Beg Oldi and Fukche in Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir, a stone's throw from Aksai Chin. Phunchok Stobdan, senior fellow at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi, had described the reopening of the airfields near Aksai Chin as a response to the "dozens of provocations from China". India "is preparing for contingency", he told Asia Times Online.

The enhanced military deployment in the eastern sector is part of that preparation.

Besides the deployment of more troops and combat aircraft near at the border in Arunachal, India is developing the IAF base at Tezpur, which is just 150 kilometers from the border, into a major hub for Sukhoi aircraft. The IAF also proposes to station more Sukhois in the nearby Chabua air force base. And plans are afoot to upgrade infrastructure at five air force bases in the eastern part of the country including Tezpur, Chabua and Jorhat in Assam, Panagarh in West Bengal and Purnea in Bihar.

China’s plans to extend the Golmud-Lhasa rail up to Yatung, a trading center near Nathu La, a mountain pass that connects Tibet with Sikkim, and to Nyingchi, a trading town north of Arunachal at the tri-junction with Myanmar. Indian analysts warn that in a few years China will be able to deploy troops by the trainload right up to the Indian border at Sikkim and Arunachal - two Indian states into which Chinese intrusions are frequent.

India’s road and rail building activity in these areas has been sluggish.

Consider this. Sikkim has only one road linking its capital Gangtok to Nathu La and one landslide-prone road, just five meters wide, joining the state with the rest of India. Sikkim's road density is 28.45 kilometers per 100 square kilometers against the national average of 84 kilometers. Arunachal Pradesh is even worse off, with a road density of just 18.65 kilometers per 100 square kilometers. No trains run to the border-states of Sikkim, Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh. While Chinese military personnel can drive down to the Sino-Indian border and will be able to take trains too in a few years, Indian soldiers often trek 10-15kms to get there.

This paucity of roads in border areas is being addressed now. In 2006, the government gave the green signal for a host of road and other infrastructure projects in border areas. It recently announced an investment of US$3 billion in road construction in border areas.
According to reports, upgrading advance landing grounds and airfields and construction of border roads, which was hitherto undertaken solely by engineers attached to the IAF or the Border Roads Organization, a unit of the armed forces, is now being opened up to the private sector as well. The aim is to speed up implementation of various infrastructure projects along a sensitive border.

For decades, India, badly bruised from its defeat at the hands of China, opted to back down in the face of Chinese intimidation. That is now changing. It is this newly assertive Indian posture that is bothering China.

Indian analysts believe that neither of the two countries wants to go to war. But they are not ruling out the possibility of China carrying out a limited military operation in the eastern sector of Arunachal, one that will deal a short and stunning blow, depriving India of Tawang and leaving it with a bloody nose.

It is to be prepared now that India is building its military muscle in Arunachal.

Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist/researcher based in Bangalore.

Source :http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KG10Df01.html

Tibet: Chinese Plans of Diverting the Brahmaputra River Raise International Concern

Source : http://www.unpo.org/article/12738.

As a way of securing access to water, Chinese authorities have plans of diverting water from the Brahmaputra River that originates in Tibet is an important source of water also for India and Bangladesh. 
Below is an article published by 2point6billion.com:
Faced with severe challenges brought by reduced water resources and a severe drought that has affected a large portion of the country, China has started to consider diverting water from the Brahmaputra River, the watercourse that originates upstream from southwestern Tibet (where it is known as the Yarlung Zangbo River) and finally enters India, a recent report by Xinhua News Agency says.

Wang Guangqian, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said on June 3 that Chinese experts have raised a new proposal to divert water from the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra River to the country’s northwestern province of Xinjiang. The water diversion route in the proposal, named the “Grand Western Canal,” is slightly different from the “western canal” mentioned in China’s well-known South-North Water Diversion Project approved by the State Council in December 2002. 

While the previous canal aims to alleviate water shortages in Qinghai, Gansu and Ningxia, and plans to divert water from three rivers in the Yangtze River’s upper reaches – namely the Tongtian River (Qinghai), the Yalong River (Sichuan) and the Dadu River (Sichuan) – the newly proposed route is expected to start from the Brahmaputra River, from which China can reroute the water to Xinjiang along the Qinghai-Tibet Railway and the Hexi Corridor – part of Northern Silk Road located in Gansu Province. 

Wang admitted the serious water crisis across China has forced experts to think about the new water diversion scheme earlier than they had wanted to. 

“We thought this would be a plan 50 years later,” he said. 

Due to the increasing demand for water along the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River and the Yellow River – China’s two largest and most heavily-exploited domestic watercourses – the upper reaches of the two rivers have seen a significant decline in their water reserves. What is worse, as a result of surface water deficiency, almost all of China’s first and second-tier cities have the problem of groundwater overdraft and are threatened by potential risks brought by the lowering of the water table (the level at which the submarine pressure is far from atmospheric pressure). 

In fact, experts originally brought up various plans to reroute water from the largest river in Tibet a long time ago. One of the most famous proposals was raised in 1990 by Guo Kai, a water expert, suggesting a project that diverts 200.6 billion cubic meters of water every year from the Brahmaputra River to the Yellow River. However, according to a 2009 Xinhua report, Wang Shucheng, the previous minister of the Ministry of Water Resources, somewhat denied the feasibility of the plan. 

At the time, Wang Shucheng believed the water diversion from the Yangtze River is enough for North China’s water supply and redirecting so much water from the Brahmaputra River every year is not even practical, because such a huge flush will destroy all the dams over the Yellow River.

Presently, Chinese experts and governmental officials are still studying the feasibility and possible impacts of distinct proposals.

Although China has claimed first use rights over the Brahmaputra and all of the other rivers in Tibet, the water resource exploitation of those international rivers does not only seem to be a domestic issue. Downstream, the Brahmaputra flows through India as well as Bangladesh and serves as a major fresh water source for a myriad of people. While China finally confirmed the construction of its dam project over the Brahmaputra last year, India’s Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh already commented the project as “unacceptable” and stressed the “great fear in India” would be China’s water diversion of the Brahmaputra, which may impact Northeastern India ecologically and bring a drought threat to the area.