Lefty Prof's List: India-U.S. ties

• The blossoming of ties with the United States has become an important diplomatic asset for India in recent years. Yet, the heady glow of the much-ballyhooed strategic partnership helped obscure prickly issues
• One aspect of the relationship, however, has thrived spectacularly — U.S. arms sales to India. In just a few years, the U.S. has quietly emerged as India’s largest arms supplier, leaving Russia and Israel far behind.
• This development is linked to the Indo-U.S. civilian nuclear deal. Although it remains a dud deal on energy, with little prospect of delivering a single operational nuclear power plant for years to come, it has proved a roaring success in opening the door to major U.S. arms sales. The 2005 nuclear agreement-in-principle incorporated a specific commitment to ramp up defence transactions.
• Still, few Indians are raising the key questions: How are India’s security interests being advanced by substituting the corrosive import dependency on Russia with a new dependency on the U.S., without progress to build a domestic arms-production base? What makes the strategic partnership “special,” given that Washington also has special relationships with India’s regional adversaries — a security alliance since 2004 and strategic partnership since 2006 with Pakistan, and a “constructive strategic partnership” with China since 1997 that predates the strategic partnership with India? Is a relationship locking India as a leading U.S. arms client sustainable in the long run?
• Let’s be clear: India can never emerge as a major international power in a true sense, or acquire a military edge regionally, if it remains dependent on imports to meet even its basic defence needs. The capacity to defend oneself with one’s own resources is the first test a nation must pass on the way to becoming a great power.
• Such large-scale imports might suggest that India is pursuing a well-planned military build-up. In truth, such imports lack strategic direction, given the absence of long-term political thinking or joint tri-service planning and command. They are being made in a haphazard manner, although any imported weapon makes India hostage to the supplier-nation for spares and service for the full life of that system.
• exposing new gaps in its capabilities to decisively win a war.
• Worse still, defence transactions remain the single largest source of kickbacks for India’s corrupt and compromised political elites.
• For the U.S., displacing Russia as India’s largest arms supplier has been a diplomatic coup. Rarely before has America acquired a major arms client of such size so rapidly.
• True, such a relationship will have a countervailing value vis-à-vis China. Yet, it is also true that America has a deeper engagement with China than with India. Indeed, China is now central to U.S. economic and strategic interests.
• A wake-up call for Asian states that rely on the U.S. as their security guarantor was Obama’s inaction on the 2012 Chinese capture of the Scarborough Shoal, located within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. America’s indifference to its commitment to the Philippines under their Mutual Defence Treaty emboldened China to effectively seize a second Philippine-claimed shoal. This is proof that despite its “pivot” toward Asia, the U.S. won’t act in ways detrimental to its close engagement with China. Obama’s foreign policy bears a distinct transactional imprint.

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• US has made India a "groundbreaking collaborative defence proposal" to co-develop with India a next-generation Javelin antitank capability, according to a top defence official.
• an unprecedented offer the US has made unique to India, Deputy Defence Secretary Ash Carter, said Monday at the Centre for American Progress, a Washington think tank.
• "the strong and rapidly growing defense partnership between the US and India, as we execute.... the rebalance, so-called, to the Asia Pacific region."
• Asserting that US and India are "destined to be partners on the world stage," he said
• "We have demonstrated repeatedly that we can release sensitive technology to India," Carter said.
• "We'll ensure that those innovative projects receive priority funding. This is an approach we've only ever taken with the United Kingdom and Australia, and now India will join that company."

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• India has been the world’s biggest arms importer for the last four years in a row, and the value of its purchases from the US has soared since their nadir of zero in 2004-2005, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI.
• The two countries’ militaries regularly exercise with one another, especially at sea. There is even talk of regular “rotations” of US Air Force units through the Indian airbase at Trivandrum, similar to the US Marine Corps’ long-term but not permanent presence in Darwin, Australia

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• The story of the Indian economy’s fall from grace is by now familiar – almost a new cliché. After three years of 9 percent growth, India’s economy has sharply slowed. Projections for 2014 range from 4 to 5.5 percent; Paribas bank estimates growth during the April-June 2013 quarter at 3.7 percent. Manufacturing growth, which had done well during the boom years, sank to 3.5 percent in 2011 and barely topped 3 percent in 2012. Perhaps the biggest attention-getter has been the plummeting value of the rupee, down 22 percent between May and September 2013, Rs. 63 to the dollar in mid-September.
• Services, accounting for about 59 percent of the Indian economy, grew over 7 percent – below the double digit levels of the past two decades, but still ahead of GDP
• Domestic capital investment remains relatively high by international standards, though it did fall from a high of 38 percent of GDP in 2007/08 to 35.4 percent in 2011/12.
• International trade has held up better – exports and imports came close to doubling in the five years since 2007.
• Finance Minister P. Chidambaram has pushed through some measures intended to bring in more foreign investment and improve relations with international business. These included the suspension of the Indian government’s policy on “preferential market access” (local content requirements) for electronic equipment purchased by the government.  The government also revised and moved to implement its decision to open single-brand retail to foreign investment. Unfortunately, to sell this measure politically, the government surrounded it with conditions that have kept investors away.
• However, elections loom before May 2014. The government has turned inward; populist
• The Food Security bill, passed during the last session of parliament, will extend food entitlement programs to up to 50 percent of the urban population and up to 75 percent of the rural population.
• The Land Acquisition, Resettlement and Rehabilitation Act, also passed during the last session, updates the often troublesome process of land acquisition. Legal experts familiar with the process expressed hope that the enhanced compensation levels it enacts will reduce the frequency of protracted litigation over land acquisition. Business observers fear that the requirement for administrative review of the social impact of each land transaction in which the government is involved will lead to even further delays on the creation of new industrial establishments.
• For the past twenty years, India has enjoyed and nurtured a global role that goes starts with primacy in its own neighborhood but also features a dynamic new relationship with the United States, expanded trade as well as strategic competition with China, a growing role in Asian security extending from the Indian Ocean through to the Pacific, and a growing network of economic agreements, including Free Trade Agreements already concluded with Japan, Korea and ASEAN and pacts under negotiation with the EU and Canada. India has also built up its ties with the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Each of these relationships is driven in significant part by India’s economic profile.
• India’s economic slowdown will act as a drag on its strategic objectives.
• India’s lackluster economic performance suggests that the time when India might move into the same economic league as China is not getting closer.
• security engagement to India’s east will depend in part on the budget, and at the moment, austerity is holding planned defense increases below the rate of inflation.
• the proposed BRICS development bank: unless India’s economic surge resumes, it becomes almost impossible to imagine such a bank having sufficient capital to make a difference unless its financing is turned over to China, a decision that India would probably be reluctant to accept
• U.S.-India bilateral economic agenda has made relatively little progress. Long-standing issues important to U.S. business, such as the cap on foreign investment in insurance, have stalled.
• Recent Indian legislation, especially on land acquisition, has raised hackles among prospective investors.

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• The US now wants to do a Russia on India. Eager to displace Russia as India's largest defence supplier, the US is promising to treat India on par with its closest allies like the UK and Australia in terms of providing cutting-edge military technology.
• From offering joint manufacturing facilities for the next-generation of Javelin anti-tank guided missiles to C-130J "Super Hercules" aircraft, Carter said the US was looking to partner with India across "the entire spectrum" of defence capabilities with "no boundaries" being set.

• The hard-sell comes in the backdrop of India poised to spend well over $100 billion on acquiring arms over the next decade. Having already inked Indian defence contracts worth over $8 billion in recent years, the US is now also set to bag another four deals worth almost $5 billion in the current fiscal.

  But none of the four deals for six more C-130J aircraft, 22 Apache attack helicopters, 15 Chinook heavy-lift helicopters and 145 M-777 ultra-light howitzers will actually be inked when the PM meets President Barack Obama on September 27.

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• Although poorer and less economically dynamic than China, India has soft power in abundance. It is committed to democratic institutions, the rule of law and human rights. As a victim of jihadist violence, it is in the front rank of the fight against terrorism. It has a huge and talented diaspora. It may not want to be co-opted by the West but it shares many Western values. It is confident and culturally rich. If it had a permanent Security Council seat (which it has earned by being one of the most consistent contributors to UN peacekeeping operations) it would not instinctively excuse and defend brutal regimes. Unlike China and Russia, it has few skeletons in its cupboard. With its enormous coastline and respected navy (rated by its American counterpart, with which it often holds exercises, as up to NATO standard) India is well-placed to provide security in a critical part of the global commons.
• the country lacks the culture to pursue an active security policy
• Despite a rapidly rising defence budget, forecast to be the world’s fourth-largest by 2020, India’s politicians and bureaucrats show little interest in grand strategy
• India’s tradition of strategic restraint has in some ways served the country well. Having little to show for several limited wars with Pakistan and one with China, India tends to respond to provocations with caution.
• India should start to shape its own destiny and the fate of its region. It needs to take strategy more seriously and build a foreign service that is fitting for a great power—one that is at least three times bigger. It needs a more professional defence ministry and a unified defence staff that can work with the country’s political leadership. It needs to let private and foreign firms into its moribund state-run defence industry. And it needs a well-funded navy that can become both a provider of maritime security along some of the world’s busiest sea-lanes and an expression of India’s willingness to shoulder the responsibilities of a great power.
• Most of all, though, India needs to give up its outdated philosophy of non-alignment. Since the nuclear deal with America in 2005, it has shifted towards the west—it tends to vote America’s way in the UN, it has cut its purchases of Iranian oil, it collaborates with NATO in Afghanistan and co-ordinates with the West in dealing with regional problems such as repression in Sri Lanka and transition in Myanmar—but has done so surreptitiously. Making its shift more explicit, by signing up with Western-backed security alliances, would be good for the region, and the world.
• That might not be in India’s short-term interest, for it would risk antagonising China. But looking beyond short-term self-interest is the kind of thing a great power does.

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• India and the US can work out joint ventures to upgrade defence capabilities if New Delhi is perceived as "a friend and a focal point" in Asia, former Indian Army chief Gen (retd) VK Singh has said.
• There is great scope for cooperation in defence technology between the two sides and things will move at a faster pace if Indian military officials are given a greater role in talks with the US, Singh told a news agency in an interview. 
  
   "There is a great (scope for) cooperation that can be worked out as a joint venture between the two to upgrade capabilities if the US thinks that India is a friend and a focal point for it in Asia," he said.
• Singh, the only Indian general to be inducted into the International Fellow Hall of Fame at the prestigious US Army War College, pushed for strong defence ties between the two sides when he headed the Indian Army during March 2010-February 2012.

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• The Ministry of External Affairs and the Environment Ministry — both nodal points for environment-related international agreements — have opposed the move strongly, raising a red flag on several counts. They have said that the Union cabinet had earlier decided against such a move. It’s noted that the new technology and gases being pushed as the alternative are patented by select industrialised country companies, are 20 times more costly at times and untested for safety in some cases.

• General Raymond T. Odierno was in an upbeat mood. He had just returned from a visit to India. He was profuse in his praise for the Indian Army. He said the US Army had to learn a lot from its Indian counterpart.
• He visited the Indian Army’s Northern Command, responsible for the borders with Pakistan and China, and interacted with the staff and commanders there. The Northern Command has the Srinagar-based 15 Corps and Nagrota-based 16 Corps which look after the counter-insurgency operations in the State. General Odierno thus gained firsthand knowledge of India’s counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir.
• He made clear what the strategy is: “to continue to rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region”.
• Highly impressed by the Indian military’s successful counter-insurgency operations, he said: “The US would like to learn from the Indian experience as to how to fight militants in a tough environment and difficult terrain as in Afghanistan.”
• The General expressed interest in conducting US-India joint exercises in Kashmir. “The US may be interested in but still need to take a look at by sending people to train in these types of environment,” he said. Indian and US troops have held joint exercises in the mountainous Ladakh region in 2003. The renewed interest in Kashmir has a reason. “The basis of our continued relationship will be the sharing of information about what they face on a day-to-day basis with Pakistan as well as with China.”
• The General could as well go to Tel Aviv to learn about the strategy and tactics of counter-terrorism in India. During the visit by (then) Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres to New Delhi in January 2002, a Foreign Ministry spokes-person said: “India finds it increasingly beneficial to learn from Israel’s experience in dealing with terrorism since Israel too has long suffered from cross-border terrorism.”
• India and Israel not only exchange crucial intelligence information on what they call “Islamist terrorist groups” but Israel is also ‘helping’ India to ‘fight terrorism’ in Kashmir by providing important logistical support such as specialised surveillance equipment, cooperation on intelligence gathering, and joint exercises.
• Jane’s Defence Weekly reported in March 2000 that Israeli security officers were regularly visiting the Kashmir border. Jane’s Terrorism and Security Monitor (August 14, 2001): “Israeli intelligence have been intensifying their relations with Indian security apparatus and are now understood to be heavily involved in helping New Delhi combat Islamic militants in the disputed province of Kashmir.”
• The Jerusalem Post reported on February 3, 2003 that India was sending three battalions of nearly 3000 Indian soldiers to Israel for specialised anti-insurgency training.
• India and the USA have counter-terrorism cooperation from 2001 buttressed by the Framework Agreement on Defence Cooperation between the two countries, signed in June 2005
• There is also enough reason for India to have serious doubts about the US commitment to bilateral cooperation in the absence of transparency in Washington’s actions. The prime example of the David Headley case stands out. India was surprised by accounts that the US was aware of Headley’s connections and movements much before his arrest as a terrorist.
• As Lisa Curtis of the Heritage Foundation said in her testimony before the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs’ Sub-committee on Terrorism and Non-prolife-ration on September 14, 2012, “It took almost nine months before Indian authorities were given direct access to Headley. The US failure to pursue arrest and prosecution of Pakistani intelligence officers named by Headley as being involved in the 2008 Mumbai attack has also reinforced Indian beliefs that the US will gloss over Pakistani involvement in India so long as Pakistan continues to cooperate with the US against groups that attack America. By choosing to view the activities of the Al-Qaeda and other Pak-based terrorist groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba through a separate lens, US officials have failed to hold Pakistan accountable for dealing effectively with terrorists located on its territory.”

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• ONA is a Pentagon think-tank chartered with the task of studying potential trouble spots and shaping the military response to them. It has long predicted problems with China over the nation's growing military and demand for natural resources to fuel its manufacturing economy. A Washington Post report in August 2012 quoted a foreign policy strategist calling ONA the "Office of Threat Inflation" for its fixation on China and promotion of a military strategy called Air-Sea Battle.
• In recent weeks, the office has commissioned studies on "Mining the Gaps in Chinese Strategic Discourse" for $199,800 from a Georgia company called Joint Management Services, which is run by Georgia Tech professor Michael Salomone, and a $220,000 contract to the Hudson Institute, a conservative Washington think-tank, for a study on issues in the strategic contest between China and India.
• The Hudson Institute, which contains several ONA alumni, has a long record of viewing China's activities with concern and skepticism. Recent articles published by Hudson scholars include those titled "China's Growing Challenge to U.S. Naval Power," "Beware a Revanchist China" and "China's Cyber Spies are Stealing More Than Secrets."

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• The man appeared closer in age to his first shave than to fatherhood.

   

  My mem­ory has him slouch­ing in the chair. I suc­cumbed to the temp­ta­tion of a current-events joke: The A380 was in the news those days for falling behind on the pro­duc­tion sched­ule. Smil­ing, I asked the man whether he was to blame for the delay.

   

  “Actu­ally, sir,” he replied, “if they had out­sourced the whole plane to us, it would have been fin­ished early.”

   

  There was some­thing dis­tinctly un-Indian about a response like this.

   

  An unmis­tak­able whiff of Amer­ica had got­ten into him. The young man’s par­ents prob­a­bly wouldn’t have spo­ken in that way; they might have found such talk dis­re­spect­ful and tempt­ing of fate. But what was Indian and un-Indian was chang­ing, and such verve, con­fi­dence, self-belief were con­ta­gious among the glob­al­ized, upwardly mobile young.

  • This is the dominant image of "Brand India," the image that seems to have bedazzled Thomas Friedman for several years now.
• Dur­ing the visit, Mr. Obama repeat­edly described the Indian-American bond as “the defin­ing part­ner­ship of the 21st century.”
• The case of India and the United States reveals what is true of many other cases as well: Beneath the sum­mitry and state din­ners and trade deals, there is a grad­ual human weav­ing through which two coun­tries sen­si­tize them­selves to each other, inspire and learn from each other, laugh at and argue with each other, mimic each other’s fash­ions and man­age­ment philoso­phies, dis­cover each other’s pres­sure points.

  • Of course, the author ignores the fact that this "weaving together" involves, at best, a small fraction of Indian society, the urban elite and middle classes. Who else, after all, is involved in "mimicking each others' fashions and management philosophies"? The notion that the experiences of this segment of the population speaks for the country as a whole is easily recognizable as the rhetorical sleight-of-hand of nationalist discourse.

• It hap­pened in the book­stores. In India, where the self had for many mil­lions tra­di­tion­ally been some­thing to sub­li­mate to the fam­ily and clan, the stores began to fill with take-charge-of-your-life Amer­i­can self-help titles like “The Seven Habits of Highly Effec­tive People.”

   

  U.S.-style man­age­ment phi­los­o­phy like­wise taught a ris­ing gen­er­a­tion of Indian man­agers to invig­o­rate their fathers’ slug­gish enterprises.

  • Indeed. Bookstores in Indian cities have long played the role of defining urban popular intellectual life, thanks in large measure to a dearth of accessible library resources. The American self-help titles that litter the shelves of aspiring middle class youngsters in India are certainly indicators of a cultural shift that is mirrored in the preoccupations of the mass media, and--somewhat less visibly--in education.
    
    Behind the enthusiasm with which American models of management, media production, marketing, and education are being taken up, one can detect an unmistakable euphoria about finally "catching up" with the U.S.
• In the United States, mean­while, books on med­i­ta­tion, yoga and ayurvedic med­i­cine pro­lif­er­ated; as one coun­try learned from the other how to light dynamism’s fire, another learned how to slow it down and live with bal­ance.

  • Giridharadas would do well to read Vijay Prashad's critique of the cultural politics of this phenomenon in The Karma of Brown Folk.
• And writ­ers like Jhumpa Lahiri explained India to Amer­i­cans and Amer­ica to Indi­ans, and showed, in her lit­tle fam­ily micro­cosms, what life might look like were the two worlds to blend.

  • Has Giridharadas actually read Lahiri's work? Quite apart from the fact that her fiction does not pretend to "explain India to Americans" or vice versa, the vignettes she paints in Interpreter of Maladies can hardly be seen as representing a happy "blending" of worlds. (In the story "Mrs. Sen's House," for instance, the simple act of driving to the grocery store becomes, for its main character, symbolic not merely of an identity crisis but of an existential crisis.)
• It hap­pened in the arts and cul­ture. A new crop of Bol­ly­wood song mak­ers merged Amer­i­can hip-hop beats into their tracks and some­times even rap inter­ludes.
• Indian adver­tise­ments began to speak in the Amer­i­can lan­guage of self­hood, free­dom and choice — “The Inter­net is under new man­age­ment. Yours,” declared an ad for Yahoo in The Hin­dus­tan Times. Film­mak­ers began to make pop­u­lar off-Bollywood films more likely to appeal to West­ern­ers: darker, grit­tier, shorter song-and-dance-free titles like “Life in a Metro” and “Love Sex aur Dhokha.”
• Amer­ica rec­i­p­ro­cated with an Acad­emy Award for “Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire,” with the cast­ing of Aish­warya Rai in “Bride and Prej­u­dice,” with Indian char­ac­ters in main­stream tele­vi­sion shows like “Out­sourced” and movies like “Office Space.”
• Each coun­try became more com­fort­able with pub­lic offi­cials with ties to the other coun­try.
• It hap­pened in the realm of style. In India, the jeans slowly grew skin­nier and acquired delib­er­ate, paid-for wear and tear, while slip­ping from the waist down to the hip. Slinky tank tops mul­ti­plied on the streets of Mum­bai and Delhi, sold by men who would faint if they saw their wives wear­ing one.
• bottom-up bilat­eral warm­ing
• places like the Bagel Shop in the Ban­dra quar­ter of Mum­bai, where expats and locals min­gled; the Grand Hyatt hotel nearby, where con­fer­ences were held to give Indian and Amer­i­can jour­nal­ists and power bro­kers unprece­dented access to each other; Rasika, an Indian restau­rant in Wash­ing­ton, where Indi­ans and Wash­ing­ton lob­by­ist types dined side by side; the business-class cab­ins of Continental’s and Delta’s direct U.S.-India flights, aboard which it became increas­ingly com­mon for reg­u­lar pli­ers of that route to run into one another.
• the quiet daily sum­mitry of mil­lions of ordi­nary peo­ple
• It can build a rela­tion­ship over long years and can make diplo­matic break­throughs, impor­tant though they are, seem merely like acknowl­edge­ments of what already, inex­orably is.

  • Hallelujah! We have arrived!

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• But the United States has ruled out a Golden Temple visit, according to an American official involved in planning. Temple officials said that American advance teams had gone to Amritsar, the holy city that is the site of the temple, to discuss a possible visit. But the plan appears to have foundered on the thorny question of how Mr. Obama would cover his head, as Sikh tradition requires, while visiting the temple.

• Senior American military commanders have sought to press India to formally disavow an obscure military doctrine that they contend is fueling tensions between India and Pakistan and hindering the American war effort in Afghanistan.

   

   But with President Obama arriving in India on Saturday for a closely watched three-day visit, administration officials said they did not expect him to broach the subject of the doctrine, known informally as Cold Start. At the most, these officials predicted, Mr. Obama will quietly encourage India’s leaders to do what they can to cool tensions between these nuclear-armed neighbors.

   

   That would be a victory for India, which denies the very existence of Cold Start, a plan to deploy new ground forces that could strike inside Pakistan quickly in the event of a conflict.
• It is also a victory for those in the administration who agree that the United States and India should focus on broader concerns, including commercial ties, military sales, climate change and regional security. However vital the Afghan war effort, officials said, it has lost out in the internal debate to priorities like American jobs and the rising role of China.
• The two countries are expected to sign a $5.8 billion deal to supply Boeing C-17 transport planes to the Indian military, one of several lucrative multiyear agreements to supply India with military hardware. The United States is eager to strengthen military ties with India, partly to make it a counterweight to China, which is flexing its muscles militarily and economically
• “President Obama intends this trip to be — and intends our policy to be — a full embrace of India’s rise,” Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, said to reporters on Air Force One en route to India.
• “We don’t know what Cold Start is,” said India’s defense secretary, Pradeep Kumar

• Indian officials and some analysts say Cold Start has taken on a nearly mythical status in the minds of Pakistani leaders, whom they suspect of inflating it as an excuse to avoid engaging militants on their own turf.

   

   “The Pakistanis will use everything they can to delay or drag out doing a serious reorientation of their military,” said Stephen P. Cohen, an expert on South Asia at the Brookings Institution.
• When Pakistani military officials are asked to justify the huge investment in upgrading that arsenal, some respond that because Pakistan has no conventional means to deter Cold Start, nuclear weapons are its only option.
• “They are grasping at straws because they have a predicament in the Afghan theater that they cannot fix without Pakistan’s help,” said Ashley J. Tellis, a former diplomat and South Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They are looking at India to do something to placate the Pakistanis.”

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