India's Modi's Policy Blunders and Superpower Delusions

[Riaz Haq]

"If you (India) want to run with the big dogs, you have to stop pissing with the puppies".
 Robert Blackwill, Ex US Ambassador to India

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Top Foreign Policy Advisor Ajit Doval

What Mr. Blackwill said about India back in 2006 still rings true with Modi's foreign policy team's poor handling of Nepal.  In a piece titled "Has Narendra Modi's foreign policy bubble burst", a BBC report summed up the situation in the following words:

"For many in India, Narendra Modi is seen as the country's best brand ambassador. That's quite apparent from his many overseas visits in his first 16 months in office - he has generated plenty of interest, airtime and drawn adulation from the extensive Indian diaspora.
But that may not be enough in sustaining relationships in the neighbourhood, as he is fast finding out."

India's Regional Ties:

There seems to be emerging consensus that Prime Modi's "Neighborhood First" policy he announced at the time of his inauguration last year appears to be on the verge of collapse.

The Hindu Nationalists' foreign policy spearheaded by former RAW Chief Ajit Doval is causing rapid deterioration of India's relations with most of its neighbors ranging in size from China and Pakistan to Maldives and Nepal. Written during Prime Minister Modi's recent US visit, including a large reception given by Indian Americans in Silicon Valley, an opinion piece by policy analyst Jyoti Malhotra concludes as follows:  "So as the prime minister charms America, flanked by his two key aides Ajit Doval and S Jaishankar, the thought surfaces: Let him also spare a thought for India’s crisis-ridden neighbourhood".

India's Biggest Policy Blunder:

India threw away its substantial conventional military edge over Pakistan when the Hindu Nationalist government of Atal Bihari Vajapayee decided to carry out its nuclear tests in 1998.  It gave Pakistan the justification it needed to go nuclear a few weeks later, thereby achieving balance of terror with its much larger neighbor with a huge conventional military.

Indian analyst Krishna Kant explains his country's policymakers blunder as follows: "Nuclear weapons have reduced Pakistan defense cost while we (India) have been forced to spend tens of billions of dollars to acquire latest military hardware in a bid to retain the edge. Its shows in the defence budget of the two countries since 1999 nuclear blasts. All through 1980s and 90s, Pakistan was spending around a third of its government budget and 5-6% of its GDP on defence, or about twice the corresponding ratios for India.

After going nuclear, Pakistan’s defence spending decelerated and its share in GDP is expected to be decline to around 2.5% in the current fiscal year, slightly ahead of India’s 2%. This is releasing resources for Pakistan to invest in productive sectors such as infrastructure and social services, something they couldn’t do when they were competing with India to maintain parity in conventional weapons."

Ajit Doval's Rhetoric Against Pakistan:

Kant argues that the Hindu Nationalists blunders in the past have severely limited India's policy options vis-a-vis Pakistan. Here's how how he concluded his Op Ed in Business Standard: "In this environment, a hard talk by Mr Doval followed by a high-decibel drama by the government on the National Security Advisor’s talk between the two countries seems nothing more than a show for the gallery. The audience may be applauding right now, but claps may turn to boos as the public realises the inconsistencies in the script and the pain it inflicts on the hero."

Summary:

Hindu Nationalists' superpower delusions have led them to policies that are hurting India's position in South Asia region and the world. No amount of hard talk by Ajit Doval can change this fact.  Former Indian Prime Minister Mr. Manmohan Singh has recently said: "India and Pakistan need sustained engagement to realise the vast potential of benefits of liberalisation of trade and investment in the South Asian region." Modi and Doval need listen to Mr. Singh. India's best bet is to engage with Pakistan as well as other neighbors on a sustained basis to deal with the realities as they exist.


Viewpoint From Overseas host Faraz Darvesh discusses the subject with panelists Ali H. Cemendtaur and Riaz Haq (www.riazhaq.com)

https://vimeo.com/141373288



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[Riaz Haq]

"#Modi can't promote Make in #India abroad, #Hate in India at home": Shashi Tharoor. #BJP http://toi.in/Ur6zpY via @timesofindia

Congress parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor on Tuesday tore through the Narendra Modi government, saying it cannot promote its ambitious Make in India programme abroad while a 'Hate in India' campaign is on in the country.

Speaking during a charged debate on intolerance in Lok Sabha, Tharoor said the "bomb of communalism" was dividing India. "It's safer to be a cow than a Muslim in India today," the MP from Thiruvananthapuram said, inviting a loud protest by the BJP members.

Tharoor quoted a Bangladeshi friend as telling him that fundamentalists in his country were attacking India after incidents of intolerance and communal polarisation grew in the country. "We are shamed with the reputation we are gaining abroad," he said.

The Congress leader said India was built on the premise of respecting diversity, and it is the responsibility of the government to uphold that promise.

Attacking Modi and reminding of his election promises, Tharoor said, "Has the Prime Minister forgotten that he is a leader and he is supposed to walk with people belonging to all caste, class and religion?"

"Where is the Modi who refused to politicise the bomb blasts that took place while he was addressing an election rally at Patna's Gandhi Maidan?" he asked in Hindi.

Tharoor also demanded the abolition of death penalty, describing it as an "aberration in a healthy democracy". Raising the issue during Zero Hour, he said hanging people does not deter crime and there is a lot of subjectivity in application of death penalty.

"It (death penalty) is an aberration in a healthy democracy," Tharoor said, adding that instead preventive and reformative measures should be strengthened to prevent crimes.

Contending that death penalty has mostly affected the marginalised people, the Congress leader said the state should not become killer. "We should abolish death penalty to uphold the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi," he said.

According to him, around 70 per cent of the United Nations members have abolished death penalty.

[Riaz Haq]

#India is second most ignorant nation of the world after #Mexico: Survey http://www.ibnlive.com/news/india/india-is-second-most-ignorant-nat... … via @ibnlive

London: India has the "dubious honour" of being the second most ignorant nation in the world after Mexico, according to a survey which posed questions on issues like inequality, non-religious population, female employment and internet access. The survey conducted by Ipsos MORI, a London-based market research firm, polled 25,000 people from 33 countries and found that while people "over-estimate what we worry about", a lot of major issues are underestimated.
"Mexico and India receive the dubious honour of being the most inaccurate in their perceptions on these issues, while South Koreans are the most accurate, followed by the Irish," the survey said. The rankings of the nations were based on the "Index of Ignorance" which was determined by questions about wealth that the top one per cent own, obesity, non-religious population, immigration, living with parents, female employment, rural living and internet access.

Most Indians "underestimate" how much of their country's wealth is concentrated in the hands of the top 1 per cent, the survey said, adding that the top 1 per cent actually own an "incredible" 70 per cent of all wealth. The survey also found that most Indians "hugely overestimate" the proportions of non-religious people in the country to be 33 per cent when the true figure is under 1 per cent.
While Israel significantly underestimates the proportion of female employment (by 29 percentage points), people in countries like India, Mexico, South Africa and Chile all think of more women in work than really are, it said. India fell in the list of nations which overestimate representation by women in politics. Countries like Columbia, Russia, India and Brazil all think there is better female representation than there really is, the survey said.

However, the Indian population seriously underestimates the rural population of the country and thinks more people have internet access than in reality. In India the average guess among online respondents for internet access is 60 per cent - an overestimation of the true picture of 41 percentage points, the survey added.

[Riaz Haq]

#India blockade has shattered my dreams, says #Nepal PM K P Sharma Oli. #NepalChokedByIndia http://toi.in/vngW7a via @timesofindia

Nepal Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli on Sunday said his dream to develop the Himalayan nation as "vibrant" had been shattered by the "embargo imposed by India". Receiving a memorandum submitted by academicians on Sunday, Oli said his plan to make Nepal a developed nation was under a cloud. Nepal's economic growth witnessed a sharp fall following the April 25 earthquake which claimed over 9,000 lives and devastated vast areas of the nation.

After being elected prime minister, Oli said, he had made many commitments to the nation, including ending the long daily load-shedding, plying electric vehicles in Kathmandu, and building a self-reliant economy. "I had dreamt several dreams on becoming prime minister," he said.
"I became prime minister in a very difficult situation. As we were trying to overcome the pain caused by the quake, the embargo along the border came as a serious jolt," he added, "I have been trying my best to overcome the pain and suffering."

Oli admitted that he had not been able to fulfil his commitments because of the unrest in Nepal's southern plain for the last four months. Due to protests and demonstrations at the border, thousands of Nepal-bound freight vehicles are stuck on the Indian side of the border

This has brought the economy of the landlocked Himalayan nation to a grinding halt. Officials say that if the standoff continues, Nepal will soon face a humanitarian crisis.

[Riaz Haq]

#India's aid to #Nepal dwindles to $22 million vs #China's $37 million in 2014-15 - The Economic Times

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/indias...


India's aid to Nepal has dwindled by over 50 per cent in the last five years to USD 22 million while China's assistance to the land-locked nation doubled, a Nepalese Finance Ministry report says, amid Nepal's deepening ties with the Communist giant.

Chinese aid of USD 37.94 million was disbursed in the 12-month period in 2014-2015 which made it the fourth largest bilateral donor to Nepal behind the UK, the US and Japan, according to Nepal's Development Cooperation Report 2014-15.

[Riaz Haq]

#Asia's sweetheart: Why the region's giants are wooing #SriLanka? #China #India #Japan #US

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/24/global-opportunities-china-india-tus...

Situated almost in the middle of the Indian Ocean, there is no escaping Sri Lanka's centrality.

The country lies just a few nautical miles away from the super-busy east-west shipping route, through which an estimated 60,000 ships pass every year, carrying two-thirds of the world's oil and half of all container shipments.

Now, with Asia's economic rise, experts say Sri Lanka's location has become even more alluring. Not only are three Asian powers - China, Japan and India - playing dominant roles in the global economy at the same time for the first time, there are also increasingly attractive markets and trade opportunities in Asia.

"Sri Lanka is the pivotal point for a global grand strategy," R. Hariharan, a retired Indian army colonel and specialist in South Asian geopolitics, told CNBC. "Sri Lanka's geography gives it an advantage disproportionate to its size."

The small island nation with a population of 22 million has been rediscovering its strategic location for the past few years as it comes out of a 26-year civil war that depleted government resources and held back development. As Sri Lanka looks for assistance to reboot its economy, a largely two-way tussle for influence in the country and, in turn, the region is on.

[Riaz Haq]

#Modi's man Doval's meddling: #India losing the neighbourhood - The Hindu. #Nepal #SriLanka #Maldives #Pakistan #BJP

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/modis-neighbourhoodfirst-polic...

Save for Bhutan and perhaps Bangladesh, much of South Asia has major grievances against New Delhi today. Clearly, then, there is something fundamentally wrong with the BJP-led government’s neighbourhood diplomacy. If so, what is it that New Delhi has done to deserve the ire of its neighbours? While New Delhi’s not-so-friendly relationship with Islamabad is unsurprising, what has provoked the other countries, some of which figured very high on Mr. Modi’s bilateral priorities, to suddenly come out openly against India?

Nosey in Nepal

One of the major reasons for India’s growing unpopularity in the regional capitals is its increasing tendency to interfere in the domestic affairs of its smaller neighbours, either citing security implications or to offset the target country’s unfriendly strategic choices. Take the case of Nepal, for instance. New Delhi was deeply upset with the Constitution passed by the Nepalese Constituent Assembly in September last year. Its unhappiness resulted from the legitimate feeling among the people of Terai, especially the Madhesis and Tharus, living close to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, that they have been short-changed by the country’s new Constitution. But a substantive political argument was thwarted by poor diplomatic style.

Meddling in Sri Lanka

If New Delhi’s Mission Kathmandu was both a failure and distasteful, its ‘subtle interference’ in Sri Lanka in the run-up to the island nation’s elections last year has set a dangerous precedent. New Delhi had proactively promoted the coalition led by Maithripala Sirisena to defeat the then Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa whose anti-Tamil record and pro-China tilt was resented by New Delhi. Several reports at the time claimed that Colombo had asked New Delhi to withdraw the Research and Analysis Wing’s station chief in Sri Lanka for allegedly working to ensure the victory of the anti-Rajapaksa coalition.

While involving ourselves in regime changes in the neighbourhood is a terrible idea in the longer run, we must ask whether the regime change in Colombo has actually prompted it to declare itself pro-India. Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, while visiting India last year, removed any such misgivings by saying, “Sri Lanka is neither pro-India nor pro-China.” The new government in Colombo has been vigorously courting Beijing for economic and infrastructural assistance, something it knows fully well that New Delhi can only provide in small measure.

Riling the Maldives regime

Maldives, yet another traditional ally of ours, has also been resenting the Indian reactions to its domestic political developments. New Delhi, being highly critical of how the pro-India former Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed was jailed by the current regime under terrorism charges, publicly stated that “we are concerned at recent developments in the Maldives, including the arrest and manhandling of former President Nasheed”. The Maldivian government responded by saying it hoped that India would “adhere to the principle of Panchsheel and will not intervene in domestic politics of Maldives”.

During External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj’s visit to Maldives in October last year, Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen’s office issued a sharply worded statement that his “government will not tolerate foreign parties interfering with the country’s domestic issues”.

[Riaz Haq]

#Pakistan sends 30-bed field hospital to #SriLanka, 17 doctors coming to help flood victims- The Hindu http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article8633155.ece …

Hospital has operation theaters, and x-ray laboratories, two special cargo aircraft carrying relief items also expected.

Even as relief and rescue operations continued in Sri Lanka, the government of Pakistan sent a 30 bed fully-equipped field hospital and relief materials.

A release of the Pakistan High Commission here stated that the field hospital had operation theaters and x-ray laboratories. Two special cargo aircraft, carrying relief items, were also expected to reach Colombo shortly. Besides, 17 Pakistani doctors would be arriving in Sri Lanka for providing health care assistance.

Oz announces contribution

The Australian government said it would contribute $5,00,000 to UNICEF for humanitarian assistance, including the provision of clean water and sanitation for children in shelters.

On Sunday afternoon, the number of deaths in the country went up to 84 with the recovery of 11 more bodies. Toll in Aranayaka, the site of last week’s landslip, stood at 32 and the district of Kegalle accounted for 50 deaths. As of now, 2.37 lakh persons were kept at relief camps. President Maithripala Sirisena visited Wellampitiya, Meethotamulla and Kolonnawa, all located in Colombo district, and met the flood-affected people.

3.4 lakh people affected

Of about 3.4 lakh affected people in the country, the Western Province accounted for around 2.43 lakh persons. There were about 94,151 persons hit by the floods in the Kolonnawa division and 24,824 – Kaduwela, both in the district of Colombo. In the neighbouring Gampaha district, Wattala had 35,407 affected persons; Biyagama – 21,302 and Kelaniya – 16,202, according to a report of the government’s Disaster Management Centre.

[Riaz Haq]

Anti-#Pakistan hawk & ex spy Ajit Doval shaping #India's aggressive foreign policy under #Modi #BJP http://bloom.bg/2cwLzOT via @business

He spent seven years undercover in Pakistan, recruited rebels as informants in disputed Kashmir, and once disguised himself as a rickshaw driver to infiltrate a militant group inside India’s holiest Sikh temple. Now some consider Ajit Doval the most powerful person in India after Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Modi picked Doval as his National Security Advisor, a position that holds more sway than the ministers of defense and foreign affairs. It puts Doval in charge of talks with arch-rival Pakistan. He visits arms manufacturers to discuss strategic capabilities, and orchestrates the response to militant attacks, liaising daily with Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar, the nation’s top diplomat.
Since Doval took the job, he has supported a nationalist agenda while adopting a tougher line against hostile neighbors. That has growing economic ramifications as China funds a $45 billion trade corridor through Pakistan that bypasses India and as both China and India eye resource-rich neighbors in central Asia like Afghanistan.

“Every strategic issue in this region involves security in a way that it doesn’t in other regions,” says R. K. Sawhney, a former director general of military intelligence who’s known Doval for nearly two decades. “As the profile of the country grows, the profile of the national security advisor grows.”
Short, trim and bespectacled, Doval shuns the limelight and rarely appears in public. His office said he wasn’t available for an interview. Six people who have known him personally for years—some of whom requested not to be identified because he dislikes publicity—said Doval is overseeing India’s most delicate diplomatic issues.
Shortly after taking office, Modi sent Doval as his special envoy to Afghanistan and brought him on his first foreign trip to Bhutan. He’s also special representative in charge of talks with China over a disputed border, a task made more difficult as China plans to invest millions into transportation links through Kashmir, an area claimed by both India and Pakistan.
In December, Doval flew to Bangkok for a secret meeting with his Pakistani counterpart in an effort to restart peace talks between the two nuclear-armed nations.

Calls for Doval’s replacement intensified after Home Minister Rajnath Singh suffered a politically embarrassing trip to Pakistan in August that Doval pulled out of at the last minute, according to press reports. A spokesman for the prime minister's office declined to answer questions about Doval.
“The best experts on how to deal with terrorism, how to think about diplomacy and foreign affairs—they are not being consulted,” opposition politician Rahul Gandhi, son of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, said in January. Doval’s job is “strategy, not tactics.”
No government website carries Doval’s profile. A biography provided during a lecture he gave in August 2015 in Mumbai stated he was born in 1945 in Garhwal, in a northern region now called Uttarakhand, and graduated with a master’s degree in economics from the University of Agra in 1967 before joining the police force.

In 1972, he moved to the Intelligence Bureau, where he spent three decades, including stints in the restive regions of India’s northeast, Jammu and Kashmir, and the U.K. Doval is fluent in Urdu, the main language used in Pakistan. He told an audience in November 2014 he had lived in Pakistan for seven years, getting plastic surgery to remove signs his ears had been pierced—an indication of his Hindu roots.
“I haven’t seen anyone else at his level who would continue to come into the field,” said S.S. Virk, former director general of police in Punjab who was shot during the Golden Temple operation and says Doval visited him at the hospital. “He was an outstanding operator.” 

Anti-#Pakistan hawk & ex spy Ajit Doval shaping #India's aggressive foreign policy under #Modi #BJP http://bloom.bg/2cwLzOT via @business

Those who know him describe him as a heavy smoker with an almost insatiable thirst for knowledge, taking guests at his home in Noida near New Delhi for drinks in a library in the basement lined from floor to ceiling with hundreds of books.
After retiring from the Intelligence Bureau, Doval founded the Vivekananda International Foundation in 2009. In its red sandstone and concrete headquarters in a tony district of Delhi, Doval has courted foreign diplomats and high-ranking defense officials, striking hawkish, nationalist views that resonated with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

“Doval wields more influence than previous national security advisers in part because of his credibility and experience in intelligence and security matters,” said Sameer Patil, who served in the prime minister’s national security council secretariat under the previous Congress government. Patil said it was long rumored that Doval advised Modi even before he was elected prime minister in 2014.
In papers published during that time, Doval argued for a more assertive foreign policy and a beefed up military. He warned of India’s “eroding maritime preeminence" in the Indian Ocean, of Pakistan’s attempts to influence Afghanistan and the Taliban, and said China’s development was "not an assured peaceful rise."
“India has a mindset that, where it hits, it punches below its weight,” he said at the August 2015 lecture. “We have to increase our weight and punch proportionately.”

[Riaz Haq]

Threat of a nuke war with Pakistan has increased: Shivshankar Menon

http://www.business-standard.com/article/specials/threat-of-a-nuke-...

Former National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon has said the threat of a nuclear war with Pakistan has increased, but criticised Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar for suggesting that India should give up its ‘no first use’ policy. He believes the September 29 ‘surgical strikes’, following the Uri terror attack, were inevitable, but disagrees with the Narendra Modi government’s decision to go public with the information.

Menon had played a key role in the India-US civil nuclear deal and was India’s foreign secretary when the 26/11 terror attacks took place in Mumbai in 2008. Menon told India Today TV’s Karan Thapar in an interview that he was wrong in advising the then Manmohan Singh government to retaliate after the 26/11 terror attacks. Pranab Mukherjee, then the external affairs minister, had “seemed to agree” with him. While Menon didn’t reveal Singh’s response, India had eventually not retaliated militarily.

On Parrikar, Menon said the defence minister did not have a right to voice his personal opinion on nuclear policy in public, particularly when that opinion contradicted the official policy of the country. Menon, the NSA from 2011 to 2014 during the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s second term, said Parrikar’s suggestion would not be in India’s strategic interest, as it would increase India’s insecurity against Pakistan’s tactical nuclear weapons.

Earlier this month, Parrikar had said at a public function that his “personal opinion” was that India should relook at its pledge of ‘No First Use’ (NFU) of nuclear weapons. Parrikar said New Delhi should only commit to being a “responsible nuclear state”. In 1998, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government had given a unilateral pledge that India would not be the first to use nuclear weapons.

Elaborating on his criticism of Parrikar’s comments, Menon said India’s nuclear weapons were no guard and no deterrent against Pakistani terror. Threatening a nuclear response to a terrorist attack from Pakistan “would be like threatening to kill a mosquito with a shotgun and would be unlikely to be understood by India’s own people, let alone the international community.”

[Riaz Haq]

What #India Has Done To Its Money Is Sickening And #Immoral. #Modi #Demonetization via @forbes

http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2016/12/22/what-india-has-d...

Not since India's short-lived forced-sterilization program in the 1970s--this bout of Nazi-like eugenics was instituted to deal with the country's "overpopulation"--has the government engaged in something so immoral. It claims the move will fight corruption and tax evasion by allegedly flushing out illegal cash, crippling criminal enterprises and terrorists and force-marching India into a digitized credit system.

India is the most extreme and destructive example of the anticash fad currently sweeping governments and the economics profession. Countries are moving to ban high-denomination bills, citing the rationales trotted out by New Delhi. But there's no misunderstanding what this is truly about: attacking your privacy and inflicting more government control over your life.

India's awful act underscores another piece of immorality. Money represents what people produce in the real world. It is a claim on products and services, just as a coat-check ticket is a claim for a coat left at the coat check in a restaurant or a ticket is for a seat at an event. Governments don't create resources, people do. What India has done is commit a massive theft of people's property without even the pretense of due process--a shocking move for a democratically elected government. (One expects such things in places like Venezuela.) Not surprisingly, the government is downplaying the fact that this move will give India a onetime windfall of perhaps tens of billions of dollars.

By stealing property, further impoverishing the least fortunate among its population and undermining social trust, thereby poisoning politics and hurting future investment, India has immorally and unnecessarily harmed its people, while setting a dreadful example for the rest of the world.

What India must do to fulfill its desire to become a global powerhouse is clear: slash income and business tax rates and simplify the whole tax structure; make the rupee as powerful as the Swiss franc; hack away at regulations, so that setting up a business can be done with no cost and in only a few minutes; and take a supersize buzz saw to all the rules that make each infrastructure project a 100-year undertaking.