India’s civil-military fusion order of the day but not at the cost of military identity

It is a no-brainer that religion and caste continue to hold the centre stage in India’s domestic political firmament and impose many obstacles on its developmental path. What is often not acknowledged is that identity issues are also germane to defence reforms. The primary contest is between the identities of civil authorities and the military.

India’s political leadership, which represents the civil identity, would prefer to have the Armed Forces on a tightrope that it can unleash on the nation’s enemies in order to protect national interests. Unquestioning obedience is the political preference and the route taken mostly by authoritarians and despots. But in democracies like India, the leadership is expected to confer and be advised on how and for what purpose should the military be deployed against the adversaries.

Why BF.7 won't remain only China's problem much longer

With China abruptly abandoning its zero-Covid policy, a horrendous picture of collapsing healthcare systems is being reported from there. While making sense of the developments there is made hard by the fact that China is not always keen on sharing data in a transparent manner and its official figures can be quite misleading, latest reports do show that the BF.7 subvariant is the most infective variant present in that country. While official confirmation of BF.7 being the culprit for this wave is still awaited, let’s take stock of what we do know about it.

India's PLI vs China’s PLA: Can Delhi’s Strategic Use of Trade Thwart Beijing?

The past three years have witnessed the emergence of a new pattern in the India-China relationship. With tensions along the disputed boundary escalating, New Delhi has increasingly chosen to respond with actions in the economic domain.

For instance, even before the standoff began in Eastern Ladakh in April 2020, the Indian government made prior approval mandatory for investments from the countries sharing land borders with India. Following the Galwan Valley clash, decisions were taken to ban Chinese apps on national security grounds and exclude Chinese vendors from India’s 5G ecosystem, and there has also been an intensification of investigations into Chinese enterprises.

Yangtse showed Army capability but it’s Navy that can shift balance of power in India’s favour

The troops of two nuclear powers, India and China, had a face-off on 9 December in Arunachal Pradesh’s Tawang sector at a height of 16,000 feet at sub-zero temperatures. They were carrying weapons but didn’t use them. Perhaps following the orders of their political masters passed down through their military bosses, the troops reportedly restricted themselves to pushing, shoving, and punching. Some used clubs to inflict injuries that weren’t serious but required hospitalisation.

Military force application seemed to be bound within some mutually understood parameters. The encounter was short. Local commanders soon met and blamed each other. Anodyne statements about the need to avoid such incidents in future ensued.

Technological power in today’s world is much too concentrated

You don’t have to be a Luddite to have serious misgivings about brain implants. There certainly are beneficial uses, but once brain-computer interfaces become commercially available, we can neither predict nor control what they will end up being used for. There is a risk we will rapidly and thoughtlessly end up changing what it means to be human. With only an indirect interface to the human brain, social media networks have profoundly transformed human society. We are still discovering how pervasive information networks influence human cognition, but we already know enough to be concerned about the impact on rational thinking and collective opinion formation.

Pain & gain: Deterring China requires us to change Xi’s cost-benefit calculations

This month’s clash between Chinese and Indian troops at Tawang is yet another reminder that New Delhi must ratchet up military, diplomatic and geopolitical pressure on Beijing until it changes its strategic calculations. At this time the Xi Jinping regime’s calculation runs something like this: the global balance of power is such that China can change the territorial status quo in its neighbourhood on its own terms through the use of military force. This approach succeeded in the South China Sea, and to some extent in Doklam and Galwan.

Theatre commands to defence university, why Indian security interests need a political push

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s clarion call for Atmanirbhar Bharat in May 2020 made self-reliance a policy goal for the Ministry of Defence. Despite decades of effort, India’s defence industrial ecosystem has failed to achieve substantive progress and indigenous research, development and production capabilities remain a challenge.

Time will reveal whether the slogan has been matched by accomplishment. However, even if Atmanirbhartha is accomplished to any acceptable degree, India’s military effectiveness will require the fulfilment of two other crucial reform initiatives – defence university and theatre commands. Both reforms have the potential to provide massive doses of energy to advance India’s military effectiveness through the improvement of leadership and achieving jointness among the three Services through organisational restructuring.

Quad Needs a More Near-Term, Outcomes-Focussed Approach

Ever since its revitalisation, the Quad grouping, comprising India, the US, Japan and Australia, has evolved an ambitious agenda. Over the past two years, the Quad has established six leader-level working groups, covering domains like the COVID-19 Response and Global Health Security, Climate, Critical and Emerging Technologies, Cyber, Space, and Infrastructure. These are long-term agenda items that have primarily focussed on establishing frameworks and standards, boosting sharing of information and best practices, identifying vulnerabilities and discussing pathways to address them. The two most visible products of the Quad’s engagement so far have been the COVID-19 vaccine partnership and the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA). These also underscore a desire to be near-term outcomes-focussed, while working on longer term challenges.

Red China blues by Dikotter: an account of the country’s developments during Xi Jinping era

Ensuring strict control over the historical narrative is a key aspect of the Communist Party of China (CPC) toolkit to maintain legitimacy. One way in which the party has done this is through the adoption of official resolutions, which argue that “both the facts of history and the reality of today prove that without the CPC, there would be no new China and no national rejuvenation”. 

Frank Dikotter’s China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower, however, punctures this narrative. The book offers a granular and engrossing account of the key economic and political developments in China, starting from 1976 till the era of Xi Jinping. In telling the story of over four decades of tumult, the author primarily relies on over 600 documents from China’s municipal and provincial archives along with newspaper reports and unpublished memoirs of key party members, such as the diary of Mao’s personal secretary Li Rui.

Akhand Bharat shouldn’t enter Indian military gates. Army can’t afford to lose focus

In 1999, Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee visited the Minar-e-Pakistan in Lahore. It symbolised the Indian State’s acceptance of Pakistan’s sovereignty. On 1 December 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, writing on the occasion of India assuming G20 presidency, emphasised the lasting appeal of spiritual traditions that advocate the fundamental oneness of us all. He reiterated ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’, or  ‘The world is one family’.

Let's talk about India's invisible emergency – suicide

India is beating most other economies; we are self-sufficient in food; and our post-Covid economy is showing greater resilience than even China's. Here is the sobering statistic, though: we have the highest number of suicides for any country in the world. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), there were approximately eight lakh deaths by suicide globally in 2021, up from a little over seven lakh deaths the previous year. India accounted for over 20% per cent of those deaths -- 164,033 -- up by over 7% from the previous year. India's suicide rate per one lakh population is 12, ranking it 41 in the list of countries with the highest such statistic.

What unrest and anger in China’s cities reveal

Cities across China have witnessed protests over the past week, as people have demonstrated their anger and frustration with the persistence and costs of the zero-Covid policy. What triggered the protests was an apartment fire in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which led to the death of 10 people. Reports of the Covid-19 lockdown in the city hampering rescue efforts ignited widespread anger on social media. Soon, this anger, fuelled further by official denials and online censorship, spilled onto the streets of major cities in the country. In Shanghai, hundreds gathered along Wulumuqi Road, named after Urumqi, demanded the lifting of lockdowns and basic human rights, and carried blank pieces of paper to protest the lack of freedom of expression. Similar protests have since been seen in cities such as Wuhan, Chengdu, Beijing, and Nanjing, among others. In some instances, protesters have gone beyond simply demanding an end to lockdowns and mass testing to call for freedom, respect for universal values, and for Xi Jinping to step down.

Indian military leaders must speak with caution, media twisting Army’s PoK remark

India regaining Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir is a topic that makes periodic appearances in India’s domestic and foreign policy discourses. On 22 November, Northern Army Commander Lt General Upendra Dwivedi, while answering a question about the Army’s position on defence minister Rajnath Singh’s statements on reclaiming PoK, said this: “As you are aware, a parliamentary resolution exists on the subject and therefore it is nothing new. As far as the Indian Army is concerned, it will carry out any order given by the government of India, and whenever such orders are given, we will always be ready for it.”

India’s Anti-Manual Scavenging Drive is Faltering, Needs Immediate Intervention

Social ostracism and lack of opportunities have forced generations of lower caste families to continue indulging in manual scavenging as their daily job.

Not often discussed in mainstream media, however, is that over 95 percent of India’s 1.3 million manual scavengers are women. In spite of such overwhelming numbers and enough evidence pointing to serious health consequences directly resulting from this kind of work, government authorities have failed to implement available laws and programmes. Manual scavenging is a degrading profession and it needs solutions that are technologically pertinent, economically driven, socially responsible, and sensitive.

Govt filled Armed Forces Tribunal posts but didn’t consider the members’ usefulness criteria

The Narendra Modi government has approved the appointment of 11 judicial and 12 administrative members in the Armed Forces Tribunal on 15 November. The approval derives its powers and procedures from the Tribunals Reforms Bill, 2021 passed by both the Houses of Parliament in August 2021.

The Bill, part of a broader ongoing tussle between the judiciary and the executive/legislature, is being contested in the Supreme Court. In essence, the issue is about the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary. At its core, it is about the institutional control of the various tribunals that have been established to relieve the high courts of the heavy burden cast on them by large numbers of pending cases. However, the focus here is on the AFT in the context of the larger tussle.

Effective altruism is a useful way to go about giving back to society

Whenever professionals and corporate executives tell me that they are considering volunteer work or a career switch in order to “give back" to society, I advise them to continue in their current careers and donate money to promising non-profit organizations instead. This is often not what they want to hear, but is based on sound economic reasoning. If you have a comparative advantage in developing software and making money, it is better that you do that than social work. Everyone is better off if you earn more money and give away a portion of that to someone who is better at, say, administering deworming tablets than at building apps.

Could the Quad Help With India’s Space Station Dreams?

Last month, China launched its Long March 5B heavy-lift rocket into low Earth orbit, carrying the final module for the Tiangong space station. The significance of the completion of China’s space station was somewhat lost, however, as much of the attention was taken away by the uncontrolled re-entry of the Long March 5 B’s main body

The Skyroot of our final frontier: Vikram-S’s successful launch will boost both private Indian space firms and Isro’s ambitions

Three years ago, if you walked up to a space enthusiast and told them that a private space company would launch a rocket from an Isro facility in the near future, they would probably laugh at you and tell you that your space prognostication would never take off, let alone rockets.

Fast forward to the present – Skyroot Aerospace, a space startup based in Hyderabad, conducted the first test of its Vikram-S rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre yesterday. Soon to follow is AgniKul Cosmos, based out of Chennai, who will launch their first rocket by the end of the year. Both of the rockets are tech demonstrators. This is a milestone for India and its space sector, as less than three years ago, one could not fathom that these small startups would have the freedom and support to achieve their ambitions.

Bengaluru needs out-of-pothole thinking

The Karnataka High Court’s proceedings on Bengaluru’s pothole epidemic have raised hopes that the shameful state of our city roads may, at last, get some attention. So appalling is the state of our roads, and so brazen is the authorities’ disregard for the needs of its citizens, that Bengalurians are calling for the prime minister himself to visit their neighbourhoods so that the roads may be properly resurfaced.

The joke is a sign of despair.

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s biggest strength lies in its weakness. That’s tempting for army

On 3 November 2022, when I first heard that Imran Khan had been shot, my instinctive conclusion was that the Pakistan Army must have orchestrated it. When it was quickly followed up by an assurance that he had suffered only minor bullet injuries to his leg, my instincts discounted the involvement of the Pakistan Army as the attempt did not reflect its professional competence in such matters. Later, as details trickled in, the attempt seemed amateurish. Accusations toward the Shehbaz Sharif government and the Inter-Services intelligence by Khan and his party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, followed, while a few in the ruling coalition described the incident as staged.