Comment by Riaz Haq on January 13, 2021 at 9:39am

2020 Gave India a Sharp Lesson on the Chinese Military. When Will Indian Generals Take Heed?
The reality is that the PLA’s war preparedness cannot be matched by the Indian military embarking on some rapid learning course.

https://thewire.in/security/pla-china-military-india-lessons


The May 2020 Ladakh crisis marks a turning point in India-China relations, since both sides have crossed each other’s red lines. By grabbing 1,000 square km of Indian territory in Ladakh, China has made it known that bilateral peace and stability will be on its terms. Incapable of evicting the People’s Liberation Army forcefully, and unwilling to accept Beijing’s military coercion, India has become the United States’ de facto military ally to purportedly contain China. Signing the sensitive Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA) is the latest step in this direction

In India’s judgment, the possibility of horizonal escalation in the Indian Ocean region with the supposed help of the US would deter China from escalation on the Line of Actual Control (LAC). The wisdom of this position can only be gauged if the relationship is tested. As of now, what appears more probable is that the disengagement and partial de-escalation of opposing forces in Ladakh, whenever it happens, would be on PLA’s terms.

Since both sides intend to permanently hold the LAC, meaningful de-induction of Indian forces from the northern and eastern theatres is ruled out. Unfortunately, the PLA threat will increase and not diminish in 2021. China’s preparations are focused on intelligentised war and it hopes, in my estimation, to be ready for a conflict against India by the end of 2023.

Being non-contact and invisible, intelligentised war places a premium on Artificial Intelligence and has four distinctive technology features: Dominance of the electromagnetic spectrum; autonomy; drones and unmanned systems; and human-machine collaboration and combat teaming. Such a conflict will not be a border war limited to salami slicing, as the Indian military believes. It will be war of occupation where there would be minimal loss of PLA soldiers’ blood. Given the unbridgeable mismatch between the conventional capabilities of the two sides, India’s nuclear deterrence would be rendered useless.

The Indian military – even seven months into the crisis – remains oblivious about what lies ahead. Under the Chief of Defence Staff, General Bipin Rawat, the Indian military is three decades behind the PLA in its war concepts (for campaign); and tactics, techniques and procedures (for battles). While it is preparing for war with ‘human soldiers in the lead’, the war that the PLA will fight would have ‘machines with autonomy in the lead’.

For General Rawat, a war with China would be fought in the physical domains of land, air and sea with the army leading the campaign. For the PLA, the war-winning domains against the Indian military would be the virtual ones – of cyber, electronic and electromagnetic spectrum. General Rawat believes that time, effort, and finances should be spent on creating the organisation for supporting physical domains of war. He is pushing for raising of a joint integrated air defence command, integrated theatre commands and a maritime theatre command by 2023.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 13, 2021 at 9:41am

2020 Gave India a Sharp Lesson on the Chinese Military. When Will Indian Generals Take Heed?
The reality is that the PLA’s war preparedness cannot be matched by the Indian military embarking on some rapid learning course.

https://thewire.in/security/pla-china-military-india-lessons

This is when the PLA would be ready with its de-centralised war where the sensors-to-shooters cycle, now called data-to-decision cycle, would have the human role largely limited to fast decision-making to remain ahead of the enemy’s kill chain. General Rawat believes that speedy infrastructure building on India’s side would help the operational and tactical movement of forces. The PLA, on the other hand, is focused on unmanned systems.

For General Rawat, civil-military fusion implies the marrying of physical assets on the commercial and military side. These include integration of civil-military airports, and getting ISRO commercial satellites to help meet armed forces requirements with inbuilt encryption. For China, civil-military fusion means utilisation of most new disruptive technologies incubated in the civil sector for the PLA. This involves a long experimentation phase, as well as large finances to get the desired assurance level for unmanned systems in war.

Not to be left behind, retired field commanders in India are suggesting piecemeal technology additives to the armed forces. However, these will do more harm than good by giving a sense of false security. For instance, a former army commander, in a recent article, writes that drone warfare would be a gamechanger. While drones would play an important role in battles, war or campaign would require a mix of many disruptive technologies. In another article, he mentions the need for strengthening Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to build trusted networks. For one, the Indian military is years, if not decades, behind becoming a networked joint warfighting force. For another, PLA’s war would witness the end of traditional battle networks which are prone to cyber and electronic disruptions. Hence, the transformational shift towards autonomy or freedom for weapons from human command and control.

The reality is that the PLA’s war preparedness – underway for three decades, and especially since Xi Jinping assumed the title of commander-in-chief in 2016, with huge finances spent on vibrant military-technology ecosystem and institutions devoted to war concepts – cannot be matched by the Indian military embarking on some rapid learning course. This writer has been saying since the PLA unveiled its 2015 transformational reforms that its Western Theatre Command has a single enemy to fight: India.

Worse, even now, the Indian military is refusing to accept that its 2009 two-front war fighting strategy, predicated on Pakistan being the primary threat, has been rendered irrelevant. Hence, General Rawat’s structural reforms pivoted on the two-front thinking too stand superseded. China is more than a military threat now. If it decides to go to war, Pakistan too will join the war, and the people of Kashmir will not be left behind. Given China’s assessment of India becoming a US ally, all this is real.

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Incidentally, China’s Central Military Commission’s Science and Technology Commission formed in 2016 under PLA’s 2015 reforms is the equivalent of the US DARPA. According to the first director of CMC’s Science and Technology Commission, Lieutenant General Liu Guozhi, “Future intelligentized operations are expected to involve prominent employment of intelligent autonomy in weapon systems under conditions of multi-domain integration with command exercised through brain-machine integration enabled by cloud infrastructure.” Most of the building block technologies enumerated by the PLA are not required against a middle level military power like India. They are meant for its main adversary: the US military.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 13, 2021 at 8:14pm

#India #farmersrprotest | Farmer leaders reject Supreme Court panel as a ‘government ploy’ to reduce pressure on #Modi sarkar. #Sikh #Punjab https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/farm-leaders-disappointed-wi...

“We understand that this committee is a government ploy. It is only meant to divert attention from the protest, and to reduce the pressure on the government,” said Balbir Singh Rajewal, who heads his own faction of the Bharatiya Kisan Union in Punjab.

“All members of this committee are pro-government, and they have been promoting and justifying these laws from the beginning. They have been writing in the newspapers, claiming that these laws are in farmers’ interests,” he said.

One of the proposed committee members, food and agricultural policy expert Pramod Kumar Joshi, told The Hindu he had not yet received any official communication from the Supreme Court, and would not comment until he had seen the committee’s terms of reference. He has previously characterised the farmers’ repeal demand as “bizarre”. Another member, agricultural economist Ashok Gulati, has been a long-time advocate for farm reforms and welcomed the Centre’s announcement of the new laws as “big, bold steps in the right direction which will benefit both farmers and consumers”.

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The unions said they intend to show up for the next round of talks with Central Ministers led by Mr. Tomar, scheduled for January 15. In the meanwhile, a full calendar of protest events will continue, starting with plans to burn the three farm laws for the festival of Lohri on Wednesday, which will also mark the 50th day of protest on the borders of Delhi. Women, children and senior citizens will also continue to participate in the protest, despite the Chief Justice’s appeal to send them home.

With regard to their Republic Day plans, union leaders said the Centre was misleading the Supreme Court on the issue. “We are going to protest peacefully. We don’t want to occupy Parliament. We have no plan to go to Lal Qila. On our side, violence will not be tolerated,” said Mr. Rajewal, adding that the tractor parade would take place in Delhi as well as in other locations across the country.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 15, 2021 at 6:18pm

#US declassifies its strategy to use “a strong India” to “counterbalance China". It assumes India is already able to “counter border provocations by China.” It was developed in 2018, well before #China's PLA routed #India's military in #Ladakh. @TRTWorld https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/us-declassifies-its-strategy-to-u...

India features prominently in US strategic plans for the region. Specifically, the strategy seeks to build a “quadrilateral security framework with India, Japan, Australia” and the US. The four-cornered strategy wants to use “a strong India” to “counterbalance China.”

This comes after pointing out that India is already able to “counter border provocations by China.” It should be noted that the strategy was passed before India-China skirmishes in the Doklam region.

Interestingly, the strategy makes no mention of Pakistan at all in spite of its close ties to China. It further defines a key need to “accelerate India’s rise and capacity to serve as a net provider of security and Major Defense Partner; solidify an enduring strategic partnership with India underpinned by a strong Indian military able to effectively collaborate with the United States and our partners in the region to address shared interests.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 8, 2021 at 12:19pm

American democracy, as Biden put it in his inaugural speech, appears to have prevailed. If that's true of the world's oldest democracy, in the world's biggest, it is a different story altogether.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPT...​

The pro-democracy nonprofit Freedom House put out its annual report this week. And India's status, usually a rare bright spot in Asia, has fallen from "free" to "partly free" for the first time in 30 years.

https://freedomhouse.org/country/indi...​

India's illiberal slide has been steady and now swift under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP.

Over the past few years, India has clamped down tightly on freedom of speech. Police have filed criminal charges against activists, journalists and opposition politicians for merely criticizing the government under a colonial-era sedition law.

Last month, a climate activist in her early 20s named Disha Ravi was arrested on sedition charges for doing nothing worse, it seems, than drafting and sharing a document in support of the ongoing farmers' protests. The document was later tweeted by Greta Thunburg. The police accuse Ravi of attempting to "spread disaffection against the Indian state."

According to the research group Article 14, more than 7,000 people have faced sedition charges since Modi was elected prime minister in 2014. The press, once vaunted for its dynamism, has been under relentless attack and intimidation.

"The New York Times" reported in April that Modi used the pandemic to harangue media outlets into providing favorable coverage. His government has pressured outlets to fire journalists critical of its policies and to suspend features that critiqued it, the paper report reported.

A spokesperson for India's foreign ministry responded to the Freedom House downgrade on Friday saying "India has robust institutions and well-established democratic practices. We do not need sermons, especially from those who cannot get their basics right."

A central thrust of the government's illiberalism relates to its efforts to promote Hindu nationalism, singling out India's Muslim minority.

In December of 2019, the government passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, a law which allows a path to citizenship for migrants belonging to six different religions from nearby countries. The one group it does not set a path for, Muslims.

And there are hints of more discriminatory policies to come. BJP officials have spoken of instituting a national citizens register in which every Indian would have to establish proof of their place of birth. It's difficult for many to furnish such proof in India, but as Freedom House notes, Muslims would be disproportionately affected by such a register.

And then there is Kashmir. Jammu and Kashmir was India's only Muslim minority state. I say "was" because in August 2019 the central government hurriedly passed legislation that stripped Kashmir of its statehood and its special autonomous status under the Indian constitution.

And under a harsh security crackdown, thousands of people in the state were preventively detained. Freedom House tallies Kashmir separately than the rest of India.

In 2020, Kashmir's score plummeted. Currently, it is rated as "not free," on par with dictatorships and police states.

The Indian historian Ramachandra Guha argues in a recent article in the journal Liberties that the beauty and radicalism of the nationalism of India's founding fathers is that it was not tied to any single faith or language. It exalted in India's diversity.

India has fallen short of its democratic ideals before Modi but rarely has it fallen so far, so fast.

Comment by Akhtar Hussain on March 9, 2021 at 11:13am

I just do not know how much longer Fareed Zakaria, will be allowed to embarrass himself.  His ex-wife obviously did not think much of him and I do not think his show is popular anymore.  If you follow his career, you will come across many instances where he is having a go at Pakistan.  This is before social media was big.  He attracted the attention of Indian media and got their backing to spread hatred against Pakistan. He has fooled some people but the genie is out of the bottle. He has been accused of plagiarism and he still has some serious questions to answer about this issue.  How long he will be allowed to carry on with his CNN show is anyone's guess.  He is just not a good journalist.  

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 6, 2023 at 2:35pm

Will India Surpass China to Become the Next Superpower?
Four inconvenient truths make this scenario unlikely.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/24/india-china-biden-modi-summit-...

by Prof Graham Allison, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government

First, analysts have been wrong about India’s rise in the past. In the 1990s, analysts trumpeted a growing, youthful Indian population that would drive economic liberalization to create an “economic miracle.” One of the United States’ most thoughtful India analysts, journalist Fareed Zakaria, noted in a recent column in the Washington Post that he found himself caught up in the second wave of this euphoria in 2006, when the World Economic Forum in Davos heralded India as the “world’s fastest-growing free market democracy” and the then-Indian trade minister said that India’s economy would shortly surpass China’s. Although India’s economy did grow, Zakaria points out that these predictions didn’t come true.

Second, despite India’s extraordinary growth over the past two years—when India joined the club of the world’s five largest economies—India’s economy has remained much smaller than China’s. In the early 2000s, China’s manufacturing, exports, and GDP were about two to three times larger than India’s. Now, China’s economy is about five times larger, with a GDP of $17.7 trillion versus India’s GDP of $3.2 trillion.

Third, India has been falling behind in the race to develop science and technology to power economic growth. China graduates nearly twice as many STEM students as India. China spends 2 percent of its GDP on research and development, while India spends 0.7 percent. Four of the world’s 20 biggest tech companies by revenue are Chinese; none are based in India. China produces over half of the world’s 5G infrastructure, India just 1 percent. TikTok and similar apps created in China are now global leaders, but India has yet to create a tech product that has gone global. When it comes to producing artificial intelligence (AI), China is the only global rival to the United States. China’s SenseTime AI model recently beat OpenAI’s GPT on key technical performance measures; India has no entry in this race. China holds 65 percent of the world’s AI patents, compared with India’s 3 percent. China’s AI firms have received $95 billion in private investment from 2013 through 2022 versus India’s $7 billion. And top-tier AI researchers hail primarily from China, the United States, and Europe, while India lags behind.

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