Home & Away

The head table of global affairs is in for a makeover, marking possibly a new chapter in international relations. In a couple of weeks from now, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s top interlocutors could be new faces, as the US and China head for leadership changes. In the next few months Pakistan will be heading into presidential elections, with Asif Zardari as the first civilian head of government in that troubled nation to last a full term. Japan, whose troubled politics see an almost annual changeover of guard, is also likely to go in for elections, with former PM, Shinzo Abe a surprise draw. Afghanistan is due for the next presidential elections in 2014 when Karzai will have to make way for another leader. But there are signs that he might be considering a 2013 election, in which case the change of leadership alongwith the drawdown timetable could throw up a completely different political landscape. In Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina’s government will be heading into elections in Janu...

India built the Zaranj-Delaram road connecting Afghanistan to Iran in 2008. Four years later, India is being courted to replicate the successful project to connect Afghanistan to its other Central Asian neighbours Turkmenistan, Tajikistan etc. India is returning to centerstage in Afghanistan. Two years after being relegated to the sidelines, India is clawing her way back to relevance. As the US prepares to draw down in Afghanistan, India is emerging as Afghanistan’s key ally. The tide turned decisively with the first trilateral meeting between Afghanistan, India and US in New York last week. Jawed Ludin, Afghanistan’s deputy foreign minister led the proceedings. For the first time, Indian, US and Afghan officials sat together to discuss Afghanistan’s future. The meetings, held at the Afghan mission in NY, were totally under the radar and didn’t attract the attention of Pakistan, which is very wary of the trilateral arrangement. In an unpublicised statement which laid out the co...

Julia Gillard is a woman with that rare attribute, “spunk”, and its not because she attacked sexism with courage and conviction. Or because she responded with the perfect riposte after a shoe malfunction. Its because the Australian prime minister, here this week on a state visit, has assiduously courted India with not a lot to show for it yet, and come back for more. And that’s why India needs to grow up and look at Australia differently. It needed courage to overturn decades of non-proliferation theology to agree to uranium sales to India, which she did last December. Her predecessor, the Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd, would not. This week Australia and India agreed to start negotiations on a nuclear agreement with safeguards and other bells and whistles. It will be a long time before India actually buys the yellowcake, but it removed the political mistrust that had persisted. Gillard need not have visited __ its actually the turn of the Indian prime minister to go there __ but s...

Manmohan Singh bemoans its absence. In the halcyon days of his first term, Singh, attempting to change the strategic outlook of this giant nation, was often heard complaining plaintively, “we must develop a strategic culture in this country.” The prime minister joins a large number of Indian intellectuals who decry our apparent lack of ability to plot out India’s “strategic thought” or even plan a “grand strategy”. To a casual observer, India’s actions __ or lack thereof __ appear to be often a result of who the government spoke to last, or based on adhoc considerations that undermine India’s interests. What makes this outlook interesting is that foreign scholars or analysts writing about India, seem equally clear that India does have a vibrant strategic culture. Many of us would agree with George Tanham who wrote in his seminal RAND study on Indian strategic thought __  “(India) is an extraordinarily complex and diverse society, and Indian elites show little evidence of hav...

The US wants India to persuade Iran to return to the negotiating table on its nuclear programme, the first time it has openly asked New Delhi to intercede with Tehran. Speaking to Times of India ahead of his meetings with National Security Advisor (NSA) Shivshankar Menon and foreign secretary Ranjan Mathai in the US-India strategic security dialogue in New Delhi on Friday, deputy secretary in the US State Department, William Burns, said, "We feel a great sense of urgency, an urgency widely shared in the international community. There is a great deal at stake here, given Iran’s failure thus far to comply with its international obligations — the danger of increased tension, nuclear arms race in a region that already has more than its share of instability and which plays a very important role in the health of the global economy." He said the US hopes India would reinforce this message to the Iranian leadership. Despite almost crippling sanctions against Iran’s energy and f...

As the European Union slapped further sanctions on Iran’s gas, oil and maritime sectors for its nuclear programme, Iran declared there was an “easy solution” to the nuclear question. Seyyed Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, said all Iran wants is a western “recognition”.  “We want them (the west) to recognize our right to a peaceful nuclear programme under the NPT. If they just say this, we would agree to a settlement,” the Iranian functionary said. The longer “they” delay a settlement, he added, the closer Iran would get to acquiring a complete nuclear programme. Iran’s deputy foreign minister is in India for the tenth round of strategic dialogue with foreign secretary Ranjan Mathai. India now has rupees worth $1 billion in payments to Iran for oil in Iran’s bank accounts in India. India continues to source oil from Iran, though over 40 per cent less than earlier. The bulk of Indian payments are routed through Turkey, which might be stopped if a new set of...

India plans to create a workforce of 5 lakh cybersecurity professionals in the next five years cutting across public and private sectors. A group of experts reckon India will have a 4.7 lakh shortfall of such experts in the coming years. Even as National Security Advisor, Shivshankar Menon flagged off a set of recommendations for government-private sector collaboration on cybersecurity, it is painfully clear that India, as a late entrant to the party, will struggle to keep up with the constantly evolving challenges in the cyber world. Cyberwarfare has emerged as a top-of-the-mind threat to national security as India’s systems are battered daily by cyber attacks both from within and outside the country. Cyber experts say India faces the greatest attacks from the following countries __ US, China, Russia and some EU countries and Iran. Capacity building therefore is of paramount importance, and this was the core message of the cybersecurity recommendations unveiled on Monday. Releasing th...

The head table of global affairs is in for a makeover. In one month from now, Manmohan Singh’s top interlocutors could all be new faces, as US, China, and even Japan head for the hustings. On November 6, Barack Obama will be up for re-election, in a race that has thrown up unpleasant surprises close to the home stretch. From being a candidate who could barely control his own Republican party, Mitt Romney surged forward to be a surprisingly competent debator. A tired, “not there” Obama opened up the presidential sweepstakes, even giving Romney a 4-point lead, and turning what was until then an easy victory to a question. Despite the Romney surge, pundits would still put their money on Obama. But it is increasingly clear that the new presidency, with either Obama or Romney at the helm, will be different from the last four years. The job figures, which has been measured as closely as blood pressure, fell to a reassuring 7.8 per cent last month __ to the level it was when Obama took of...

Fifty years ago, India suffered its worst military defeat when China invaded and India buckled. The memory of that defeat __ along with embarrassing revelations of India’s misbegotten “forward policy”, strategic and tactical blunders __ still sends a humiliating chill down Indians’ spine. The unspoken thought always is __the war stopped when China carried out a unilateral ceasefire. What if it didn’t? The collective Indian trauma that surrounds the 1962 war has informed India’s strategic outlook since. India has never made public the Brooks-Henderson report which analysed the conflict. Neville Maxwell, whose book, India’s China War squarely blames India for the conflict was banned in India. We never looked at ourselves critically on that war. And perhaps left gaps in future strategic thought. K. Subrahmanyam, late guru of strategic thought once said, “India’s 1962 burden stems from the fact the defeat of Sela-Bomdilla was papered over and the nation never had th...

The Iranian currency was in free fall last week, a clear sign that US and EU sanctions on the country is hurting. While the rial has been a declining currency for some time, the Ahmedinejad government unwisely set up an “exchange center” for a fixed dollar-rial exchange rate for basic commodities. But the sentiment on the Iranian street was entirely different. The rial dropped like a stone, by over 40 per cent to about 37,000 to the dollar.Across the border in Afghanistan, the government, alarmed by the rial’s slide and fearing massive losses to Afghan traders, put a cap of $1000 that could be taken out of the country. Whatever the immediate causes of the rial’s fall, Iran’s economic woes are unlikely to end anytime soon. During a recent visit to the country we were told prices of consumer goods have been rising steadily. In August, the prices of chickens created a minor stir. This week, Iran’s politically sensitive bazaar stayed closed while security forces crack...

The US is becoming energy independent, which might mean a certain level of disengagement from the Middle East. Here are the energy , political and security implications for India and what India can do about it. The demise of oil and gas is greatly exaggerated. As more and more sources of oil and gas are unearthed, and new technologies are coaxing oil out of obscure places like tar sands, the world can relax where oil supplies are concerned. What should we be concerned about? Well, the less important worry is the immediate future of renewable  energy  is bleak. The game changer is that the US, long dependent on Middle East oil with a foreign policy to match, and the chief guarantor of security in this volatile region, is marching towards energy  self-reliance _ and that would change the world. US’ official projections say their oil imports will drop 20 per cent by 2025. Citigroup, in a much-talked about report earlier this year described America as the “new ...

Watching hundreds of protesters braving the sea at Kudankulam battling a tough-minded Tamil Nadu administration, it might seem that India is ploughing a lonely furrow, pushing for nuclear energy when the world is seemingly turning away from it. After Japan’s Fukushima disaster in March 2011, when a tsunami led to a power failure leading to a failure of the cooling system and a meltdown in the nuclear reactor, a resultant tsunami of public opinion blew away a burgeoning nuclear renaissance. Germany, anyway ambivalent about nuclear power, moved swiftly to cut out nuclear power from their energy mix. Norbert Rottgen, environment minister, announced Germany would shut down all its nuclear plants by 2022. Eight reactors were immediately put out of work. Germany decided to go for off-shore wind farms, coal power plants but with carbon sequestration technology, and solar energy. All very green-sounding stuff. An irate Japan, reeling from the effects of the tsunami and the radiation...

Rare earths is the next big thing. Prime minister Manmohan Singh is expected to sign an intergovernmental agreement with Japan if he travels to Tokyo in November. As an umbrella agreement, this is expected to start in earnest joint development of rare earths metals in India. But as a strategic move, it brings Japan even closer to India, becoming what Singh calls a “transformational” relationship. Japan’s internal politics and its election schedules, have, as a result, become a matter of deep interest in the Indian government, because, the only thing that could delay a PM trip is an election in Japan. But notwithstanding frequent political changes in Japan, Singh has insisted on meeting every Japanese leader, because he believes the Japan relationship to be bigger than the current political party. Indian diplomats at the recent ambassador’s conference here in September were given detailed briefings on the DMIC __ an iconic Japanese investment project which could have massive long-...