Henry Kissinger, once Richard Nixon’s grey eminence, and long in the tooth as a China admirer, waxed eloquent on Chairman Mao’s humbling of India in the autumnal border war of 1962. He had done so apparently while drawing inspiration and wisdom from a classical Chinese text on realpolitik. India was humbled alright, but it was a wake-up call too. India’s wars with Pakistan – China’s ‘all-weather friend’- and their results were evidence that lessons were being learnt, if not at the required speed. When Mao expired in September 1976, three of China’s principal neighbours – the Soviet Union, Vietnam and India – had been listed in Beijing as China’s sworn enemies. Edward Luttwak, arguably America’s leading strategic thinker, debunking Kissinger, questioned Mao’s wisdom in antagonizing India, once a friend of China, now a nuclear-armed adversary. Luttwak referred to the parallel of the pre-First World War Kaiser’s Germany attempting to humiliate France and ended being humiliated itself. It was the same with Adolf Hitler’s and his vaunted 1,000-year Reich, which was reduced eventually to rubble in less than seven.
China flexing its muscles in the South China Sea, and along the Himalayan borders with India, has finally awoken Delhi to the true dimension of the Chinese threat. India’s Pokhran II nuclear weapon tests in May 1998, accompanied by its missile development, have led to the country’s acquisition of a nuclear second strike capability from land, air and sea, bringing every Chinese city within range of Indian deterrent power. More, of course, needs to be done to secure India from surprise Chinese attack with conventional weaponry. The challenge in this area is being faced with commendable urgency.
As proof, the Defence Ministry took a team of Indian reporters on a tour of the forbidding heights of Eastern Ladakh to witness first-hand the preparations put in place by the Indian Army and Air Force to meet any contingency that may arise, now or in the future. The Hindu and Telegraph reports (July 16) were robust but balanced. The Hindu set the scene with clarity. ‘Bunkers drilled into barren hills, battle tanks at over 14,000 ft, and additional troops on newly built roads. India’s quiet efforts of beefing up military capabilities to match China’s wide-ranging transformation across the border in Tibet are becoming a reality.'
The Telegraph reported: ‘Order of battle or Orbat, is military jargon for the units, formations, equipment, supplies that are networked to wage war if called upon to do so. India has deployed troops in a slow but growing march that can no longer be kept quiet because of the large numbers involved in the build-up. The Indian government directed a change in 2012 because of a higher threat perception of a China-Pakistan nexus. The command for change in the Orbat has been a secret so far. The force accretion continues, indicating a bipartisan agreement on the requirement despite the passing of the baton from Manmohan Singh’s UPA II regime to Narendra Modi’s NDA.'
Lt-General S K Patyal, apropos of 1962, said: ‘Our force levels are a thousand times better. We are now well-prepared to take on any contingency from anywhere. We have war-gamed everything.’ Colonel Ritesh Singh, an alumnus of St Augustine School, Kalimpong, says his troops are mostly from the mountains. ‘I know I’m here for two years. I have to visit every patrolling point every month, every nook and cranny of my area of responsibility. The brief is clear: visit, check, stay fighting fit, keep morale high, build defences. Eastern Ladakh is no longer a place where we’re just passing through. The LAC is here. We are here.’
The military are exploring the possibility of an Advanced Landing Ground (rough airstrip) in the Parma Valley behind Indian lines and beyond the sight of Chinese troops. Augmented rapid airlift capabilities are proceeding apace with an Advanced Landing Ground now operational at Daulat Beg Oldi, a height of 16,000 ft. Key bridges and roads have been built to facilitate the movement of heavy trucks and armoured vehicles; others are being constructed fast. Warplanes are making practice runs around Leh, Ladakh’s capital.
Peace is best guaranteed when one is fully prepared for war – an age-old truth that should serve India well in these troubled and uncertain times.
Indian cricket’s Augean Stables set for cleansing
The Board of Control for Cricket in India, or BCCI, is the richest body in the world, where it was once among the poorest; it is, alas, one of the most corrupt. Cronyism, manipulated internal elections, conflicts of interest in the magic circle of top officials, with politicians in the driving seat overseeing smash-and-grab operations for perks, perquisites and much else. Cricket has long been portrayed as a gentleman’s game, but the Indian cricket board is no place for gentlemen, having housed some of the sport’s most notorious Al Capones. But the good times, it would appear, are drawing to a welcome close.
The Supreme Court of India, asked to intervene in the aftermath of the board’s frequent scams, took a hand in it and has now come up with a raft of swinging reforms that would make it fit for purpose in the 21st century. It has been both a rotten and a pocket borough attuned to an 18th century lineage. A committee chaired by Justice R M Lodha has put forward changes that should be in place sooner rather than later. The Supreme Court has recommended that people above the age of 70 should be barred from standing for office – which means that Sharad Pawar, 75, N Srinivasan, 71, M P Pandove, 70, G Gangaraju, 70, Farooq Abdullah, 78, must bow out; second, that no politician can concurrently hold a BCCI office, which disqualifies Abdul Bari Siddiqui, Finance Minister of Bihar, and Hemanta Biswa Sarma Minister, Education, Health & Finance, Assam. No BCCI official can hold concurrent office with a State cricket board. It has to be one or the other. The present BCCI president Anurag Thakur is also the head of the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association. A three term is decreed for Ashirbad Behera (Odisha), Ranjib Biswal (Odisha), Niranjan Shah (Saurashtra) and Ajay Shirke (Maharashtra)
Abuse of authority could also have received judicial scrutiny, but has not – not yet, anyway. For instance, following India’s disastrous Test series in England in 2011, team captain M S Dhoni was replaced by the Chairman of the Selectors, Mohinder Amarnath. Instead, Amarnath was peremptorily sacked by then BCCI president N Srinivasan. Dhoni was restored as captain and has enjoyed the status of a deity, despite his record as Test captain being the worst in living memory.
The Lodha Committee has made a start in cleansing the Augean Stables. Hopefully its efforts will gather traction until the job is completed and cricket fans and the larger public can breathe easy again.
Science is opening new doors
When paddy is turned into rice in the mill, the husk is discarded. However, for physicist Mancheri Maniketh Shaijumon of the Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, the discarded husk is something of far-reaching value. A team, of which he is the leader, extracted a carbon material from rice husk, paving the way for a cheaper hybrid energy storage device – the dream of energy technology transformed into reality.
Such energy devices – still work in progress – are designed to pack more power than conventional lithium ion batteries capable of powering a range of gadgets, from a cell phone and a laptop to a camera flash or an electric car. To make such an all-in-one device, electro-chemical scientists have been attempting to combine the best of two disparate devices that can deliver power in a nano second to start up an electric vehicle. A supercapcitator’s ability to harness huge amounts of power in a short time-frame is so impressive that Airbus 380, hailed as an iconic airliner for 21st century travel, uses an array of supercapcitators to operate its emergency evacuation doors.
The IISER team includes Shaijumon’s students, Binson Babu and P G Lakshmi, reports synthesis of one such novel capacitator electrode, their paper published recently in the journal ‘Electrochim. Acta.’ What is unique about the electrode is that it was fabricated from a porous carbon material derived from the rice husk through simple chemical reactions that are environmentally friendly. Most great discoveries have small beginnings. This may be one. More power to Shaijumon’s elbow.
Beijing reasserts claims in South China Sea
The international ruling by the Hague tribunal on China’s exclusive rights in the South China Sea has been dismissed by the Chinese government as ‘null and void’. The Philippines had brought the case before the tribunal. China’s claims are also disputed by Vietnam and Taiwan. The Straits of Malacca at one end links the waters of the Indian Ocean to those of the Pacific, making this one of the world’s busiest trade routes for China, South East Asia and India. The area is supposedly rich in oil and gas.
Islands carry an exclusive economic attachment of 200 miles of abutting waters. The outcrops of rock entail economic rights up to 12 surrounding miles. Reefs carry no rights at all. The dispute between the contending parties has become especially acute because China, unilaterally, has transformed this broad area, through land-fill projects, into military airfields, an instrument of pressure to translate its de jure claims to de facto rights. A further complication is the right of the littoral powers to explore for oil and gas in waters presumed to be their own. In this instance, India having been empowered by Vietnam to drill in its waters for oil and gas, has run into Chinese obstructions.
Talks between China and the ASEAN states have been ongoing with little sign of any settlement, but Chinese activities in the construction of military bases have proceeded apace. The United States and Japan, the two major Pacific powers by virtue of commerce and naval outreach have been drawn into the region’s politics. They are, naturally, concerned about the freedom of the high seas – a cardinal principle of International Law. India shares similar concerns, hence its trilateral alignment with Japan, the United States and Australia and their joint naval exercises. Beijing has complained that this is part of a conspiracy to thwart China’s rise. A Chinese TV analyst drew a parallel with Britain’s alleged attempt to prevent Germany’s rise prior to the First World War. This is patently false, proof of the man’s imperfect grasp of history. Germany’s rise at the time was comprehensive: great universities, seminal scholars and philosophers, peerless scientists, engineers and industrialists, all exciting global admiration. The weak spot in this formidable array of talent was the German Kaiser William II: capricious, unstable conceited, and the Prussian military caste. William’s ill-conceived policies seeded diplomatic crisis after crisis; finally, one too many of his reckless acts of irresponsibility led to a ruinous conflict. The aggrandizing Chinese leadership would do well to avoid such a folly.
