Strategic autonomy was the bedrock of India’s foreign policy under the country’s first and longest serving prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and the second longest serving incumbent Indira Gandhi. The principle in time came to be enshrined as the country’s paramount national interest, and hence inviolate.
There have been siren calls, from time to time, for a reorientation of Indian policy towards the United States, the language subtle and camouflaged with buzzwords agreeable to many Indian ears. One recalls President Obama’s description of Indo-US relations as the ‘defining relationship of the 21 st century.’ His deeds, typically, fell short of his honeyed words and were consigned wisely to limbo. His Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, visiting India in the aftermath of the jihadi assault on Mumbai on 26/11/2008 was quick to condemn terrorism but never came round to pointing a finger at Pakistan whence came the attack. Her successor at the State Department John Kerry as a Senator had piloted a packaged $20 billion through Congress in financial and military aid to Islamabad.
In earlier years, the US Administrations in the 1980s and early 90s had turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s covert activities to acquire nuclear weapon technology, assuring Congress that no such attempts had been detected by US intelligence agencies – a blatant falsehood as it turned out in the fullness of time. Still earlier, in 1971-72,the Nixon White House had sided with Pakistan’s military dictatorship and its mentoring collaborator, Maoist China (also patron and fund manager of Pol Pot’s genocidal regime in Cambodia). The threats, intimidation and insults prime minister Indira Gandhi had to endure from the President and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger and their egging China to attack India, and Beijing deterred by a warning of a counter-strike by the Soviet Union, with whom India had formally signed a security treaty, if it did so. It didn’t; the occupying Pakistani army in East Pakistan, which had massacred around three million Bengalis, and had set up military camps for the mass rapes of Bengali women for the avowed purpose of creating a new generation of Muslims free of Hindu cultural contamination, was routed by the Indian army and the local Mukti Bahini guerillas. East Pakistan metamorphosed into Bangladesh and the geopolitics of the Subcontinent now cast in stone. BJP would do well to respect Indira Gandhi’s great service to her country.
To forget or ignore history is to do so at the risk of national peril. Of course, one must move on from the past, as both India and the US have done, and may well continue to do well into the future. Such a relationship must be anchored on India’s strategic autonomy. India can be a friend but not an ally of the United States, agreeing to differ where their national interests diverged, cooperating closely with each other where they converged.
The US Congress has passed legislation threatening any with sanctions if they lined up with countries listed as adversarial foes of the United States. This is at variance of a rules-based global order, an affront to international peace and security and a gross violation of international law. Arbitrary tariffs, unilateral sanctions, tearing up of previous treaties signed in good faith by members of the international community are a sure recipe for tension and ultimately, war.
India has been told by Washington to sign up to a sanctions regime against Iran and reduced its ‘privileged strategic partnership with Russia.’ India’s Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has turned down these peremptory demands. She described India’s ties with Russia as ‘time-tested,’ and hence transcending any such pressures. Voices in India’s US lobby have suggested slyly that Iran may serve as a subject for bargain, in exchange for India’s purchase of Russia’s S-400 anti-missile defence system. Why only this item and not the thousands that emanate from Russia. Base trickery rarely brings lasting rewards. The English historian Harold Nicolson, penned these enduring truths in his masterly study of The Congress of Vienna (1815): ‘…good diplomacy must be based on confidence; and that confidence can only be created by consistency and truthfulness.’
IIT Roorkee drones for Indian Railways
Indian Railways will soon be deploying dronesd to monitor rail tracks, a step that promises to bring India’s most extensive transport system into a 21st security framework. Under an initiative of the telecom industry and the railways, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Roorkee has developed the drones that are currently being tested on the tracks around this Uttar Pradesh town.
‘The Indian Railways is in the advanced stages of deployment of these aerial vehicles to monitor rail tracks using the technology developed by IIT-Roorkee, ‘ said Anurag Vibhuti, Deputy Director, Telecom Centres of Excellence (TCOE) India. TCOE is a public-private sector initiative in the telecom industry that works with the academic community on the development of new technologies. Under this venture, the the railways broadband services arm RailTel Corporation has partnered IIT-Roorkee to develop drones that will help automate rail track monitoring, which is a labour intensive enterprise.
The drones will operate alongside the present operating system, perhaps even replacing it, if possible, sometime in the future. The railways plan to expand drone usage into complementary functions such as infrastructure projects as well as relief and rescue operations and crowd control.
This is in line with government objectives to apply technology including Artificial Intelligence to enhance safety and efficiency in train operations. For IIT-Roorkee, the next challenge in the project is utilizing Artificial Intelligence and Big Data to analyze images and information captured by drones and make the monitoring more real-time to pinpoint faulty rail tracks. This is key to passenger safety on one of the world’s largest railway systems. It adds a significant measure for the prevention of rail accidents involving derailment of trains or their collisions resulting in avoidable deaths and injuries among the travelling public. Government data show 54 derailments in 2017-18 compared to 76 in the previous year and 141 in 2012-13. IIT-Roorkee is considering applying for a patent for the technology. Why ever not, as it has been its principal driver. The coda messages the critical component of science and technology in India’s transformation from developing to developed nation. Politics and politicians come and go for the main part, science and technology have more enduring impact, turning past and present into the future.
UK welcomes Indian businessmen, students
Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond stated that the challenges facing Britain in the post Brexit world will be to make the most of the opportunities in the big emerging economies of India, China. ‘When you are number one in any game, somebody will always be trying to overtake you. However, London has got where it is and stayed where it is by being innovative and agile, always scanning the horizon for the next thing that is coming whether it is green finance or masala bonds, or renminbi internationalization, making sure that we are always ahead of the game.’
Apropos of Brexit, history and geography are the key determinants in the making of policy, hence both sides, with traditional sophistication to back them will surmount the pitfalls and barriers that currently confront their governments. Furthermore, the EU has internal divisions on the vexed question of migration. Over and above that, the United States, once wedded to open markets and free trade, had now reverted to protectionist policies with the arbitrary imposition of tariffs. He was hopeful that the world would be spared a tariff war, but ‘whatever happens, the UK will remain an outspoken proponent of open markets and free trade;’ and he hoped India, too, would think about ‘opening up its market further removing non-tariff barriers and encorage trade and stimulate competition.’
Philip Hammond dwelt on his recent experiences in Mumbai, where he witnessed the fruitful interactions of British and Indian businessmen; he alluded to his conversations with the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and the Chief Minister of Maharashtra. Tuning into other topics of interest, he said: ‘For highly skilled workers, for example, where we have tier-II visas … we have announced that we will take doctors out of that count…That frees up another 8,000 places, make it easier for people for software skills, for example, that want to go and work in the UK to do so.’ He said Indian students, like Indian businessmen, ‘are very welcome in the UK.’
