Why Modi will look weak in front of China

One characterisation of the change that the Modi government brought over the previous UPA administration was regarding its China Policy. If past governments had been obstructionist on trade but permissive on security, the Modi approach could be described as permissive on trade, unyielding on security.

However as the prime minister heads to China, what we are beginning to realise is that the government’s China security strategy is in its embryonic stages and this is not able to project a convincing “tough on security” image in Beijing. There are two layers to the problem – strategic and tactical, but they are both linked to the same question “where and how do we confront the Chinese”?

Dispute

Of course there is a border dispute in the Himalayas and the immediate knee-jerk reaction of most people would be to see this as the immediate concern and opt to fight them there. The problem is we would be fighting uphill, literally, in a battleground of China’s choosing where they have the advantage. The asymmetry here is that China’s threat on the Himalayas is strategic, being within a hundred or so kilometres of the India-Gangetic plains. India’s counter here on the other hand would be a mere nuisance value to China, being thousands of kilometres away from its population centres and its industrial heartland.

However there is the cheaper and wiser option would be the indirect attack – the maritime route, one that is capable of choking off China’s energy supplies and posing a direct threat to its industrial heartland – the eastern seaboard.

The closest parallel to this is the situation with the US and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. Both nations shared a maritime boundary and their landmass was the closest in the Barents Straits separating Siberia from Alaska by a mere 3.8km at the Diomede Islands. As presidential wannabe Sarah Palin infamously surmised her foreign policy experience as governor of Alaska: “I can see Russia from my house”.

Yet the Americans were smart enough to to keep this border calm and focus their resources on far away Europe and the Fulda Gap in Germany. In doing so they focussed the Russian attention far from their soil, kept Europe on tenter-hooks and thus beholden to America as allies. India has the same choice to make – to be the former Soviet Union and play into the adversaries’ hands, or to pull a US and create a 21st century Fulda Gap — a maritime one in the South China Sea.

Defence

Sadly it would seem India is choosing the former option and compounding a bad strategic choice with a bad tactical choice in choosing to fight the Chinese in the most foolish ways possible. The problem comes down to Army-centrism, where it gobbles up most of the budget and deliberately edges out the Air Force and the Navy from the decision-making process. World over, the Air Force has replaced the Army as the cornerstone of a continental defence and the Navy remains the key to a maritime defence. Yet bucking the trend in every existing Army of downsizing and focussing on the air force, the Indian Army is the only one that has chosen to become bigger, divert funding from the other more effective services, and spread what meagre resources are available thinner than ever before.

A case in point is the ill-advised Mountain Divisions formed specifically to deal with China, a brainchild of General VK Singh who now serves as the minister of state for external affairs. The quality of foreign policy advice he would give will very clearly have to be weighed against his prejudice in favour of the Army and an inherent intra-service suspicion of the other two branches. In effect, the system is set up structurally in a failure reinforcing cycle. This means we can never move past World War II’s paradigms of warfare.

Contradiction

But the fault doesn’t simply lie with the Army. The Air Force for its part is so completely dysfunctional in operations and vision that its great China gamble the Su-30MKI has turned out to be a categorical failure. They have consistently deluded themselves into believing otherwise and misled civilian administrations to this effect. And now after spending billions of dollars on a failure, they want to acquire another new toy called the Rafale, which they have no idea how to integrate with current systems.

That leaves us with the Navy, and this is not to suggest that it does not have its own internal contradictions and mistakes, but it is the only service today that can realistically threaten the Chinese in any meaningful way. Though depleted they can pose a significant headache for Chinese energy supplies, they can to some extent block the Mallaca Straits, and if they put some effort into it, they are probably the only service that stands a chance of success in hitting the Chinese eastern seaboard.

What does this mean in real terms? When PM Modi lands up in Beijing, they will see a leader who is willing to trade but faces challenges on security, for no fault of his. While he may not betray this aura, the Chinese would know that his “tough on security posture” does not hide the fact that we have a hopelessly divided military back home. If Modi expects his new carrot-and-stick policy to work, he will have to resolve the internal contradictions in order to deter the Chinese in any meaningful way.