The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

ARTICLE

Challenges from China
Imports threaten India's energy and cyber security
by G Parthasarathy

Rarely in history has a country moved from rags to riches and from relative isolation to a power, either feared or respected worldwide, in such a short time as China has done after Deng Xiao Ping assumed the reins of power. Bent on overturning a Communist system, which had perpetuated poverty and throwing the slogans of Marx, Lenin and Mao into the wastepaper basket, Deng proclaimed: “Poverty is not socialism. To be rich is glorious”.

What followed were policies that produced a sustained, near double-digit annual growth rate for over two decades. Recognising that an economically backward and militarily weak China should bide its time before asserting itself internationally, Deng proclaimed: “Keep a cool head and maintain a low profile. Never take the lead, but aim to do something big.”

China's rise over the past quarter of a century has been remarkable. But the historic trait of chauvinism and the dynamics of socio-economic transformation are inevitably having an impact on China's behaviour. The contradictions between an increasingly open economy in an era of expanding global communications on the one hand, and corruption and venality that characterise the behaviour of dictatorial elites on the other, are producing social and economic tensions. These tensions can get out of hand if not addressed deftly. Like all other dictatorships facing such challenges, China's leadership is increasingly resorting to jingoism to divert the attention of its people. The message to the people of China is that with its growing military might and economic power, China is set to share global pre-eminence with the US and will overtake the US soon in economic power. This has been coupled with bullying and coercion of neighbours in order to enforce claims for territorial expansion on China's land and maritime boundaries.

China seeks to enforce its outrageous territorial claims on its maritime boundaries with countries like Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam through coercion and intimidation, while showing scant regard for the provisions of the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas. Regionally, it uses its economic clout in ASEAN to divide its members on its maritime boundary claims. It refuses to behave transparently or equitably with its lower riparian neighbours, on its upstream utilisation of the waters of the Mekong river. It suddenly upped the ante on its border dispute with India by laying claim to the whole state of Arunachal Pradesh, just after Prime Minister Wen Jiabao inked an agreement with New Delhi in 2005, in which it was agreed that “The India-China boundary should be along well-defined and easily identifiable natural geographic features”. In Ladakh, the Ladakh-Tiber boundary has been quite clearly defined since 1684, except for some divergences on the status of parts of Aksai Chin.

The “well-defined and easily identifiable natural geographic features” in the Ladakh sector lie along the Karakoram mountains up to the Indus river watershed. Areas which China brazenly intruded into in April like Depsang and Chumar clearly lie on the Indian side of this boundary. It is here that India has walked into a diplomatic quagmire as agreements on peace and tranquility along the “Line of Actual Control” allude to a “Line” whose delineation China refuses to spell out clearly by exchanging maps. This enables China to lay unsubstantiated claims to territories it intrudes into, disregarding past agreements. Prominent Indians like Stopden from Ladakh and former IB Special Director Ravi have spelt out details of how such Chinese intrusions have changed the situation on the ground in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh to India's disadvantage. In future border negotiations India should forcefully refer to the 2005 “Guiding Principles” as the fundamental basis for addressing and resolving the border issue.

The Agreement on Border Cooperation, signed on October 23 last, only puts India in a more disadvantageous position. Its Article VI prohibits India from “following or tailing” Chinese patrols after they intrude into areas India asserts as being on its side of the Line of Control. Technically, the Chinese can now intrude into the Tawang Area which they have long claimed, or choose to move across the Karakoram Range, and then could well demand that our patrols do not follow them, while they return to their former positions. The agreement, moreover, requires us to provide advance intimation of aircraft flights. We are building air bases in Daulat Beg Oldi and elsewhere along the LoC to improve logistics. Are we going to provide advance intimation to the Chinese every time our aircraft fly to these airbases? Moreover, are we going to give China prior intimation of drone reconnaissance flights?

Nine so-called “agreements” were signed on October 23, most of which have only symbolic value. The only agreement showing some movement forward was on the river waters, where the two sides have agreed to enhance the exchange of information on the river water flows, while acknowledging that “cooperation on trans-border rivers” will “strengthen the strategic and cooperative partnership”. Whether this will entail Chinese restraint on diverting the waters of the Brahmaputra is questionable, given their behaviour with the lower riparian states on the Mekong basin. The harsh reality appears to be that given their vastly superior communications along their borders with India and our present inability to mount offensive operations, because of the delays in acquisitions and raisings of strike formations, we appear to have persuaded ourselves that discretion is the better part of valour in the face of Chinese intrusions.

India inked an agreement on “equipment service centres” for Chinese power equipment. The real strategic challenge we face today is, however, the Chinese dominance of our power and electronics sectors. Imports of electronic equipment today amount to $32 billion. Energy and cyber security cannot be guaranteed by facilitating Chinese imports, but by devising policies to enhance domestic manufacturing capabilities and giving Indian industry due tariff protection. It's a pity that the recent Summit was not used to make our concerns known to the Chinese on how their supply of plutonium reactors and reprocessing facilities to Pakistan had endangered nuclear security in South Asia.

On the positive side, however, the Prime Minister, while speaking earlier at the East Asia Summit, welcomed the establishment of an expanded ASEAN Maritime Forum for "developing maritime norms that would reinforce existing international law relating to maritime security". He thereafter pledged to enhance strategic cooperation with Indonesia.

Prime Minister Li Keqiang followed his visit to India by visiting Pakistan. Dr Manmohan Singh could perhaps have reciprocated by stopovers in Tokyo and Hanoi, after his visit to China.

MIDDLE

Angels on the wheels
by Raj Kadyan

It was a bitingly cold morning in January 1993 as I boarded the train from Den Haag (The Hague) to Hengelo, a small industrial town in the east of Holland, close to the German border. As the military attaché posted in our Embassy in Paris I was visiting a defence industrial unit.

Sheets of rain pelted the windowpanes of the first-class compartment. I draped my overcoat tightly till the internal heating brought warmth. There were four other passengers in the compartment -- all Dutch males emitting a pleasant morning coffee aroma.

The flat green countryside with its fertile pasturage was criss-crossed by a network of canals. One could see healthy cows grazing lazily in the enclosed fields. Low houses with sharply sloping roofs dotted the landscape. The small country abuts on the violent North Sea largely tamed through the construction of dykes to avoid flooding.

Some 15 minutes into the train ride the ticket examiner came in, dressed in an immaculate uniform. The others all were daily passengers and showed their passes. I produced my ticket. The examiner, standing over 78 inches tall and hugely built, looked long at the ticket, and then handed it back to me with a polite 'thank you' in a heavy guttural voice.

The first halt was Gouda, a mid-sized town famous for its cheese. All others alighted and I was left alone in the compartment. The ticket checker came back and gave me a friendly smile. "Excuse me sir", he said with utmost courtesy, "you have a second-class ticket". Before I could respond, he added, "I did not want to embarrass you by pointing this out in front of others". I was flabbergasted. The respect he had shown to human dignity, even to that of an apparent offender, was unnerving. It took me some time to recover while he continued to wear that same smile of genuine friendliness. How the misunderstanding was resolved is not relevant to this narrative.

The incident had a replay recently. I was travelling from Balia in eastern UP to Delhi. The ticket checker came in. His attire looked slept in and his cap was under-sized. After examining my ticket, he peered at me and demanded in a stern voice that had a mix of authority and hauteur, “You do not look like a senior citizen?”

Having crossed that threshold long way back, I am proud of my years and remained unfazed. Before he could talk business and utter the inevitable, ‘Let us have a word on the side’, I made light of it.

“What do you doubt more?” I counter-questioned, “My seniority or my citizenship?”

It was either my voice or the manner that betrayed my identity. “Oh” he said easing into a smile, “you are surely an Army man.” Without waiting for my response, he ticked at my name in his chart. Before moving on he turned placating and complimentary, “How do you manage to look so young, sir?”

OPED

Accommodate plurality of identities
The question of minority rights as a marker of identity, and their accommodation within the ambit of citizenship rights, remains a live one. It is not so much on the principle of minority rights as to their realisation in actual practice
M. Hamid Ansari

I wish to share some thoughts on the twin concepts of identity and citizenship and the manner of their impact on the building blocks of modern states. Needless to say, it is an Indian perspective and draws in good measure on the Indian experience. It may be of relevance to some of the objectives of this Centre, since India counts amongst its citizens the third largest Muslim population in the world and the largest Muslim minority anywhere.

United we stand! A distinctive feature of Indian society is its heterogeneity. Historian Ramachandra Guha depicts our recent history as 'a series of conflict maps' involving caste, language, religion and class. A Tribune photo

It is a truism that the human being is a social creature and societies consist of individuals who come together for a set of common purposes for whose achievement they agree to abide by a set of rules and, to that extent and for those purposes, give their tacit or explicit consent to the abridgment of individual free will or action. They, in other words, do not get subsumed totally in a larger whole and retain their individual identity. This identity, as pointed out by William James and sustained by more recent social-psychological research, is a compound of the material, social and spiritual self. When acting together in smaller groups, they develop group identities and these too are retained. Thus in every society we have identities at three or four levels, namely individual, group, regional and national. We can also, in this age of globalisation, add an international dimension to it. The challenge in all societies, therefore, is to accommodate these layered identities in a framework that is harmonious and optimally conducive to social purpose.

Plurality of identities

Much has been written about identity, its theoretical framework and practical manifestations. An eminent sociologist has defined it as ‘the process of construction of meaning on the basis of a cultural attribute, or a related set of cultural attributes, that is given priority over other sources of meaning. For a given individual, or a collective of actors, there may be a plurality of identities.’ The question is to determine how this identification is expressed in every day life of individuals who are members of such specific groups?

Conceptually and legally, citizenship of a modern state provides this framework and encapsulates the totality of rights and duties emanating from the membership of the citizen body, inclusive of the right of representation and the right to hold office under the state. By the same logic, a certain tension is built into the relationship, even if the society happens to be relatively homogenous, in itself a rarity in modern times. Rabindranath Tagore described his family background as a ‘confluence of three cultures, Hindu, Mohammedan and British’. Away from India but in our own neighbourhood, Abdolkarim Soroush depicted the Iranian Muslim as ‘the carrier of three cultures at once’ having national, religious and Western origins.

Thus instead of a narrow concept of a singular identity implied by the classical concept of citizenship, the need is to recognise and accommodate the existence of a plurality of social identities. The contours of this were explored earlier by Thomas Marshall, and more recently by Will Kymlicka, Manuel Castells, Charles Taylor, Gurpreet Mahajan and others. Put simply, it has been argued that identity encapsulates the notion of authenticity, the demand for recognition, the idea of difference and the principle of equal dignity.

What then has been the Indian approach to, and experience of, the concepts of identity and of citizenship in a modern state? What is the accommodative framework for identities in modern India?

A distinctive feature of Indian society is its heterogeneity. The historian Ramachandra Guha depicts our recent history as ‘a series of conflict maps’ involving caste, language, religion and class and opines that conflicts relating to these ‘operate both singly and in tandem’. Each of these also brings forth an identity of varying intensity; together, they constitute what the opening line of the Preamble of our Constitution depicts as We, the People of India.

In other words, the superstructure of a democratic polity and a secular state structure put in place after independence on August 15, 1947 is anchored in the existential reality of a plural society. It is reflective of India’s cultural past. Our culture is synthetic in character and, as a historian of another generation put it, ‘embraces in its orbit beliefs, customs, rites, institutions, arts, religions and philosophies belonging to different strata of societies in varying stages of development. It eternally seeks to find a unity for the heterogeneous elements which make up its totality’. It is a veritable human laboratory where the cross breeding of ideas, beliefs and cultural traditions has been in progress for a few thousand years. The national movement recognised this cultural plurality and sought to base a national identity on it. The size and diversity of the Indian landscape makes it essential. A population of 1.27 billion comprising over 4,635 communities 78 percent of whom are not only linguistic and cultural but social categories. Religious minorities constitute 19.4 percent of the population; of these, Muslims account for 13.4 percent amounting in absolute terms to around 160 million. The human diversities are both hierarchical and spatial. ‘The de jure WE, the sovereign people is in reality a fragmented ‘we’, divided by yawning gaps that remain to be bridged.’ Around 22 per cent of our people live below the official poverty line and the health and education indicators for the population as a whole, despite recent correctives, leave much to be desired.

Identity assertion

Identity assertion in any society has three sets of impulses: civic equality, liberty and opportunity. Identity groups are a byproduct of the right of freedom of association. They can be cultural, voluntary, ascriptive and religious. They are neither good nor bad in themselves but do present challenges to democratic justice. This is true of India also. The functioning of democratic institutions and the deepening of the democratic process along with the efforts to implement constitutional mandates for affirmative action induced higher levels of political mobilisation. These manifested themselves, most visibly, in demand groups each with its own identity. A multiplication of identities seeking social status and economic wellbeing through the route of politics thus emerged as a logical consequence.

It has been argued that ‘casteism in politics is no more and no less than politicisation of caste which, in turn, leads to a transformation of the caste system’. The same holds for religious and tribal minorities. In an evolving quasi-federal state structure, yet another imperative emanates from the requirements of regional or state identity. ‘The new politics of caste has also reinforced old, upper caste solidarities. Brahmin, Kshatriya, Bramharishi Sabhas have reemerged and the logic of electoral politics has forced the forces of social justice to strike strategic alliances with them’. These, together, have induced political actors to develop narrower foci on their electoral management methodologies; these have been reinforced by the shortcomings of the first-past-the-post electoral system and the ability of a high percentage of candidates to win on a plurality rather than the majority of votes cast in an election.

A society so diverse inevitably faced the challenge of integration. It was twofold, physical and emotional. The former, involving the merger of 554 large and miniscule princely states with those parts of the former British India that became the Indian Republic, was attended to with commendable speed and was almost completed by the end of 1949. Emotional integration, on the other hand, was a more complex process. As early as 1902, Tagore had cautioned that unity cannot be brought about by enacting a law and in 1949 Sardar Patel, the architect of integration of states, had laid emphasis on the process taking ‘healthy roots’ and bringing forth ‘a wider outlook and a broader vision.’

Thus the Indian approach steers clear of notions of assimilation and adaptation, philosophically and in practice. Instead, the management of diversity to ensure (in Nehru’s words) the integration of minds and hearts is accepted as an ongoing national priority. Some have described it as the ‘salad-bowl’ approach, with each ingredient identifiable and yet together bringing forth an appetising product.

A government-commissioned report on Diversity Index some years back concluded that ‘unequal economic opportunities lead to unequal outcomes which in turn lead to unequal access to political power. This creates a vicious circle since unequal power structure determines the nature and functioning of the institutions and their policies’. This and other official reports delineate areas that need to be visited more purposefully.

How far can this to be taken? A Constitution Amendment in 1977, adding a section on Fundamental Duties of citizens as part of the Directive Principles of State Policy, carries a clause stipulating promotion of harmony and spirit of brotherhood "transcending religious, linguistic and regional or sectional diversities.” It is at this point that the rights of identity and the duties of citizenship intersect. The identification of this point, with any degree of precision, is another matter. The litmus test, eventually, must be the maintenance of social cohesiveness through a sense of citizenship premised on equality of status and opportunity so essential for the maintenance of democracy. The need for sustaining and reinvigoration of this sentiment is thus essential.

Cultural discrimination

There is an Indian segment to the debate on multiculturalism. It has been argued that ‘while a multicultural polity was designed, the principles of multiculturalism were not systematically enunciated.’ It is asserted that multiculturalism goes beyond tolerance and probes areas of cultural discrimination that may exist even after legal equality has been established; it therefore ‘needs to explore ways by which the sense of alienation and disadvantage that comes with being a minority is visibly diminished, but in a way that does not replace the power of the homogenising state with that of the community. It should therefore aspire towards a form of citizenship that is marked neither by a universalism generated by complete homogenisation, nor by particularism of self-identical and closed communities’.

These debates and practices vindicate in good measure the vision and foresight displayed by the founding fathers of the Republic of India. The vindication is greater when considered in the context of the size and diversity of India and the stresses and strains it has withstood in this period. And yet, we cannot rest on our laurels since impulses tilting towards ‘assimilationist’ and homogenising approaches do exist, suggestive of imagined otherness and seeking uniformity at the expense of diversity. Indian pluralism, as a careful observer puts it, ‘continues to be hard won’. Hence the persisting need of reinforcing and improving present practices and the principles underlying them. Such an endeavour would continue to be fruitful as long as ‘the glue of solidarity’ around the civic ideal remains sufficiently cohesive, reinforced by the existential reality of market unity and the imperative of national security. There is no reason to be sceptical about the stability of the tripod.

Excerpted from the Vice President's speech on "Identity and Citizenship: An Indian Perspective" delivered at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies on November 01, 2013