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Prices beyond control Defence production |
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Nepalese crisis
deepens
India in global
reckoning
Romance and reality
THE THIRD BATTLE OF
PANIPAT JANUARY 1761
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Defence production
All
major and even middle-level defence powers possess a strong military-industrial complex and are also major exporters of weapons. In contrast, India is the only regional power that seeks to be a global power of reckoning but it is almost entirely dependent on foreign imports for high technology weapon systems and platforms and has been an embarrassingly modest exporter. As such, the Defence Ministry’s framing of a first-ever defence production policy (DPP) ought to be welcomed. The ambitious DPP envisages according preference to indigenous design, development and manufacture of defence equipment. Based on the approved Long-Term Integrated Perspective Plan, the Defence Ministry’s endeavour will be to mostly indigenously develop and build the all defence equipment, weapon systems and platforms required in 10 years and more down the line. The decision to import defence equipment will be dependent on the existing capability and the urgency and criticality of the requirement of a particular weapon system or platform. Laudable as this policy might be, there is, however, one major problem: It is unrealistic. India’s state-owned military industrial complex has repeatedly demonstrated a severe limitation in building high technology defence equipment. In 1995, the Defence Research and Development Organisation, which is entrusted with spearheading India’s efforts to attain self-reliance in defence technology, conceived an ambitious 10-year plan to increase self-reliance in defence technology from 30 per cent to 70 per cent by 2005. Instead, a decade-and-a-half after the plan was put into effect and five years after the plan was supposed to have materialised, India’s import dependency continues to remain at 70 per cent. Successive reports prepared by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence on the functioning and capabilities of the DRDO and all the nine defence public sector units and 39 ordinance factories have, with monotonous regularity, been pointing to the severe limitations of India’s defence research, development and production capability. The government has since taken a series of measures to increase self-reliance – permitted 100 per cent participation of the private industry in the defence sector, allowed up to 26 per cent foreign direct investment, introduced a 30 per cent offset policy for all imports worth over Rs 300 crore and gone in for more joint ventures with foreign companies. India remains a long way away from achieving credible self-reliance in defence. And it will take more than just producing a booklet with loftily expressed ambitions. |
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Nepalese crisis deepens
The
Nepalese Constituent Assembly has ultimately failed to elect a candidate to form a government in the Himalayan nation despite making 16 attempts since June last year. The 17th attempt could not be made as the only remaining claimant to the Prime Minister’s post, Mr Ram Chandra Poudel of the Nepali Congress, withdrew from the contest at the eleventh hour, foreseeing a certain defeat. Now the ball is in the court of the Speaker of the House to look for a consensus candidate before the situation takes a turn for the worse, threatening the peace process that began in 2006. It is not an easy task since the Maoists, who have nearly 40 per cent of the 601 seats in the House, are unlikely to agree to any suggestion unless their main demand for proper rehabilitation of the members of its armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), is accepted. Most political players in Nepal are looking towards India to use its influence over the non-Maoist parties, particularly the Nepalese Congress and the Madhesi groups, to help find a leader to run the government. Both sides — the Maoists and those who have been reluctant to share power with them — need to be persuaded to forget their differences in the interest of peace and progress in their country. The new constitution for a republican Nepal must be ready by May, as stipulated by the Constituent Assembly. There is very little time left. Under the circumstances, a broad national unity government appears to be the best alternative with all the major parties being on board. A definite move towards such a government will allay the fears being expressed owing to the departure of the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) — its term ended today. The UNMIN arrangement was basically aimed at settling the issues related to the PLA. However, the caretaker government did not press for extending UNMIN’s term, as it had become controversial owing to its alleged tilt towards the Maoists. Now, in frustration, the Maoists may take any extreme step if a consensus candidate is not found soon to take over as the Prime Minister of Nepal.
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Success doesn't come to you. You go to it. — Marva Collins
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India in global reckoning
India
can derive legitimate satisfaction in the enhanced interest in its growing strategic significance in Asia and the world, acknowledged by global powers. This acknowledgement came when four nuclear and UN Security Council veto-wielding powers came calling in a span of six weeks between November and December 2010. If British Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit in July is added, it would be all the P-5 powers in a span of less than six months. Part of New Delhi’s diplomatic traffic congestion was on account of accommodating unscheduled guests like China’s Wen Jiabao. Now it is time for a balanced and objective stocktaking on the imperatives and implications of these visits. India’s recognition as a major strategic player in world affairs is primarily a fallout of the power shift from the West to Asia, driven by Asia’s phenomenal economic growth. India, therefore, is not alone in attracting global attention. China has been doing so for a much longer time and now fast growing countries like Vietnam are also in limelight. Since the “declining” West needs to engage with the rising Asian economies, they are generous in conceding strategic value to the Asian countries, sometimes more that what countries like India really command. India’s additional advantage is that it is a democratic country. Mark US President Obama’s assertions that India is not the “rising” but “risen” power, and an “indispensable” strategic partner of the US. This echoes elements of exaggeration, particularly when viewed in the context of the US traditional approach to India and still lingering challenges of India’s economic performance and military modernisation. Tied to such flattering rhetoric is the demand, made by almost all the high-powered visitors to India, to open up its markets for the incoming goods and services, through lowering its tariff barriers and speeding up its economic reforms. Linked to the question of opening up of the Indian markets are also the issues of softening India’s Nuclear Liability Bill and opening wide its defence imports which are considered as the two most lucrative sectors of India’s market potential for the dwindling economies of the West as well as competing defence and nuclear exports of Russia. To what extent India will be able to accommodate such demands to nurse its strategic aspirations and yet protect its vital economic and foreign policy autonomy remains to be seen. Even beyond and behind the exaggerated rhetoric, there is certainly a degree of sincerity in the international community’s recognition of India’s growing strategic significance. More so as a rising China disturbs the existing global balance of power and stirs anxieties and uncertainties all around. If the US and Europe have to keep China away from pushing their dominating presence and influence out of Asia, they need to balance China. India, for its stability, size, capabilities and growth potential, is the obvious candidate to be explored in this respect. That is why the US invited India to join it in a leadership role in the Indian Ocean and Pacific regions. It asked India to “not only look East” but also “engage with the East” and be more active in Africa, where China is fast making deep inroads. India is, of course, engaged with East Asia, but what the US wants is to prepare India to invest more of its economic, military and diplomatic resources in the East Asian countries to limit the growing Chinese assertiveness. To wards that end, the West now seems willing to lure India with the promise of technology transfers and greater global decision making role. The coming months and years will only show how much of these promises will be delivered and how fast. With an eye on China’s growing influence in Central Asia, Russia has invited India to become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Russian worries in relation to China also arise from the latter’s creeping expansion, even through illegal migration and inter-marriages in its remote and scarcely populated Far-east region. One wonders if it is desirable for India and it is willing and prepared to be launched in this role of balancing China at this stage. Is an all-out competition with China a viable and sustainable policy option for India at this juncture? Besides, India is also expected to follow the Western line on other issues of international concerns like Iran and nuclear non-proliferation. Almost each of the visitors, from the US to France to the UK and Russia, tried to nudge India towards joining the Non-Proliferation Treaty. China is already signalling that it will add to India’s costs for being strategically promoted in Asia by the West. A clear and most uncomfortable message from these visits for India is that the international community is a helpless and unreliable partner to blunt and moderate Pakistan’s terror agenda. China and the US refused to hold the Pakistani state responsible for Pakistan’s cross-border terrorism against India. Both of them seemed even interested in pushing India into talking to Pakistan on Pakistan’s terms. China, in fact, will not hesitate in backing up the Pakistani position on Kashmir as indicated through its involvement in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir and refusal to recognise the border with Kashmir as part of the Sino-Indian disputed border. The US and China naturally have their respective constraints and preferences towards Pakistan in refusing to understand India’s concerns. Pakistan is blackmailing the US in Afghanistan and keeping China anxious in Xinjiang. China also sees great strategic value in Pakistan in protecting its interests in South and Central Asia as well as the Indian Ocean. British Prime Minister David Cameron and Russian President Medvedev did sing a song to Indian ears on Pakistan; the former by openly warning Pakistan on the “export of terrorism to India”, and the latter by asserting that India was within its rights to militarily retaliate against a state that sponsors terrorism. But neither the UK nor Russia is in a position to prevail over Pakistan to sober its unethical strategy against India. Should India then make a radical departure in its approach to Pakistan, and be prepared for sending an effective message to Islamabad and also to its proclaimed benefactors, that enough is enough. In handling the high-power visits, India left no one in doubt that it was acutely conscious of its burgeoning market potential and will use this potential in the pursuance of its vital strategic interests. India neither needs to be lured by strategic promises nor be pressured by the undue demands of the international community. There are enough contradictions among the international community’s new bidders for association and partnership with India so as to play upon them to its own advantage. This is easier said than done as the challenge will unfold in the coming
decade. The writer is Visiting Research Professor, Institute of South Asian
Studies, Singapore
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Romance and reality God
created Man, replacing the unique strengths of birds and animals by endowing him with transformed powers collected into the cranium cavity. He turned the power to fly into imagination accompanied by fancy, fantasy, and reverie. It is imagination that has helped man to invent a machine that flies at an incredible speed carrying tons of weight comprising passengers, the crew and the cargo. Imagination creates a new form of reality, even vivid characters that are true to life, such as Hamlet. Fancy dreams up delightful, non-existent beings, such as elves, fairies, and woodland spirits. Fantasy directs vivid day-dreams like a drama by the mind. God transformed animals’ need of chewing the cud into man’s capacity for rumination in thought. Using his unique mental powers man has invented the radar a la a bat, and a telescope that can see distant objects millions of times better than the eagle. But perhaps the best use that man has put his newfound mental powers to is the discovery of romance and its development into mesmerising stories. The most effective deployment of romance comes handy when man uses it to deal with the insensate obduracy of reality which, left to itself, would render life impossible by its unrelenting stony stance. Preceding romance, the game of colourful psycho-emotional antics with unyielding objectivity, man coined thousands of words, phrases, and metaphors to extend his insatiable urge to see beauty where there is none, to discern victory where there is only defeat. The best word for this avocation is ‘heart’ while man’s vocation for survival monitored by his mind keeps him on the edge of life. If this word weren’t invented, the undivorceable pair of ‘mind’ and ‘heart’ wouldn’t be there, leaving life a deadly duration of colourless monotony. Even though the reality that ‘heart’ is nothing but a muscle which pumps blood cyclically stands scientifically revealed, man hates to give up his romance. He puts ‘heart’ on the side of poetry, leaving the ‘mind’ an enigmatic prose. By the same token, notions like sunrise and sunset persist, despite the stark reality that the sun is stationary, and days and nights are formed by the earth’s own rotation. As a matter of fact, even the so-called cardinal points do not exist, because the sun ‘rises’ at a given point of time on different parts of the globe when that part facing the sun, on its turn, becomes the east! The creation of romance and the apprehension of reality are functions of mind which is a culturally endowed software of the grey-matter hardware called the brain. But strangely enough, mind prefers romance to reality to stay at peace with itself and the world — giving man the illusion he’s having great
time!
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THE THIRD BATTLE OF PANIPAT JANUARY 1761 M Rajivlochan
The forces of the Marathas clashed with those of Ahmed Shah Abdali 250 years ago in a historic encounter. The warring parties had no doubt about the prize to be had by the victor — the throne of Delhi
On
the 14th January 1761, with the Third Battle of Panipat, the Maratha effort to rule over India came to an end. It had begun in 1720, when the newly appointed Peshwa Baji Rao, all of 20 years of age, had shown his compatriots the vision for a Maratha conquest of Hindustan. He offered to share all the newly-accrued power with his able military commanders thus earning tremendous loyalty from Holkar, Gaikwar, Bhonsale and Shinde. We can see the remnants of these families in control of large tracts of land in Indore, Baroda, Nagpur and Gwalior respectively even today. The Marathas set up a new kind of civil administration and effectively began to replace the now defunct Mughal imperial system. Their empire began to touch the borders of Delhi by the time of the death of Baji Rao in 1740. In the meanwhile the Marathas began to set up a system of stable administration much akin to that of the Mughals. This included charging Hindu traders double the transit duty that was charged from Muslim traders. However, the opportunity to expand the Maratha Empire further north into the Punjab came only when the Mughal governors of Punjab were rattled by invasions from Afghanistan and internally weakened by the continuous rebellion of the Sikh peasantry who refused to pay their taxes.
Matching the Maratha desire to control Delhi was a similar desire on the part of Ahmed Shah of the Abdali tribe. Ahmed Shah had been a slave of Shah Nadir of Iran and his chief of palace security. After Nadir's assassination in 1747 Ahmed Shah looted the palace treasures and fled to Kandahar. Here he persuaded other Pakhtun chiefs to join him in setting up an Afghan kingdom in the mountains that would be free from Iranian control. He also changed the name of his tribe from Abdali to Durrani (pearl), using a title that had been bestowed upon him by Shah Nadir. Historically, the typical way for any Afghan chieftain to make himself popular with the other tribes of the region was to lead them into a military expedition to the plains of Hindustan and bring back loot that would impress everyone back home. Ahmed Shah lost no time in launching a similar attack on Lahore. In the 20 years of his rule, Ahmed Shah would come down the mountains nine times. Each time he would leave his nominee to rule over some territory within India in the hope that there would be at least a modicum of Afghan control over some parts of India. When that control was challenged, he would come down again, plunder a fresh part of the subcontinent and return with even more loot. By 1757 it was the turn of the region around Delhi and further south to be looted. Before returning he appointed his son Timur Shah the governor of Punjab. Timur proved incapable of managing the rebellious Punjab. On seeing him weakening the Mughal governor of Jallandhar
doab, Adina Beg, invited the Marathas to launch an attack on Lahore. It is said that to help Adina Beg the Marathas charged
Rs. 1 lakh for each day's march and Rs. 50,000 for each day's halt. Raghunath
Rao, the Maratha general in-charge of Delhi, defeated Ahmed Shah's son on April 20, 1758, and set up a brief Maratha rule over Punjab with Adina Beg as the Maratha governor. A small contingent of Maratha troops was left at Attock and
Multan. An enraged Ahmed Shah once again began to march into the plains of India.
The Battle: facts and implications
The most important Abdali gun was named the
Zamzama. It was immortalised as 'Kims' Gun'. It is on display at the Lahore Museum. The conflict this time, however, was being couched in religious terms. Ahmed Shah declared that he was on a jihad to India. After all, his son had been kicked out of Punjab. Moreover, Ahmed Shah had been invited by Shah Waliullah (1703-62), one of the leading Islamic clerics in India based at the Rahimiya Madarssa in Delhi. Waliullah, one of the early proponents of a war-like Islam, wrote to Ahmed Shah that it was obligatory upon him "to wage an Indian campaign, break the sway of the unbelieving Marathas and Jats, and rescue the weaknesses of the Muslism who are captive in the land of the unbelievers." The Marathas on their part stated that it was their holy duty to punish the invading Afghans for having desecrated the Golden Temple at Amritsar. It was quite usual in those times to call upon differences in religion to justify pre-existing rivalries. It was just as usual for the combatants to call upon support from those of the other religion without bothering about the prima facie contradiction between religious assertion and ground reality. Thus one of the most important military commanders in the Maratha army was a Muslim general who controlled the Maratha artillery. His name was Ibrahim Khan Gardi and he refused to be wooed in the name of religion to side with the Afghans. None of the warring parties had any doubt about the prize to be had by the victor: the throne of Delhi. Ahmed Shah crossed the Indus at Attock, then moving across north Punjab he crossed the Yamuna near Saharanpur into the territories of the Rohilla Afghans who sought his support against the Marathas. On the march from Saharanpur to Delhi Ahmed Shah encountered a troop under the command of Dataji Shinde and then another under the command of Malhar Rao Holkar. Both were defeated. Ahmed Shah over took Delhi, left a small contingent in the town and moved further south with the rest of his forces to Anupshahr, over a 100 kms south. In the meanwhile the Marathas, under the command of Sadashiv Rao Bhau, having amassed a huge army of 70,000, retook Delhi from the Afghans and moved up north to attack Kunjpura, some 90 km away. Ahmed Shah tried to save his garrison at Kunjpura but could not. He was on the eastern banks of the Yamuna and his position was extremely vulnerable. The Marathas, however, confident about their strength and numbers entrenched themselves at Panipat and let the Afghan forces cross the river and settle down facing them across the fields. The Marathas blocked the pathway of Ahmed Shah to Afghanistan just as Ahmed Shah blocked their supply routes from the Deccan. Thus the two forces remained entrenched for two and a half months. In these two and a half months the two armies snatched provisions from the locals thus destroying the land in and around Panipat almost entirely even before any battle had been fought. It was only when it was not possible to keep the army in camp any longer that the Marathas decided to join battle. Both sides had almost the same number of soldiers. Half of Ahmed Shah's forces were made up of his Indian allies. Almost half of the Maratha forces were made of mercenaries who were in the war for booty that the victorious Marathas always provided. And the Maratha track record in getting a victory on the battle field was quite good. This battle has been one of the most studied battles of Indian history. It lasted from sunrise to just before sunset. For most of the day the Marathas had an upper hand and pulverized Ahmed Shah and his allies. But by 4 pm, the tide of battle began to turn. All the Maratha troops had become engaged in battle while Ahmed Shah still had a few troops in reserve. These fresh reserves were brought forth and the Maratha rout began. To make matters worse the prisoners taken at Kunjpura by the Marathas too began to attack the Marathas from behind. By sunset both sides decided to stop the battle. Most of the people on the battle field had either died or lay dying by then. At night the Marathas decided to leave the battle field and escaped back towards Delhi. Sadashivrao Bhau's wife, who had been in-charge of the camp administration, too managed to flee along with her bodyguards. The writer is Professor of History and Chairman of the Department of History, Panjab University, Chandigarh.
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