The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

ARTICLE

Modi’s triumphs & failings
Gujarat experiment not possible at national level
by S. Nihal Singh

WHILE Mr Narendra Modi has begun his campaign for the Gujarat assembly elections all guns blazing, a new academic study of his more than 10 years in office* shines a harsh light on the methodologies he uses and his aims. The conclusion of the author, Nikita Sud, is that for all the economic progress in the state, the model is skewed because its economic liberalisation is combined with political ‘illiberalisation’ in the service of building a Hindu rashtra.

Ms Sud recognises that Mr Modi makes adroit use of modern technology to disseminate his message, suggesting that he was working on fertile soil. Unlike neighbouring states and in the South, there has been no effective left movement in Gujarat nor have there been sustained stirs by the disadvantaged like the Dalits. Traditionally, Gujarat has been governed by larger-than-life personalities and consensual rule even in the days of the Congress ascendancy.

However, Mr Modi’s contribution to the mix has been remarkable in taking the state in the direction of Hindu rashtra, thanks to his Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) upbringing and the support he enjoys of the Sangh Parivar. He contested his first election in 2001 without any administrative experience from Rajkot, the city with the largest number of RSS shakhas, and ran his state in the RSS fashion, as a state bureaucrat confessed to the author, making short of rules and procedures “as if it were one (an RSS shakha)”. The issues he harped upon in election campaigns were ‘single issue affairs’ around Hindutva, mega development, terrorism, anti-nationalism, insults to Gujarati pride and, importantly, the governance record of one person.

Mr Modi has in the process ridden on developing enduring ties between the state and the dominant groups in society, subscribing to the trickle-down effects of development. Religious minorities have repeatedly been referred to as non-Gujaratis after 2002 and, according to officials interacting with the author, Dalits are incapable of paying back loans and cannot sustain entrepreneurial enterprise.

In the author’s view, the Gujarat model is skewed. For instance, the number of educated unemployed rose dramatically from 7.1 lakh in urban centres in 1999 to 12 lakh in 2002. In Gini co-efficient terms, inequality was 0.31 in 2004-05. And the stunted nature of politics in Gujarat is clear from the same dominant classes and castes remaining the driver of politics across party lines.

Mr Modi has not been shy in using state power to entrench the building blocks of the Hindu rashtra. He created 20,000 jobs of teaching assistants recruited from the RSS and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad to village schools. By another order, state civil service officials and those belonging to the subordinate services were permitted to join the RSS. This convergence of the state and the Hindu rashtra made those who remained outside its orbit suitably intimidated into viewing activities of the Sangh Parivar.

The horrific events of 2002, which rather recently yielded the first substantive convictions going up to the conviction of a former minister in Mr Modi’s Cabinet, are in the author’s view a landmark moment because it represented aggressive economic development coupled with Hindu nationalist jingoism with the ‘othering’ of Muslims and Christians to keep the Bharatiya Janata Party in power. And in creating a single window of clearance for major economic projects, Mr Modi cut out his party politicians who were unable to oblige their supporters. This was often the cause of dissensions in party ranks, but dissidents were until recently kept in check by RSS pressure and the edict of the central party leadership.

Mr Modi’s success in retaining power in the state is, according to the author, because of the Congress, not despite it. The Congress as well as other political opponents have been for the most part quiescent and are party to Mr Modi making the state legislature almost irrelevant; a meeting of the assembly is often a rarity, to conform to constitutional requirements. And it took Ms Sonia Gandhi during her recent foray into Gujarat to raise the pertinent question of the state having no Rajyapal to give the BJP leader an untrammelled rein of power.

Thus far, Mr Modi has neatly sidestepped the question of wealth distribution and helping the economically handicapped by his slogans of Hindu pride and security. The RSS has described Gujarat as “the ideological anchor of the Hindu nation”. The original purpose of veteran leader S.P. Mukherjee in founding the Jan Sangh, the forbear of the BJP, was to form a political organisation independent of the RSS, but the latter’s shadow was always on it because he, as his many successors, had had to rely on it to provide the sinews of political mobilisation.

If the RSS views Gujarat as the laboratory of the kind of India it desires, Mr Modi has demonstrated by his success in retaining power how to bring it about in one state under propitious circumstances. To its chagrin, the RSS has discovered that this success has come with the baggage of a vainglorious leader with visions of achieving supreme power. It seems to have come to the tentative conclusion that he is the necessary evil in achieving the Hindu rashtra of its dreams.

This academic view of Mr Modi’s triumphs and failings raises two kinds of questions on the eve of Gujarat elections and the next general election due in 2014. One, the Gujarat experiment cannot be repeated on a national scale by the very nature of a multi-religious and multi-ethnic country. In other words, the success of the BJP and the Sangh Parivar to flatten governance to a majoritarian proposition of the Hindu rashtra would be unacceptable.

Second, although the BJP president, Mr Nitin Gadkari, is shying away from naming the party’s likely candidate for the Prime Minister’s post, it would be committing hara-kiri if it were to name him. Despite the token representation the BJP has given to Muslims, they will vote as one man to try to defeat it in polls. Besides, the other minorities, considerable in number, will be wary of the success of the Hindutva experience in Gujarat and will tend to support candidates opposing the BJP.

The success of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee experience at the Centre in the shape of a coalition led by the BJP for six years was because he was totally unlike Mr Modi and was the acceptable face of a party which otherwise provokes reservations from many quarters. There is no Vajpayee in the BJP on the horizon.n

* Liberalisation, Hindu Nationalism and the State/A Biography of Gujarat by Nikita Sud; Oxford University Press.

MIDDLE

Flights of fancy
by Chandni Chandel

When do you get the time to think about yourself, about your aspirations, your long and short-term goals. When you are true to yourself, you have a mirror image of yourself in front of you. Maybe, while commuting to office, while taking a bath.

You talk to your soul. When you are happy you belt out your favourite numbers; when you are sad, you cry, with the salinity of the tears blending with the tap water. You want to submerge all your sadness and spread the good feelings to the entire body. That is why you ‘shine’ sometimes after a bath. All your fatigue gets drained in the water globules and your inner strength comes out.

There are so many things that go on in the mind during the morning shower. You decide and rehearse your lines — I’ll counter the boss like this; I will tell my father this; I will follow my timetable from tomorrow, ‘pucca’; I will go to the gym; I will definitely go to get my car fixed today; I have to pay my electricity bill; I will… I have to… You plan out so many things. You try and put yourselves in hypothetical situations and try to find the best answer. The same is true while commuting to office in your own car, bus or local train. You chalk out your daily plan or try to solve the many jigsaw puzzles in your life chipping the blocks one by one. It brings happiness to you for a while, and chances are that your plans go kaput.

Once my husband and I applied for jobs in a private Dehradun-based university. I was so sure of being called for an interview, based on the experience in our respective fields, that my mind started making flights of fancy to Dehradun. I started assuming my future life in Dehradun, a new home, started surfing the net for children’s schools.

I pre-planned how I would go about doing my new job, the kind of house I would rent in.

I would everyday open the website of the institute applied for in an attempt to know more about it. I was ready to forgo the best of schooling that my children were getting, a job in a prestigious newspaper that I had just joined.

We all find reason to dislike our offices; we find many excuses to crib about, but hardly make an endeavour to thank God for the fact that at least we have it. Though I had my own small domestic reasons for wanting to get a better life than what I was enjoying at the moment.

In a way, I put everything at stake for my over-hyped fancy. The best time when my thought would take wings was while I commuted to my workplace. Days passed by, there was no correspondence from the university’s side. In the back of my mind I had the feeling that if the plan did not materialise, I would definitely suffer. I had almost become obsessed with the thought of a utopian living.

Days passed by in the hope that the thinkable would happen. Meanwhile, I started enjoying my current job and the thought process stopped.

When the anticipated did not happen, thankfully there was no sorrow. I realised that a thought had magnified into an aspiration to ward off a nagging emotional turmoil.

A few days back, another job prospect in Ahmedabad came knocking at our doors again. This time around, I clipped my fancy(ful) wings.

OPED

Tribune Special
Why India and China went to war in 1962
The scars of the 1962 war against China that resulted in a humiliating defeat for India still remain 50 years later. Starting today, The Tribune brings you a series of articles by experts on the genesis of the war, India’s political and military blunders and the lessons the country has learnt and should learn
Zorawar Daulet Singh

INDia-CHINA WAR 50 years later

Indian historian John Lall once observed, "Perhaps nowhere else in the world has such a long frontier been unmistakably delineated by nature itself". How then, did India and China defy topographical odds to lock into an impasse that was ultimately tested on the battlefield?

Areas (in red) claimed by China in Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh.

In retrospect, certain fundamental factors can be identified that framed the context of India-China interactions in the 1950s. Despite attaining a bloody independence in 1947, a truncated India viewed itself as the inheritor of the legacy of British India's frontiers. While the Nehru regime was acutely aware of the changed geopolitical context, its perception of the northern frontiers was based on the institutional memory of a century of frontier making by British strategists.

The bone of contention
The border with China runs 3488 km. It can be divided into three sectors:
Western Sector: This includes the border between Jammu and Kashmir and Xinjiang and Tibet. India claims that China is occupying 43,000 sq km in this sector, including 5180 sq km illegally ceded to it by Pakistan.
Central Sector: This includes borders shared by Himachal Pradesh and Uttrakhand with Tibet. Shipki La and Kaurik areas in HP and areas around Pulam, Thag La, Barahori, Kungri Bingri La, Lapthal and Sangha are disputed.
Eastern Sector: China disputes India's sovereignty over 90,000 sq km, mostly in Arunachal Pradesh. Tawang, Bum La, Asaphi La and Lo La are among the sensitive points in this sector. Strategically vital Tawang holds the key to the defence of the entire sub-Himalayan space in this sector.

Let's briefly deconstruct this legacy. It is now accepted that British India's frontier policies had failed to produce a single integrated and well-defined northern boundary separating the Indian subcontinent from Xinjiang and Tibet. The legacy, however, was more nuanced. In the eastern sector, the British had largely attained an ethnically and strategically viable alignment via the 1914 Simla conference of India, China and Tibet, even though the Chinese repudiated the agreement itself.

The underlying rationale for British policy was to carve a buffer around an autonomous 'Outer Tibet' not very dissimilar to the division of Mongolia in 1913 that Russia and China had agreed upon. While this policy of an attempted zonal division of Tibet never materialised, the fortuitous byproduct of this episode was the delimiting of a border alignment between India and Tibet that mirrors more or less the de facto position today. It is instructive to note that China's principal concern back then was not the precise boundary between Tibet and India but the borders and the political relationship between Tibet and China.

In contrast, the legacy of the western sector was more blurred. This sector, the crux of the dispute, was never formally delineated nor successfully resolved by British India. The fluid British approach in this sector was shaped by the geopolitical and geoeconomic goals of its empire, and was never designed to meet the basic requirements of a sovereign nation state.

New power equilibrium

There were almost a dozen attempts by the British to arrive at exactly where the boundaries should lie. Most, however, were exploratory surveys by frontier agents reflecting British expansion in the north-west frontiers rather than a concerted pursuit of an international border. And, they varied with the then geopolitical objectives of London, vis-à-vis the perceived Russian threat. For instance, when Russia threatened Xinjiang, some British strategists advocated an extreme northern Kashmiri border. At times, opinion favoured a relatively moderate border, with reliance even being placed on Chinese control of Xinjiang as a buffer against Russia.

The only serious, albeit futile, attempts by the British to map the border east of the Karakoram pass with China were made in 1899 and 1905. The Chinese never responded to these proposals. Interestingly, Alastair Lamb's 1973 study argues that the 1899 line when plotted on a modern map rather than on one relying on surveys done in the nineteenth century would place the eastern portion of Aksai Chin, including the area covering the Xinjiang-Tibet road, in China.

In 1947, no definite boundary line to the east of the Karakoram Pass existed. On the official 1950 India Map, Kashmir's boundary east of this pass was expressed as ‘Boundary Undefined’, while the 1914 McMahon Line was clearly shown as the boundary in the eastern sector. The only two points accepted by India and China was that the Karakoram Pass and Demchok, the western and eastern extremities of this sector, were in Indian territory. Opinion differed on how the line traversed between the two points. Thus, in effect, India and China were faced with a ‘no man's land’ in eastern Ladakh, where the contentious Aksai Chin lay.

This situation would have sufficed had Chinese power remained weak and relatively ambivalent to its southern periphery, as it had during most of the British colonial experience in India. But across the Himalayas, the restoration of Chinese power in 1949 and its thrust into Tibet in 1951, showed that Mao's China had awoken after its ‘century of humiliation’.

Adjustment to the new power equilibrium was unavoidable. Path dependence and institutional memory of previous British Indian frontier policies and its attendant impulse for a forward presence had to be reconciled with the reality of a rejuvenated China. The dilemma for India was to reconcile the colonial legacy that had produced the foundation for a strategically secure northern frontier and special relations with the smaller Himalayan states, with the post-colonial reality that obliged India to discard the symbols of the very policies that had bequeathed these privileges to India. A bit of hypocrisy was unavoidable if an independent but weaker India was to secure itself against a stronger China.

The essence of the Indian response was an uneasy combination of realism and accommodation of Chinese interests. And in the absence of military modernisation constrained by economic and institutional resources, diplomacy and soft external balancing via an attempt to leverage the superpower rivalry assumed the major burden of advancing India's diplomatic position and preventing conflict. Little effort was expended on internal balancing until after 1962.

Further, the spillover of the Cold War into South Asia, largely via an American decision in the early 1950s to buttress Pakistan as a regional client, reduced India's options of external balancing. It made an alignment with the West unappealing to the nationalist consensus among the Indian elites that had produced the philosophy of non-alignment.

Chinese fait accompli

Nehru's response to the 1954 US-Pakistan alliance exemplified this: "The United States imagines that by this policy they have completely outflanked India's so-called neutralism and will thus bring India to her knees. Whatever the future may hold, this is not going to happen". This explains much of India's early efforts to forge an accommodation with China, and the 1954 agreement over Tibet must be viewed in such a context rather than simply as an idealistic expression of Nehru's pan-Asian vision.

The 1954 agreement was essentially a Chinese fait accompli extracting a de jure Indian endorsement of China's sovereignty over Tibet and India relinquishing its special British-era privileges. The agreement was valid for eight years, till June 1962, and as relations turned sour, China would have to wait another five decades for a reiteration of the 1954 Indian position. This came in 2003 in a joint declaration at Beijing. Curiously, this important shift in the Indian position was once again undertaken without a reciprocal Chinese concession other than a tacit acknowledgment of India's sovereignty over Sikkim.

Returning to the April 1954 agreement, where India erred was in extracting a quid quo pro. Some have interpreted 1954 as an implicit trade-off that resolved the border issue. Indeed, the Nehru government seemed to believe it had addressed all Sino-Indian questions.

On 1 July 1954, shortly after the agreement, Nehru, through a note to the Secretary-General and Foreign Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs, stated that, "All our old maps dealing with the frontier should be carefully examined, and where necessary, withdrawn. New maps should be printed showing our northern and northeastern frontier without any reference to any ‘line’. These new maps should also not state there is any undemarcated territory…Both as flowing from our policy and as a consequence of our Agreement with China, this frontier should be considered a firm and definite one which is not open to discussion with anybody". As it turned out, this was a significant decision because the new maps of 1954 publicly committed India to a cartographic position over territory in the western sector that was known to have been of ambiguous provenance.

Military confrontation

The central puzzle, of course, is why did India not bring up the border issue during the 1954 negotiations with the Chinese? Archival evidence reveals that Nehru's unwillingness to unilaterally raise the boundary issue at the time was based on an assumption that Beijing might respond by offering to negotiate a fresh boundary, which could have been disadvantageous to India. Nehru instructed his negotiators that if the Chinese raised the boundary issue "we should express our surprise and point out that this is a settled issue". By not explicitly linking China's ownership over Tibet with a reciprocal and wider agreement on the frontiers was an extraordinary error of judgment.

Further, India gave no expression to its revised 1954 maps showing a settled northern border. Unlike in the east, where India proactively extended its sovereignty over Tawang in 1951, which was not contested by China at the time, and reaffirmed close relations with Bhutan, Nepal, and Sikkim, India did little to alter the ground reality in the west. Though historical record did not support Chinese claims in Aksai Chin, the Chinese by virtue of their expanded presence in Tibet would henceforth view Aksai Chin as a strategically located area to maintain their supply lines to Tibet. That Delhi knew little of these remote eastern parts of Ladakh was evident in the subsequent course of events such as the discovery of the Xinjiang-Tibet road after it was written about in a Chinese magazine in 1957!

India officially claimed Aksai Chin in a note to the Chinese Ambassador in Delhi in October 1958. A few months later, a rebellion in Tibet led to the exodus of the Dalai Lama to India. The first armed clash with China occurred at Longju in the east on 25 August 1959. On 21 October 1959, at the Kongka Pass in the west, Chinese guards killed nine members of an Indian patrol team and took ten prisoners. The wheels of dispute were set in motion though it would still take an unfortunate international conjuncture to transform a political disagreement into a military confrontation.

The writer, a PhD candidate at King’s College, London, is also the author of Himalayan Stalemate: Understanding the India China Dispute

Tomorrow: The clash of personalities

From genesis to nemesis
October 1950: Chinese troops cross the Sino-Tibetan boundary and move towards Lhasa.
April 1954: Sino-Indian Agreement on Trade and Intercourse between India and Tibet region of China signed by Jawaharlal Nehru and Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in Beijing.
May 1954: China and India sign the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence or Panchsheel.
June 1954: Zhou Enlai visits India for the first time, stresses on the adherence to the five principles
March 1955: India objects to the inclusion of a portion of India's northern frontier on the official map of China, calling it a clear infringement of Panchsheel
November 1956: Zhou Enlai visits India for the second time on a goodwill mission.
September 1958: India officially objects to the inclusion of a big chunk of Northern Assam and NEFA (now Arunachal Pradesh) in China Pictorial.
January 1959: Zhou Enlai spells out for the first time China's claims to over 40,000 square miles of Indian territory both in Ladakh and NEFA.
April 1959: Dalai Lama escapes from Lhasa and crosses into Indian territory.
August 1959: Chinese troops open fire on an Indian picket near Migyitun in eastern Ladakh, killing an Indian soldier. They also overrun the Indian outpost at Longju in north-eastern Ladakh.
September 1959: China refuses to accept the McMahon Line. Beijing lays claims to 50,000 square miles of territory in Sikkim and Bhutan.
October 1959: Chinese troops fire on an Indian patrol in the Aksai Chin area killing nine soldiers and capturing ten.
April 1960: A meeting in New Delhi between Zhou Enlai and Nehru to address the boundary question ends in deadlock.
June 1960: Chinese troops violate the Indian border near Shipki village in the northeast
February 1961: China further occupies 12,000 sq miles in the western sector.
October 1961: Chinese start aggressive border patrolling and establishes new military formations which start moving into Indian territory.
December 1961: India adopts the Forward Policy to stem the advancing Chinese frontier line by establishing a few border outposts.
April 1962: China issues ultimatum demanding the withdrawal of the Indian frontier personnel from the border posts.
September 1962: Chinese forces cross the McMahon Line in the Thag La region in the east and open fire on an Indian post. Launch another intensified attack.
20 October 1962: China launches a massive multi-pronged attack all along the border from Ladakh in the west to Arunachal Pradesh in the east.

15 November 1962: A massive Chinese attack on the eastern front. Tawang and Walong in the eastern sector over run, Rezang La and the Chushul airport in the west shelled.
18 November 1962: Chinese troops capture Bomdi La in the NEFA region
21 November 1962: China declares a unilateral ceasefire along the entire border and announces withdrawal of its troops to 20 km behind the LAC.

— Compiled by Vijay Mohan