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Expanding Security Council
Time to make it more representative
by S. Nihal Singh
THE ineffectiveness of the United Nations Security Council to cope with the growing Syrian crisis as the United States and its allies on the one hand and Russia, China and others face off against one another should persuade the powerful nations of an almost forgotten truth. The Council as it exists is unrepresentative of the state of play in the world.Two kinds of forces have worked against any sensible restructuring of the Council. Some of the 'have' powers are reluctant to see their clout diluted. But a greater hurdle is the envy of those nations that will not make the grade. A third factor is China, which would be loath to see India and Japan as permanent members of the world's most influential UN agency. Yet in a prevailing crisis in which the American delegate charges Russia with holding the world body hostage, one way to break the logjam would be to take the job of enlarging the key Security Council seriously. The only real change made in recent years has been its unofficial expansion by including Germany in many of the deliberations of the five permanent members, described as 'Five plus one'. There is wide agreement on the countries the expanded Council should include Germany, Japan, India, Brazil and South Africa representing the African continent. While China's unspoken objections to Japan and India relate to Beijing's desire to revel as the only Asian representative by keeping the other two nations out, there are others in the 'envy' category working as spoilers. In this list are countries such as Pakistan and Italy, the so-called coffee club members. Clearly, there is no powerful driving force impelling the current permanent members to push through crying reforms over the objections of the usual suspects. And the old order thoroughly unrepresentative of today's world grinds on. Even in the current stalemate over Syria, a more representative Council could have contributed towards a solution. The institution of the Group of 20 countries is a half bow towards a more equitable top table. But the G-20 is no substitute for an expanded Council because it does not have compelling powers in the international architecture. The Syria crisis does have a past. Russia for one has reacted vigorously against the West's employment of the Council resolution to launch an air attack on Libya to effect a regime change. The West suggests that Moscow knew what the resolution really meant, but Russia maintains its opposition to the interpretation the West placed on the fateful resolution. The problem, of course, is that power equations in the world are changing. China, for one, is decidedly a rising power and the clout of a number of emerging countries is growing. In the ranks of the emerging powers are Japan, India, Brazil and South Africa although the United States remains the most powerful nation on earth. American think tanks believe that uniquely in history their country is seeking the 'peaceful rise' of China as it muscles its way to the top of the power structure. But stresses in readjusting to China's rise are plain to see. Even more notably, the old co-super power, the diminished successor of the Soviet Union, is flexing its muscles and one way in which it is compensating for the loss of its former power is though encouraging such ventures as Brics, with South Africa added to the original four, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation although Beijing is seeking to gain more from the latter. There is, however, no substitute for a truly empowered and representative Security Council with its brief of seeking peace and tranquillity in an increasingly troubled world. This brings us back to the urgency of reconfiguring the Security Council. Will the Syria stalemate give a leisurely, largely moribund process the needed push to get going? Perhaps countries that are widely believed to be deserving of permanent membership of the Council can become more active in promoting their cause. It is indeed ironic that apart from Russia, Europe occupies two permanent slots and the only addition to the list unofficially should have been another European nation, Germany much as it deserves to be entitled to its European dominance. Asia, on the other hand, remains represented by only one country, with the world's second most populous nation, India, unrepresented. The question many outside Europe are asking is whether the European Union should be collectively represented by one country. The composition of the Council represents a pre-World War II order. It is never easy to make adjustments to reflect new realities until long after the event. But the anachronism of a Security Council reflecting yesterday's world is too glaring to stand unchallenged. Indeed, it is time the likely new permanent members of the Security Council committed themselves to a new blitzkrieg to make the world aware of a gaping hole in the United Nations structure. If the main UN organ to keep the peace and police the world continues to reflect yesterday's world, we are being parties to an institution that has lost its legitimacy. As recent events have demonstrated, the United States is no longer in a position in the post-Cold War world to enforce its edicts all on its own or in league with a few staunch allies. Although Germany might be tempted to coast along, given its privileged unofficial status, it would be to Berlin's advantage to secure a permanent slot as a right. There is thus far no indication that any of the other likely permanent members are bestirring themselves to fight for a legitimate cause. After all, the very process of forming the G-20 involved a process of selection. Admittedly, selecting 20 is easier than selecting four or five new permanent members. But it is time the leaders of the new brigade got their act together. It promises to be a tough fight, but few worthwhile causes are won easily and those seeking places at the high table have right and justice on their side. They have to summon the will power to fight for what is their
right.
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Truth about ACRs
by Sukhdarshan Likhi
Incredible, ridiculuous, shameful. I had no reasons not to react like that when a middle-level official of one of the leading oil corporations told me in confidence about the clandestine practice of calling for bids from prospective aspirants for outstanding annual confidential reports. He said the bitter truth was that this wily practice had been in vogue in the organisation for quite some time in the recent past. He further revealed how an end-of-the-career director crafted a scheme to make a fast buck before laying reins of office. First, he roped in a public relations official of the corporation who went about picking men of his confidence like they select agents for the secret service. Thereafter, he and his cronies would go about collecting bids followed by realisation of 20 per cent of the bid as earnest money. Once the ACRs were written, categorised and filed, the remaining 80 per cent money was taken from the officials concerned. In this manner the retiring director had a handsome booty in his kitty. In one case, however, the non-refund of the earnest money stirred considerable resentment but in the absence of any proof the "cat could not be out of the bag" and the matter ended there.Generally, writing ACRs is a serious matter. One senior officer who had served the colonial administration in pre-independent India had, however, made this task easy for himself. He had kept a record of ACRs under classification A, B, C written by British officers. With minor changes he would simply lift these reports to describe and assess the working of his subordinate officials. Some reporting officers have a penchant for brevity, lacing their remarks with a touch of humour. In one case, he summed up the report with the remark, "the year has passed 365 days but the officer has not changed". In another case, the comment was "here is an autocrat answerable to none" (including the reporting officer himself). Yet in another case the "chicken-obsessed" lower-rank field official, earned the remark "he takes chicken in the field with both hands". In another case one General of the Indian Army called on Field Marshal Montgomery in England under whom he had served and told him that despite the adverse remarks recorded by him in his ACR, he had earned promotion, to which the Field Marshal replied, "You might commit a similar mistake". It is doubtful if politicians who hold high public offices have any interest or fascination for the ACRs of the bureaucrats who work directly under them. It is left to your imagination to surmise how some of them who have no formal education, can discharge this responsibility of writing ACRs. More than often it is learnt that they ask the officer to write his own report. In such self-prepared appraisals the words in the report would obliviously glow like "an incandescent lamp"'. April is said to be a cruel month for a variety of reasons, including the hope/fear of good/bad ACRs. However, to minimise the chances of an adverse report, the recipe for a possible remedy may lie in remaining on the right side of the bosses and also keeping them in good humour. This strategy may work equally well for obtaining an outstanding report. Generally, ACRs lay the foundation of a person's career. They are the key to future promotions as well. However, "super merit" reports, barring a few genuine exceptions, without validated back-up data of performance may be as harmful to the overall personnel management system as downgrading of honest, upright, diligent members of the service who discharge their duties and responsibilities strictly according to the law and rules without any fear and
favour.
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DBO: Whose perfidy is the border imbroglio?
History is witness to the fact that until the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, there simply was no presence of the Chinese south of the Karakoram-Kunlun Ranges, nor any objections by any nation-state to the frequent Indian presence in the Daulat Beg Oldie region
Lt Gen Baljit Singh (Retd)
Their aim was to explore and map the passes leading from the Russian frontier southwards into Kashmir and gauge whether a modern army could enter India by them — Sir Douglas Forsyth, Leh, 1864.
Spectacular yet perilous: An IAF C-130J Super Hercules raises dust on its maiden touchdown at the strategically vital Daulat Beg Oldie airstrip in north-east Ladakh, the world’s highest landing ground that also has huge ramifications for national security. Photo: PIB
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THERE are perhaps more tales about the origin of the place-name — Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO) — than are the number of alphabets in it! Be that as it may, DBO was never a human habitation, nor indeed a place-name in any recognised map-almanac. Nevertheless, DBO per se figures prominently in the vast body of literature related to explorations of the Western Himalayas, including intrigue and murders of a few prominent explorers in the vicinity of DBO and upon the Karakoram Pass. And of course Indian government documents of the nineteenth century maintained exhaustive reports purporting to frenzied shadow-boxing between the then super powers, Russia and Great Britain, for ousting Chinese presence from and establishing their own political hegemony over the emirates and khanates of Central Asia. To begin with, Whitehall opted for Afghanistan as the convenient launch pad for facilitating British entry in to Central Asia. And willy-nilly, the adventure-inclined subalterns of the Indian Army led by Lieutenant Arthur Conolly of the 6th Bengal Native Infantry were inducted in to Central Asia via Mazar-i-Sharif in north-west Afghanistan, ostensibly on a “trek” to Bokhara or Khiva but in essence to check on Russian presence in the region. The Emir did receive Conolly affably in his Bokhara Palace but a few days later the news of sighting of the Czar’s cossacks in the vicinity of Khiva so unnerved the potentate that Conolly was at once thrown inside a vermin infested dungeon and later summarily beheaded. The world learnt of that murder two years later when Alexander Burns, another subaltern, chanced upon Conolly’s copy of the Bible, scribbled inside which was the message from him to his sister which made “Great Game” a part of the English lexicon. “We of the Game are beyond protection. If we die, we die. That is all,” Conolly had written. Much to the dismay of the Rudyard Kipling fans, this exciting new idiom was not of Kipling’s making! The Russians were by no means sitting idle. Exploiting the advantage of terrain, they easily neutralised the meager gains made by Connolly and Burns in the north-western Central Asian States. So the British next decided to shift focus east of Bokhara by circumventing the Karakorams Range from its eastern-most flank and made Leh the pivot, for furthering their Central Asian policy. Over the next two decades, dozens of British operatives crossed the Karakorams and traversed the region from Khotan in the east, to Kashgar in the west, totally unhindered by any other nation. Both to encourage this ongoing effort and to collate the intelligence so gathered, the then Governor General of India appointed and stationed Sir Douglas Forsyth at Leh in 1862 as the first British representative. Forsythe at once led three forays to Khotan and Yarkand, each time via DBO but bypassing the Karakoram Pass from farther East, over the Kunlun Range. He learnt that Yakub Beg, the Khan of Kashgar had decisively defeated and driven the Chinese out of western parts of Central Asia as also totally prohibited barter trade with them in this entire region. So in his report to the Governor General, Forsyth emphasised that “…great untapped market lies in Central Asia, especially for Indian tea now that supplies from China had been prohibited.” It was logical that Forsyth, at that stage, would invite Robert Shaw, who had monopoly of tea plantations in the Kangra Valley, to accompany him to Yarkand in 1867. Shaw returned convinced that the Kashgar-Yarkand-Khotan khanates had at least sixty thousand potential tea-consumers and that he had the capacity to fully meet that demand. So, in September 1873, Shaw once again set out from Leh for Kashgar but this time at the head of a cavalcade comprising 6,474 porters (rather an improbable figure but appears as such in Shaw’s text), 1,621 horses and ponies and 550 yaks carrying bales of Kangra Valley tea and assorted gifts both for Yakub Beg and his hosts en-route at Yarkand and Khotan. Shaw took the longer but easier route, up north from Pangong Tso Lake on to the now disputed Lingze Thang Plain and had the first pause at DBO, after about five weeks journey, so as to reorganise loads and to dismiss porters, horses, yaks and connected staff, rendered surplus. That was probably the occasion when DBO first emerged both as a place-name and as the most strategically located staging post for entry and exit between India and the Central Asian khanates which some seventy five years later in the 1950s, gained recognition as part of China’s Sinkiang Province. There is little evidence in the Western Himalayan explorations literature of any Chinese presence south of the Karakoam-Kunlun mountain ranges, whatsoever. In fact the accepted southern boundary of Sinkiang lay notionally to the north of the line of passes on the Karakoram Himalayas, always. Here a question might legitimately arise as to why such boundary alignments were not marked out by way of pillars or verifiable, written mutual protocols etc. The answer perhaps lay in the fact that the very creation of and the forever steady expansion of the British Empire in Asia hinged upon the factor that frontiers and boundaries between Asian nations and countries were ill defined or not delineated at all, and were ripe for grabs as it were, either through diplomatic subterfuge and/or accompanied with show of armed force. But in certain areas such as northern and eastern Ladakh and also Arunachal Pradesh, till the mid twentieth century hazards of climate coupled with primitive connectivity had fostered the policy of acceptance of frontiers as determined by past usage, practice and custom. Be that as it may, the British seized the politico-diplomatic vacuum in the region and installed His Majesty’s Consul to the Khan of Kashgar, Yakub Beg, as a mutually agreed arrangement. Surprisingly, despite all such on-goings across India’s trans-Himalayan frontiers, there was simply no turmoil in this tract, until 1950. The last HM’s consul to reach Kashgar in 1946 was Eric Shipton who was not a career diplomat but had the aura of the man of the Himalayas, among the most distinguished mountaineer of his generation and also the pioneer of the South Col route through the Khumbu icefall to Mount Everest. That sizeable cross-frontier trafficking of men and merchandise from Ladakh to Central Asia saw no let up between 1840 and 1950 even though it levied a mind boggling penalty on those daring human beings, animals and commodities who happily plunged head first in to the Great Game. The magnitude of adversity and its ramifications is best gleaned from a passing observation of Wing Commander Abdul Haneef of the Indian Air Force, who “would look down from his chopper cockpit as he flew over the Pass (Saser La, 17,753 feet) still littered with bones of camels, ponies and human way-farers…the detritus of a by-gone era when arbitrary frontiers had not disrupted centuries old patterns of trade and connectivity.” Usually, nations do memorialise the sacrifices made by their citizens for national causes and in the instant case too, there does exist one granite Obelisk inside the compound of the Moravia Mission, at Leh — the lone timeless witness to the hundreds of nameless and faceless Indians who perished in the DBO region. That Obelisk is to the memory of Dr Ferdinand Stoliczka, Ph.D, an Austrian by birth but in the employ of the Government of India, who had passed away and was buried at DBO on June 19, 1874, as a member of Shaw’s second mission to Kashgar. The inscription on the memorial plaque makes poignant reading — “Though young when he fell, a sacrifice to duty he had already achieved eminence by his researches into the ecology and natural history of India. And his early death is deeply regretted by the world of science and by the Government of India, who in recognition of his able and honorable services, have caused this monument to be erected, 1876.” So, history is witness to the fact that until the fateful proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, there simply was no presence of the Chinese south of the Karakoram-Kunlun Ranges, nor any objections by any nation-state to the frequent Indian presence in the DBO region. The southern alignment of Sinkiang Province was ipso facto always north of the chain of the Karakoram Passes and thence eastwards over the crest of Kunlun mountain range. So, whose perfidy is the DBO imbroglio?
Strategic significance of Daulat Beg Oldie
Located in north-eastern Ladakh on an ancient trade route connecting what is now India’s largest district to Uyghuristan in western China, Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO) is a historic camp site for caravans and is now an Indian military post with an airfield. Also known as an advance landing ground in air force parlence it is at an altitude of about 16,600, making is the world's highest landing ground for fixed-wing aircraft. Strategically vital, it is situated near the easternmost point of the Karakoram Range in a cold desert region, just 8 km south of the Chinese border and 9 km northwest of the Line of Actual Control between India and China. A few miles north-west of the airstrip is the Karokoram Pass that links Pakistan with China via a highway. The Karakoram highway and an upcoming rail link would eventually link China with the Pakistani port of Gwadar, giving China at alternate link into western Tibet and there on further into the hinterland for bulk movement of energy supplies from the Gulf.
The nearest inhabited town is Murgo to the south, which has a small population of Baltis who primarily depend on apricot farming and yak rearing. Murgo in local dialect means “gateway to death”. Temperature at DBO plummets as low as minus 30 degree Celsius in the winters and the weather deteriorates frequently with strong icy winds lashing the area. The airstrip, which is still unpaved, was build during the 1962 Sino-Indian conflict and three-engined Packets operated from DBO from 1962 to 1965. In 2008, the airstrip was reactivated by the IAF when an AN-32 twin-engined aircraft touched down. During the interim period of 43 years, helicopters used to operate there. In August this year, the IAF landed its recently inducted four-engined C-130J Super Hercules at DBO, which has a payload capability of five times that of the AN-32. The reactivation of DBO, along with two other advance landing grounds at Fukche and Nyoma in Ladakh, for transport aircraft has considerably boosted the logistic support to army formations deployed in the area as well as enhanced the ability for rapid induction and deinduction of troops. The DBO sector also came into focus in April 2013, when a platoon-sized contingent of the People's Liberation Army established a campsite in Depsang Valley 30 km southeast of the airfield, about 19 kms on the Indian side of the LAC. The three-week stand-off continued till early May, when both sides withdrew their units further back. Chinese incursions into Indian Territory in Ladakh are said to be frequent.
— Vijay Mohan
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