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Bharat’s new Ratnas |
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Preserving knowledge
Naval challenges amid giant strides
Chess and mathematics
Using technology to strengthen guard
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Bharat’s new Ratnas FEW can question the merits of conferring India's highest national honour, Bharat Ratna, on cricketing icon Sachin Tendulkar and eminent scientist C.N.R. Rao, both of whom have made India proud at the national and international levels. Sachin's professionalism and humility are as admirable as Rao's published research work and citations which are globally appreciated. And yet as human beings both are poles apart. "I am humbled and honoured", said Sachin a day after the award. "I dedicate Bharat Ratna to all mothers in India". CNR Rao, on the other hand, made no secret of his disgust with politicians for not making enough funds available for science and research. And he heads the Prime Minister's Scientific Advisory Council. Many may agree with him that politicians are "idiots" but would be circumspect in saying so publicly. The controversial remark should not distract attention from the point he emphasised, that is, science needs higher budgetary allocations. While the choice of Sachin and Rao for Bharat Ratna has gone down well without controversy, a demand has emanated from some quarters that hockey legend Dhian Chand too should be awarded Bharat Ratna. Earlier, sport was not considered eligible for the country's top honour. In 2011 the rules were changed to clear the way for Sachin Tendulkar. Since hockey is the national game and its admirers find Dhian Chand no less a legend than Sachin, the demand for Bharat Ratna for him has resurfaced. The BJP too has pitched in for a similar honour for Atal Behari Vajpayee. The logic is plain and simple: If Rajiv Gandhi could get it, why not Vajpayee? But does Vajpayee need a lobbyist to plead his case? There is a long list of prominent Indians who, it can be argued with justifiable reason, deserve the award. Among them are Verghese Kurien, whose contribution to the cooperative movement and white revolution in the country remains unmatched; Ratan Tata, the giant among industrialists who have preached and practised ethical corporate governance — the Niira Radia tapes controversy notwithstanding; and M.F. Husain, the much-acclaimed artist who died in exile. To avoid the taint of controversy to such a coveted honour, it is imperative to have clear-cut guidelines and a transparent selection process. Lobbying diminishes the stature of an otherwise deserving candidate.
Preserving knowledge While the focus of our entire education plan has been job-oriented, it ignored many unique aspects of the Indian knowledge tradition. One of them was our rich heritage of manuscripts, which are a goldmine of information on subjects varying from medicine to the craft of making a ship. Had it not been for the creation of the National Manuscript Mission (NMM) in 2003 the country would have lost knowledge in diverse fields, acquired and documented over thousands of years, when technology to do so was not available. In the last ten years the NMM has created a digital collection of about a million manuscripts, which works out to more than 10 million folios, gathered from distant corners of the country. While the NMM could achieve this feat despite many hiccups, controversies and cuts in financial allocations (Rs 12.5 crore in 2010-2011 to Rs 9.5 crore in 2012-2013), universities that were assigned the responsibility of taking care of institutions that stored priceless heritage of manuscripts could not do justice despite resources at their disposal. A living example of this neglect is Vishveshvaranand Biswabandhu Institute of Sanskrit and Indological Studies (VBIS&IS), Hoshiarpur, that stores thousands of rare manuscripts, some in indecipherable languages. Established with the dedication for the pursuit of knowledge in 1903 by two great scholars, who were also sanyasins, the institute was taken over by Panjab University in 1965. Under the university VBIS&IS lost many of its major academic programmes, periodicals and journals etc. Over the period, the faculty and staff, once retired, were not replaced. Many scholars of indology who visited the institute from abroad had to face great difficulty in accessing the rich data stored there, which was in a shambles. With the digitisation of these manuscripts by the efforts of the NMM finally, these rare manuscripts will survive in future, though microfilming would have been a better option to give longevity to these rare documents of our knowledge heritage.
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THE Bombay Government has issued a press note on the subject of the improvement of milk supply in towns which is, as we all know, very unsatisfactory. Not only has the price of milk gone up but uncontaminated milk is very difficult to obtain. The Bombay Government observes that except in Cantonment areas no systematic action has been taken in improving the milk supply, and this is true of Punjab and other provinces also. The difficulty is how to adopt improved methods without directly enhancing the price of milk and thereby making it more difficult for the great bulk of the people to buy it. “Radical” finance in India There is hardly sufficient ground to suspect that expenditure of a kind that benefits the “people of India directly will be incurred on what is called a “radical” scale. Lord Cromer, in his article in the “Quarterly Review,” warns the Government against adding to the burdens of the people whose income is more or less stationary. Of late liberal contributions have been made for education and sanitation both from general revenues and the opium windfalls. In every province there is demand for more expenditure on objects of a reproductive nature, which has to be incurred in the interests of the people. But there is also a general cry that officers who draw Rs. 500 do not get even what is called a “living wage” and a general improvement in the pay of European officers is urged by several witnesses in the Public Service Commission. It is unproductive expenditure of this sort that Government has to guard against and not expenditure on education, sanitation etc.
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Naval challenges amid giant strides AFTER a long nine-year wait, India has finally taken possession of the 45,000-tonne, $2.3 billion Admiral Gorshkov, now renamed INS Vikramaditya, built in the final years of the Soviet Union and now India's largest ship. It is now being escorted by warships to India on a two-month voyage from Russia's northern coast and will reach the port of Karwar in January following which the Navy will operationalise it with the first landing of its MiG-29K aircraft.
Earlier this year in August, India became the fifth nation in the world with the capability to indigenously design and build its own aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant. This launch was preceded with the announcement that the reactor in India's first indigenously built nuclear-powered submarine (SSBN), INS Arihant, has gone critical, marking a turning point in New Delhi's attempt to establish a nuclear triad. But the celebrations came to an abrupt end when two days after the launch of INS Vikrant, a tragedy followed as INS Sindhurakshak, one of the 10 kilo-class submarines that form the backbone of India's ageing conventional submarine force, sank with 18 crew members after explosions at the naval dockyard in Mumbai. Together these developments underscored the giant strides that India has made as well as the challenges that India faces in its attempts to emerge as a credible global naval power. Indian naval expansion is being undertaken with an eye on China, and recent strides notwithstanding, India has nautical miles to go before it can catch up with its powerful neighbour, which has made some significant advances in the waters surrounding India. The launch of an aircraft carrier is seen as critical for the Indian Navy as it remains anxious to maintain its presence in the shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, especially in the light of China's massive naval build-up. China commissioned its aircraft carrier, Liaoning, last year which is a refurbished vessel purchased from Ukraine in 1998. It is also working on an indigenous carrier of its own even as it is eyeing a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. India remains heavily dependent on imports to meet its defence requirements, so its recent successes are particularly important. But for all the euphoria, it will be five years until INS Vikrant can be commissioned by the Indian Navy and INS Arihant has yet to pass a series of sea trials. The Indian Navy wants to be a serious blue-water force and is working hard to achieve that goal. Indian naval planners have long argued that if it is to main continuous operational readiness in the Indian Ocean, protect sea lanes of communication in the Persian Gulf and monitor Chinese activities in the Bay of Bengal, it needs a minimum of three aircraft carriers and a fleet of five nuclear submarines. With Admiral Gorshkov likely to be operational by early next year and a second aircraft indigenous carrier in the wings, the Navy could be close to realising the dream of operating three carriers by the end of the decade. But serious challenges remain as exemplified by the disaster of INS Sindhurakshak which has brought the focus back to the enduring problems of safety and reliability the Navy has been grappling with for decades. The Navy has a poor accident record with several mishaps in recent years. INS Sindhurakshak had been reintroduced to service only in April this year after a refit in Russia. The Navy has ordered a review of its submarines weapons safety systems after initial investigations showed arms on board the submarine may have played a role in its sinking. The latest accident comes at a time when even as the Navy's surface fleet expansion has been progressing well, the Indian submarime fleet is not only ageing but also depleting fast with the induction of new submarines not on track. Despite the success of Vikrant and Arihant, India's indigenous defence production has been marred by serious technical and organisational problems, leading to significant delays in the development of key defence technologies and platforms. The Navy, much like the other two services, has found it difficult to translate its conceptual commitment to self-reliance and indigenisation into actionable policy, resulting in a perpetuation of reliance on external sources for naval modernisation. Yet India's reliance on its Navy to project power is only likely to increase in the coming years as naval build-up continues apace in the Indo-Pacific. Apart from China, other powers are also developing their naval might. Japan's commissioning of third helicopter carrier, the Izumo, has raised hackles in Beijing which has referred to it as an "aircraft carrier in disguise." And in this regional context, India's naval engagement with East and Southeast Asian states is integral to its two-decade old 'Look East' policy. Countries ranging from the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia to Vietnam and Myanmar have been pushing India toward assuming a higher profile in the region. India is training Myanmar naval personnel and is building at least four offshore patrol vehicles in Indian shipyards to be used by Myanmar's Navy. The Indian Navy has not only been supplying spares to Hanoi for its Russian-origin ships and missile boats but has also extended a $100 million credit line to Vietnam for the purchase of patrol boats. Defence Minister A.K. Antony was in Australia, Thailand and Singapore recently forging closer naval ties even as New Delhi's naval relationship with major Western powers and the Gulf states is blossoming. As a result, the Navy will remain an indispensable tool for furthering national foreign policy goals. But as resources dry up with a significant decline in the economic growth rate, Indian naval planners will have to think more carefully about balancing their ways, ends and means if India wants to emerge as serious naval power in the coming years.
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Chess and mathematics Arithmophobia
— which means a persistent and abnormal fear of numbers -- is a word I heard again recently. It cropped up during a discussion on mathematics, a subject that was my Achilles' heel in my student days (which subject wasn't, my father would say). How's that possible? I have been often asked. One is supposed to be good in both being the common refrain. Not in my case, dude. So, after securing exactly passing marks in the subject in the tenth, I crawl-passed the mark on the basis of grace marks in the eleventh. Providence doesn't help the brave always. I got just three marks in the subject in class 12. The certificate is still shown to me — a constant ridicule. Even my 11-year-old niece does it at times, all for a hearty laugh at my expense. In the supplementary exams, my bro and his IITian friends ensured I got solved 'parchis' of the paper. It was mass copying in a school in the walled city of old Patiala. Still, I jumbled up the answers. I flunked. I stared at a dead-end road. No teacher of maths could help me till someone told me about a young teacher of the subject in Thapar Engineering College. His fee was astronomical. And he only taught engineers or prospective IITians. A few days ago, I had become Under-19 North India chess champion. I mentioned it to the teacher wishing I could focus similarly on maths also. He blurted out the same question. Why not good in maths if in chess? Beats me, I said, perhaps because chess doesn't have calculus and theorems, though it has theories. "Can you beat me in the game?" he asked I did, several times that evening. Not just him but the team of him, his wife and brother. He was impressed. He saw the syllabus of my exam, asked me a few questions and took me in. The next day, he did what no teacher had done. He separated the syllabus. One part for 60 marks, and second for 40. "You are not programmed to understand the 40 marks part, mainly calculus", he said. "Forget it. We will focus on 60 marks". In a few weeks, he made me go through the sums again and again. The practice stretched to nearly hundred notebooks. There was hardly any question possible from that 60 marks section that I had not seen and done again and again. And the benevolent teacher took half the fee but with a rider. I had to play chess with him and his brother so that they could win the chess tournament in their college. He did. And I too passed the exam easily, submitting the answer-sheet to the examiner in half of the stipulated time. I secured 57 out of 60, making a careless mistake, so integral and still incorrigible part of my nature, to lose three marks. I tried in vain to find the teacher recently. But his lesson stayed with me. In life, you just can't do and attain everything. One can lose what one can do in the bargain. The great Sachin Tendulkar was not made to be a great captain. He left it in good time. He learnt his limitations. Life is like that. It is good to have a 'nothing-is-impossible' attitude but one should know one's boundaries as well. That, sometimes, defines the fine line between success and failure, and importantly, helps to come to terms with the latter. I have revisited it at times of distress and returned smiling.
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Using technology to strengthen guard Science and warfare have always been intimately connected. That technology is critical to war is now so widely recognised that military historians today define the ages of warfare by technological change rather than by the great generals or leaders associated with them. We now speak of the age of gunpowder, of industrial war, of the atomic age, and of modern war in the age of electronics or the age of systems.
This is not a new or post-industrial revolution phenomenon, though the pace of change has certainly accelerated in the last three centuries. The invention of the stirrup and the high saddle in Asia enabled cavalry to dominate the battlefield that belonged to infantry. The limitations of cavalry (it could not hold ground or reduce fortifications) meant that infantry continued in new roles. From the 12th century until the end of the 17th century, the proportion of cavalry to infantry in most successful armies was steady at around 1:2, until the musket, bayonet and flintlock increased infantry firepower, decimating cavalry. That was only one of the changes that gunpowder brought to warfare. Once gunpowder could be used as a propellant for cannon balls breaking down castle walls, tactics and strategy changed. Combined with the logistics revolution that long-distance navigation, and soon the telegraph, mass production and railways made possible, we saw an age of industrial war by European nations against the non-industrial world from the 19th century onwards. Examples of such change, of revolutions in military affairs as a result of the adoption of new technologies — gunpowder, navigation, radio, atomic energy, and electronics — are myriad and well known to military men, though not part of our science history curricula in schools and universities. Each time a new technology arrives the human reaction has been very similar. There is a deep root for the many technology control and denial regimes that we see in the modern world. The interesting question, however, is why even identical implements and technologies have been understood and used in entirely different ways in the hands of different societies. Gunpowder was known and used in China from the 7th century onwards but was only harnessed to warfare effectively towards the end of the 14th century, first in West Europe and then by the Mughals and others, long before China did so. Steel was manufactured in blast furnaces in China around 800 AD, thereafter in India, and in Western Europe after 1300 but was effectively applied to the manufacture of weapons in the Levant and Europe, not East Asia. Clearly science and technology is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition for enhanced military effectiveness. The determining element was the human factor, the choices made by the elite responsible for military decisions. And those choices were guided by their social and cultural milieu, or from what we would now call their strategic culture. Strategic culture is the influence of our ideological and mental training and upbringing and the ways of thinking that we normally take for granted. It is not an easy idea for scientists who are trained to think of a universal scientific method, which produces reproducible results irrespective of the country, culture or gender of those who carry out an experiment. Certain countries, say India and Russia for instance, consistently produce mathematicians of the highest quality. Why a generation of path-breaking nuclear physicists came from not just one country but one high school? While science itself is value neutral and culture free, technology, the choice of what to study, and how to apply science is not. It is the result of individual choices that reflect their milieu and upbringing. It is that relationship between strategic culture and available technologies produced by science that determines not just the manner in which technologies are applied to war, but the changes in tactics, strategy and what the Russians call the operational art. Often this goes beyond the military to the nature of society itself. Industrial war The industrial revolution brought total war, an era of mass industrialised warfare where quantity was quality. The highly skilled German war machine was overwhelmed in WWII by the material superiority of its opponents. The industrial revolution also established the idea of military invention as a permanent and systematic feature of modern war, not just the invention of new weapons which has happened through the ages. The difference was the sustained conduct of military research with state support to take advantage of rapid technological change. As a result, the relationship between the state and industry, and between the state and research, became increasingly close. From the 1940s until the seventies military, R&D led rather than followed the ideas of industry in critical sectors like electronics and aerospace. If not for this, computers would have come some 12-15 years later, as also the first integrated circuits which led to the information revolution. The Internet was first conceived in the sixties as a "post apocalyptic command grid" — as a means of maintaining strategic military communication in the event of a surprise nuclear attack.
Information and communications Many recent technologies that have carried forward the information and communications technology revolution (ICT) and its military applications are the result of private research and entrepreneurship, of small science, unlike the Cold War pattern of military led and state organised or conducted research. Today the role of the state in new areas has shrunk to being a facilitator and provider of funds. The products of many of the new technologies are made in what would have been called handicraft industry in the past, not the large military industrial complex. The ICT revolution has brought power into the hands of small groups and individuals, and made the state's control over its physical borders irrelevant while creating a whole new domain for contention in cyber space. The state's legal monopoly of violence has been exposed and the new information and communication technologies promote alternative forms of war. By enabling and empowering individual communications and small group operations, these technologies make guerrilla warfare and sub-conventional conflict more likely, as also the use of asymmetry and deception, and conflict at the lower end of the spectrum of violence. When attacks in cyber space are close to the speed of light, conventional deterrence can barely operate. Cyber space is a borderless, anonymous and anarchic domain, where it is hard to ascribe an origin or source to attacks and other malicious activities. The other new domain of contention that science has created is outer space which is increasingly being used for military purposes.
Technology and security Technology has changed the way we define security. We cannot consider national security without considering cyber security, and we look increasingly to technology for solutions to internal security issues. If we have had some success in intelligence-based counter-terrorism operations recently, it is due in part to a combination of technological methods, including data fusion, with traditional intelligence trade craft. As we urbanise our societies, technology becomes ever more important to policing and law and order. Half the world's population now lives in cities. India too is rapidly moving in that direction. Internal security in these situations, when aspirations and expectations have been aroused, will be achieved only if we are successful in finding technology-based solutions. Besides, in the borderless world that ICT has created, we have no choice but to benchmark our domestic security efforts and institutions to international standards. It is time to think about India's technology security. This would involve not just our possession of and access to technology, but also our ability to innovate, generate technology, and more important, to use it and apply it in creative ways to the solution of our problems. In one sense, military and security technology is evolving towards India's strengths. The question is how we can best organise ourselves to exploit these opportunities. If we are to produce technologies and outcomes that national security requires, the traditional ways in which we have organised our scientific effort will need to change, or at least be considerably supplemented. We need much stronger links between scientists and the services, and we need to break down the vertical silos in which we work today. The possible changes in war from the use of new materials, genetics, or nanotechnology are mind boggling. India is fortunate in having a cohort of world-class scientists and governments supportive of scientific research. Indian science and technology will make its contribution to the defence and security of the country. Excerpt from a lecture on "Science and technology" by the National Security Adviser at the Indian Academy of Science on November 9.
Nuclear revolution
Equation changes: The creation of nuclear weapons brought into being weapons of such unimaginable power that they changed the way in which we thought of war. The atomic military revolution required the development of a doctrine and a force capable of using technology in a new and unexpected way. The power of these weapons made war between the superpowers irrational under all but the most extreme circumstances. Deterrence theory: The development of deterrence theory, different from earlier versions of dissuasion or coercion, and its ramifications, including game theory and other refinements, was a result of the development of these weapons. Since deterrence is sensitive to technological change, it sustained military R&D efforts right through the Cold War. The challenges: There were problems with reliance on deterrence. What if a possessor of N-weapons did not understand that these weapons were not meant for use? Fortunately, these weapons were the product of big science, requiring heavy capital investments and large and complex facilities. They were therefore in the hands of states and it has been possible to deal with the proliferation of these weapons through inter-state mechanisms like the IAEA and NPT.
How gunpowder changed it The invention of the stirrup and high saddle in Asia enabled cavalry to dominate the battlefield. Limitations of cavalry meant that infantry continued in new roles. From the 12th century until the end of the 17th century the proportion of cavalry to infantry in most successful armies was steady, until the musket, bayonet and flintlock increased infantry firepower, decimating cavalry. Once gunpowder could be used as a propellant for cannon balls breaking down castle walls, tactics changed. Combined with the logistics revolution that long-distance navigation, and soon the telegraph, mass production and railways made possible, we saw an age of industrial war by European nations against the non-industrial world from the 19th century.
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I almost lost two academic years to it. Yet, that subject taught me a great lesson of life. I remember it more following the World Chess Championship between Magnus and Anand. Chess and mathematics had a topsy-turvy relationship in my life. I excelled in the game to a certain level but failed in the subject of numbers.
Paradoxical: The main purpose of the military establishment was to win wars, but after nuclear weapons, it was to prevent them. This was to be done through deterrence, by threatening unacceptable damage upon an enemy who might attempt to win a nuclear exchange. In order to prevent the use of N-weapons, the adversary had to be convinced of the certainty of their use against him.