Tags:
Journalism of Courage
When English Prime Minister Lord Palmerston said in the mid-19th century that “nations have no permanent friends or allies, but only permanent interests”, he could hardly have foreseen that the birds would come home to roost within a century. In an authentic demonstration of the primacy of national self-interest, the US Congress passed a law known as the McMahon Act of 1946, which expressly forbade the transfer of any atomic weapon know-how to wartime allies, and partners in the Manhattan A-bomb project, the British.
I will revisit the McMahon Act presently, but the other fact I wish to draw attention to is that nations rarely if ever do anything for altruistic motives. It is against these touchstones of international relations that we need to gauge the contretemps we are witnessing about the ongoing multilateral naval exercises in the Bay of Bengal. I will try to provide answers to five FAQs regarding this issue which has been given such a controversial slant by some political parties. Are we really doing anything unique and unprecedented by having a multilateral exercise? From 1949 onwards, the Indian Navy (IN) participated regularly in the annual Britain-led Commonwealth naval exercises known as Joint Exercises Trincomalee. The participants included Australia and Pakistan, and these exercises were abandoned only in 1965 when Indo-Pak relations plummeted.
Why did we resume exercising with other navies? Four decades of almost complete insularity had taken its toll on the tactical and doctrinal skills of the IN. These cannot be had for love or money, and can only be acquired painstakingly by pitting yourself against mock adversaries. So when the opportunity presented itself to first exercise with the US Navy in 1994, it was eagerly grabbed. Readers may please note that the 123 Agreement was unheard of then.
A few years later we were intrigued to find ourselves besieged by navies wanting to exercise with the IN. A little reflection showed that given India’s position astride the shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean, which has 100,000 ships transiting through annually, it made sense for those who depended on these arteries of commerce to know and befriend the sole regional blue water navy. The US is finding to its discomfort that while it can try to set agendas world-wide, it is spread too thin to effectively implement them everywhere. So it is no doubt in quest of “partners”.
Then there were others who thought highly of our professional attainments and wanted to learn maritime warfare skills from our sailors. So we made a list of navies we would exercise with periodically: Singapore, Oman, Indonesia, Thailand, Russia, US, UK, and France. In addition, our ships would exercise with other navies like those of China, Japan, New Zealand or Australia during mutual port calls.
Why switch from the bilateral to multilateral exercise format? Over the past decade or so, our surface-ship operators, submariners and aircrew have gained tremendously in self-confidence and expertise by pitting their professional skills against the best in the business. However, each such exercise takes months of preparation, and consumes ship, submarine and aircraft operating hours; and in the past few years it was becoming obvious that by exercising separately with so many navies we were overstretching both our material and personnel. The answer: go multilateral, reduce the time, multiply the benefits, save machinery hours, and give more leave to the sailors. The MEA was not very keen, but obviously the navy managed to convince them. This is the real reason that for the first time ‘Malabar’ has five navies participating — not secret instructions from the Pentagon.
Have we shown inadequate concern about China’s sensitivities? We have held naval exercises with the PLA (navy) on many occasions, but at their insistence these have remained confined only to basic manoeuvres. Moreover, the Chinese continuously look over their shoulders to ensure that they balance the IN with the Pakistan Navy. Talk of China feeling “encircled” is nothing but dialectic disinformation; we have no presence whatsoever in the Pacific. At the same time, India is in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and that is where China has implemented its “string of pearls” strategy by creating right around us what are best described as “weapon-client states”: Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan. In this context, Gwadar, situated at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, is probably the first in a chain of ports that China is developing in our neighbourhood, and which could provide future facilities to its ships and missile-carrying nuclear submarines.
Why do we need to cooperate with navies of other democracies? The Indian Ocean’s vast reaches are full of security hazards, and we face the full gamut of low intensity threats from piracy and hijacking to trafficking in arms and human beings, and smuggling of WMDs. We need to remind ourselves that in June 1999, alert Indian customs officers in Kandla port had discovered a North Korean ship carrying a clandestine cargo of missile components from Pyongyang to Karachi. No navy can undertake all these tasks single-handed, and it appears sensible to make common cause with other like-minded nations. The tsunami disaster relief and Lebanon refugee evacuation operations clearly showed us the huge benefits of being able to talk, work alongside and operate seamlessly with other navies; or have the ability to be “interoperable”.
Burgeoning Sino-Indian trade is a welcome development for the future of bilateral relations, but we must not allow this aspect alone to lull us into complacency. To all those who get dreamy-eyed about the future of Sino-Indian relations, I would pose just one question. Where in the annals of international relations can one find a precedent for one nation handing over to another not just the designs and expertise, but also actual hardware relating to nuclear weapons and a family of ballistic missiles? And here I hark back to the post-war McMahon Act which was used by the Americans to deny atomic secrets to their Anglo-Saxon cousins, the British.
The Chinese are not even distant cousins of the Pakistanis; so there must be a compelling reason for this nexus which has forced India to divert scarce resources, and substantially checkmated her developmental plans. Till we unravel this conundrum, and as long as Indians resident in Arunachal Pradesh are termed “Chinese citizens”, it would be prudent to remember Palmerston’s words and hedge our bets.
The writer was chief of the Indian Navy
