Author: Praveen Swami

NRC and detention centres: What you need to know about PM’s claims 

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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What the PM said: “No Muslim is being sent to detention centres, nor are there any detention centres in India. I am shocked at the lengths some people can go to spread lies”.

The Prime Minister misspoke: In November, the Minister of State for Home Nityanand Rai informed the Lok Sabha that state governments have been instructed from time to time, to set up detention centres. “As informed by the government of Assam, as on 22 November 2019, 988 foreigners were lodged in six detention centres in Assam,” Rai said.

In ongoing hearings in the Karnataka High Court, the Union government said the Ministry of Home Affairs had written letters to all states in 2014 and again 2018, written letters to all states for setting up detention centres, to house foreign nationals.

There are six such centres in Assam, and similar facilities are being built in West Bengal, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Telengana.

Why are there detention centres?

Foreigners, at the end of their sentence for crimes — whether for being illegal immigrants, or anything else — must be deported back to their country of origin.  However, in many cases, there’s no evidence that alleged foreigners belong to the country India says they’re from — which means those countries refuse to take them (India also sometimes refuses to take back asylum-seekers in Europe, the US and Mexico on similar grounds). The detention centres are meant to be prisons-after-prisons.

In ongoing hearings in Karnataka, High Court judge KT Phaneendran instructed that adequate provision should be made for the education of children of detainees, as well as for their physical well-being.  The Ministry of Home Affairs’ guidelines also state that detention centres should have “well-lit, airy rooms adhering to basic hygiene standards and equipped with electricity, water and communication facilities”. However, no costing of this exercise has been done by the MHA.

There are similar detention centres around the world — but many countries are realising it isn’t a great solution, both because of the huge costs involve, and the ethics of indefinitely detaining people. Australia and the United States have no time limits on detention, and the US has some 30,000 people in detention on any given day. However, tens of thousands more are released because it’s just too expensive to hold them indefinitely.  France, on the other hand, has a 32 day limit on detention.

Perhaps the PM just meant there are no Indians in detention centres

Legally, that claim would be true. However, there are credible complaints that people have been declared foreigners on the basis of flimsy evidence. In one case, documented by an independent investigation Samina Bibi was declared a foreigner because she could not remember the constituency where her grandfather cast his vote in 1966. Abu Bakkar Siddiqui was declared a foreigner because his grandfather’s name was spelt Aper Ali in one document and Afer Ali in another.

And this brings us to the NRC.

Muslims fear local officials will harass and intimidate them. The current citizenship rules give vast discretionary rules to the local registrar of citizens, allowing them to arbitrarily determine whose citizenship might be in doubt.

And this brings us to the CAA.

Muslims fear the CAA will give Hindus wrongly identified as non-citizens an escape route, which they will be denied.

Is it true, as the Prime Minister said, that since he came to power in 2014, “there has been no discussion on NRC anywhere”?

The government, however, for the last several years, has repeatedly committed to an NRC. Home Minister Amit Shah recently said the “NRC will be implemented across the country and all infiltrators identified and expelled before 2024 polls”. He made this statement while addressing a rally in Jharkhand. In November 2019, a tweet from the BJP’s official handle also showed Home Minister Amit Shah ensuring “implementation of NRC in the entire country”. The BJP’s manifesto also committed it to “implement the NRC in a phased manner in other parts of the country.”

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The hot-pink India-US romance is ending; New Delhi needs to worry

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Ensconced inside the commodious environs of the Great Hall of the People, invigorated by a long winter-morning march on the Great Wall, President Richard Nixon ruminated on the problems of modern India. “I think,” he told Prime Minister Chou En-lai, “if we analyse why Germany and Japan have done so well, it is because they have qualities of drive, and are willing to work hard.” “But some people on the subcontinent, maybe because of the environment, they never had this drive.”

Prime Minister Chou pushed back, declassified documents record, despite his country’s bitter differences with India: “people throughout the world have similar qualities,” he protested.

Nixon would have none of this liberal nonsense.  “I would only respectfully advise the Prime Minister,” he snorted, “that if his government gives aid to India, to expect nothing. Except a slap in the face.”

Last week’s high-level 2+2 ministerial dialogue between Washington and New Delhi generated a long list of promises: Smoother cooperation between defence industries, enhanced cooperation in science and technology, greater engagement on peacekeeping, capacity-building. In Washington, though, there’s mounting frustration that the long list of to-dos the two countries agree on never seem to actually get done. To many in Washington’s policy élite, the idea that India will emerge as a credible counterweight to China now seems increasingly unreal.

Concerns about India’s business environment

In a recent report, the Congressional Research Service noted that “Prime Minister Modi’s first term fell short of many observers’ expectations, as India did not move forward with anticipated market-opening reforms, and instead increased tariffs and trade restrictions”. Now, it went on, “slowing economic growth in India raises concerns about India’s business environment”.

Even though President Donald Trump has often been supportive of the strategic partnership with India, the pile of unresolved issues has mounted. Negotiations on the two countries’ tariff disputes are dragging on; sharp differences persist on services, agriculture, intellectual property and data localisation.

Liberal American disquiet over Kashmir and the National Citizenship Register has added to the friction. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unconcealed support for President Donald Trump — and Ambassador Harsh Vardhan Shringla’s ill-advised description of neoconservative ideologue Steve Bannon as a “Dharma Guru”— outraged many US democrats, many otherwise supportive of India. Poor diplomacy has succeeded in transforming friends into enemies.

Though disputes like these aren’t catastrophic, the writing on the wall is hard to miss: Eleven years after the hot-pink romance that flowered with the signing of the India-US nuclear deal, Nixon’s glowering pessimism is again taking hold in Washington.

But the issues in the relationship go far deeper. First up, Indian interests aren’t as neatly aligned with the United States as some imagine. The Phase 1 trade deal signed by the US and China last week commits Beijing to import an additional $200 billion of American goods and services over two years. US exports to China added up to $188 billion in 2017, and Phase 1 effectively doubles that number.

US-China trade deal impact

This is good news for Washington — but not great for New Delhi, whose own hopes of increasing exports to China will be directly hit. The deal makes clear that the US, like all nation-states, will look after its own interests first.

India has long hoped to ride on the back of the United States’ need to contain Chinese power in Asia. In their 1972 negotiations, Nixon and Chou En-lai agreed both countries had agreed to eschew the pursuit of regional hegemony. As its wealth and power have grown, Beijing has sought to expand its geopolitical influence. India has bumped up against an increasingly powerful China in the Himalayas — and is being increasingly challenged in the Indian Ocean.

However, it’s far from clear what President Trump is willing to commit to the cause of containment. Trump’s spats with South Korea and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation make it clear he believes US allies shouldn’t expect its support for free. His interest, like that of Nixon, is to arrive at a workable arrangement to share power with China — not to protect India’s interests.

The US, similarly, has interests in Pakistan that aren’t the same as those of India. The US is seeking a peace deal with the Taliban that would let President Trump bring troops home. That needs the support of the Pakistan Army, which in turn expects payback for its assistance.

Washington will pressure Pakistan to rein in terrorists, knowing their activities could precipitate a regional crisis. It isn’t necessarily going to bat for India, though, in the event of future crisis in Kashmir.

Relationship is transactional

Patronage comes with costs. Ending oil imports from Iran and Venezuela to comply with US sanctions — sanctions India believes are profoundly misplaced — has increased India’s energy bills. It has also undermined India’s pursuit of a strategic relationship with Iran. India, similarly, needs the Russian-made S-400 Triumf air-defence system to ensure a credible deterrent against Pakistan. However, that purchase risks being hit with US sanctions intended to punish Russia.

Washington, of course, also has its frustrations: Principal among them is India’s apparent unwillingness to share the costs of membership in a regional security umbrella, though it wants the benefits.

President Trump’s caustic remarks on India’s role in Afghanistan — chiding Prime Minister Modi for “constantly telling me he built a library in Afghanistan”— reflect a wider irritation over India’s unwillingness to commit resources in conflicts from the war against the Islamic State to Afghanistan.

For all the pablum in the India-US 2+2 joint statement about “shared values of freedom, justice, human rights and commitment to the rule of law”, both sides know their relationship is transactional. “There is a quid-pro-quo in international relations,” US political leader Tom Lantos argued in 2005. “And if our Indian friends are interested in receiving all the benefits of US support, we have every right to expect that India will reciprocate”. That’s obviously true of India, too.

Economic woes 

At its core, the US-India strategic partnership rested on the bet that India would continue on the path of growth, becoming more prosperous and militarily capable. That vision of the future seems increasingly improbable. In Washington, many are wondering if India is, instead, fated to be a country with an anaemic economy, scarred by mass violence and internet shutdowns.

For more than a decade after the Soviet Union collapsed, New Delhi had to engage with a dangerous world alone. Through the 1990s, as the insurgency in Kashmir escalated and the country battled economic crisis, its options were severely limited. The India-US strategic relationship mitigated those risks, enabling resolute foreign policies and security strategies.

Even the best-executed foreign policy can’t fix the Indian government’s failure to grow the economy, manage civil tensions and modernise its military. New Delhi needs to get its act in order — or risks having to negotiate the dark alleyways of our dangerous world alone.

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Bangladesh Victory Day: India is destroying relationship with strategically-vital country it birthed today with Citizenship Act

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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From his seat in the first-class cabin, Mohander Dhali, saw the storm draw closer as the little steamer fought its way across the Rupna towards Khulna: some fifty men,  “dressed in black pajama and black Punjabis with daggers in hand, waiting on the jetty to start killing the Hindus who arrived there”. Faik mian, Dhali’s elderly neighbour in Hoogalbunia, hid him and the village doctor, Sushil Biswas,  from the killers, as blood began to flow off the lower deck, washing bodies into the gentle river.

“The riot in the launch on the lower deck being somewhat calm”, Dhali would later record, “we got out and tried to go to the market”. “In the diffused light, suddenly I saw lying all around innumerable dead bodies”. As he watched, new killers arrived: “Had it not been for Faik again, who caught the dagger in motion, I would have been slain then on the spot”.

Hariprasad Bardhan eyes focussed who had less luck on the Khulna ghat that night of January, 1963. “I saw in the market the dead body of a big merchant”, Bardhan recalled. “He had been put in a gunny bag, and it appeared as if the body had been pierced through the bag”.

For three generations, savagery shaped the life of Hindus in what is now Bangladesh—driving millions across the border into West Bengal, Tripura and Assam, in turn opening up grinding conflicts with indigenous communities, and straining the resources of newly-independent India to breaking point.

In the decade she has ruled Bangladesh, though, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed’s government has worked to heal those wounds—and rebuild the country’s relationship with India. Bangladesh’s Hindu population has grown significantly, upending decades of decline, and hundreds of thousands of refugees have returned home. Islamist forces like the Jama’at-e-Islami and the Jama’at-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh have been ruthlessly put down.

Last year, the Border Security Force said that, for the first time since the 1950s, north-east based insurgent groups didn’t have a single camp operating in Bangladesh’s territory. Bangladesh’s cooperation has been critical, moreover, to India’s efforts to beat-back threats from terrorist groups.

But the toxic climate generated by India’s new citizenship-law amendments—ranging from anti-Muslim polemic by senior political leaders, and even attacks on Bangladeshi diplomats in India—is empowering Sheikh Hasina’s opponents, who argue that she has conceded too much to their unreliable, Hindu-chauvinist neighbour.

To understand the seriousness of the threat requires a grasp of the political power of communalism in Bangladesh’s history, and politics.

Hours before the slaughter on the Khulna docks began, Abdus Sabur Khan had appeared in the bazaar in Loppur, to make this promise: “he would make shoes with the Hindu skins torn from their backs”, villager Manindra Kumar Kirtania recalled. Then, Pakistan’s communications minister busied himself with his niece’s wedding, attended among others by ministers Abdul Moneim Khan, Kazi Abdul Kadar, several members of Provincial Assembly and local officials and the Khulna élite.

That night, mobs armed by Khan’s local apparatus attacked Raj Kumar Mandal’s village, setting Hindu homes on fire.  “The mob was shouting with glee, and also shouting the slogan of jihad”, he was to say. “Among many, who were found dead from burns, were old people and children”.

From the outset, communal violence in East Pakistan had state sponsorship: the ethnic cleansing of the region’s Hindus offered local politicians win the support of refugees arriving from Bihar, by handing over their land. This posed intolerable strains on India, and not just because of religious solidarities: the desperately poor Muslims leaving India for East Pakistan weren’t leaving behind land and assets that could be offered to the new refugees coming into West Bengal.

In 1950, 1.5 million refugees came to India; in 1951-52, 600,000; another million from 1953 to 1956 another 1.6 million, an investigation by the Indian Commission of Jurists documented. In 1961, India expelled Muslim economic refugees from East Pakistan back home—but that only led to reprisals against Hindus. In 1962 there were attacks on non-Muslims and their proper ties and women in Rajshahi District, leading 35,000 refugees to move to West Bengal and Assam; the 1964 violence, another 850,000.

At a Congress Working Committee meeting in 1949, Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel had stated that “unless we take concrete steps to solve the problem, India would be crushed under their weight”. He advocated seizing territory; Khulna and Jessore were possible targets, the scholar Pallavi Raghavan has noted. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru also considered the idea of war.

To both, though, it was clear this idea was unworkable: on top of the crippling costs of the use of military force, a conflict would generate even larger numbers of refugees.

Inside Bangladesh, the killing machine became increasingly institutionalised.  Leading up to Bangladesh’s war of independence, the Jama’at-e-Islami set up up a death-squad which killed tens of thousands.  In a judgment sentencing a Jama’at leader to 90 years in prison, Bangladesh’s war crimes tribunal said the Jama’at “intentionally functioned as a criminal organisation”.

Bangladesh’s liberation ought to have marked a turning point: The Jama’at-e-Islami, was annihilated in the war, along with its patrons, Pakistan’s army.  But the wheels of history soon spun in its favour. Major-General Ziaur Rahman, who emerged as Bangladesh’s ruler after the 1975 coup, allowed the Jama’at-e-Islami to re-enter civic life. His successor, General HM Ershad, even appointed two 1971 war criminals, Abdul Mannan and Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury, to cabinet positions.

Formally founded at Dhaka’s Eden Hotel in May, 1979, the Bangladesh Jama’at-e-Islami was soon back at the core of political life. From 2001-2006, it used its alliance with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party to take control of the social welfare ministry, dominating Bangladesh’s well-funded NGO sector. It also controlled the Islami Bank, Bangladesh’s third-largest.

Even at its peak in 1991, the scholar Jyoti Rahman has pointed out in a thoughtful analysis, the Jama’at never enjoyed a mass constituency. At its peak, in 1991, it won 12 per cent of the popular vote and 18 of 300 seats in parliament, falling in 2008 to 4 per cent of the vote and just eight seats. However, the system of communal ideas it represented gave it legitimacy and social heft.

Following the killings at Khulna, witnesses said, minister Abdus Sabur Khan  vowed “even the leaves would have Allah written on them”.  Amnestied in 1973, Khan landed on his feet, allying with General Ziaur Rahman.

That ugly history has been defeated by Prime Minister Wazed—and it’s her victory India’s actions are now imperilling.

In Bangladesh’s eyes, India’s arguments for the citizenship amendment just don’t wash. The decision to explicitly prevent Muslims from making citizenship claims based on religious persecution—clearly designed to exclude Rohingya refugee claims—is a key case. Bangladesh, housing 1.1 million Rohingya, fears their long-term presence could empower Islamists, and threaten communal peace in the Chittagong hills. But India, which needs Myanmar’s help to contain its own Naga insurgents, has been loath either to share the refugee burden—or pressure Naypyidaw to take them back.

“The thing is this”, one senior Bangladeshi diplomat says, “you can’t say you are a regional power, a friend of Bangladesh, but refuse to share the costs and problems of our collective security because of your internal communal politics”.

Even though India claims the Rohingya are a security threat, moreover, Bangladesh points out the country hasn’t had a single terrorism case involving the refugees—just one of a British national, Samiun Rahman, recruiting among them to fight in their homeland.

Prime Minister Wazed’s government, moreover, is sensitive to the political costs it’s had to incur because of Indian politicians threatening to evict alleged Bangladeshi migrants from the country—migrants Dhaka denies are its citizens—even as New Delhi has held out official diplomatic assurances it plans to do no such thing.

Hindu anger against the treatment of Hindus in Bangladesh or Pakistan isn’t ill-founded. Emotion, however, isn’t a sound basis for action.  Few Hindu migrants from Bangladesh, official data shows, are likely to apply for Indian citizenship; most have, through whatever means, already integrated themselves into a de-facto legal status they are unlikely to risk. The sheer numbers of economic migrants from Bangladesh—the vast bulk of whom arrived long before the country existed—are, similarly, profoundly unlikely to ever be deported.

BR Ambedkar once warned that Indians needed to choose between building functional countries, and the nihilism of the bayonet: “if swaraj is to usher in an era in which the Hindus and the Muslims will be engaged in scheming against each other, the one planning to conquer its rival”, he warned, it “will be a snare, a delusion and a perversion”.

Indians wondering what their future should look like just need to look left, then right. There’s Pakistan, where leaders dragged God out on to the streets—with catastrophic consequences. Then, there’s Bangladesh, which showed that it’s possible to step away from the abyss.

The bottom line is this: India is weakening a key ally for at-best-tenuous gains. And as Team India works overtime to bowl itself out in Dhaka, Beijing is watching from the stands, quietly smiling.

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Living with dragons: India needs to prepare to bump up against China’s power

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Equipped with guns, grenades, and a perfect haircut, loose-cannon special forces officer Leng Feng emerges from retirement to battle the evil American Big Daddy and his mercenary army. Evading armed drones and single-handedly knocking out battle tanks, Leng rescues a small legion of aid workers and cheering natives. His underwater kung-fu skills aren’t enough, though: final retribution has to be delivered by People’s Liberation Army Navy, which rains missiles on to Big Daddy’s evil empire.

Like so films of its genre, Wolf Warrior II — domestic gross, $874 million; the highest non-English take of all time — tells us mainly about the anxieties of pimply teenage boys: Rambo-with-Chinese-characteristics isn’t that different from the original.

Earlier this month, though, India encountered the real-world iteration the Wolf Warrior fantasy, interdicting the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) espionage ship Shi Yan 1 off the Andaman islands — a manifestation of China’s growing ambition and reach in the Indian Ocean and beyond.

The Indian Navy responded professionally, and directed the ship out of India’s Exclusive Economic Zone, but that’s unlikely to be the end of the story. For years now, PLAN ships and submarines have become increasingly active across the Indian Ocean. In time, it’s probable, India will be bumping up against Chinese naval power in its near neighbourhood, just as it has in the Himalayas.

Beijing’s continental rise isn’t uncontested. India has sought security within emerging alliances of states with an interest in upholding the geopolitical status-quo — in the main, Australia and Japan. But, as former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd has argued, however, the three major members of this alliance haven’t always been consistently enthusiastic about containing China. There is, moreover, an elephant in the ocean: the United States, whose power underpins the Asian architecture.

Washington’s inaction

As the scholar James Fanell has observed, China’s rise has been enabled by a long-standing failure of US resolve to recognise and confront the dangers. In 1974, when the PLA occupied Duncan Island in the Parcel chain, the United States looked away, in the interests of propitiating its new-found ally against the Soviet Union. Fourteen years later, it condoned the slaughter of Vietnamese troops holding Johnson Reef in the Spratly Islands. In 1995, it essentially legitimised the occupation of Mischief Reef, within the Exclusive Economic Zone of the Philippines.

Cold logic underpins the United States’ inaction: Beijing’s assertion of power in its near-neighbourhood isn’t enough of a threat to justify the potential costs of military intervention. President Donald Trump might be willing to engage in trade wars with Beijing — but it makes no sense for him to risk a real one over Philippine reefs.

That reality has led many south-east Asian states to make their peace with Beijing. Thailand’s military regime, for example, has purchased Chinese military hardware, granted it access to naval infrastructure, and is even considering building the Kra canal — a 120-kilometre mega-passage that would slash 1,200 kilometres off the route Chinese warships now take to reach South Asian ports, and allow it to bypass the Malacca Straits.

Even though much Chinese investment in the region is dressed up as purely commercial, a study of fifteen port projects by experts Devin Thorne and Ben Spevack concluded that “only six are arguably or potentially profitable”.

For New Delhi, this shift towards China has real consequences: Sri Lanka continues to cede space to China’s interests; as the recent crisis in the Maldives unfolded, PLAN deployed destroyers, a frigate and an amphibious port dock to signal it wouldn’t allow uncontested Indian military intervention.

Few countries have benefitted from the global order as much as China, which makes its desire to rewrite the rules, at first glance, incomprehensible: There’s no obvious payoff from intimidating neighbours who pose no threat. But where the world sees a fire-breathing dragon, the dragon sees the glint of hunters’ spears and sabres. China’s aggression on its periphery isn’t driven by its new economic might; it’s the legacy of deep insecurity.

From 1956, as strains with the Soviet Union deepened, Beijing emerged a strategic orphan. In 1965, the Soviet Union even secretly proposed a joint strike to the United States, to cripple China’s nuclear-weapons programme. From 17 divisions in 1965, Soviet forces facing China in the far-east grew to 27 divisions by 1969.

Instead of backing down, though, China attacked Soviet border guards on Damansky island on the Ussuri river — the first-ever skirmish between troops of nuclear powers. The Soviet Union suffered 58 dead to well over 200 People’s Liberation Army fatalities.

Losing the battle proved a strategic triumph. It persuaded the Soviet Union that, ill-equipped as the PLA might be, its sheer numerical force could create havoc. Even an easy victory, moreover, would only yield an ungovernable, continent-sized begging-bowl.

Persuaded — wrongly — that Moscow was certain to attack by 1985, Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping moved to contain Soviet influence in Asia, by demonstrating his interests and those of the United States were aligned. From 1975, border clashes with Soviet ally Vietnam began to rise sharply — from 439 incidents in 1975 to 1,100 in 1978 — leading, eventually, to war in 1984.

The PLA ended up getting a bloody nose in Vietnam, losing at least 12,192 soldiers. The economic reforms Deng had introduced, paradoxically, contributed to the PLA’s undoing. Xiaoming Zhang’s magisterial history of the China-Vietnam war notes that fewer soldiers joined the army during that decade than at any previous time — and were less than willing to die.

In some cases, the crisis of morale bred low farce: Elements of the 67th Army, on their way out of Laoshan, demanded $1,500 from their 47th Army replacements for all intelligence on enemy positions and firepower. In another case, an armoured unit which did not receive care packages despatched its tanks to surround an infantry division headquarters and demand its share.

Faced with a second period of strategic isolation — this time, in the form of the breakdown of the Sino-United States alliance — China is again turning to coercion. Doklam, like other recent stand-offs in Depsang or Demchok, was not about a road: It was intended as an education in the costs of allying with China’s strategic adversaries.

China’s strength is part steel and part illusion

Like so much to do with military power, China’s great strength is part steel and part illusion. The dragon may indeed breathe fire — but it’s missing a few teeth and claws, and asthmatic to boot. The growth of the military budget — which, it bears mention, has consistently hovered around 2 percent of gross domestic product, the global norm — has helped drag the PLA into the 21st century, but only just. There are areas of excellence, the PLA is still inefficient, bloated and, perhaps most important, untested in war.

Examples aren’t hard to come by. China’s state-of-the-art Type 95 submarines will only be as stealthy as the 1980s Soviet titanium-hulled Akula-class. It’s Dong Feng 21D anti-ship ballistic missile has yet to hit a target moving at realistic speeds. Large parts of the Air Force and Navy are still made up of obsolescent types.

There are more than a few, moreover, who are sceptical of the combat qualities of this new cohort of PLA officers — products of China’s one-child policy, which spawned a generation derisively referred to as ‘Little Emperors’. PLA newspapers are replete with stories of new recruits using boarding-school tricks like spitting out red ink to avoid training. “I’d hide under my blanket and cry every night,” former cadet Sun Youpeng, who joined the PLA after graduating from university at the age of 22, told the South China Morning Post in 2014.

Liu Mingfu, a scholar at China’s National Defence University, estimated in a 2012 report that 70 percent of the PLA’s troops were only sons — a number rising to 80 percent among combat troops. In a country with a growing cohort of aged people, with ancient cultural norms against sending only sons to war, the consequences could be significant, Liu noted.

Following 2011 meeting with the United States’ secretary of defence Robert Gates, China’s defence minister, General Liang Guanglie said that while the PLA had indeed demonstrated increased technological capacitbility, “I also firmly believe that in terms of the level of modernisation of the PLA, we can by no means call ourselves an advanced military force”. “The gap between us and that of advanced countries is at least two to three decades”.

“Without actual combat experience proving (or disproving) the effectiveness of the PLA’s new weapons systems and force structure,” expert Dennis Blasko has noted, “some degree of uncertainty in the senior Chinese leadership’s collective mind likely will exist for many years and may serve as a brake to moving from assertiveness to overt military aggression”.

Those years need to be used intelligently by India. As scholar Abjijnan Rej has argued, the problem isn’t India’s decade of anaemic military budgets. For every one rupee China spent on new military equipment, it spends Rs 0.75 on personnel, reflecting decade-long, sustained reforms. India’s case, personnel costs have bloated. In 2017, India spent more than 2.3 times on its personnel costs than what it did on buying new equipment, an increase from its 2010 ratio of a little more than 1.4.

In 1888, the legendary Prussian leader Otto von Bismark prophecied that the next great European war would emerge from “some damn fool thing in the Balkans”. European leaders didn’t listen — and prepare. There’s no sign that Indian leaders are even thinking of a long-term roadmap to address China’s expanding reach and power. The price of this failure could be catastrophic.

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KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Hyderabad: The road from the encounter killings heads to infinite darkness, not justice

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Late in the winter of 1979, as police officers watched, a doctor inserted a needle into Patel Sah’s eyes — to be clear, the kind used to stitch jute bags, not a surgeon’s tool. Then, they carefully dropped acid into the wound, to be sure. No-one paid much attention: Sah was just one of 33 local men, alleged to have participated in violent crime, who was punished by blinding. Local judges ignored the parade of blinded prisoners; jail authorities pretended nothing was wrong. For the most part, the public cheered: Lacking witnesses, prosecution after prosecution collapsed.

“It is far pleasanter to sit comfortably in the shade rubbing red pepper in some poor devil’s eyes,” the British civil servant James Stephens observed in 1883 of India’s colonial-era police, “than to go about in the sun hunting up evidence”. It’s even easier to torture them.

This morning, millions of Indians have been applauding the killing of four men alleged to have raped, and murdered, a Hyderabad woman — shot, the police claims in a story that does barely aspires to narrative credibility, while attempting to escape. Leaders have joined in: the Congress’ Jyotiraditya Scindia, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Rajyavardhan Rathore, and the Bahujan Samaj Party’s Kumari Mayawati, have all been cheering the same team, a sight rarely seen other than at international cricket matches.

Extra-judicial executions and torture aren’t new in India: but this is the first time they’ve been publicly applauded. The morning of Friday, December 6, 2019, might well mark the time India decided to stop wasting time and money pretending to be a Republic, and transformed itself from the world’s largest democracy into the world’s greatest Khap Panchayat.

Public frustration over the state’s inability to enforce order

Let’s accept this: moral pieties aren’t the answer to what’s happened in Hyderabad. For decades, extra-judicial executions have formed the bedrock of Indian criminal justice, a response to public frustration over the state’s inability to enforce order. From the mid-1960s, police forces in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh began shooting dacoits in response to massacres and looting — hideous crimes that had none of the nostalgic romance now vested in them by Hindi pop film. Five hundred dacoits were reputed to have been killed in the operations; contemporary newspaper accounts were suffused with stories of extra-judicial killings and torture.

In Maharashtra, then-police commissioner Julio Ribeiro has often been alleged to have presided over the murder of organised crime suspects. Beginning with the cold-blooded murder of Manya Surve in 1983, an estimated 500 men with alleged links to crime syndicates and terrorism were simply shot dead.

“The encounter policy was not only not questioned at the time,” journalist Debashish Panigrahi wrote, “it was warmly welcomed as a necessary step in breaking the back of the underworld.”

Siddharth Shankar Ray, West Bengal’s former chief minister, is reputed to have presided over the torture and killing of hundreds of Maoists, aided by the state’s communists. There are graphic accounts of how “over a hundred young Naxalites were killed by the Congress and the CPM together at Baranagar and Kashipur, close to Kolkata, and the dead bodies were tarred over and thrown into the Ganga”.

The Indian elephant is slow generally pacific — but, when panicked, it is a savage, indiscriminate killer. It’s generally forgotten that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the air force to bomb Aizawl in March, 1966, using air power against civilians.

Assam Chief Secretary Vijendra Singh Jafa recorded how the villagers of Darzo were relocated: the hamlet was set on fire, and elders ordered to certify “that they had burnt down their own village.”

For obvious reasons, there’s no certain way of telling just how common extra-judicial killings by police are. There is no national database of the mandatory inquiry by magistrates into all cases of use of lethal force by police. Few cases, moreover, are investigated; just six cases relating to extra-judicial executions were registered in 2017. This, however, we do know: Having fallen for several years from 2010, civilian deaths in police action have surged from just 40 in 2014, to 772 in 2017.

In 2017, Haryana registered an astonishing 431 killings of civilians by police in what are described as “other incidents”— a term the NCRB uses to distinguish these deaths from those from a clear cause, like “accidentally” during police operations, or shootouts with terrorists and armed criminals. This single category from Haryana made up over 55 percent of all killings by police in 2017; Uttar Pradesh, with 88, came in a close second.

The numbers are significantly higher than in 2016, when the NCRB reported 91 civilian deaths in 183 incidents where police used lethal force. In population-adjusted terms, this rate of killing is still relatively low: police forces in the United States and Mexico, among others, reach more easily for their guns. The fact is, however, that this involves cold-blooded murder: The act, we’d like to think, of criminals, not nation-states

No institutional introspection       

Like everything else, this savagery has a context. KTS Tulsi, the eminent lawyer, who served as public prosecutor in Punjab’s most grim years of carnage, has provided rare insight why these things happened the way they did. In February, 1986, Dalip Singh’s son, Avtar Singh, was shot dead by a group of four terrorists outside the village church.  In June 1988, top terrorist Malkiat Singh Ajnala was arrested — and charged, based on his video-taped confession, with the murder.

“I, in my capacity as Public Prosecutor, met Dalip Singh,” Tulsi wrote, “who very bluntly told me, with tears in his eyes, that he would not give evidence in court because he had been told that if he did so, his two other sons would meet the same fate.” “Dalip Singh refused to identify his own son’s murderer”.

Malkit Singh Ajnala vanished in the waning years of the insurgency — perhaps ending up as one of the many victims of Punjab Police encounters the police never did get around to identifying.

From the frontlines of India’s insurgencies, stories like these emerge all the time. Farooq Ahmad Dar, known on the streets of Srinagar as Bitta Karate, who lives a quiet life in Srinagar after bragging that he executed Kashmiri Pandits, lives happily; hundreds of people showed up at his wedding in 2011. Maulana Masood Azhar, the chief of the Jaish-e-Muhammad spent years in Indian jails without being convicted of anything.

Following Azhar’s release in the Indian Airlines hostages-for-prisoners swap at Kandahar, and the surge of pan-India terrorism starting from 2002, security services operated a take-no-Pakistani-prisoners policy — a policy that, infamously, was to take the life of alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba recruit Ishrat Jehan Raza.

There’s no evidence, though, that the Gujarat police was especially fond of these policies. In 2004, the year Ishrat Jahan was killed, there were 354 civilian civilians killed in police firing — the highest number coming from Andhra Pradesh, with 85, Jammu Kashmir with 50, Uttar Pradesh with 42. Gujarat had just 5.

From time to time, courts have stepped in to contain police killings — but there’s been no institutional introspection, let alone reform. In a 1996 editorial, written amidst prosecutions of decorated Punjab Police officers, Indian Express editor Shekhar Gupta asked this: “the Punjab crisis saw five prime ministers and as many internal security ministers. Each one knew precisely what was going on”. “Why are they hiding now?”

The answer is simple: the encounter-killing remains a valuable tool for Indian governments; a quick-fix for their inability to build a modern nation-state, governed by institutions and the rule of law. Police forces simply don’t have the numbers, resources, skills or technologies needed to bring about prosecutions — but the public demands order. The encounter-killing offers at the least the simulacrum of it.

For all the talk of making India safer, the data tells us what government promises have been worth.  Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D) statistics show, there are 192 officers sanctioned for every 100,000 of India’s 1.287 billion residents: Except there aren’t. Because police hiring has lagged, bogged down by budget constraints, India actually has 150.80 police officers per 100,000 population, below the sanctioned level even for 2007. Uttar Pradesh should have 185 police officers per 100,000 citizens; it has 127. Telengana should have 218; it has 131.

Manpower shortage

In 2017-2018, according to BPR&D statistics, India’s states and union territories together spent Rs 108,174.88 crore on police forces: up just 1.39 percent in nominal terms. In no states barring Tamil Nadu, Telengana and Delhi did spending on police constitute more than 2 percent of the budget.

That’s not even counting quality: The sight of officers of the Telengana Police, the country’s best-resourced and trained, rifling the crime-scene without gloves tells us all we ought need to know.  In 2016-2017, the last year for which figures are available, just 44,083 police personnel across the country received any form of in-service training: 0.03 percent of the national police force.

No-one ought be surprised, either, that trials of alleged rapists haven’t become faster because of new fast-track courts, or that conviction rates haven’t inched up despite new laws: The criminal justice system has, simply, disintegrated. The consequences are also there for us to see. Police attitudes to investigation, to the rule of law, and life itself have been casualised: Why bother spending months digging for evidence, when you can settle the case with a bullet? Public respect for laws and courts has diminished; even the police are obeyed only because of fear.

For India, there will be a certain, inexorable consequence. From the traffic lights we refuse to stop at, to the parking disputes which end with gunfire, to mob violence over electricity or water: Each of these is a symptom of the same malaise we’re applauding in Hyderabad. Popular will isn’t, notwithstanding what we’re taught in school, the foundations of a Republic: It’s law. We’ve lost it.

Perhaps India deserves better, but its leadership has proved incapable of delivering it — and its people are demanding it. The road from here heads straight into infinite darkness.

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New Delhi’s warm words for Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajpaksa won’t comfort him as much as Beijing’s cash

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Led by Grand-Admiral eunuch Zheng He, flying the flag of the Ming dynasty, forty-eight great ships of the line rounded the coast of Ceylon in February, 1411, carrying some 30,000 soldiers. The Grand-Admiral had first arrived there in 1408, demanding Ceylon’s king, Vira Alagakkonara, kneel before his emperor, and acknowledge him as the son of heaven. King Alagakkonara refused, and Zheng He sailed away. Now, he had returned to deliver retribution: the king, his aristocrats, were made prisoner, and taken to China.

Zhu-Di, the third emperor of the Ming, left behind a stele introducing himself thus to the Buddha, the Vishnu of Tenamram and Allah: he was, reads an imperial inscription, bearing the date November 15, 1409, “the King of Great China, supreme overlord of kings, full-orbed moon in splendour”. He made generous offerings to the deities: a 1,000 qian of gold, 5,000 qian of silver, silk, scented oil and incense.

The followers of these gods, Zhu-Di did not seek to propitiate. “Their dens and hideouts we ravaged”, the scholar Timothy Brook recounts Zhu-Di’s advisor Yang Rong having written, “and made captive that entire country, bringing back to our August capital, their women, children, families and retainers, leaving none”.

Fei Xin, a soldier on the expedition, recorded the outcome in his memoirs, somewhat more pithily: “now, the barbarians are respectful”.

The assertion of Chinese power

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s visit to New Delhi comes in the midst of the greatest assertion of Chinese power across the Indian ocean since the fifteenth century — an assertion that many fear could rewrite the security and trade architecture that has ensured peace across the region since World War II. Already, Beijing has extended its naval reach into the Indian ocean, opening its first base in Djibouti, planning a second in Gwadar, and investing in ports like Tanzania’s Bagamoyo.

In response, New Delhi has demonstrated large ambitions: brushing up against Chinese power in the Himalayas, it has signalled a willingness to use military force. This coming March, the Indian Navy will stage multinational exercises on the Pacific rim, showing its willingness to military partner with allies to uphold the status quo.

Ever since his brother, President Mahinda Rajapaksa — now appointed Prime Minister — was defeated by India-backed Maithripala Sirisena in 2015, Gotabaya Rajapaksa has worked assiduously to rebuild his relationship with New Delhi. Though Chinese investment is critical for cash-strapped Sri Lanka, its leaders have understood that accommodating Indian interests is also critical.

Sri Lanka understands New Delhi’s worries: it doesn’t take a lot of imagination, after all, to see how Chinese control of Hambantota port could one day give the People’s Liberation Army Navy the ability to dominate India’s southern seaboard. But Sri Lanka’s self-interest is at odds with India’s strategic concerns.  India’s weakening economy is — and will — struggle to match the cash Beijing brings to the table, compelling Colombo to engage in complex trade-offs.

The story of Sri Lanka’s ghost airport helps illustrate the problem. Ten thousand square metres of terminal space; a sprawling 92,000m² duty-free shopping area; twelve check-in counters with inline baggage scanning; twenty immigration desks; a 3.5-kilometre runway capable of handling Airbus A380s: built on the back of a $190 million loan from China’s Exim bank, the Mattala Rajapakshe International Airport was meant to be the hub of a new Sri Lanka, driven by the great port at Hambantota.

But Mattala has turned out to have all the life of a dinosaur skeleton. In 2018, according to Sri Lanka’s civil aviation authority, it handled just 708 flights in the entire year, down from 1,418 in 2017. International airlines terminated their last operations from Mattala last year. Projections that Mattala would be handling one million passengers, 6,250 flights and 50,000 tonnes of cargo by 2028 now look like an astrologer’s fantasy.

Ever since 2018, New Delhi and Colombo have been discussing the prospect of the Airports Authority of India acquiring a 70 percent stake in the airport project — but, in spite of prodding from the Ministry of External Affairs, civil aviation bureaucrats have shown a hard-nosed scepticism about the airport ever making money.

In essence, Sri Lanka’s new government needs someone to pay the ill-considered debt it picked up —but India simply isn’t in a financial position to play Santa Claus.

Sri Lanka has dragged its feet, too, on a string of projects agreed on in 2007: among them, a Liquid Natural Gas-fired 500 megawatt capacity power plant in Kerewelapitiya, near Colombo; an LNG storage unit and a piped gas system. There’s been no progress, either, in developing oil storage tanks in Trincomalee, building on infrastructure dating back to World War II.

End of civil war against LTTE

Beijing’s relationship with the Rajapaksas blossomed after the end of the civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, when China helped stonewall Western efforts to investigate war crimes. New Delhi, faced with pressures from ethnic-Tamil political leaders hostile to Sri Lanka, proved a not-always-reliable partner, even though Indian intelligence and logistical support was critical to winning the war.

In 2007, Rajapaksa signed a $1 billion deal with a Chinese consortium to construct a new deep-water port at Hambantota, the president’s home constituency. Later, a Chinese-led consortium was contracted to construct and operate Colombo’s South Container Terminal.

There were more investments, too: the $1.4 billion Colombo Port City, part of the Belt and Road Initiative, and a $272 million contract to build the country’s first major post-colonial railway infrastructure.

New Delhi watched from the sidelines, taking no small satisfaction when many of these projects drowned in debt. In 2017, hard-pressed to meet its commitments for Hambantota alone, Sri Lanka’s new government was compelled to lease the port and 15,000 acres of land around it for 99 years in December.

Even though Gotabaya Rajapaksa will be reluctant to irk India, the fundamentals of the country’s position haven’t changed. Sri Lanka’s debt problem goes far wider than China. In fact, Chinese debt makes up just some 10 percent of the country’s repayment burden. International commercial borrowings have made up more than half the country’s debt since 2011, rising alongside a slowing of foreign trade, protectionism and declining government revenue.

Faced with a grim economic landscape, Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government will have little choice other than to take what cash is on the table — and India is in no position to match China.

“The sinews of war”, the great Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero once observed “is infinite money”. That’s true of geopolitics, too. For two generations, New Delhi’s resources were adequate to ensure it a preeminent position in shaping the foreign policies of its neighbours: Nepal, Bhutan and even sometimes-prickly Bangladesh all orbited an Indian axis.

Now, as India enters the dangerous, uncharted waters of a changing world, it has begun receiving an unpleasant education in the inexorable relationship between wealth and power.

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Line of Control clashes show India’s Pakistan policy has run out of ideas

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Inside weeks, it had  had swept through the Low Countries, destroyed Belgium’s defences, swept aside Paris’ defences, could, Adolf Hitler had once bragged, could “storm the gates of heaven itself”. Instead, the men of the 6th Army, the flower of the German Wehrmacht, emerged from the ruins of Stalingrad in February, 1943, half-dead from starvation and cold, crushed by the Red Army. The time was coming, the Soviet Union’s ruler, Joseph Stalin, exulted on May 1, 1943, “to break the backbone of the Fascist Beast”.

Then, six weeks later, the German lawyer and foreign office official Peter Keist heard a knock on the door of his room in Stockholm’s plush Strand Hotel. His visitor was Edgar Clauss, a businessman of uncertain nationality and even more uncertain business.  Local German residents, diplomatic records tell us, thought him “either a braggart or a spy”; “he was both”, the historian  Vojtech Mastny wryly notes.

The businessman had come bearing a message from the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the feared Soviet secret police: Stalin, his public posture notwithstanding, wanted to explore peace.

Lessons ought be learned in both Islamabad and New Delhi from the strange story of Soviet-Nazi secret diplomacy in 1943-1944—a time when the two countries were locked in a war of existential survival that claimed tens of millions of lives. The weekend’s murderous clashes on the Line of Control are just a far wider escalation of violence, one that could end in a larger crisis that is in neither country’s real strategic interests—which is as-rapid-as-possible economic growth.

Political prestige

Put simply, New Delhi has made punishing Pakistan-backed terrorism by striking across the Line of Control an article of political prestige. Faced with continued terrorism, New Delhi finds itself compelled to do so repeatedly—even when there are no clear tactical or strategic ends to be secured by violence. This is what strategic affairs experts call a “commitment trap”.

This much is clear: military escalation on and across the Line of Control is a strategy that is tried, time-tested, and demonstrated to be ineffectual. In the early 1990s, as ever-growing numbers of jihadists began crossing the Line of Control into Kashmir, the Pakistan Army began using artillery to shell Indian positions—thus, making it hard for India to interdict or ambush infiltrators. In turn, India retaliating bombarded the Neelam valley, the  site of road feeding Pakistani infrastructure along the northern stretches of the  Line of Control.

Even though Indian artillery superiority was clear even this period, the Pakistan army proved willing to soak up the damage. Killings of terrorists in Kashmir—a rough-and-ready measure of the levels of infiltration—rose steadily until 1994. Killings of civilians and security forces, two other key indices, also steadily until 1996, falling only after the reintroduction of democratic politics in Kashmir.

Few Indians understand that even India’s victory in Kargil did nothing to still Pakistan-backed terrorism: violence escalated steadily until 2003, when the two countries agreed to a ceasefire.

In 2019, government data shows to October 10 shows, there have been 2,317 clashes—levels higher than 2003, though thanks in part to large-scale bunker construction on both sides, fatalities have been low. In essence, though, both countries are back to where the were.

Ever since 2014, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office, New Delhi has become increasingly aggressive in response to Pakistani provocation. That year, shelling across the Line of Control was punished with disproportionate fire assaults. Then, in 2016, India struck across the Line of Control, in the first publicly-disclosed operation of their kind. Finally, in 2019, air power was used to strike at a Jaish-e-Muhammad facility inside Pakistan.

For all the public impact these events had, their strategic impact has been—at the very least—debatable. The 2016 strikes, the government’s own data shows, didn’t stop an escalation of terrorist violence in Kashmir. The levels of violence in 2019, the data available suggests, isn’t going to be that different from 2018 either—something that’s now forcing India to escalate, again, on the Line of Control.

Escalation isn’t serving Indian security interests, though. Even though India’s intelligence services estimate more than 45 terrorists have entered Kashmir since August—and more than 100 since January—not one infiltrating group has been interdicted. That’s likely linked to artillery exchanges on the Line of Control, which force Indian troops to take cover and thus facilitate infiltration.

“The point isn’t whether more Indian soldiers or more Pakistani soldiers are killed in these exchanges”, Ajai Sahni, the Director of the Institute of Conflict Management has said. “No Indian soldier’s life should be lost without a clear, strategic end, and I cannot see one here”.

In his May Day message to his troops in 1942, Stalin addressed what he called the “babble of peace” emanating from Germany. “But of what kind of peace can one talk with imperialist bandits from the German-Fascist camp, who have flooded Europe with blood and covered it with gallows? Is it not clear that only the utter routing of the Hitlerite armies and the unconditional surrender of Hitlerite Germany can bring peace to Europe?”

Even as Soviet armour battered the Nazi counter-offensive during in the summer of 1943, opening the long road to Berlin, though, Stalin kept up the secret diplomacy.

In May, 1943, Soviet and Nazi negotiators were reported by United States intelligence to have conducted several days of negotiations at a country estate outside Stockholm. The discussions led nowhere, with Hitler holding out for the Ukraine, and the Soviets proving unwilling to concede anything beyond their 1941 borders. Kleist, for his part, received an offer from Clauss to meet with the Soviet diplomat AM Alexandrov.  As late as 1944, we know from the work of historian HW Koch, Kleist remained in contact with his Soviet interlocutors.

E Razin, a military officer Stalin used to voice his views, explained it thus in 1943: the “separation of politics and strategy, and the neglect of the requirements of politics for ‘purely strategic’ reasons are fraught with dangerous consequences”. “Politics and war influence each other but they are not factors of the same order; primacy always belongs to politics”.

For Stalin and his intelligence services, a deal with the Nazis wasn’t the only Plan B: they also explored a coup against the Nazis by Prussian military conservatives and assassinations by the Red Orchestra spy network, while all the while working to secure outright military victory. The point of war was to achieve strategic ends—not shed blood.

It isn’t that coercion can’t work. In 2003, Pakistan’s then-ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, began a secret peace process with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, aiming to secure a final-status agreement on Kashmir. Even though Pakistan’s nuclear weapons deterred India from going to war, General Musharraf realised the crisis of 2001-2002 imposed asymmetric costs on his country’s economy. New Delhi, too, saw reason to back off: the crisis scared away investors, undermining India’s wider strategic objectives.

Kashmir terrorism continues to escalate

But as things stand, New Delhi’s Pakistan policy has taken it to a remarkably dismal place. In spite of its increasing reliance on violence, terrorism inside Kashmir continues to escalate; there is nothing to show Pakistan’s military has been deterred.

Even though the prospect of sanctions by the Financial Action Task Force have led Pakistan to restrain levels of terrorist violence, the country has shown no signs of shutting down its jihadist proxies. Islamabad calculates, likely correctly, that allies like China, as well as the United States’ need for a partner in Afghanistan

Worse, the violence is making Pakistan’s army stronger within the country, the threat of war allowing it to silence and marginalise politicians as well as civil society formations who seek a negotiated peace with India. The only winner is the jihadist.

India could ratchet up the pain—but only at great risk to its own long-term economic prospects.  Talking to Pakistan might achieve nothing good either: multiple rounds of dialogue in the past, after all, have achieved nothing. But the lesson from the secret diplomacy of 1942-1944 is that that wise keep more than a hammer in their toolboxes—a hammer, moreover, worn down by excessive use.

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Even as it talks peace, Taliban providing safe haven in Afghanistan to Lashkar, al-Qaeda, new UN report says

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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The Taliban’s leadership is providing safe havens and resources to  the Lashkar-e-Taiba, al-Qaida and other terrorist groups targeting India, a report produced by a United Nations expert group has revealed.  “Foreign fighters continue to operate under the authority of the Taliban in multiple Afghan provinces at undiminished levels,” the United Nations’ Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team’s report states.

Intelligence and foreign-policy officials have long been warning that ongoing United States-led power-sharing negotiations with the Taliban could end up again turning Afghanistan into a hub for global Islamist terror groups.

Last week’s report, produced by the United Nations’ Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team’s report, says the Taliban “cooperate and retain strong links with al-Qaida, al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent, the Haqqani Network, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, as well as nearly 20 other regionally and globally-focussed groups.”

In addition to the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is responsible for 26/11 and multiple other attacks in India, counter-terrorism officials in New Delhi see al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent, led by Indian-born jihadist Sami-ul-Haq, as a significant threat.

Facing intense international pressure, possible economic sanctions and Indian threats of cross-border military strikes, Pakistan has claimed to have cracked down on jihadist training facilities and infrastructure—but Indian intelligence officials fear at least some of that could now being relocated across the border in Afghanistan.

In recent weeks, the Research and Analysis Wing has also pointed to escalating threats Afghanistan to Indian targets, including diplomatic missions.

“From our perspective,” an Indian intelligence officer said, “it seems probable Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence is facilitating this transition, since it has excellent relations with both the Taliban and groups like the Lashkar.”

The United Nation’s grim findings come even as United States negotiators, led by Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad, have arrived at an understanding with Taliban leaders that Western forces in Afghanistan will be withdrawn in return for counter-terrorism guarantees.

Faced with a relentless Taliban campaign that has seen it take control of some 25 of the country’s 421 districts, and contest government authority in over 200, Afghan government officials have, however, been warning a withdrawal of Western troops will allow the Taliban to resile on whatever promises it makes.

“Al-Qaida,” the report warns, “has grown stronger operating under the Taliban umbrella across Afghanistan and is more active than in recent years.” In addition to strengthening its presence in Badakshan and Paktika, the report states, al-Qaida is also “ intensifying its concentration in the Afghan-Pakistan border area in close cooperation with Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Haqqani Network.”

Estimated to earn over $400 million each year from opium trafficking, the UN report  says the Taliban have significantly expanded their weapons stockpiles, and raised their manpower levels to around 65,000 combatants, as well as half that number again of non-combat personnel. The Taliban’s spring offensive of 2019, which began in April, has been the most intense in two years, Afghan officials say.

In particular, the Taliban have expanded their night-fighting capabilities by purchasing black-market supplies of BAE’s OASYS thermal monoculars, as well as  PULSAR and ATN ThOR-HD night thermal scopes.

The UN report makes clear international sanctions directed at the Taliban have not worked, noting members of the organisation “have undertaken visits to Gulf States to collect cash donations amounting to millions of United States dollars.”

“Individuals who maintain legitimate business interests in the Gulf States and in Balochistan also launder money for the Taliban and share profits with the Taliban,” the report adds.

The report cites, in particular, the case of Faizullah Khan Noorzai and Malik Noorzai, who it says  “conduct money laundering and provide funding to the Taliban through the import and export of spare automobile parts from Japan.” Even though the Noorzai brothers have featured multiple United Nations reports, it says, they continue to conduct businesses in Japan, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan.”

Praveen Swami is Group Consulting Editor, Network18. This article was published by Firstpost.

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New Lashkar base blossoming in dust-blown Pakistani town

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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The Lashkar-e-Taiba has been purchasing land in dust-blown Samasatta, south-west of Bahawalpur in Pakistan’s Punjab province, hoping it will flower into a campus housing medical, educational and ideological training facilities, Indian intelligence sources have told Firstpost. The camp, the sources said, is intended to eventually replace the Lashkar’s existing headquarters at Muridke, near Lahore, which was seized by the Punjab government in 2009.

Financial crimes experts representing the multinational Financial Action Task Force, or FATF, which has threatened to blacklist Pakistan unless it acts against terror financing, are currently in the country to assess its claims to be acting against jihadist groups.

Even though Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government, mired in a foreign debt crisis, hopes to ward off FATF action, it has a close association with the Lashkar and its jihadist allies.  Last month, Religious Affairs Minister Noorul Haq Qadri shared a platform with jihad patriarch Sami-ul-Haq, as he delivered a speech asserting “the Kashmir issue cannot be resolved without jihad”.

Interestingly, staff from international Non-Governmental Organisations have been pushed out from around Bahawalpur—an effort, Indian officials believe, to keep prying eyes off jihadist infrastructure coming up in the area.

Funds for the benami purchases of land around Samasatta, the sources said, were likely routed in cash by contributions made to the Lashkar’s charitable front-organisation, the Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation, or FIF. The small town—best known for its colonial-era railway junction, capped by multiple domes—may have been picked because land prices are low compared to nearby Bahwalpur, where the Lashkar already has a building.

Even though the FIF is listed as a front for the Lashkar by the United Nations Security Council—obligating all member-states to freeze its assets—the organisation continues to operate openly in Pakistan.  Its Facebook page, bearing a Lahore phone number, solicits donations for a number of projects in Pakistan and abroad, ranging from medical care to drinking water.

In its 2017 annual report, the FIF claimed to have provided free medical treatment to 1.6 million patients, and to have provided blood for 107,551 in need, through its medical services.

Back in January, in an unsuccessful bid to avert grey-listing by the FATF, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government amended the country’s Anti-Terrorism Act to mandate the proscription of all organisations banned by the United Nations.

Following this, some 148 properties and assets belonging to the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the parent organisation of both the FIF and the Lashkar-e-Taiba, were seized across the province of Punjab.

For Prime Minister Khan’s government, which has announced it intends to seek a bail-out from the International Monetary Fund, FATF blacklisting could be painful. In addition to damaging Pakistan’s reputation among potential investors, it would impose every international banking transaction involving the country to additional scrutiny by foreign banks. FATF blacklisting could also harm Pakistan’s

The country’s bid to escape blacklisting is expected to be discussed at the FATF on October 14, though a final decision is unlikely to be made then. Pakistan’s grey-listing by the FATF, which came into force from June, was driven by worries that its lax financial system allowed terrorist groups to launder cash raised by activities ranging from narcotics trafficking to charitable operations.

Experts from the United States, United Kingdom, Turkey, Maldives, Indonesia and China arrived in Pakistan this week to assess the effectiveness of its anti-money laundering and countering terror finance legal regime, and are expected to conclude their visit by October 19.

However, Prime Minister Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf party, or PTI, is closely allied with the Difa-e-Pakistan Council, a coalition of hardline Islamist groups which includes the Lashkar—making it impossible for him to crack down their assets, as his predecessor sought to do.

Leaders at last month’s Difa-e-Pakistan Council rally, attended by Khan’s Religious Affairs Minister, warned that “Pakistan has not made a nuclear bomb to keep as a decoration in an almirah [cupboard]”. “The Pakistani nation is always ready alongside the Pakistani armed forces to deliver a mouth-breaking response to India’s aggression”, the rally’s joint declaration read.

Earlier this year, Pakistan’s Defence Minister, Pervez Khattak—then Chief Minister of the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa—had also attended a Difa-e-Pakistan meeting, were slogans were chanted calling for jihad against the United States and India.

The conference was addressed by Lashkar chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed—for whose arrest the United States has offered a US$10 million reward—through a telephone link. Khattak shared the platform with Saeed’s deputy, Hafiz Abdul Rehman Makki, who is accused, along with his leader, of planning the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai.

Southern Punjab—a region where industrial backwardness collides with agrarian distress and a large pool of landless peasants—has emerged as a hub for the expansion of jihadist groups in Pakistan. The town’s main employer, the Peoples Textile Mill set up by President—then Prime Minister—Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in an effort to bring about state-led economic development, now lies abandoned. Little investment has trickled in to make up for the loss.

Firstpost revealed, earlier this year, that the Jaish-e-Muhammad had purchased 15 acres of land outside the town to build a complex rivalling its existing Usman-o-Ali complex. Samasatta, local sources said, had witnessed steady efforts by both the Jaish and Lashkar to recruit young people.

In a 2009 essay, the Pakistani scholar Ayesha Siddiqa wrote of the rural despair that underpinned jihadist recruitment. “A few years ago,” Siddiqa wrote, “I met some young boys from my village near Bahawalpur who were preparing to go on jihad. They smirked politely when I asked them to close their eyes and imagine their future: ‘we can tell you without closing our eyes that we don’t see anything’.”

Jaish leader Muhammad Masood Azhar Alvi’s disquisition on the Quran, notably, is designed for a peasant audience. “The light of the sun and water,” Azhar writes, “are essential for crops; otherwise they go waste. In the same way, the life of nations depends on martyrs. The national fields can be irrigated only with the blood of the best hearts and minds.”

The jihadist movement promises something better than the earthly paradise Pakistan’s corrupt elite deny the poor entry into: “as we fly in aeroplanes in this world, the souls of martyrs, entering into the bodies of green birds, fly in Paradise for recreation.”

“Having no alternative ideology like Marxism or Liberalism or even language symbols which may challenge the feudal stranglehold,” social scientist Tahir Kamran has explained, “militancy remains one of the few ways to counter it.”

(Source: Firstpost)

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KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow