One cannot caution enough how subtly this game will have to be played, for India will never officially join the United States in any anti-Chinese alliance the way Japan joined the United States in an anti-Soviet one during the Cold War. Japan was a defeated nation after World War II, in close proximity to Soviet ports; whereas India is a strong nation with an independent streak “codified in its policy of non-alignment,” far from the Chinese navy’s main ports.13 Not just the architecture but also New Delhi’s very geopolitical situation make one doubly cognizant of India’s potential as a post-Mughal, post-British power in its own right.
Although his manner was quiet and dull, Admiral Sureesh Mehta, chief of the Indian naval staff at the time of my visit, was the most sanguine of the officials I met, liberated as he was from the troublesome land borders of partition with which India, and particularly its army, was stuck. The future of the Indian navy could not have looked brighter, for it was slated in the near future to possibly become the world’s third or fourth largest.14
India’s economy, Admiral Mehta and others said, had been growing at 9 percent annually, with a 10 percent growth in its industrial output. Its middle class would grow from 200 million to perhaps 500 million by 2020, and the global economic crisis would slow down but not halt this trend.* By 2050, India would have the world’s third largest economy after the United States and China. That allowed India’s defense budget to increase by 10 percent, even as it fell in relative terms to under 2 percent of the gross domestic product. Twenty percent of the defense budget was for the navy, and half of that went into capitalization for new ships.* Naval officials said India planned to have two aircraft carrier strike groups by 2015, three by 2022, and was building or acquiring six new submarines and thirty-one new surface warships. It was in discussion to equip seven of its frigates with the Aegis integrated combat system used by the American, Australian, Japanese, South Korean, and a few European navies. All of this activity would result in several brand-new shipyards. There was a new naval training academy on the Malabar coast north of Cochin. In sort of a coming-out party for its growing naval power, in 2008 India hosted an Indian Ocean naval symposium in New Delhi for twenty-seven littoral countries modeled on U.S.-led naval coalitions. It was part of a larger story, in which India would spend as much as $40 billion on weapons procurement, making it one of the largest military markets in the world.15 Maybe the Chinese had a right to worry seriously after all.
A million ships pass through the various Indian Ocean straits each year. The future was all about the security of energy supplies. Meanwhile, China’s so-called string-of-pearls naval strategy was part of an ongoing historical development in which the Chinese, from the strategic perspective of India, had been trying to box India into its subregion. China’s 1950 invasion of Tibet, traditionally the buffer between India and China, had established this tendency. There was, too, a 2500-mile-long border dispute arising out of the 1962 Sino-Indian war in which China’s victory—the Humiliation in Indian eyes—remains engraved in the local psyche. China still occupied the Aksai Chin region of the western Himalayas and claimed the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which Beijing referred to as lower Tibet. On land India faced an encirclement strategy: top beneficiaries of Chinese arms exports were Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma.16 Moreover, when Nepal’s King Gyanendra briefly became a dictator in 2005, suspending political parties and the constitution, Western nations including the United States cut or downgraded military links, even as Beijing dramatically enhanced them, for no other purpose, it seemed, than to balance against India.17
The Chinese had a port and road system in Burma. They were building bunkering facilities in Sri Lanka. They had footholds in the Seychelles and Madagascar where they were spending increased amounts on aid. They hoped Gwadar in Pakistan would be a friendly harbor. The Indians were not waiting to see if Gwadar succeeded. Occupying a peninsula connected to the mainland by an isthmus, Gwadar was at present hard for the Chinese to defend.18 Nevertheless, the Indians’ answer to Sino-Pakistani cooperation at Gwadar was a giant new $8 billion naval base at Karwar, south of Goa on India’s Arabian Sea coast, the first phase of which opened in 2005. Named INS (Indian Naval Ship) Kadamba, it would be India’s third operational naval base, after Mumbai farther north and Visakhapatnam on the Bay of Bengal. Karwar had been designed to ultimately berth a whopping forty-two ships, including submarines. The effect would be to decongest Mumbai and maneuver India’s fleet fast enough without being hemmed in by merchant vessels.19 India was not about to let China and Pakistan guard, or indeed block, its entrance to the Gulf of Oman from Gwadar, for this would create for India a “Hormuz dilemma,” the equivalent to China’s “Malacca dilemma.”20 Beyond American hegemony, the China-Pakistan-India triangle was emerging as the Arabian Sea’s decisive geostrategic issue.21
To the Arabian Sea’s south, in the western Indian Ocean close to Africa, India was establishing naval staging posts, listening stations, and arms relationships in and with the island nations of Madagascar, Mauritius, and the Seychelles. China was countering with its own active military cooperation with these states.
Just as Chinese warships operated in the western Indian Ocean, Indian warships were now in the South China Sea. India was increasing naval cooperation with Indonesia and Vietnam to hedge against the Chinese at the eastern crossroads of the Indian Ocean, and countering in the southwest through its de facto control of Mauritius. Indian naval officers were essentially running the coast guards of both Mauritius and the Seychelles.
Indian officials denied that a naval exercise in late 2007 of five democratic nations—India, the United States, Japan, Australia, and Singapore—off the Malabar coast was an attempt to snub China. Nevertheless, while that exercise witnessed five Western navies—a “concert of democracies,” as one Indian official called it—with twenty thousand officers and sailors cooperating at a complex level of operations, India and China were engaged in only the most basic of military exercises—land-based search-and-rescue maneuvers—in which both sides were intent on hiding their advanced systems.
“India has never waited for American permission to balance [against] China,” said Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan, confirming the Chinese analyst’s fears, adding that India has been balancing against China since the day the Chinese invaded Tibet.*
Concerns about China were born of success. China was the elephant in the room that drove India and the United States closer together.† Nevertheless, “No country has watched China’s utterly spectacular rise as closely and jealously as India,” write the analysts Mohan and Parag Khanna.22 India, writes the British journalist Edward Luce, “wants to remain equidistant from both China and the United States.… In practice, this would still suit Washington’s purposes,” for merely by growing economically and becoming more “assertive in its dealings with the world,” India would “naturally act as a counterbalance to China.”23 As I have said, India will remain nonaligned, but whereas during the Cold War it tilted toward the Soviet Union, now it will tilt toward the United States.
Yet China was still a problem for India’s strategists only—much less so for its security services, or for anyone else in India. Explosions in India were not the work of China-based terrorist outfits, but of Pakistan-based ones. After the United States, China was India’s biggest trading partner, for the Indian and Chinese economies were highly complementary. Because of demography, one day China and India would constitute the world’s largest trading relationship.24 It seemed that the two Asian demographic behemoths were bound to cooperate at some basic and crucial level, adding complexity to their relationship, and thus making it unclear whether or not China would ever be so provocative as to establish overt naval bases in the Indian Ocean.
China notwithstanding, from a naval standpoint, India was already a major regional power, with the possibility later in the century of being a great power. Most of India’s problems were on land, not at sea. General Deepak Kapoor, chief of the Indian army general staff at th
e time of my visit, said that “even though we can’t deny China’s capability, China is our neighbor and we have to get along.” Nevertheless, the Indian army had taken note of three airfields built in Tibet whose arc of operations included India, and of roads and high-altitude rail lines flowing into the Tibetan plateau that abuts the Indian Subcontinent from the Chinese heartland. Then there were the newly constructed thirty-nine transport routes from interior China to its contested border with India.25
But as I said, China was an over-the-horizon threat; in the general’s eyes, it was meager compared to the real threat represented by Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). In New Delhi, discussions about China still belonged to the more abstract realm of grand strategy, whereas those about Pakistan were up close and personal. People in New Delhi desperately wanted to compare themselves with China, even as the category of worries that kept them up at night was all about Pakistan. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence was “a law unto itself,” another Indian army officer had told me. ISI was seen in New Delhi as a state organization that was almost a terrorist outfit, and thus an entity with few equivalents in the world, outside the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah. ISI was the key supporter of the Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgencies in Afghanistan, and was helping terrorists in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Above all, ISI was operationalizing the infiltration of jihadis into India. “Radical forces are moving east of the Indus, and things will get worse,” an Indian intelligence officer told me. He said this before the spectacular 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai. Indeed, that attack featured a seaborne infiltration, meaning that the maritime borders of the state were also insecure, and thus the Indian navy still had more to do at home in addition to worrying about China.
This was all occurring even as the Pakistan army was redeploying away from the Indian border to Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province next door to Afghanistan, in order to deal with insurgents and terrorists inside its own borders. A trend was apparent: the threat to India from Pakistan was less the conventional one of the Pakistani army, as in years and decades past, and more unconventional in the form of infiltrating Muslim terrorists. Still, the Indians spoke about the Pakistani army, which it had defeated in war, with utter derision. The Pakistani army, as one highly placed Indian official put it, “was not a professional army because it has been involved in politics for too long.” Moreover, he went on, the political structure in Pakistan could not “deal with or handle its own terrorist elements,” so a situation had arisen in which jihadis mixed seamlessly with the bureaucracy itself there. Again, the Mumbai attack would crystallize all of this. The fact that Indian voters, despite this grave threat, had rejected Modi and the other Hindu nationalists in the 2009 election was a further indication of India’s rise in stature. The election results heralded a nation that was confident enough not to give in to extremism.
Because of the need for a rear base against Pakistan, the Indian army saw a pro-Western, Taliban-free Afghanistan as a necessity. From India’s viewpoint, said General Kapoor, it was more important that the United States maintain a long-term commitment in Afghanistan than in Iraq. “India has a critical interest in the survival of the [Hamid] Karzai regime,” said the Indian national security advisor M. K. Narayanan in another meeting. The Afghan war was India’s as much as America’s. To be sure, Afghanistan has been a prize that Pakistan and India have fought over indirectly for decades. To Pakistan, Afghanistan represented vital strategic real estate that, along with the Islamic nations of former Soviet Central Asia, would offer a united religious front against Hindu-dominated India, and block its rival’s access to energy-rich regions. Conversely, for India, a friendly Afghanistan would pressure Pakistan on its western border—just as India itself pressures Pakistan on its eastern border—thus dealing Pakistan a strategic defeat of sorts.
In the 1980s, India backed the secular pro-Soviet regime of Mohammad Najibullah in Kabul, and Pakistan backed Islamic insurgents trying to topple him. Because America’s interests at the time were aligned with Pakistan’s, the United States encouraged Pakistan’s ISI to support the insurgents, many of whom later became allies of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But in 1991 came the breakup of the Soviet Union, and a decade later 9/11. Although the world changed for America, the importance of Afghanistan to India and Pakistan remained the same. India still needed to back a relatively secular regime in Kabul, just as Pakistan still thought it needed to support Islamic insurgents who wanted to topple it.* Thus, America’s interests were now more or less aligned with those of the Soviets of a generation ago.
Besides Pakistan, General Kapoor was also concerned about the tinderbox of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, whose loss or further explosion could ignite “a chain reaction of separatism” across India’s kaleidoscopic regions, with their myriad of races, languages, and religions.26 There was, too, Maoist-inspired instability in Nepal, where half the population lived close to the Indian border, and which was in the eyes of Indian security officials under the increasing influence of both ISI and China. Even if this was exaggerated, their insistence of it reflected their own and their country’s insecurity on this particular front, especially as the strengthened Maoist position in Nepal might have encouraged terrorist attacks in central and eastern India by Maoist Naxalites.
Rightly obsessed with India’s land borders, Indian army officers were worried about a lot of things. They spoke of rising Sunni Islamic fundamentalism in the Maldive Islands to India’s southwest; of anti-Indian ethnic insurgent groups in the extreme northeast of the country operating from inside Burma, where China was heavily involved; of illegal immigration in the neighborhood of ten to fifteen million people from Bangladesh; and of the war in Sri Lanka off India’s southeast coast, which ended only in 2009. Said one army officer: “We don’t have the luxury to go full bore into American-style rapid reaction forces, because we have unsettled borders, and therefore we need boots on the ground in significant numbers.”
Then the tone of the discussions lightened, and officials spoke of future energy pipelines connecting India with Turkmenistan and other countries in Central Asia, a region that India—fearing encirclement—is not ready to concede to China and Pakistan. This was witnessed by its recent establishment of a military base in Tajikistan. We spoke of the importance of the Gulf and Southeast Asia for Indian security.
In other words, to sum up this and other briefings, India was weak close by, even as it flexed its muscles farther away. “Pakistan, Afghanistan, Burma, Sri Lanka,” said an Indian official, “turmoil, turmoil, turmoil.… Everyone expects India to have a tough policy toward Burma and toward Tibet because we are a democracy, but we have land borders with these places, and we can’t tolerate a vacuum.” It was not for India to stand on ceremony and make black-and-white moral pronouncements in the manner of the United States, which was protected by two oceans, said Shivshankar Menon, India’s foreign secretary at the time. “The last thing we want is all eighteen insurgencies up and running in Burma again,” said another official. India was strongest in its southern peninsular region by the sea, and most fragile in the north, east, and west.
“We have 155 million Muslims in India. Our concern really is fundamentalism. How do we ensure that things don’t get out of control?” said yet another official to me. “Al-Qaeda as a mindset is more dangerous than al-Qaeda as an organization.” There was a real fear that instability in the neighborhood would become the norm. “Our calmness and peace are at risk.” Indeed, after Iraq, India suffered from the greatest number of terrorist incidents per annum, according to the U.S. State Department.27 Narayanan mentioned the July 2006 train attacks in Mumbai, consisting of seven bomb blasts, that killed more than two hundred people and injured some seven hundred, which he said “were planned across several countries.” Yet, as he went on, “There was no adequate sharing of intelligence” in the region. Vulnerable to terrorism like few other states in the world, India was a natural ally of the United States in the
fight against Islamic extremism, whose hub was the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier in India’s own backyard.*
Amid the arcaded porticoes and Mughal miniatures of the Foreign Ministry guesthouse, Menon, the foreign secretary, using the phrase of the scholar Sunil Khilnani, called India a “bridging power”—that is, something between America and China, between a global power and a regional power, between hard power and soft power, between the emerging power of its economy and navy and the poverty of many of its people and its weak borders.28 Indian cultural influence has always been more widespread and profound than conventional calculations of power would suggest.
It was a nice concept, but how did it help in decision-making? In an even less benign security environment, India might be forced to make choices that would put it firmly in one category or another. Moreover, the nation had often shown a certain ambivalence in asserting its power. Incorporating a much stronger navy and air force into its foreign policy calculations was something that India was still mastering.29
India was the ultimate paradox. It dominated the Subcontinent much as the British had, yet unlike the viceroys it was bedeviled by land borders in which the only state within the Subcontinent that was not dysfunctional was India itself. All the others—Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Burma—were supreme messes of countries. Pakistan and Bangladesh made no geographical sense. They were artificial constructs in places where the political map had changed dramatically over the decades and centuries. Nepal and its dozen ethnic groups had been held together by a Hindu monarchy torn asunder by gruesome murders, and finally replaced by a fragile new democracy. Sri Lanka’s rival ethnic groups had been engaged in a generation-long war whose embers were still hot. And Burma’s very sprawling and rugged topography made it home to several ethnic insurgencies that had provided the raison d’être for military misrule. Only India, despite its languages, religions, and ethnicities, dominated the Subcontinent from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, providing it with geographical logic. Democracy helped immeasurably by giving all these groups a stake in the system. The Naxalite terrorists notwithstanding, India was inherently stable—in other words, it could not fall apart even if it wanted to.
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power Page 16