We need more trade, not a trade war

The decision by the Trump administration to withdraw preferential treatment to Indian goods should serve as a strong warning to the New Delhi that prioritising narrow domestic politics over good economic policy can have dangerous consequences.Trump’s decision to levy import duties on erstwhile exempted goods did not, as commonly understood, come out of the blue, nor was it the first strike in an emerging trade dispute. The US Trade Representative has appealed to New Delhi multiple times in the past to remove the trade barriers that it has imposed on US goods and investments. This move by the US is largely due to three distortions introduced by the government that hurts not only US business interests but also Indian consumers. These are the price caps on cardiac stents and knee caps, the new FDI in e-commerce industry rules that prohibit foreign e-commerce firms to run inventory based retail, and the ban on American dairy products.It is not in India’s national interest to get into a trade war with the US. We have more to lose than them by doing so. India should drop the threat of escalating the trade war. Relative size of an economy and dependence on trade with the other partner are crucial in determining whether trade barriers can achieve the necessary outcomes. The US is a lot more important trading partner for India than India is to the US.Geopolitical realism instructs us that India cannot afford to indulge in such a trade war and that the damage we can inflict upon the US is not big enough to force it to change its trade regime. If India escalates the matter, it could very well lead to a full-blown trade war that could potentially witness bigger retaliation from the US in the form of higher tariffs on pharmaceutical products or non-trade barriers on Indian software products, which can truly hurt the Indian economy. We could also suffer due to decreased investment by US firms in India and, at a time of decreasing domestic investment, this can be damaging.Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/panorama/we-need-more-trade-not-a-trade-war-with-us-722934.html 

Without realistic rules, Election Commission can’t monitor social media before polls

The Election Commission has announced that it will closely monitor the social media campaigns of parties and candidates in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. It has enlisted the cooperation of Google, Facebook and Twitter to uphold “the integrity of the political campaigns on their platforms”. As much as the Election Commission must be commended for factoring in social media activities in its overall governance of the electoral process, it is unclear how effectively it can manage to do this.Even if a significant number — around 40 per cent in urban and 20 per cent in rural areas — of the 90 crore eligible Indian voters are on social media, let us be clear that tackling the regular offline issues during elections is far more important.Read More

OIC behaves like Organisation of Internal Contradictions, but India must be a part of it

There is a delicious irony in the Indian external affairs minister being the guest of honour at the OIC foreign ministers’ conclave in Abu Dhabi last week. The hosts did not rescind their invitation to India despite Pakistan’s strident protest, and accepted a Pakistani ministerial boycott as a price worth paying for the benefit of engaging India. Ironic, because it is almost exactly the opposite of what happened in September 1969, when the leaders of Muslim countries had assembled in Rabat, Morocco to inaugurate the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (since renamed to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation).Read More

Ten Takeaways from the Recent India-Pakistan Escalation

As the fog of war between India and Pakistan clears, here’s an assessment of the strategic consequences that go beyond immediate tactical gains and losses.Read the full article on ThePrint.

Is Opposition justified in seeking Balakot evidence or shouldn’t politicise national security?

Pranay's reply to this question for ThePrint's #TalkPoint of 4th March 2019The opposition parties are justified in seeking evidence to the extent that the government’s spokespersons insist with their boastful claim that 250-300 terrorists were killed in the Balakot air strikes by the Indian Air Force.In the broader scheme of things, the strategic consequences of the air strikes remain the same irrespective of the casualty figure. It’s not as if the Jaish-e-Mohammed will stop terrorism just because the air strikes hit their facility and killed some of its operatives.But the Pakistani military-jihadi complex, spearheaded by the Pakistani army, will definitely remember that India struck on its sovereign territory in response to a terror attack by an outfit operating from its soil. So, the strikes are a dent on the Pakistani army – the self-proclaimed ideological and territorial defenders of Pakistan.This is the real strategic victory for India. Any physical damage to the JeM facility and its leadership is a bonus. Hence the government and the opposition both should desist from exploiting this successful operation for their own partisan propaganda. We as a society are on the wrong track if Pakistan and its terrorists become an important issue in the upcoming elections.Read more on ThePrint.

Social Media and the Ghost of "Political Interference"

Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey was required to appear for a Parliamentary hearing earlier this month after being accused by social media users of bias against particular political views. He did not. As the conversation around social media, fake news, and online censorship gets intense in the run-up to the general elections, Anirudh Kanisetti asks whether these companies are really interfering with India’s political process, and what could be done about it.http://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/2019/feb/23/is-twitter-interfering-in-our-politics-1942592.html

From Jobless Growth to Job-Loss Growth

This is the eleventh edition of The Jobscape, our weekly round-up of news and opinion on the state of employment and job creation in India. In this edition, we look at recruitment in the armed forces, women and jobs in STEM, artificial intelligence, and the woes of youth.Read more

To war or not to war with Pakistan: Strategy, not public mood, should drive Modi govt

More than fear and insecurity, it is the outrage that is driving public opinion after the terrorist attack on a CRPF convoy in Pulwama. There is widespread expectation that the Narendra Modi government retaliate using military force and further, conversationally at least, many people want to go to war with PakistanTo the extent that such a state of public opinion allows the government greater leeway in terms of options, it’s a good thing. On the flip side, to the extent that it compels the government to respond to the popular mood, it is dangerous. Politics might almost always be a popularity contest, but statecraft is not. If India must retaliate against Pakistan, it must be for reasons of strategy, not to assuage outraged public opinion.The strategic reason for India to retaliate is to impose costs on the Pakistani military-jihadi complex so as to deter further attacks to the extent possible. If an attack on India goes without punishment, the military-jihadi complex will be encouraged to carry out more. Retaliation is also necessary to persuade the Pakistani military establishment that it cannot use its nuclear shield and Chinese political cover to attack India with impunity.Read More

Narendra Modi’s ‘free hand’ to armed forces is misleading and problematic

When dealing with a nuclear-armed country, even the political leadership’s freedom to direct use of maximum force is curtailed.Treading discreetly, staying vigilant and having an unambiguous diplomatic goal may be better options to extract meaningful revenge. A ‘free hand’ is a hazardous approach that promises no happy endings.Read more

Reliability of GDP data

In terms of the reliability of official data, India is getting dangerously close to Chinese territory. The year that witnessed demonetisation, when 86% of the cash in circulation was declared as illegal tender overnight and which was perhaps one of the greatest assaults on private property in recent history, is now being touted as the year of highest GDP growth in the last eight years. This was the year when all other macroeconomic indicators took a nose-dive, but the GDP for that year has been inexplicably revised upwards to 8.2%, which has left everyone confounded.Good policy-making requires reliable data. Collecting and publishing data has always been a difficult affair in India, given the magnitude of the task, compounded by the presence of a large informal and unorganised sector. We do not need deliberate manipulation and withholding of data to make the task even harder.Read more

DNA bill is designed to fail

The promise of delivering speedy justice has moved members of the Lok Sabha to okay the, 2018, early last month. In response to concerns about privacy violations, the Bill proposes constituting a regulatory board, which will have the difficult task of finding ways to secure informed consent from people who may not understand what their DNA is, or its value.But even if the privacy and consent issues are adequately addressed, would the Bill deliver on speedier justice?In its current form, the Bill is a potpourri of good intentions aimed at governing too many outcomes without focusing on one thing. However, by trying to achieve too much, the Bill may end up subverting its own aims.. [Read more]

Nuclear No-First Use: Revisiting Hawks, Doves and Owls

Is it possible to consider no-first-use as a means of bridging trust deficits between nuclear states?The present international system is as dangerous as it was in 1953 – at the start of the nuclear arms race. At least that’s what the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists believes, as the Doomsday Clock remains at two minutes to midnight in the “new abnormal” of 2019. Central to this sense of heightened risk is the danger posed by nuclear weapons use, evident through weakening arms control efforts, duplicitous international commitments to non-proliferation, and emerging military doctrines that have the potential to erode the nuclear taboo.Integral to India’s nuclear doctrine is the idea of minimum credible deterrence, as well as a policy of nuclear no-first-use (NFU). NFU has been the subject of intense domestic debate between doves, hawks, and owls.Hawks see nuclear deterrence as a numbers game and advocate for the strengthening of arsenals to bolster deterrence. Doves prefer to avoid the use of force, seeking recourse to diplomacy or other kinds of incentives. Owls, however, present a “middle path.” They prefer a realistic approach to force but remain cautious about situations that heighten risks and increase the chance for accidents. NFU is very much an owl’s view – pragmatic, yet cautious.If this is the case, then why has NFU remained on the fringes of international security debates in this period of heightened risk?NFU remains on the marginsThe main reason is that NFU is quite difficult to operationalise. NFU succeeds in contexts where the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is only to deter a nuclear attack by a nuclear-armed adversary. Historically, however, it is the threat of nuclear force, even in a pre-emptive attack, that has remained the preferred grounds for maintaining deterrence. Proponents of this logic argue that fear of superior Soviet conventional forces led to US deployment of nuclear weapons through NATO in 1979.This deterred a Soviet invasion and maintained peace in Western Europe (the Soviet Union’s NFU pledge in 1982 is to be understood as mere rhetoric!) Interestingly, when the Soviet Union collapsed and NATO countries were momentarily at a conventional military advantage, Russia dropped her NFU pledge in 1993. In this historical pattern, the threat of first-use is the preferred deterrence posture for a weaker state, while NFU requires a secure state with a strong conventional capability.However, can NFU be considered more than just the end of the deterrence calculus? Is it possible to consider it a means of bridging trust deficits between nuclear states?Denuclearisation of the Korean PeninsulaThe Korean peninsula presents a compelling case for this question since it was one of the high-risk areas for nuclear miscalculation last year. With 2019 promising another big-ticket meeting between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, the actual mechanisms by which denuclearisation will be achieved remain uncertain.For the United States, CVID (comprehensive, verifiable, irreversible, dismantling) has been the maximalist mantra. For North Korea, denuclearisation means withdrawal of threatening US forces from neighbouring South Korea’s borders, and possible withdrawal of the US nuclear umbrella over the region. These positions are untenable in practice, and acrimonious rhetoric from both parties notwithstanding, both sides have been urged to arrive at a compromise this year, by no less than Xi Jinping.Hawks will argue that Kim will be keen to avoid the fate of Muammar Gadaffi and Saddam Hussein. From the North Korean point of view, a nuclear arsenal remains the best insurance policy against invasion. Complete nuclear disarmament, though unlikely in the near term, is not entirely out of the picture. Doves might point to South Africa in 1989-91 or the Treaty of Tlatelolco signed in 1967 to imagine a non-zero-sum endgame to the stalemate on the peninsula.If the spectacle of the Singapore summit last year is anything to go by, the next meeting between the two leaders may well build on the high-visibility/vague-outcome template. Declaring the end of the Korean war and a North-South reconciliation with great fanfare seems to be the low hanging fruit (the Korean War was fought between 1950-1953 and ended with an armistice but no official peace treaty.) This will ensure a great show, but will also mean that in long-term North Korea will have no reasons at all to give up her nuclear arsenal – an outcome that will have far-reaching consequences in East Asia. The region may experience a “domino effect,” where Japan and South Korea are also compelled to go nuclear.An owl’s approachAn owl’s approach is to introduce an NFU pledge as part of the denuclearisation agenda. An NFU pledge would signal North Korean sincerity, and provide a “holding position” from which to explore further improvement in ties with South Korea and Japan or bargaining with the US. The pledge can function as the minimum concession Kim Jong-un can make towards ending nuclear sabre-rattling and threats, retaining a nuclear arsenal, while also advancing aims of “normalisation.” If the North Korean arsenal is indeed defensive, an NFU pledge is not outside the realm of possibility.North Korea as a conventionally weaker state might look to history to find no instance to substantiate the adoption of an NFU in this context. But then again, if history is going to be made, it ought to be in a manner that does not repeat the mistakes of the past. Cold War thinking in the current international system, will recreate the same instability.An interim position like NFU that signals defensive intentions is preferable to an indefinite position that relies on nuclear threats. In both cases, uncertainty remains, but the interim position is far more likely to lead to a practical negotiation and a discrete outcome that builds trust, while the indefinite position merely increases uncertainty at all levels. While the second may produce an uneasy and unreliable deterrence, it only the first that addresses the larger questions of regional order.If the world is as dangerous as it was back in 1953, perhaps an end to the Korean war can be the start of something new.Ram Ganesh Kamatham is an Associate Research Fellow at Takshashila Institution, Bengaluru. His research occurs at the intersection of culture and strategy. He holds double master's degrees in the Anthropology of Media from SOAS, and International Relations from RSIS, NTU. He can be followed on Twitter @RGKwriting

Reservations may turn out to be vacuous

Both these are part of the fundamental rights conferred by the Constitution upon the citizens of India. The reservation bill amends both these articles by inserting sub-clauses. That these articles were amended with very little prior notice and almost no debate among people’s representatives is alarming, to say the least.Read more 

Why India must worry about splitting the internet. Ask the Chinese

The cookie dropped yesterday. After weeks of suspense, the US government charged Huawei, a Chinese networking equipment manufacturer, with violating US sanctions and stealing trade secrets from its American partner. The specific charges apart, US officials have made no secret that the action has two broader dimensions — the ongoing trade war with China and the wider geopolitical contest for dominance in the Information Age.On the other side of the drama, last week Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, suddenly became inaccessible to users in China. A day or so later, just as mysteriously, it was back online. Now, unlike Google — which once decided to stay out of the Chinese market rather than accept censorship of its search results — Microsoft has made its peace with Beijing and Bing only throws up sanitised, party-approved hits. It commands a tiny share of the Chinese internet search market. Why Beijing would want to turn off an almost insignificant search engine — and a pliant one at that — is hard to fathom; even if the word has been put out that it was due to a ‘technical error‘ it is impossible to rule out political motives. Neither Microsoft nor the Chinese government has explained why Bing went down for a day.For many years, companies and governments would roll their eyes after incidents like this and concede that ‘that is the cost of doing business in China.’ It is only now that it is dawning on many Western countries, mainly the United States, that censorship is a feature that China has introduced on the internet. Furthermore, China has now acquired enough economic, political, and technological power to be able to shape the future of the internet in its own image, and according to its own interests. The Trump administration is waking up to this reality in alarm.Read more

Modi calls Constitution a ‘holy book’ but his government violates its letter and spirit

On the surface, it might appear to be paradoxical that while Prime Minister Narendra Modi once declared that the Constitution is a “holy book”, his government has presided over the weakening of several important institutions: the Council of Ministers is now fully subordinate to the PMO, and once relatively independent RBI, Central Information Commission, and Election Commission have been weakened, not to mention the further deterioration of the CBI and CVC.Furthermore, in many cases — for instance during the formation of the government in Goa and Karnataka — what governors did was quite different from what the Constitution required them to do. How is it that on the one hand we say the Constitution is our holy book, and on the other hand increasingly violate its letter and spirit?Because, first of all, it is wrong to declare the Constitution of India a “holy book”. Second, the idea of a “holy book” is foreign to India’s largely Hindu culture. Finally, in India, symbolism is frequently used as a substitute for the substantial.Read more

As China Fights For Huawei, Should India Be Wary of Its 5G Entry?

After the Canadian government arrested Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer and daughter of the founder of Huawei, a Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer, upon an extradition request by the United States, relations between China and Canada have taken a nosedive.In barely concealed retaliation, China arrested two Canadians over the past month, and then summarily re-sentenced a third, a convicted drug smuggler to death. The official rhetoric from Beijing has become increasingly strident, like what we saw during the Doklam stand-off. Beijing has taken off its gloves and is baring its teeth.Such political aggression is part of President Xi Jinping’s foreign policy, and the Chinese establishment might well justify the impatient, aggressive, gangster-like diplomacy as befitting a great power of its stature.Read more

What All Those Ministers Say!

This is the ninth edition of The Jobscape, our weekly round-up of news and opinion on the state of employment and job creation in India. In this edition, we look at the ministrations of Modi’s ministers, Ambani vs Bezos, jobs for trans men, and unfair taxes on angel investors.Read more

How India Should Respond to Trump’s Barbs on Afghanistan

An article on Trump's barbs that India is only building 'libraries' in Afghanistan. We find that though conveyed crudely, there is some truth in his argument - India has not done much since August 2017 when Trump announced his previous Afghanistan approach. So we look at some options for India on the security, political, and cultural fronts in this piece. Finally, it is for India’s own national interest that we need to do a lot more and help build a strong, resilient, democratic and peaceful Afghanistan.Read more on TheWire.in

Forget Job Creation, India is LOSING Jobs

This is the eighth edition of The Jobscape, our weekly round-up of news and opinion on the state of employment and job creation in India. In this edition, we look at lost jobs, the new reservations, sexism, and much more.Read more

No first use, for us and for all

In my previous column "Towards global no-first-use"(November 20), I had argued that as India acquires a reliable nuclear triad — the ability to carry out retaliatory strikes by land, air, sea, and under-sea — we must adopt a new approach to our nuclear policy: “The completion of the triad calls for a profound review of India’s policy on nuclear weapons. Now that we are close to achieving credible second-strike capability, we must shift focus from negotiating our way through international nuclear weapons control regimes to shaping a world where these weapons of mass destruction are not used.”I go on to advocate that India persuade China and other nuclear powers and champion a “global no-first-use” (GNFU) policy, wherein all the world’s nuclear states declare that they won’t carry out first strikes. Obviously, this is going to be very hard. Obviously merely declaring no-first-use won’t be enough to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war. Yet the GNFU is the only feasible first step in avoiding a nuclear catastrophe, intended or accidental.India is perhaps the only nuclear power that can credibly champion GNFU because we ourselves are doctrinally committed to NFU. If our commitment to NFU were to weaken, our ability to champion it globally would weaken even more. So it is with some concern that I read a very well-argued piece by Kunal Singh in Hindustan Times that drew attention to the new strains on India’s NFU doctrine.Singh gives three reasons why India’s NFU doctrine must be reviewed. First, India would need to rely on nuclear weapons to counter China’s growing conventional superiority. Second, that Pakistan’s acquisition of lower-yield battlefield nuclear weapons demands India neutralise them before they are used against our forces. Third, that India has access to technologies makes it easier to adopt a first-strike posture today, than 15 years ago, when the doctrine was first promulgated.Let’s examine each argument in turn. First, China’s conventional military advantage is real but can be countered without changing the nuclear doctrine. Not all of its firepower and forces can be concentrated against us — for it has other, stronger, strategic adversaries — so what concerns is the fraction it can dedicate in and around the Indian subcontinent. What this implies is that we must cooperate with China’s adversaries to ensure that it remains engaged in many places elsewhere. What it also implies is that we must take our own conventional military modernisation seriously: Fixing the dysfunctional procurement system and getting out of the fiscal hole of ballooning revenue expenditure ought to be top priorities.In my view, we can continue to manage China’s military preponderance in such ways.Also, let me be a little naughty here and say that the strategists in Beijing don’t entirely believe our solemn declarations that we won’t use nuclear weapons first. In an earlier column on nuclear doctrine, I had pointed out “any declaration of no first use by one side cannot avoid being seen by its adversary as a deception for a surprise first strike. It is the fear of unacceptable damage caused by being at the receiving end of a nuclear attack that prevents either side from using them first. This is the essence of nuclear deterrence.”Second, should we threaten first strikes to counter Pakistan’s well-advertised readiness to use battlefield nuclear weapons? There is no reason to believe that the Pakistani military-jihadi complex will be deterred from using cross-border terrorists should India adopt the first-strike posture.In fact, it would make terrorism a far more valuable instrument. If the space between a terrorist attack and a nuclear attack is reduced, the Pakistani establishment will find it much easier to blackmail us and scare the rest of the world. Instead of ending up in such a situation, it is far better to stick to our current position: That a nuclear attack will invite massive retaliation. It doesn’t matter if the Pakistanis call their weapons “tactical”, “theatre” or “battlefield”— if used against our territory or troops, they must expect certain massive retaliation.Third, the availability of new technology and the modernisation of India’s arsenal does not in itself call for a change of doctrine. Few proponents of first-use are conscious of the costs of a first-strike arsenal and the command and control infrastructure required to manage it. Fewer still are conscious of the arms race this will set off, without a commensurate increase in national security or planetary safety. The folly of American and Soviet nuclear strategy during the Cold War ought to warn us against getting onto a slippery slope where nuclear weapons will be abundant, but security scarce.Without a doubt, the Indian government must conduct regular, official reviews of its nuclear weapons policies. Academic debate on the merits of retaining or abandoning no-first-use is very important. At this time though, no fundamental change is warranted. On the contrary, it is far more in India’s interests to invest in the diplomacy that reduces the salience of nuclear weapons.This piece was originally published in Business Standard