Tag Archive for: India

The thin veneer of India’s constitutional secularism

After India’s recent defeat by Pakistan at the T20 World Cup cricket tournament, Indian bowler Mohammed Shami confronted vicious trolling on social media. It was the latest display of the Islamophobic bigotry that has consumed Indian society under the rule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Shami had performed poorly in the match. But so had 10 other Indian players in the rout by Pakistan. Shami was singled out because he is Muslim. His failure was viewed not merely as a sporting issue, but as a failure to do his best against an opposing team composed of his co-religionists.

Unpleasant as it was, the Shami episode pales in comparison to other recent incidents of Islamophobia in India. In Darrang district, in the northeastern state of Assam, the state’s BJP government launched an eviction drive against Muslims whom it decided were ‘illegal settlers’ on public land. During a protest against the evictions, police shot and beat a villager, and a photographer officially documenting the demolition drive brutally stomped him, in full view of cameras, even after his body appeared lifeless.

Video footage of the murderous assault went viral on social media, prompting much hand-wringing among those sections of the Indian public not yet inured to stories of violent hate crimes against its Muslim minority, which have proliferated under BJP rule. In recent years, a spate of inflammatory anti-Muslim rallies have sometimes erupted in violence. In February 2020, riots consumed parts of the capital, New Delhi, leaving more than 53 dead. Most of the victims were Muslim.

There has also been a dramatic increase in lynchings of Muslims, especially for the ‘offence’ of transporting or consuming beef (the cow is considered holy in Hinduism). Most states have enacted laws prohibiting the slaughter of cows, and both police and self-appointed mobs are enforcing them with greater zeal than judgement. Cow ‘vigilantes’ have been known to beat Muslims, forcing them to chant Hindu religious slogans. Such hate crimes are committed with impunity.

Meanwhile, police have charged Muslim students under draconian terrorism and sedition laws for the frivolous ‘crime’ of cheering for Pakistani cricketers. Four Muslims were arrested in the city of Indore for attending a popular annual college dance celebration that was abruptly classified as restricted to ‘Hindus only’. A Muslim journalist, Siddique Kappan, has been jailed for more than a year on charges of sedition, terrorism and incitement, when all he did was his job.

As disturbing as these trends are, they should not be surprising, given that senior political figures express their bigotry openly. Modi once declared that anti-government protesters could be identified by their clothes—that is, traditional Muslim attire. And prior to the 2019 general election, BJP president Amit Shah called Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants ‘termites’ and pledged that a BJP government would ‘pick up infiltrators one by one and throw them into the Bay of Bengal’. Islamophobic sentiment is stoked further via social media, often in BJP-curated WhatsApp groups, where the sins—both real and imagined—of past Muslim invaders and rulers are blamed on the entire community.

Whereas previous governments sought to temper communal passions, promote harmony and provide official support (including tax incentives) for efforts to promote India’s pluralism and diversity, the BJP unapologetically embraces an intolerant majoritarian ‘Hindutva’ ideology. Those close to the ruling establishment routinely excoriate the Muslim minority—and previous governments’ alleged appeasement of it—as a threat to India’s Hindu identity.

Under BJP rule, campaigns have been launched against interfaith romance (with Muslim men being accused of waging ‘love jihad’ to entrap Hindu women), religious conversion (despite it being permitted by India’s constitution) and Muslim practices of marriage, divorce and alimony (which are viewed as incompatible with women’s rights). A popular clothing firm was browbeaten into withdrawing an advertising campaign deemed by zealots to be inserting Muslim elements into the Hindu festival of Diwali. A Muslim religious gathering was deemed a Covid-19 super-spreader event, even as the far larger Hindu Kumbh Mela festival was allowed—even encouraged—to proceed.

The BJP government also enacted a law offering fast-track citizenship to refugees from neighbouring Muslim-majority countries—provided they were not Muslim. And family-planning campaigns have been portrayed as efforts to preserve India’s ‘demographic balance’—India is 80% Hindu—in the face of higher Muslim fertility.

What dismays liberals like me is how thin the veneer of India’s constitutional secularism has turned out to be. In just seven years of BJP rule, the cultural pluralism and Hindu–Muslim amity that India has touted for decades have been annihilated.

There was a time when government officials would point proudly to Muslims in prominent positions as evidence of India’s ability to overcome the bitter legacy of partition with Pakistan. Today, Muslims are dramatically underrepresented in the police forces and elite central administrative services, and they are overrepresented in the prisons. Sentiments that would have been deemed impolite to express a generation ago are declaimed from political platforms. The police often enable, rather than stop, the torment of Muslims.

Islamophobia now seems to have colonised a significant segment of north Indian society, though the south has yet to succumb. India’s much-vaunted free press has been complicit—and even an active participant—in the erasure of its longstanding syncretic cultural traditions.

Under BJP rule, the segregation and disempowerment of Muslims—the division of Indian society into ‘us’ and ‘them’—is being gradually normalised, and Indians are becoming desensitised to the routine expression and practice of anti-Muslim bigotry. A Muslim who points this out will be told to ‘go to Pakistan’. Hindus like me are derided as ‘anti-national’.

I have been called that myself. In 2015, speaking in parliament, I repeated a friend’s observation: in BJP-ruled India, it is safer to be a cow than a Muslim. Sadly, that rings even truer today.

AUKUS can strengthen India’s strategic autonomy

The AUKUS strategic partnership of Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States has created a kerfuffle whose echoes have been heard from the Indo-Pacific to the Atlantic. Canberra is relieved, Beijing is enraged, Paris feels slighted and Southeast Asia is scared as Washington prepares to part with its closely held nuclear submarine technology.

Yet, New Delhi’s reaction has been relatively reserved. The only direct remark on AUKUS came from Foreign Secretary Harsh Shringla, who suggested the deal was a strategic alliance among the three Anglo-Saxon powers and therefore irrelevant since it would have no impact on the functioning of the Quad.

Analysts have suggested India should be skeptical of AUKUS, cautioning that it could damage the Quad as it gains momentum. AUKUS, they say, could create a central security core within the Quad and relegate the rest of the grouping to soft security issues. An overzealous Indian response to the US providing this technology to Australia wouldn’t just rile the Russians, on whom India’s nuclear submarine program depends, but also the French, who are already fuming over the loss of the conventional submarine deal with Canberra and the diplomatic embarrassment at the hands of their so-called allies.

Perhaps most important is the contention that despite the momentous growth in the India–US strategic partnership, Washington won’t share top-shelf defence technologies with New Delhi even when India’s needs are the most pressing given the threat China poses on its Himalayan border.

But these concerns underestimate the potential benefits of AUKUS for India’s nuclear submarine program, the global market for sensitive military technology and the evolving balance of naval power in the Indo-Pacific.

India is weighing the likely impact of the AUKUS arrangement on its own nuclear submarine program and the prospect of the US helping it build a fleet of nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs). Of the four Quad countries, only the US and India have indigenous nuclear submarine programs. So far, India has concentrated on nuclear-powered ballistic-missile-carrying submarines (SSBNs) to complete its triad of nuclear-delivery platforms.

India’s nuclear submarine program is based on Russian technology. However, India’s strategic planners are keen to procure SSNs and to lessen the Indian military’s dependence on Russia. The navy wants six SSNs.

The program is stuck for two reasons. While India has absorbed considerable nuclear propulsion expertise through its SSBN program, it’s based on antiquated Russian technology from the 1970s. India’s SSBN fleet is very underpowered. The reactor aboard the first of its submarines, INS Arihant, can produce barely 85 megawatts of energy compared with the 190 megawatts from modern attack submarines.

Power isn’t a huge issue for SSBNs, however, because their missions don’t require constant surveillance of or engagement with an adversary’s naval assets. SSN reactors need to withstand very high-power ramping or power fluctuations, and New Delhi and the navy aren’t confident of the indigenous program’s capacity to satisfy this requirement—at least not yet. More importantly, it’s difficult to find suitable foreign vendors. France and Russia are the only states offering nuclear propulsion. They can sell what they want, at the price they want. The lack of vendors is exacerbated by nuclear nonproliferation restraints.

The US decision may have an impact on the monopolistic market for nuclear submarine technology. Even if Washington may not sell to New Delhi, the possibility that it might will strengthen India’s negotiating position with the French and the Russians. New Delhi has expressed an interest in French Barracudas at the highest level but has received no firm response so far. However, the prospect of French assistance made Moscow offer its new Yasen-class SSNs. By inducing competition in the market from a new vendor that has both better technology and the right motivation to help, AUKUS has substantially enhanced India’s bargaining power.

The greater significance, however, has been the shift in US strategic intent, which now clearly prioritises the norms of power over the power of norms. The relentless Chinese onslaught and fear of peer competition have made Washington realise that the liberal system it aims to preserve might not survive its decline.

If that means relaxing some of its most cherished norms—nonproliferation of sensitive military technology and regional stability—the US is willing to pay the price. One reason for initial French reluctance to offer nuclear propulsion technology to both Australia and India was the constraint imposed by US nonproliferation policies.

The French anger over AUKUS is also an expression of its frustration in overestimating American idealism and underestimating its realism. Now AUKUS has eased the transaction costs for both buyers and sellers of nuclear propulsion.

The Indo-Pacific democracies believe that ensuring their maritime safety in the face of rapidly growing Chinese naval power lies in dividing the defence of the Indo-Pacific among their zones of interest and influence. Enhancing the capability of individual Quad members complicates Chinese naval strategy by dividing the focus and concentration of its naval forces. Building superior naval power across maritime zones will be costly for China, irrespective of the current trajectory of its naval growth.

And as Quad members substantially augment their naval capabilities, decision-makers in Beijing will have to weigh the gains of imposing their claims and influence against the costs associated with accidental, inadvertent or even deliberate escalation. In the long run, the systemic effects of AUKUS will benefit New Delhi’s interests in the Indian Ocean.

Beijing has long held the view that it can ‘scare the monkey by killing the chicken’. The US has finally thrown down the gauntlet to Beijing. In doing so, it has also opened India’s strategic space. India has more autonomy to pursue its interests in the post-AUKUS world than it had before.

India’s Taliban problem

In the weeks since the Taliban’s theocratic terrorists returned to power in Kabul, the people of Afghanistan, particularly its women and girls, have been subjected to unimaginable suffering as the world’s attention turns to other issues. But many other countries, and especially India, have reason to worry.

The Taliban’s victory, following 20 years of unsuccessful American-led ‘nation-building’ efforts, will not only greatly embolden their fellow jihadists, but will also shake up the region’s geopolitics. For evidence of the destabilising impact of Kabul’s fall, just look at the reactions of Afghanistan’s neighbours.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s response—notably his statement that the Taliban’s return to power was akin to throwing off ‘the shackles of slavery’—highlights what was already known: Taliban-run Afghanistan will be a creature of Pakistan. When the Taliban ruled the country from 1996 to 2001, their ‘Islamic emirate’ functioned as a wholly owned subsidiary of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency. This time, Pakistan’s control is supposedly a little less absolute, but that did not prevent ISI chief Faiz Hameed from traveling to Kabul soon after its fall to preside triumphantly over the formation of the new Taliban government.

Less overtly but arguably more importantly, China has been working to make the best of a delicate situation. The Chinese have invested US$62 billion in the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the single largest project of its transnational Belt and Road Initiative, and are anxious that Taliban extremists do not jeopardise it. Significantly, Foreign Minister Wang Yi formally received a Taliban delegation in July.

With economic and strategic gains ripe for the taking, China has announced that it will do business with the Taliban. It is seeking to tap Afghanistan’s considerable underexploited mineral resources, especially rare earths, and reopen the Mes Aynak copper mine. There is even talk of extending the CPEC to Afghanistan.

The warm overtures appear to be mutual, with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Afghanistan’s new first deputy prime minister, calling China a ‘trustworthy friend’, despite its systematic persecution of its own minority Muslim population. China’s priority vis-à-vis Afghanistan is to ensure that the Taliban offer neither support nor refuge to Uyghur dissidents from Xinjiang and do nothing to disturb the functioning of the CPEC. With the Taliban government desperately in need of patronage—80% of the previous Afghan government’s US$5.5 billion budget was financed by external assistance—China seems ideally suited to fill the breach.

These regional dynamics, with Pakistan and China becoming increasingly close, should be of enormous concern to Indian policymakers. Pakistan is a long-term adversary that has actively funded and fomented armed militancy against India, hosting (among others) the organisers of the deadly 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. China, meanwhile, is a systemic rival to India and poses economic, military, and strategic threats. Any Afghanistan–Pakistan–China axis involving policy coordination is a major risk for India.

The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan gives Pakistan not only the ‘strategic depth’ its military has long sought against India, but also a useful recruiting ground for more militants and terrorists, should the ISI seek to deploy them again. The last time the Taliban were in power, India made common cause with Russia and Iran in actively supporting the Panjshir Valley insurgency of the Northern Alliance under the late Ahmad Shah Massoud. This time, however, an increasingly pro-Chinese Russia has taken a neutral stance on Afghanistan’s issues with India.

Iran, under its recently elected hardline president, Ebrahim Raisi, seems willing to accept the new Islamic emirate as long as the Taliban refrain from the anti-Shia persecution that characterised their previous reign. If Afghanistan’s Shia Hazaras and culturally Persian-influenced Tajiks and Uzbeks are saved the worst of what the Taliban inflicted upon them a quarter of a century ago, Iran may stay neutral. Both Iran and Russia are, in any case, pleased that the United States has received its comeuppance in Afghanistan.

India could try to reach out to the new government in Kabul, despite recently denying that its foreign minister met with Taliban representatives in Doha in June. Other Indian diplomats certainly were in touch with Taliban officials, two of whom—Baradar and Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, the deputy foreign minister—are in the new Afghan government.

Baradar spent eight years in Pakistani detention and may be presumed to have no great love for his jailers. But while some Taliban officials have spoken soothingly of wanting good relations with India, others have stated that their Islamic emirate will stand up for India’s Muslims, especially in Kashmir.

As I have argued previously, Pakistan cannot afford to be complacent about the Taliban’s victory. The emergence of the Pakistani Taliban, which seeks to overthrow the country’s government for being insufficiently Islamist, and the Islamic State–Khorasan, which bombed Kabul airport in August, should be triggering anxiety in Islamabad. Moreover, the end of the US troop presence in Afghanistan reduces America’s logistical dependence on the Pakistani security establishment, depriving the ISI of support and resources.

India has invested US$3 billion in Afghanistan—in dams, highways, electricity grids, hospitals, schools and even the parliament building. With all this now in Taliban hands, Indian policymakers may be forgiven for feeling despondent. And Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has done itself no favours with its consistently anti-Muslim rhetoric and domestic policies, which are likely to stoke resentment across the Islamic world.

The Quad partnership—comprising India, the US, Japan and Australia—strengthens India’s maritime presence in the Indian Ocean. But the main security threats to the country are on its land borders with China and Pakistan, where the Quad is unlikely to be of much use.

India now has a Taliban regime to its northwest, a nuclear-armed, terrorism-supporting state to its west and a hostile superpower to its northeast, and it faces ongoing threats to its territorial integrity. In this environment, maintaining national security and regional stability will pose an unprecedented challenge for Indian diplomacy in the months and years ahead.

How Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban increases the global terrorism threat

The bomb blast outside Kabul’s airport made 26 August the deadliest day for the US in Afghanistan for a decade. An Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K) suicide bomber killed an estimated 170 Afghans and 13 US soldiers—more American troops than were killed in action each year between 2015 and 2018.

Though IS-K has conducted several mass-casualty atrocities over the years, attacks on this scale will likely become more common with the US withdrawal, and an IS-K unchecked by a US military and intelligence presence may quickly begin to pose a global threat.

Joe Biden’s administration, like Donald Trump’s before it, has been gambling on a partnership with the Taliban for counterterrorism operations against IS-K, something that was likely raised when CIA director William Burns met with the Taliban’s putative leader, Abdul Ghani Baradar, in Afghanistan on 23 August. For some time, the US air force has ‘deconflicted’ with the Taliban to help fight IS-K, upgrading these efforts to include direct strikes in support of the Taliban in 2019 and 2020.

The Taliban recently appointed members of their most dangerous, al-Qaeda-intertwined component, the Haqqani network, to take the lead in Kabul, making clear that transnational jihad is still a core part of their agenda. The 26 August attack and subsequent 30 August rocket attack should end the delusion that the Taliban can be an effective counterterrorism partner, a notion that never made sense given that al-Qaeda is functionally the Taliban’s foreign operations arm.

In addition to reabsorbing thousands of prisoners released by the Taliban, IS-K has had several months without counterterrorism pressure to rebuild its already extensive networks. Meanwhile, the Taliban’s capture of the entire Afghan security forces arsenal makes it the best-armed jihadist group in history, dwarfing even the rise of the Islamic State terror group in 2014.

IS-K, however, has infiltrated the ranks of the Taliban and its allies. So, regardless of where one draws the line between genuine defection and infiltration, or who comes out on top in the endlessly fracturing and reconstituting terrorist milieu in Afghanistan, the primary losers will be Afghans, the region and the rest of the world.

The US surrender to the Taliban is already inspiring every jihadist group and sympathiser across the world. Once again, from their perspective, a superpower has thrown up its hands in the face of unwavering jihad in Afghanistan. This will supercharge activity and likely provide a safe haven for decades to come for those plotting and training.

The Taliban are only one component of an integrated jihadist network controlled by figures in Pakistan’s military and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), and Afghanistan is only one front in the broader ISI-led regional jihad. Already in the 1990s, elements of this network were being trained in Afghanistan and then dispatched to Kashmir and deeper into India in an ever-escalating terrorist campaign. Because this is a single network that shifts resources to various fronts in the jihad, some of these fighters were sent back to Afghanistan to aid the initial Taliban conquest.

With Afghanistan likely to once again serve as an ISI terrorist camp, there’s little doubt that the jihadist network will be fed back into Kashmir and India, but this time armed with US weapons captured by the Taliban. Unlike with the training camps in Kashmir, India will be unable to target the terror camps in Afghanistan.

Even as it turns its eyes to India, the ISI may also use this jihadist network against the Pakistani state, which it has been trying to transform into a version of the Taliban’s ‘Islamic emirate’ since the early 2000s via its Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban, component. Thousands of TTP prisoners have been released by the Taliban as potential foot soldiers in this ISI-linked effort to reignite the jihad against the Pakistani state. That could destabilise a country of over 200 million people and threaten the country’s control over its nuclear weapons. Often mischaracterised as ‘blowback’ from the ISI’s support for al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the TTP jihad against Pakistan is a core component of the ISI’s regional endeavours.

Pakistan has been a virtual client regime of the Chinese Communist Party for several decades. Islamabad’s victories, including in Afghanistan, are very much those of the CCP, even if the Biden administration believes otherwise.

The CCP is reportedly harbouring, training and arming anti-India insurgent groups via Myanmar. It has also escalated direct attacks on India since 2020, forcing India to deploy at least 50,000 troops to its northern border as the CCP massively expands its military infrastructure.

Pakistan refocusing its attention on India and pouring new insurgents and upgraded weaponry across the border will lead to a surrounded, distracted India incapable of focusing on the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and broader efforts to counter CCP activity in the Indo-Pacific.

Moreover, Washington’s European allies, already upset by the US disregarding their interests and its haphazard, unilateral decision-making, now face a potential new refugee crisis. A Western coalition hampered by the political fallout of such a crisis and wary of US decision-making in general will be less able to effectively push back against expanding CCP influence.

Since 2011, the US has pursued its ‘pivot to Asia’ by attempting to disengage from the Middle East and Afghanistan and refocus on competition with China. Every attempt has been short-circuited by the rapid rise of a jihadist group, a pattern likely to continue with the Taliban’s victory and the resurgence of IS-K. The net result of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, including a potential hostage crisis as the US attempts to extract more than 100 American citizens stranded in the country, will leave the US less, not more, focused on confronting China’s hegemonic impulses.

Biden may think he’s succeeded where his two predecessors failed, but the consequences of the Afghanistan withdrawal will not stay contained for long. The same administration that estimated Kabul wouldn’t fall to the Taliban this year is now claiming that neither IS-K nor al-Qaeda will pose a global threat anytime soon despite the US withdrawal. They are almost certainly incorrect.

The Olympic-sized difference between India and China

The Tokyo Olympic Games are over, and the Japanese people and government have heaved a sigh of relief that the spectacle passed without a major Covid-19 outbreak in the athletes’ village or another disaster. Here in India, the celebrations of the country’s first gold medal in the men’s javelin—and its best-ever medal performance at a single Olympics—have not yet subsided. But how good, really, is our best?

A decade or so ago, many spoke of India and China in the same breath. The two countries were supposedly the new contenders for global eminence after centuries of Western ascendancy, the Oriental response to generations of Occidental economic success. Some even spoke of ‘Chindia’, as if they were joined at the hip in the international imagination.

But anyone seeking confirmation that such twinning is, to put it mildly, out of place, need only look at the medal tally in Tokyo. China ranked a proud second, with 38 gold medals—one fewer than the United States—and 88 medals in total. Now scroll down, past Belarus, divided Georgia, the Bahamas and even the breakaway province of Kosovo (whose independence India does not recognise). There, in 48th place, sits India, with seven medals in all, one gold, two silver, and four bronze.

In fact, this is not a surprise. Whereas China has systematically strived for Olympic success since it re-entered global athletic competition after years of isolation, India has remained complacent about its lack of sporting prowess. China lobbied for and won the right to host the summer Olympics barely two decades after its return to the games. But India rested on its laurels after hosting the 1982 Asian Games in Delhi and is now seen as being further behind in the competition to host the Olympics than it was four decades ago.

In the run-up to the 2008 Beijing games, China embarked on ‘Project 119’, a government program devised specifically to boost the country’s Olympic medal haul (the 119 refers to the number of golds awarded at the 2000 Sydney Olympics in such medal-laden sports as track and field, swimming, rowing, sailing and canoeing and kayaking). Indians, by contrast, wonder if they will ever crack the magic ceiling of 10 medals.

China, seeing the number of medals on offer in kayaking, decided to create a team that would master a sport hitherto unknown in the Middle Kingdom. But India has not even lobbied successfully for the inclusion in the games of the few sports it does play well, such as kabaddi (a form of tag-team wrestling), polo or cricket, which was played in the 1900 Olympics and never since.

Likewise, China has developed new strengths in other non-traditional sports, like shooting, while maintaining its dominance in table tennis and badminton. India, by contrast, has seen its once-legendary invincibility in field hockey fade with the introduction of artificial turf, to the point where a bronze for the men’s team in Tokyo prompted great exhilaration. When it comes to sport, forget ‘Chindia’—the two countries barely belong in the same sentence.

What has happened at the Olympics speaks to a basic difference in the two countries’ systems. Put metaphorically, it’s the creative chaos of all-singing, all-dancing Bollywood versus the perfectly choreographed precision of the 2008 Beijing opening ceremony.

The Chinese, as befits a communist autocracy, approached the task of dominating the Olympics with top-down military discipline. The objective was established, a program to achieve it drawn up, the state’s considerable resources devoted to it, state-of-the-art technology acquired and world-class coaches imported. India, by contrast, approached the Tokyo Olympics as it had every other, with its usual combination of amiable amateurism, bureaucratic ineptitude, half-hearted experimentation and shambolic organisation.

That’s simply the way we are. If the Chinese authorities want to build a new six-lane expressway, they can bulldoze their way past any number of villages in its path. But if you want to widen a two-lane road in India, you could be tied up in court for a dozen years fighting over compensation claims. In China, national priorities are established by the government and then funded by the state; in India, they emerge from seemingly endless discussions and arguments among myriad interests, and funds have to be found where they can. China’s budget for preparing its athletes for the Tokyo games alone probably exceeded India’s expenditure on all Olympic training in the last 70 years.

So, whereas India produces individual excellence despite the system’s limitations, individual success in China is a product of the system. Indians excel wherever individual talent is given free rein. The country has produced world-class computer scientists, mathematicians, biotech researchers, filmmakers and novelists. But come up with a challenge that requires high levels of organisation, strict discipline, sophisticated equipment, systematic training and elastic budgets, and Indians quail. Perhaps tellingly, the only Indians who have attained the title of world champion in recent years have been a billiards player and a chess grandmaster.

In Tokyo, the much-favoured Indian shooters failed to win a single medal, owing to setbacks such as a malfunctioning trigger on a world champion’s pistol that could not be fixed quickly enough. The best women’s table tennis player, denied the advice of her trainer, snubbed the official Indian coach, leading to disciplinary action. Our female archer, ranked first in the world, failed to get past her qualifying round.

India’s sporting talent pool is smaller than its large population suggests; in a country of existential challenges and intense competition for every opportunity, very few feel able or inclined to devote the time needed to master a sport. The system is not designed to unearth athletic talent, and many who have it lack the health, nutrition, sporting infrastructure and training resources required to make a global mark.

India, unlike China, is a fractious democracy. China will win many Olympic medals for many games to come. But India, perhaps, might win some hearts.

Among India’s believers

It’s rare for a public opinion survey to shake established perceptions of a country in the way a recent Pew Research Center study of religion in India has done. The revelations in Pew’s comprehensive survey, based on interviews with 30,000 adults in 17 languages between late 2019 and early 2020, have astonished many.

In particular, this nationwide, multi-faith study finds that Indians value both religious tolerance and coexistence, on the one hand, and religious exclusivity and segregation, on the other. But this apparent contradiction is in fact not entirely surprising.

For over 25 years—notably in my 1997 book India: from midnight to the millennium and beyond—I have argued that India isn’t a melting pot like the United States. Rather, it’s a thali—a collection of different dishes in separate bowls that don’t necessarily flow into one another, but nonetheless combine satisfyingly on your palate. Pew’s study, titled ‘Religion in India: tolerance and segregation’, appears to confirm my hypothesis.

For starters, India is deeply religious: 97% of Indians say they believe in God and about 80% are certain that God exists. ‘Not only do most of the world’s Hindus, Jains and Sikhs live in India, but it also is home to one of the world’s largest Muslim populations and to millions of Christians and Buddhists,’ the Pew study observes. ‘Indians of all these religious backgrounds overwhelmingly say they are very free to practice their faiths.’ Some 53% of adults say religious diversity benefits India.

An overwhelming majority (84%) of respondents say that respect for other religions is a fundamental aspect of their identity. ‘Indians see religious tolerance as a central part of who they are as a nation,’ say the study’s authors. ‘Across the major religious groups, most people say it is very important to respect all religions to be “truly Indian.”’ Tolerance is also a religious value: ‘Indians are united in the view that respecting other religions is a very important part of what it means to be a member of their own religious community.’

But for all this mutual respect, segregationist impulses remain strong. For example, 36% of Hindus do not want Muslims as neighbors (though that does mean 64% are willing to accept them). Likewise, opposition to interfaith and intercaste marriages is widespread. About 80% of Indian Muslims disapprove of, and wish to prevent, interfaith marriages. Roughly two-thirds of Hindus feel the same way.

Disappointingly, Indians also prefer making friends within their own religious community. Religious identity has a strong hold: 64% of Hindus say it is very important to be Hindu in order to be ‘truly Indian’. North Indian Hindus say speaking Hindi—a language fiercely resisted in the country’s south and northeast—is essential, too.

Although Indians have many beliefs in common—there are startling overlaps among all faiths on topics such as reincarnation, karma, identification with a caste, and the purifying power of the sacred Ganges River—there’s a marked preference for religious segregation. Adherents of every religion want to maintain a safe distance from those of other faiths.

What are the national political implications of all this, at a time when the ruling party’s Hindutva dogma has put identity politics in the ascendant? Many supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has long propagated a ‘Hindi–Hindu–Hindustan’ version of Indian nationalism, strongly believe that being Hindu and speaking Hindi are vital to being truly Indian.

That suggests a risk of discrimination against India’s minorities. Yet, according to the Pew survey, only one in five Indian Muslims say they have faced religious discrimination. People in the south, where the BJP struggles to win votes, emerge in the study as less religious and more inclusive and accommodative.

At the same time, 95% of India’s Muslims say they are proud to be Indian and 85% agree with the statement that ‘Indian people are not perfect, but Indian culture is superior to others.’ Those Hindutva ideologues casting doubt on the patriotism of India’s Muslims should take note.

Other religious fault lines in Indian politics also appear less troubling than previously imagined. Although Pakistan has sought for three decades to foment disaffection towards India among Sikhs in Punjab, the study finds that 95% of Sikhs say they are very proud to be Indian, while 70% say that a person who disrespects India cannot be a Sikh.

Overall, the study reveals that India is a highly religious country that is profoundly committed to respecting its diversity while practising what Pratap Bhanu Mehta calls a ‘segregationist form of toleration’. Given this, reviving and reaffirming the civic nationalism enshrined in India’s constitution, with its commitment to empowering the individual citizen rather than privileging his or her religious group, is all the more important.

This is the thesis of my most recent book, The battle of belonging (to be published internationally in October as The struggle for India’s soul). The Pew survey confirms some of my concerns, but also offers hope for affirming a liberal constitutionalism that the BJP’s nationalism has sought to eclipse.

There’s one more straw in the wind for those, like me, who would like India’s religious identity politics to yield to a focus on governmental performance and issues that affect citizens of all faiths. The Pew survey shows that unemployment, corruption and crime are the top concerns for people of all religious groups. A government that tackles those effectively, irrespective of whether it does so in Hindi or after offering prayers at a Hindu temple, is bound to win gratitude—and votes.

India’s Afghanistan quandary

America has cut and run. Pakistan and China are rubbing their hands in glee waiting to move in to fill the vacuum in Afghanistan left by the United States. Russia and Iran, although wary of the Taliban, are happy that the US has been shown up as a colossus with feet of clay despite the gloss being put by Washington on what amounts to a humiliating retreat. The only country with a major stake in the future of Afghanistan that is unhappy with the American decision is India—and for very good reasons. India has already pumped US$3 billion since 2001 in developmental assistance into Afghanistan in order to prevent the exact scenario that is emerging now.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent visit to India tried to paper over the cracks between American and Indian perceptions of the future of Afghanistan. Afghanistan was at the top of the agenda during Blinken’s talks with Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, which ended with the bland statement that India and the US ‘largely see Afghanistan in the same light. We’re both committed to the proposition that there is no military solution to the conflict that afflicts Afghanistan.’ This meaningless declaration ignores the fact that after withdrawal neither Washington nor New Delhi has any means of preventing a power grab in Afghanistan or a takeover of the country by the Taliban.

The reasons why New Delhi agreed to put up a brave front by endorsing the American formulation used as a fig leaf to hide the harsh reality of a Vietnam-like retreat and the expected fall of the Kabul government as predicted by American intelligence agencies are not hard to fathom. First, the Indian government knows that the Biden administration’s decision to leave Afghanistan to its fate is irreversible and New Delhi doesn’t have sufficient leverage with Washington to force it to rethink its decision.

Second, India doesn’t want to create public acrimony on this issue because of its overriding interest in collaborating with the US bilaterally as well as through the medium of the Quad to contain the expansion of Chinese influence in the region.

Third, the Modi government didn’t want to add to the differences with the Biden administration on issues of human rights and freedom of expression already on display during Blinken’s visit, despite the secretary’s efforts to underplay American concerns on these issues in order not to annoy New Delhi and create a backlash.

However, all this fudging can’t hide the hard fact that India faces a quandary in terms of its policy towards Afghanistan. India was opposed to the Taliban regime in power in Afghanistan from the mid-1990s until 2001 primarily because it saw it as a tool of Pakistani policy in two spheres. First, a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul was expected to provide Islamabad defence in depth in times of future conflict with India, thus to some extent neutralising India’s conventional-power superiority. Second, Afghanistan under the Taliban had become a safe haven for Pakistani and Pakistan-trained terrorists that Islamabad deployed on the Indian side of the Line of Control in Kashmir in an effort both to make the state of Jammu and Kashmir ungovernable and to divert substantial Indian military capabilities into fighting the insurgency and keeping order in Kashmir. This is why India supported and secretly armed the Northern Alliance that was fighting the Taliban in northern Afghanistan.

New Delhi is worried that if the Taliban return to power they will once again act as Pakistan’s proxy. Although Taliban 2.0 projects itself as being different from the original Taliban and its leaders have repeatedly stressed that it will not allow terrorist groups to operate from Afghanistan, its current rhetoric is seen as mere dissimulation by the Indian government. This is why India has refused to have direct contact with the Taliban, despite the fact that all other interested powers, including China and Iran, have held negotiations with them in anticipation of their coming to power in Kabul. New Delhi has denied recent reports emanating from Qatar that its external affairs minister met with the Taliban leadership in Doha in June.

India is worried not only about Pakistan’s increasing clout in Afghanistan but also about potential moves by India’s other nemesis, China, in post-withdrawal Afghanistan, especially in light of Beijing’s interest in roping in Afghanistan as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. A meeting between a Taliban delegation and the Chinese foreign minister on 28 July in China has heightened these concerns. In the meeting, Mullah Baradar, who led the Taliban delegation, called Beijing a ‘trustworthy friend’ and said that the group wouldn’t permit ‘anyone to use’ Afghanistan’s territory. The reference to ‘anyone’ was obviously meant to reassure China that the Taliban won’t allow insurgent Uyghur groups already active in Afghanistan to use the country to attack targets in China. Incidentally, this meeting followed a joint statement issued by the Pakistani and Chinese foreign ministers on 24 July that the two countries will coordinate their policies and closely cooperate on Afghanistan, further adding to Indian apprehensions.

New Delhi perceives these developments as potentially highly damaging to India’s interests in Afghanistan, especially since the American withdrawal has made it almost certain that the Taliban will play a major role in governing Afghanistan even if they are unable to capture power single-handedly. The military advances made by the Taliban as American and allied forces have withdrawn have added to Indian fears.

However, New Delhi isn’t in a position to affect the outcome on the ground primarily because it has no land borders with Afghanistan, unlike the other powers with stakes in the country. Furthermore, its major local ally, the Kabul government, appears to be on the brink of collapse because of endemic corruption, infighting and the steady disintegration of its armed forces.

The endgame in Afghanistan could, therefore, signal a major reversal for India. This is likely to embolden both Pakistan and China to adopt more aggressive postures in their relations with New Delhi, thus further worsening India’s security environment.

India, China and the Quad’s defining test

The Quad is stronger than ever. The informal ‘minilateral’ grouping of Australia, India, Japan and the United States has in the past year held its first stand-alone ministerial meeting and its first leaders’ summit, and launched an ambitious project to deliver Covid-19 vaccines. This ‘golden age’ of the Quad is a product of newfound Indian enthusiasm for the grouping, in turn spurred by the military crisis in Ladakh, where India faces ongoing Chinese troop incursions across the two countries’ disputed border.

But the Quad is not bulletproof. Some experts have suggested that the economic and diplomatic effects of the devastating second wave of the pandemic in India will preoccupy the Indian government, sapping the Quad of capacity for any new initiatives. Others counter that India remains committed to competition with China—which is what really matters for the Quad—although its partners always expected ‘two steps forward, one step back’ from India.

The pandemic may well prove to be a hiccup in the Quad’s evolution; but a potentially much larger disruption may come from the ongoing Ladakh crisis itself. As I argue in a new ASPI Strategic Insights paper, the crisis has greatly increased the risk of a border war between India and China, which would present a defining test of the Quad. A possible war could either strengthen or enervate the Quad—depending on how India and its partners, including Australia, act now to shape the strategic environment.

Risk is a function of likelihood and consequence. The likelihood of war on the India–China border is still low—both countries would prefer to avoid it—but has risen since the crisis began. Both countries have greatly expanded their military deployments on the border, and backed them with new permanent infrastructure to resupply and reinforce them. China has proved its revisionist intent with large and costly military incursions, although its specific objectives and plans remain unknown. And the interaction of both countries’ military strategies and doctrines would, on the threshold of conflict, promote escalation.

The consequences of a possible conflict would be dire for both belligerents and for the region. China —assuming it is the provocateur of conflict—would likely face some political rebuke from states that consider themselves its competitors, but it will work strenuously to reduce those costs, and would likely have priced them in to its calculations of whether to fight. India will suffer high tactical costs on the border, and may also suffer wider harm, if China uses coercive cyberattacks against strategic or dual-use targets.

In a costly war, the repercussions may spill over to damage India’s recently developing strategic partnerships, especially with the United States and Australia. Despite generally favourable views of the US, the Indian strategic elite still harbours some latent suspicions. This was highlighted in two episodes in April 2021, when the US Navy conducted a freedom of navigation patrol through the Indian exclusive economic zone, and when the US was slow in delivering Covid-19 vaccine raw materials and other relief. Both instances quickly receded from the Indian public imagination—thanks to quick correctives from Washington—but they did reveal that, under some conditions, Indian perceptions of its new partnerships can be quickly coloured by distrust.

A China–India border war may create exactly those conditions. There is a chance that conflict may result in a redoubled Indian commitment to the Quad, if New Delhi judges that it has no option but to seek more external assistance. Conversely, unless a conflict is managed well by India and its partners, it is more likely to result in Indian disaffection with the Quad. India deepened Quad cooperation during the Ladakh crisis partly as a deterrent signal to China, and partly because the Quad is still full of promise. However, after a conflict—when China hasn’t been deterred and has probably imposed significant costs on India—the Quad’s utility would have been tested, and probably not ameliorated India’s wartime disadvantage.

The task before Quad governments is to be sensitised to this risk and implement mitigation strategies before a possible conflict, to buttress the coalition in advance. As I outline in the ASPI paper, they could do this at three levels. First, they could offer operational support—such as intelligence or resupply of key equipment, as the US already has done in the Ladakh crisis—although Quad partners’ role here would be limited. Second, they could provide support in other theatres or domains—with a naval show of force, for example, although cyber operations would probably be more meaningful in deterring conflict or dampening its costs. Third, they could provide political and diplomatic support—signalling to Beijing that a conflict would harm its regional political standing.

For Quad members, the main goal would be to deter conflict in the first place, and, failing that, to preserve the long-term strategic partnership with India for the sake of maintaining as powerful and energetic a coalition as possible to counterbalance China in the long term.

Afghanistan: Where imperial hubris goes to die

In 2009, as I gazed at the gaping hillside holes in Bamiyan where once two imposing Buddha statues had stood as silent sentinels for more than 1,500 years, two emotions were dominant. The first was the internalisation of the northern limits of India’s borders in the ebb and flow of history. The second was sadness at the cultural vandalism of religious fanatics, little knowing that 11 years later, the UK and US would themselves be consumed with the destruction of statues honouring historical figures based on a Manichean reinterpretation of the past through the prism of current faddish morality. Back in Kabul, I climbed a hilltop in the mountains around the capital and stood beside the burnt-out shell of a destroyed Soviet military vehicle, wondering: how long before the US gives it up as yet another lost cause?

Now we have the answer: on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Another great power afflicted with hubris comes to grief in the graveyard of empires. The US will complete an inglorious withdrawal and the exodus of its allies will be all exit and no strategy. One hundred thousand American troops at an annual cost of US$100 billion, backed by European and Australasian allies, failed to defeat 20,000–25,000 Taliban who fight for no pay, but rather a cause. Occupation proved more challenging than invasion and nation-building proved a chimera. After 20 years of Western blood and treasure, no one seriously expects the Afghan government and army to be fit for purpose against the Taliban.

Western commentary has been full of such factors as the lack of a reliable local partner; the corruption, incompetence and violence of security forces; the ethnonational divisions; and the lack of connection to local tribal and religious leaders. I’d like to focus instead on three big mistakes: waging a war against Iraq, disassociating Afghanistan from its region, and imposing the wrong political system.

The debilitating distraction of the Iraq war sucked resources and legitimacy out of Afghanistan. The British ambassador to Italy, Sir Ivor Roberts, memorably said in 2004 that with the invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush became al-Qaeda’s ‘best recruiting sergeant’. It allowed many of the real culprits behind 9/11 to get away as, with the policy focus on Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden in effect became Osama bin Forgotten. Islamist radicals, dispirited in 2002 after the swift rout of the Afghan Taliban, regained exuberance as the US got bogged down in Iraq. The ‘real’ US was ‘exposed’ as the global enemy of Islam bent on stealing Arab oil.

The site of the terrorist attacks on New York became known as Ground Zero. But 2001 was not Year Zero for Afghanistan. Much of post-2001 Western policy towards Afghanistan has airbrushed the country’s history and also detached it from geography. Yet, historically, Afghanistan’s destiny has often been determined by its geography.

Western powers lost interest in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal and abandoned it to the tender mercies of the Taliban who had been closely nurtured by the Pakistani security establishment. The anti-Taliban Northern Alliance was sustained by Russia, Iran and India. Several members of the government, including President Hamid Karzai, had deep Indian connections. When the US-led Western powers returned to Afghanistan with a vengeance after 9/11, India and Iran were frozen out.

Yet, India is linked to Afghanistan by geography, history, culture and commercial and strategic interests that give depth and texture to bilateral relations. Compared to fleeting and peripatetic Western interest, India’s enduring interests include checking the Taliban; eradicating Islamist extremism; strengthening the institutions, capacity and stability of the state; developing Afghanistan as a trade and transit corridor to Central Asia and Iran, especially for energy; and precluding the re-emergence of Afghanistan as a base for launching terrorist attacks on India.

Alexander and the Mughals came to the subcontinent through Afghanistan. The spectacular Hindu Kush mountains between northern Pakistan and central Afghanistan have three different interpretations for their name: the mountains of India (‘hind’ being the land of the Hindus), from a Central Asian perspective; the boundary of India, from an Indian perspective; and the killing fields for the slaughter of the Hindus, from a Persian perspective. Afghanistan was also the site of the north–south axis of the fabled Silk Road and the geographical crossroads for the spread of Buddhism from India to China.

While Indo–US collaboration on Afghanistan could have been rooted in a stable conjunction of interests between US hard power and Indian soft power, the US–Pakistan partnership was based on a transactional relationship on both sides. Pakistan’s ability to influence and control the Afghan space has two priceless advantages. It gives Islamabad strategic depth with respect to locating training camps for India-specific insurgents and terrorists beyond the reach of the Indian military and it avoids the security nightmare of hostile neighbours on two fronts and a pincer movement in which Pakistan could be entrapped. The tensions and frustrations that periodically boiled over in US–Pakistan relations were the logical culmination of hunting with the hounds while running with the hares.

India is relevant also for the third mistake. Of all the countries in the region around Afghanistan in every direction, India should have been the most attractive model to replicate in crafting political institutions, with suitable adaptation for Afghanistan’s unique features. India’s exceptional stability in the entire developing world is explained by a trio of imperfect but robust and resilient core institutions: parliamentary democracy, federalism and secularism.

In a deeply segmented and war-torn society with powerful strongmen, a presidential form of government typically produces one winner but leaves many disgruntled and powerful losers as spoilers. In societies riven by deep social and political cleavages, parliamentary democracy is the more stable. Parliamentary regimes have built-in mechanisms for power-sharing in such circumstances (for example, through coalition governments) and place a higher premium on the political skills of bargaining and consensus building.

To be sure, neither the three factors together, nor any one of them separately, guaranteed failure of the US-led intervention to remake Afghanistan in the image of Western liberal democracy. But they certainly tilted the odds heavily against success.

China’s problematic solution to its water-security woes

Beijing has long understood that China has a water-security problem that could pose an existential threat. In 2005, China’s minister for water resources reportedly said, ‘To fight for every drop of water or die: that is the challenge facing China.’ Former premier Wen Jiabao observed that water shortages threaten ‘the very survival of the Chinese nation’.

China has 20% of the world’s population but only 7% of its fresh water. And 80% of China’s water is in the south, whereas half of its population and two-thirds of its farmland are in the north. While total water usage in China increased by only 35% between 1980 and 2010, water usage in households increased elevenfold and in industrial sectors, threefold. But per capita available water in China amounts to only a quarter of the world average.

Climate change will also increase China’s vulnerability to water scarcity. The average annual temperature in China has increased faster than the global average and regional and seasonal patterns have changed significantly across the country, impacting negatively on the drier north of the country. More critically, climate change is causing glacial retreat in the Himalayas, which will result in a decrease in total water volume in major river systems in China.

The implications of these factors for China’s water security have become apparent. A three-year survey of its river system completed by Beijing in 2013 indicated that the number of rivers in China had decreased by 28,000 from previous estimates. The flow of the Yellow River, which provides water to a significant proportion of China’s population, is a tenth of what it was 80 years ago. In addition, groundwater aquifers, critically important to northern parts of China, are being depleted at a rate of 1 to 3 metres a year. A 2015 study of the country’s groundwater found that 80% was contaminated by toxic metals and other pollutants, rendering supply unfit for human consumption.

Given this context, Beijing’s announcement late last year that it was moving ahead with plans to construct the world’s largest hydropower dam at Motuo on the Yarlung Tsangpo river is likely as much about water security as it is about clean energy.

The new dam, one of at least eleven to be constructed along the Yarlung Tsangpo, is considered by some as a key element of Beijing’s plan to achieve net-zero emissions by 2060. When complete, it will generate up to 60 gigawatts of electricity. Nevertheless, China’s decision to proceed with the project now is curious for two reasons.

First, analysts see such projects as unfeasible given the prohibitive costs associated with dam-building in the region and with the transmission network that would be required to get the electricity to distant population centres.

Second, existing installed hydropower already far outstrips demand in China and Southeast Asia. Observers have noted that Beijing is now tilting towards other forms of clean energy generation, such as wind and solar, instead of expensive signature hydro projects.

Beijing’s decision to proceed with the dam makes more sense in light of the likelihood of its being integrated into China’s South–North Water Transfer Project. This project is designed to resolve the water shortage problem in China’s north by moving water through 1,500-kilometre-long canals.

The completed eastern and middle routes of the transfer project can transfer 20.9 billion cubic metres of water each year. In 2018, Beijing started exploring options for the controversial western route of this project. This may result in tens of millions of cubic metres of water being diverted from the Yarlung Tsangpo and other transnational river systems in Tibet to the Yellow River. The project gained further impetus in early 2020, when Chinese Premier Li Keqiang called for options.

The consequences of the new dam for downstream countries like India and Bangladesh could prove catastrophic. The Yarlung Tsangpo is a transnational river system that becomes the Brahmaputra River in India, which provides 30% of the country’s water. The project could reduce water flows to India by 60%.

The environmental impacts in Tibet and downstream will be devastating. Peter Bosshard, the policy director of the International Rivers Organisation, noted more than a decade ago, ‘A large dam on the Tibetan plateau would amount to a major, irreversible experiment with geo-engineering. Blocking the Yarlung Tsangpo could devastate the fragile ecosystem of the Tibetan plateau, and would withhold the river’s sediments from the fertile floodplains of Assam in north-east India, and Bangladesh.’

More recently, Brian Eyler of the Stimson Center said, ‘Upstream dams on the Brahmaputra impact downstream seasonal hydrological cycles which hold important cultural significance and impact local and national economic activities.’ Eyler drew comparisons with the impact of the 11 dams China constructed upstream from the Mekong Delta, noting that they ‘had a severe impact on hydrological cycles downstream, restricting the water flow at times of drought’.

Importantly, the Yarlung Tsangpo dam will also provide Beijing with significant leverage over its strategic rival India at a time when tensions between the two countries are worsening. China controls the sources of 10 major rivers that flow through 11 countries and supply 1.6 billion people with water. As noted by Dechen Palmo of the Tibet Policy Institute, ‘[T]he future of Asia’s water lies in China’s hands.’

Somewhat presciently, in 2010 the general manager of China Hydropower Engineering Consulting Group wrote in favour of constructing a new dam at Motuo because it was a ‘great policy to protect our territory from Indian invasion’. China’s incursion into Ladakh in 2020 has also been seen as part of a broader Chinese strategy to build a strategic buffer around key river systems originating in Tibet.

Given this broader context, the new mega-dam project on the Yarlung Tsangpo may be dressed up as a viable solution to China’s clean energy needs, but it is about much more than just its 2060 net-zero-emissions target. Given the likely downstream impacts, it might create almost as many environmental problems as it solves.