📰 Are the United States and China entering a new Cold War?
Relations have taken a hit after the COVID-19 outbreak; experts say tensions are unlikely to ease in near future as mutual mistrust is building up
•Relations between the U.S. and China have plunged to a nadir in recent weeks. On May 15, President Donald Trump threatened to “cut off the whole relationship” with China over the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in Wuhan. He had earlier called the coronavirus “Chinese virus” and threatened to seek compensation from China for the damages caused by the outbreak.
•China, sometimes through the state-run media, has hit back, calling Mr. Trump’s recent comments “lunacy”.
•The rising tensions between the two superpowers have prompted many experts to warn of a new Cold War. Hawks in the Trump administration openly push for a more aggressive approach towards Beijing.
•Relations between the two countries had started deteriorating well before the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2017, the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy called China as “a revisionist power” seeking “to erode American security and prosperity”.
•In September 2019, while responding to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Ford’s comment that the American government was formulating a strategy to address potential “security challenges” by China, the Foreign Ministry in Beijing “urged” the U.S. “to abandon the Cold-War mentality”
The ‘Novikov telegram’
•COVID-19 appears to have aggravated the crisis. “Record high temperatures have been recorded in Sino-U.S. relations in recent years and the pandemic is no exception to this. Competition rules the relationship, and flexibility and mature handling are in short supply on both sides. Uncertainty prevails, whether it on the question of resolving trade problems, or on the maritime front in the East and South China Seas, on technology, or on mutual mud-slinging on COVID-19-related issues,” Nirupama Menon Rao, former Foreign Secretary, told The Hindu .
•In early April, China’s Ministry of State Security sent an internal report to the country’s top leaders, stating that hostility in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak could tip relations with the U.S. into confrontation, according to a Reuters report. One of the officials the report has quoted said some in the Chinese intelligence community see the internal report as China’s version of the ‘Novikov Telegram’, referring to a report Nikolai Novikov, the Soviet Ambassador in Washington, sent to Moscow in September 1946, laying out his analysis of the U.S. conduct.
•In his report, Novikov had said the U.S. was determined on world domination, and suggested the Soviet Union create a buffer in Eastern Europe. Novikov’s telegram was a response to the “Long Telegram”, the 8,000-word report sent by George Kennan, an official at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, to Washington, in which he said the Soviet Union was heavily armed and determined to spread communism. Historians often trace the origins of the Cold War to these telegrams.
Nationalist overdrive
•So where is the current crisis in relations between the U.S. and China headed? According to Ms. Rao, tensions will not go away. “This situation is unlikely to ease until the U.S. presidential election. Post-election, temperatures could decrease, but a deep-rooted antipathy towards China has gripped the popular and political imagination in the U.S. Therefore, tensions will not go away. In China, the leadership and public opinion are both on a nationalist overdrive and the Trump administration is seen as the prime antagonist. The prognosis is not encouraging,” she said.
•Does it mean both countries are already in a Cold War? “There are similarities between the current crisis and the Cold War. The political elites of both China and the U.S., like the Soviet Union and the U.S. back then, see each other as their main rivals. We can also see this antagonism moving from the political elite to the popular perception,” said Jabin T. Jacob, Associate Professor at Shiv Nadar University.
•“But there are key differences as well. We don’t see the kind of proxy conflicts between the U.S. and China which we did during the Cold War. The world is also not bipolar any more. There are third parties such as the EU, Russia, India and Japan. These parties increasingly have a choice whether or not to align with either power as they see fit and on a case by case basis. This leads to a very different kind of international order than during the Cold War,” Mr. Jacob told The Hindu .
•But Mr. Jacob warned that ties between the U.S. and China could take a worse turn if Mr. Trump is re-elected this November. “The Cold War was out and out ideological between the communist and capitalist blocs. For China, a country ruled by a communist party where the primary goal of all state apparatus is preserving the regime in power, it’s always been ideological. The U.S. has started realising this angle about China now. The Republican party has ideological worldviews, too. If Trump gets re-elected, the ideological underpinnings of the U.S.-China rivalry could get further solidified.”
ADR report says 54% of the income of 23 regional entities is from such donors
•More than half of the income of 23 regional parties whose annual audit and contribution reports were analysed came from unknown sources in 2018-19, a report released by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) on Monday said.
•The report initially considered 52 recognised regional parties but only 26 of them had filed their annual audit and contribution reports with the Election Commission, the report said.
•Of the 26, the Shiromani Akali Dal, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi and the Lok Jan Shakti Party were left out of the analysis as there were discrepancies in their reports, the ADR said. The total income declared by the 23 parties was Rs. 885.956 crore, of which Rs. 257.14 crore or 29.02% came from known sources (donations declared to the ECI) and Rs.147.54 crore or 16.65% came from other known sources such as membership fees, bank interest etc.
•A total of Rs. 481.27 crore or 54.32% of the parties’ income came from unknown sources, the report said. Ninety per cent of the income from unknown sources was through electoral bonds.
Highest amount
•The Biju Janata Dal declared the highest income from unknown sources (Rs. 213.54 crore), followed by the YSR-Congress (Rs. 100.50 crore) and the Shiv Sena (Rs. 60.73 crore).
•“Since a very large percentage of the income of political parties cannot be traced to the original donor, full details of all donors should be made available for public scrutiny through RTI,” the report recommended.
📰 Faking danger
Use of sedition law to fight fake news is an attempt to suppress inconvenient reports
•The frequency with which journalists have been arrested since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic is quite disturbing. The reasons given by the police across India for arresting reporters and editors of news portals indicate that special provisions enacted to prevent the spread of rumour during disasters are being used to suppress reporting on political developments and possible governmental corruption. The most egregious case involves a criminal provision that governments invariably fall back upon to suppress dissent. The arrest of Dhaval Patel, editor of a news portal in Gujarat, on the serious charge of sedition, is a shocking instance of misuse of criminal laws to intimidate journalists. The case concerned an article speculating that State Chief Minister Vijay Rupani may be replaced by the BJP for his alleged inept handling of efforts to combat the pandemic. The report had even named a possible successor. It is befuddling how such a report could amount to sedition, regardless of whether the speculation is true. Oftentimes, the source of such speculation is a disgruntled section of the ruling party itself, and it is excessive to punish reportage with inadequate verification with arrest and prosecution for sedition. Mr. Patel has also been charged under Section 54 of the Disaster Management Act for allegedly spreading panic through a false alarm concerning a disaster.
•The Editors Guild of India has seen a “growing pattern” in the misuse of criminal laws to intimidate journalists. The concern is not misplaced. In the Andamans, a reporter was arrested for a social media post claiming people who had contacted a COVID-19 positive patient over phone were also being quarantined. In Coimbatore, police arrested a news portal founder following a report on alleged corruption in food distribution as part of the local administration’s efforts to handle the fallout of the pandemic. In Delhi, a reporter was summoned in response to a report that claimed that an audio clip purportedly containing a speech by the head of the Tablighi Jamaat was doctored. While asking a journalist to join the investigation may not by itself be illegal, the police should not use the power of summons to intimidate reporters or extract details of the source. There ought to be greater restraint while invoking special provisions relating to handling disasters and epidemics. Section 54 only penalises the spreading of panic relating to the severity or magnitude of a disaster — claiming falsely, for instance, that a dam had breached — and does not extend to mere incorrect reporting. In normal circumstances, the authorities ought to be content with getting their version or response to be carried by the news outlets concerned, and not seek to use the pandemic as an excuse to curb inconvenient reporting.
📰 A jolt to national energy security
The amendments to the Electricity Bill will only burden States and erode the concurrent status given to electricity
•Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s proposal for reform of power tariff policy — announced as part of the stimulus package following the pandemic — is of a piece with the recent comprehensive proposal to amend the Electricity Act 2003; put together, they erode the concurrent status accorded to electricity in the Constitution. If implemented, they will not only weaken the control of States over an industry supplying a basic human necessity such as electricity but also arm the Centre with a pincer-like weapon which could choke the distribution utilities/companies (DISCOM) and jeopardise the country’s energy security.
DISCOM troubles
•These proposals have to be seen in the context of a continuing centralisation of control over the sector whose main impact in the last 25 years has been to drive up the cost of power purchase to 80% of the total costs of State DISCOMs. At the core of DISCOM woes is the two-part tariff policy, mandated by the Ministry of Power in the 1990s at the behest of the World Bank. As more private developers came forward to invest in generation, DISCOMs were required to sign long-term power purchase agreements (PPA), committing to pay a fixed cost to the power generator, irrespective of whether the State draws the power or not, and a variable charge for fuel when it does.
•The PPAs signed by DISCOMs were based on over-optimistic projection of power demand estimated by the Central Electricity Authority (CEA), a central agency. The 18th Electric Power Survey (EPS) overestimated peak electricity demand for 2019-2020 by 70 GW. The 19th EPS published in 2017, by 25 GW, both pre-Covid 19. In the event, DISCOMs locked into long-term contracts end up servicing perpetual fixed costs for power not drawn. NTPC Limited’s Kudgi, in Karnataka, alone received Rs. 4,800 crore as idle fixed costs during 2018-19, operating at a plant load factor of only 22%. Due to the CEA’s overestimates, the all-India plant load factor of coal power plants is at an abysmal 56% even before COVID-19.
Factor of renewable energy
•From 2010, solar and wind power plants were declared as “must-run”, requiring DISCOMs to absorb all renewable power as long as there was sun or wind, in excess of mandatory renewable purchase obligations. This means backing down thermal generation to accommodate all available green power, entailing further idle fixed costs payable on account of two-part tariff PPAs.
•Second, power demand peaks after sunset. In the absence of viable storage, every megawatt of renewable power requires twice as much spinning reserves to keep lights on after sunset. DISCOMs, especially in the southern region, have had to integrate large volumes of infirm power, mostly from solar and wind energy plants which enjoy must-run status irrespective of their high tariffs (Rs. 5/kwh in Karnataka and Rs. 6/kwh in Tamil Nadu for solar power) even as the demand growth envisaged in the 18th EPS failed to materialise.
•Third, in 2015 the Centre announced an ambitious target of 175 gigawatts of renewable power by 2022, offering a slew of concessions to renewable energy developers, and aggravating the burden of DISCOMs. Incidentally, China benefited by as much as $13 billion in the last five years from India’s solar panel imports.
The fine print
•It is against this backdrop that we must examine the proposals in the Electricity Act 2020.
•First, the amendment proposes sub-franchisees, presumably private, in an attempt to usher in markets through the back door. Going by past privatisation experiments, private sub-franchisees are likely to cherry-pick the more profitable segments of the DISCOM’s jurisdiction. The Electricity Bill 2020 containing the proposed amendments is silent on whether a private sub-franchisee would be required to buy the expensive power (averaging out the idle fixed costs) from the DISCOM or procure cheaper power directly from power exchanges. If it is the first, the gains from the move are doubtful since the room for efficiency improvements is rather restricted in the already profitable regions attractive to sub-franchisees. If it is the second, DISCOMs will then be saddled with costly power purchase from locked-in PPAs and fewer profitable areas from which to recover it.
•Second, the amendment proposes even greater concessions to renewable power developers, with its cascading impact on idling fixed charges, impacting the viability of DISCOMs even more.
•Third, and the most controversial amendment proposed, seeks to eliminate in one stroke, the cross-subsidies in retail power tariff. This means each consumer category would be charged what it costs to service that category. Rural consumers requiring long lines and numerous step-down transformers and the attendant higher line losses will pay the steepest tariffs. Disingenuously, the proposed amendments envisage that State governments will directly subsidise whichever category they want to, through direct benefit transfers. Cross-subsidy is a fact of life in even private industries, soap, newspapers, or even utilities such as telecom. There is undoubtedly a case for reducing the steep cross-subsidies in electricity. But eliminating them in one stroke when State governments are already struggling with direct power subsidies is bound to be ruinous to their finances, not to mention the myriad problems with Direct Benefit Transfer. Without going into the political arguments relating to subsidies, and the impact of
COVID-19 which has not been factored in, this proposal is practically infeasible; if forcibly implemented, it will lead to chaos.
•Fourth, State regulators will henceforth be appointed by a central selection committee, the composition of which inspires little confidence in its objectivity, jeopardising not only regulatory autonomy and independence but also the concurrent status of the electricity sector.
•Finally, the last claw in this multipronged pincer is the establishment of a centralised Electricity Contract Enforcement Authority whose members and chairman will again be selected by the same selection committee referred to above. The power to adjudicate upon disputes relating to contracts will be taken away from State Electricity Regulatory Commissions and vested in this new authority, ostensibly to protect and foster the sanctity of contracts. This is to ensure that States saddled with high-priced PPAs and idling fixed costs, yet forced to keep increasing the share of renewables in their basket, have no room for manoeuvre.
•When the country is reeling under the economic impact of the novel coronavirus crisis, the Electricity Bill 2020 is indeed a disingenuous document drafted to shift the burden imposed by the short-sighted policies of the Centre onto hapless States, with serious consequences for the nation’s energy security.
📰 A post-pandemic world order
Dogma, ideology and notions of power could eitherimpede or accelerate the recovery process of nations
•As the world starts recovering from the debilitating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, nations will draw on all their reserves to ensure that their place in the global pecking order is largely maintained. Among many factors, dogma, ideology and notions of power merit serious attention as non-quantifiable national characteristics that could either impede or accelerate the recovery process.
Ideological and civilisational beliefs
•Dogma has traditionally been linked to religious beliefs. Since World War II, however, it has incorporated several strains of ideological and enduring civilisational beliefs. Take the case of China, for example, which is attempting to upstage, or at least match, the U.S. as the principal global hegemon. Realising that mere ideology was not enough to propel it to that position, Mao Zedong’s successors have drawn on two civilisational markers from Chinese history that have troubled the Chinese people for centuries: the ‘Middle Kingdom’ syndrome and ‘the Century of Humiliation’. While the first marker builds on the glory of the Ming Dynasty (late 14th century to mid-17th century) and the centrality of the Han people in a world order that saw China as the most prosperous nation in the world, it also reminds the Chinese people of the dangers that lurk around its periphery. Chinese leaders often draw attention to the Mongol rule (late 13th century to mid-14th century) and over two centuries of misrule by the Manchus and the Qing Dynasty (mid-17th century to early 20th century) as examples of this. The second marker draws on the stripping of China of its honour and resources by multiple colonial powers during the ‘Century of Humiliation’ from the mid-19th century to the time of the emergence of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. These markers from Chinese history have gradually become dogma and seen as a blot on Chinese history that need resolution.
•Realising in the 1980s that Maoist ideology no longer appealed to the Chinese people, Deng reintroduced Confucianism as a much-needed intellectual and ethical prop to China’s push for ‘great power’ status. Sun Tzu re-emerged as China’s answer to Clausewitz and for a few decades it appeared that these would soften traditional Chinese dogma. It also raised hopes that China would largely play by the existing rules and bide its time.
•Xi Jinping, however, has been a leader in a hurry. In the process, he has perpetuated the deepened hurt of the Chinese people to an extent that it has become embedded dogma. He has abandoned Confucianism and the ethical pursuit of power, and fallen back on hard-core communist ideology. Hard power and muscular nationalism coupled with a neo-colonial and mercantilist attitude towards vulnerable nations seems to be the new strategy to compete with the U.S. While this strategy seemed to be working at a time when the U.S. appeared to be looking inwards and showing signs of strategic fatigue, President Xi’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative demonstrated an overreach that had the potential to backfire as it created a sense of fear of, rather than respect for, China. Then came the pandemic and it is worth pondering over whether holding on to historical dogma, ideology and notions of power will hold the same potential in the accumulation of power, or whether nations which are willing to live in the moment and be sensitive to the global environment will fare better. China will be worse off should it prefer the former course. Its continued aggressive posture along the Line of Actual Control only confirms this rigid position.
•The U.S.’s recovery will be impeded by embedded notions of power which have resulted in a strategic oversight and fatigue of sorts. The pandemic has tested the U.S. state’s capacity, capability and competency. However, the U.S.’s economic resilience, restless people, institutional robustness and intellectual reserves will help it pull through.
Demonstration of flexibility
•India is neither afflicted by unreasonable expectations of power, ideological dogma, or haunted by accentuated perceptions of historical hurt. Despite its own centuries of conquest and exploitation by invaders and colonial powers, it has demonstrated resilience, learnt to let go and embraced the good that emerged from the centuries of darkness. That is a demonstration of flexibility, which is good in troubled times such as these. Yes, it does have societal fissures and serious issues of compliance, but those can be mended with national resilience and improved public discipline and good leadership. If India weathers the entire pandemic cycle as it has coped with the initial storm, it should be better placed than the two leading powers to recover. It will be a fascinating global strategic landscape to observe as a post-COVID-19 world order emerges, and for sure, India could play an important role in its possible transformation.
