📰 Not possible to fully block Chinese firms: officials
They say many companies have linkages of some sort with military
•Despite the uproar against the use of Chinese products amid the border stand-off in eastern Ladakh and the government’s decision to ban several apps, government officials say it is not possible to fully decouple the trend due to the substantial investments by Chinese companies in India.
•Intelligence assessments have cautioned on the direct and indirect links many companies have with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
•“While some measures can be taken, several Chinese investments are quite substantive. It is not possible to fully block them. A worrisome factor is that these Chinese companies have linkages of some sort with the Chinese military,” one government official said on condition of anonymity.
•In June 2017, China passed a national intelligence law, which gave Beijing powers over Chinese companies’ overseas investments as well. As per the Annual report of the U.S. Secretary of Defence to the Congress on the “Military and Security Developments involving the People’s Republic of China 2019”, this law requires Chinese companies, such as Huawei, ZTE and TikTok to support, provide assistance, and cooperate in China’s national intelligence work, wherever they operate.
•Article 7 of the law states, “Any organisation or citizen shall support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work in accordance with the law... The state protects individuals and organisations that support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence work.”
•It has direct security implications for all overseas Foreign Direct Investment from China, a second official said.
•Intelligence assessments have flagged some large Chinese companies with major presence in India having direct or indirect links with the PLA. They include Xindia Steels Limited, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), Huawei, Alibaba and Tencent.
•For instance, Xindia Steels Limited is considered one of the largest joint ventures between India and China and has commissioned a 0.8 mtpa iron ore pelletisation facility in Koppal district of Karnataka at a cost of over Rs. 250 crore. Its main investor is Xinxing Cathay International Group Co. Ltd. which, as per its website, is “reorganized, reconstructed and unhooked from previous production department and subordinate enterprises and institutions of the General Logistics Department of the PLA”.
•Huawei, which has generated global concern over its 5G services, was founded by Ren Zhengfei, a former deputy director of the PLA’s engineering corps in 1987. A government decision on its bid for 5G services in India is expected shortly.
Multi-million funding
•CETC in 2018 announced $46 million investment in a 200 MW photo-voltaic manufacturing unit in Andhra Pradesh. Officials pointed out that CETC is China’s leading military electronics manufacturer, and also makes Hikvision CCTV cameras.
•It has been implicated by the U.S. Department of Justice in at least three cases of illegal exports and many employees have been convicted for military espionage, the second official stated.
•CETC also provides technology used for human rights abuses in Xinjiang, where around one million are held in re-education camps, assessments noted.
•Another aspect that raised red flags is Chinese investments in Indian technology start-ups. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a U.S. Congressional commission, said in its 2019 report, “The Chinese government’s military-civil fusion policy aims to spur innovation and economic growth through an array of policies and other government-supported mechanisms, including Venture Capital VC) funds, while leveraging the fruits of civilian innovation for China’s defence sector.”
India should reject the Nepali state’s ill-conceived territorial claims but do all to nurture the Nepali people’s goodwill
•On August 15, Nepal Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli made a friendly gesture towards India by telephoning Prime Minister Narendra Modi to convey greetings on India’s Independence Day. This should be welcomed. This was followed by a meeting of the India-Nepal Joint Project Monitoring Committee on August 17 chaired by the Indian Ambassador to Nepal and the Nepal Foreign Secretary.
•The committee was set up to review progress in the large number of bilateral cooperation projects. An India-Nepal Joint Commission meeting at the level of Foreign Ministers is due later in October but may be held virtually due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. But will the two sides hold Foreign Secretary-level talks on the vexed boundary issue that is related to Kalapani and Susta?
Unilateral actions
•The Nepali side has upset the apple cart by taking a series of unilateral actions. A relatively minor dispute involving about 35 square kilometres of territory around the Kalapani springs, was expanded to claim a large wedge of Indian territory towards the east, measuring nearly 400 square kilometres. The expanded claim was incorporated into Nepal through a constitutional amendment and a revised official map. India has been confronted with a fait accompli though Nepal has conveyed its willingness to negotiate on the issue in Foreign Secretary-level talks. India should be willing to engage in talks with Nepal on all aspects of India-Nepal relations. But any talks on the Kalapani issue should be limited to the area which was the original subject for negotiations and Susta. To agree to talks which include the unilateral changes will create a very bad precedent not only in India-Nepal relations but in managing India’s borders in general. This is irrespective of Nepal presenting historical documents or maps which
support its claims.
•Borders which have been accepted by both sides for more than 100 years and which have also been reflected on their official maps cannot be unilaterally altered by one side coming up with archival material which has surfaced in the meantime. This would make national boundaries unstable and shifting, and create avoidable controversies between countries as is the case now between India and Nepal.
Geography and boundaries
•The Treaty of Sugauli of 1816 sets the Kali river as the boundary between the two countries in the western sector. There was no map attached to the treaty. Nepal is now claiming that the main tributary of the Kalapani river rises east of the Lipu Lekh pass from the Limpiyadhura ridgeline and hence should serve as the border. Even if the lengthiest tributary may be one principle for a riverine boundary, which is itself debatable, it is not the only one. There are many boundaries which do not follow any geographical principle at all but are the result of historical circumstances, mutual agreement and legal recognition.
•The fact is that once the British side carried out detailed surveys of the region, they consistently showed the India-Nepal border heading due north of Kalapani springs to a few kilometres east of the Lipu Lekh Pass. This alignment never changed in subsequent years and was also reflected in Nepali official maps. This is just a fact.
•It has been argued that it was the East India Company and successor governments which engaged in “cartographic chicanery” to shift the source of the Kali river towards the east. What prevented successive Nepali governments to reject such chicanery and assert the Nepali claim? There is no record of such a claim being raised at any point including when the Company was in a generous mood, having received Nepali help in putting down the 1857 Indian war of independence.
•In 1969, the then Prime Minister of Nepal Kirti Nidhi Bisht, demanded that India military personnel manning 17 villages along the Nepal-Tibet border since the early 1950s be withdrawn. Here is the National Panchayat record of Bisht’s statement: “The Minister informed that the check posts manned by the Indian nationals exist in seventeen villages — Gumsha, Mustang, Namche Bazar, Lamabagar, Kodari, Thula, Thumshe, Thulo, Olanchung Dola, Mugu,Simikot, Tin Kar, Chepuwa, Jhumshung, Pushu, Basuwa and Selubash.”
•If Lipu Lekh and Kalapani were on Nepali territory then why were they omitted from the list?
•I have pointed out earlier that the argument that the omission was due to Nepali “magnanimity” taking into account India’s security concerns vis-à-vis China is laughable. The withdrawal of Indian military personnel from the Nepal-Tibet border was precisely to win brownie points with China.
•The inconvenient fact is that the Chinese, at least since 1954, have accepted Lipu Lekh Pass as being in Indian territory. In the Nepal-China boundary agreement of 1960, the starting point of the boundary is clearly designated at a point just west of the Tinker Pass.
History and ties
•In a recent article ( The Hindu , Editorial page, August 19, 2020), Nepali journalist Kanak Mani Dixit advised Indians “must try and understand why Nepal does not have an ‘independence day’”, the implication being that Indians should with humility remember their history as a colonised country while Nepal was always an independent nation. Independence Day has meaning for us because we engaged in a long and painful struggle for independence from British colonial rule. We also recall that it was the ruler of” independent” Nepal which sent troops to fight alongside the East India Company, mercilessly killing those who were fighting India’s first war of independence. The same independent country was happy to receive as reward chunks of Indian territory in the Terai through the treaty of 1861. If no agreement has superseded the Sugauli treaty as has been claimed then, perhaps the “Naya Muluk” received after Nepal’s alliance with the Company against Indians fighting for freedom, should be restituted. Or should this brand of “chicanery” be excused since it benefited Nepal?
•Reversing history selectively may seem tempting but it can open a Pandora’s box which may have irretrievably negative consequences for what Mr. Dixit rightly describes as “the most exemplary inter-state relationship of South Asia”.
•For India, more than the exemplary inter-state relationship, it is the unique people-to-people relations between India and Nepal; and, fortunately, inter-state relations have been unable to undermine the dense affinities that bind our peoples together. While India should reject the Nepali state’s ill-conceived territorial claims, it should do everything to nurture the invaluable asset it has in the goodwill of the people of Nepal.
📰 More evidence of India’s food insecurity
The SOFI report and lockdown distress have renewed focus on what is also the world’s largest food insecure population
•Data from the latest edition of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report show that India retains the dubious distinction of being the country with the largest population of food insecure people. Estimates presented in the report which was released by several United Nations organisations show that the prevalence of food insecurity increased by 3.8 percentage points in India between 2014 and 2019, the first term of the Narendra Modi government. By 2019, 6.2 crore more people were living with food insecurity than the number in 2014.
Authoritative indicators
•The SOFI report, which is published annually, presents the most authoritative evaluation of hunger and food insecurity in the world. Since 2017, SOFI presents two key measures of food insecurity: the conventional measure called the Prevalence of Undernourishment (PoU) and a new measure called the Prevalence of Moderate and Severe Food Insecurity (PMSFI).
•Both of these are globally-accepted indicators of progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Target 2.1 to end hunger and food insecurity. While PoU is focused on estimating the proportion of population facing chronic deficiency of calories, the PMSFI is a more comprehensive measure of the lack of access to adequate and nutritious food. Estimates of PoU are based on food balance sheets and national surveys of consumption. Given that consumption surveys are done infrequently in most countries, these estimates are often based on outdated data and are revised when better data become available.
•In contrast, the PMSFI is based on annual surveys that collect information on experiences of food insecurity (such as food shortages, skipping meals, and changing diet diversity because of a lack of resources). The PMSFI uses the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), a gold standard in food security measurement developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), for estimating globally-comparable prevalence rates. Given the solid conceptual foundations of this methodology and the ease of collection of data, FIES and the PMFSI have been widely adopted by countries across the world.
•The FAO commissions Gallup to include FIES questions in the Gallup®World Poll (FAO-GWP) survey conducted in more than 140 countries across the world. Many countries have also started conducting their own FIES surveys. Unlike most other countries, the government of India neither conducts official FIES surveys nor accepts estimates based on FAO-GWP surveys. Although FAO-GWP surveys are conducted in India, India is among the few countries that do not allow publication of estimates based on these surveys. Consequently, as in the past years, estimates of PMSFI for India are not published in SOFI.
Country data
•However, interestingly, these estimates can be derived for India from the information provided in the report. The report provides three-year average estimates of the number of food insecure people for South Asia as a whole and for South Asia (excluding India). By taking a difference between the two, one can derive the estimates for India.
•These estimates show that while 27.8% of India’s population suffered from moderate or severe food insecurity in 2014-16, the proportion rose to 31.6% in 2017-19. The number of food insecure people grew from 42.65 crore in 2014-16 to 48.86 crore in 2017-19. India accounted for 22% of the global burden of food insecurity, the highest for any country, in 2017-19. It is also noteworthy that while the PMSFI increased in India by 3.7 percentage points during this period, it fell by 0.5 percentage points in the rest of South Asia.
•India has not released the latest National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) consumption expenditure survey data for 2017-18. As a result, conventional measures of poverty and food consumption are not available for recent years. Lack of availability of data from this consumption survey also has implications for the FAO’s PoU estimates for India.
•Because of a lack of regular availability of consumption survey data from most countries, the FAO uses supply-wise data on per capita food availability to measure changes in average per capita calorie intake. While this is a reasonable approach, it has become untenable for India because of a large and growing disparity between the supply-side data and data from the consumption surveys. Not only do the supply-side data show a much higher level of per capita availability of food than the amount of food that is captured to have been consumed in the surveys, even the direction of change between the two does not seem to be consistent.
•While the per capita dietary energy supply in India increased by 3.8% between 2011-13 and 2015-17, the consumption survey data that became available through a media leak showed that the average consumption expenditure (covering food and other expenses) fell by 3.7% between 2011-12 and 2017-18. On the whole, withholding of consumption survey data by the government has meant that SOFI continues to use outdated data for variability of food intake, making PoU estimates for India untenable.
•Given this, estimates of the PMSFI for India have become particularly valuable.
Causes of suffering
•The significant rise in food insecurity, as shown by these data, is a clear manifestation of the overall economic distress during this period marked by a deepening agrarian crisis, falling investments across sectors and shrinking employment opportunities. The latest PLFS data have shown that the unemployment rates in the recent years have been higher than in the last four decades. It is widely believed that demonetisation and introduction of the Goods and Services Tax were two prime causes of economic distress during this period.
•A sudden imposition of an unprecedented and prolonged lockdown in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought renewed focus on the problems of hunger and food insecurity. With a sudden loss of livelihoods, a vast majority of India’s poor are faced with increased food insecurity, hunger and starvation. A number of starvation deaths have also been reported in the media.
•Given this, these estimates of the PMSFI provide an important baseline estimate for the situation before the COVID-19 pandemic. It is critical for India to conduct a national survey on food insecurity to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food security of different sections of the population.
