📰 Governors can pardon prisoners, including death row ones: Supreme Court
Advice of the appropriate government binds the Head of the State, says judge
•The Supreme Court on Tuesday held that the Governor of a State can pardon prisoners, including death row ones, even before they have served a minimum 14 years of prison sentence.
•In fact, the Governor’s power to pardon overrides a provision in the Code of Criminal Procedure — Section 433A —which mandates that a prisoner’s sentence can be remitted only after 14 years of jail, a Bench of Justices Hemant Gupta and A.S. Bopanna observed in a judgment.
•“Section 433-A of the Code cannot and does not in any way affect the constitutional power conferred on the President/Governor to grant pardon under Articles 72 or 161 of the Constitution... If the prisoner has not undergone 14 years or more of actual imprisonment, the Governor has a power to grant pardon... de hors the restrictions imposed under Section 433-A... Such power is in exercise of the power of the sovereign, though the Governor is bound to act on the aid and advice of the State Government,” the court observed.
•In fact, the court noted that the sovereign power of a Governor to pardon a prisoner under Article 161 is actually exercised by the State government and not the Governor on his own.
•“The advice of the appropriate government binds the Head of the State,” Justice Gupta observed in the judgment which referred to the Supreme Court’s Constitution Bench judgment in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case on the power of remission.
Constitutional courtesy
•“The action of commutation and release can thus be pursuant to a governmental decision and the order may be issued even without the Governor’s approval. However, under the Rules of Business and as a matter of constitutional courtesy, it may seek approval of the Governor, if such release is under Article 161 of the Constitution,” the court noted.
•The Bench was considering the feasibility of remission policies in Haryana.
📰 Lok Sabha passes two key bills without debate
The opposition members protested over the Pegasus snooping controversy
•The Lok Sabha on Tuesday passed two key bills without a debate, as the House once again witnessed protests by the Opposition over the Pegasus snooping controversy and farmers' issues.
•The Essential Defence Services Bill, 2021 and The Tribunals Reforms Bill, 2021 were passed separately by voice vote before the House was adjourned for the day as Opposition continued with their sloganeering.
•Tuesday was the eleventh consecutive working day of the Lower House to witness repeated adjournments.
•When the proceedings started at 11am, Speaker Om Birla pointed out that important issues related to the farmers were being discussed and urged the protesting members to go back to their seats.
•During the Question Hour, more than seven questions pertaining to farmers — on issues ranging from Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana, dairy, Food Corporation of India depot, nurseries and quality saplings of fruit-bearing trees, and Farmer Produce Organisations — were taken up and answered by the respective Ministers.
•The Question Hour went on for nearly 40 minutes. Expressing his displeasure at the members “insulting” Parliamentary traditions, Mr. Birla then adjourned the House until noon.
•The House was adjourned one more time when it reassembled at noon as members did not heed the request of Biju Janata Dal member, Bhartruhari Mahtab, who was in the Chair.
•As the House reconvened at 2 PM, Mr. Birla asked the Minister of State for Defence Ajay Bhatt to move the Essential Defence Services Bill, 2021, that seeks to prohibit any agitation and strike by anyone engaged in essential defence services.
•Mr. Bhatt informed the House that the “biggest thing” is that a “sunset clause” — a clause that gives an expiry date to a law — was given in the bill.
•Terming the bill “draconian”, Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said it should not be passed when the House is “not in order”.
•While N.K. Premachandran (RSP) echoed the Congress leader’s position about not passing the bill in the din, TMC's Saugata Roy alleged that the measure was “anti-labour”.
•Defence Minister Rajnath Singh assured the House that that there may not be a need to invoke this Act, adding that the law “will be effective for only a year”.
•The Essential Defence Services Bill, 2021 seeks to replace an ordinance issued in June in the wake of agitation plans by the employees of the Indian Ordnance Factories after the government announced its plan to corporatise it.
•Once the Defence Services bill was passed, the House was adjourned until 4 pm. On reconvening, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman moved the Tribunals Reforms Bill, 2021 for passage.
•The bill seeks to abolish tribunals or authorities under various laws by amending the Cinematograph Act, 1952, the Copyrights, Act, 1957, the Customs Act, 1962, the Patents Act, 1970, the Airport Authority of India Act, 1994, the Trade Marks Act, 1999 and the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act.
•Certain existing appellate tribunals would be dissolved and their functions such as adjudication of appeals transferred to other existing judicial bodies.
•Once again, Mr .Chowdhury and Mr. Premchandran objected to the passage of such important bills when the House was not in order.
•Ms. Sitharaman said that the government was ready to respond to any queries raised by members and blamed the Opposition for creating “Constitutional impasse in Parliament”.
📰 Parliamentary panel recommends money in banks, social security measures for informal workers
‘Pandemic has made matters worse for women, the young, self-employed, migrants’.
•Direct transfer of money into bank accounts of informal workers and an urban employment guarantee scheme were among the recommendations of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour in its report on the impact of the pandemic on rising unemployment and job loss.
•The report, which was presented in the Lok Sabha and tabled in the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday, said: “The pandemic has devastated the labour market, denting the employment scenario and threatening the survival of millions of workers and their families.” The panel, which is chaired by Bhartruhari Mahtab, called on the government to improve social security measures for workers.
•Citing the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), the report said 90% of workers were in the informal sector, which is 419 million of the 465 million workers. The PLFS quarterly bulletin for April-June 2020 showed the unemployment rate in urban areas for those above 15 years at 20.8%, an increase from 9.1% in January-March 2020.
•The committee noted that the PLFS data for years prior to the pandemic were available and the real impact of COVID-19 would only be seen when the PLFS for 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 are available. It asked the Labour Ministry to take up the issue of timely completion of the PLFS with the Statistics and Programme Implementation Ministry.
Significant income losses
•“Although no survey data are available as yet on the impact of the second wave which has undisputedly been more severe than the first, anecdotal evidence as well as the situation experienced during the first wave suggest that there would have been significant income losses particularly in the informal sector, pushing the vulnerables deeper into crisis,” the report said.
•The panel said it was of the “studied opinion that the COVID-19 crisis in India has come in the backdrop of pre-existing high and rising unemployment”.
•“Therefore, a comprehensive plan and roadmap are required to address the deteriorating condition of employment much aggravated by the pandemic, and widening disparities in the job market in the organised sector…Offering another round of income support to the poor to compensate for loss of jobs/employment incurred due to the two lockdowns imposed would go a long way in mitigating their woes.”
•Among the suggestions were strengthening of social security measures and the possibility of putting “money in the bank accounts of the informal workers during adverse conditions like COVID-19”. The panel noted that like in most countries, in India too the pandemic had made matters worse for women, the young, self-employed, migrants and worker with low and medium skills.
•“The government therefore, should strive to support a recovery that is robust, broad based and women centric and based on social dialogues with all the stakeholders concerned so as to promote and ensure seamless transition,” it said.
Universal healthcare
•The panel said universal healthcare should be made a legal obligation of the government and the budgetary allocation for MGNREGA should be increased. It said an urban jobs guarantee scheme on the lines of the MGNREGA should be implemented.
•The committee noted the efforts of the government to address workers’ woes in the past year. The State Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Boards had disbursed ₹5,618 crore to the bank accounts of 1.83 workers during the first wave and ₹1,704.3 crore was disbursed 1.18 crore workers in the second wave.
•The panel flagged the issue of lack of a study by the Labour Ministry to gauge the impact of its advisories on employers’ recruitment and termination policies. The committee pulled up the Ministry for the delay in developing a national database of unorganised workers, which the Labour and Employment Secretary told the panel would now be completed by August 15.
•“When the entire nation was witnessing a heart-rending sight of lakhs of migrant workers walking back to their native places helplessly without anything to fall back on, the Committee find it surprising that the Ministry waited for as long as two months i.e. until June 2020 to write to the State governments and that too after goaded by the Supreme Court, to collect the much needed detailed data of the migrant workers. (sic),” the report said.
📰 Circumscription: on security clearances for passport or government jobs
Circular on using past protest record to deny jobs, passports risks further alienation in J&K
•Police verification and security clearances for passport or government job applicants are a matter of routine in most parts of the country. In Kashmir, where the police have now issued a circular aimed at gathering details and denying security clearance to those involved in throwing stones and joining street protests in the past, the exercise may not be out of the ordinary, but it could result in serious prejudice to the aspirations of many young men and women. The circular, which asks CID Special Branch field units to ensure that any subject’s involvement in law-and-order incidents and related crimes be specifically looked into, and also to collect digital evidence from the records of police and security forces, suggests that the administration is quite serious about preventing those with a likely link to protests in the past from either entering government service or travelling abroad. Reports suggest that the official list of street protesters swelled between 2008 and 2017 to include nearly 20,000 people. On the face of it, the decision to subject applicants for passports and jobs to scrutiny is not illegal. Under Section 6(2) of the Passports Act, 1967, passports can be denied to applicants for various reasons, including their likelihood of engaging in activities prejudicial to the country’s sovereignty and integrity, or detrimental to its security. Further, those convicted in the preceding five years, or against whom proceedings are pending before any criminal court, are also candidates for refusal. There is legal recourse for those affected, as the Act allows them to approach the trial court for a ‘No Objection’ certificate to get a passport.
•In the backdrop of the Union government’s outreach to revive political activity preparatory to elections, it is quite incongruous that such a far-reaching measure that would dampen the hopes and aspirations of thousands of people is being pursued. The Government’s position is that the alteration of the status of J&K in August 2019 has ushered in a new era of development and prosperity, and that it is time to strengthen grassroots democracy. It was as a part of this process that Prime Minister Narendra Modi invited leaders of the Union Territory’s political parties in June for a discussion. Despite their obvious disappointment that the restoration of statehood is likely to be considered only after polls to the Legislative Assembly, the parley did create some cautious optimism about a fresh political process. Were the administration to pursue this circular zealously, there is a danger that it may revive the sort of alienation among the youth that led to the stone-pelting incidents in 2008 and 2010, and the wave of disaffection following the killing of militant leader Burhan Wani. When all efforts should be directed towards building on current gains, nothing ought to be done to make those still harbouring, for whatever reason, a sense of betrayal feel that some fresh collective punishment is in the offing.
📰 Poverty in India is on the rise again
In the absence of CES data, the Periodic Labour Force Survey shows a rise in the absolute number of the poor
•India has not released its Consumption Expenditure Survey (CES) data since 2011-12. Normally a CES is conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSO) every five years. But the CES of 2017-18 (already conducted a year late) was not made public by the Government of India. Now, we hear that a new CES is likely to be conducted in 2021-22, the data from which will probably not be available before end-2022.
•Meanwhile, we know that the economy has been slowing for nine quarters prior to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Unemployment had reached a 45-year high in 2017-18, as revealed by NSO’s Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS).
Sufficient to estimate change
•India’s labour force surveys, including the five-yearly Employment-Unemployment Rounds from 1973-4 to 2011-12, have also collected consumption expenditure of households. The PLFS has maintained that tradition. While the PLFS’s questions on consumption expenditure are not as detailed as those of the CES, they are sufficient for us to estimate changes in consumption on a consistent basis across time. It enables any careful researcher to estimate the incidence of poverty (i.e., the share in the total population of those below the poverty line), as well as the total number of persons below poverty. That is exactly what we do in the table.
•There is a clear trajectory of the incidence of poverty falling from 1973 to 2012. In fact, since India began collecting data on poverty, the incidence of poverty has always fallen, consistently. It was 54.9% in 1973-4; 44.5% in 1983-84; 36% in 1993-94 and 27.5% in 2004-05. This was in accordance with the Lakdawala poverty line (which was lower than the Tendulkar poverty line), named after a distinguished economist, then a member of the Planning Commission.
Methodology
•In 2011, it was decided in the Planning Commission, that the national poverty line will be raised in accordance with the recommendations of an expert group chaired by the late Suresh Tendulkar (then professor of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics). That is the poverty line we use in estimating poverty in the table. As it happens, this poverty line was comparable at the time to the international poverty line (estimated by the World Bank), of $1.09 (now raised to $1.90 to account for inflation) person per day.
•Based on the Tendulkar poverty line, the poverty estimates for 2004-05 and 2011-12 are to be found in the Planning Commission’s own estimates using the CES of those years. Hence, we have extended the 2011-12 poverty line for each State and used the consumption expenditure reported by the PLFS to estimate a consistent poverty head count ratio (i.e., incidence of poverty in the population) as well as the absolute number of the poor. We feel confident about using the PLFS, because in the absence of CES data, the PLFS can be used to estimate the incidence of poverty. It also collects the household monthly per capita consumption expenditure data based on the Mixed Recall Period methodology. Similar to the CES, the PLFS (PLFS annual report, 2019-20, page 6) also asks the household questions about expenses on health, clothing and bedding, education, footwear and consumer durables for a 365 day recall period — prior to the day of the survey; but for non-durable consumption goods/services — including expenses on food, housing and conveyance, etc. — its question expects a recall period of 30 days prior to the day of survey. We naturally updated the Tendulkar poverty line, using the Consumer Price Index for each State to 2019-20, to arrive at the estimate for the last year before COVID-19.
An urban and rural rise
•What is stunning is that for the first time in India’s history of estimating poverty, there is a rise in the incidence of poverty since 2011-12. The important point is that this is consistent with the NSO’s CES data for 2017-18 that was leaked data. The leaked data showed that rural consumption between 2012 and 2018 had fallen by 8%, while urban consumption had risen by barely 2%. Since the majority of India’s population (certainly over 65%) is rural, poverty in India is also predominantly rural. Remarkably, by 2019-20, poverty had increased significantly in both the rural and urban areas, but much more so in rural areas (from 25% to 30%).
•It is also for the first time since the estimation of poverty began in India on a consistent basis, that the absolute number of poor has risen: from 217 million in 2012 to 270 million in 2019-20 in rural areas; and from 53 million to 71 million in the urban areas; or a total increase of the absolute poor of about 70 million.
•It is important here to recall two facts: between 1973 and 1993, the absolute number of poor had remained constant (at about 320 million poor), despite a significant increase in India’s total population. Between 1993 and 2004, the absolute number of poor fell by a marginal number (18 million) from 320 million to 302 million, during a period when the GDP growth rate had picked up after the economic reforms.
•It is for the first time in India’s history since the CES began that we have seen an increase in the absolute numbers of the poor, between 2012-13 and 2019-20.
•The second fact is that for the first time ever, between 2004-05 and 2011-12, the number of the poor fell, and that too by a staggering 133 million, or by over 19 million per year. This was accounted for by what has come to be called India’s ‘dream run’ of growth: over 2004 and 2014, the GDP growth rate had averaged 8% per annum — a 10-year run that was not sustained thereafter. By contrast, not only has the incidence of poverty increased since then, but the absolute increase in poverty is totally unprecedented.
The contributory factors
•The reasons for increased poverty since 2013 are not far to seek. While the economy maintained some growth momentum till 2015, the monumental blunder of demonetisation followed by a poorly planned and hurriedly introduced Goods and Services Tax, both delivered body blows to the unorganised sector and Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises. The economic slowdown followed. None of the four engines of growth was firing after that. Private investment fell from 31% inherited by the new government, to 28% of GDP by 2019-20. Public expenditure was constrained by a silent fiscal crisis. Exports, which had never fallen in absolute dollar terms for a quarter century since 1991, actually fell below the 2013-14 level ($315 billion) for five years. Consumption stagnated and household savings rates fell. Joblessness increased to a 45-year high by 2017-18 (by the usual status), and youth (15-29 years of age) saw unemployment triple from 6% to 18% between 2012 and 2018. Real wages did not increase for casual or regular workers over the same period, hardly surprising when job seekers were increasing but jobs were not at anywhere close to that rate. Hence, consumer expenditure fell, and poverty increased.
•Poverty is expected to rise further during the COVID-19 pandemic after the economy has contracted.
📰 Providing horizontal quota: the Bihar way
The case for reservations for women and transgender persons in State jobs and higher education
•The Bihar government recently announced 33% horizontal reservation for women in State engineering and medical colleges. While reservation for Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) is referred to as vertical reservation, horizontal reservation refers to the equal opportunity provided to other categories of beneficiaries, such as women, veterans, the transgender community, and individuals with disabilities, cutting through the vertical categories.
•Bihar at present has 60% reservation in the State higher educational institutions along the six vertical categories (SCs, STs, EWS and so on). The newly announced reservation for women in engineering and medical seats will not be in addition to this; it will instead be distributed across all the vertical categories, including the non-reserved 40% seats open to all. For example, if an engineering college has 100 reserved seats for STs, 33 of those seats will have to be filled with ST women. Article 15(3) of the Constitution allows governments to make special provisions for women and children.
Dropping out of the workforce
•This initiative should be welcomed and adopted across sectors, departments, and States given that India’s female labour force participation (FLFP) rate is consistently declining and is worryingly low. World Bank data show that the FLFP came down to 21% in 2019 from 31.79% in 2005.
•As per the Bihar Economic Survey 2019-20, the State’s FLFP rate was abysmal compared to the all-India average. Only 6.4% and 3.9% women were employed in the urban and rural areas of Bihar compared to the all-India figures of 20.4% and 24.6% respectively. The FLFP rate needs to be treated cautiously though as it doesn’t take into account unpaid work (majorly performed by women) or the role played by social barriers like caste in blocking employment opportunities for women like owning a shop.
•Patriarchal control of women and systemic gender discrimination cannot be defeated by government intervention alone; State welfare schemes can go a long way in challenging them. The Bihar government needs to work towards reducing the female and male school dropout rate and ensure quality education at the primary and secondary level. In addition, initiatives like reservation of seats, when implemented properly, could become an important driver for improving the FLFP.
Improving representation
•In the last three decades, Bihar has implemented various initiatives to empower women and improve their representation in various fields. When Lalu Prasad was the Chief Minister in 1992, Bihar had announced two consecutive days of menstrual leave for women employees in government services. In 2006, under Nitish Kumar, Bihar became the first State to reserve 50% seats for women in Panchayati Raj institutions even though the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution, which came into force in 1993, mandated only one-third seats for them. This was later imitated by several other States such as Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Chhattisgarh.
•In 2013, the Bihar government made a provision for 50% reservation for women in cooperative societies and reserved 35% seats for them in police recruitment. The second initiative led to a swift jump in the number of women officers in the police department to 25.3% in 2020, more than double the national average of 10.3%, from 3.3% in 2015. In 2016, the government extended the 35% reservation for women to all government jobs in Bihar for which direct recruitment is made.
•In 2006, a scheme called the Mukhyamantri Balika Cycle Yojana was launched for Class 9 and 10 girl students. This was India’s first scaled up conditional cash transfer programme for secondary education of girls. The enrolment of girl students went up after this scheme. The Bihar government also provides ₹50,000 in installments to girl students to support their studies and other needs till graduation under the Mukhyamantri Kanya Utthan Yojana. This is an incentive-based scheme to encourage girls to complete education and delay marriage. According to the National Family Health Survey-5, the State’s literacy rate among girl children rose to 61.1% in 2019-20 from 56.9% in 2015-16.
More jobs for women
•While the Bihar government has taken some laudable steps for the empowerment of women, the low female literacy rate and FLFP rate are of concern. One of the important factors for the low FLFP rate is the lack of employment opportunities for women after matriculation and graduation. The India Human Development Survey-II found that women with low levels of education and from rural areas are relatively more active in the labour market compared to women with middle or high school education. Therefore, the Bihar government needs to ensure that women don’t fall out of the labour market as they become more educationally qualified.
•One way this can be done is by filling up pending vacancies in the health sector, police force, teaching and other government departments as at least 35% of these posts will go to women. The government should also do away with hiring workers on contract and make all the current contractual workers permanent.
•Evidence points out that increasing women’s participation in the workforce to the level of men boosts the economy. In light of this, it is important for the government to make more and more jobs available for women. The Bihar government should also extend the engineering and medical quota for women to all institutions of higher education, including private colleges and universities. Further, the quota allotted to them can be increased to 40-45%, if not 50%, and the category can be renamed as ‘women and transgender persons’. Other State governments and the Union government should follow the Bihar government’s lead and introduce horizontal quota for women (and in addition, for transgender persons) in higher educational institutions as well as State employment as these measures will go a long way in reducing gender disparity in the country.
📰 A confident exit from Afghanistan
It is the U.S.’s belief that the Taliban won’t harm its interests that has propelled its exit
•Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. is not getting out of Afghanistan a defeated nation. It stayed there as long as it needed to, as President Joe Biden stated, achieving its objective “to degrade the terrorist threat to keep Afghanistan from becoming a base from which attacks could be continued against the United States.”
•The U.S.’s exit from Afghanistan represents a fundamental shift in its strategic objectives. As Vanda Felbab-Brown observes in her blog dated April 15, 2021 in Brookings Institution, the U.S.’s decision is the right one. It is time for it to move on and focus on more important strategic priorities such as “threats from China, an aggressive Russia, North Korea, and Iran — as well as zoonotic pandemics”.
Stopping spread of communism
•By exiting Afghanistan, the U.S. has left the problem of containing what remains of the Taliban’s brand of Islamic fundamentalism to its concerned neighbours. The most aggrieved by this exit will be the Afghans who, after enduring 20 years of conflict, were looking forward to better times, but are instead being abandoned by the U.S. This is what happened to the South Vietnamese when the U.S. withdrew from the Vietnam war in 1973. The U.S.’s seemingly messy exit then concealed a victory against global communism that two shrewd and ruthless men — President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger — conjured in just under four years between 1969 and 1973.
•At the start of the big U.S. engagement in Vietnam following the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed by the U.S. Congress in August 1964, which authorised the President to deploy armed forces in Southeast Asia, there was a real fear among Americans that revolutionary communism, spearheaded by the Soviet Union and China, would take over one country after another in Asia and that Vietnam would be one more country to fall if not checked.
•Fortunately for Nixon, soon after becoming the American President in 1969, the ideological differences between the Soviet Union and China came out in the open and led to a border dispute. It is here that Nixon saw his chance to drive them further apart by reaching out to China through Romania and Pakistan.
•In her 2005 paper, ‘Nixon, Kissinger, and the “Soviet Card” in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971-1974,’ Evelyn Goh, citing declassified documents, wrote about how the U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, in his first secret trip to Beijing in July 1971, assured Premier Zhou Enlai that the U.S. government “would gradually withdraw U.S. troops as the war in Vietnam ended and as relations with China improved”. The paper was published in the official journal of Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Diplomatic History.
•Following up on Kissinger’s secret visit to China, Nixon went there in 1972 on his much publicised ‘the week that changed the world’ tour paving the way for a ‘safe’ U.S. exit from Vietnam in 1973. This was no small victory for Nixon. With China almost wholly on his side, the U.S.’s principal enemy, the Soviet Union, stood alone. This practically eliminated American fears of communism overrunning the world or of Vietnam falling into communist hands.
Drawing parallels
•Something similar has happened in Afghanistan. With the kind of surveillance that the U.S. and its allies are able to mount on countries and individuals today, it is unlikely that the Taliban will, even if they wrest control of Afghanistan, be in a position to nurture another terrorist like Osama Bin Laden, as they have been accused of doing. It is this confidence, not frustration, that has enabled Mr. Biden to announce American military disengagement in Afghanistan.
📰 Getting back in business in the Indo-Pacific
The choreographed visits of three senior U.S. officials are a part of the Biden administration’s deliberate strategic refocus
•United States President Joe Biden executed a bold diplomatic outreach to the Indo-Pacific region last month through carefully choreographed visits of his three top officials — Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. This is part of a deliberate strategic re-focus, away from the 20 years of Afghanistan and Iraq and towards maritime Asia, where COVID-19, climate change and China are the compelling challenges.
•Assessing what the three American dignitaries sought and actually achieved is instructive in order to appreciate the impressive sweep of diplomacy and military strength of the world’s top power, the United States. Their discussions would surely mould the geopolitical equations in the region.
In East Asia and Oman
•Ms. Sherman’s visit (July 19-27) was probably the most complex since it covered not only Japan, South Korea and Mongolia but also China. Throughout her trip, she reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to working with allies and partners for the promotion of peace and prosperity and upholding a ‘rules-based order’, the code word critical of China’s behaviour. Her discussions with Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Mori Takeo, covered not only the present state of the Japan-U.S. alliance but also other issues including Myanmar and COVID-19. In addition, she participated in a trilateral meeting involving Japan and South Korea, perhaps in a bid to smoothen tensions afflicting the two east Asian neighbours.
•By visiting Ulaanbaatar, Ms. Sherman became the highest U.S. dignitary to visit Mongolia since 2016. Despite its close relationship with Beijing, Mongolia looks for devices to assert its independence. So, the opportunity to discuss its needs and concerns with the new administration was valuable. In Tianjin, China, she held discussions with Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng, her counterpart, and was also received by Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Her main mission was to convey that the U.S. welcomed competition but did not seek confrontation with China. She also discussed forthrightly the dismal human rights situation in Xinjiang and logistics for a possible Biden-Xi Jinping meeting at the G20 summit in Rome in October.
Southeast Asian dynamics
•The visit by Mr. Austin (July 23-30) covering three important ASEAN member-states — Singapore, Vietnam and the Philippines — turned out to be the most productive in that it reiterated the necessity for a U.S. military presence in the region. As the Pentagon chief, Mr. Austin is heard with attention, particularly when he speaks with the candour of a veteran general. “Beijing’s claim to the vast majority of the South China Sea has no basis in international law,” he aptly asserted, while delivering the Fullerton Lecture on July 27. He listed China’s other objectionable actions, including “aggression against India”. And then he sent out the key signal to Beijing: “We will not flinch when our interests are threatened. Yet we do not seek confrontation.”
•This seems to have resonated, as Mr. Austin’s discussions with leaders of the three countries went off exceptionally well. In a joint statement, Singapore and the U.S. agreed that America’s presence in the region is “vital for its peace, prosperity and stability”. The U.S. side appreciated Singapore’s logistical support to U.S. military aircraft and vessels, while Singapore benefits from the arrangement of an air force fighter training detachment hosted in Guam as well as new training facilities inside the U.S. Singapore could modulate its current inclination to move closer to China.
•Mr. Austin encouraged Vietnam to develop closer defence cooperation with the U.S. A new memorandum of understanding was signed to resolve the war legacy issues by creating a database to accelerate the search for those still missing in action (MIA). Mr. Austin’s visits to Singapore and Vietnam will be followed shortly by U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. The Philippines leg produced a notable result as Manila agreed to full restoration of the Visiting Forces Agreement which provides the legal foundation for the U.S. military presence in that country.
In South Asia and Kuwait
•Mr. Blinken’s trip to Delhi and Kuwait (July 26-29) drew attention for its positive outcomes. The India visit was more in the nature of a consultative, confirmatory dialogue rather than one that results in signing of new agreements. His discussions with the Prime Minister, the National Security Adviser and the External Affairs Minister brought out clearly that the areas of convergence between the two nations are expanding and the areas of divergence are shrinking. His repeated observation that the friendship with India is one of the closest that the U.S. has, was music to Indian ears.
•On Afghanistan, the proximity of perceptions was emphasised, although this did not conceal the differences in their perspectives. On the Indo-Pacific, however, the convergence was clear, with the two Foreign Ministers agreeing to cooperate on a range of geopolitical and geo-economic issues without uttering the “C” word even once in their smoothly-managed joint press conference. By clarifying that the Quad was not “a military alliance”, Mr. Blinken spoke the truth, tipping his hat to India’s strategic autonomy. He defined the Quad as four like-minded countries “coming together to work collectively … on regional challenges, while reinforcing international rules and values”.
The takeaways
•Together, what do the three visits signal? First, that America’s China policy and the Rest of the Indo-Pacific policy will run in tandem, with inner consistency ensured by Mr. Biden. Second, Washington maintains a tough attitude towards Beijing, but it desires to keep the doors open for dialogue. The relationship with China is marked by three characteristics — adversarial, competitive and cooperative — and is likely to stay that way. Third, the U.S. is willing to resist and counter China firmly, but with the full engagement of and contribution by the like-minded states of the region. Therefore, Mr. Austin’s exposition of “integrated deterrence”, defined as “using every military and non-military tool in our toolbox, in lock-step with our allies and partners....”, assumes significance.
•In short, the U.S. is back and is willing to lead — but the region will have to seriously step up too and participate actively to maintain peace and prosperity. Asia can ill-afford to be a reticent bystander.
