📰 Supersonic missile-assisted torpedo system successfully launched: DRDO
It’s designed to enhance anti-submarine warfare capability far beyond the conventional range of the torpedo
•A supersonic missile-assisted torpedo system developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) was successfully launched from the Wheeler Island in Odisha on Monday.
•“The system is a next generation missile-based standoff torpedo delivery system. During the mission, full-range capability of the missile was successfully demonstrated. The system has been designed to enhance anti-submarine warfare capability far beyond the conventional range of the torpedo,” the DRDO said in a statement.
•It was a textbook launch, where the entire trajectory was monitored by the electro-optic telemetry system, various range radars, including the down range instrumentation and down range ships, the DRDO said. The missile carried a torpedo, parachute delivery system and release mechanisms.
•This canister-based missile system consists of advanced technologies - two-stage solid propulsion, electro-mechanical actuators and precision inertial navigation. The missile is launched from ground mobile launcher and it can cover a range of distances.
•While a number of DRDO laboratories developed various technologies for this system, industry participated in the development and production of various sub-systems, the statement said.
•Defence Minister Rajnath Singh termed the development of the system a perfect example of building futuristic defence systems in the country.
📰 India lays emphasis on UNCLOS
Govt. says committed to promoting a free, open, rules-based order rooted in law
•India remained committed to promoting a free, open and rules-based order rooted in international law and undaunted by coercion, the Centre informed Parliament on Monday while reiterating support for the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
•“Government of India is committed to safeguarding maritime interests and strengthening security in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) to ensure a favourable and positive maritime environment,” Minister of State for Defence Ajay Bhatt said in a written reply in the Lok Sabha.
•India also supported freedom of navigation and overflight, and unimpeded commerce based on the principles of international law, reflected notably in the UNCLOS 1982. As a State party to the UNCLOS, India promoted utmost respect for the UNCLOS, which established the international legal order of the seas and oceans, the statement said.
•India developed its maritime cooperation with regional partners in consonance with the Government’s vision of Security and Growth for All in the Region (SAGAR), Mr. Bhatt said. The steps taken include ‘Mission based Deployments’ of naval ships and aircraft to enhance Maritime Domain Awareness, promote maritime security and address contingencies that may arise, he stated.
Joint exercises
•In addition, India proactively engaged with regional and extra-regional maritime forces through multilateral exercises, joint surveillance, coordinated patrols among others to promote maritime security in the region in an inclusive and cooperative manner, the statement added.
It is pegged to the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, a development with a far-reaching impact on global politics
•The year 2021 will most likely go down in history as one of the pivotal years in the post-Cold War period. It may be too early to say how the American withdrawal from Afghanistan would shape regional geopolitics in Asia and the great power contest between the United States and its competitors. But it is certainly one of those developments that will have a far-reaching impact on global politics. There are two dominant narratives about the American withdrawal. One is that the U.S. exited the country on its own will as it is undertaking a larger realignment in its foreign policy. This argument rejects any comparison between the American pull-back from Vietnam in 1975 and its retreat from Afghanistan this year. The other one is that the U.S. failed to win the war in Afghanistan and, like in the case of Vietnam, was forced to withdraw from the country. This writer, who wrote in these pages in February 2019 that “America has lost the Afghan war”, shares the second view. The reorientation that is under way in American foreign policy, focused on China, certainly played a role in the Afghan withdrawal. But that does not obscure the fact that the world’s most powerful military and economic power failed to win the war in Afghanistan against the Taliban even after fighting them for 20 years.
Examples from history
•Superpowers suffering military setbacks at the hands of weaker forces would create a perception of great power fatigue, if not weakness, that would prompt both their allies and rivals to rethink their strategic assessments. There are ample examples in history. Take the post-War world. Britain, whose imperial glory came to an end with the Second World War, took time to come to terms with that reality. Joined by France, it backed Israel’s misadventure in the Suez in 1956, only to be repudiated by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Despite making military advances, the Anglo-French-Israeli troops had to withdraw from the Suez and Sinai of Egypt — a development that many historians believe marked the end of British influence in the region. Britain has never got West Asia back.
•In the 1970s, the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam was read in Moscow as a weak moment for the Western bloc in the Cold War. It prompted the Soviets to act more aggressively. In 1978, communists, backed by the Soviet Union, seized power in Kabul and a year later, Moscow sent troops to Afghanistan, orchestrated a coup and installed an ally in Kabul’s presidential palace. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989, after failing to defeat the Mujahideen and Islamist guerillas who were backed by the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, dealt a fatal blow to the Soviet power. Within months, communist regimes in Eastern Europe started crumbling, eventually leading to the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
•This is not to argue that the U.S. is facing an immediate threat to its superpower status. With seamless access to the world’s two vast oceans and definite borders and a continent under its command, the U.S. is far more powerful and agile than the U.K. of 1956 and the Soviet Union of 1989. But the gradual erosion of the U.S.’s ability in shaping geopolitical outcomes in faraway regions has already shaken up the structures of American unipolarity. The Afghan withdrawal was not an isolated incident. In Iraq and Libya, it failed to establish political stability and order after invasions. It could not stop Russia taking Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. In Syria, it was outmanoeuvred by Vladimir Putin. Finally, the way American troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban to power strengthened this perception of great power fatigue and emboldened America’s rivals to openly challenge the U.S.-centric “rules-based order.”
The three challengers
•Almost four months after its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the U.S. is already facing intense geopolitical competition from three of its rivals. Russia has amassed about 175,000 troops on its border with Ukraine. Western intelligence agencies claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin could order an invasion of Ukraine, which the Kremlin sees, as scholars at Carnegie observed, “as a Western aircraft carrier parked just across southern Russia”. Mr. Putin has also backed Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko over the refugee crisis on the Polish border of the European Union. From the migrant crisis in Belarus to the troop mobilisation in Ukraine, Mr. Putin is unmistakably sending a message to the West that the region stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, the eastern flank of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is a Russian sphere of influence.
•Cut to West Asia. Iran, which has stepped up its nuclear programme after the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 nuclear deal, has refused to hold direct talks with the U.S. The Biden administration has promised to lift nuclear sanctions on Iran if the Islamic Republic returns to the deal. But Iran insists that the U.S. should first remove the sanctions and give assurance that a future President would not violate the terms of the agreement. As both sides stick to their positions, the attempts to revive the agreement through talks in Vienna have hit a stone wall, with risks of a collapse.
•Enter the South China Sea. China is sending dozens of fighter jets into the so-called Taiwan Air Defence Identification Zone almost on a weekly basis, triggering speculation on whether Beijing was considering taking the self-ruled island by force. As the U.S. is trying to shift its focus to the Indo-Pacific region to tackle China’s rise (Mr. Biden announced the AUKUS partnership — trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. — within two weeks of America’s Afghan pull-out), China is becoming more and more assertive in its periphery, seeking strategic depth.
Tough choices
•The U.S. is facing tough choices. The pivot to Asia has limited America’s options elsewhere. For example, what could the U.S. do to deter Mr. Putin from making the next military move in Europe. Mr. Biden has understandably ruled out a military confrontation with Russia over Ukraine. What the U.S. and its European allies could possibly do is to impose harsher sanctions on Russia. But sanctions slapped on Russia after the Crimean annexation in 2014 did little to deter Mr. Putin from taking more military steps. Economic sanctions will also drive Russia further into the Chinese embrace, strengthening the Eurasian partnership, which the U.S., during the Cold War, saw as a critical challenge to American interests. With regard to Iran, if the U.S. blinks first and lifts the sanctions, it could be read as another sign of weakness. If it does not and if the Vienna talks collapse, Iran could continue to enrich uranium to a higher purity, attaining a de facto nuclear power status without a bomb (like Japan), which would be against America’s declared goals in West Asia.
•The Afghan withdrawal and the downsizing in West Asia suggest that America’s strategic focus has shifted towards China. Ideally, the U.S. would not prefer to get involved in another conflict as the structures of the new Cold War are taking shape — this explains the reluctance to use hard power. But the inconclusive wars the U.S. fought in recent years and the associated great power fatigue have opened up space for its regional rivals, who are trying to maximise their influence, even at the risk of triggering more conflicts. This transition, from American unipolarity into something that is still unknown, has put America in a strategic dilemma: Should it stay focused on China, preparing itself for the next bipolar contest; or continue to act as a global policeman of the liberal order that is under attack from multiple fronts?
📰 A global gateway to creating links, not dependencies
With its new Global Gateway strategy, the European Union is showing how it can aid investors, partners and people
•In May this year at the Leader’s Meeting in Porto, the European Union (EU) and India adopted the Connectivity Partnership, expanding our cooperation across the digital, energy, transport, and people-to-people sectors. Our partnership is centred on transparency, sustainability, equity and inclusivity for the benefit of both regions, in order to create links, not dependencies.
What exists and more
•With India, we already have a strong ongoing collaboration on sustainable infrastructure. For instance, the European Investment Bank (EIB) has financed over €4.31 billion in the country since 1993, including significant connectivity projects. New operations are in the pipeline, such as further EIB investments in urban metro systems.
•The EU is working in the same spirit across the world. Earlier this year, the EU and Brazil inaugurated a new fibre-optic cable to carry terabytes of data faster and more securely between our two continents. This helps scientists in Europe and Latin America to work together, on issues from climate modelling to disaster mitigation. The cable starts in the EU, where the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became the gold standard of data protection, and ends in Brazil, which recently introduced a similar law. The cable links two continents together building a data economy that respects the privacy of its citizens’ data. This is how Europe approaches connectivity — bringing partners together without creating unwanted dependencies.
In Africa
•Last week, the EIB and the cooperation agencies of France, Spain and Germany joined the European Commission in Togo to identify projects to finance in the energy, transport and digital sectors. During the mission, the EIB signed a €100 million credit line to support African small and medium businesses to recover from the pandemic and to seize growth opportunities from the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
•These are just examples of what we call Team Europe, bringing together all those who work with our partners to support the green and digital transition.
•Since the start of the von der Leyen Commission, the twin transitions of green and digital in Europe have been at the forefront. With the new Global Gateway strategy, the EU continues to promote the green and digital transition at the global level.
•In a world of interdependence, where supply chains are showing their fragility, we know how important connectivity is. We have also seen how the links that connect us can also be weaponised. Data flows, energy supplies, rare earths, vaccines and semi-conductors are all instruments of power in today’s world. Which is why we need to ensure that global connectivity and access to these flows is based on rules and international standards.
•While flows in goods may be ideologically neutral, the rules which govern them are intertwined with political values. Particularly in the digital domain, Europe and other democracies must ensure that the standards of the future reflect our core values.
No ‘debt traps’
•Europe wants to reduce excessive dependencies and be more autonomous in areas such as the production of computer chips. Our autonomy is reinforced if all our partners have alternatives when making their investment decisions. Europe’s calling card and offer to our partner countries to address infrastructure investment needs is financially, socially, and environmentally sustainable connectivity. No ‘white elephants’ and no ‘debt traps’, but projects that are sustainable and serve the needs of local populations.
•For Europe to master the connectivity challenge, it needs not only principles and frameworks but also adequate resources and clear priorities.
•First, we will use the resources of Team Europe, the EU and its Member States in a smarter, more efficient way. The Global Gateway will mobilise investments of more than €300 billion in public and private funds for global infrastructure development between 2021 and 2027, financing the climate and digital transition, as well as health, education and research. We will mobilise half of the investments with the help of the EU budget and the other half indicates the planned investments from European financial institutions and Member States’ development finance institutions.
•We have remodelled our financial tools to provide the firepower that can blend loans and grants and provide the guarantees needed today. We put in place mechanisms to filter out abnormally low tenders and protect against offers that benefit from distortive foreign subsidies, which undermine the level playing field. We will also ensure that EU internal programmes — InvestEU, our research programme, Horizon Europe and the Connecting Europe Facility — will support Global Gateway, alongside Member States’ development banks, national promotional banks and export credit agencies.
An export credit facility
•Of course, capital from the private sector will remain the biggest source of investment in infrastructure. That is why we are exploring the possibility of establishing a European Export Credit Facility to complement the existing export credit arrangements at the Member State level. This would help ensure a more level-playing field for EU businesses in third country markets, where they increasingly have to compete with foreign competitors that receive large support from their governments.
•Second, on the priorities, Global Gateway has identified a number of flagship projects. These includes the extension to the BELLA (Building the Europe Link to Latin America) cable to the rest of the Latin America, as part of the EU-LAC Digital Alliance; the expansion of the Trans-European Network to improve transport links with the Eastern Partnership and Western Balkan countries and scaled-up funding for the Erasmus+ student exchange programme worldwide. In Africa, along with support for new strategic transport corridors, the EU will mobilise €2.4 billion grants for Sub-Saharan Africa and over €1 billion for North Africa to support renewable energy and the production of renewable hydrogen, which can help meet the EU’s projected demand for clean energy and help partners to do the same.
•At heart, the Global Gateway is about demonstrating how democratic values offer certainty and fairness for investors, sustainability for partners and long-term benefits for people around the world. The EU and India can be leaders in this endeavour.
📰 Home truths on climate change
There is a gap between what the goverment says on the international stage and what it does at home
•At the 26th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the developed countries, which continue to be the most responsible for the destruction of the biosphere, resorted to their usual tactics of bullying the less developed world to accept higher targets for controlling greenhouse emissions when they haven’t done so themselves. In fact, they have failed to even implement their earlier commitments towards funds and technology transfer.
•The reasons for the climate crisis affecting the world can be found in the reckless drive for profit maximisation by global capitalism led by the U.S. and its developed country allies. This has resulted in ecological destruction in the name of development. The effort in Glasgow was to push ‘net zero’ emissions by 2050 as a standard across countries, without taking into account the cumulative emissions for which the Global North is mainly responsible. The effort by some to equate India and other developing countries with the U.S. and Europe as the worst “emitters” is also misplaced precisely for this reason of cumulative emissions. In its model of country-wise cumulative emissions, carbonbrief.org uses population as a factor in its report of October 5, 2021. It finds that “the U.S., Russia, the U.K., Japan and Canada account for 10% of the world’s population, but 39% of cumulative emissions”, while China, India, Brazil and Indonesia account for 42% of the world’s population but just 23% of cumulative emissions.
Looking inward
•To find sustainable solutions, in addition to resisting the imperialist mindset of the developed world, we have to also look at the internal policies of the governments of developing countries. Most of these governments are committed to capitalist appropriation of natural and national resources. For example, the official delegation from India may have fought hard to protect sovereign decisions on the use of fossil-based energy requirements from the hypocritical demands of the Global North for additional commitments against use of coal. But in India, the government’s coal use policy is driven by its determination to hand over mineral resources, including coal, to the corporate sector. Even as India boasts of switching to solar energy to meet its emission control targets, it is privatising the coal industry, auctioning coal mines and encouraging open cast mines without the guarantee of end use, but for commercialisation and export. Thus, on the Glasgow stage, India’s ruling regime wears the crown of a developing country fighting against the aggression of developed countries on climate change responsibilities, but policies at home reflect the interests of domestic and foreign capital — coal is used as a commodity for profit, not necessarily for any development purposes.
•It is a similar story on the declaration signed by over 140 countries to “halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030.” India did not sign the agreement on the ground that the declaration linked trade to land use and trade falls under the purview of the World Trade Organization. However, within India, the promotion of policies towards corporatisation of agriculture and the encouragement to contract farming on conditions set by big agri-businesses undermines food security. The pursuit of such policies domestically damages the credibility of India’s stand on international platforms.
•The same declaration has important commitments to “recognise and (extend) support to smallholders, indigenous peoples and local communities.” It was convenient for the government not to sign this since it is following policies that are opposed to these commitments. In a slew of amendments proposed to existing laws and policies, the government has moved to monetise, privatise, commercialise and even militarise forests, trampling over the recognised rights of forest communities and specifically tribal communities. These measures are reflected in the proposed Forest Policy of 2018, the suggested amendments to the Forest Act of 1927, the amendments to the Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980, amendments to the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act of 1957, the changes proposed to the Coal Bearing Areas (Acquisition and Development) Act of 1957, and the adoption of the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Rules. All these changes strip the Gram Sabhas of any voice in decision-making processes, even though they are affected directly, and make it easier to handover forests to the private sector. These policies have accentuated the diversion of forests for a variety of projects. From 2013-2019, it is estimated that 96% of tree cover loss occurred in natural forests. On the other hand, the Forest Rights Act of 2006, which recognises the rights and duties of Adivasis and traditional forest-dwelling communities, is being diluted with a high rejection of claims.
Setting an example
•In the 2015 COP in Paris, the Government of India had promised that it would develop carbon sinks to the equivalent of 2 billion to 3 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2030. The government set up a Green Mission for the regeneration of forests, afforestation, additional forest and tree cover, and so on. The Estimates Committee of Parliament in its 2018-2019 report on progress towards these goals slammed the government stating that it “deplores the way that an issue pertaining to the existence of the earth is being handled.” The report stated that to fulfil the promise of sequestering the CO2 target, 30 million hectares of land are required to plant indigenous trees, not monocultures or plantations as is being done at present. Where will this land come from? Planting trees along national highways or along railway tracks as is being planned will be a very small component of the required target. At present, the lands of forest-dwelling communities are being forcibly taken away and used for plantations. The Gram Sabhas are not being consulted. The method of making those communities which have the least responsibility for carbon emissions pay with their lands and livelihoods is embedded in India’s climate change strategies as far as forest policies are concerned.
•The clear gap between what is portrayed as a nationalist fight on the international stage and what is followed at home is even more stark with the present regime. The government must reverse its pro-corporate policies reflected in privatisation. It needs to call off its undeclared war on the Forest Rights Act and constitutional provisions that protect Adivasi communities. It is only with the cooperation of those who have protected forests that India can make a real contribution in the efforts to control climate change and be an example to the rest of the world.
