MARITIME : PLAYING THE GREAT GAME (AN AIMLESS EXERCISE IN FUTILITY}

SOURCE:
http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/playing-the-great-game/507723.html


                            AN AIMLESS  EXERCISE IN FUTILITY

At sea: Costs involved to sustain ‘heightened’ maritime activity are immense.

MARITIME : Playing the Great Game 

                                                                            BY
                      Sandeep Dikshit

THE three years of the Narendra Modi government have seen a shifting of the goal posts of the Great Game in South Asia. The British navy’s muscle at one time brooked no contest; hence the maritime domain posed no challenges. The British instead played the Great Game on terra firma,  for it was here that it suspected a challenge, especially from Russia and, for a brief time, when Napolean planned march to India till he ran aground in Egypt.

 For most of the time, Independent India conducted the Great Game on land: keen interest in Afghanistan and Nepal, the Bangladesh war, the annexation of Sikkim and even its military intervention in Sri Lanka was a short sea-hop away. But for the intervention in the Maldives in 1987, India kept away from dipping its toes in the maritime domain though 90 per cent of its trade, including all oil supplies, came from the sea.

There was a good reason for the aversion. India had no axe to grind beyond the Malacca Straits. Neither did it need to foray much into the western Indian Ocean: there never has been any disruption of oil supplies from Arabia to warrant a preemptive naval presence. It, however, kept its ethnicity-based diaspora links alive with Mauritius and the Maldives by occasionally handing over used military hardware and kept ships deployed in the Gulf of Aden to tackle piracy. 

The Modi government promises to revolutionise this somnolescent state of affairs. It has made much of a berthing arrangement for its ships with Singapore. On his visit to Seychelles, Mr Modi had come away with a solemn assurance of being given an island on lease for “developmental purposes”. There is little doubt it would evolve into a military foothold for India. 

More than his other third world Asian colleagues, Mr Modi has taken to heart frequent US exhortations for India to pull its weight in the region. There was enough on India’s plate anyway: its humanitarian mission in Afghanistan, the constant prodding by Pakistan and China, its foray into Africa and, of course, the usual bread and butter of international relations that a middle power like India was fully stretched to cope with due to its abysmally small diplomatic corps and an asset-starved Navy.

The Manmohan Singh government wisely kept most of US homilies on a slow flame: it backed out from a quasi-naval alliance with Japan, Australia and the US; maintained a calibrated intensity of ties with Vietnam; and the file on the three military pacts with the US kept shuffling between the ministries and the PMO.

Now, as the Navy Chief put it, warships and aircraft are deployed from the Gulf of Aden to the Western Pacific on an almost 24x7 basis. He justified this philosophy because it ensures a high degree of presence, visibility and situational awareness in important maritime regions across the globe. 

But what are the costs involved to sustain this heightened maritime activity? Apart from the usual expenditure on personnel and fuel, besides the increased wear and tear of assets, massive capital expenditure upwards of Rs 1 lakh crore may be required to match words with deeds.  

However, the Modi government is missing a trick by not interweaving naval muscle with exploitation of economic opportunities. It may be treading the same path as the British when they made financially ruinous military forays into the badlands of Afghanistan as part of the Great Game in the 19th century with no commensurate financial returns.

Since Mr Modi is benchmarking the Indian Navy’s forays with those of the Chinese navy, it would be worthwhile to examine how both compare in extracting money from the military investment. On its Pacific coast, China stepped up deployment when India was investing all its vigour in facing off with its army on the Doklam plateau. Beijing’s testing of its military prowess on the Pacific coast was not meant only as a signal to Japan, but also to avert the possibility of a possible US-Japan interdiction of its supply routes of oil from a massive, newly-minted terminal at Vladivostok in case Sino-West ties nose-dived.

While India imports or has substantial foreign inputs in its high-end naval assets, China’s complete mastery over submarines has allowed it to innovate in underwater robotics that is useful for the offshore petroleum industry and the mining of undersea metals. China is well on its way to extracting much sought-after minerals from a UN-allotted 75,000 sq km of seabed for poly-metallic nodules. It is not the only player. Canada will mine sulphide resources while Korea, Japan and the US have also invested in deep-sea prospecting.

In sum, like the Europeans who used the navy as a battering ram to open unwilling economic doors, the Chinese are also marrying security deployment with economic returns: the oil-rich South China Sea is a prime example. Its more ambitious Maritime Silk Road too has an economic approach.

India, in contrast, may soon find itself in an overstretched defensive position, struggling to retain its earlier salience. The Maldives — where the Indian Navy once fended off a mercenary take-over attempt — has signed a Free Trade Agreement with China while keeping India in the dark. And this island-nation receives subsidised ration and water from India! New Delhi’s repeated requests to Sri Lanka for taking over the Trincomalee oil tanks and the airport at Hambantota is getting a feeble response. 

The latest news is that China may even have turned around Seychelles.

No Great Game can be played only by military tools and with no economic returns to boot. 

India has no economic doors to knock down. Its Navy is good enough to thwart all challenges and has traditionally evacuated Indians in distress on foreign shores or assisted neighbours suffering from a natural calamity. Even in the 16-country ASEAN Plus it is considered the most reluctant on a free trade agreement. Had India been a big power, Mr Modi’s military vision in the high seas would have been called imperial overstretch. Currently,  he seems to be locking the country into permanent antagonisms with no commensurate returns.