MARITIME - SOUTH CHINA SEA :The World’s Most Important Body of Water

 

                         The four ghosts who haunt                              those troubled waters.

SOURCE:  https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/12/south-china-sea-us-ghosts-strategic-tensions/617380/

https://www.ancient.eu/article/1334/the-seven-voyages-of-zheng-he/

More than most, four men shaped the oft-cited “strategic tensions” over the South China Sea.

The World’s Most Important                 Body of Water

Story by Daniel Yergin

The south china sea is the most important body of water for the world economy—through it passes at least one-third of global trade. It is also the most dangerous body of water in the world, the place where the militaries of the United States and China could most easily collide.

Chinese and American warships have just barely averted several incidents there over the past few years, and the Chinese military has warned off U.S. jets flying above. In July, the two nations carried out competing naval exercises in those waters. Given what is called the growing “strategic rivalry” between Washington and Beijing, the specter of an accident that in turn triggers a larger military confrontation preoccupies strategists in both capitals.

These tensions grow out of a disagreement between the two countries as to whether the South China Sea is Chinese territory, a quarrel that speaks to a deeper dispute about maritime sovereignty, how it is decided upon, and the fundamental rights of movement in those waters.

The standoff over the South China Sea thus has many levels of complexity. It is not simply about one body of water, or a single boundary. As Tommy Koh, a senior Singaporean diplomat who led negotiations to create the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, told me, “the South China Sea is about law, power, and resources, and about history.”

That history is haunted in particular by four ghosts, long-departed men from centuries past whose shadows fall across the South China Sea, their legacies shaping the deepening rivalry in the region; historical figures whose lives and work have framed the disputes about sovereignty and freedom of navigation, the competition of navies, as well as war and its costs.

During the writing of my book, The New Map, I began thinking about these men. When I was speaking on the challenges of globalization and international commerce at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, the commanders of virtually all the world’s navies were there, a galaxy of admirals, all resplendent in their dress uniforms. Among them was Admiral Wu Shengli, the head of China’s navy at the time and the man who was driving its expansion to compete with the American Navy. By then the South China Sea had already become a center of contention. Wu sat in the center of the audience, in the fifth or sixth row, his gaze unwavering throughout.

That was when I started seeing ghosts: that of China’s greatest seafarer, a predecessor to Wu; of the Dutch lawyer who penned the legal brief that now underpins the American argument against China’s claims; of the American admiral whose philosophies offered a foundation for both the U.S. Navy and Chinese maritime expansionism; and of the British writer who argued that the costs of conflict were too high, even for those who would be victorious.

For modern China, claims to the South China Sea center around what is called the “nine-dash line”—literal dashes that, on the Chinese map, hug the coasts of other nations and encompass 90 percent of the waters of the South China Sea. Derived from a map drawn by a Chinese cartographer in 1936 in response to what Beijing calls the “century of humiliation,” the nine-dash line is, according to Shan Zhiqiang, the former editor of China’s National Geography magazine, “now deeply engraved in the hearts and minds of the Chinese people.” Chinese schoolchildren have for decades been taught that their country’s border extends more than a thousand miles to the coast of Malaysia. Beijing’s claims are bolstered by military bases that it has built in recent years on tiny islands and on 3,200 acres of reclaimed land scattered in the middle of the sea.

Beijing bases its claim of “indisputable sovereignty” upon history—that, as an official position paper put it, “Chinese activities in the South China Sea date back to over two thousand years ago.” These “historic claims,” in the words of a Chinese government think tank, have “a foundation in international law, including the customary law of discovery, occupation, and historic title.”

      

Read: What happens when China leads the world

The U.S. replies that, under international law, the South China Sea is an open water—what is often called “Asia’s maritime commons”—for all nations, a view shared by the countries that border its waters, as well as by Australia, Britain, and Japan. As such, says the U.S. State Department, China “has no legal grounds” for its South China claims and “no coherent legal basis” for the nine-dash line. “China’s maritime claims,” a U.S. government policy paper argued this year, “pose the greatest threat to the freedom of the seas in modern times.”

And this brings us to the four ghosts.

Zheng He’s sailing charts were published in in 1628, depicting India and Africa. (Universal History Archive / Getty)

In 1381, during a battle in southwest China, a Muslim boy was captured by soldiers of the Ming dynasty, castrated, and sent to work in the royal household of Prince Zhu Di. As time went on, the boy—renamed Zheng He—grew up to become a confidant of the prince and, eventually, one of his most able military leaders.

When Zhu became emperor, determined that China must be a great maritime power, he ordered a frenetic shipbuilding campaign that launched huge fleets carrying up to 30,000 personnel. They transported both a wide range of Chinese goods and the most advanced ordnance of the day—guns, cannonballs, and rockets. The biggest boats were treasure ships that were as much as 10 times larger in capacity than those Christopher Columbus would captain to the New World almost a century later. These Chinese voyages would take two or three years, with eunuchs in command of each of the fleets. But the commander in chief, above all others, was Zheng. He eventually became known as the Three-Jewel Eunuch, in honor of the “three jewels” central to the dominant Buddhist faith of Zhu’s reign.

Admiral Zheng’s first voyage, in 1405, was put to sea with an armada of more than 250 ships, of which more than 60 were treasure ships. Altogether Zheng commanded seven voyages, some sailing as far as the east coast of Africa, to modern Kenya. Along the way, his fleet would trade Chinese goods and products with the locals, while projecting the power and majesty of China—in Zheng’s words, “making manifest the transforming power of imperial virtue.” One can imagine the impact on those ashore when they caught sight of the approaching giant fleets, and especially the huge treasure ships, with their tail sails filling the skies, their fierce dragon eyes painted on their prows, bearing down on the shore

Upon their return to China, Zheng’s fleets brought back not only a wide variety of products and novelties—including precious stones, spices, camels, and ostriches—but also rulers and ambassadors, who would pay homage and tribute before the emperor. Zheng’s armadas, as the historian John Keay has written, also “demonstrated maritime mastery of the entire Indian Ocean.”

An illustration depicting Zheng He. (Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group / Getty

In 1433, on a final voyage homeward across the Indian Ocean—nine years after the death of his patron, Zhu—Zheng died. The great navy he had built did not long survive him. Eventually, on the orders of the new emperor, China’s fleet, which had numbered at as many as 3,500 ships, was burned. Bureaucrats argued that they were wasting money needed to resist encroaching Mongols in the north (though of course, they also saw the navy as the power base for their great rivals, the eunuchs). The legacy of the Three-Jewel Eunuch was to be expunged from history, the memory of his seaborne exploits almost obliterated.

As China once again turned to the sea in the 21st century, though, Zheng has been resuscitated as the symbol of the country’s traditional engagement and trading relationship with Southeast and South Asia—and as “the most towering maritime figure” in the nation’s history. The admiral was celebrated in 2009 with a widely watched series on Chinese television, and in 2005, on the 600th anniversary of his first voyage, a $50 million museum dedicated to him was opened in Nanjing. A 19-year-old girl from an island off Kenya, distinguished by her seemingly Asian features, was invited to the museum’s opening as a putative descendant of Chinese who had sailed with Zheng, ostensibly living proof of how far-reaching and “manifest” was the Three-Jewel Eunuch’s seagoing prowess. Today, Zheng and his voyages are the great embodiment of “Chinese activities in the South China Sea,” and the claims of history based upon it, his legacy enshrined centuries later in the nine-dash line.

If zheng provided the narrative of China’s historic maritime rights, then the Dutch lawyer and legal theorist Hugo Grotius would provide the opposite, laying the foundations for the concept of free passage through the world’s oceans, and embodying the “rule of law” as opposed to the legacy of history.

Read: How milk tea became a potent anti-China symbol

Though of worldwide import, Grotius’ arguments arose, ironically, from a specific event at one corner of the South China Sea. In 1603, after the burning of China’s fleet and the erasing of the memory of Zheng, Dutch ships attacked a Portuguese vessel in the South China Sea in revenge for Portuguese attacks on Dutch shipping. This marked the beginning of a global struggle between Portugal and the Dutch for control of colonies and, in Southeast Asia, the spice trade. The Portuguese ship was a tempting prize, laden with silk, gold, porcelain, spices, and many other goods.

But when the booty got back to the Netherlands, the Dutch needed legal ammunition to justify the seizure and secure their profit. They turned to Grotius who, although just 21, was already known as a dazzling prodigy—he had entered Leiden University at 11.

In his legal brief, Grotius pulverized the Portuguese argument that the South China Sea was theirs because they had “discovered” the sailing routes to it, as though Zheng He and all of the other eunuch captains, along with the Arab and Southeast Asian merchants before them, had never existed. Instead, Grotius argued for freedom of the seas and of commerce, and asserted that these rights were universal in their application. Thus, he insisted, the Dutch seizure was wholly justified in retaliation for Portuguese interference with Dutch shipping. Part of the brief was published in what became his great work, Mare Liberum, or The Freedom of the Seas. The water was, like air and the sky, the common property of humanity, Grotius wrote. No nation could own them or prevent another from sailing through them. “Every nation,” he declared, “is free to travel to every other nation, and to trade with it.”

A painting of the Dutch lawyer and legal theorist Hugo Grotius, by Jansz van Mierevelt Michiel. (Imagno / Getty)

Grotius went on to occupy several distinguished legal and civic positions. But then, caught on the wrong side in a religious battle in the Netherlands, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Smuggled out of jail in a book chest, he managed to make his way to Paris, where he wrote another landmark book, On the Law of War and Peace, which outlined both the basis of a “just war” and the rules for the conduct of warfare. The economist Adam Smith later said that “Grotius seems to have been the first who attempted to give the world anything like a regular system of natural jurisprudence.”

Much admired by Sweden’s king, Grotius was appointed Sweden’s ambassador to France. On a trip back from Sweden in 1645, he was tossed for three days in the Baltic Sea by a violent storm, wrecking the ship, and Grotius eventually washed up on a beach in northern Germany. There, “the father of the law of the sea,” as he would later be called, died from a calamity at sea. His legacy lived on, however: The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the defining international document governing maritime rules, can be directly traced back to his work.

In 1897, theodore roosevelt, then the assistant secretary of the Navy, traveled up to the U.S. Naval War College. In his lecture there, Roosevelt propounded the argument for a much stronger U.S. Navy—“a first-class fleet of first-class battleships”—as the best guarantor of peace. The speech brought him national attention.

Roosevelt visited the War College for a second purpose as well: to meet with a faculty member, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, who would have more influence on him in regard to naval power than any other single person, and whose spirit pervades today’s disputes over the South China Sea and the collision of U.S. and Chinese naval power.

Despite the objections of his father, a professor at the Army’s West Point military academy, Mahan went to the U.S. Naval Academy. But when he served at sea, his commanders judged him to be deficient in practical command. He did not disagree. “I have known myself too long not to know that I am the man of thought, not the man of action,” Mahan wrote to Roosevelt. But he was determined, as he put it, “to be of some use to a navy, despite adverse reports.” And he would be. Beginning with The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, his many books and articles would make him the world’s most influential theorist of naval strategy.

Read: The end of Hong Kong

Sea power, Mahan wrote, was essential to protect a nation’s commerce, its security, and its position, and it rested on “three pillars”—overseas commerce, naval and merchant fleets, and bases along maritime lanes. The great objective was to assure “command of the sea” and “the overbearing power that can only be exercised by great navies,” which meant the ability to dominate naval passages and the “sea lines of communication.”

His influence on the U.S. was clear and direct. Roosevelt went on to become vice president and then, in September 1901, after the assassination of William McKinley, ascended to the presidency. Roosevelt was relentless in his commitment to a modern navy, culminating with his launch of the Great White Fleet on a round-the-world voyage, which announced America’s new role as a global power.

Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, left, was a major influence on President Theodore Roosevelt, right, pictured acknowledging the salute of warships from the deck of the Algonquin in Charleston Harbour, South Carolina, circa 1902. (Underwood & Underwood / Archive Photos / Getty)

Mahan’s impact was also global. The Japanese translation of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History sold several thousand copies in a matter of days, and he was offered a teaching post at Japan’s Naval Staff College. On a visit to Britain, he received honorary degrees from Cambridge and Oxford and dined with Queen Victoria. Yet no nation took Mahan more to heart than Germany. “I am just now not reading but devouring … Mahan’s book and am trying to learn it by heart,” Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany wrote. “It is on board all my ships and constantly quoted by my captains and officers.”

When Mahan died in 1914, Roosevelt wrote, “There was no one else in his class, or anywhere near it.” Decades later, the strategist Edward Meade Earle noted, “Few persons leave so deep an imprint on world events as that left by Mahan.” That imprint is clear today in China, and particularly as it relates to the South China Sea.

Beijing maintains as a “core interest” that Taiwan is an integral part of China. In 1996, Beijing, fearing that the lead candidate in Taiwan’s presidential election might move toward official independence, launched missile tests and live fire in waters very near the island, effectively blockading its western ports. The U.S. responded by dispatching two aircraft-carrier groups to the Taiwan Strait, ostensibly to avoid “bad weather.” The crisis subsided, but the Mahanian lesson for Beijing was clear: The ability to deploy and demonstrate sea power was of paramount importance.

There are many other strands in Chinese military debates, but Mahan’s focus on maritime power and “command of the seas” provides a framework for understanding Chinese naval strategy. More than a century after his death, he is much quoted and cited by Chinese thinkers and continues to shape their views. As the strategist Robert Kaplan writes: “The Chinese are the Mahanians now.”

On a clear Sunday morning in August 2014, Chinese naval personnel gathered in the northern port of Weihai. They were there not to mark a victory, the usual reason for such a gathering, but to mark a defeat—China’s loss to the Japanese in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, which had been sealed by the destruction of the Chinese fleet at Weihai. As a result, Japan gained control over Korea and Taiwan, and Weihai passed under British control, altogether a particularly humiliating chapter in China’s “century of humiliation.”

The "Great White Fleet," a collection of American battleships, was sent around the world on goodwill missions. (Bettmann / Getty)

At the 2014 ceremony, white chrysanthemums and red roses were scattered over the waters to mourn the Chinese losses. The most prominent speaker that day was Admiral Wu Shengli. In Wu’s remarks at Weihai, one could hear echoes of Mahan.

“History reminds us that a country will not prosper without maritime power,” Wu said. The century of humiliation, he argued, was the result of insufficient naval strength, which the Weihai defeat had demonstrated. But today, “the sea is no obstacle; the history of national humiliation is gone, never to return.”

Mahan was writing amidst the first age of globalization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the world was being knit together by technology—steamships, railways, the telegraph—and by flows of investment and trade. He provided the intellectual rationale in that age for what became a global race to build up navies.

READ :  Alfred Thayer Mahan: The United States looking outward

In looking for analogies for the wider risks that might be unleashed by the U.S.-China naval competition in the South China Sea, analysts are drawn again and again to that vivid example of strategic rivalry from more than a century ago: the Anglo-Germany naval race that helped set the stage for World War I. So worrying is it that in his book On China, Henry Kissinger concludes with an epilogue entitled “Does History Repeat Itself?” entirely devoted to this military buildup. Yet Kissinger goes on to say with some uneasiness, “Historical analogies are by nature inexact.”

In looking for analogies for the wider risks that might be unleashed by the U.S.-China naval competition in the South China Sea, analysts are drawn again and again to that vivid example of strategic rivalry from more than a century ago: the Anglo-Germany naval race that helped set the stage for World War I. So worrying is it that in his book On China, Henry Kissinger concludes with an epilogue entitled “Does History Repeat Itself?” entirely devoted to this military buildup. Yet Kissinger goes on to say with some uneasiness, “Historical analogies are by nature inexact.”

The Anglo-German naval race was the defining strategic competition of the time. It was also a significant part of a fever that convinced people that war between Britain and Germany was inevitable. That was the conclusion that Winston Churchill, the first lord of the admiralty, came to in 1911. From then on, as he later wrote, he prepared “for an attack by Germany as if it might come the next day.”

Yet there were some who disagreed with that assessment—and none more vigorously than the fourth ghost who haunts the South China Sea.

Among the voices at the beginning of the 20th century arguing that war between Germany and Britain need not be inevitable, none was more powerful than that of a slight, frail-looking man named Norman Angell. He would have enormous influence in convincing people that war had become irrational. He would even receive the Nobel Peace Prize for making the case that “war is a quite inadequate method for solving international disputes.” (That the award was made in 1934 prompted him to remark, with a certain dryness, “It would have been more logical to have awarded it at the earlier date.”) Angell emphasized the benefits of a connected world economy and the costs of conflict, a particularly relevant message for a U.S. and a China that are so economically interdependent on each other and so embedded in a wider global economy on which their respective prosperities rely.

Angell came to his calling by a rather circuitous and incongruous route. As a teenager, he went to work as a newspaper reporter, first in his native Britain, before moving to the United States. He ended up northeast of Los Angeles, in sparsely populated Bakersfield, where he worked as a ranch and farm hand, and as a mail carrier; homesteaded outside the city; speculated unsuccessfully in land; searched for gold; and tried his hand at oil exploration, all to no avail. Having failed to find his fortune, he left and eventually ended up in Paris, where he worked for English-language newspapers.

By then he had become obsessed with the rise of mass media and alarmed about what he saw as the emergence of mass psychology and the rising temper of virulent nationalism and intolerance in Europe. In 1903, he published his first book, Patriotism Under Three Flags, arguing that “emotionalism,” or extreme jingoism, worked against the interests of the polity.

Norman Angell was a prolific writer and journalist. (Time Life Pictures / Mansell / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty)

Angell then landed a job as the publisher of the European edition of the Daily Mail, at the time the largest-circulation newspaper in the world. Prompted by the Anglo-German naval race, Angell hurriedly wrote a new book, Europe’s Optical Illusion, in which he insisted that he was no pacifist and was not opposed to Britain’s military spending, but that, owing to how much more interconnected the world economy had become and the dense ligaments of trade and investment that by then joined nations, the costs of war would far outweigh the gain—not only for the defeated, but also for the victor. (Angell is often ridiculed for allegedly saying that the powerful economic links of the first modern age of globalization made war impossible. But, although a man of many words, sometimes too many, that actually is not what he said. His thesis was “not that war is impossible, but that it is futile.” Given the grim decades that followed the First World War, who can say that he was wrong?) To Angell’s chagrin, he could not find a publisher, and ended up publishing and distributing the book himself.

Despite its inauspicious start, the book caught on. A top British diplomat said it had “set my brain in a whirl.” One newspaper called it “the most discussed book of recent years.” Britain’s Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Gray publicly commended what he called “a very interesting little book.”

The book became a best seller, and Norman Angell was launched. So, too, was “Norman Angell”: Up to this time, he had written under his real name, Ralph Lane, adopting “Norman Angell” to separate the book from his work for the Daily Mail. In subsequent editions, Angell rechristened the book The Great Illusion.

There were critics, among them Mahan, who dismissed Angell’s argument that growing interdependence made war irrational. “Nationality will not be discarded in face of the remapping of the world,” the admiral wrote in words that have some echo today.

Critics notwithstanding, Angell was only gaining in influence. Even Kaiser Wilhelm was reported to have read the book “with keen interest and discussed it a good deal.” The Anglo-German naval race continued under full steam, yet the two powers had demonstrated restraint during a Balkans crisis in 1912. This Angell took as a sign of rationality over emotion. On a trip to the United States in February 1914, he told a reporter, “There will never be another war between European powers.” In June 1914, the British fleet made a weeklong friendship visit to the German port of Kiel, strengthening his claim. While it was there, 800 miles to the south, in Sarajevo, Franz Ferdinand, the archduke of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was assassinated. Five weeks later, World War I began.

The war’s aftermath would nevertheless prove Angell right: The lasting costs far outweighed whatever might have been gained. It is a message that haunts today’s rising tensions between the United States and China.

History versus international law, nationalism and military power versus interdependence and common interests—these define the contention over the South China Sea.

And so when you hear historic claims, think Admiral Zheng He. When it’s freedom of the seas, it’s Hugo Grotius. When it’s the U.S.-China arms race, then it’s the other admiral, Alfred Thayer Mahan. And with the growing rift between Washington and Beijing, think of Norman Angell and the costs of confrontation between two nations that are so economically interdependent.

These are the four ghosts who haunt                           those troubled waters.

                            ----------------------------------------------

DANIEL YERGIN is the author of The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations, which describes the current tensions in the South China Sea. His previous books include The Quest and The Prize, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize.

National Security Strategy : Need for a Comprehensive National Security Strategy

 SOURCE: https://cprindia.org/news/7832#:~:text=An%20NSS%20for%20India%20needs,disciplinary%20and%20multi%2Dsectoral%20interventions.

 

National Security Strategy India Needs- Abhijit Iyer Mitra

                                                     ( https://youtu.be/_GC525Sk7vc )

Dr Happymon Jacob speaks with Col (Retd) Ali Ahmed about doctrinal thinking in the Indian armed forces and the need to devise a comprehensive national security strategy.

                                             ( https://youtu.be/N6fK182w3VA )

4 June 2019

     Need for a Comprehensive National

                 Security Strategy

                            By

                      Shyam Saran

AS PART OF 'POLICY CHALLENGES - 2019-2024: THE BIG POLICY QUESTIONS FOR THE NEW GOVERNMENT AND POSSIBLE PATHWAYS

In the recent general elections, national security has emerged as a major political issue. However, the discourse over national security has been limited to dealing with specific security-related episodes such as terrorist attacks at Pathankot, Uri and Pulwama on the Line of Control with Pakistan; the stand-off with Chinese forces on the India-Bhutan-China border; and the security operations in the disturbed state of Jammu and Kashmir. A holistic discussion of India’s national security rarely occurs in the public space or even within the government. The Indian state does not possess an overarching national security strategy (NSS) that comprehensively assesses the challenges to the country’s security and spells out policies to deal effectively with them; of course such a strategy must be executed within the parameters laid down by the Constitution of India and the country’s democratic political dispensation. In the absence of an overall strategy, the state relies on ad hoc responses of questionable utility. Moreover, it possesses no mechanism that permits it to learn from its experiences. Ad hocism also neglects the broader political, social and economic context within which specific episodes must be located and understood.

A modern state confronts multiple and simultaneous challenges across several domains. National security cannot be confined to the use of the state’s coercive power to overcome domestic and external threats. For example, threats to domestic peace and stability may arise from economic and social grievances. A knee-jerk reaction may leave these grievances unaddressed while the use of coercive power exacerbates rather than ameliorates the situation. For instance, left-wing extremism in India is rooted in the persistent exploitation of tribal populations. 

Similarly, the vulnerability of our borders is linked to a large-scale smuggling and contraband trade that permits channels through which terrorists and criminals find easy access. Such threats cannot be dealt with solely through enhanced military capabilities without addressing the drivers of illegal trade. It is recognized that the prolonged use of subsidies for ostensibly social welfare purposes creates arbitrage opportunities for cross-border smuggling. Such criminal activities often entrench powerful mafia groups with close links to politics. While groups of this sort constitute a serious threat to domestic security, the solution lies as much in the economic domain as in strengthening the state’s law and order machinery. The NSS will need to acknowledge such cross-domain linkages and policy interventions. 

For a modern state operating in an increasingly globalized world, the line between what is domestic and what is external is becoming increasingly blurred. For example, terrorism is a threat to domestic security but may have external links. Dealing with terrorism may require not only domestic interventions but also action on the external front. Issues related to water security may involve dealing with neighbouring countries with which India shares its major rivers. Thus a combination of domestic and external interventions may be necessary. It is only within a comprehensive NSS that such complex inter-relationships between domestic and external dimensions can be analysed and coordinated policy responses formulated. 

We live in a technology-driven world; new technologies such as the Internet and digitization are enabling powerful tools for states to enhance national security but also creating new and serious vulnerabilities and security risks. Cyber security has become a major concern and it is only through developing advanced technological capabilities that a state has a chance of defending itself against cyber attacks. The NSS would enable the identification of critical infrastructure that may be vulnerable to cyber attacks, and the development of human resources capable of identifying attacks and protecting and restoring critical systems. Anticipating cyber attacks and hardening systems against them become ever more necessary as economic and governance activities increasingly rely on digital technologies. Ad hoc responses would be grossly inadequate. A critical aspect is that in a democracy like India, the state’s use of advanced digital technologies for surveillance and intelligence gathering must not violate the citizens’ right to privacy and freedom of expression. There is a trade-off between enhanced security and the citizens’ rights guaranteed by the Constitution, and this must be clearly spelt out for the people of the country and well-considered solutions put forward. National security must not become a justification for a surveillance state. The danger of relying on ad hoc responses is that they may cumulatively lead to a predatory and authoritarian state that limits the exercise of democratic rights. The NSS must deal with this dilemma upfront.

Technological change and geopolitical shifts are also impacting India’s nuclear security. The country’s nuclear deterrent must deal with the challenge of two nuclear-armed neighbours: China and Pakistan. Furthermore, the nuclear domain is becoming closely interlinked with cyber and space-related capabilities. The development of India’s nuclear deterrent must take into account the impacts of such technological change. The overall nuclear security environment is also being affected by geopolitical shifts with the gap between the US and Russia on the one hand and China on the other reducing significantly. The older nuclear order anchored in bilateral US-Russia arms control arrangements is now unravelling because China remains outside these arrangements. A new nuclear order is becoming essential as we move into a world of multiple nuclear states. India will need to determine what role it should play in the shaping of this new nuclear order. 

Ecological degradation and climate change have significant impacts on national security. There may be direct consequences of the melting of glaciers on the deployment of troops at high-altitude locations on India’s mountainous borders. Sea-level rise as a result of global warming may inundate naval bases along the coasts. There may be large-scale migration of populations from low-lying coastal plains towards higher ground, and this may lead to social disruptions and economic distress, undermining domestic security. Therefore, the NSS must anticipate the consequences of ecological degradation and climate change, and formulate coping measures. 

Another oft-neglected dimension of India’s national security that must be integrated within the NSS is strategic communications. It relates to the indispensable need, particularly in a democracy, to shape public perceptions through constant and consistent public outreach and to provide a channel for public opinion or feedback. This would enable the government to explain its policies, garner public understanding and support, and review and adjust policies on the basis of feedback received. This has become a far more difficult and complex challenge due to the spread of social media, the phenomenon of fake news, and the instant nature of news gathering and dissemination. Governments need to stay ahead of the news cycle, establish credibility as a source of authentic and reliable information, and shape public opinion rather than be reactive all the time. National security may be adversely impacted by the spread of false news by hostile elements within and outside the country using social media. This will require strong and advanced cyber capabilities, which may have to be constantly upgraded to keep pace with rapid technological advance.

An NSS for India needs to take a comprehensive approach, encompassing domestic and external and economic and ecological challenges, highlighting the inter-linkages and feedback loops among them and on that basis formulate a coherent template for multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral interventions. Such a template would serve as a guide for a whole of government approach, ensuring that intervention in any one domain does not contradict or even negate intervention in another domain. It is only by having a big picture constantly at hand that contradictory and wasteful policies can be avoided. We should move towards a pattern of governance where interventions in one domain reinforce interventions in other domains. 

Drawing up an NSS for India must be a key item on the agenda of the new government. This may be tasked to a group of eminent persons from different disciplines who could consider India’s national security in its multiple dimensions. In a democracy, an NSS should be citizen-centric and must reflect the values and beliefs of the people; at the same time, it must seek to raise public awareness of and shape public perceptions about national security issues. The proposed NSS must take the Constitution of India as its guide and its objective should be the safeguarding and consolidation of India’s democracy. This approach would, for example, reject intrusive governmental intrusions into the lives of ordinary people, violating their rights enshrined in the Constitution.

In every domain of national endeavour there must be pursuit of excellence and high standards to enable India to compete successfully in a highly competitive and globalized landscape. Islands of excellence cannot be sustained in an ocean of mediocrity and low quality. This need not conflict with properly designed policies for affirmative action designed to reduce and eventually eliminate the consequences of long-standing social and economic disabilities suffered by sections of India’s citizens. What is critical is the state’s capacity to design, execute and evaluate interventions in different domains, and for this the institutions and processes of governance may need to be altered and strengthened. New institutions may be required to deal with newly emerging challenges. This, too, must be included in the NSS.  

Previous exercises undertaken to promote national security could serve as useful reference material for the NSS. These include the Kargil Review Committee report (2000), the Report of the Naresh Chandra Task Force on Security (2012), and the document entitled ‘Building Comprehensive National Power: Towards an Integrated National Security Strategy’ prepared by the National Security Advisory Board (2015). Only the Kargil report has been made public. It is recommended that these reports and the NSS prepared by the new government should be public documents and open to public debate and review. A well-informed, vigilant and educated public opinion is the best assurance of national security. 

Other pieces as part of CPR's policy document, 'Policy Challenges - 2019-2024' can be accessed below:

• The Future is Federal: Why Indian Foreign Policy Needs to Leverage its Border States by Nimmi Kurian
• Rethinking India’s Approach to International and Domestic Climate Policy by Navroz K Dubash and Lavanya Rajamani
• India's Foreign Policy in an Uncertain World by Shyam Saran
• A Clarion Call for Just Jobs: Addressing the Nation’s Employment Crisis by Sabina Dewan
• Time for Disruptive Foreign and National Security Policies by Bharat Karnad
• Multiply Urban ‘Growth Engines’, Encourage Migration to Reboot Economy by Mukta Naik

 SOURCE: https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/battle-honour-fatehpur-a-war-veterans-memories-of-11-december-1971

IDEAS

Battle Honour ‘Fatehpur’: A War Veteran’s              Memories Of 11 December 1971

                            By 

                             Harsha Bhat

Dec 11, 2020

The Sikh light Infantry as the Anti Tank Gun  After the Battle of Fatehpur

Snapshot

• As India marks 49 years of the 1971 war, a war veteran describes a fierce battle that was fought at the western front on the intervening night of 11-12 December.

Come December 11, our defence forces celebrate Fatehpur day - marking a key victory that saw the Indian Army capture this crucial post between Amritsar and Lahore in the 1971 India-Pakistan war.

For the 8 Sikh Light Infantry it was its first tryst with bloodshed, just five years into its raising.

The 8 Sikh LI was entrusted with capturing the diamond-shaped Fatehpur post that was fortified on four sides with mammoth Dussi Bundhs. Even at costs of many of its men, this young battalion made history winning the heroic battle that won them the Battle Honour “Fathepur”.

Among the surviving heroes of this battle is I N Rai, who was then 2nd Lieutenant.

All of 22, this young soldier trembled as he prepared to bury 42 bodies of his brothers in arms. Sorrow, anger, pain, and many other nameless emotions flooded him as he saw his fellow soldiers lying down covered in the national flag.

Just then he heard an elderly voice say ‘dukhi na ho sahabji. Badey bhagyashali hai ye. Aise goli chaathi main liye, tiranga odhkar oopar jaarahe hain. Aisa mauka sabko nahin milta’ (Do not be sad. These are fortunate - To go with bullets in their chest and wrapped in the tricolour. Not everyone gets a chance like this). It was an old Subedar Jodha Singh giving him the courage to lay to rest those who had until a few days ago been ‘waiting for war’.

Of the 46 men martyred that night, two were his closest friends - 2nd Lieutenant H P Nayyar and Captain Karam Singh - with whom he had the ‘hot meal’ before India went to war with Pakistan on the night of 11 December 1971. It turned out to be their ‘last supper’ together.

The images are all vivid in the eyes of Brigadier (Retd.) I N Rai and come alive as he takes us down memory lane in his living room in his house in Mangaluru, almost five decades later.

Brigadier I N Rai

On the 49th anniversary of the Indo-Pak Bangladesh war, Brigadier Rai recounts for Swarajya the war that was through the people who fought it.

After completing training from OTA Chennai, I N Rai was posted to the 8th Sikh Light infantry in Jalandhar and was greeted by a host of Sardars in May 1970. Finding himself among soldiers who spoke only chaste Punjabi, this southern Indian, whose dream to join the army had finally come true, wouldn't have imagined that in 16 months time he would be part of an event that would redefine the history of the subcontinent.

With Mujibur Rehman winning the elections in the still-united Pakistan, and the atrocities in East Pakistan that had lakhs of refugees flee to India, the political situation in Islamabad and Dhaka had turned fluid by September 1971.

“Which is when they asked us to mobilise, leave the peace station in Jalandhar and move to Amritsar - next to Ravi river - we were the reserve battalion for the entire division,” explains Rai, taking us back to where it all started from.

But staying put for the next few months was like tying horses in the stable, he muses. Although, unlike other battalions that had their areas defined, the reserve battalion was required to recce the entire stretch - from Dera Baba Nanak, Ajnala, Ramdas, Fategarh Chudiya - the whole sector.

This is when the Commanding Officer took him out of Charlie Company and made him his intelligence officer. The battalion spent the next three months there. Since their task was not to start an offensive operation in the Western Sector - although by then the Indian Army had entered Bangladesh - they were posted there to only stop any misadventure by Pakistan. “But staying put was making us desperate thinking ‘ladai nai ho rahi’” he laughs, narrating how the battalion brought in the evening of 3 December 1971.

Brigadier I N Rai as Second Lieutenant during the 1971 War (left); With the Ceremonial Turban of the Sikh Light infantry (Right)

Around six o’clock, on 3 December, as they were seated in their bunkers, the men heard the sound of fighter jets flying over their head.

“In those days we could see the night lights of Lahore where the sky meets the earth from where we were. And suddenly there were flares. The artillery had started firing. The whistling sound of shells flying over our heads meant they were not falling on us but going over. We all got ready and said ‘thank god the war has begun’. Some of us even ran out to the officers' mess in the bunkers and said let us have one scotch whiskey”.

When they asked the mess havaldar for a glass of scotch each, he quizzed ‘kyun sahab’., ‘Cause we are celebrating that the war has finally begun’ they valiantly told him.

But that it would end up taking away many of those that raised a toast that night was not a thought that crossed their minds.

In moments though, ”we saw their jets return. They were being chased by our aircrafts as their plans had been foiled. They wanted to attack our air force on the ground itself but our aircrafts were prepared and ruined their plans of a blitzkrieg,”.

But in the days that followed, Pakistan managed to capture certain weak areas pushing back the BSF and other forces. They also managed to capture the Fatehpur post - that was giving them a vantage position given their location in the plains.

The 8 Sikh LI now had its task cut out - to capture Fatehpur back - not just the Indian post but the Pakistani one too.

This was a post the battalion had never seen. But the order was there - By 12 December 1971, Fatehpur post had to be captured and the enemy thrown beyond the Ravi.

“Intelligence kept changing because the reconnaissance that was sent out initially said there was one platoon of Pakistani soldiers and one platoon of Mujahid, then it became two platoons of regulars.”

Pakistani soldiers had attacked a post that was manned by non-Sikh battalion troops. But by the time they could capture it and settle down, there was a commando platoon of 8 Sikh LI, led by ‘dare devil young officer’ Second Lieutenant J J Singh, that was lying in there along the Dussi Bund that attacked them - leaving them shell shocked.

There was a daring counter-attack that left Rai’s good friend 2 Lt JJ Singh wounded. Recollecting some of the earliest incidents that left a strong mark on him, Rai recalls one where Naik Subedar Surjit Singh pulled a machine gun of a Pakistani soldier and gave him one kick on his head. ‘He held a barrel which was firing, he went and snatched it and kicked the Pakistani officer on his head’.

Another havaldar was hurt such that his full intestine was gutting out. ‘We reached there just then, shoved his intestine back into his stomach, removed his turban and wrapped it around his stomach and evacuated him,‘.

Meanwhile, ‘I was watching this Surjit Singh, he was walking around as if nothing had happened, busy instructing the boys to pick this and that. But I saw something was wrong with him. Then I suddenly saw that his thumb and three fingers were missing - they were burnt and singed - which means there was no bleeding - like sutures- and the last finger was hanging with the skin - but that fellow was not even aware that it had hit him - he was just going about his duties”.

And the man whose intestines they shoved inside too miraculously survived. ‘These were the first things I saw,’ he reminisces.

And then came the D Day - 11 December. The H-Hour was 2300 hours. As they prepared for the attack later that night, they had their ‘hot meal’ at the assembly area.

Hot Meal

The truck with the hot meal arrived. ‘Nayyar being the junior-most brought the dal in the mess tin.’

Nayyar who was in Bravo, and Karam Singh who was in Alpha sat with Rai under a tree in the darkness and had the ‘hot meal’ - a mess tin full of dal and a lump of chapatis. The three had shared a room back in Jalandhar.

‘We knew we were going to attack in the next three hours but we never spoke or thought of life and death and the like,’ he muses. Post the meal, the trio shook hands and they joined their respective companies while Rai joined his commanding officer.

The battle that ensued that night was a fierce one. What started at 11 pm on 11 December went on till the wee hours of 12 December with the battalion suffering huge casualties.

‘It was a hand to hand fight, in the hour of darkness. The para illumination by the Pakistanis had the whole area illuminated, there was dust smoke, shelling screaming. This was the first stage,’ he explains, as he takes us through the hours moment by moment.

Both Bravo and Charlie teams who were leading the assault had suffered huge casualties. Rai was behind them with the CO followed by the Alpha and Delta company. If both of these would not succeed, ‘it was going to be a failure. And a failure is the biggest insult for a soldier. He will be disgraced,’ he says.

Rai then chose to lead and pull up the fallen soldiers. ”The company commander had fallen sick. I said no falling back, just follow me. I was flashing the torch on their faces, kicking them to move but we had to see it through. The para flares were giving a ghostly shadow to the ghastly scene around,” he describes.

The hand to hand fight went on up to 1.30 in the night. “You are stabbing someone on a bayonet, hurling a grande. Somebody is shouting ‘ya Ali ya ali’ and cursing in Urdu. But finally, we went and captured the objective and so did Bravo followed by Alpha and Delta,” he says reliving all the moments that made that fateful night.

Red Red Red

Rai recounts the tale of yet another soldier whose sacrifice and daredevilry he says was characteristic of a Sikh soldier.

‘Alpha company had one daredevil named Major Tirath Singh. When he reached the head of the diamond after capturing it he was left with just about 15 men - others were staggering behind or lost.

Pakistanis also didn’t want to give up. It was about 3 in the morning - they launched a counter-attack - as he was the closest to the Pakistanis - he repulsed them, they fell back - after half an hour again they regrouped and attacked him - he was left with just six men.

At this point, Major Tirath Singh knew that if he were to withdraw at that point for the head of the diamond, the balance would be lost.

In those days, explains Rai, there was a thing known as ‘red red red’, which is no longer part of the Indian army operations. ‘Red red red’ meant you asking the artillery to fire on you - ‘you give your position and say here I am at the head of the diamond and say 'fire on me' - because I am having ten men but I am surrounded by 50 enemy soldiers which means if one of us die - at least five die there.’

Getting nostalgic about Singh’s family back in Jalandhar, with two sons who were then aged four and two and his newborn daughter, Rai reminisces the sacrifice that Singh made with utmost pride and honour. Even though the higher commanders asked him to reconsider his decision but he said loud and clear ‘I am asking you red red red’.

So the artillery guns fired on him. And it is during this firing that one of the artillery splinters hit him and he died.

It is because of such men who dared to die that we are sitting here to tell the tale, muses Rai remembering the action-packed night.

‘There is no greater honour for a Sardar than to die on the battlefield. It is true for every warrior but more so for our Sikh soldiers,’ he adds quoting words of Guru Gobind Singh, which, during Rai’s journey with the Sikh Regiment and to this day, fuel his urge to live and die for the nation. ‘Sura so pehchaniye jo lare din ke heth, purja purja kat mare kabhun na chhade khet,’ - the real hero is the one who fights for the weak and even if his limbs be severed bit by hit, he flees not the battlefield’.

In the Line of Duty

As casualties began to rise, the CO sent an officer to get the medical supplies. Recollecting the unfortunate incident where a nursing assistant, KC Mathew was burnt alive, Rai narrates how the entire 3-tonne truck carrying the medical supplies was blown up as it came on an anti-tank mine.

‘The doctor was thrown out of the driver's cabin - his leg was all shattered. The havaldars were all thrown out - one nursing assistant Mathews went up and fell down back in the truck - and the truck got fire - so he was burnt while being semi-conscious. So many soldiers died because medical assistance could not reach them in time,” he laments.

The next morning, he had to do the duty of paying last respects to those who had fallen in the line of duty and the first sheets he lifted revealed the bodies of his two roommates.

Photo taken after the capture of Pakistani Fatehpur post. 2nd Lt I N Rai is second from right

Brig(Retd) I N Rai

“Nayyar was leading the men into an MMG bunker that hit his head slicing it like a watermelon. There was no injury anywhere else on his body. But Karam Singh's body was in two pieces as he was hit directly by an anti-tank gun.”

(From Left to Right) Capture Karam Singh, 2nd Lt H P Nayyar, Maj Tirath Singh SM

Brig.(Retd) I N Rai

For Rai it was the beginning of a long and action-packed career that saw him move from being a second lieutenant to a major to retiring as a brigadier. He also was an instructor at both the premier military institutes in the country, led various troops of soldiers in different parts of the country from Nagaland to Jammu, including leading the same Sikh battalion in its 25th year of raising as its Commanding officer, and was part of the peace keeping force in Sri Lanka, which is when he suffered massive injuries, being in the ICU for three months, among others.

To this day, he is involved with inspiring youth to join the armed forces, take up defence for a career, and is disappointed that the place he comes from has not many youngsters taking pride in wanting to don the olive green.

To those that cite ‘risk to life’ as a deterrent to joining the forces, he says, there were family members who had said ‘aye sayyera popey’ when he announced his decision to join the army back in 1968, implying he was going to the army to get killed.

But 52 years later, while all those who sneered have left, including his ’siblings who chose safer terrain’, he still is alive and kicking and roaring to do whatever it takes to inspire those that wish to live for the nation, to not fear dying for it. ‘For there can be no better death than that of a soldier’, he signs off.

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