Top India Analysts Dispel "India's Size Illusion"
https://www.southasiainvestor.com/2022/03/top-india-analysts-dispel-indias-size.html
India's leaders and their western
boosters have been promoting the country as an emerging superpower to counter
rising China. They cite the size of India's economy, demography, military
and consumer market to back up their assertions. These claims are challenged by
India's former chief economic advisor Arvind Subramanian
and Josh Felman, former head of IMF in India, in an article titled "India's Size Illusion". In a similar article titled "The Chinese
Threat No One Is Talking About — And How to Counter It", Sameer Lalwani, a
senior fellow for Asia strategy at the Stimson Center, has raised serious questions
about India's ability to counter China in the Indian Ocean region.
"Desh
ka bahut nuksaan hua hai", acknowledged Indian Prime Minister Narendra
Modi after his military's 2019 failures against Pakistan in Balakot and Kashmir. This marked a major shift in
Modi's belligerent tone that has been characterized by his boasts of "chhappan
inch ki chhati" (56 inch chest) and
talk of "munh tor jawab"
(jaw-breaking response) and "boli nahin goli" (bullets, not talks) to
intimidate Pakistan in the last few years. These events should force India's western backers to reassess
their strategy of boosting India as a counterweight to China.
India's Illusions:
Indian
government's former Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian has enumerated
and challenged arguments for what he calls "India's Size Illusion" as follows:
1. India’s economic size has not
translated into commensurate military strength. Part of the problem is simple
geography. (German Chancellor Otto Von) Bismarck (1815-1898) supposedly said that
the US is bordered on two sides by weak
neighbors and on two sides by fish. India, however, does not enjoy such
splendid isolation. Ever since independence, it has been confronted on its
Western frontier by Pakistan, a highly armed, chronically
hostile, and often military-ruled neighbor. More recently, India’s northern neighbor, China, also has become aggressive,
repudiating the territorial status quo, occupying contested land in the Himalayas, reclaiming territory in the
east, and building up a large military presence along India’s borders. So, India may have fish for neighbors along
its long peninsular coast, but on land it faces major security challenges on
two fronts.
2. Then there is the question of market size. As
Pennsylvania State University’s Shoumitro Chatterjee and one of
us (Subramanian) have shown, India’s middle-class market for
consumption is much smaller than the $3 trillion headline GDP number suggests,
because many people have limited purchasing power while a smaller number of
well-off people tend to save a lot. In fact, the effective size of India’s consumer market is less than $1
trillion, far smaller than China’s and even smaller relative to
the potential world export market of nearly $30 trillion.
Indo-Pacific
Dominance:
In an
article titled "The Chinese Threat No One Is Talking About — And How to
Counter It", Sameer Lalwani, a senior fellow for Asia strategy at the Stimson Center, has raised serious doubts about India's ability to counter China in the Indian Ocean region. Here are a couple of
excerpts from the article:
1. China
has been building dozens of advanced warships that seem poised to head toward
the vast body of water through which 80 percent of global seaborne trade
transits.....Indeed, a deeper (US) partnership with India — the world’s largest
democracy, on an upward economic trajectory, seemingly perfectly positioned to
counter China on land and at sea — has been something of a holy grail for at
least four U.S. administrations.......Yet what former Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton a decade ago called a “strategic bet” on India does not seem to
be paying off. Indian naval and political power in the Indian Ocean region is faltering, giving way
to influence by Beijing. Many of these problems are of India’s own making.
2. There
is increasing discussion and advocacy among China’s foreign policy scholars and
former officials about an Indian Ocean fleet. Indeed, the idea is consistent with China’s efforts to acquire military
facilities in the Horn of Africa, on Pakistan’s Indian Ocean coast, in Myanmar and in the UAE, which offers
access to the Persian
Gulf. China has also engaged in intelligence
collection efforts in the region and increased its port visits and diplomatic
presence.
India's "Accidental" Missile
Firing:
India's March 9 "accidental firing"
of Brahmos nuclear-capable supersonic cruise missile into Pakistan has raised serious questions
about the safety of the Indian nuclear arsenal. Do the people in charge of India's nukes have basic competence to
handle such weapons? Was this really an "unauthorized" or "accidental"
firing? Why was there a long delay by New Delhi in acknowledging the
incident? Could Pakistan be blamed if it assumed that
extremist right-wing Hindu elements had taken control of the missile system in India and fired it deliberately into
Pakistani territory? Has the Indian government risked the lives of 1.6 billion
people of South
Asia?
Could
this "errant" missile brought down commercial passenger planes that
were in the air at the time of this "accidental" firing? Here's an
excerpt from Bloomberg detailing air traffic in the flight path of the Indian
Brahmos:
"Several
planes passed through the direct trajectory of the missile that day, which flew
from the Indian garrison town of Ambala and ended up in Mian Channu in Eastern Pakistan. They included a Flydubai jet
heading to Dubai from Sialkot, an IndiGo plane going from Srinagar to Mumbai and an Airblue Ltd. flight
from Lahore to Riyadh. All crossed the missile’s
trajectory within an hour of its accidental launch, data from flight-tracking
application Flightradar24 show. Other
international flights in the vicinity of the missile’s trajectory -- and within
its range -- included a Kuwait Airways Co. jet heading to Guangzhou, China from Kuwait City, a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight
to Riyadh from New Delhi, and a Qatar Airways service from
Kathmandu to Doha, the data show. No advisory to
pilots operating in the vicinity -- known as a notice to airmen or NOTAM -- was
issued".
India: A Paper Elephant:
In an
article titled "Paper Elephant", the Economist magazine talked about
how India has ramped up its military
spending and emerged as the world's largest arms importer. "Its military
doctrine envisages fighting simultaneous land wars against Pakistan and China while retaining dominance in the Indian Ocean", the article said. It
summed up the situation as follows: "India spends a fortune on defense and
gets poor value for money".
After the
India-Pakistan aerial combat over Kashmir, New York Times published a story from its South Asia correspondent headlined: "After
India Loses Dogfight to Pakistan, Questions Arise About Its
Military". Here are some excerpts
of the report:
"Its
(India's) loss of a plane last week to a country (Pakistan) whose military is
about half the size and receives a quarter (a sixth according to SIPRI) of the
funding is telling. ...India’s armed forces are in alarming
shape....It was an inauspicious moment for a military the United States is banking on to help keep an
expanding China in check".
