Abhijit Iyer-Mitra
At around the same time that President Barack Obama decided to take up Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s invitation to visit Delhi for Republic Day, our other great ally Russia was announcing the sale of Mi-35 attack helicopters to Pakistan. The issue here is that a US presidential visit is indicative of nothing greater than higher attention – the trajectory of India ensuring deep systemic limitations to the synergies that can be achieved with the US. With Russia on the other, the sale of these obsolete helicopters is the product of a continuing trend of the worsening of our strategic situation.
It always surprises me as to why, the more nationalist one becomes the greater is one’s need for external validation. The visit of US President Barack Obama is a symptom of just that – the need for external validation. The question is: If India is resurgent and confident, why exactly does it need an American stamp of approval – much like an encouraging “good boy” that one gives one’s Labrador in return for good behaviour. But here lies the reality: The story of India’s resurgence needs a big ticket event to be publicly palatable.
Most of India’s population, rural or urban, does not give a hoot what Mr Obama thinks or does. But, sadly, the reality of international investments is that proximity to the US and superficial gestures such as this visit tend to have a marked effect on things such as ‘investor confidence’ and the like. The second aspect here was the US needed to make up for the self-inflicted wound of ignoring Mr Modi for 10 long years. In that sense, this is a huge comedown for them – with some sycophants like Mr Fareed Zakaria, attributing the visa denial to the “Republican Bush Administration”. The point is that America is trying very hard to kiss and make up, and this is something that must be appreciated, irrespective of what little comes out of the visit.
The real victory that the Government scored here was not in getting Mr Obama to visit but rather getting the US to accept its version of food security a few weeks earlier and in agreeing to an empowered panel on intellectual property rights during the Prime Minister’s visit to the US. On both these subjects – though almost entirely ignored by the media – the US’s psychological climbdown is immense. In the first case, it has accepted India’s argument that some subsidies are about subsistence and security and not about trade. In the second case, India is the first country to have tacitly got American acceptance that there are many shades of grey in the intellectual property rights debate, with increasing scholarship such as that of Michele Boldrin and David K Levine beginning to show that stringent IPR may actually significantly hinder innovation and competition.
However, on the Indian side, there are structural limitations to what we can achieve with the US on the military side, irrespective of the levels of technology they are willing to transfer to us. The first is our steadfast refusal to integrate with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s standards. What this means in real terms is that we will never have seamless inter-operability with the US forces in the next 25 to 30 years. In effect, our systems cannot talk to theirs – and we can at best partially benefit from the electronics and signals intelligence that their vastly superior complex is able to gather. As a result, the massive military synergies that come into play from such integration will not be realised. Moreover, though the scale and complexity of joint exercises may increase, but without having similar equipment what we learn from the Americans will be at best restricted to tactics and protocols and little else. Consequently irrespective of what is sold to us – be it the F-35 or even the F-22 (if that should ever be feasible), the reality is we will never really be able to exploit its abilities.
Perhaps the more serious issue here is that we will not at current and projected rates even be able to absorb the lion’s share of this technology. Much of this has to do with the rot that has been creeping up in our education system for decades. Take a simple example, the University of New Mexico, by American standards an unheard of backwater in little Albuquerque with a population of half a million has a nuclear reactor for its students to operate and learn from.
Moreover, the university’s course on unmanned aerial vehicles offers students access to the latest methods of composite fabrication and construction. Is there a single Indian university that offers anything even remotely comparable to what is effect a non-descript US university? In the process of the last two years talking to industry and Government, the one complaint that keeps cropping up over and over is the acute skill-deficit and a lack of critical thinking in our young workforce. Evidently India’s youth are simply not what they’re cracked up to be.
