Size Of Economy & Military Matters

A Last Chance to Malign And Disrupt India’s Progress, Because By 2028 It will Be Too Late

When an economy is No.5 in the world, having surpassed its former colonial masters, the United Kingdom, and despite its 1.40 billion population; it is time to recalibrate perceptions of its place in the world.

Multilateral agencies like the World Bank, the IMF, already have. So have a number of leading international rating agencies.

India has begun chairing the G-20 along with nine invited guests including Egypt that is mulling an extensive defence manufacturing cooperation with India, including its Tejas fighters, its helicopters, howitzers, armoured vehicles, light tanks, drones, missiles.

But, in due course, perhaps a decade from now, when India becomes a percentage player in defence exports, it will challenge the vastly more expensive military industrial complexes of the West. A prospect they do not welcome. Unlike copycat Chinese armaments that nobody wants, India’s military demands and gets a quality product that can consequently be exported. A long list of countries want to follow the Philippines to import the Brahmos missiles already.

China chose December 9^th 2022 to attack, yet again, with clubs and stones, in a carefully planned operation at Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh. Perhaps it is time for India to authorise the use of artillery and other weapons at these intrusions.

The Chinese came with as many as 300 troops, but were promptly repulsed by just 50 to 70 Indian soldiers with over two dozen Chinese injured in intense hand-to-hand fighting. India suffered six soldiers injured. The timing suggests that Xi Jinping was trying to embarrass Narendra Modi just before India takes over the G 20 from January 1^st 2023.

But sovereign Western nations being overtaken economically, all members of the G7 and NATO, also find the rise of India hard to digest.

Even Japan, otherwise warm and cooperative towards India, a QUAD member, has decided to develop a new generation of fighter plane, for the first time since WWII, along with Britain and Italy, as it diversifies away from the US, its erstwhile sole defence partner.

An article by Somnath Mukherjee, Managing Partner at ASK Wealth Advisors, suggests that Warren Buffet’s investment dictum of ‘Never bet against America’ is beginning to apply to India too.

He writes ‘The biggest variable in India’s favour is in our numbers-a population of 1.4 billion works the probabilities in its favour. Even if 10% of the population approach Korea-level productivity, that is a market the size of Russia at Korean levels of income. This small cohort itself would generate an income pool of nearly $ 5 trillion’.

To illustrate this point in a razmataz manner, today’s news says India’s well-heeled will purchase 450 super cars this fiscal, up from 300 last year, each at over a couple of crores in price.

In Dubai five-star hotels, only super-cars like Maserati, Ferrari, Bentley and their ilk get to park in the portico and front parking lot nowadays. Apparently, staff valet-park BMWs, Mercedes Benzes and Audis in the back lot, as they are now regarded as taxi worthy, if not taxis. In Dubai, with its tiny population, this sort of thing, excessive as it is, still makes a point, but in India it could be the beginning of a tsunami.   

Nevertheless, in 2022, India is still an emerging economy, albeit with the fastest growth rate of a major economy in the world at between 6-7 per cent per annum. It is headed to become the No.3 economy behind the United States and China by 2028. It will then be a $10 trillion plus economy, up from nearly $ 4 trillion in GDP presently.

Morgan Stanley says India is adding $ 400 billion to its GDP annually now, a figure bigger than its entire economy till even 1990, when it was at $ 320 .98 billion.

China, at No.2 presently, at $18.32 trillion in 2022, is still growing at 3.2 %, and some reports say it may overtake the American economy by 2028.

Not, of course, if America can help it, but the intertwining of the economies has been built over more than 30 years, and disengagement where in many case both the raw materials and the manufacturing is Chinese, is not easy.

China has long been suggesting that it shares hegemony over the world with the US - the Atlantic for America, the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean for China. Of course, this is errant nonsense, and unacceptable to the present world order. But China is still pushing this envelope in the absence of an outright domination of America.

India is about to attain these dizzy economic and strategic heights soon, provided it can keep building its military deterrence and using it to good effect when challenged. But getting there will buffet the power structure of the dominant West no matter how diplomatic India may choose to be. Still, size and heft has its compensations.

India is quietly building its second indigenous aircraft carrier, other nuclear powered submarines, stealth frigates, fighters and other aircraft, armoured cars, light tanks, missiles in a great variety, and is proceeding as quickly as it can on a wide range of military aatmanirbharta.

Why is it that China, despite being a repressive, autocratic, imperialistic, near dictatorship under President Xi Jinping, does not receive much criticism from the Western media?

Democratic India, on the other hand, receives daily brickbats from the West. Is it because the West realises that if India’s progress is to be slowed, now is probably the last window of opportunity to make it happen. It is not easy though, because even today, India is a nuclear weapons power with a large market and considerable technological prowess, and a new determination to not be pushed around by China.

There are a multiplicity of weapons manufacturing countries willing to collaborate with India if the terms are right. But India is making more and more of its military equipment indigenously and more often than not, shops only for componentry, engines, radars and the like.

India, it has become something of a cliché, is seen as a possible bulwark against Chinese hegemony in the Asia Pacific, the Indian Ocean and farther afield. The leading Western powers are officially keen on cultivating India. But, another, more hawkish school of thought from the West is not averse to seeing China knock some spots off India to make it more amenable to negotiations that favour the West, as always.

The West is uncomfortable dealing with a sovereign independent-minded India with a freshly declared intent to pursue policies and alliances that best suit its national interest.

So, at a low-cost minimum, the West and even radical regimes like Qatar in West Asia, uses its media. It encourages pressure groups such as diverse often ISI backed resident Pakistani organisations, Khalistanis abroad in Britain and Canada, Kashmiri radicals likewise, who want to see J&K severed from India. Then there are China supported academics, celebrities, Leftists, Communists, Islamists, terrorist organisations, drug cartels, parts of the OIC, who are given free play to constantly snipe at India.

This affords plausible deniability to Western governments, and the detractors of India are positioned as people exercising democratic rights to dissent, criticise and influence. Ideas that India says it professes.

So Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is portrayed as fascist and communal, its freedoms of expression curtailed, its minorities targeted, practicing a narrow chauvinistic Hindu nationalism that is out to destroy its erstwhile pluralism and so on.

Rounds of little-known NGOs issue reports from European countries putting India near the bottom of the pile on many such parameters with great regularity.

That none of this bears any resemblance to the truth, and actual circumstances on the ground do not bother this spreading of calumny. Fortunately, India has grown thick-skinned and Western approval from its fringe operators that trash journalistic and professional ethics every day, is not very high on its list of priorities.

One has to actually pity groups like the Khalistanis and their supporters. They gave it their best shot backed by Pakistan in the 1980s, and were squarely routed. Today, it makes no real sense, as neither they, nor any of their backers stand a chance of actually creating a Khalistan out of Punjab. So why does the West pamper such no hoper third-rate terrorists, drug-dealers, smugglers, and murderers?

What good, this hypocritical policy does in a time when India is not likely to be deterred by any amount of Western propaganda, is anybody’s guess. Perhaps it is designed to put off those who would invest in India, but if so, these would be only the ones who do not do their research properly.

The Apples and semi-conductor manufacturers, the aircraft joint ventures, are not the least bit put off.

The counter narrative sees Narendra Modi as a visionary world leader and India as a terrific business destination. But of course, there is much controversy and tumult even as the rag-tag opposition tries to latch on and get a grip and traction.

China, on the other hand, is handled with kid gloves because of massive supply chain dependencies and billions of dollars in bilateral trade. This despite efforts to get away from it post the Covid pandemic that originated in Wuhan.

It is not as if the atrocities against Uigurs in Xingiang do not receive censure and bad press internationally. But it all seems quite muted and largely  cosmetic in comparison to the magnitude and audacity of the systematic repression of an ethnic minority. Similarly, China’s treatment of Tibetans, and indeed its own Han Chinese in Hong Kong is seen more or less as an internal matter. Even its acute sabre-rattling against Taiwan is largely glossed over. Likewise its attempts to project sovereignty over all of the South China Sea, ignoring other countries in the littoral, and even international laws on the freedom of the seas, is not accepted by the West, but it tries not to provoke the dragon beyond aggressively patrolling the important waterway.

While India’s problems with China along the long LaC as well as via the Pakistani proxies are acknowledged by the West, the defence of the border is regarded as a largely Indian matter.

Similarly, when China menaces the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, the region said to be rich with unexploited oil deposits, it is mainly up to Japan to defend its sovereignty over the islands.

America has retreated from playing universal globocop, and having to foot the bill as a consequence. But this too has encouraged China’s ambitions.

In a sense the West, particularly America, was the architect of China’s meteoric rise to prominence. So much so, that China now wants the No. 1 spot in naked terms. This is the stuff of pride before the fall because a vastly superior American military will simply not allow it.

It has happened over and over in history, and caused both the world wars of the 20^th century, but China under Xi Jinping, seems impervious to the warnings of such history. Instead, the strategy is to keep chipping away at the Western room to manoeuvre. And yet, the West treats China like a foregone conclusion, like a bad habit perhaps, and objects, out of pique, jealousy, nascent racism, against a resurgent India.

It is more than likely that both China and the West will fail in their interwoven machinations, and India will prosper regardless, passing between the chinks in their armour. One major reason is the vibrancy of its domestic economy dependent on none, and its ability to feed itself. The other is that it will remain the most populous but young country in the world for the rest of the 21^st century.

(1,930 words)

December 13^th, 2022

For: Firstpost/News18.com

Gautam Mukherjee