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India

Can India become a great power?

India’s lack of a strategic culture hobbles its ambition to be a force in the world

(from The Economist print edition, March 30th-April 5th 2013)

NOBODY doubts that China has joined the ranks of the great powers: the idea of a G2 with America is mooted, albeit prematurely. India is often spoken of in the same breath as China because of its billion-plus population, economic promise, value as a trading partner and growing military capabilities. All five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council support—however grudgingly—India’s claim to join them. But whereas China’s rise is a given, India is still widely seen as a nearly-power that cannot quite get its act together.

That is a pity, for as a great power, India would have much to offer. Although poorer and less economically dynamic than China, India has soft power in abundance. It is committed to democratic institutions, the rule of law and human rights. As a victim of jihadist violence, it is in the front rank of the fight against terrorism. It has a huge and talented diaspora. It may not want to be co-opted by the West but it shares many Western values. It is confident and culturally rich. If it had a permanent Security Council seat (which it has earned by being one of the most consistent contributors to UN peacekeeping operations) it would not instinctively excuse and defend brutal regimes. Unlike China and Russia, it has few skeletons in its cupboard. With its enormous coastline and respected navy (rated by its American counterpart, with which it often holds exercises, as up to NATO standarAlternativa India is well-placed to provide security in a critical part of the global commons.

The modest power

Yet India’s huge potential to be a force for stability and an upholder of the rules-based international system is far from being realised. One big reason is that the country lacks the culture to pursue an active security policy. Despite a rapidly rising defence budget, forecast to be the world’s fourth-largest by 2020, India’s politicians and bureaucrats show little interest in grand strategy (…). The foreign service is ridiculously feeble—India’s 1.2 billion people are represented by about the same number of diplomats as Singapore’s 5m. The leadership of the armed forces and the political-bureaucratic establishment operate in different worlds. The defence ministry is chronically short of military expertise.

These weaknesses partly reflect a pragmatic desire to make economic development at home the priority. India has also wisely kept generals out of politics (a lesson ignored elsewhere in Asia, not least by Pakistan, with usually parlous results). But Nehruvian ideology also plays a role. At home, India mercifully gave up Fabian economics in the 1990s (and reaped the rewards). But diplomatically, 66 years after the British left, it still clings to the post-independence creeds of semi-pacifism and “non-alignment”: the West is not to be trusted.

India’s tradition of strategic restraint has in some ways served the country well. Having little to show for several limited wars with Pakistan and one with China, India tends to respond to provocations with caution. It has long-running territorial disputes with both its big neighbours, but it usually tries not to inflame them (although it censors any maps which accurately depict where the border lies, something its press shamefully tolerates). India does not go looking for trouble, and that has generally been to its advantage.

Indispensable India

But the lack of a strategic culture comes at a cost. Pakistan is dangerous and unstable, bristling with nuclear weapons, torn apart by jihadist violence and vulnerable to an army command threatened by radical junior officers. Yet India does not think coherently about how to cope. The government hopes that increased trade will improve relations, even as the army plans for a blitzkrieg-style attack across the border. It needs to work harder at healing the running sore of Kashmir and supporting Pakistan’s civilian government. Right now, for instance, Pakistan is going through what should be its first transition from one elected civilian government to the next. India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, should support this process by arranging to visit the country’s next leader.

China, which is increasingly willing and able to project military power, including in the Indian Ocean, poses a threat of a different kind. Nobody can be sure how China will use its military and economic clout to further its own interests and, perhaps, put India’s at risk. But India, like China’s other near neighbours, has every reason to be nervous. The country is particularly vulnerable to any interruption in energy supplies (India has 17% of the world’s population but just 0.8% of its known oil and gas reserves).

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Based on your interpretation of the following texts, determine whether each statement is right or wrong.

Text 1

(from The Economist print edition, March 30^th – April 5^th 2013)

Excerpts from:

Climate science

A sensitive matter

The climate may be heating up less in response to greenhouse-gas emissions than was once thought. But that does not mean the problem is going away

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”

Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models (…). If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.

The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does

need explaining. (…)

The insensitive planet

The term scientists use to describe the way the climate reacts to changes in carbon-dioxide levels is “climate sensitivity”. This is usually defined as how much hotter the Earth will get for each doubling of CO₂ concentrations. So-called equilibrium sensitivity, the commonest measure, refers to the temperature rise after allowing all feedback mechanisms to work (but without accounting for changes in vegetation and ice sheets).

Carbon dioxide itself absorbs infra-red at a consistent rate. For each doubling of CO₂ levels you get roughly 1°C of warming. A rise in concentrations from preindustrial levels of 280 parts per million (ppm) to 560ppm would thus warm the Earth by 1°C. If that were all there was to worry about, there would, as it were, be nothing to worry about. A 1°C rise could be shrugged off. But things are not that simple, for two reasons. One is that rising CO₂ levels directly influence phenomena such as the amount of water vapour (also a greenhouse gas) and clouds that amplify or diminish the temperature rise. This affects equilibrium sensitivity directly, meaning doubling carbon concentrations would produce more than a 1°C rise in temperature. The second is that other things, such as adding soot and other aerosols to the atmosphere, add to or subtract from the effect of CO₂. All serious climate scientists agree on these two lines of reasoning. But they disagree on the size of the change that is predicted.

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We can infer from the text that:

Item 1 - Warming is related to changes in CO₂ levels;