This commentary was first published in The Hindu.

India and China appear to be mending fences, gingerly. Relations have been icy since China launched multiple incursions across the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh in mid-2020. After years of inconclusive military talks and halting “disengagement” from sites of confrontation, the rivals made inching progress last week. They completed disengagement in an area known as Patrolling Point 15 (PP15), pulling troops back to create a demilitarized buffer zone, and their leaders met in person at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Samarkand.

The tentative conciliatory steps between two nuclear-armed rivals are important; but they also carry risks, especially for India.

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Despite the latest round of disengagement, the LAC remains deeply unsettled. Observers have pointed out that the buffer zones produced by the crisis inhibit India’s ability to patrol its own territory. And India and China have tacitly agreed to postpone settlement at two other confrontation sites, including a particularly tactically valuable area known as Depsang. The buffer zones and Depsang’s status both suit China’s objectives because they limit India’s military activities near the LAC, which analysts judge had partly motivated China’s initial incursions in 2020.

Similarly, the military threat on the border is not only undiminished, but has actually grown over the course of the crisis. The reinforcements that each side deployed since 2020 have not returned to garrison. Even if future rounds of talks continue “disengagement and de-escalation,” and reduce those forces, returning to the status quo ante is now impossible. Both sides have raced to build permanent military infrastructure near the border, to help them surge forces to the border. Unsurprisingly, China seems to have outpaced India in building these roads, helipads, and communications nodes. 

China still claims Arunachal Pradesh as its own, and just as it has pressed its maritime claims once its growing capabilities permit, its military build-up may portend increasing pressure in coming years. Even without a deliberate attack, the increasing capabilities and mobility on both sides of the border means that a crisis can more quickly escalate to a large military stand-off anywhere on the LAC, and possibly even trigger a conflict.

Strategic implications
 

As vexatious as the tactical picture may be on the border, the strategic implications are more dire. For over two years, the land border has become the overwhelming priority in India’s military competition with China. India has reassigned one of three originally Pakistan-facing Strike Corps to the China front. It has deployed its newest artillery, fighter jets, and drones to the China border. 

At the same time, India has not significantly improved its capabilities or posture in the Indian Ocean region. Granted, a suite of impressive new capabilities — from cruise missile-equipped fighters and U.S.-origin naval helicopters to a brand-new indigenously-built aircraft carrier — are inching towards fruition. But these programmes were all initiated before the border crisis, when the Indian military was incrementally modernising its capabilities for the Indian Ocean.

Whether or not by design, this must delight Beijing. As India and China jostle for security and influence in Asia, the contest in the Indian Ocean will inevitably intensify. Their respective capabilities to project military force across the Ocean, to coerce or defend smaller regional States, and to establish an enduring strategic presence there, will determine the Asian balance of power. With the border crisis, China seems to have successfully fixed India’s gaze to the land border, at the expense of that more consequential competition over the Indian Ocean.

Disengagement at PP15, and especially continued “disengagement and de-escalation,” has the potential to ameliorate this strategic trap. A progressively less urgent threat will tempt New Delhi to de-emphasise military readiness on the border. This could be a golden opportunity for Indian planners to work towards long-term military modernisation and political influence across the Indian Ocean region. But a likelier and riskier outcome is that decision makers will prioritise other, more politically salient issues, like gaining quick wins in the campaign for Atmanirbharta in defence industry — which may come at the expense of modernisation.

Paradoxically, then, a cooling crisis on the border may teach India the wrong lesson: that the short-term expedient of greater readiness is enough to see off the Chinese threat. In fact, and especially for the strategic prize of the Indian Ocean region, the challenge posed by China cannot be met without long-term growth in Indian national capacity. That, in turn, requires coherent strategic assessments and the political will to balance readiness with modernisation.

Problems with Intelligence Orthodoxy

Using the case of Iran, Tarapore argues that estimates adopting the view from somewhere could have warned Washington of critical decision points while it still had leverage to act, explained how U.S. policy had inadvertently shaped the Shah’s ineffectual response to unrest, and assessed opportunities for effective policy alternatives. For Tarapore, the view from nowhere and its surrounding orthodoxy is driven by “a concern over politicization in its many forms – a concern that is fundamentally sound, but often overblown or applied dogmatically…in some cases this aspiration to a view from nowhere is itself the impediment to effective estimates.”

Tarapore rules out traditional explanations of estimative failure that suggest the fault lies with insufficient data collection, weak analysis, or unreceptive audiences. “While more data and better analysis would always be welcome, they may not materially reduce uncertainty; and explanations centering on the intelligence-policymaker relationship offer no systematic critique of the orthodoxy that keeps intelligence and policymakers at arm’s length,” he writes.

The danger of dogmatic adherence to a view from nowhere orthodoxy is that estimative assessments of the unfolding events offer little actionable insight to their policy customers when they do not take into account the policymaker’s actual and potential impact on the target. According to Tarapore, “sometimes the problem is not a simple case of customers ignoring intelligence advice, but a more fundamental flaw in the intelligence-policymaker orthodoxy, which limits the types of questions intelligence estimates address.” By explicitly accounting for customer’s actual and potential impact on the situation – in those cases where policymakers had some influence on the target – analysts would have better prepared customers for change.

Limits to the View

As with any intelligence or security concept, there are limits to the view from somewhere. First and foremost, this concept does not reduce uncertainty, Tarpore notes. Data collection and deft analysis using social science methods remain as critical elements of an effective intelligence enterprise. Another caveat is that bringing the customer to the center of the intelligence problem means that intelligence analysts must track two moving objects: the target and the customer. The desired end-states, priorities and other constraints of the customer are also dynamic – they will shift as a function of political evolution, bureaucratic arrangement, or other policy developments.

As with all intelligence advice, the intelligence community can only do so much to shape the customer’s views and prepare them for change. Policymakers, Tarapore argues, would be unwilling to act solely on the strength of early, uncertain warning signs. The view from somewhere, however, would have been a useful tool to sensitize customers to the risks of not changing course – that failing to even tentatively prepare for change could result in an even costlier policy catastrophe, as with the case of revolutionary Iran.

On May 6, APARC’s South Asia Initiative hosted its inaugural conference, on the theme of “A New Agenda for Indian Competitiveness." India faces an intensifying strategic competition with China that will affect not only Indian national security but also the nature of the international system in the Indo-Pacific region. The trajectory of that competition will hinge increasingly on emerging technologies – from artificial intelligence to biotechnology. India’s ability to research, develop, and deploy such technologies will shape not only its military power but also its resilience and self-sufficiency, which the Indian government sees as key national goals in a post-pandemic world. To develop these technologies, India’s national security establishment will need new policy settings — including new relationships with private industry — and new ways of cooperating with key partners, especially the United States.

To that end, the South Asia Initiative’s conference brought together three stakeholder groups that rarely convene in the same forum: academic researchers, government policymakers, and technology industry leaders. The conference’s aim was to create a community of interest among these groups, sensitizing them to the importance of India as a key developer and user of emerging technologies, and conversely, to the importance of those technologies for Indian security and U.S.-India relations.

The conference’s discussions were led and framed by Stanford research scholars and faculty, but they were directed towards addressing policy problems. What role do these technologies play, for example, in military power? How can government and industry best cooperate to foster innovation in defense technology? How can start-up firms navigate this rapidly evolving ecosystem? The conference did not aim to solve any of those problems, but it did seek to start the discussion that might ultimately generate new pathways for U.S.-India cooperation on technology — paths that are better suited to the nature of today’s strategic competition and more rooted in the nature of today’s technology industry.

India’s Defence Secretary, Dr. Ajay Kumar, in the conference’s opening keynote address, laid out some of the challenges facing India. He noted that a handful of large and inefficient Defence Public Sector Undertakings (DPSUs) account for some 90-95% of Indian defense production, but those DPSUs have a negligible presence in the global market. In large part this is because Indian defense production has comprised of licensed manufacturing or simply assembly and integration of foreign-sourced components, traditionally but decreasingly from Russia. To realize the objective of greater national self-reliance in defense, India recognizes the need to cultivate greater private-sector technology development, and harness the economic potential of dual-use (civilian and military) technologies. India could even seek to leapfrog generations of technology, by focusing on developing the digital technologies that lie at the center of much of contemporary defense innovation. This will only be possible if India encourages greater private-sector research and development, reduces onerous government regulations, and fosters a healthier start-up ecosystem.

Dr. Kumar also reflected on the lessons of the ongoing war in Ukraine. He suggested that it underscored to India the importance of national self-reliance; India now sees its dependence on Russia as a challenge. It also revealed the importance of surprise, not only tactically but in the asymmetric or innovative capabilities a country is able to field against its enemy.

In the conference’s other keynote address, the Under-Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, Jose W. Fernandez addressed the role of technology in broader U.S.-India bilateral relationship. Technology is at the heart of addressing climate change, one of the most pressing strategic challenges facing the United States and India. The two countries are prioritizing the development and protection of cyberspace and telecommunications, as engines of the burgeoning digital economy across the world. From climate to cyberspace, cooperation on technology policies and facilitating private sector cooperation is not only central to the bilateral relationship but also a vital alternative to other actors that seek to use technology for their own, less democratic interests. To address these challenges, India and the United States must strike the right regulatory balance, to support transparent governance, and foster innovation; they must widen their cooperation to include other like-minded countries; and they must facilitate a more balanced flow of educational exchange to strengthen people-to-people links.

Mr. Fernandez further noted that the United States and India work together through various mechanisms. The Quad, for example, is a key multiplier for both U.S. and Indian policy, and India has deepened its cooperation with the Quad. Strategic competition with China requires a common positive vision for the region — an agenda spanning, for example, health, infrastructure, and food security.

The South Asia Initiative’s inaugural conference succeeded in bringing together a new constellation of stakeholders concerned with the role of technology in India’s strategic competitiveness. It initiated a vital conversation on how policymakers and industry can promote defense innovation, in the context of the wider US-India relationship. Critically, for APARC, it also spotlighted some complex issues that merit further scholarly investigation. The South Asia Initiative will incorporate those observations as it continues to develop its lines of research effort in the coming months and years.

The results show that the pandemic’s broad social and economic impact has adversely affected population health well beyond those directly suffering from COVID-19. Study participants with chronic conditions faced significant challenges in managing their symptoms during the pandemic. They experienced a loss of income and difficulties in accessing healthcare or medications, with the resulting delayed and foregone care leading to uncertain longer-term effects. For a nontrivial portion of participants, these factors are associated with the worsening of diabetes symptoms. The threat is twofold among people living in rural populations with limited access, availability, and affordability of healthcare services.

A Global Health Priority

The unintended adverse consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on chronic disease care may also further aggravate inequality in health outcomes. “If the trend continues and no immediate actions are taken to mitigate pandemic impacts,” Eggleston and her colleagues caution, then “the Asia-Pacific region will struggle to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 3.4 to reduce premature mortality from non-communicable diseases by a third relative to 2015 levels and to promote mental health and wellbeing.”

Addressing the pandemic’s unintended negative social and economic impacts on chronic disease care is a global health priority, determine the researchers. They propose several measures to help provide timely care for people with chronic conditions in resource-constrained settings. These include implementing innovations in healthcare delivery models to improve the adoption of healthy lifestyle changes and self-management of chronic disease and mild COVID-19 symptoms, increasing investment in interventions to provide social and economic support to disadvantaged populations, and strengthening primary healthcare infrastructure and support of healthcare providers.

The study was supported in part by funding from Shorenstein APARC’s faculty research award, Stanford King Center for Global Development, and a seed grant from the Stanford Center for Asian Health Research and Education.