Talk with Pakistan Over Withdrawal from Siachen
Thirteen rounds of talks to resolve the Siachen issue have already taken place between Government of India and Pakistan, led by the respective Defence Secretaries. Indian Government has made it clear to Pakistan that the solution to Siachen Glacier is a part of the larger issue to include Pakistan’s support to terrorism in India.
On December 9, 2015 External Affairs Minister met the Pakistani leadership on the side-lines of the Heart of Asia process for regional cooperation on Afghanistan. These discussions directed the Foreign Secretaries of both countries to work out the modalities and schedule of the meetings under the Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue on various issues including Siachen.
Indian Army soldiers deployed in extremely harsh terrain and weather conditions are suitably equipped and properly trained to undertake the operational challenges and carry out their mandated tasks. The soldiers deployed at Siachen Glacier are provided with quality winter clothing including ‘Extreme Cold Climate’ clothing. Besides, they are provided with prefabricated insulated shelters and wherever it is not possible to construct such shelters due to technical difficulties, insulated tents are provided which can withstand low temperatures upto – 500 Celsius.
Background :-
Siachen has been in the news recently due to the avalanche which took away precious lives who guard our country. Many news editorials came up with the prescription to demilitarize Siachen. In light of this the debate is indeed quite relevant and a through analysis of it thus called for.
Analysis :-
Before delving in to the various aspects of Sicahen , it in necessary to understand what demilitarization is all about.
In this prospect if you recall the events of Kargil , it was also an agreement between India and Pakistan forces to withdraw from certain difficult terrains in the wake of winter.However, once India withdrew from Kargil and other sector , the military adventurism was started by Pakistan , which ultimately resulted in Kargil war and loss of many valuable lives.
So , the real issues here is even though India has extended many confidence building measures for the past 4/5 decades, yet it has not been reciprocated by Pakistan . The military clout that runs the Pakistan establishments and their military policies have primary objective is not to establish peace but to engage in different activities that do harm to India, whether it is through proxy war or tacit support to terrorists.Given the history , trust is not an option.
War itself has significance influence not only on the psyche of citizenry but also on economy and is best avoided. The only way to avoid war with any rouge state is to build deterrence.For eg- If Indian forces had not withdrawn from the Kargil and other bases in the region in the winter of 1999 , the chances of military adventurism and the subsequent war could have been deterred.
Hence, if we learn anything from history , it is not to repeat the mistakes again.If we have an advantage from military stand point , it should not be given away merely for political reasons without proper assessment of future implications.
Having said that , Siachen , itself is a subject matter that have multiple angles.
Most of India’s military policies are reactive in nature and built as defense mechanisms.Siachen is no exception.Once Pakistan started it’s Siachen adventurism , India in order to secure Kashmir launched Operation Meghdoot in 1984 . It was a reaction too.India would not have sent troops if the conflict had not been escalated in the first place.
Now that India , controls and has significant advantage in Siachen , hence it must not be given away just because of editors of certain newspapers thinks its good thing to do.Of course, India wants to do good things and is neither assertive about its capabilities nor flexes its military muscle beyond requirement or without reason. But we do not live in a ideal world , and just becasue we are good that does mean other will be good to us.
If we let go off our strategic strengths , it will be the greatest provocation for war.Weakness is the greatest provocation for violence.And demilitarizing Siachen would be a significant strategic weakening.
Often , the policy makers of India contemplate two front war – that is, if we are engaged in a war with Pakistan in west, there are chances that we may have to fight a war with China – leading two front war and most of our military policies are designed to deal with two front war.Two front war may be hypothetical at this point ,but the danger of it looms large over Indian policy makers.In this context , Siachen would be a real advantage as a operation base giving India the high ground not only to monitor the Karakoram highway but also the much hyped China -Pakistan Economic corridor.In case of a war , the communication channel can be disrupted and Siachen can act as the choke point.
The other aspect of Siachen and the main reason for promoting idea of demilitarization is due to the following reasons :-
1)It is a difficult terrain and military personnel undergo significant stress to guard it
2)The region is the highest battlefield in the world and the dangers of climatic accidents and health injuries such as – frost bite, snow blindness, depression etc are real , leading to casualties.
The above two are the main reasons that support the cause demilitarization.But , as we learned from history , if after demilitarization leads to military escapades that ultimately result in a war then there will be a greater number of loss of life.From causality stand point, it is better to avoid war than to demilitarize and then fight a war.The health hazards can be easily avoided by inclusion of certain standards, protocols ,military gears and building few strong and safe bases in Siachen itself. How to survive and avoid casualty at this high ground with sub zero temperature is purely a problem of science and technology , thus proper inclusion and adaptation of the technological solution can minimize the damage to a great extent.
Moreover ,as is apparent, the concept of demilitarization entails two major essentials. One, it presupposes that both sides have their military presence in the said area/zone. Two and more frighteningly, it implies that both sides agree to settle their mutual claims at a later date through non-military means. In other words, it declares the area to be a disputed territory.
In the case of Siachen, Pakistan has no presence on the glacier – not even a toehold. The entire main glacier (76 km by 2-8 km) and the subsidiary glaciers are in India’s control. As a matter of fact, Pakistan cannot even have a peek at them as all the three main passes (Sia La, Bilafond La and Gyang La) are under India’s occupation. Pakistani positions are well west of the Saltoro Ridge. Hence, if Pakistan is not present on the glacier, how can the question of its withdrawal arise? If that be so, demilitarization of Siachen would mean unilateral withdrawal by India and accepting it to be a disputed zone. It will amount to forfeiting the territory which is rightfully under India’s absolute military control.
Pakistan is adept at achieving through negotiations what it loses in war. Indian soldiers shed blood to gain military ascendency, only to see their hard fought gains being lost through the misplaced zeal of some self-proclaimed advocates of peace. Their current suggestion of demilitarization of Siachen is an extension of the same subterfuge.
National Implementation Committee :-
The Government of India has decided to commemorate the following eminent personalities in the country during this year:
(i) Birth Centenary of Biju Patnaik
(ii) Birth Centenary of Bismillah Khan
(iii) Birth Centenary of Amritlal Nagar
(iv) Birth Centenary of M. S. Subbulakshmi
(v) 150th Birth anniversary of Swami Abhedananda
(vi) Birth Centenary of Pt. Deen Dayal Upadhyay
(vii) Birth Centenary of Nanaji Deshmukh
(viii) 350th Birth Anniversary of Guru Gobind Singh
National Implementation Committees under the Chairmanship of the Union Home Minister have been constituted for all the commemorations.
Why it is important – Jubilees are especially important as UPSC usually asks about them hence important.
1)Biju Patnaik :-
- Former CM of Odisha
- Role in Indonesian Independence Struggle :-
- Biju Patnaik met with Jawaharlal Nehru during his participation in Indian freedom struggle and became one of his trusted friends. Nehru viewed the freedom struggle of the Indonesian people as parallel to that of India, and viewed Indonesia as a potential ally.
- When the Dutch attempted to quell Indonesian independence on 21 July 1947, President Sukarno ordered Sjahrir, the former prime minister of Indonesia, to leave the country to attend the first Inter-Asia Conference, organised by Nehru, in July 1947 and to foment international public opinion against the Dutch Sjahrir was unable to leave as the Dutch controlled the Indonesian sea and air routes. Nehru asked Biju Patnaik, who was adventurous and an expert pilot, to rescue Sjahrir.
- Biju Patnaik and his wife flew to Java and brought Sultan Sjahrir out on a Dakota reaching India via Singapore on 24 July 1947. For this act of bravery, Patnaik was given honorary citizenship in Indonesia and awarded the ‘Bhoomi Putra‘, the highest Indonesian award, rarely granted to a foreigner. In 1996, when Indonesia was celebrating its 50th Independence Day, Biju Patnaik was awarded the highest national award, the ‘Bintang Jasa Utama‘.
- Played a key role at times of Kashmir Insurgency.
- In 1951 he established the international Kalinga Prize for popularisation of Science and Technology among the people and entrusted the responsibility to the UNESCO.
2)Guru Gobind Singh :-
- Guru Gobind Singh, born Gobind Rai (22 December 1666 – 7 October 1708),was the 10th Sikh Guru.
- Founder of Khalsa –
- Guru Gobind Singh initiated the Five K’s tradition of the Khalsa,Kesh: uncut hair.
Kangha: a wooden comb.
Kara: an iron or steel bracelet worn on the wrist.
Kirpan: a sword.
Kacchera: short breeches.
- Guru Gobind Singh initiated the Five K’s tradition of the Khalsa,Kesh: uncut hair.
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.