Type: op-ed snap

Context

In May last year, Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Boris Johnson announced their shared vision for a transformative decade for the India-United Kingdom partnership. These words have now been made real.

Transforming India-UK partnership

• Doubling bilateral trade: The two leaders had declared their ambition to more than double bilateral trade by 2030, which totalled over £23 billion in 2019.
• Reduce barriers to trade: They directed their governments to take rapid steps to reduce barriers to trade.
• FTA: The groundwork necessary to begin work on a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) had to be prepared by the end of 2021.
• Both governments have already taken action; for example, unlocking the export of British apples to India and enabling a greater number of Indian fisheries to export shrimp to the U.K.
• The big next step was the launch of FTA negotiations last month.

Trade relations at present

• Bilateral trade: The bilateral trade between the two countries stood at 15.5 billion USD in 2019-20. India has engaged with the UK in sectors like pharma, textiles, leather, industrial machinery, furniture, and toys.
  • Britain is among the top investors in India and India is the second-biggest investor and a major job creator in Britain. Recently, the Serum Institute of India has announced setting up its research facilities in the UK.
• Indian Diaspora: Around 1.5 million people of Indian origin live in Britain. This includes 15 Members of Parliament, three members in Cabinet, and two in high office as Finance and Home Ministers.
• India is already a big investor in the U.K. — especially in dynamic sectors such as fintech, electric vehicles, and batteries.
• India has an extraordinary opportunity to transform its economy and society in the next 30 years, as it hits its demographic sweet spot, at the heart of the Indo-Pacific region where half the world’s people live and 50% of global economic growth is produced.

Benefits of FTA

• A U.K.-India trade agreement will stimulate growth and employment in both countries. 
• Lower barriers coupled with greater regulatory certainty would incentivize new small and medium-sized enterprises to export their goods and services.
• An agreement also means Indian and British consumers see improvements in the variety and affordability of products.
• Strategic reasons: The British Government’s Integrated Review of our overseas policy, describes the world we are in; messier, with the more geostrategic competition.
• It is one in which two dynamic democracies such as India and the U.K. need to work closely together to promote open economies.

Consider the question “Colonial prism has long distorted the perception of India-UK relation. However, both the countries stand to gain by finding a fresh basis for sustaining bilateral relations. Comment.”  

Conclusion

An FTA would mark a new way of working between the U.K. and India. It gives a new framework within which the two countries can grow and flourish together, putting the colonial economic relationship where it belongs — in the history books.

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Context

In a recent television interview, the Indian Army Chief, General M.M. Naravane, argued that “out of the five or six friction points (in Ladakh), five have been solved”.

Friction points in Ladakh

• ‘Friction point’ are the points of Chinese ingress into hitherto India-controlled territory in Ladakh, where this control is exercised by the Army and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) through regular patrols to the claimed areas.
• These ‘friction points’ are Depsang, Galwan, Hot Springs, Gogra, North bank of Pangong Tso, Kailash Range and Demchok.
• By asserting that only one of the friction points is remaining to be resolved —  Hot Springs or PP15, Army Chief implicitly ruled out Depsang as an area to be resolved.
• This attempt to delink the strategically important area of Depsang from the ongoing Ladakh border crisis is worrying.

Significance of Depsang

• Depsang is an enclave of flat terrain located in an area the Army classifies as Sub-Sector North (SSN), which provides land access to Central Asia through the Karakoram Pass.
• The Army has always identified Depsang plains as where it finds itself most vulnerable in Ladakh, devising plans to tackle the major Chinese challenge.
• SSN’s flat terrain of Depsang, Trig Heights and DBO — which provides direct access to Aksai Chin — is suited for mechanised warfare but is located at the end of only one very long and tenuous communication axis for India.
• China, in turn, has multiple roads that provide easy access to the area.
• This leaves SSN highly vulnerable to capture by the PLA, with a few thousands of square kilometres from the Karakoram Pass to Burtse, likely to be lost.
• Nowhere else in Ladakh is the PLA likely to gain so much territory in a single swoop.
• SSN lies to the east of Siachen, located between the Saltoro ridge on the Pakistani border and the Saser ridge close to the Chinese border.
• On paper, it is the only place where a physical military collusion can take place between Pakistan and China — and the challenge of a two-front war can become real in the worst-case scenario.
• If India loses this area, it will be nearly impossible to launch a military operation to wrest back Gilgit-Baltistan from Pakistan.

Dangers of delinking Depsang

• Invalidation of Indian claims: The biggest danger of delinking Depsang from the current border crisis in Ladakh, however, is of corroborating the Chinese argument, which invalidates the rightful Indian claim over a large swathe of territory. 
• In sparsely populated areas like Ladakh, with limited forward deployment of troops, the only assertion of territorial claims is by regular patrolling. 
• By arguing that the blockade at Y-junction predates the current stand-off — a ‘legacy issue’ that goes back years — the Chinese side can affirm that Indian patrols never had access to this area and thus India has no valid claim on the territory.

Conclusion

As was demonstrated by China in the aftermath of the 1962 War, there should be no holding back in painstakingly asserting one’s claims when it comes to safeguarding the territory.

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