New Delhi, January 10

India has deployed its aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya in the Arabian Sea at a time China and Pakistan are holding a nine-day mega naval exercise in the region, a move seen as New Delhi sending a clear signal to its two neighbours.

Top officials of the Naval headquarters were on board the aircraft carrier when it was deployed in the strategic mission earlier this week, military sources told PTI.

Pakistan and China on Monday launched a major drill in the North Arabian Sea with an aim to increase inter-operability and strategic cooperation between their two navies.

The exercise ‘Sea Guardians’ is taking place in the midst of heightened tension between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir issue. Key platforms of both China and Pakistan, including submarines, destroyers and frigates, are part of the exercise.

Aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya, with MiG29K fighters on board, has been sent with a strategic objective, the sources said without elaborating.

A Navy spokesperson said Deputy Chief of Naval Staff M S Pawar reviewed INS Vikramaditya’s operations in the Arabian Sea.

The deputy chief was extremely pleased to witness the “intense air operations”  with high levels of motivation and will to win that were evident on-board the “Queen of the Battle”, the spokesperson said.

He expressed confidence that INS Vikramaditya will “live up to the name and remain victorious in battle – always”, the spokesperson added.

China has been expanding its presence in the North Arabian Sea and is developing Pakistan’s deep water Gwadar port in the region.

Gwadar is being connected through the over USD 60 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to China’s Xinjiang province, providing a key land route to China to access the warm waters of Arabian Sea.

The Arabian Sea provides entry to the Indian Ocean where China has built a logistics base at Djibouti in the Horn of Africa.

In September, the Indian Navy drove out a Chinese PLA ship from India’s Exclusive Economic Zone and had warned that such activities will be dealt with sternly.

The INS Vikramaditya, commissioned into the Indian Navy in November 2013, is considered one of the top rated aircraft carriers globally.

The Russian-origin ship is often called a floating airfield. The 44,500 tonne is about 284-m-long and its height is around 60 m, which is like a 20 storeyed building from keel to the highest point.

The ship has a total of 22 decks and it has the ability to carry over 30 aircraft comprising an assortment of MiG 29K/Sea Harrier, Kamov 31, Kamov 28, Sea King, ALH-Dhruv and Chetak helicopters. PTI

The scale of the First World War underscored the command and control dilemmas of concurrent conflicts playing out simultaneously in multiple theatres of conflict.

War and the West

During the locust years of Great Britain, an issue that received consideration was the British higher command and control structures. With the declaration of the Second World War, the onus for the higher direction of war fell to the remit of the War Cabinet serviced by the Chiefs of Staff Committee. The British legislative system functioned through the Second World War. Winston Churchill, as Prime Minister, was given supreme powers but stayed accountable to Parliament through the War Cabinet. He assumed the portfolio of Minister for Defence, with the resultant duty of overseeing the British War effort. This allowed him, as Chairperson of Chiefs of Staff Committee, to exercise both tactical and strategic options.

After the United States entered the war, following the Pearl Harbor attack, an integrated command became the norm during the Second World War as diverse allies including the Soviet Union had to work in unison. A unified command required a single commander liable to the joint chiefs of staff supported by a joint staff and exerting command over all constituents of his allocated force irrespective of their service.

After the war ended and the world split into two ideological blocs, General Dwight D. Eisenhower became the First North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) supreme commander while political power was vested in the NATO Council. The First Supreme Commander of the Warsaw Pact Forces was Marshal Ivan Konev, while de-facto political authority resided with the General Secretary of the Soviet Union in Moscow. The United States, vide the National Security Act 1947, established the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were jointly tasked to be Military Advisers to the President and the Secretary of Defence. Despite the experience of the Second World War, they chose not to appoint a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS). The U.S. amended this structure vide the Goldwater–Nichols Act in 1986 by having a chairperson and vice-chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Joint Chiefs in unison are again the principal military advisers to the government. There is no CDS. The military chain of command runs directly from the theatre commanders through a civilian Defence Secretary to the President. However, Britain, conversely in 1959, created a Chief of the Defence Staff. Air Chief Marshal Sir William Dickson became the first CDS after serving as the rotational chairperson of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. Was it required or was it the hubris of a declining power — the jury is still out on that.

The outline for India

In India, ‘in 1947, Lord Ismay, the Chief of Staff to Lord Mountbatten, Governor General of India, recommended a three-tier higher defence management structure to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Three committees were constituted: the defence committee of cabinet presided over by the Prime Minister; the Defence Minister’s Committee chaired by the Defence Minister, and the Chiefs of Staff Committee integrated into the military wing of the Cabinet Secretariat. The chair of the committee was rotational, with the Service Chief longest in the committee becoming the chairperson’.

This procedure operated into ‘the middle of the 1950s despite the Commander-in-Chief only being an invitee to the Defence Committee of Cabinet. The designation of the Commander in-Chief of the three services was consciously altered to Chiefs of Staff in 1955. After the 1962 Sino-Indian war, the Defence Committee of the Cabinet first morphed into the Emergency Committee of Cabinet and then later into the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs’. It is now the Cabinet Committee on Security, or CCS. This system has served India well over the years.

On December 24, 2019, a Press Information Bureau release on the Cabinet clearing the appointment of a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS)said: “The following areas will be dealt by the Department of Military Affairs headed by CDS: The Armed Forces of the Union, namely, the Army, the Navy and the Air Force. Integrated Headquarters of the Ministry of Defence comprising Army Headquarters, Naval Headquarters, Air Headquarters and Defence Staff Headquarters. The Territorial Army. Works relating to the Army, the Navy and the Air Force. Procurement exclusive to the Services except capital acquisitions, as per prevalent rules and procedures.”

It added, “The Chief of Defence Staff, apart from being the head of the Department of Military Affairs, will also be the Permanent Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. He will act as the Principal Military Adviser to the Raksha Mantri [RM] on all tri-Services matters. The three Chiefs will continue to advise RM on matters exclusively concerning their respective Services. CDS will not exercise any military command, including over the three Service Chiefs, so as to be able to provide impartial advice to the political leadership.”

A subordination

Herein lies the contradiction and the design flaw. As Secretary in charge of the Department of Military Affairs (DMA) and having superintendence over the Indian Army, Indian Navy and Indian Air Force, there would be an implied subordination of the three service chiefs to the CDS notwithstanding any declaration to the contrary. As Secretary of the DMA, the CDS is tasked with facilitating the restructuring of military commands, bringing about jointness in operations including through the establishment of joint/theatre commands.

This will invariably encroach upon the domain of the service chiefs.

The CDS, as Permanent Chairperson of Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, would outrank the three service chiefs even though theoretically all are four star. Moreover the advice of the CDS could override the advice of the respective Service Chiefs on critical tactical and perhaps even strategic issues.

With the creation of the DMA on most issues, the reporting structure of the three services to the Defence Minister would now be through the CDS; if not immediately it would become the norm over time. Even today while in theory the service chiefs report directly to the Defence Minister, in practice all files and decisions are routed through the Defence Secretary.

However most problematic is the erosion of civilian supremacy over the defence establishment in the Ministry of Defence itself. This impacts on the first principles of constitutionalism and has implications for our democratic polity also. Sophistry is being employed to suggest that the Secretary DMA would be in charge of military affairs and the Defence Secretary would look after the ‘defence of the realm’. The fact is that the defence of India is managed by the three services who would now report to the DMA.

Since the DMA would exercise control over the three services, it virtually makes the CDS the ‘Supreme Commander

Chandigarh, January 10

An Army Naik and two others have been arrested for allegedly smuggling drugs and weapons from across the Indo-Pak boarder using GPS-fitted drones in collusion with their Pakistani accomplices, the Punjab Police said on Friday.

Punjab Police chief Dinakar Gupta said they seized two Chinese-made drones, 12 drone batteries, some custom-made drone containers, an INSAS rifle magazine and two walkie-talkie sets, besides Rs 6.22 lakh in cash from them.

The cash is suspected to be the sale proceed of the smuggled drugs, he said, adding that no drug, however, has been recovered from them as yet.

He said three persons including an Army naik, Rahul Chauhan, were arrested, said Director-General of Police Dinkar Gupta.

“Now, we have come across a module in which three people were arrested and where they were launching drones from India to across the border (Pakistan) and they were to bring back drugs payloads,” Gupta said, adding they suspected both drugs and small weapons like pistols came from the other side of the border.

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Detailing about the two drones seized from smugglers, Gupta said the first drone, a Quadcopter was recovered from an abandoned government dispensary in Modhe village in Amritsar (Rural).

The second one, a Hexacopter, was recovered from the house of a friend of arrested Army Naik Rahul Chauhan in Karnal in Haryana on his disclosures, DGP Gupta said.

The seized drones were GPS-fitted, he said, adding that it was discovered that such drones were being used to drop weapons, hand grenades, satellite phones and fake currency notes in India.

Detailing Army Naik Rahul Chauhan’s role in the novel modus operandi of smuggling drugs and weapons using drones, the DGP said he was involved in not only procuring and supplying drones but also training the cross-border smugglers how to use them.

Police said Rahul, an Ambala Cantonment resident, did not only procure drones but even operated its to-and-fro sorties across the border for smuggling consignments of heroin and weapons from Pakistan.

The two other accused were identified as Dharminder Singh of Dhanoa Khurd village in Amritsar and Balkar Singh of Sara Amanat Khan in Amritsar.

While Dharminder was arrested from village Hardo Rattan, about 3 km from the Indo-Pak border, Balkar, who was lodged in Amritsar jail in a drug case, was into smuggling drugs and weapons through drones, along with his accomplices, said the police.

The police secured his custody on production warrant on Thursday for his custodial interrogation in the case.

The arrests and seizures were made nearly four months after the emergence of the novel modus operandi of smuggling weapons and drugs from Pakistan, after the discovery of two crash-landed drones in a border village in Amritsar district and other in a Karnal village in Haryana in September and August 2019, respectively.

One of the drones, recovered from a paddy field in Mohawa village of Amritsar district in September, was found to be a ‘hexacopter drone of Chinese make, powered by six electric motors with 25 kg of weight and payload capacity of 21 kg, enough to carry weapons and bulky consignments. PTI

New Delhi, January 10

The Centre on Friday announced that the Citizenship (Amendment) Act will come into force from January 10.

In a gazette notification, the Union Home Ministry said the Act, under which non-Muslim refugees from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan will be given Indian citizenship, will come into force from January 10.

“In exercise of the powers conferred by sub-section (2) of the section 1 of the Citizenship  (Amendment) Act, 2019 (47 of 2019), the Central government hereby appoints the 10th day of January, 2020, as the  date on which the provisions of the said Act shall come into force,” the notification said.

The CAA was passed by Parliament on December 11.

According to the CAA, members of Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian communities who have come from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan till December 31, 2014, facing religious persecution there will not be treated as illegal immigrants but given Indian citizenship.

There have been widespread protests against the act in different parts of the country.

Those who are opposed to the legislation are saying that it is for the first time that India will grant citizenship on the basis of religion which violates the basic tenets of the country’s constitution.

However, the government and ruling BJP has been defending the act saying that the minority groups from the three countries have no other option but to come India when they face religious persecution there.

The Home Ministry, however, is yet to frame the rules for the Act. PTI