#225 Reaching for the Moon

Can Space Powers Become Semiconductor Powers? Understanding India's Internal Security Challenges. And Some Good Readings.

India Policy Watch #1: Can Space Powers Become Semiconductor Powers or AI Powers?

Insights on current policy issues in India

— Pranay Kotasthane

Chandrayaan-3 was deservedly the news of the past week. The reactions reaffirmed the notion that success in space exploration is the ultimate advertisement for science and technology. (To understand the significance of a space programme, check out this Puliyabaazi with Pavan Srinath from December 2018.)

From a policy perspective, the success of this mission throws up a rather interesting question: If largely government-run efforts could make India a bonafide space power, can it apply the learnings to become an AI power or a semiconductor power?

The short answer is no, not necessarily. Because there are significant categorical differences between space and nuclear technology on one hand and AI research and semiconductors on the other.

Read on for the longer version.

First, observe the countries that have operational space or nuclear weapons programmes. Countries having operational space launch vehicle programmes are the EU, the US, Japan, China, India, Israel, North Korea, South Korea, Iran, Ukraine, and Russia. The countries with nuclear weapons are Russia, China, the US, France, North Korea, Israel, India, Pakistan, and the UK. As you can see, success in these two areas seems to be orthogonal to the regime type. But one thing’s common. They are all largely government-driven efforts, with the private sector playing a secondary role.

The second important point to note about space and nuclear programmes is that these domains are technically complex but operationally simple. Simple in the sense that these domains have the following features that competent companies that government-run companies can manage without too much trouble:

1. The output demand is small. Companies need to produce products for generally just one buyer—the government. The throughput required is manageable. Contrast this with a contract semiconductor foundry, which cannot survive by merely meeting the small government demand. It must sell to different buyers to remain financially sustainable.

2. Because the output required is small, the capital investment required is manageable, too. For instance, India’s budget for its entire space programme is about $1.5 billion. That amount is in the same ballpark as a single, rather old 65-nm digital chip fabrication unit with second-hand instruments.

3. The supply chain is short and can be indigenised substantially. India’s space programme required some technology transfer from the US and the USSR and a small set of brilliant scientists to begin the process of indigenisation from there. Pakistan began its nuclear programme through surreptitious transfers from China and competent home-grown scientists. As long as there was consistent government backing after the initial technology transfer, government-run programmes had a chance of success. Contrast that with semiconductors today. Even if we had a semiconductor specialist of the calibre and vision that Homi Bhabha or Vikram Sarabhai had for space, success would require a lot more dependence on external companies, intermediate inputs, and international talent.

Thus, it’s no surprise that many communist regimes with strong State-run space and nuclear programmes couldn’t excel in computing or semiconductors. For instance, Mao’s China could get its space and nuclear programmes off the ground with the “Two Bombs, One Satellite” project, which even survived the madness of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. However, the same strategy failed miserably for semiconductors. The initial government-owned successes couldn’t survive the demands of constant upgradation and capital infusion. In fact, Chinese scientists made the first transistor in 1956 and the first IC in 1965, ahead of South Korea and Taiwan. But twenty years later, China was nowhere in the game. It was only the period of global integration and private-sector investment when China could make a fresh beginning.

The USSR’s case is also quite similar. Like the Star City for its space programme, the USSR hoped that Zelenograd would be a grandly planned city, a scientific paradise, that would excel in semiconductor manufacturing. It was supposed to be the Soviet ‘Silicon Valley’. But that was not to be. After initial successes, it too petered out.

India’s case is not too different. Two of India’s public-sector firms, Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) and Semiconductor Complex Ltd (SCL), were both able to strike technology transfer agreements with competent Western chip-making firms. They began producing chips but faded away by the 1980s.

There are three general lessons from the failures of these government-run, government-owned programmes of the USSR, China, and India.

First, government-run companies didn’t have any incentive to compete in a hyper-competitive space that demanded constant capital infusion and technology upgradation. They started well but couldn’t keep themselves in the race for long. Eventually, when political vectors aligned in the right direction, their products became old and costly. Even customers within the government could find better technology at cheaper rates through imports.

Second, these companies were shielded from internal competition. Competition forces companies to seek differentiation. Without it, they could sustain themselves at low-level equilibria. BEL and SCL were both a part of the race initially. But from the government’s perspective, this competition was undesirable—having two companies perform the same task wastes resources. While SCL was chosen to manufacture chips, BEL was confined to assembling them. In Taiwan, on the other hand, the government-led ERSO was able to spin off multiple private companies and foster competition successfully while BEL and SCL were busy fighting turf wars to attain monopoly power. While this approach may have saved the government precious money, it perpetuated a structure that was fundamentally at odds with innovation.

Third, inward-looking trade and business policies proved costly, as in the case of the USSR. The dominant economic narrative was to save foreign exchange and dollars from leaving the country. This meant strict import controls and exorbitant tariffs. Even after paying these duties, equipment remained stuck at ports awaiting government approvals. The cumulative effect was that products from BEL and SCL couldn’t compete internationally. Seeking self-reliance, the government was neither interested nor confident in exporting chips.

Hence, although government successes in space and nuclear domains are truly admirable, lessons from these domains do not broadly apply to sectors such as semiconductors today.

Perhaps, a better model to study is India’s automobile story via Maruti. Although it began as a vague dream for a fully atmanirbhar “people’s car”, the government gave considerable freedom to the management, relaxed trade norms so that it could import intermediate parts easily, and provided consistent political and financial cover in the initial phase. But the energy, time, shift in incentives, and effort that governments need to expend to see them through makes failure a more likely outcome.

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India Policy Watch #2: On Internal Security

Insights on current policy issues in India

— RSJ

We haven’t written anything about the situation in Manipur in any of our editions so far. While I have read through the history of the issues involved and the genesis of the current situation, I have struggled to think about it through a frame that will provide any real insight into the policy failure there. Internal security is a complex area, and I don’t have the required appreciation of the state apparatus that’s responsible for it. In a way, this is quite strange. Growing up in the 80s, I didn’t need any help in grasping the seriousness of India’s internal security challenges. The everyday violence in Punjab, Kashmir, Assam and Tamil Nadu during that decade was apparent even to a school-going kid in a remote part of eastern India that got its newspapers two days late. That experience should have spurred further inquiry into why the state failed institutionally on so many occasions then and what were the policy lessons learnt from that violent decade. But I guess I shut all of that out of my mind.

So, I was delighted to see a new book edited by Devesh Kapur and Amit Ahuja titled ‘Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State’ which has a stellar list of scholars writing on various aspects of internal security challenges in India, the evolving response of the state in preserving order and the integrity of the nation and what those responses have meant for civil liberties and democratic process in India. I’m midway through the book, and I have found it to be both enlightening and exhaustive in its scope. While the authors do lament about the lack of easily available data on the various forms of internal violence across states, they have managed to gather enough to give the reader a data-supported basis for the arguments and the opinions they have formed through the book. I strongly recommend it. Maybe after I finish, I might have a reason to write about Manipur. 

I have taken two extracts from the first chapter in the book that get to the core premise of the book and set the stage for the remaining chapters.

In the first extract below, you get a sense of the tremendous increase in centralisation of internal security apparatus and the huge shift to private sector security at the local level while the police and security capacity in the states continue to shrink simultaneously. 

“Three broad and interrelated questions organize the discussions in this volume. First, what has been the record of the Indian state on the objectives of controlling violence and preserving order? Second, how have the approaches and capacity of the Indian state evolved to attain these twin objectives? And third, what have been the implications of the Indian state’s approach toward internal security for civil liberties and the quality of democracy? 

The Indian state has grappled with a variety of internal security challenges since independence from colonial rule and the bloodbath of Partition. Insurgencies, terrorist attacks, communal violence including large-scale massacres, mob violence, and electoral violence have claimed more lives than all of India’s external wars put together. After showing a sharp upswing in the 1980s and 1990s, a number of violence-related indicators have declined over the past two decades. This drop in violence, its cause and implications, have largely gone unnoticed. At the same time, in response to its internal security challenges and with more resources at its disposal, the Indian state has expanded its capacity across multiple sectors. The increase has been lopsided and has mostly occurred at the federal level, however. The army has substantially enhanced its counterinsurgency capacity. The size of the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) has doubled over the last three decades. Simultaneously, the institutional infrastructure overseeing internal security at the federal level has also expanded. New agencies and new laws have appeared. By contrast, the state police forces, preventive agents, and first responders to acts of violence and disorder remained understaffed, underequipped, badly trained, and poorly led. Separate from the state, a fast-expanding private security sector has emerged. It currently employs around nine million personnel, which is about three times all the central and state police forces put together. 

India’s internal security approach has come at a deeply troubling price for the quality of the country’s democracy. The Indian Constitution privileges national security over individual civil liberties in ways that is uncommon for long-standing democracies. Numerous national security laws, weak oversight mechanisms within and outside the security forces, and judicial forbearance for human rights violations in the name of national security reflect and enhance the bias against civil liberties. Extrajudicial killings by security forces, a high number of custodial deaths, the use of torture to extract information and confessions, wrongful detentions of suspects for long durations, and the use of national security laws to suppress political dissent and harass citizens are some of the quotidian practices that have come to be accepted in the name of internal security.”

The second extract that I have talks about the reduction in the incidents of internal violence going by the data available from various states but points to four trends that suggest a shift in the nature of the violence and the dangers that these trends portend for a democracy. There are further chapters in the book that back the claims for these trends. As Kapur notes in an interview in the Times of India, the state’s capacity and ability to manage mass violence has grown, but the question is about its willingness to act. In a way, analysing these trends and this somewhat strange unwillingness can lead us to understand the likely fault lines that are emerging in internal security, of which, possibly, Manipur is a symptom. 

“It is certainly the case that public violence, such as riots and insurgencies, has persisted (albeit less virulently) even as new forms of public violence such as vigilantism and lynch mobs seem to be sprouting like an ugly cancer across the country. Yet, notwithstanding this trend, aggregate levels of violence in India—public and private—have declined in the first two decades of this century compared to the previous two decades. Nonetheless, the absence of evidence does not necessarily imply evidence of absence. 

This is evident in contemporary India in at least four distinct ways. The philosopher Amia Srinivasan has argued that, “The privation of safety doesn’t just mean the exposure to forms of physical harm or even psychological harm; it also means the erosion of our sense of selves as agents in the world.” More than “exposure to bodily threat and assaults on dignity” is the “creation of an insidious uncertainty, one that closes down the sense of individual possibility and control. Without some guarantee of safety, we cannot plan, and we cannot dream.” 

Violence and humiliation have for long curtailed the life opportunities of Dalits and women. Even as some of these substantial constraints have moderated, India’s religious minorities, especially Muslims, are also endangered by a growing threat of violence, humiliation, and diminishing safety. Take the use of lynching as an instrument of terror. The actual numbers of deaths in lynching are relatively small compared to many other acts of violence. But its effects are much larger, akin to terrorism. The violence of lynching is targeted not just at the individual but to send a message to certain communities about their subordinate position. Speaking about the lynching of African Americans in the United States, the historian Amy Louise Wood argued that although, “Compared to other forms of terror and intimidation that African Americans were subject to under Jim Crow, lynching was an infrequent and extraordinary occurrence,” yet, “despite, or even because of, its relative rarity, lynching had a singular psychological force, generating a level of fear and horror that overwhelmed all other forms of violence.” 

Second, in certain regions, epitomized by Kashmir, the curbing of violence is the result of an iron fist emanating from a massive security presence. The Indian state’s actions hardly seem to vindicate a government seeking to reach out to its citizens.

But it is two other features that are more worrying. 

The first is the changing nature of the Indian state. Of particular concern is the erosion of the necessary institutional checks and balances which, from Parliament to courts to the media, can scrutinize and curb the excesses of the multiple security agencies that comprise the “deep” state. Some of these attributes have been a feature of state and national level politics for decades. But, they have reappeared in such a pronounced manner for the first time since the political emergency that lasted from 1975 to 1977. At the time of writing, the misuse of the coercive apparatus of the state for stifling dissent, muzzling civil liberties and pursuing political vendettas has become routine. Still, state abuse can be stopped and corrected. Weaponization of social prejudice, however, is more difficult to reverse, and therefore, poses a more long-lasting threat. 

The second feature, rooted in Indian society, as Hansen points out, is “why so many ordinary people in India today seem to either tacitly endorse, or actively participate in public violence?”, be it encounter killings by the police, or violence by gauraksha vigilantes and lynch mobs. It is the tacit, if not explicit, support or threat of violence among large sections of the public that weakens a powerful check on the state. With street and online mobs being allowed to act with impunity, and incendiary commentary going unchallenged in the public sphere, gradually society is being weaponized against itself. These actions are undermining the authority of the state. Experience from across the world, including India’s own neighborhood, suggests that this process could easily spin out of control and significantly undermine state capacity to control violence. The decline of violence, then, is no assurance of social harmony. If both the state and society find ways to rationalize exclusionary politics, violence will become de facto legitimized. The resultant weakening of the critical guard rails does not necessarily portend much greater levels of violence, but it certainly increases its likelihood.

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HomeWork

Reading and listening recommendations on public policy matters

1. [Podcast] A Puliyabaazi episode with Amit Ahuja and Devesh Kapur, editors of the book Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State. Also, check out Nitin Pai’s book review for the Indian Express.

1. [Podcast] A Puliyabaazi episode with Pavan Srinath on India’s Space Programme (Dec 2018).

2. [Paper] Fallen Behind: Science, Technology, and Soviet Statism by Chi Ling Chan.

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