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Chaturanga

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Tag Archives: PLA

Taming the Dragon

01 Sun Oct 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on Taming the Dragon

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China, China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, CPEC, Dragon on Our Doorstep, George Tanham, Ghazala Wahab, India, Jawaharlal Nehru, Kargil, Line of Actual Control, Line of Control, LoAC, LoC, military, Nathu La, OBOR, One Belt, One Road, Operation Meghdoot, Operation Vijay, Pakistan, People's Liberation Army, PLA, Pravin Sawhney, Russia, Siachen, Sumdorung Chu, United States

Sawhney, Pravin and Ghazala Wahab. Dragon on our Doorstep: Managing China Through Military Power. New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2017. 488 pp.

Let alone China, India cannot even win a war against Pakistan. This is the provocative opening sentence of Dragon on our Doorstep: Managing China Through Military Power by Pravin Sawhney and Ghazala Wahab. While most Indians grudgingly admit to the vast disparity between their country and its giant northeastern neighbour, they are emotionally unprepared to accept that India might struggle to win a war with its Islamic twin to the west. Sawhney, a journalist with 13 years of service in the Indian Army, and Wahab, a career journalist covering security and terrorism, describe in their book the disturbing lack of strategic thought in India’s defence policy. While the material is nothing new for seasoned analysts, it brings to to the general public in a readable manner what the authors see as shortcomings in the country’s security and their proposed solutions.

The crux of the central point of Dragon on our Doorstep is made at the outset – Sawhney and Wahab begin with the argument that bean-counting the number of tanks, artillery pieces, fighter jets, and other hardware may make for colourful charts and captivating news coverage but says little about military strength. The authors differentiate between military power, which Pakistan has developed, and military force, in which India enjoys numerical superiority. The latter is merely the stockpiling of war materiel while the former is concerns the optimal utilisation of that force through well considered defence policy and political directive.

If the famous Prussian military theorist was right that war is the continuation of politics by other means, Sawhney and Wahab have put their finger on the fundamental weakness in Indian security that propagates to all other aspects and levels. The authors’ observation that India’s political will and institutional structure is ambivalent at best reinforces an observation made by an American analyst, George Tanham, in that has been received with some rancour in the Indian establishment. In a now famous 1992 essay for Rand titled, Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay, Tanham bemoans that India has always lacked in strategic thinking. This has only been to the advantage of Delhi’s enemies. As Sawhney and Wahab contend, “India’s political and military leaders, in cahoots with its diplomats, have sold falsehoods to their own people” about the country’s security.

Establishment weakness is partly due to incompetence: in its crusade to establish civilian primacy over the military, the government has effectively eliminated the armed forces from decision-making process and replaced them with generalist civil servants who are simply unaware of the implications of policies. Dragon on our Doorstep gives several examples of diplomatic errors that were caused by having little knowledge of precedence, history, and facts on the ground.

The lack of a coordinated security policy sometimes results in different government departments working at cross purposes with each other. The lines of authority are also inordinately ambiguous; for example, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police falls under the Ministry of Home Affairs during peacetime but is seconded to the Ministry of Defence in wartime. Not only do such regulations denude cohesiveness and self-awareness among units at the border but they create multiple chains of command that report to different bureaucracies that do not always have the same goals.

Sawhney and Wahab contrast the Indian condition with a conference they attended in China. From the beginning to the end, all representatives of the Chinese media had only one message to impress upon their guests, from the political leaders and bureaucrats to military officials and the media. Such is Beijing’s coordinated strategy, aligning everything from the battlefield to the airwaves.

Not only are Chinese forces well-coordinated, they have, through arms exports and constant training, achieved a high degree of interoperability with the Pakistani Army. This means that India’s enemies retain the physical option to fight on two fronts against a common enemy, holding only the political decision in abeyance. Delhi, on the other hand, suffers from poor coordination between its units, its services, and with foreign powers. Blurred chains of command and the lack of a joint chief of staff has hurt military planning severely, and Raisina’s reticence to establish regular and comprehensive exercises with foreign militaries has left India completely unprepared even if foreign assistance were immediately forthcoming in the event of war.

Sawhney and Wahab take readers on a tour of India’s security blunders and make a convincing case that someone, somewhere, who should know what is going on in fact does not. As the authors explain, weakness at the top has percolated to all levels – from strategic to operational and tactical. The elimination of military inputs from foreign policy and even, to an extent, defence policy, has created a dangerous blind spot in the manner India views the world.

One of the concerns is that India does not seem to learn from its mistakes; perhaps the structure of the defence establishment is such that it does not retain an institutional history. For example, Operation Vijay (1999) was preceded by an Operation Meghdoot. Just as Indian soldiers returning to the mountain tops of Kargil in the summer of 1999 discovered that Pakistani soldiers had infiltrated into India during the winter and occupied the heights, Indian soldiers at Siachen had already had a similar experience in 1983. Sawhney and Wahab describe how Indian delegations were surprised to bump into their Pakistani counterparts in Europe shopping for the same winter accoutrements. The inability to learn from experience is a death knell for any organisation.

There is nothing particularly new by way of data or analysis in Dragon on our Doorstep for scholars or even seasoned observers of Indian foreign and security policy. However, the solutions offered are bound to raise hackles and ignite spirited debates. Ultimately, however, this is perhaps what Sawhney and Wahab seek – greater discussion of issues of vital importance among citizens and decision-makers alike.

For example, it is suggested that the path to India becoming a leading power is Pakistan because Delhi would not be able to focus on global issues or dedicate resources to them without a stable neighbourhood. This would indeed be ideal but the observation underestimates Pakistan’s hatred of India. The authors remind readers of how close both nations were to peace during the Agra summit in 2001 with Pakistani military dictator Pervez Musharraf but India was wary of trusting any offer from across the border so soon after the Kargil conflict.

On a related issue, Dragon on the Doorstep warns that Kashmir is potentially destabilising for India and goes on to criticise the highly controversial enactment of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) in the state. Again, the ideal of diplomacy over bullets is proposed without taking into account relentless cross-border instigation. Sawhney and Wahab also work on the assumption that Kashmir is the root of India’s problems with Pakistan, something that has always been rejected by India and recently been dismissed by even Western scholars such as Christine Fair and Daniel Markey.

Provocatively, the authors write, “India needs to understand that the road to managing an assertive China runs through Pakistan.” This is not the first time this suggestion has been made. Bharat Karnad, a scholar at the Centre for Policy Research, has long advocated some emollience with Pakistan so that India may better focus on the real threat to its security from China. As Sawhney and Wahab see it, India has three options towards China. One, it can form a closer partnership with the United States to contain Chinese ambitions; however, India will always have a deficit of trust with a country that is as supportive of Pakistan as the United States has been.

Two, India can go it alone – build the requisite military and economic strength to become a true rival to the dragon; this is easier said than done and the umpteen structural weaknesses in the Indian state will make this a decades-long process, assuming there is no wavering of political will in the meantime. Three, India can bluff its way along without aggravating China too much; the authors leave the substance of this ambiguous but it possibly means maintaining the status quo and playing the unsatisfying balancing act between Beijing and Washington. The language leaves one suspecting that this would be the authors’ choice.

While the title may imply a hawkish position on China, some of the authors’ suggestions are surprising, some may even say naive. For example, Sawhney and Wahab recommend that India join Chinese infrastructural initiatives like One Belt, One Road (OBOR) and even the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) because it would give Delhi leverage to open negotiations on Tibet and facilitate a stable peace with Pakistan.

The same credulity is witnessed when Dragon on the Doorstep accept every positive claim about the Chinese and Pakistani armies while questioning the Indian army at every turn. The simple fact of the matter is that India managed to “win” its wars with Pakistan and hold its ground with China in later conflagrations such as at Nathu La in 1967, Sumdorung Chu in 1987, and Doka La in 2017. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has no doubt advanced leaps and bounds since the modernisation begun by Deng Xiaoping in the early 1970s – which Dragon on our Doorstep discusses at length – but despite its clear strategic vision, the PLA still suffers from lack of decent hardware, regular political indoctrination, insufficient training, a crisis of loyalty, and corruption much like the Pakistani Army.

It is important to understand the assumptions behind these evaluations, for they are not limited to the authors alone. In this world view, the United States is seen as untrustworthy, and India’s nuclear deal with it a failure. Russia is the model relationship, and China is a regrettable enemy. With these parameters, Dragon on our Doorstep makes a far more compelling argument than without. Sawhney and Wahab do not explore these assumptions beyond a superficial glance, unfortunately.

Otherwise, it might be countered that the United States remains the only country that has the economic and military wherewithal to catalyse India’s hesitant rise to an international power to reckon with. Furthermore, its relations with India and Pakistan over the decades have been coloured by Delhi’s (Jawaharlal Nehru’s) assumptions about the United States. Regarding Russia, there are more thorns in that relationship than are publicly discussed. The ballooning cost of the Admiral Gorshkov aircraft carrier was just one incident among several disagreements on transfers of technology, quality of equipment, and cost. Finally, on China, it is unfathomable that a rising superpower would ever tolerate a powerful country on its border. Regardless of how much both countries can achieve together, Beijing can never countenance Delhi’s power.

Dragon on our Doorstep has a questionable foreign policy analysis but that should not detract readers from its strength – the discussion of the nitty-gritty of military planning and preparation, from foot soldier to president. The expertise of both the authors is on display as they marshal facts and anecdotes to make their argument that security-wise, India is ill-prepared at all levels. Sawhney and Wahab present a comprehensive accounting of India’s weaknesses, from border logistics to Islamist and Maoist insurgencies that draw soldiers away from military operations to counter-terrorism, from an anaemic domestic defence manufacturing industry to over-confidence in India’s armed forces.

A more conscientious editor would have certainly helped Dragon on our Doorstep sharpen the argument and reining in the authors when they got carried away by their narrative. What should be obvious by now is that Sawhney and Wahab are primarily interested in revealing the inefficiencies and incompetence in the Indian security structure despite the ominous, admonitory title implying China. In this, the book certainly succeeds, and is a valuable addition to the security buff’s reading list .

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China’s Latest War Manual

27 Wed May 2015

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Security

≈ Comments Off on China’s Latest War Manual

Tags

anti-access/area denial, China, Communist Party of China, CPC, cyber, Defence White Paper, Indian Ocean, Japan, Line of Actual Control, LoAC, military, NFU, No First Use, Non-Proliferation Treaty, NPT, nuclear, nuclear weapons state, NWS, People's Liberation Army, People's Liberation Army Air Force, People's Liberation Army Navy, People's Liberation Army Second Artillery Force, PLA, PLAAF, PLAN, PLASAF, Revolution in Military Affairs, RMA, sea lines of communication, Senkaku Islands, SLOC, South China Sea, space, Taiwan, Tibet, Uighur, United States, Xinjiang

On May 26 this year, China released its latest Defence White Paper in which it outlined the direction and scope of its military modernisation efforts. As with the release of every such document, the immediate question is, ‘What’s new?’ The honest answer is, ‘Not much.’ The White Paper has never been the vehicle through which Beijing announces its policy changes; usually, these documents, about nine of them since 1998, reiterate already announced policies and tweak old policies a little to factor in the Communist Party of China’s latest threat perception. This means that the White Papers are fairly useless to strategists or Sinologists but may be of some use to political leaders who tend to have diverse demands on their attention.

China Defence White Paper 2015The 2015 White Paper starts typically with a brief assessment of the security situation China faces and the changes it expects in the proximate future. It repeats the standard rhetoric from Beijing of seeking only cooperation and peaceful coexistence. Beijing perceives the international environment to be fairly peaceful and stable with little risk of a major war in the foreseeable future. However, the CPC is concerned about threats arising from hegemonism, power politics, and neo-interventionism which may encourage terrorist activities, ethnic, border, and territorial disputes; local wars, therefore, remain a threat.

Not surprisingly, China’s political and military confidence of recent years comes from its conviction that the world’s economic centre of gravity is shifting rapidly back to Asia. Its primary concern is the US in the western Pacific but Japan’s even gradual militarisation has alarmed Beijing. In perhaps a veiled reference to India, the White Paper also mentions foreign countries interfering in South China Sea affairs. Vietnam and the Philippines get a similar mention for the Senkakus and China rounds off its list of potential threats with a mention of Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang.

Interestingly, the last two did not merit a mention in the previous white paper two years ago. Several incidents by Uighurs in recent months makes the addition of Xinjiang an understandable addition but Tibet is a little surprising. The paper mentions the United States and Japan by name less number of times than earlier years, indicating that China has become more confident of its anti-access/area denial tactics.

The CPC has not altered its views on the role of the military – defending Chinese interests, participating in relief operations, international security cooperation, and preserving the stability of the state. Beijing’s paranoia about outside powers trying to foment a revolution, though much reduced since the days of Mao Zedong, has still not gone away completely.

China soldiersBut what can we expect to see in China’s defence spending and its areas of interests? Unlike the 2013 white paper, there are no mentions of units, military districts, or strength of the various branches of the Chinese military. However, the general outlook appears similar – the Revolution in Military Affairs has an inherent and irresistible push, according to Beijing, towards the development of long-range weapons systems, stealth, unmanned platforms, precision weapons, and the use of cyber and outer space. The focus on cyber and space-based assets for communications, reconnaissance, intelligence gathering, and surveillance, is clear from the mention – fear? – of the modern “informationized” battlefield 22 times in a short, 5,500-word document.

Operationally, the People’s Liberation Army will reorient its mission from merely theatre defence to trans-theatre mobility. This sounds a little like India’s much-vaunted Cold Start doctrine but something the Chinese might actually be able to pull off given their superior infrastructure. The PLA intends to develop specially-skilled units for different terrains and tasks and train them for closely coordinated operations. The multi-functional, modular units allows the PLA greater operational flexibility for small-scale operations in localised conflicts of the kind the CPC perceives China to be occupied with in the foreseeable future. The smaller, more mobile units would be perfect for “warning exercises” opposite the Japanese or Taiwanese coast or for adventures along the Line of Actual Control.

China navyThe PLA Navy’s role has been expanded from offshore waters defence to include open seas protection. This likely means the defence of new Chinese maritime claims and the assets Beijing might place in disputed waters. To this end, Beijing’s interest in acquiring additional aircraft carriers makes perfect sense – the envelope around a carrier group will be able to create little mobile pockets of Chinese sovereignty. This expanded role is of great concern not just for China’s immediate neighbours but also Indonesia and Australia. Fielding a blue-water navy has long been a Chinese ambition but open seas protection moves beyond that to some serious force projection.

Until now, China has relied on the international system to keep its sea lines of communication safe; henceforth, the PLAN will take a direct interest in ensuring their security. A legitimate security concern, defending its SLOCs gives the PLAN an excuse to sail more regularly and in greater strength into the Indian Ocean, a move sure to alarm Delhi.

The PLA Air Force will maintain its current role of early warning, air defence and offence, and force projection while modernising itself. A small but crucial addition to its role from 2013 will be “information countermeasures.” In essence, China’s military strategists have observed over the past quarter century how the United States fights its wars – the reliance upon aerial assets for positioning, reconnaissance, communications, targeting, and electronic countermeasures is a huge force multiplier for ground forces and is something the Chinese are interested in replicating. To this end, the PLAAF’s jurisdiction will extend into space as well.

China’s use of space must worry India greatly. The successful demonstration of an anti-satellite missile in 2007 and the development of other weapons systems for “soft kills” in space puts India’s own communications with its nuclear submarines and other military units in jeopardy. As the Chinese race after the United States to achieve parity in C5ISR, sooner or later, India will be inadvertently dragged in its wake. Sooner would be better.

Of particular concern to India is the profile of the PLA Second Artillery Force, the units in charge of China’s nuclear arsenal. Beijing has always adhered to a no first use nuclear policy ever since its first nuclear test in October 1964 but in 2013, the manner in which this assurance was worded became ambiguous. That ambiguity remains in this latest edition of Beijing’s white paper too – the document reads, “China has always pursued the policy of no first use of nuclear weapons and adhered to a self-defensive nuclear strategy…. China will unconditionally not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states…” Again, it is not clear if Beijing’s NFU posture applies to nuclear weapons states or not.

One might argue that Beijing does not view India as a nuclear weapons state as per the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and therefore the NFU policy applies to India. Yet China has shown the ability to be surprisingly pragmatic when it serves them and the possession of nuclear weapons might confer NWS status for military purposes. Beijing’s no first use declaration, which critics, with some justification, have always considered empty words, in all likelihood does not apply to India. Delhi must take this into consideration when it next updates its own nuclear posture.

Besides this significant reorientation, the PLASAF will modernise its delivery systems and warheads and work on technologies to improve its deterrence, early warning, survivability, and counterattack capabilities as well as medium and long-range precision strikes.

The rest of the document lays out the PLA’s goals to streamline its and modernise logistics, augment its war reserves, improve rules and standards, and innovate modes of support. Officers will be given more opportunities to study military strategy and operations so that they may be able to introduce more effective principles and methods in their units. Troops will be given more “realistic” combat training and will strive for a high degree of combat readiness and alertness. The reserve force will be expanded and given better training to integrate them better with the regular military.

The PLA has stepped back from participating in the construction of civilian infrastructure but retains a focus on better integration of civilian and military infrastructure, education, manufacturing, and logistics. These personnel goals are less glamorous than the development of space-based military assets or a reorientation of operational strategy but remain nonetheless vital to the PLA’s well-being. As several US analysts have observed over the years, the PLA lacks the support of a professional non-commissioned officer corps or recent combat experience. The latter has led to China participating in UN peacekeeping missions but these human and experiential factors hamper the process of modernisation.

It would be an interesting exercise for those with Mandarin language skills to compare the English and Mandarin versions of China’s Defence White Paper. In any case, the white paper does not explain how the laundry list of goals will be achieved or make any assessments of the utility of developing certain capabilities; nor does it get into evaluations of present capabilities as a point of reference. This should be of no surprise as the primary goal of the document is to deter its foreign audience rather than provide an academic study of Chinese military thought.

On a concluding note, it is worrisome for countries vested in the Pax Americana to see how anti-status quo states like Russia and China are rapidly catching up with the United States in force-on-force warfare in terms of material as well as technology. All the while, the United States has been occupied with learning to fight a different kind of war in the Middle East and Central Asia and has had little time to dedicate to the strategic shifts in the western Pacific, space, and other theatres. India has only a secondary role to play in this imminent clash between powers but how Delhi plays its part in this game over the next twenty years will be very interesting to watch.


This post appeared on FirstPost on June 05, 2015.

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Sentinels in the Himalayas

30 Tue Jul 2013

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, Opinion and Response, Security, South Asia

≈ Comments Off on Sentinels in the Himalayas

Tags

China, Daulat Beg Oldi, DF-21, Himalayas, India, Line of Actual Control, mountain strike corps, PLA, PLAAF, PLAN, SLOC, Tibet

China’s prolonged incursion into India in April this year, and perhaps the media attention it garnered, finally proved the nudge Delhi required to green-light the formation of new mountain strike corps units to be deployed in the vicinity of the Line of Actual Control between the two Asian giants. The plan will, at a cost of ₹65,000 crores, effectively raise approximately 90,000 men, formed in two mountain strike corps, two engineering, two armoured, one artillery (Brahmos-equipped), one independent infantry, one aviation, and one air defence brigades, perhaps with a few UAV squadrons thrown in too. These will be supported by the recently acquired C-130Js based out of Panagarh in West Bengal and the Su-30MKIs at the Advanced Landing Grounds (ALG) of Machuka, Vijaynagar, Pasighat, and Zero. Although this has been mulled not-so-secretly for over ten years, it has suddenly come under public criticism after its announcement.

While many observers have seen Delhi’s decision to go ahead with the mountain strike corps as a resultant of the Chinese intrusion at Daulat Beg Oldi (DBO) and their subsequent vandalism of Indian border posts, the structure of the new units betrays no such motive. In the difficult mountain terrain of the Himalayas rife with unpredictable asymmetric advantages, it would be impossible to land and manoeuvre such large forces effectively. If anything, India’s latest military creation must be seen as the development of capability to leapfrog the Himalayas and fight on the Tibetan plateau. This is a first in Indian military thought – even during the nuclear debates in the Lok Sabha in the 1960s, parliamentarians suggested using nuclear weapons in the mountains to isolate and decimate invading enemy troops than acquire expensive delivery systems that would put the bomb on Beijing’s doorstep.

There are fundamental problems in using the newly raised troops as rapid response units to China’s frequent pinpricks, not the least of which is how far they are stationed from the frontier. Secondly, with a single aviation brigade to conduct airlift operations, reconnaissance, and provide air support, the corps will not be as fast and nimble as it needs to be; in addition, armour will be of limited use in the mountains, and unless new light artillery is acquired, the Indian Army’s present guns would be an additional burden. For all these reasons, it is unlikely that these units will play a major role in countering the regular Chinese incursions into Indian territory. Many of the infrastructural disadvantages the units have on this side of the border will, ironically, disappear in Tibet where China is reported to have built a sufficient network of roads, rail, and airstrips for a rapid deployment of troops in case of a crisis.

There is some apprehension that China’s ability to quickly mobilise and deploy up to 34 divisions – approximately 500,000 men – in Tibet in a war scenario will leave the Indian Army hopeless outmatched. This figure comes from the Tibetan Government-in-exile in Dharamsala, and is thought to include the People’s Armed Police, the Chinese Frontier Guards, and the Garrison Duty Forces. However, the PLA’s main centres, in Golmud and Chengdu, are at least 1,000 kilometres away and the troops there would need to acclimatise to Tibet’s rarer air. Additionally, any significant troop deployment into Tibet would only have to come by rail or road, as the PLAAF does not have the resources to airlift 100,000 men close to enemy positions overnight. It is also unlikely that the PLA would mobilise troops from its other regional centre, Kashgar significantly for fear of stripping another of its restive border provinces (Xinjiang) of security. Of course, Indian forces would have air cover from Advanced Landing Grounds in India while in Tibet. Ultimately, it is presumptuous to assume that Delhi would order a thrust into Tibet without clear and limited objectives – these 90,000 men are not expected to march onto Beijing on their own and win the war for India. The notion of their being outnumbered and out-gunned, therefore, needs to take this into account.

Some suggestions that have been floated advocate challenging the Chinese in their weak spot, namely, the seas. The reasoning is that India will take a long while to catch up with the Chinese in terms of infrastructure and land warfare capabilities, so a more profitable return on investment for Delhi would be to dominate the seas in return. First and foremost, it must be realised that the cost of a single capital ship and the attractive target it presents enemies is no less worrisome than raising and arming 90,000 men. Secondly, this is not an either-or situation – the PLAN certainly does not share this view with respect to its country;s capabilities as it develops blue-water ambitions. It must also be understood that strangling sea lines of communications (SLOC) is a daunting task in the world’s busiest waterways; to stop, search, and turn around every China-bound vessel would be almost impossible even without a Chinese naval presence. Beijing is also developing land alternatives to its most critical needs, with road links and oil & gas pipelines planned from Central and West Asia to reduce the criticality of SLOCs. Of course, the constraints of deploying aircraft carriers some distance from littoral waters to maintain manoeuvrability and safety from access denial systems such as the Chinese DF-21 (anti-ship ballistic missile) in the crowded waters of Southeast Asia is another concern.

There is, of course, the immediate problem that clashes between Indian and Chinese soldiers happen mostly on land and in the Himalayas. While the mountain strike corps do not immediately address incidents like DBO, they were not meant to either – they are intended for a much higher level of conflict than the almost-daily skirmishes that occur on the Indo-Tibetan border. India’s immediate needs in the sector are special forces units which can be fast, agile, and concentrate heavy fire-power on their targets at a moment’s notice. This does not, however, negate the need for units that can strike into Tibet. It is commendable that India’s defence planners are thinking broadly about the country’s defence needs. However, the public’s imagination has been captured by recent events at the border, and objectives are being conflated and questions being asked about how India intends to raise the cost to Beijing of its pinprick policy. That would be another story.


This post appeared on Tehelka Blogs on August 01, 2013.

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