BY : Abu Dhabi Media Company



Asia’s two burgeoning giants, India and China, have long done battle.

They jostle at the top of the league tables for the title of largest emerging economy and biggest population. They have also fought one war and both are in the process of rapidly modernising air, sea and nuclear capabilities.

But that rivalry may be about to go into orbit, with members of India’s top brass having said the country must accelerate its military space programme to counter China’s technological advances.

“The Chinese space programme is expanding at an extraordinarily rapid pace in both offensive and defensive content,” Gen Deepak Kapoor, India’s chief of army staff, said at a conference in Delhi last week.

“The Indian army’s agenda for the exploitation of space will have to evolve dynamically.”

Gen Kapoor called for the establishment of a space command centre to co-ordinate surveillance, intelligence and communications, and said the army needed to “optimise space-based capabilities”.

The general is the third top Indian official in the past month to express concern over China’s enhanced military capabilities in space, although AK Anthony, the defence minister, stopped short of naming India’s strategic rival, and said there was a “growing threat” from “offensive anti-satellite weaponry in the neighbourhood”.

Throughout most of the 1950s, India enjoyed friendly relations with China despite several territorial disputes. But New Delhi’s decision to allow the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, to take refuge in the north Indian town of Dharamsala after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959, saw those ties sour, culminating in a brief but bloody border war in 1962.

Today, despite attempts to foster closer relations through bilateral trade – which grew to US$37 billion (Dh135bn) last year – the two nations remain suspicious of one another.

China still claims large swathes of the north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and occupies land in Ladakh in the north-west that India claims. Last month, a fresh dispute emerged when Chinese officials reportedly claimed the northernmost tip of the Indian state of Sikkim.

But it was China’s decision to shoot down one of its own defunct satellites with a ballistic missile in January last year that really got the Indian military thinking.

“Since then India has woken up to the dangers it faces,” said Brahma Chellaney, a former adviser to India’s National Security Council and a professor of strategic studies at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research.

China is only the third country, after Russia and the United States, to shoot down an object in orbit. By comparison, India does not have a dedicated spy satellite, relying instead on civilian ones to gather imagery and other intelligence.

China’s space programme is already several years ahead of India’s. In part because of the utilitarian principles on which the Indian Space Research Organisation, India’s space agency, was founded – any project had to produce direct benefits for the nation’s masses. As a result, India has one of the world’s largest constellations of communications and weather imaging satellites. The agency launches satellites for other countries too, including an Israeli spy satellite in January.

But China’s successful attempt to put a man into space in 2003, again only the third country after the United States and Russia to do so, has made India re-evaluate such principles.

“With time, we will get sucked into a military race to protect our space assets and inevitably there will be a military contest in space,” said Lt Gen HS Lidder, chief of integrated defence staff. “In a life and death situation, only space resources would provide an advantage to any military force.”

The two countries are already engaged in a race to the moon. This year the agency will launch Chandrayaan to the moon, the first Indian satellite to venture beyond the Earth’s orbit and by 2013 it hopes to launch a probe to Mars. A few years later it could be sending up its first gaganaut – one suggestion for the Sanskrit version of astronaut.

The Chinese are hoping to put their first taikonaut – derived from the Chinese word taikong, meaning space, on the moon by 2020.

Right now, one of the Indian military’s main priorities is to develop similar technology to that which China used to down its satellite, more than 800km above the Earth’s surface.

Abdul Kalam, India’s former president, said in February that India had the capacity to destroy an object located 200km above Earth.

Such targets, however, come into direct conflict with India’s long-held position, opposing the weaponisation of space. “Things are changing in India, we don’t get much reaction to our Gandhian principles,” said Jabin Jacobs, a China expert at the Delhi-based Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies. China’s heavy military spending has spurred India into action in other spheres too, with the county announcing plans to have aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines in the next decade.

Recently, India tested nuclear-capable missiles that could reach China’s cities and it has reopened air force bases near the Chinese border.

“All of India’s military planning is focused on China,” Mr Chellaney said.