BSNL resists full ban of Chinese Telecom
By Bala Shah

Most Indian security experts feel that the biggest threats to our country come from Pakistan and China.  Conversely, the Chinese and Pakistanis will have their own views on which nations pose a danger to their own countries.  Any overseas Telecom company that has the potential to harm national interest is banned or restricted from operating in the host country.  

The Indian Government is grappling with the same challenges while dealing with Chinese Telecom major Huawei. Huawei, on their website, describes itself as a leader in providing next generation telecommunications networks, and now serves 36 of the world's top 50 operators, along with over one billion users worldwide. By mid-2008, Huawei had 87,500 employees and massive overseas R&D Centres in  USA, Sweden, Russia and Bangalore,  India.

Last week, Huawei India bagged a $400 million order from mobile operator Unitech Wireless to deploy its services in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.

But Huawei is facing strong opposition from the Indian intelligence agencies whenever it tenders for any Indian project with a national security dimension.  It is an open secret that part of the Huawei management is closely linked to the Chinese Government.   In the latest such case,  the Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB) and Defence Ministry has warned the Government owned BSNL that it should not give any of its major contracts to Huawei.

The Economic Times is reporting:

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Both IB and the defence ministry’s reactions are in the wake of BSNL’s move to shortlist Huawei, along with Swedish equipment major Ericsson, for its mega 93-million-line GSM expansion project worth around Rs 30,000 crore, in what is the single-largest telecom contract in the world. Ericsson was short-listed as the lowest bidder for north and east zones while Huawei was selected for west, east and south zones.

The views of IB and the defence ministry were conveyed to BSNL at a meeting on April 9. During the meet, both BSNL and the Department of Telecom (DoT) suggested that Huawei could be awarded the contract in south India since the region did not share sensitive borders with Pakistan, China and Bangladesh. Besides, the Department of Telecom argued that Huawei was already working with BSNL in south India.
“

It beggars belief that while the Indian Intelligence agencies feel that a specific company should be kept out because of national interest,  the Department of Telecom (Dot) and BSNL feel it would be safe to award it a multi crore contract for South of India.

In this high stakes game,  the Indian Intelligence agencies have ‘leaked’ their views to Indian media to ensure there is mounting public pressure on BSNL to do things in the national interest.

As with most national security issues,  the Indian public will be in the dark on why exactly our intelligence services feel that this Chinese company should be blocked from major BSNL contracts.  Other countries like USA, Russia,  China and UK also never explain such decisions as it would compromise intelligence sources.

China has the same right to block Indian companies which may impinge on its security interests.  And it does.  China even created its own operating system Kylin to keep its dependency on Microsoft products to a bare minimum.  China has even engineered its own search engine Baidu so that its citizens do not use Google.  Naturally, Baidu has a very pro China slant to most issues. America, on its part, has blocked Huawei from a number of sensitive projects.