Since January last year, Pakistan has launched no less than six satellites with the help of ‘Iron Brother’ China, and there can be little doubt the satellite program will boost its coverage of India.
The disquieting point here is that India, in roughly the same period, has not launched a single satellite. The payloads are there and ready, according to various reports, but two successive failures of ISRO’s workhorse rocket the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle in May last year and January this year, has pushed Indian scientists back to the drawing boards.
This is not to suggest Pakistan has taken a lead on India, argues Brig Arun Sahgal of the Forum for Security Initiatives, a Delhi-based think tank. Pakistan’s success is relative. It is nowhere near India’s space capabilities or capacities despite support from China.
Reports say Pakistan tends to place its satellites in sun synchronous orbit that make them ideal for surveillance and continual coverage of Indian territory. But Ashwin Prasad, who tracks Outer Space Programmes at the Takshashila Institution believes that Pakistan is not just focussed on satellite coverage of India.
“Pakistan is trying to expand its space capabilities like other nations. Now they do have a Synthetic Aperture Radar. This can essentially see through clouds, it can see through darkness, it does not need sunlight to observe assets. So they can probably map some of the areas that are weather covered or night covered better now.”
Brig Sahgal makes another point. Pakistan should not be seen primarily in terms of the threat it poses from across the Line of Control or an air threat, but increasingly as a maritime threat, given that the satellites are suspected to be used for civil and defence purposes by Islamabad’s military establishment.
“India must take cognisance of this as its planning factor. If the Pakistanis are tardy in attacking Indian targets, you should be clear as an extra effort to engage fairly at the regular interval, and a fairly high degree of accuracy at long range, 2,000 km targets,” he said.
There’s also the fact that Pakistan shares its satellite data and imagery with China. Then again, Chinese spy ships are doing underwater mapping of the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea and such technology is constantly evolving. India will have to see how much their capacity and the capability impacts its operational thinking.
