Balkanising India, Chinsese way

A Chinese "strategist" has recently posted a game plan on a website to break India into “20-30 pieces” of ethnic concentrations. And so what’s new? The Chinese have been trying to destabilize India almost from the moment of its emergence as a free nation from British colonial bondage by providing guerrilla warfare training, arms and sanctuaries to the Nagas. All the North-east insurgencies are China-Pakistan joint ventures.

The Pakistan Army Inter-Services Intelligence is the hatchet-arm of Han hegemony. But things are going wrong for this gang-up and chickens are coming home to roost.

Hence this blatant, officially-sponsored, threat to India. This is officially sponsored because such things cannot happen in China if the top leadership does not want it. And if it does happen and the leadership does not act to discipline the culprit it is an indicator of official acquiescence. China has not done anything about it even after the Indian Ministry of External Affairs had brought the impugned blog to Beijing’s notice.

From 1948 to 1971 China used the unruly segments in Myanmar and the Chittagong Hill Tracts to train and indoctrinate insurgent groups from the North-east India. It is only with the creation of Bangladesh that the Chinese nexus was, to a large extent, neutralized and China tried to make political capital of a bad situation by claiming that it had stopped all support to anti-India groups. The lie was soon exposed with the capture of a Naga group trying to cross into Tibet through Bhutan thereby indicating that fresh attempts were being made to open up new routes and avenues to support NE militants who were falling to cordon-and-search operations by security forces.

It was a short-lived respite for India because President Mujib-ur-Rehman was assassinated and a military regime was followed by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party led by Begum Khaleda Zia, widow of one of the conspirators involved in the Bangabandhu killing. The regime’s attitude towards India was best illustrated by the seizure (by sheer accident) of a huge consignment of Chinese weapons delivered at Cox Bazaar which was intended to be delivered to ULFA and Naga militants. Recently, Bangladesh Army officers were arrested for complicity in that act.

However, China’s greater sin is making nuclear weapons the bulwark from behind which terrorist activities have been conducted against India by Pakistan. Since the mid-Seventies China has supplied Pakistan with tested nuclear warheads and arranged for North Korea to export missiles that can deliver the warheads to targets in India. That was the time when Pakistan was totally immersed in funding and facilitating the Khalistan terrorists in their attempt to break away from India. Religious fundamentalism and nuclear weapons became a heady decoction.

While Pakistan was wallowing in its new found “strategic depth” in Afghanistan where it had installed the Taliban in government, US Secretary of State Jeane Kirkpatric was credited with a plan to Balkanise (the dictionary meaning being to divide a country or territory into small, quarrelsome, ineffectual territories) India using the Khalistanis as the thin edge of the wedge. Hence, diplomatic and political support was given to Dr Jagjit Singh Chauhan “President” of Khalistan.

Pakistan’s enthusiasm for Khalistan received a severe jolt when in 1985, the National Council of Khalistan demanded of General Zia-ul-Haq that Lahore, the Pakistani city, be renamed ‘Ranjit Pura’, as it was the capital of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s empire. That rang alarm bells in the predominantly Punjabi Pakistan Army which saw the spectre of Sikh domination of a unified Punjab if Khalistan ever became a reality. They saw it as Balkanisation in reverse. At the same time the momentum of the joint operation by the Indian Army, the Punjab Police and paramilitary organizations broke the back of the movement.

Having failed in its first attempt at the vivisection of India by a replication of the British game plan of nationhood based on religion, Pakistan shifted gear and tried to inject communal poison in the Muslim majority Kashmir Valley a la the Taliban experiment in Afghanistan. By this time its “bomb in the basement” programme being executed with “all-weather friend” China’s assistance, was assessed by American experts to be just “two screwdriver turns away” from fruition.

Seeing how China had made arrangements to supply Pakistan with tested and fully operational nuclear weapons, Chinese perfidy on nuclear proliferation came up front during negotiations on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treat at Geneva. It was when it became clear that the rest of the world was not willing to comprehend the threat to Indian territorial integrity posed by the China-Pakistan nuclear nexus India made an unequivocal declaration that it would not sign the CTBT in Arundhati Ghosh’s resounding words: “Not now, not ever!”. India began accelerating its nuclear weapons programme and in 1998 conducted a series of underground tests at Pokharan. It had the effect of flushing out Pakistan’s clandestine “bomb in the basement” programme and forcing Islamabad to conduct its own series of tests in the Chagai Hills of Balochistan.

The cat was now out of the bag and when Pakistan Army Chief General Pervez Musharraf planned the intrusion into Kargil in 1999 it was based on a new-found invincibility of his nuclear weapons. How gravely he and China miscalculated (he was in Beijing when the invasion took place) was there for all to see when US President Bill Clinton confronted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif with evidence of the Pakistan Army activating its nuclear arsenal and demanded the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the Pakistan Army from Kargil.

The evolution of Chinese support to terrorism as a tool for the destabilization and eventual disintegration of India has culminated in the nuclearisation of terror in this part of the world.