For reasons well-documented by history India’s relations with Pakistan have always drawn public and media attention on both sides of the border. Arguably, four wars and hundreds of confidence building measures later, Pakistan truly is one of India’s prime foreign policy and national security concerns and given its track record, so it ought to be. Between then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s confidence building bus journey to Lahore in 1999 and his successor Mr Manmohan Singh’s abject surrender to Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani in Sharm el-Sheikh on the Balochistan issue this July, lies a decade of deceptions, obfuscations, intrusions, terror attacks and denials by Pakistan. As the pendulum of opinion swings between the need to “engage” Pakistan and teaching that country a few lessons in good neighbourly conduct, the undeniable truth is India, not for once, can afford to let its guard down with Pakistan.
Despite Pakistan’s brazenness and the Manmohan Singh’s Government’s miserable failure to make that country accountable for repeated terror attacks on India, what inspires hope is the fact that each time the India-Pakistan face-off has turned into a conventional military conflict, India has emerged victorious, militarily and diplomatically. If at all, Pakistan has a humiliating history to look back at in this regard. There is, however, another neighbour with whom India has a deeply humiliating military past to remember, dating back to 1962. This neighbour, which has since aided and abetted Pakistan’s hostile designs on India including its nuclear weapons programme, cleverly staying away from a direct military confrontation again, is now making consistently disturbing noises on India’s northern and eastern borders. This needs to be discussed and debated as intensely, if not more, as India-Pakistan relations.
With Pakistan rapidly imploding and Barack Obama’s America directly involved in the region, it is apparent that China is gradually losing the leverage it has had since 1962 of using Pakistan to needle India. With the Chinese as uncertain as the rest of the world about who calls the shots in Pakistan — the Army, the Prime Minister or the President —Beijing no longer has a failsafe political interface with Islamabad. Too many players have now entered the Pakistani arena for any one country or entity to control or influence Islamabad. Accompanying this irretrievable unmaking and fragmentation of the Pakistani polity, therefore, is a disturbing trend in recent months: More than casual, in fact defiant, Chinese intrusions into Indian territory, on repeated occasions in Arunachal Pradesh and now in Ladakh.
While paranoia is best avoided at this juncture, the gradual unmaking of Pakistan and China’s recent border missives to India seem more than merely coincidental. Be it a navigational error or an undefined Line of Actual Control, India can ill-afford to dismiss Chinese intrusions as “routine” to be dealt with under a “standard mechanism” set up in a 2005 protocol wherein a flag meeting is to be called within 48 hours of any intrusion which then has to be investigated by the “guilty” party and a report sent back to the other country. It is perhaps India’s inexplicable lack of urgency that has emboldened China into outright denial of any territorial intrusion. In response to Indian Army chief Gen Deepak Kapoor’s casual observation, therefore, that, “there have been several violations and one incursion by a Chinese helicopter in the past few months,” have come two official denials from Beijing in the space of a month.
Even if one were to dismiss the recent intrusions as routine or ignore them as innocuous games by a bunch of young Chinese soldiers thumbing their nose at India for adventurous relief from their boredom at the border posts, the fact is recent years have witnessed an intensification of China’s military modernisation as well as massive infrastructure development in the Tibet Autonomous Region. In fact, Gen Kapoor admitted last year that these developments “could impact our security in the long term.” Indeed, on a visit to TAR in 2007 one was astounded by the sheer scale of infrastructure development in the region, swank airports, a commanding rail network and impressive highways rolling up the mountains that can effortlessly ferry Chinese troops in a matter of hours to the Himalayan heights that stare down menacingly on our soldiers. However, simply carping about China’s infrastructure build-up or border incursions will not ease India’s problems on its northern frontier.
Admittedly, the Indian armed forces have duly acknowledged the ongoing Chinese moves along the border by intensifying border patrol along the country’s sensitive North-East. However, one must not be too hasty to infer from this development that there are chances of an India-China military face-off in the foreseeable future. The geopolitical make-up of the region and indeed of the world is significantly different from 1962. And so is the position India and China independently occupy on the global stage today.
For one, an aspiring world power like China can afford the temerity of a military aggression against India, a legitimate aspirant to a similar position, at a huge diplomatic cost globally. Two, India and China are emerging as the world’s fastest growing economic powerhouses, a historic opportunity neither country would want to fritter away by risking a military face-off. Three, both India’s and China’s equations with the United States will serve as a deterrent to any military misadventure. If India today enjoys strategic clout with the US, China has an economic card to play with the Americans. While neither would want to risk disturbing this balance by turning the region into a theatre of conventional war, the US, on its part too, cannot play one against the other. Added to this is the fact that for the first time since the disintegration of the USSR, China and India are credible options for redistributing the strategic weight long concentrated in the world’s sole superpower.
Why then is China resorting to its pre-1962 tactics of irritating India on the long-standing border dispute? The answer lies in the last reason cited for the unlikelihood of a military combat anytime soon. China has its eyes trained on a 2020 scenario when it hopes to assume a significant share of the strategic weight the US is likely to shed by then. And, India is a direct competitor, if not rival. Therefore, while not engaging in a full-blown military face-off that would erode its credibility as a global player, China is only seeking to remind India of the screws it can so easily tighten on the borders even after Pakistan has been rendered unemployable. This pressure-in-perpetuity Chinese game is what India urgently needs to apply its mind to.
Despite Pakistan’s brazenness and the Manmohan Singh’s Government’s miserable failure to make that country accountable for repeated terror attacks on India, what inspires hope is the fact that each time the India-Pakistan face-off has turned into a conventional military conflict, India has emerged victorious, militarily and diplomatically. If at all, Pakistan has a humiliating history to look back at in this regard. There is, however, another neighbour with whom India has a deeply humiliating military past to remember, dating back to 1962. This neighbour, which has since aided and abetted Pakistan’s hostile designs on India including its nuclear weapons programme, cleverly staying away from a direct military confrontation again, is now making consistently disturbing noises on India’s northern and eastern borders. This needs to be discussed and debated as intensely, if not more, as India-Pakistan relations.
With Pakistan rapidly imploding and Barack Obama’s America directly involved in the region, it is apparent that China is gradually losing the leverage it has had since 1962 of using Pakistan to needle India. With the Chinese as uncertain as the rest of the world about who calls the shots in Pakistan — the Army, the Prime Minister or the President —Beijing no longer has a failsafe political interface with Islamabad. Too many players have now entered the Pakistani arena for any one country or entity to control or influence Islamabad. Accompanying this irretrievable unmaking and fragmentation of the Pakistani polity, therefore, is a disturbing trend in recent months: More than casual, in fact defiant, Chinese intrusions into Indian territory, on repeated occasions in Arunachal Pradesh and now in Ladakh.
While paranoia is best avoided at this juncture, the gradual unmaking of Pakistan and China’s recent border missives to India seem more than merely coincidental. Be it a navigational error or an undefined Line of Actual Control, India can ill-afford to dismiss Chinese intrusions as “routine” to be dealt with under a “standard mechanism” set up in a 2005 protocol wherein a flag meeting is to be called within 48 hours of any intrusion which then has to be investigated by the “guilty” party and a report sent back to the other country. It is perhaps India’s inexplicable lack of urgency that has emboldened China into outright denial of any territorial intrusion. In response to Indian Army chief Gen Deepak Kapoor’s casual observation, therefore, that, “there have been several violations and one incursion by a Chinese helicopter in the past few months,” have come two official denials from Beijing in the space of a month.
Even if one were to dismiss the recent intrusions as routine or ignore them as innocuous games by a bunch of young Chinese soldiers thumbing their nose at India for adventurous relief from their boredom at the border posts, the fact is recent years have witnessed an intensification of China’s military modernisation as well as massive infrastructure development in the Tibet Autonomous Region. In fact, Gen Kapoor admitted last year that these developments “could impact our security in the long term.” Indeed, on a visit to TAR in 2007 one was astounded by the sheer scale of infrastructure development in the region, swank airports, a commanding rail network and impressive highways rolling up the mountains that can effortlessly ferry Chinese troops in a matter of hours to the Himalayan heights that stare down menacingly on our soldiers. However, simply carping about China’s infrastructure build-up or border incursions will not ease India’s problems on its northern frontier.
Admittedly, the Indian armed forces have duly acknowledged the ongoing Chinese moves along the border by intensifying border patrol along the country’s sensitive North-East. However, one must not be too hasty to infer from this development that there are chances of an India-China military face-off in the foreseeable future. The geopolitical make-up of the region and indeed of the world is significantly different from 1962. And so is the position India and China independently occupy on the global stage today.
For one, an aspiring world power like China can afford the temerity of a military aggression against India, a legitimate aspirant to a similar position, at a huge diplomatic cost globally. Two, India and China are emerging as the world’s fastest growing economic powerhouses, a historic opportunity neither country would want to fritter away by risking a military face-off. Three, both India’s and China’s equations with the United States will serve as a deterrent to any military misadventure. If India today enjoys strategic clout with the US, China has an economic card to play with the Americans. While neither would want to risk disturbing this balance by turning the region into a theatre of conventional war, the US, on its part too, cannot play one against the other. Added to this is the fact that for the first time since the disintegration of the USSR, China and India are credible options for redistributing the strategic weight long concentrated in the world’s sole superpower.
Why then is China resorting to its pre-1962 tactics of irritating India on the long-standing border dispute? The answer lies in the last reason cited for the unlikelihood of a military combat anytime soon. China has its eyes trained on a 2020 scenario when it hopes to assume a significant share of the strategic weight the US is likely to shed by then. And, India is a direct competitor, if not rival. Therefore, while not engaging in a full-blown military face-off that would erode its credibility as a global player, China is only seeking to remind India of the screws it can so easily tighten on the borders even after Pakistan has been rendered unemployable. This pressure-in-perpetuity Chinese game is what India urgently needs to apply its mind to.
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