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Sikkim standoff: Why China is challenging India now
Not only is India militarily not in a position to challenge China now, the direction the BJP is taking the country undermines India’s capabilities as a power and leaves it in no position to deter China’s aggression for years to come.
The India-China military standoff near Sikkim continues. The rhetoric from both sides is very revealing of their states of mind. India is adopting a conciliatory tone and China an uncompromising one. India will be “patient and peaceful” in dealing with its neighbours says the Narendra Modi government, commentators emphasise Delhi’s moderation and maturity. China insists that withdrawal of Indian troopsfrom Doklam is a precondition for dialogue. Chinese experts are not mincing words. Victor Gao, a former diplomat and once an interpreter for Deng Xiaoping, has said that any other country in China’s situation of seeing foreign (Indian) soldiers on its territory would send troops to drive them out. He says the longer India keeps troops in Doklam the more likely a military confrontation is.
The reaction in Indian media to the standoff with China is markedly different from what tensions with Pakistan usually provoke. Television channels are not dishing out angry hashtags about Beijing as they usually do about Islamabad’s misdemeanours. The Indian establishment clearly wants to avoid a confrontation. In Delhi’s muted reaction and Beijing’s belligerence there is perhaps a tacit acknowledgment in both capitals that the reason China is being aggressive is because India now is the weakest it has been for years.
China wants to symbolically establish dominance in Asia and it has chosen a moment when the contours of India’s path to decline are fairly well-established, three years into Modi’s rule. This is the lesson that Delhi should take away from this standoff, that not only is India militarily not in a position to challenge China now (short of a nuclear exchange), the direction that the BJP is taking the country undermines India’s capabilities as a power and leaves it in no position to resist China’s belligerence in the years to come. This is the time to starkly assess India’s situation, let go of the positive spin the BJP government puts out, and see India how its adversaries would.
This may be a counterintuitive argument to make because India certainly has some impressive attributes: a large youthful population, a formidable military machine with nuclear weapons, a sizeable middle class and elite to keep foreign companies interested for years and, like any happening power, it hosts several business and think-tank conferences. China is evidently not daunted by this because some indicators of India’s power make for grim reading.
India’s vulnerabilities are manifest in four areas. The first is in the economy, where India has recently seen a series of self-inflicted wounds. India has had a weak investment climate for years owing to regulatory bottlenecks and because its banks are saddled with bad loans. Demonetisation was needlessly introduced in an already difficult situation and it brought cities to a standstill for weeks on end and compounded an agrarian distress by simply short-circuiting billions of transactions in rural India and disrupting supply chains. Growth slowed to 6.1% in the last quarter, one economist believes it may have permanently damaged the country’s informal sector. After demonetisation came changed rules for cattle slaughter which essentially constitute a form of trade war against Muslim entrepreneurs, Dalits and the meat export industry at large. The subsequent introduction of GST has bred widespread confusion; one businessman simply warns that “small traders will die”.
Alongside the effects of recent decision-making India has a jobs crisis, an education crisis and a skills crisis. PM Modi promised 100 million manufacturing jobs by 2022; around 135,000 materialised in eight sectors in 2015--far shorter of the 12 million that reportedly enter the workforce each year. The government has simply abandoned the goal of training 500 million Indians as part of its Skill India plans. The education sector looks almost irredeemable. A committee appointed by the ministry of human resource developmenthas conceded that “large segments of the education sector…face a serious crisis of credibility in terms of the quality of education which they provide, as well as the worth of the degrees which they confer on students.” There are simply too many bad teachers in government schools, many of whom get their jobs through patronage or corruption. Students are not failed in schools and colleges for political reasons--since parents would be angry if governments provided their children bad education to begin with and then failed them. India thus has millions of youth with college degrees often lacking foundational skills let alone employable ones.
If challenges in the economy, education and skills weren’t enough there is now an active attack on India’s social cohesion, the one thing that held the country together despite all its problems. BJP rule has seen a spike in hate speech directed at Muslims that has led to their targeting and lynching. The Indian Muslim is being constantly represented as a hate figure with a view to snap the possibility of an associational life between Hindus and Muslims. All this corrodes social life and undermines economic productivity - a divided and fear-ridden country is hardly in a position to pool its energies and talents to tackle present and future challenges.
Several other fissures have come to the surface since 2014. In addition to intensifying Hindu-Muslim strife, there is the North-South divide which we are increasingly seeing because of the NDA’s attempts to impose the Hindi language. There is continuing conflict in Kashmir and great restiveness among different social groups elsewhere: Patels and Dalits in Gujarat, Rajputs in Rajasthan, and farmers in various states, including Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu.
Not only is society beyond polarised by identity politics, the Modi government is also instinctively anti-intellectual and waging a war against knowledge, particularly targeting the liberal arts and social sciences. There is not a single variety of independent intellectual endeavour that is potentially not under threat in India now either by regulation, censorship or physical intimidation - be it a play, film, comedy sketches, documentaries, political discussions in universities or academic publications.
This is a disturbing trend with real implications because the Modi government is letting its antipathy toward liberal intellectuals undermine the transmission of social science knowledge in India - which is indispensable for a society to understand itself and the world. The problem here is two-fold. Progressive intellectuals dominate the social science scene in India, perhaps not in number but in the standing they have in their disciplines. On the contrary, there is no credible right-wing intellectual ecosystem in India--in that one can scarcely find historians or sociologists sympathetic to the BJP who are capable of being published by university presses, the gold standard of academic publishing. Rather than treat progressive intellectuals as a national resource, the BJP government is hell bent on marginalising them, thereby threatening to snuff out forms of knowledge that have developed with some difficulty over the decades. If India is struggling with its quality of education to begin with, it makes little sense to undercut whatever little intellectual capital it has. The Modi government may well note that in the US a few years ago around 58-66 percent of social science professors identified themselves as liberals, only 5-8 percent as conservative. Liberal intellectuals are often critical of America and yet its governments do not interfere in academic life as universities advance knowledge and ultimately America’s cultural power.
The real source of India’s weakness at the moment is that the Modi government is concentrating its energies on achieving political and ideological dominance, rather than addressing the country’s glaring deficits. Politics of polarisation has taken precedence over governmental efforts to facilitate cooperation among citizens that can yield productive outcomes. All regimes in big powers aim to increase power, but they strive for excellence as well (in the hope of compensating for weaknesses). In India we are, for most part, seeing the former without much evidence of support for the latter. The Chinese Communist Party is, on the contrary, unflinching about exercising political control but is pushing the country towards new frontiers. It wants to introduce 100,000 industrial robots every year and plans on having 150 robots in operation for every 10,000 employees by 2020. It is making major investments in artificial intelligence; this year an international conference of AI researchers in the US had to be rescheduled because Chinese delegates could not attend as it clashed with the Chinese New Year. China takes social science seriously too and is making strenuous efforts to get Western academics to teach and undertake research projects in China, through initiatives such as the Thousand Talent and Thousand Foreign Experts programmes.
India, by contrast, is grappling with basic issues of social order, the rule of law - and constrictions on the life of the mind. The military standoff with China is an important opportunity to take a hard look at its own realities and see how they stack up against the priorities of other countries. If the Modi government does not change course now, the gap between India and China will increase in the future and give Beijing more reason to continue bullying India.
(Views expressed are personal. The writer tweets as @SushilAaron)
http://www.hindustantimes.com/opini...llenging-it/story-RtXSligZ4FHH9sAJO7tq9J.html
Don't bank on US and Japan, you'll lose: Chinese daily warns India over Doklam standoff
State-guided Chinese daily Global Times today issued yet another threat that if India doesn't withdraw its forces from Doklam, China may get prepared for a military confrontation and resolve the conflict through non-diplomatic means. The paper reminded India as to how it had underestimated Beijing in 1962 and cautioned not to repeat the 'same mistake'.
Global Times' strongly-worded editorial came a day after Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj told the Parliament that there was no question of pulling Indian forces back from the Doklam territory unless China does the same. Swaraj also stated that all other countries support India's stand on the current stand-off. However, the Global Times writes that, "She (Sushma Swaraj) was lying to the parliament."
The Global Times also termed India's act on the border as incursion. It said: "First, India's invasion of Chinese territory is a plain fact. New Delhi's impetuous action stuns the international community. No other country will support India's aggression. Second, India's military strength is far behind that of China. If the conflict between China and India escalates to the intensity where their row has to be resolved through military means, India will surely lose."
The Chinese daily also refused to agree on the withdrawal of forces from the both sides, an idea that Sushma Swaraj put forward to begin the diplomatic talk. The editorial said: "India should abandon the fantasy of a long-term standoff at Doklam. China will by no means agree to the withdrawal of troops from both sides in order for talks to be held. Doklam is Chinese territory. The withdrawal of Indian troops must be a precondition for talks and China will not compromise on this stance."
In what could be called a warning to New Delhi, it further said that "If Indian troops continue trespassing into China's territory, what Beijing may do next is to get prepared for a military confrontation and resolve the conflict through non-diplomatic means."
The Chinese mouthpiece also confirmed that what the People's Liberation Army or PLA has been doing - deployment of troops and military drills - on the border is not for show. It said: "Now that the PLA has moved in on the China-India border, they will definitely not call back troops unless they recover the Chinese territory."
Talking about grave military escalations, the paper said: "China cannot afford to lose an inch of territory. If New Delhi remains stubborn, India should get prepared for all possibilities from a potentially grave escalation of tension in the future."
Boasting about China's military capabilities, the Global Times wrote that the PLA's mobility and logistics capability could not be matched by that of its Indian counterpart. "PLA troops may appear in any area beyond the line of actual control that was previously controlled by India. The China-India border area may become a stage where China showcases the achievement of its long-term military development and reforms," it further stated.
The Global Times calls the military strength compassion between India and China 'extremely comical'. "They (India) bragged that India has more troops in the area but they fail to realize that the PLA's strong capability to deploy troops can reverse the balance of power at the border within a day. The PLA's long-range combat capability can also allow its troops in remote area to provide fire support to troops at the border," it said.
Support that India has from the United States and Japan, China thinks, "is illusory". It said: "India should by no means count on support from the US and Japan because their support is illusory. If India fancies the idea that it has a strategic card to play in the Indian Ocean, it could not be even more naive. China does hold a lot of cards and can hit India's Achilles' heel, but India has no leverage at all to have a strategic showdown with China."
Talking tough on delay in withdrawing the Indian troops, it wrote: "That the later India withdraws troops, the greater the risk that it will face from a military counteraction and the more clout it will lose politically. China's military pressure on India will increase every day and India will end up losing face and be totally disgraced."
http://www.businesstoday.in/current...-india-over-doklam-standoff/story/256879.html
Doklam standoff: India must be ready to give China a real bloody nose
India-China border row: Beijing is currently waging full-throttle psychological warfare over Doklam to tame India. Deception and mendacity are its tools. If India gives in, it will endure strategic subordination and ignominy forever.
Updated: Jul 21, 2017 18:43 IST
Brahma Chellaney
The current troop standoff with China at Doklam offers India important lessons that go far beyond the Chinese intrusion into this Bhutanese plateau. Unless India grasps the long-term threat posed by an increasingly muscular China and responds with an appropriate counter-strategy, it is sure to confront much bigger problems than Doklam. Unfortunately, institutional memory in India tends to be short, with a mindset of immediacy blurring the bigger picture.
For example, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti’s recent statement that China is “meddling” in her statewas seen as signifying a new trend. In truth, China — occupying a fifth of the original princely state of J&K and now enlarging its strategic footprint in Pakistan-occupied J&K — has long been playing the Kashmir card against India. In 2010 it honed that card by aggressively adopting a stapled-visa policy for J&K residents.
To mount pressure, Beijing has tacitly questioned India’s sovereignty over the 45% of J&K under Indian control and officially shortened the length of the Himalayan border it shares with India by purging the 1,597-kilometre line separating Indian J&K from Chinese-held J&K. China’s Kashmir interference will only increase as a result of its so-called economic corridor through Pakistan-held J&K, where Chinese military presence is growing, including near Pakistan’s ceasefire line with India. India now faces Chinese troops on both flanks of its portion of J&K.
China, which fomented the Naga and Mizo insurgencies, taught its “all weather” client Pakistan how to wage proxy war against India. China still fans flames in India’s northeast. For example, Paresh Barua, the long-time fugitive commander-in-chief of ULFA, has been traced to Ruili, in China’s Yunnan province. Some other Indian insurgent leaders have been ensconced in Myanmar’s Yunnan-bordering region controlled by the China-backed Kachin Independence Army. This newspaper reported in 2015 that Chinese intelligence played “an active role” in assisting nine northeast Indian insurgent groups to form a united front. The illicit flow of Chinese arms to India, including to Maoists, was confirmed by Home Secretary G.K. Pillai in 2010. Meanwhile, the deepening China-Pakistan nexus presents India with a two-front theatre in the event of a war with either country.
China’s strategy is to subdue India by attacking its weak points, striking where it is unprepared, and stymieing its rise to the extent possible. As part of this strategy, it is waging a multipronged unconventional war without firing a single shot. It is closing in on India from multiple flanks, extending from Nepal to the Indian Ocean.
Sixty-six years after gobbling up buffer Tibet and mounting a Himalayan threat, China — with the world’s fastest-growing submarine fleet — is opening a threat from the seas against India. Its recently opened naval base in Djibouti, at the Indian Ocean’s north-western edge, constitutes just a first step in its game plan to dominate the region. For India, whose energy and strategic infrastructure is concentrated along a vulnerable, 7,600-kilometre coastline, this represents a tectonic shift in its threat calculus.
Add to the picture China’s economic warfare to undermine India’s strength in various ways, including stifling its manufacturing capability through large-scale dumping of goods. Artificially low prices of Chinese products also translate into India losing billions of dollars yearly in customs duties and tax revenue. Portentously, China, including Hong Kong, made up 22% of India’s imports in 2015, with the US just at 5% and Japan at 2%.
Yet India has yet to fully shed its policy blinkers. As India repeats the same old platitudes about conciliation and cooperation, China is making clear that there cannot be “two Suns in the sky” — or, as a Chinese idiom goes, “one mountain cannot accommodate two tigers”. With its rekindled, atavistic nationalism, China plainly wants to be Asia’s sole tiger.
Beijing is currently waging full-throttle psychological warfare over Doklam to tame India. Deception and mendacity are its tools. If India gives in, it will endure strategic subordination and ignominy forever. Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj’s excellent rebuttal in Parliament of Chinese disinformation begs the question: Why has India been so slow in countering Beijing’s propaganda war?
New Delhi must play psychological hardball: Instead of appearing zealous for talks, it should insist that China first withdraw both its troops and preconditions, while leaving Beijing in no doubt that India will hold its ground, come what may. If India is to stop China’s creeping, covert encroachments and secure Himalayan peace, it must be ready to give Beijing a real bloody nose if it escalates the standoff to a conflict. Humiliating China even in a localised military engagement, in 1967 style, is vital to help destabilise its expansionist regime.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author.
The views expressed are personal
http://www.hindustantimes.com/opini...bloody-nose/story-APFZAV2LoQH2QErI5AykDL.html
View: India's faceoff with China in Sikkim is a sign of the future
Bloomberg|
Jul 21, 2017, 09.47 AM IST
By Mihir Sharma
In Kashmir, shells and bullets regularly fly back and forth across India's de facto border with Pakistan. Yet, although India's 4,000-kilometer border with China is similarly disputed, not a single shot has been fired in anger there for decades. That may soon change: There are genuine fears in New Delhi that the long period of calm may not last. And whether it does or not, the latest standoff in the Himalayas is sure to change India.
A weeks-long confrontation on the shared border between China, India and tiny Bhutan -- the sort that barely makes the headlines outside the countries involved -- has lasted longer than usual, and neither side looks ready to back off. Troops have had shoving matches and now stare one another down from encampments just miles apart. Although previous confrontations have been quietly resolved, this time some Indian strategists believe China will soon be tempted to launch a limited punitive strike as a reminder of its military superiority.
Clashes between India and China don’t usually matter to the rest of the world. Even when the two countries fought a short and bitter border war in 1962, the world’s attention was fixated on the brewing nuclear crisis in Cuba. While Indians have never quite forgotten our humiliating loss in that war, China has rarely chosen to remind us of it. This time, however, the usual chest-beating from India’s hyper-patriotic news media has been matched by similar noises from over the border. The state-cont ..
In Beijing, a few weeks ago, I got the clear impression from some Chinese policymakers and diplomats that they thought India was getting, well, a bit above itself. Unhappy about China’s big Belt and Road Initiative, India not only stayed away from President Xi Jinping's recent forum showcasing the project, but released a stinging denunciation of the principles underlying the grand infrastructure scheme. That same language found its way into the joint statement issued by U.S. President Donald Trump and Narendra Modi when the Indian prime minister visited Washington last month. And India has recently taken a harder line on Tibet and the border than it has in the past.
For leaders in Beijing, this behavior seems inexplicable. I was repeatedly asked whether India had forgotten that its economy is five times smaller than China’s. Perhaps, one got the impression, India needed to be shown its place.
The problem is that India does not quite know its place. This makes sense when one considers its vision of its past and its expectations of its future. Independent India inherited the Raj’s armies -- the peacekeepers of Asia and Africa -- and with them, the Raj’s self-image as dominant east of Aden. It has always viewed itself as at least China’s equal in spite of the 1962 loss -- and even as its northern neighbor raced ahead economically. That was a minor setback, Indians feel; eventually we'll catch up, once we sort our messy politics out. And meantime, why not behave as if we already have?
For the first time, perhaps, a sense of disquiet about this assumption has crept in. Questions are being asked about whether India is, in fact, ready to play a bigger strategic role in the region. Defense spending has not kept pace with India’s economy; the government spends less, proportionally, on the military than it has at any point since 1962. Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer noted on Twitter recently that India is one of the very few countries spending more on infrastructure than defense. This is by design; Indian policymakers are convinced that a new highway strengthens the country more than another battalion would. They may be right, too.
But it’s unlikely India will sit quietly in a corner. This is a young country, and impatient. When a billion people have been led to expect that they are a great power, they will demand their government behave accordingly. And so, whether or not we can afford it, whether or not it makes a great deal of objective sense to outsiders, our democracy guarantees that we won’t do what Deng Xiaoping’s China did and “bide our time.” Every time China appears to disregard or dismiss India’s capabilities -- actions which seem eminently rational in Beijing -- it merely hastens the day that India will step up and seek a bigger role, one that matches its self-image.
Earlier this week, Australia’s foreign minister pointed out the stakes in New Delhi. “Military outlays in our region expanded by over 5.5 percent in 2015-16, easily outpacing the one percent overall global increase in military spending," Julie Bishop noted. "By 2020, combined military budgets in our region are forecast to exceed $600 billion. Now this is significant, given U.S. expenditure is currently at $611 billion and Europe is at $334 billion.” And this is without India even seeking to live up to its conception of itself. The question for China soon won't be how the world manages its rise, but how well it manages India’s.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners)
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com...a-sign-of-the-future/articleshow/59692536.cms
is with Iron Brother, come what may 
Long Live Sino-Pak Brotherhood...Let Indians do cheerleading of West...This is best thing they can do to please their masters...
Not only is India militarily not in a position to challenge China now, the direction the BJP is taking the country undermines India’s capabilities as a power and leaves it in no position to deter China’s aggression for years to come.
The India-China military standoff near Sikkim continues. The rhetoric from both sides is very revealing of their states of mind. India is adopting a conciliatory tone and China an uncompromising one. India will be “patient and peaceful” in dealing with its neighbours says the Narendra Modi government, commentators emphasise Delhi’s moderation and maturity. China insists that withdrawal of Indian troopsfrom Doklam is a precondition for dialogue. Chinese experts are not mincing words. Victor Gao, a former diplomat and once an interpreter for Deng Xiaoping, has said that any other country in China’s situation of seeing foreign (Indian) soldiers on its territory would send troops to drive them out. He says the longer India keeps troops in Doklam the more likely a military confrontation is.
The reaction in Indian media to the standoff with China is markedly different from what tensions with Pakistan usually provoke. Television channels are not dishing out angry hashtags about Beijing as they usually do about Islamabad’s misdemeanours. The Indian establishment clearly wants to avoid a confrontation. In Delhi’s muted reaction and Beijing’s belligerence there is perhaps a tacit acknowledgment in both capitals that the reason China is being aggressive is because India now is the weakest it has been for years.
China wants to symbolically establish dominance in Asia and it has chosen a moment when the contours of India’s path to decline are fairly well-established, three years into Modi’s rule. This is the lesson that Delhi should take away from this standoff, that not only is India militarily not in a position to challenge China now (short of a nuclear exchange), the direction that the BJP is taking the country undermines India’s capabilities as a power and leaves it in no position to resist China’s belligerence in the years to come. This is the time to starkly assess India’s situation, let go of the positive spin the BJP government puts out, and see India how its adversaries would.
This may be a counterintuitive argument to make because India certainly has some impressive attributes: a large youthful population, a formidable military machine with nuclear weapons, a sizeable middle class and elite to keep foreign companies interested for years and, like any happening power, it hosts several business and think-tank conferences. China is evidently not daunted by this because some indicators of India’s power make for grim reading.
India’s vulnerabilities are manifest in four areas. The first is in the economy, where India has recently seen a series of self-inflicted wounds. India has had a weak investment climate for years owing to regulatory bottlenecks and because its banks are saddled with bad loans. Demonetisation was needlessly introduced in an already difficult situation and it brought cities to a standstill for weeks on end and compounded an agrarian distress by simply short-circuiting billions of transactions in rural India and disrupting supply chains. Growth slowed to 6.1% in the last quarter, one economist believes it may have permanently damaged the country’s informal sector. After demonetisation came changed rules for cattle slaughter which essentially constitute a form of trade war against Muslim entrepreneurs, Dalits and the meat export industry at large. The subsequent introduction of GST has bred widespread confusion; one businessman simply warns that “small traders will die”.
Alongside the effects of recent decision-making India has a jobs crisis, an education crisis and a skills crisis. PM Modi promised 100 million manufacturing jobs by 2022; around 135,000 materialised in eight sectors in 2015--far shorter of the 12 million that reportedly enter the workforce each year. The government has simply abandoned the goal of training 500 million Indians as part of its Skill India plans. The education sector looks almost irredeemable. A committee appointed by the ministry of human resource developmenthas conceded that “large segments of the education sector…face a serious crisis of credibility in terms of the quality of education which they provide, as well as the worth of the degrees which they confer on students.” There are simply too many bad teachers in government schools, many of whom get their jobs through patronage or corruption. Students are not failed in schools and colleges for political reasons--since parents would be angry if governments provided their children bad education to begin with and then failed them. India thus has millions of youth with college degrees often lacking foundational skills let alone employable ones.
If challenges in the economy, education and skills weren’t enough there is now an active attack on India’s social cohesion, the one thing that held the country together despite all its problems. BJP rule has seen a spike in hate speech directed at Muslims that has led to their targeting and lynching. The Indian Muslim is being constantly represented as a hate figure with a view to snap the possibility of an associational life between Hindus and Muslims. All this corrodes social life and undermines economic productivity - a divided and fear-ridden country is hardly in a position to pool its energies and talents to tackle present and future challenges.
Several other fissures have come to the surface since 2014. In addition to intensifying Hindu-Muslim strife, there is the North-South divide which we are increasingly seeing because of the NDA’s attempts to impose the Hindi language. There is continuing conflict in Kashmir and great restiveness among different social groups elsewhere: Patels and Dalits in Gujarat, Rajputs in Rajasthan, and farmers in various states, including Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu.
Not only is society beyond polarised by identity politics, the Modi government is also instinctively anti-intellectual and waging a war against knowledge, particularly targeting the liberal arts and social sciences. There is not a single variety of independent intellectual endeavour that is potentially not under threat in India now either by regulation, censorship or physical intimidation - be it a play, film, comedy sketches, documentaries, political discussions in universities or academic publications.
This is a disturbing trend with real implications because the Modi government is letting its antipathy toward liberal intellectuals undermine the transmission of social science knowledge in India - which is indispensable for a society to understand itself and the world. The problem here is two-fold. Progressive intellectuals dominate the social science scene in India, perhaps not in number but in the standing they have in their disciplines. On the contrary, there is no credible right-wing intellectual ecosystem in India--in that one can scarcely find historians or sociologists sympathetic to the BJP who are capable of being published by university presses, the gold standard of academic publishing. Rather than treat progressive intellectuals as a national resource, the BJP government is hell bent on marginalising them, thereby threatening to snuff out forms of knowledge that have developed with some difficulty over the decades. If India is struggling with its quality of education to begin with, it makes little sense to undercut whatever little intellectual capital it has. The Modi government may well note that in the US a few years ago around 58-66 percent of social science professors identified themselves as liberals, only 5-8 percent as conservative. Liberal intellectuals are often critical of America and yet its governments do not interfere in academic life as universities advance knowledge and ultimately America’s cultural power.
The real source of India’s weakness at the moment is that the Modi government is concentrating its energies on achieving political and ideological dominance, rather than addressing the country’s glaring deficits. Politics of polarisation has taken precedence over governmental efforts to facilitate cooperation among citizens that can yield productive outcomes. All regimes in big powers aim to increase power, but they strive for excellence as well (in the hope of compensating for weaknesses). In India we are, for most part, seeing the former without much evidence of support for the latter. The Chinese Communist Party is, on the contrary, unflinching about exercising political control but is pushing the country towards new frontiers. It wants to introduce 100,000 industrial robots every year and plans on having 150 robots in operation for every 10,000 employees by 2020. It is making major investments in artificial intelligence; this year an international conference of AI researchers in the US had to be rescheduled because Chinese delegates could not attend as it clashed with the Chinese New Year. China takes social science seriously too and is making strenuous efforts to get Western academics to teach and undertake research projects in China, through initiatives such as the Thousand Talent and Thousand Foreign Experts programmes.
India, by contrast, is grappling with basic issues of social order, the rule of law - and constrictions on the life of the mind. The military standoff with China is an important opportunity to take a hard look at its own realities and see how they stack up against the priorities of other countries. If the Modi government does not change course now, the gap between India and China will increase in the future and give Beijing more reason to continue bullying India.
(Views expressed are personal. The writer tweets as @SushilAaron)
http://www.hindustantimes.com/opini...llenging-it/story-RtXSligZ4FHH9sAJO7tq9J.html
Don't bank on US and Japan, you'll lose: Chinese daily warns India over Doklam standoff
State-guided Chinese daily Global Times today issued yet another threat that if India doesn't withdraw its forces from Doklam, China may get prepared for a military confrontation and resolve the conflict through non-diplomatic means. The paper reminded India as to how it had underestimated Beijing in 1962 and cautioned not to repeat the 'same mistake'.
Global Times' strongly-worded editorial came a day after Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj told the Parliament that there was no question of pulling Indian forces back from the Doklam territory unless China does the same. Swaraj also stated that all other countries support India's stand on the current stand-off. However, the Global Times writes that, "She (Sushma Swaraj) was lying to the parliament."
The Global Times also termed India's act on the border as incursion. It said: "First, India's invasion of Chinese territory is a plain fact. New Delhi's impetuous action stuns the international community. No other country will support India's aggression. Second, India's military strength is far behind that of China. If the conflict between China and India escalates to the intensity where their row has to be resolved through military means, India will surely lose."
The Chinese daily also refused to agree on the withdrawal of forces from the both sides, an idea that Sushma Swaraj put forward to begin the diplomatic talk. The editorial said: "India should abandon the fantasy of a long-term standoff at Doklam. China will by no means agree to the withdrawal of troops from both sides in order for talks to be held. Doklam is Chinese territory. The withdrawal of Indian troops must be a precondition for talks and China will not compromise on this stance."
In what could be called a warning to New Delhi, it further said that "If Indian troops continue trespassing into China's territory, what Beijing may do next is to get prepared for a military confrontation and resolve the conflict through non-diplomatic means."
The Chinese mouthpiece also confirmed that what the People's Liberation Army or PLA has been doing - deployment of troops and military drills - on the border is not for show. It said: "Now that the PLA has moved in on the China-India border, they will definitely not call back troops unless they recover the Chinese territory."
Talking about grave military escalations, the paper said: "China cannot afford to lose an inch of territory. If New Delhi remains stubborn, India should get prepared for all possibilities from a potentially grave escalation of tension in the future."
Boasting about China's military capabilities, the Global Times wrote that the PLA's mobility and logistics capability could not be matched by that of its Indian counterpart. "PLA troops may appear in any area beyond the line of actual control that was previously controlled by India. The China-India border area may become a stage where China showcases the achievement of its long-term military development and reforms," it further stated.
The Global Times calls the military strength compassion between India and China 'extremely comical'. "They (India) bragged that India has more troops in the area but they fail to realize that the PLA's strong capability to deploy troops can reverse the balance of power at the border within a day. The PLA's long-range combat capability can also allow its troops in remote area to provide fire support to troops at the border," it said.
Support that India has from the United States and Japan, China thinks, "is illusory". It said: "India should by no means count on support from the US and Japan because their support is illusory. If India fancies the idea that it has a strategic card to play in the Indian Ocean, it could not be even more naive. China does hold a lot of cards and can hit India's Achilles' heel, but India has no leverage at all to have a strategic showdown with China."
Talking tough on delay in withdrawing the Indian troops, it wrote: "That the later India withdraws troops, the greater the risk that it will face from a military counteraction and the more clout it will lose politically. China's military pressure on India will increase every day and India will end up losing face and be totally disgraced."
http://www.businesstoday.in/current...-india-over-doklam-standoff/story/256879.html
Doklam standoff: India must be ready to give China a real bloody nose
India-China border row: Beijing is currently waging full-throttle psychological warfare over Doklam to tame India. Deception and mendacity are its tools. If India gives in, it will endure strategic subordination and ignominy forever.
Updated: Jul 21, 2017 18:43 IST
Brahma Chellaney
The current troop standoff with China at Doklam offers India important lessons that go far beyond the Chinese intrusion into this Bhutanese plateau. Unless India grasps the long-term threat posed by an increasingly muscular China and responds with an appropriate counter-strategy, it is sure to confront much bigger problems than Doklam. Unfortunately, institutional memory in India tends to be short, with a mindset of immediacy blurring the bigger picture.
For example, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti’s recent statement that China is “meddling” in her statewas seen as signifying a new trend. In truth, China — occupying a fifth of the original princely state of J&K and now enlarging its strategic footprint in Pakistan-occupied J&K — has long been playing the Kashmir card against India. In 2010 it honed that card by aggressively adopting a stapled-visa policy for J&K residents.
To mount pressure, Beijing has tacitly questioned India’s sovereignty over the 45% of J&K under Indian control and officially shortened the length of the Himalayan border it shares with India by purging the 1,597-kilometre line separating Indian J&K from Chinese-held J&K. China’s Kashmir interference will only increase as a result of its so-called economic corridor through Pakistan-held J&K, where Chinese military presence is growing, including near Pakistan’s ceasefire line with India. India now faces Chinese troops on both flanks of its portion of J&K.
China, which fomented the Naga and Mizo insurgencies, taught its “all weather” client Pakistan how to wage proxy war against India. China still fans flames in India’s northeast. For example, Paresh Barua, the long-time fugitive commander-in-chief of ULFA, has been traced to Ruili, in China’s Yunnan province. Some other Indian insurgent leaders have been ensconced in Myanmar’s Yunnan-bordering region controlled by the China-backed Kachin Independence Army. This newspaper reported in 2015 that Chinese intelligence played “an active role” in assisting nine northeast Indian insurgent groups to form a united front. The illicit flow of Chinese arms to India, including to Maoists, was confirmed by Home Secretary G.K. Pillai in 2010. Meanwhile, the deepening China-Pakistan nexus presents India with a two-front theatre in the event of a war with either country.
China’s strategy is to subdue India by attacking its weak points, striking where it is unprepared, and stymieing its rise to the extent possible. As part of this strategy, it is waging a multipronged unconventional war without firing a single shot. It is closing in on India from multiple flanks, extending from Nepal to the Indian Ocean.
Sixty-six years after gobbling up buffer Tibet and mounting a Himalayan threat, China — with the world’s fastest-growing submarine fleet — is opening a threat from the seas against India. Its recently opened naval base in Djibouti, at the Indian Ocean’s north-western edge, constitutes just a first step in its game plan to dominate the region. For India, whose energy and strategic infrastructure is concentrated along a vulnerable, 7,600-kilometre coastline, this represents a tectonic shift in its threat calculus.
Add to the picture China’s economic warfare to undermine India’s strength in various ways, including stifling its manufacturing capability through large-scale dumping of goods. Artificially low prices of Chinese products also translate into India losing billions of dollars yearly in customs duties and tax revenue. Portentously, China, including Hong Kong, made up 22% of India’s imports in 2015, with the US just at 5% and Japan at 2%.
Yet India has yet to fully shed its policy blinkers. As India repeats the same old platitudes about conciliation and cooperation, China is making clear that there cannot be “two Suns in the sky” — or, as a Chinese idiom goes, “one mountain cannot accommodate two tigers”. With its rekindled, atavistic nationalism, China plainly wants to be Asia’s sole tiger.
Beijing is currently waging full-throttle psychological warfare over Doklam to tame India. Deception and mendacity are its tools. If India gives in, it will endure strategic subordination and ignominy forever. Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj’s excellent rebuttal in Parliament of Chinese disinformation begs the question: Why has India been so slow in countering Beijing’s propaganda war?
New Delhi must play psychological hardball: Instead of appearing zealous for talks, it should insist that China first withdraw both its troops and preconditions, while leaving Beijing in no doubt that India will hold its ground, come what may. If India is to stop China’s creeping, covert encroachments and secure Himalayan peace, it must be ready to give Beijing a real bloody nose if it escalates the standoff to a conflict. Humiliating China even in a localised military engagement, in 1967 style, is vital to help destabilise its expansionist regime.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author.
The views expressed are personal
http://www.hindustantimes.com/opini...bloody-nose/story-APFZAV2LoQH2QErI5AykDL.html
View: India's faceoff with China in Sikkim is a sign of the future
Bloomberg|
Jul 21, 2017, 09.47 AM IST
By Mihir Sharma
In Kashmir, shells and bullets regularly fly back and forth across India's de facto border with Pakistan. Yet, although India's 4,000-kilometer border with China is similarly disputed, not a single shot has been fired in anger there for decades. That may soon change: There are genuine fears in New Delhi that the long period of calm may not last. And whether it does or not, the latest standoff in the Himalayas is sure to change India.
A weeks-long confrontation on the shared border between China, India and tiny Bhutan -- the sort that barely makes the headlines outside the countries involved -- has lasted longer than usual, and neither side looks ready to back off. Troops have had shoving matches and now stare one another down from encampments just miles apart. Although previous confrontations have been quietly resolved, this time some Indian strategists believe China will soon be tempted to launch a limited punitive strike as a reminder of its military superiority.
Clashes between India and China don’t usually matter to the rest of the world. Even when the two countries fought a short and bitter border war in 1962, the world’s attention was fixated on the brewing nuclear crisis in Cuba. While Indians have never quite forgotten our humiliating loss in that war, China has rarely chosen to remind us of it. This time, however, the usual chest-beating from India’s hyper-patriotic news media has been matched by similar noises from over the border. The state-cont ..
In Beijing, a few weeks ago, I got the clear impression from some Chinese policymakers and diplomats that they thought India was getting, well, a bit above itself. Unhappy about China’s big Belt and Road Initiative, India not only stayed away from President Xi Jinping's recent forum showcasing the project, but released a stinging denunciation of the principles underlying the grand infrastructure scheme. That same language found its way into the joint statement issued by U.S. President Donald Trump and Narendra Modi when the Indian prime minister visited Washington last month. And India has recently taken a harder line on Tibet and the border than it has in the past.
For leaders in Beijing, this behavior seems inexplicable. I was repeatedly asked whether India had forgotten that its economy is five times smaller than China’s. Perhaps, one got the impression, India needed to be shown its place.
The problem is that India does not quite know its place. This makes sense when one considers its vision of its past and its expectations of its future. Independent India inherited the Raj’s armies -- the peacekeepers of Asia and Africa -- and with them, the Raj’s self-image as dominant east of Aden. It has always viewed itself as at least China’s equal in spite of the 1962 loss -- and even as its northern neighbor raced ahead economically. That was a minor setback, Indians feel; eventually we'll catch up, once we sort our messy politics out. And meantime, why not behave as if we already have?
For the first time, perhaps, a sense of disquiet about this assumption has crept in. Questions are being asked about whether India is, in fact, ready to play a bigger strategic role in the region. Defense spending has not kept pace with India’s economy; the government spends less, proportionally, on the military than it has at any point since 1962. Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer noted on Twitter recently that India is one of the very few countries spending more on infrastructure than defense. This is by design; Indian policymakers are convinced that a new highway strengthens the country more than another battalion would. They may be right, too.
But it’s unlikely India will sit quietly in a corner. This is a young country, and impatient. When a billion people have been led to expect that they are a great power, they will demand their government behave accordingly. And so, whether or not we can afford it, whether or not it makes a great deal of objective sense to outsiders, our democracy guarantees that we won’t do what Deng Xiaoping’s China did and “bide our time.” Every time China appears to disregard or dismiss India’s capabilities -- actions which seem eminently rational in Beijing -- it merely hastens the day that India will step up and seek a bigger role, one that matches its self-image.
Earlier this week, Australia’s foreign minister pointed out the stakes in New Delhi. “Military outlays in our region expanded by over 5.5 percent in 2015-16, easily outpacing the one percent overall global increase in military spending," Julie Bishop noted. "By 2020, combined military budgets in our region are forecast to exceed $600 billion. Now this is significant, given U.S. expenditure is currently at $611 billion and Europe is at $334 billion.” And this is without India even seeking to live up to its conception of itself. The question for China soon won't be how the world manages its rise, but how well it manages India’s.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners)
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com...a-sign-of-the-future/articleshow/59692536.cms
is with Iron Brother, come what may Long Live Sino-Pak Brotherhood...Let Indians do cheerleading of West...This is best thing they can do to please their masters...
.....Jai Pakistan, Jai China 
