Believe me, there are a lot of Chinese nationalists who are stung by the two absurd and contradictory claims: "China is a warmonger", followed by "Haha, China doesn't have enough fighting experience because they haven't fought a war for over 30 years!"
Completely contradictory, but some truth in the latter one. What's the point of spending such massive sums of money, building advanced military platforms, increasing our defence production to near the top of the world, if we don't use it to defend our sovereignty?
Modi looks like he wants to push, though I think if it comes to that, China will be the one doing most of the heavy work. Pakistan can pull half their army to the other border by taking an aggressive posture, and could maybe come in at the end, to handle the aftermath once the majority of the fighting is over.
It's safer to have a China-India fight than a India-Pakistan one, since both China and India have "No First Use" policies, and we have a staggering nuclear advantage over India (India's total arsenal is only about 1 megaton, compared to 4 megatons for ONE single Chinese thermonuclear weapon).
Nehru's Forward Policy was a mistake but it was a clever idea at its root, to take Chinese land without a fight, while we were dying from starvation. Modi on the other hand is facing a China at the very peak of our power in the last 200 years, our manufacturing capability alone could overwhelm them, since we can essentially produce infinite amounts of our own indigenous weapons platforms, backed by China's currency reserves which are larger than the rest of the world combined.
Due to our policy, we won't fire first, though in practically that is not really a problem if someone really wanted to start a conflict, especially with Modi's "new assertive posture".
