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Why China may be plotting a 'short' border war with India as in 1962
The signs are ominous on the China front for India. Consider the smoke signals emanating from Beijing.
First, it has told us clearly that it is not interested in clearly delineating a line of actual control (LAC) on the border, pending a final settlement. This shows that it wants to change the status quo and take some territory from us. No willingness to agree on the LAC means China will not settle the border except on its terms.
Second, it has taken a deliberately contradictory position on Azad Kashmir (Azad Kashmir), China-occupied Kashmir (mostly Aksai Chin in Ladakh) and areas in India - mainly in Arunachal Pradesh – that it says are disputed areas. It protests any development project or Indian action in Arunachal, or even the South China Sea (again, a sea with several claimants) but has no qualms about investing in Azad Kashmir or CoK, which are clearly in dispute or illegal occupation by Pakistan or China.
Third, the recent escalation of terrorism in Manipur should been seen in context. Yesterday (4 June), 18 armymen were killed in an ambush in Manipur, and last month a similar attack took place in Nagaland, where eight Assam Rifles jawans being killed. While there may be no direct China hand in this resurgence of terrorism (or, at least, none that we know of), ask yourself a simple question: who benefits the most from bringing the North-East back to boiling point? It suits China to keep our army tied up in various insurgencies, especially when Indo-Bangladesh ties are improving and Sheikh Hasina has taken a strong line on containing anti-India forces.
Fourth, we already know that China has backed its territorial claims by constantly patrolling and even transgressing into Indian territory, with the incursion into Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh in August 2013 being the most blatant and indicative of where future perils lie. It was the first instance where Chinese soldiers just walked into Indian areas and tried to demolish a boundary wall. (Watch these videos of the incident here and here).
There are good reasons to believe that China may not be beyond contemplating another short war with India. We should be on an extraordinary alert for Chinese war signals, preparations or indications of hostile intent.
As India strengthens it Asian alliances and improves its defence capabilities steadily, the current huge asymmetry in military power between the two will be partially redressed. If China wants to try any strong-arm tactics against us, it has to do so using the narrow window of time when the military skew is against us. After 5-10 years of economic and military build-up by us, China's capacity to act against us will fall dramatically.
Moreover, the Chinese economy is slowing while the Indian economy is putting its UPA-induced slowdown behind. This means domestic anger in China will need channeling into jingoism as jobs and growth slow down. While Japan is one perennial target, a small territorial grab from India will seem attractive to China's Communist leadership. China is currently calculating how India will respond to this, and that is the prime purpose of its incursions into Indian territory. It is trying to figure out how we will respond.
It would also be instructive at this point to figure out what China wants and what it may do to get what it wants.
#1: The most likely territorial gain it seeks is probably Tawang in Arunachal, which houses a key Buddhist monastery that threatens China's complete domination of ideological Tibet and its future. As long as Tawang remains Indian, China fears it could be a staging post for a future Tibetan insurrection or even in the creation of a Dalai Lama based on Indian soil. As we have noted before, Tawang is psychologically crucial to China's hold on Tibet as it was the birthplace of the 6th Dalai Lama and hosts an important 17th century Tibetan Buddhist monastery. The current Dalai Lama (the 14th) spent some time in Tawang after he fled Tibet in 1959 post the Chinese takeover.
#2: China believes that. It made a mistake in 1962 when it held on to large areas of Aksai Chin in Ladakh to ensure easy access to Tibet, but voluntarily withdrew from areas seized in the North-East, including Tawang. It wants to rectify this by any means possible. This explains why it tried to intrude into Tawang in 2013. Rest assured, the Chinese troops who came by would have taken excellent pictures of the Indian fortifications and local topography, especially details that could not have been captured from satellite cameras.
#3: China's massive investment plan in Pakistan, which includes large areas of Azad Kashmir, is less about development and more about a military capability. Chinese investment and construction activities in Azad Kashmir are important for they indicate how much it is willing to risk in order to defend its interests in the region. Azad Kashmir and CoK constitute the vortex of central Asia: between them, they abut Afghanistan, Tibet, the Islamic republics of Central Asia and China's own alienated Muslim province of Xinjiang. So China's massive investment is intended to maintain a military presence in this area for defensive and offensive reasons: it will try to block jihadi influence in Xinjiang, and also maintain pressure on the Indian army on the Pakistan border.
Now consider how China may be weighing the risks and benefits of a short war over Tawang.
One, it will ask its lackey Pakistan to make the entire western border hot when it wants to pressure India. Pakistani firing and shelling of Indian positions has been not so much on the Line of Control (LoC) but the settled international border (IB). This has probably been done at the urgings of China. It means, when China winks, Pakistan can make the entire Kashmir LoC and IB a live battleground.
Two, insurgency in the North-East will keep the army busy in Nagaland and Manipur, while distracting us from Arunachal.
China's calculations could revolve around a quick surgical strike to capture Tawang - despite adverse terrain - or a bigger grab in Kashmir to use as a bargaining chip to gain Tawang. It may also be betting that India will not fight too hard for Tawang or threaten nuclear mayhem in retaliation. India has made the mistake of not developing tactical nuclear weapons unlike Pakistan, which will have no qualms about using them if we make territorial gains on the western front.
In essence, China is developing a two-front war capability vis-à-vis India and hobble it with various insurgencies – a Pakistan-propped one in the west, and a more covert one in the north-east. The aim may be to get us to part with Tawang, with or without a short war. With Tawang won, China will put up a show of "magnanimity" and offer to settle the border elsewhere.
The point is simple: China will not see a "short" border war as necessarily a bad thing. India should be more than ready for it, and must lose no time preparing for it.
The key elements of our strategy should be the following: strengthen the army's preparedness to defend Tawang and Ladakh at all costs and make this obvious to China; create the new mountain corps quickly, and speed up investment in border infrastructure; create a crash pan to develop and deploy tactical nuclear weapons and make it clear that these will be used only on the China border.
The paradox of Narendra Modi successful Asian diplomacy involving China's rivals (Japan and Vietnam specifically) is that China may want to strike before Modi manages to strengthen India's economy, defences and alliances. This calculation may have the adverse consequence of making China rush into a short war before India improves his fighting capabilities.
The only way to prevent Chinese adventurism of the 1962 kind is to prepare for one.
NYT writer is absolutely right: Delhi is literally a shithole; but so is all of India
In his 1960 exploration of eastern mysticism, The Lotus and the Robot, Arthur Koestler compared the smell of Bombay to that of "a wet smelly diaper” wrapped around his head. Four years later, VS Naipaul was so revulsed about the filth in India that he wrote in an Area of Darkness that "Indians defecate everywhere” - beside the railway tracks, on the beaches, on the hills, on the riverbanks and on the streets. "They never look for cover,” he said with absolute disgust.
India was smarter than Koestler and Naipaul - it promptly banned both the books.
When the South Asia correspondent of New York Times, Gardiner Harris, wrote on 29 May (Holding Your Breath in India) - that Delhi is an unliveable place because of pollution and that he left the city to safeguard his son's health, the outrage was similar. There was no possibility of banning an article on the Internet, but angry Indians took to social media and slammed Harris for being an elitist expat. Some said while he was over-protective over his child, he had scant regard for the Indian children in Delhi who had no option but to live there, little realising that his voice was that of a frustrated father, who doesn't have to put his family through the perils of living in a dirty city.
Harris wrote: "Foreigners have lived in Delhi for centuries, of course, but the air and the mounting research into its effects have become so frightening that some feel it is unethical for those who have a choice to willingly raise children here. Similar discussions are doubtless underway in Beijing and other Asian megacities, but it is in Delhi - among the most populous, polluted, unsanitary and bacterially unsafe cities on earth - where the new calculus seems most urgent.”
He hits where it hurts. The capital of a super power aspirant, a country which is projected to become the world's third biggest economy in 2020, has been described as "among the most populous, polluted, unsanitary and bacterially unsafe cities on earth”. He also goes on to add that out of the 25 worst polluted cities in the world, 13 are in India.
It's remarkable that even after 50 years since Koestler and Naipaul refused to hold back their revulsion to the all-pervading filth in India, it still remains a humiliating truth that visitors find out the moment they set their foot in the country.
In his recent overseas tour, Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that earlier Indians felt ashamed of being born in India, but now they feel proud. Do they? His point was political. He thought that the change of government in India makes its people proud. But in reality, Indians should still be ashamed because outsiders find their country too filthy to live in; the filth that has permeated every state of matter - solid, liquid, gas and perhaps even plasma. It doesn't befit a modern nation that's apparently raring to go.
What Koestler and Naipaul wrote in the sixties and what Harris wrote in 2015 are not anecdotal, but are borne out by facts. According to WHO, India accounts for 90 percent of open defecation in South Asia and 59 percent of the practice in the world. It also accounts for more than twice the number of open defecations of the 18 countries that come after it in the WHO list.
WHO also says that close to 100 million Indians don't have access to improved sources of water, which is not surprising because our waterways are filled with filth. According to Central Pollution Control Board's (CPCB) 2011-12 annual report, about 60 percent of India's water-sources (which are routinely monitored) have poor "bio-chemical oxygen demand”, an indicator of organic pollution, and about 68 percent have faecal coliform - bacteria from shit.
In other words, more than 60 percent of our water sources are polluted with organic waste and faecal matter. This happens because untreated sewage, faeces and other organic wastes are led into rivers and ponds that Indians draw their water from. Industrial waste and toxic substances that are dumped into them on an hourly basis make them lethal. All major Indian rivers are polluted by industrial effluents and untreated sewage. In its report, the Pollution Control Board even specifically mentions how under-capacity sewage treatment plants let out raw filth into the rivers at various places.
In terms of air quality, the principal concern of Harris in Delhi, 79 percent of metropolitan cities have very high levels of particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide, both of which are the main causes of air pollution. Among the four metros, the presence of particulate matter in Delhi is a well-known story and is obviously rising compared to others. But Delhi is not alone, many other cities, including small towns are asphyxiating in their own emissions.
Delhiites can be peeved because Harris picked on their city while the rest of urban India is no different. It's only a matter of degree of criticality (air pollution levels are classified as low, medium, hight and critical). The fact of the matter is that urban India is rotting and is sinking in its own filth.
Can the Prime Minister's boutique project of "Swatch Bharat” change this?
Absolutely not, because the socio-economic determinants of this environmental degradation are far deeper than what's apparent. With more than 42 percent of its population living in 53 cities, India's urbanisation is so skewed that it's hard to provide a matching civic infrastructure and therefore untreated sewage will continue to flow into rivers, lakes, and open places. If the agriculture and rural employment continue to fail, it will get worse.
Without stopping open defecation, the spread of coliform and other parasites cannot be stopped. Without cracking down on crony-capitalists, including big corporates, the dumping of effluents into rivers and toxic gases into air will not stop. Without providing reliable public transport, the ambient air can never get clean.
And more importantly, all these are to be handled at the local level by the state governments and local bodies. Given the pathetic standards of governance and political priorities in some states, it's a daunting task.
In the end, India's filth is a metaphor for its overall ills that include poverty, inequality, castes, corruption, poor development policies and greed. It's not a question of aesthetics, but a question of fundamental social change.
The signs are ominous on the China front for India. Consider the smoke signals emanating from Beijing.
First, it has told us clearly that it is not interested in clearly delineating a line of actual control (LAC) on the border, pending a final settlement. This shows that it wants to change the status quo and take some territory from us. No willingness to agree on the LAC means China will not settle the border except on its terms.
Second, it has taken a deliberately contradictory position on Azad Kashmir (Azad Kashmir), China-occupied Kashmir (mostly Aksai Chin in Ladakh) and areas in India - mainly in Arunachal Pradesh – that it says are disputed areas. It protests any development project or Indian action in Arunachal, or even the South China Sea (again, a sea with several claimants) but has no qualms about investing in Azad Kashmir or CoK, which are clearly in dispute or illegal occupation by Pakistan or China.
Third, the recent escalation of terrorism in Manipur should been seen in context. Yesterday (4 June), 18 armymen were killed in an ambush in Manipur, and last month a similar attack took place in Nagaland, where eight Assam Rifles jawans being killed. While there may be no direct China hand in this resurgence of terrorism (or, at least, none that we know of), ask yourself a simple question: who benefits the most from bringing the North-East back to boiling point? It suits China to keep our army tied up in various insurgencies, especially when Indo-Bangladesh ties are improving and Sheikh Hasina has taken a strong line on containing anti-India forces.
Fourth, we already know that China has backed its territorial claims by constantly patrolling and even transgressing into Indian territory, with the incursion into Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh in August 2013 being the most blatant and indicative of where future perils lie. It was the first instance where Chinese soldiers just walked into Indian areas and tried to demolish a boundary wall. (Watch these videos of the incident here and here).
There are good reasons to believe that China may not be beyond contemplating another short war with India. We should be on an extraordinary alert for Chinese war signals, preparations or indications of hostile intent.
As India strengthens it Asian alliances and improves its defence capabilities steadily, the current huge asymmetry in military power between the two will be partially redressed. If China wants to try any strong-arm tactics against us, it has to do so using the narrow window of time when the military skew is against us. After 5-10 years of economic and military build-up by us, China's capacity to act against us will fall dramatically.
Moreover, the Chinese economy is slowing while the Indian economy is putting its UPA-induced slowdown behind. This means domestic anger in China will need channeling into jingoism as jobs and growth slow down. While Japan is one perennial target, a small territorial grab from India will seem attractive to China's Communist leadership. China is currently calculating how India will respond to this, and that is the prime purpose of its incursions into Indian territory. It is trying to figure out how we will respond.
It would also be instructive at this point to figure out what China wants and what it may do to get what it wants.
#1: The most likely territorial gain it seeks is probably Tawang in Arunachal, which houses a key Buddhist monastery that threatens China's complete domination of ideological Tibet and its future. As long as Tawang remains Indian, China fears it could be a staging post for a future Tibetan insurrection or even in the creation of a Dalai Lama based on Indian soil. As we have noted before, Tawang is psychologically crucial to China's hold on Tibet as it was the birthplace of the 6th Dalai Lama and hosts an important 17th century Tibetan Buddhist monastery. The current Dalai Lama (the 14th) spent some time in Tawang after he fled Tibet in 1959 post the Chinese takeover.
#2: China believes that. It made a mistake in 1962 when it held on to large areas of Aksai Chin in Ladakh to ensure easy access to Tibet, but voluntarily withdrew from areas seized in the North-East, including Tawang. It wants to rectify this by any means possible. This explains why it tried to intrude into Tawang in 2013. Rest assured, the Chinese troops who came by would have taken excellent pictures of the Indian fortifications and local topography, especially details that could not have been captured from satellite cameras.
#3: China's massive investment plan in Pakistan, which includes large areas of Azad Kashmir, is less about development and more about a military capability. Chinese investment and construction activities in Azad Kashmir are important for they indicate how much it is willing to risk in order to defend its interests in the region. Azad Kashmir and CoK constitute the vortex of central Asia: between them, they abut Afghanistan, Tibet, the Islamic republics of Central Asia and China's own alienated Muslim province of Xinjiang. So China's massive investment is intended to maintain a military presence in this area for defensive and offensive reasons: it will try to block jihadi influence in Xinjiang, and also maintain pressure on the Indian army on the Pakistan border.
Now consider how China may be weighing the risks and benefits of a short war over Tawang.
One, it will ask its lackey Pakistan to make the entire western border hot when it wants to pressure India. Pakistani firing and shelling of Indian positions has been not so much on the Line of Control (LoC) but the settled international border (IB). This has probably been done at the urgings of China. It means, when China winks, Pakistan can make the entire Kashmir LoC and IB a live battleground.
Two, insurgency in the North-East will keep the army busy in Nagaland and Manipur, while distracting us from Arunachal.
China's calculations could revolve around a quick surgical strike to capture Tawang - despite adverse terrain - or a bigger grab in Kashmir to use as a bargaining chip to gain Tawang. It may also be betting that India will not fight too hard for Tawang or threaten nuclear mayhem in retaliation. India has made the mistake of not developing tactical nuclear weapons unlike Pakistan, which will have no qualms about using them if we make territorial gains on the western front.
In essence, China is developing a two-front war capability vis-à-vis India and hobble it with various insurgencies – a Pakistan-propped one in the west, and a more covert one in the north-east. The aim may be to get us to part with Tawang, with or without a short war. With Tawang won, China will put up a show of "magnanimity" and offer to settle the border elsewhere.
The point is simple: China will not see a "short" border war as necessarily a bad thing. India should be more than ready for it, and must lose no time preparing for it.
The key elements of our strategy should be the following: strengthen the army's preparedness to defend Tawang and Ladakh at all costs and make this obvious to China; create the new mountain corps quickly, and speed up investment in border infrastructure; create a crash pan to develop and deploy tactical nuclear weapons and make it clear that these will be used only on the China border.
The paradox of Narendra Modi successful Asian diplomacy involving China's rivals (Japan and Vietnam specifically) is that China may want to strike before Modi manages to strengthen India's economy, defences and alliances. This calculation may have the adverse consequence of making China rush into a short war before India improves his fighting capabilities.
The only way to prevent Chinese adventurism of the 1962 kind is to prepare for one.
NYT writer is absolutely right: Delhi is literally a shithole; but so is all of India
In his 1960 exploration of eastern mysticism, The Lotus and the Robot, Arthur Koestler compared the smell of Bombay to that of "a wet smelly diaper” wrapped around his head. Four years later, VS Naipaul was so revulsed about the filth in India that he wrote in an Area of Darkness that "Indians defecate everywhere” - beside the railway tracks, on the beaches, on the hills, on the riverbanks and on the streets. "They never look for cover,” he said with absolute disgust.
India was smarter than Koestler and Naipaul - it promptly banned both the books.
When the South Asia correspondent of New York Times, Gardiner Harris, wrote on 29 May (Holding Your Breath in India) - that Delhi is an unliveable place because of pollution and that he left the city to safeguard his son's health, the outrage was similar. There was no possibility of banning an article on the Internet, but angry Indians took to social media and slammed Harris for being an elitist expat. Some said while he was over-protective over his child, he had scant regard for the Indian children in Delhi who had no option but to live there, little realising that his voice was that of a frustrated father, who doesn't have to put his family through the perils of living in a dirty city.
Harris wrote: "Foreigners have lived in Delhi for centuries, of course, but the air and the mounting research into its effects have become so frightening that some feel it is unethical for those who have a choice to willingly raise children here. Similar discussions are doubtless underway in Beijing and other Asian megacities, but it is in Delhi - among the most populous, polluted, unsanitary and bacterially unsafe cities on earth - where the new calculus seems most urgent.”
He hits where it hurts. The capital of a super power aspirant, a country which is projected to become the world's third biggest economy in 2020, has been described as "among the most populous, polluted, unsanitary and bacterially unsafe cities on earth”. He also goes on to add that out of the 25 worst polluted cities in the world, 13 are in India.
It's remarkable that even after 50 years since Koestler and Naipaul refused to hold back their revulsion to the all-pervading filth in India, it still remains a humiliating truth that visitors find out the moment they set their foot in the country.
In his recent overseas tour, Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that earlier Indians felt ashamed of being born in India, but now they feel proud. Do they? His point was political. He thought that the change of government in India makes its people proud. But in reality, Indians should still be ashamed because outsiders find their country too filthy to live in; the filth that has permeated every state of matter - solid, liquid, gas and perhaps even plasma. It doesn't befit a modern nation that's apparently raring to go.
What Koestler and Naipaul wrote in the sixties and what Harris wrote in 2015 are not anecdotal, but are borne out by facts. According to WHO, India accounts for 90 percent of open defecation in South Asia and 59 percent of the practice in the world. It also accounts for more than twice the number of open defecations of the 18 countries that come after it in the WHO list.
WHO also says that close to 100 million Indians don't have access to improved sources of water, which is not surprising because our waterways are filled with filth. According to Central Pollution Control Board's (CPCB) 2011-12 annual report, about 60 percent of India's water-sources (which are routinely monitored) have poor "bio-chemical oxygen demand”, an indicator of organic pollution, and about 68 percent have faecal coliform - bacteria from shit.
In other words, more than 60 percent of our water sources are polluted with organic waste and faecal matter. This happens because untreated sewage, faeces and other organic wastes are led into rivers and ponds that Indians draw their water from. Industrial waste and toxic substances that are dumped into them on an hourly basis make them lethal. All major Indian rivers are polluted by industrial effluents and untreated sewage. In its report, the Pollution Control Board even specifically mentions how under-capacity sewage treatment plants let out raw filth into the rivers at various places.
In terms of air quality, the principal concern of Harris in Delhi, 79 percent of metropolitan cities have very high levels of particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide, both of which are the main causes of air pollution. Among the four metros, the presence of particulate matter in Delhi is a well-known story and is obviously rising compared to others. But Delhi is not alone, many other cities, including small towns are asphyxiating in their own emissions.
Delhiites can be peeved because Harris picked on their city while the rest of urban India is no different. It's only a matter of degree of criticality (air pollution levels are classified as low, medium, hight and critical). The fact of the matter is that urban India is rotting and is sinking in its own filth.
Can the Prime Minister's boutique project of "Swatch Bharat” change this?
Absolutely not, because the socio-economic determinants of this environmental degradation are far deeper than what's apparent. With more than 42 percent of its population living in 53 cities, India's urbanisation is so skewed that it's hard to provide a matching civic infrastructure and therefore untreated sewage will continue to flow into rivers, lakes, and open places. If the agriculture and rural employment continue to fail, it will get worse.
Without stopping open defecation, the spread of coliform and other parasites cannot be stopped. Without cracking down on crony-capitalists, including big corporates, the dumping of effluents into rivers and toxic gases into air will not stop. Without providing reliable public transport, the ambient air can never get clean.
And more importantly, all these are to be handled at the local level by the state governments and local bodies. Given the pathetic standards of governance and political priorities in some states, it's a daunting task.
In the end, India's filth is a metaphor for its overall ills that include poverty, inequality, castes, corruption, poor development policies and greed. It's not a question of aesthetics, but a question of fundamental social change.
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so don't expect any war from China
