Chinese Chequers

The Disputed Region
 

“It’s summer and the Chinese, like us Europeans, probably like camping in your beautiful Himalayas,” quipped a Western diplomat whom I met during the tense few days when a Chinese platoon squatted 19 km deep in Ladakh’s Daulat Beg Oldie sector beyond what both sides tacitly agree as the line of control, raising alarm not only within the country but among a host of nations with which China shares a land or maritime border and has a dispute.

The Chinese eventually walked back but not before wrangling a deal from India that it would do away with observation bunkers (which were later described by Indian foreign ministry officials as sheds) at Chumar which overlooks the strategic Karakoram highway. As one commentator said the Chinese move was an enigma within a mystery.

Intriguingly, the move came weeks before India’s foreign minister Salman Khurshid was to travel to Beijing to be followed by a visit by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to India. Normally, most nations would try to be on their best behaviour before such high profile visits.

However, the Chinese decided to do just the opposite. Many old China hands say this is typical of the Chinese. They send in probes to test responses ahead of talks, to see how much they can extract from their opponents in any negotiations.

India’s initial response was timid. It planted a platoon of Indo-Tibetan Border Police in front of the Chinese troops and waved flags with Chinese lettering asking them to go back. The Chinese responded by waving their own banners which said in English that Indians have strayed into Chinese territory !

The border between India and China has always been tense ever since a border war in 1962, which saw the Chinese getting the better of India before withdrawing to what is perceived to be the border, though not officially accepted as one by the Chinese. The conflict over the line stems from a border pact negotiated and signed in 1912 by three powers -  British India, Tibet and China which claimed nominal suzerainity over the otherwise independent hermit kingdom. However  Beijing soon rejected the pact as undue British interferencein its affairs. **

Chinese obduracy would not have mattered had not China invaded Tibet in 1949 bringing its troops near India’s and then driven out the Dalai Lama and several tens of thousands of Tibetan into India ten years later. India’s grant of refuge brought the two sides face to face against each other and a series of moves by China nibbling away at the border ended with a full-scale border war in the winter of 1962. Since then there have been many tense face-offs in the Himalayas, some known  to the world, some not so well known.

The recent face off between ITBP border guards and Chinese People’s Liberation Army troopers,  was initially not publicised by either side. However, when Chinese troops simply dug in and attempts through normal diplomatic and military channels did not succeed, someone in India’s Army headquarters quietly broke the story to the Press Trust of India, India’s leading news agency.  The story was quickly picked up by the rest of the media, embarrassing the government of the day into more vigorous attempts to settle the dispute.

Salman Khrshid : Chinese "...acne ..."

Predictably India’s foreign ministry tried to play down the whole affair. Minister Khurshid famously said “One little spot is acne which cannot force you to say that this is not a beautiful face,” while describing the Chinese intrusion into Ladakh, to chagrin of many. However, that stance changed after opposition parties, the Jammu & Kashmir chief minister and even ruling party MPs started demanding the government take some kind of acceptable action.

A deal was eventually hammered through – some claim helped along the way by a prominent Mumbai based industrialist who buys his telecom and power equipment from India’s northern neighbour – which saw both lose some face. The Chinese walked back and Indians agreed to dismantle a couple of strategic bunkers on land which has been de facto Indian for several centuries now.

Which leads to the question – why did it happen at all? What did China gain from it all?

Chinese Take-away !

Some claim the whole brouhaha was a localised affair where a PLA Commander decided to test his Indian counterpart, without letting his masters in Beijing know. Possible,  but difficult given the tight control political commissars exercise over Chinese troops. With the recent change in guard at the top in Beijing, troop commanders would be even more desperate now to prove their loyalty to the new masters, rather than risk their ire with any display of independent thinking.

The Indian bunkers at Chumar, with their spy cameras trained on the Karakorams must have irked the Chinese considerably, but with spy satellites and drones buzzing all over, were a few bunkers and a few cameras enough to endanger the peace in the Himalayas at a time when China is caught up in a raft of border disputes? Partly because of shrewd calculations and partly  fuelled by xenophobia, China is in visible conflict over islands in South China Seas with no less than half-a-dozen nations including military powers Japan, Korea and Vietnam. These islands ranging from tiny islets under Japanese and Korean control to Taiwan and the Spratleys form a girdle around China’s coast and have the potential to be used as bases to choke China’s trade and energy supply lines in wartime.  China wants these islands and the energy rich seas they are in, to be its own.

India wants the seas free to navigate in as it needs to use them to carry on its burgeoning trade with China, Japan and Korea (trade with China alone is slated to go up to $ 100 billion a year within the next two years) and to access its leased oilfields in the Sakhalin in Russian Siberia. This is taken to imply that India supports Japan, Korea and Vietnam in their dispute with China, which it certainly does.  Part of China’s angst is perhaps because of this tacit support that India has been giving to its enemies.

In the Tibetan highlands, China continues to face resistance from a brave and desperate people who refuse to accept their suzerainty excercised through brute military strength. Monks continue to burn themselves and poets continue to write songs dreaming of an independent Tibet. A young prime minister in exile of the Tibetans operating out of Dharmashala,  seems to be slowly filling into the shoes of the Dalai Lama, the God-King and undisputed leader of the Tibetan people till now.

Tibet continues to simmer

Perhaps someone in Beijing (and the new leadership has many minds with experience of running Tibet) shrewdly calculated that a show of strength in the high Himalayas could possibly also help douse some fires in Tibet and squash ideas that India could come to the Tibetans' help, a fond hope that most of China’s oppressed races including Uighurs and Mongols,  nurture.  

For Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, unfortunately, the stand-off could not  have come at a worse time. Except for a resounding win for his party in Karnataka, the news for the PMO and the Congress party has been quite bleak. A Bansal-gate in the railways, Supreme Court’s strictures on the way CBI’s reports were “re-written”, the killing and mutilation of an alleged Indian spy in Pakistan, following beheading of Indian soldiers by Pakistani troops gave people a perception that the  government was perhaps indecisive and worse.

Khurshid's comments on the Daulat Beg Oldie incident did not help either. It showed Singh's cabinet as weak not only before the Indian people, whom the Prime Minister has to face in general elections early next year but also to India’s neighbours who look towards the Asian power for protection from an increasingly aggressive China.  

People contrast his timid response to Indira Gandhi’s handling of China in two incidents – Nathu La in 1967 and Siachen in 1980s. At Nathu La, Indian troops held their ground in the face of Chinese demands that India vacates the pass which leads into Sikkim, then  an Indian protectorate. In the ensuing artillery duel which followed, India extracted a heavy price on the Chinese eventually forcing them to agree to a ceasefire.

In the 1980s, in the face of Pakistani attempts at establishing before the international community, that Siachen, a glacier bounded on three sides by India’s Ladakh, Pakistan-held Kashmir  and Chinese-held Karakoram ranges, was part of its territory, Indian troops quietly moved in. Some in her cabinet at that time had tried to dissuade her by pointing out that China may get involved in the conflict which must ensue. However, those in the know say she did not flinch and stuck to her stand that India should own the high ground.

Siachen
 

 ** Note on Ladakh Border

Ladakh was actually conquered by Gen Zorawar Singh in 1835-36, for the Maharaja of Kashmir Gulab Singh from Tsepal Namgyal, the Gyalpo (King) of Ladakh, a tributary of Tibet till then. This was recognised in treaties signed in 1842 and 1853 by the Tibetan government and recognised by the Chinese who had nominal authority over Tibet. The boundaries of the region were well defined at Panghyong lake on the east and Karokaram range in the north-west and remain so till this date.

Aksai Chin, the icy desert north east of Ladakh, which the Chinese surreptiously annexed in the 1950s was however not part of this treaty, its status lay undefined. Though the Maharaja of Kashmir nominally claimed it in the 19th century after W.H.Johnson, a British officer of the survey of India drew a border in 1865 which placed Aksai Chin within the Maharaja's territory
 

Vijay Divas – the Day We Miss out in our Celebrations’ List

by Jayanta Roy Chowdhury

The Pakistani Surrender at Dhaka, December 16, 1971

 

Forty one years ago on December 16, independent India won its finest victory, in a war which was not merely a necessity, but perhaps one of the few in the annals of modern history which could be described as righteous.

The victory was not merely won by military muscle but by a combination of outstanding diplomatic, intelligence and industrial effort. India managed to gain the moral high ground even before entering the battlefield through a sustained global public relations campaign which exposed Pakistan’s ghastly record of murdering 2 million Bangladeshi civilians, raping over a quarter million women and driving out a seventh of its population to Indian refugee camps.

Our intelligence agencies had managed to gather vital intelligence on Pakistan’s war intentions, while fooling the rival army into believing we would not carry through the war effort to liberate the whole of East Pakistan.

The Indian military-industrial machinery had managed to manufacture and supply all necessary munitions and war materials despite a ban on arms sales by Western powers, imposed after the 1965 war with Pakistan.

The creation of a new nation Bangladesh, made the world sit up and look at India in a new light. Not only had India liberated a country, the size of Syria in fortnight’s time and taken some 92,000 Pakistani soldiers prisoners of war in the process, it had defied the most powerful nation in the world – the United States of America – through this war. As everyone knows, the United States famously sent its Seventh Fleet to threaten India’s intervention in East Pakistan, and asked allies Jordan and Turkey to send military aircraft to Pakistan’s aid.

Other western powers too were not exactly happy with the turn of events nor was Pakistan’s all weather friend – China – all of whom saw the emergence of Bangladesh under a new secular leadership as a challenge to their control of Asia. Not much reported, was the movement of a British naval group led by the aircraft carrier Eagle closer to India’s territorial waters in what could have been pincer movement in conjunction with the US Seventh Fleet and exhortations by US President Nixon and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger to the Chinese leadership to `threaten’ India on its northern borders.

Kissinger with Mao

By any account, this was a victory,which could be said to equal that of the Pandavas over Kauravas in the Mahabharatan era, of the Grecian wars against Persia or in more modern times of Rommel against the British in Libya.

Yet, strangely, India does not celebrate this victory outside its military cantonments, nor celebrate the men and women associated with this victory by building statues to them or through street naming ceremonies.

If India had been England or the US or even Australia, we would have been holding public commemorative services for those who died, victory parades with participation of defence forces, students and firemen, with floats and dancers on December 16. Statues of Field Marshall Sam Maneckshaw and Air Chief Marshall P.C. Lal would have dotted town squares along with Indira Gandhi’s. School history textbooks would have had whole chapters devoted to this one single decisive war.

But then this is India. Anything militaristic is frowned upon ever since Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s time, perhaps out of a sense of paranoia, fuelled by coups across Asia by Pakistani, Egyptian and Burmese Generals.

Gen J.N.Chaudhuri, who besides winning the 1965 war, also built up the Indian Army after a disastrous rout in 1962 from a 2.5 lakh-strong demoralised army to a three-fold larger and yet more professional national force, was sidelined without much ado by Mrs Indira Gandhi. Documents leaked now, reveal that his phone was probably tapped and that defence minister Y.B.Chavan even went to the extent of questioning him on the possibility of the army trying out a coup-de-etat!

Pt Jawaharlal Nehru with Gen Chaudhuri after 1962 war

Part of the downplaying of 1971 victory is this fear in the minds of India’s political elite that deifying the victory and the victors could result in the rise of a new military culture in this country, which has been an oasis of democracy amidst a continent where military coups have been more the rule than the aberration.

Compounding this fear, was a lack of appreciation on the part of independent India’s leaders of the positive role a modern military can play as an instrument of state policy and in actual policy formulation, especially foreign policy.

Possibly the only two leaders who understood the potential of the military as an instrument of state policy in the 20^th century were Subhash Chandra Bose and Indira Gandhi. Bose, as head of the Azad Hind government during the Second World War, of course, discussed politics and political solutions with the military leaders of the Indian National Army and even went to the extent of consulting them on such issues as whether to declare war on the US and other allied nations or to limit his war to combating Great Britain. Mrs Gandhi is well known to have taken the military leadership into confidence well ahead of the 1971 war and in ensuring a holistic approach to the war effort.
Nehru, on the other hand kept the army at bay by appointing his close aide Krishna Menon, an over-rated intellectual as defence minister and a buffer between himself and the army he rated so lowly.

Menon and Nehru had such a low esteem of the Indian military leadership’s abilities as advisors for their foreign policy, that they never bothered to take their inputs on India’s options in the border spat with China in the early years of the dispute. Rather they treated the army as a police force to be deployed on the border without questions.

Raising the Indian flag at Haji Pir Pass

Lal Bahadur Shastri, disregarded professional military advice after the 1965 war, to sign a disastrous accord in Tashkent after intense bullying by Soviet leaders, which gave back the hard-won Haji Pir pass in Kashmir and land up to Lahore in the Punjab, to Pakistan. A deal which was protested by many Indian military officers with resignations, including by BJP leader Jaswant Singh.
In more recent times, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh is reported to have been on the verge of signing a deal which would have seen Indian forces vacating Siachen ! Luckily last minute consultations with the Army and apprehensions voiced by the military leadership, besides continued Pakistani belligerence, placed that proposal on the backburner.

Unlike in the US, India does not use policy inputs from its Generals’ in forming its foreign policy. Generals come into the picture as bit players asked to advise when issues related to the border are almost finalised!

On a more philosophical plane, the Indian state has formulated a policy which rejects the use of force as an instrument of politics in favour of a policy of strategic restraint that minimizes the importance of the military.

This is said to spring from Gandhian principles. But in reality stems perhaps from a strong lack of trust of the country’s military among its elected leadership. This anti-militarism despite the reality of conflict and war that followed independence, has effectively tied India’s hands in dealing with states like Pakistan, whose state policy lies in forcing India to part with territory through overt or covert use of its military-intelligence infrastructure.

As a result, India blindly searches for a way to manage Pakistan’s provocations, every time it is hit in the face by it. Whether it be a Kargil, a terror strike in Mumbai, bombings of marketplaces and mosques or nuclear blackmail at every stage.

Similarly, devoid of proper coordination in formulating foreign policy and military planning, India does not know how to proceed when Chinese forces test India with a Sumdrongchu or threaten Indian ships in the South China Sea.
 

Without game theorising involving all essential arms of the government, including the Armed Forces, India can never realise which move by its opponents is a bluff, which a blind, which a real threat. When Chinese forces supposedly threatened India in Arunachal Pradesh in the late 1980s, Pakistan’s bomb was ticking away towards fruition. Were we fooled into a defensive stand, so that Pakistan gained valuable time to complete its Nuclear Bomb, without risking a raid by Indian fighter jets?

19th Century Cartoon on China-phobia

As strategic thinker Stephen Cohen once remarked in an essay “Indian leaders simply have not seen the use of force as a useful instrument of politics”, simply because they did not trust the use of force or those they would have to employ in the effort.

 

However, it is time our leadership gave heed to what Gen Chaudhuri is reported to have told Chavan when quizzed about the possibility of a military coup: (a) there was a deep-seated respect for constitutional government at all levels in the country. (b) The size of India and the degree of decentralisation of its government machinery made it impracticable for the Army to seize power from both the Union and the State governments in a single operation. (c) If the Army were to attempt a coup against the Union government without seizing power in the States simultaneously, the political machinery would remain operational and the coup would almost certainly be ineffectual. (d) Any coup attempt would place a critical strain on the loyalty of Army, since State loyalties and rivalries are a real factor in the Army.

Rather they would do well to understand that in the modern world as in the ancient, power and projection of power are ways to define and shape foreign policy. It was not for nothing, that Theodore Roosevelt, who was US President at beginning of the 20^th century formulated America’s foreign policy stance till the Second World War – “Walk softly, but carry a big stick.”