An icy , desolate and barren Himalayan terrain and treacherous inhuman weather beckons those who serve along India’s Northern frontiers. The soil is mostly brown and at altitudes above 16000 ft there’s perma frost and blue ice.But if the surface is scratched even that wee bit, the top soil or the ice reveals all pervading red colour– the colour of the blood of our brave soldiers, which has been spilled aplenty in firming up our Himalayan frontiers.The ‘red’ on the ground received another generous coat when 20 ‘braves’ willingly nurtured it with ‘their’ blood, at a remote outpost in Ladakh on the fateful night of June 15 & 16.
In April ’20 the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Ground Forces (PLAGF) turned up in large numbers in areas opposite the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Ladakh. Since this coincided with the PLAGF’s annual spring military manoeuvre schedule the concentration of troops did not evoke much concern. But the established ‘pattern’ suddenly gave way to amassing of armoured carriers, artillery and tanks opposite select sectors.
Two divisions worth of PLAGF troops had ‘suddenly’ manifested on the LAC and effected incursions in Eastern Ladakh in the Depsang Plains, Galwan River Valley, Gogra Heights, Pangong Tso and Naku La in Sikkim and rapidly created defences and new encampments. Brazenly enough, the PLAGF intuded 8km within Indian territory in the Pangong Tso Sector and declared sovereignty over another Sector, the Galwan River Valley.In a mere 20 days the Chinese had altered the status quo in place over the past 27 years!
These incursions were countered by the Indian Army (IA), in accordance with the border management mechanisms mutually agreed between China and India and in vogue since 1993 and this led to tense face-offs at the LAC. And some of these transformed into fist fights and stone pelting melees between the IA & the PLAGF personnel. Then on June 6, over extended and protracted talks between military commanders from China & India it was decided to mutually disengage from the points of conflagration at the LAC and to withdraw to initial positions over an extended period of time subject to reciprocal endorsements.
The disengagement process did commence in some form and on June 15 before the Chinese withdrew from the Galwan River Valley they erected an Observation Post (OP) to gain observation over the newly constructed Darbuk (Hell)-Shyok (River of Sorrow) – Daulat Beg Oldie (Daulat Beg Died Here) or the DSDBO Road. When confronted by the military commander on ground for that particular area, Colonel Santosh, CO 16 BIHAR, and his troops the Chinese reluctantly withdrew but ambushed the Indian party as they were returning and brutally clubbed them to death.
This was a singularly provocative event on the LAC and unprecedented in nature.Since 1975 there had been no bloody clashes between the IA & the PLAGF anywhere along the LAC, and since 1967 in Ladakh in particular. The brutal and treacherous assault by the PLAGF on the night of Jun 15 & 16 destabilised the power dynamics and abruptly and significantly ratcheted up confrontation levels on the escalatory matrix. The scale and ruthlessness of the Chinese moves has shocked and surprised the Nation but alarmingly enough it has had the same effect on the security establishment! Is it 1962 and 1999 all over again?
Retribution from the IA soldiers was swift and telling. The ensuing clash (with bare hands,sticks, stones, knuckle dusters and clubs) at Patrol Point (PP) 14 accounted for 43 PLAGF personnel dead including their CO and Second-in-Command. And 20 Indian soldiers were heroically martyred as well.
As of today, there has been another declaration by the two armies to disengage from the various flash points but the Chinese are continuing to amass troops all along the LAC and specifically opposite 15 select areas or points. They have built roads well into Indian territory and have created battlements and fortifications as well as Helipads. The Chinese have come prepared for the long haul and determined to alter the status quo unilaterally. And they will use force and not banners to evict the IA from contested areas.
All of this happened in the middle of a raging global pandemic in which all nations are severely tied down with its management and battling catastrophic economic chaos. China’s role in the spread of the pandemic has come under increasing scrutiny and coupled with the events at the LAC the Indian public reaction was a mix of consternation, fury, anger and disgust. Indignation has swept across India and China is seen as having back stabbed a distracted India.
But with the Chinese and in the world of realpolitik there is no room for emotions.What is needed is a cold hard look at what went wrong and whats needs to be done about it.
The root of the problem is our undefined Northern Border with China, a legacy of the British Raj. Aksai Chin, is under Chinese control since the 1950s and Pakistan, in 1961, illegally ceded the Shaksgam Valley in Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) , part of the princely state of J&K, to China. The Siachen Glacier juts in between the Shaksgam Valley and Aksai Chin. The absence of a well defined border has fuelled uncertainty and is a ticking time bomb in the context of two acrimonious neighbours.The IA & the PLAGF hold on to their respective territory on the basis of the line that separates Indian and Chinese controlled territory and is known as the Line of Actual Control.
The LAC is divided into three sectors, namely the Western Sector (Eastern Ladakh), the Middle Sector (Himachal and Uttarakhand) and the Eastern Sector (Arunachal and Sikkim). It is a concept based on the perceptions of the two opposing armies and by usage and by way of exercising actual control over areas. It is NOT a demarcated or delineated line, unlike the Line of Control (LC). This concept has been pandered by the Chinese since 1956, introduced in 1959 and then reiterated in 1962. It was finally accepted by us in 1993 in the interests of peace and to arrive at a lasting border settlement. At the time it was clarified that the LAC being referred to was not the LAC of 1959 or 1962 but as it existed on ground in 1993.
The Chinese describe the LAC in general terms on maps which are not to scale and have continued exploit this ambiguity to grab more and more territory by a creep method and by presenting newer claims of the LAC alignment on their maps. And this is possible because to date no map has ever been shared by either country, let alone exchanged. Thus on ground, there are two varying perceptions where ‘our’ LAC and ‘their’ LAC is not only overlapping but even crisscrossing at numerous places. Even the exact length of the LAC is contested, with the Chinese claiming it is 2000km in length and we identifying it as a 3488km line.
Since India faces two hostile nations from the North with varying military capabilities, the strategy to deal with them too has been especially curated. While with Pakistan the strategy is ‘punitive deterrence’ with China it is ‘strategic dissuasion’.
Dissuasion and deterrence imply the same thing, however in India-China terms it resulted in a Border Management Strategy which essentially drew from the 1993 ‘peace and tranquillity along the LAC’ agreement which was about maintaining status quo and trying to find a solution. A Joint Working Group too has been formed and which has had over a score of meetings since 1993.The two nations had then resolved to not letting their overall diplomatic, economic and cultural relations be hostage to the vexed boundary issue. As part of joint mechanisms the adversaries agreed to patrol areas up to their respective perception of the LAC. India though patrols areas short of the LAC and up to designated Patrol Points, as designated by the China Study Group (CSG) in the 1970s & 90s.The Chinese though patrol right upto their claim line. India has no ‘claim line’ as for us the border is as shown on official Survey of India maps.
And in large parts the agreement has been adhered to, until now that is.
What’s China’s game in provoking this quagmire?
China has always been insecure about its territory after having lost parts of Tibet and Mongolia and areas west of Xinjiang as a consequence of Great Power rivalry between the British and the Russians or due to China’s ‘weak nation status’ for most part of history. Its two western provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang are its Achilles heel. If it wasn’t for Aksai Chin and the Shaksgam Valley the Chinese wouldn’t have been able to connect Tibet with Xinjiang. Thus acquiring more territory through grabs only provides the Chinese with depth for their prized highways.
The present conflagration is as unprecedented as it is sudden but the Chinese justify it by claiming that India has unilaterally altered the status of J&K through the abrogation of Article 370 it has forced them to initiate counter measures to safeguard its interests. This is a most erroneous and misleading construct as India has changed only the administrative status of J&K and not made any revisionist territorial claims beyond what already exist since 1947.
A more ostensible explanation is the completion of the Leh – DSDBO Road and its extension across the Galwan River. The Chinese perceive this as part of India’s agenda towards reclaiming Aksai Chin and this strategic artery can lend itself to any future plans to launch operations towards the Karakoram (KK) Pass and for severing highway G219 connecting Tibet with Xinjiang. They are also perennially wary of the DBO Sector’s proximity to the KK Pass and would like to address this vulnerability by securing or capturing it.
And they decided to precipitate matters now because this is simply the best time to do it. Not only is the US preoccupied with the pandemic and is in an election year, the Russians too have no interest to interfere and India of course is mired with its own economic downturn and covid 19 struggles. And this leaves China enough elbow room to ‘club’ its opponents into submission.
A look at the areas that China has intruded into is also instructive and it immediately establishes that China has utilised its time well and prepared well in advance over many years. And has acted at a time and place of its choosing.
By threatening the Depsang Plains it is seeking an advantageous position to be able to interdict the Leh-DSDBO road as well as be able to cut off all areas between Depsang and DBO in one fell swoop. Through this the PLAGF would aim to link with the roads leading to Siachen and that is a prized objective as well.
In the Galwan Valley the aim is to dominate road Leh-DSDBO and keep under effective observations all movements of the IA and at the same time provide depth to the section of the G219 Highway that passes through Aksai Chin.
The importance of the intrusion at Hot Springs is to deny the IA any advantage in progressing operations along the Kongka La axis, this mountain pass is approx 3km from Hot Springs and was the site of the 1959 border incident leading to the death of 10 Indian policemen.
In the Pangong Tso area, the ingress is on the North bank of the lake and is approx 8km beyond a point called ‘Finger 8’, which the IA considers to be on the LAC, up to ‘Finger 4’.The heights adjoining ‘Finger 8’ provide excellent observation and can significantly assist Indian plans in the sector, a fact well known to China.By extending its reach to 8km beyond ‘Finger 8’ the Chinese have effectively foreclosed any IA options and negated the terrain advantage that the IA could have exploited. The PLAGF was already in a position of advantage along the Southern banks of Pangong and now with it having effectively secured the North bank its prospects of a lightning strike towards Chushul are exponentially improved.
But these are all tactical or operational aims. What is the larger gameplan?
It seems the Chinese have decided to go for a bigger prize than these roads and passes. It has sucked in enough Indian troops and is itself poised to expand its agenda by going for either severing off Ladakh or attempt a large scale assault across the McMahon line separating Arunachal and Tibet.
Sounds alarmist? A doomster’s and gloomster’s rant?
Well, the past six weeks have upturned all conventional notions about the unconventional Chinese. So let’s be wary of this larger game plan. And if Pakistan can do so and get away with it in 1965 then the Chinese are definitely better equipped to repeat the ploy. Its amply clear that China has made its decisive play and decided to ‘resolve’ the boundary dispute in its own signature muscular style. As is its wont, all the while that the PLA was intruding and building capacity in Ladakh the Chinese kept talking of peace, normalcy and the very 1993 agreement that they have so flagrantly violated.
And this is not an isolated action. China off late has been flexing its muscles to establish lasting hold over all littoral and land territories that it stakes claims on. It unilaterally established administrative districts on both Spartly and Paracel Islands regarding which it has an ongoing fued with Vietnam, Malayasia and the Phillipines, sank a Vietnamese trawler near the Paracel Islands, harassed Malaysian oil companies in the South China Sea (SCS), repeatedly violated Taiwan’s airspace with fighter aircrafts especially since a hardliner opposed to China has been elected as Taiwan’s President and provoked Japan near the waters of the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea (ECS). In addition, recently Australia made a thinly veiled reference to China after the former was subjected to large scale cyber attacks.
In effect, China’s core territorial interests are on its East Coast and the LAC isn’t exactly a top priority area for them. And they are aware that the Leh-DSDBO road notwithstanding India will not and cannot open offensives to reclaim Aksai Chin, at least not with the present levels of spending, capability and hardware asymmetry in favour of China. Then why have they done what they have done? Because in Xi Jinping’s scheme of things this is a small but vital cog in realising China’s ‘strong nation dream’. And he sees India as a ‘doable’ option, a kind of a ‘low hanging fruit’.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is one of the strongest leaders to have emerged after the death of Deng Xiaoping and his vision is singular and encapsulated in the form of the “Xi Jinping Thought”, which guides China’s actions today. It is simply explained as, quoting Seema Sirohi in the Economic Times,“ China’s on a long march to domination in Asia and beyond. He (Jinping) claims the mandate of heaven over ‘tianxia’ – all under heaven- as Imperial era Emperors did once upon a time. This is the cultural military context for imposing the China order on the World.” Borrowing from Admiral (Retd) Arun Prakash’s article, “How to Play China”, in the Indian Express – “Historically, China is heir to an ancient system based not on sovereign equality of states, but on the divine and boundless reach and authority of the Chinese Emperor”.
The “China Dream” envisions establishment of a “global unified system” with China at its centre.It is noteworthy that after many decades a Chinese leader has invoked the ‘tianxia’ concept and speaks of the hold and clout of Xi Jinping when compared to his predecessors.
An established fact is that China has been seeking to replace and displace the US from the World hierarchy and has silently been building its technological, military, diplomatic and economic capacity. Today China bankrolls dozens of governments and leaders and exercises influence at par with the US and in some cases even more so. Out of the 22 UN Agencies, China directly heads 4 and in 15 others candidates backed by them are heading the Agency. In a UNHRC vote on sanctioning China for violations it blocked the US sponsored vote successfully with 50 nations supporting it against 22 who did not. Low income economies see China as a role model and aspire to emulate its success and it Belt and Road Initiative has roped in countries in all continents. China today has loaned out more dollars than the World Bank, IMF and others combined.
Militarily it has developed potent maritime, air and ballistic missile capabilities and has ensured that any US invasion close to mainland China will be defeated, a possibility acknowledged by the US military think tanks through various warames conducted. It has through its reach upto the Second Islan Chain successfully challenged the US in the Pacific. And today China sees itself as ready to flex muscles to subjugate those who are willing and even those who aren’t. It made its intentions clear and took decisive steps to enhance its global influence in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Economic Crisis and its made its second move during another Global crisis albeit in not so sublte ways.
China has always maintained a consistent ideological and strategic construct and has not wavered from it. It fought Japanese imperialists but did not heed Nehru’s call to shun the West and instead courted the US when it needed to go beyond the detente and the Western economies when it needed to shed its laggard’s tag in the economy stakes in the late 70s.
In this context it is inexplicable, incomprehensible and baffling as to how the present dispensation in India too failed to read Chinese motives and the larger strategic drivers of it’s actions? But it’s to Jinping’s credit that he has not lost sight of the Chinese ideological underpinnings and their enmeshed relationship with the Chinese ‘core interests’, which are non negotiable. So to think that the Chinese are in Ladakh on an impulse is a fallacy, its part of a design which we failed to see.
We failed to see the manifestation of the design as the visuals of the Indo-China relationship were driven by the almost dozen meetings between PM, Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping. When we see two strongmen, leading the largest nations on the planet, sitting together on a swing in Ahmedabad, enjoying tea in Xi Jinping’s hometown Xian and sipping coconut water at Mamallapuram then it is easy not to be able to anticipate the swing of a club headed towards the head of an IA soldier deployed on the LAC. Though there was relative bonhomie between the two nations and a perceptible thaw in relations up to 2015, things went down-hill almost immediately after that.
Infact, rather dramatically the first face-off under PM Modi’s watch took place at Depsang Plains on the very day that Xi Jinping landed in Ahmedabad.
Thereafter the blocking of UN action against Zaki ur Rehman Lakhvi & Masood Azhar, the wrangling over India’s entry into the Nuclear Supplier’s Group, the Doklam standoff, India’s opposition to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – Jinping’s dream project, China’s overt support to help Kashmiris get their fundamental rights, its posturing in the UN against the abrogation of Article 370 and the impasse over Huawei have all contributed to the way things are today.
The issue of India opposing the BRI on grounds of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) passing through POK and GB and lack of financial transparency has been a sore point with Xi Jinping. He has staked his credibility and coupled his and China’s future on the success of the BRI.India’s justified rebuff does not sit well with him and he has now shown his hand. To be fair to the Modi government it has been steadfast in its opposition to BRI, concerns regarding Huawei, issue of right of passage in open seas and has actively courted alliances such as the Quad. This show of ‘strategic autonomy’ is anathema to the Chinese as they thrive only on rentier states such as Pakistan or client states such as Nepal.
The Doklam crisis in 2017 was till date the most prolonged and serious face-off between the IA and the PLAGF since the 1980s and even then had not resulted in blood being spilt. It was resolved and later PM, Narendra Modi, went and met Xi Jinping at Wuhan in April ’18. Since then the ‘Wuhan Spirit’ was supposedly guiding the actions of the two countries. But it proved to be a chimera is now starkly evident.It is inexplicable as to how it was assumed that Xi Jinping would contribute to the peaceful rise of two power centres in Asia in an ‘Asian Century’ belonging to India & China?
This just doesn’t fit with the historical and cutlural underpinnings of the Chinese. They are after all the ‘middle kingdom’ with vassal states around them. To this end itself it has retained the border dispute to perpetually keep us destabilised and then instigated our neighbours too, who find it impossible to refuse the offers that China makes.
Our concept of ‘strategic dissuasion’ involved leaving large tracts of the border areas under developed to make it difficult for China to access them during a conflict. China on the other hand never restrained itself and has rendered our concept obsolete by rapidly creating infrastructure and roads which has accrued to the PLAGF a decisive mobilisation advantage. To counter this, IA posts are essentially right in the frontline and strung along a line, which can be breached at multiple points in mountainous terrain. And consequently India belatedly decided to upgrade infrastructure on its side and is playing catch up with almost half a century of Chinese head start.
In the same vein we also suffered from Finladisation and were careful not to say or do anything which could upset or anger China who would then go onto change alter the status quo ante at the LAC. So much so, China also managed to extract from us tacit acquiescence on not highlighting issues such as Tibet, the plight of the Uighyurs in Xinjiang and Taiwan while issuing stapled visas to people from J&K and Arunachal. This asymmetry in dealing with each other defines China’s actions and they do not believe in reciprocity.
Then how did we assume that a ‘peace and tranquillity’ agreement would be enough to forestall Chinese moves along the border? That this agreement has not even resulted in an exchange of maps, something as basic to the resolution of a border dispute. And we on our side allowed the calm since 1975 to mislead us. All the ‘there will be no war’ enthusiasts in various echelons of power are responsible for this state of affairs.
To back our vision of ‘strategic autonomy’ India needed to develop its elements of national power at a rapid pace. And we haven’t done that. And this is another pointer for China’s timing on the LAC imbroglio. It perceives India to be struggling with its economy and has also kept tabs on our pace of military modernisation, deficiencies and asymmetries. It perceives India to be most vulnerable at this stage and has decided to act unilaterally along the LAC. China’s defence spend last year, as per SIPRI, was approx USD 261 billion and India in comparison spent USD 71 billion. Our hardware asymmetry is a reflection of our overall defence spending as well as the manner in which run our defence related issues. We have roughly 1/5 the number of submarines, 1/3 the number of aircrafts and 1/4 the number of armoured vehicles as compared to the Chinese.
The PLA wasn’t a world class force till about a decade back, but the rise of Xi Jinping has coincided with the PLA’s transformation into a potent modern force by 2030. It restructured its military commands into 5 integrated theater commands, downsized its troops and invested in technology. In comparison India has 17 service specific commands and spends around 60% of the defence budget on wages and pensions. These aspects are known since the late 90s and yet all we have achieved is greater ‘understanding’ of the issue and not greater action.
It is true that India has many concerns and issues to address and needs just resource allocations but a country which has for its neighbours two unpredictable, collusive, militarily belligerent and hostile states has to per force invest in military technology, upgrades and capital expenditure to develop the desired capacity to fend off such neighbours.
China also knows that for India the worst case scenario is a two front war and with the way it has joined cause with Pakistan over abrogation of Article 370 it is quite plausible that in case of a Himalayan conflict in Ladakh, Pakistan too would pitch in in some form in J&K and fix our forces along the Western borders. War happens but once in decades and the hard and bitter truth is that we have to be ready for it every day.
And it is time we stopped getting ‘surprised’ by our neighbours. By now they too are surprised at our penchant for being ‘’surprised and backstabbed’. Certainly questions of intelligence gaps, inability to detect two divisions worth of PLA build up (its Kargil again),vacuum in strategic thought and the decision to delay the IA’s spring deployment in the backdrop of the coronavirus would have already been reviewed by the GOI. But we are already past those points and the enemy is at the gates.
The prognosis is that the Chinese will act and expand this face-off at the LAC into a larger conflict, which may or may not be limited in scope and that they will do it before the winters set in. Xi Jinping is not going to give India the two seasons it needs to effectively counter the Chinese threat. It is inevitable that we will rush troops to the LAC but an eye has to be kept on Pakistan as well. And in that sense our reserves along the Western Borders are fixed.
Having expostulated thus far on China and its capabilities, while it is true that they are far stronger and enjoy significant asymmetry but they are neither invincible nor superhuman. The lessons of the 1962 war have been well learnt and in that conflict in the Ladakh Sector the Chinese were given a befitting reply on the back of a well organised defensive layout which stalled their offensive.
Though asymmetry is significant, the IA of today is urecognisable from its 1962 profile. And the Chinese know it and have just been given a ‘crash course’ on it in Galwan. Unlike ’62, where Nehru betrayed the IA by not using the IAF for ‘fear’ of escalating the conflict, this time around no such concessions will be forthcoming from India, Rafale or no Rafale. If we have to contend with the Chinese ‘Rocket Force’ then the Chinese too have to contend with our potent Long Range Vectors.
The PLAGF has the 1962 conflict to its credit. But in the Korean War and the Sino-Vietnam war it has run aground with its plans. In Vietnam its offensive was stalled by militias. And in Korea, a tattered 8th US Army resuscitated itself and chased the Chinese all the way across the 38th Parallel by bringing down massed Artillery fire on the Chinese and progressing advance under its wake, the ‘meat grinder’ strategy of Gen Ridgeway . They also outflanked the Chinese at Incheon and struck decisively at the latter’s extended Lines of Communication (LsC).
Since 1979 the PLAGF has mostly been in combat with ‘unarmed’ non Han Chinese unlike the battle hardened IA. This is not to underestimate the enemy but to underscore their vulnerabilities, lack of battle experience and successful tactics that have caused them military setbacks. It is a given that the PLAGF will be gung-ho about overrunning trip wire posts along the LAC but what happens when they come up against the actual defensive layout?
And one significant force accretion is the IA’s 17 Corps, organised only as Mountain Strike Corps to be tasked to take the offensive across the LAC or the IB. Its maiden exercise- Him Vijay– had raised Chinese heckles and they were discernibly worried about the potential of this strike force.
The versatility of this ‘Corps’ is its biggest asset. All along the LAC there are numerous points where the Chinese can be put under pressure. But any premature act by us can lead to an inadvertent trigger for a skirmish and then transform into a limited to a full-fledged conflict. And the Chinese are waiting for exactly this kind of opportunity. They tried similar moves to lure the Russians into a conflict in 1969 but the Russians refused to take the bait twice as they lacked preparation at that stage. Similarly in the present scenario the Chinese have come prepared and they will provoke us to lead us into a trap of a limited conflict being joined while we aren’t fully prepared for it.
India needs time and hardware and till then its only hope is to get Xi Jinping to back off and restore status quo ante by getting the Russians or the US to exert pressure on the Chinese leader. But the US has no leverage with China and Russia may at best succeed in delaying a Chinese attack but won’t be able to negotiate on our behalf to get the Chinese to vacate occupied areas. For which we will have to fight the big fight. The longer the Chinese stay entrenched the deeper would be the hues of red on the Himalayan battlefields. Xi Jinping has no stake in withdrawing unilaterally and if anything he has only to lose in the gambit if he does so. The coronavirus episode has weakened him and he needs to exert control all over again.
So like in 1962, we are on our own and we will have to take the fight to the Chinese sooner rather than later. Otherwise the option is to be subsumed by the ‘tianxia’ and be a vassal state ready to pay tribute to Emperor Xi Jinping. While this is one episode which will play out the way it has to, India now needs to shed diffidence to the Chinese once and for all. We have to highlight and provide overt support to issues that the Chinese are sensitive to. Its time to accept the extent and magnitude of our Chinese problem and that would be the start point of effectively formulating a long term strategy to deal with them.
Any apprehension of a Chinese backlash have to be cast to the winds as despite over four decades of diffidence and acquiescence even now we are confronting our Himalayan nightmare.It is time to start applying pressure on China by deepening our engagement with the Tibetan and Hong Kong movements and by drawing closer linkages with Taiwan. India has to be vociferous in its support for these movements just as China is showing solidarity with the ‘fundamental right of the Kashmiri people’.The Uighyur incarceration is also a sore point with the Chinese that we need to now exploit. There is nothing to be achieved through diffidence except more martyrs.
We need to deepen our alliances with like- minded nations and continue building our elements of National Power. We cannot fritter away our energy and resources on internal squabbles and need to get some coherence and reconciliation in our social and political narrative.
This is not going to happen soon or overnight because we need to develop capacity and capability but just like the Chinese we have to understand that the resolution to the border dispute and the Chinese conundrum is by taking the fight to the Chinese. We won’t be able to avoid that reality anymore and it would only be to our detriment. In any case China will thrust it upon us sooner rather than later.
I have been wondering that why should it always be that China spells doom for our PMs? Why is it not the other way round? Be rest assured, China may have taken us for granted yet again, but a fitting reply will mark the end of ‘Emperor Jinping’ and ‘Tianxia’.
So, if there ever was a good time to deal with the Chinese.
This is it!
BuTtrvieW 
Very well researched and a balanced article… It is time for India to wake up and take action…
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Amen and thanks for the review.
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