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Chinese Strategy and Indian Stupidity


Mao established a communist state after the end of WW2. During his weaker period, he appealed to nationalism to stem the conflict with nationalist Chiang Kai Shek and join forces to evict the Japanese occupying Chinese Manchuria. When the Japanese were devastated by the Americans with conventional and nuclear weapons, Mao turned his sights to the nationalist Chinese and made them retreat to Taiwan. Eisenhower had offered Nehru the Chinese UN permanent seat on the security council, but he idiotically refused and espoused the claim of China. There is some mention that the Nepalese king in 1947 offered to merge his country with India and Nehru in his typically foolish manner turned him down. 

Mao, then turned his attention to Tibet in the fifties while the west was preoccupied with Stalin's designs in Eastern Europe and weary of war. Mao saw a vast territory sparsely populated in Tibet and having a past history of accepting Chinese suzerainty a few centuries ago. His other reason was that the major Chinese rivers (Yang-tse and Yellow), the Mekong and Salween flowing through Southeast Asia, the Indus flowing through India and Pakistan and the Brahmaputra and Irrawaddy flowing through India, Bangladesh and Myanmar, all originate in Tibet. Thus he would hold a trump card for future use. China is facing severe water scarcity in its northern half and so will Pakistan and India in the near future. When China cuts off the waters of the Indus and Brahmaputra in the future for its own use or to force India to give more to Pakistan, India will have little choice but to toe the line.

China has flooded Tibet of the Tibetans and Sinkiang of the Uighurs with Han Chinese, thus remedying the demography in its favor, while India enacted article 370 by which the Kashmiri Muslim majority persists and turned a blind eye to the terrorism used to make the Indian Hindu Pundits abandon Kashmir.  China has used economic discrimination to assimilate the Uighurs and Tibetans while India pours larger subsidies into Kashmir to help the Kashmiri Muslims with less integration. Foolish Manmohan Singh wants greater subsidies and preferential goodies to be doled out to minorities to perpetuate separatist tendencies and garner votes.

The Indian electorate is so stupid and unthinkingly anti-incumbent that it voted the Congress into power at the center knowing full well that Sonia, a naturalized foreigner would be the ruler behind the curtain. The other party elected politicians happily joined the UPA, in return for power and opportunity for enrichment by bribes and corruption. Of course the NDA under the BJP was no less incompetent or corrupt. Finally Nehru by conceding to language based states fostered the regional linguistic parties that continue to tear apart the nation.

Nehru offered asylum to the fleeing Dalai Lama and irritated China but foolishly did nothing to strengthen defenses at the Tibetan or Chinese borders despite strong warnings by Vallabhbhai Patel about an aggressive scheming China. He fell for the vague statements of Panchsheel agreement with China, proclaimed Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai and tolerated the corruption of his ministers. Chinese incursions into India were ignored and proclamations were made about the sacrosanct nature of colonial borders like the McMahon line of the British which the Chinese were violating and had reneged on as colonial policies, by blatantly occupying Tibet by force without any real claim to it.

Nehru as usual was clueless and did not even try to establish a border in Aksai Chin because he said, the area is snowbound and unpopulated. China occupied it later in 1962 and made Pakistan cede that portion of Ladakh to give the two countries a land border across the Khunjerab pass in the Karakoram mountains. This also put a sliver of China and a sliver of Pakistan between India and Afghanistan and Tajikistan. This effectively established a Chinese and Pakistani veto over any future pipelines or transit passages between India and Central Asia. Now that future has become the present, China is blocking any pipelines from Central Asia to India through its captured territory.

China was much more discreet in militarily pursuing its claim to Taiwan against the powerful Americans or to Eastern Russia against the equally powerful Soviet Union. The former was illegally held by the nationalist Chinese and the latter had been usurped by the Czars by bullying weak China of the Manchu dynasty. Even today China publicly claims Arunachal Pradesh while making pious statements about peaceful resolution of border disputes. Our foolish Manmohan Singh in the face of the Chinese bold and bald claim of an entire Indian state, publicly replies that China is our best friend. It is reminiscent of the house owner hugging the seducer and calling him his best friend when told by the intruder that he has entered the house to sleep with and claim his wife. Once again like Nehru who failed to see the handwriting on the wall and did not build up his military, Manmohan Singh is hell bent on neutering India's nuclear capability and will have to go begging to America for help, as Nehru did to Kennedy.

China fought the Americans in Korea unafraid of its nuclear weapons at the cost of huge losses in manpower while Vajpayee rode a bus to Lahore to make peace despite Pakistan instigated terrorism in Kashmir. China had a fallout with the Soviet Union in the sixties and supported the Vietnamese in a war with America, but when the US was desperate in Vietnam, Mao invited the desperate Nixon to Beijing and allowed US spy stations at the Chinese Soviet border and subsequently armed the Afghan Mujahedeen to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It even attacked its former ally Vietnam at the cost of nearly hundred thousand casualties when Vietnam overthrew the Chinese backed Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.

Deng, the successor of Mao, normalized relations with the US and enticed the greedy Western capitalists to shift their manufacturing to China and is using its trade surpluses and swelling foreign exchange reserves to re-arm itself by buying sophisticated weapons from its friend turned enemy and now again friend, Russia. When the time comes it will not hesitate to turn against Russia to reclaim its part of Siberia. Right now it is doing it by settling more Chinese in eastern Russia just as Bangladesh is doing it in Assam and West Bengal to India. It refuses to back down to bullying by desperate America to revalue its currency upwards and threatens to nuke Los Angeles if the US interferes in Taiwan. India still crawls to make peace with a Pakistan responsible for Kargil and attacks on the Indian parliament, Bangalore, Mumbai, Varanasi, Delhi and Ahmedabad. Clueless Manmohan Singh under US pressure proclaims a partnership with Musharraf at the NAM summit in Cuba to combat terrorism (when Musharraf is the main terrorist himself and the architect of Kargil), postpones the testing of Agni 3 and is willing to sign a nuclear treaty which will destroy India's independent nuclear deterrent and subjugate its foreign policy forever by turning it into a client state.

Indira Gandhi in her lust for power is responsible for the insurgencies in Kashmir, Punjab and indirectly Assam. She used fraudulent election tactics to create dissatisfaction in Kashmir, promoted Bhindranwale to counter the Akali Dal in Punjab and failed to send the Muslim East Pakistani refugees back to Bangladesh. She had 90,000 Pakistani prisoners and yet in the Simla accord with a defeated Bhutto of Pakistan failed to impose the line of control as the international border in Kashmir. Vietnam established a museum extolling its victory over the US and even offered the visiting Clinton and Bush Jr. an official tour of the museum which they politely declined.

China sells its missiles only to distant countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, not in its own litoral basin. It may have sold planes and ships to Pakistan and Iran, but the first is a staunch ally, a dependent client state and an enemy of India and with whom China has a very small border in high mountains and the second has no continuous or contiguous border with China. For India to sell Brahmos with a range of 300 kms. to Indonesia which is less than 100 kms from India's Andaman islands is a folly that India may live to regret in the future. China has used its stash of foreign exchange to buy resources and allegiance from African countries and to alienate them from Taiwan, while India is pouring resources into Afghanistan which may still revert to the Taliban and alienating Sri Lanka and Nepal at the behest of America.

Rajiv Gandhi like his mother and grandfather, with the same faults for personal glory and power foolishly interfered in the Sri Lanka civil war without understanding the unjust policy of Sirimavo Bandarnaike, which was its main cause and unfortunately paid for it with his life. The history of India is replete with foolish leaders with a lust for personal glory and power who have sacrificed the nation for their greed. The jeep and coffin scandals of the last fifty years literally and metaphorically put Indian leaders in the category of 'Insaanon ki lashon se kafan lootnewale'.

All Indian governments since independence have failed to provide water, sewers, education, health, roads and economic opportunities and instead used caste, language and religion to divide the nation to garner captive vote banks to perpetuate their corruption and power. The Communist Parties while devoid of those prejudices have been blind supporters of China and oblivious to the religious manipulation of Pakistan and Bangladesh to the equal detriment of the nation.

The solution lies in a strong conventional and nuclear deterrence capability based on indigenous production, a modern and efficient infrastructure and a rapidly growing economy that is inclusive of the common man and all religions, classes and castes combined with honest leadership with foresight.  Instead India is following the neoliberal Washington consensus which marked increase internal disparity of wealth and perpetuates a two tier nation of few rich and bulk poor. China has sold its poor to slave labor in sweatshops and its leaders are expropriating land illegally and cheaply to enrich themselves. China's leaders are dishonest but want their nation to become a great power while India's leaders simply want to sell their mother and motherland just to get rich. China's leaders give no choice to their people while in India we choose scum-buckets as leaders even though we have a choice. The Chinese can blame their leaders when things go wrong. We, like the Americans, have no one else to blame except ourselves and our stupidity.  

23-Jun-2007

More by :  Gaurang Bhatt, MD

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