{"id":10037,"date":"2017-07-21T08:55:58","date_gmt":"2017-07-21T03:25:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kashmir.today\/?p=10037"},"modified":"2017-07-21T08:55:58","modified_gmt":"2017-07-21T03:25:58","slug":"war-break-india-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kashmir.watch\/?p=10037","title":{"rendered":"Could a war break out between India and China \u2014 again?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Barkha Dutt\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/h4>\n

\u201cThe United States does not recognize our countries as great powers.\u201d Chairman Mao Zedong, the Communist revolutionary and the founding father of the People\u2019s Republic of China, said this to Jawaharlal Nehru, India\u2019s first prime minister, in 1954. The two leaders met in Beijing and bonded over a shared sentiment of anti-imperialism. \u201cThe ruler that the United States uses to measure other countries will no longer be useful in the future,\u201d Nehru agreed with Mao, according to archives now declassified and released by the\u00a0Wilson Center<\/a>. \u201cIn addition to money there are other factors, the human factor is the most important,\u201d he said idealistically; \u201c \u2026 our two countries should play more important roles in Asia. In any case, the population of our two countries reaches one billion. This will lead to immense influence.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

More than six decades later, between them, China and India\u00a0make up\u00a0<\/a>36 percent of the world\u2019s population and are the globe\u2019s fastest-growing economies, with a recent report placing India ahead. Nehru was prescient about the influence they would wield\u00a0\u2014 he coined the phrase \u201cHindi-Chini bhai bhai\u201d (the Indians and Chinese are brothers) \u2014 but absolutely misjudged their imagined partnership. His naivet\u00e9 about China resulted in a\u00a0war in 1962<\/a>\u00a0that caught India off guard. This year, as Chinese and Indian soldiers stand eyeball to eyeball in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan in a\u00a0month-long standoff<\/a>, the state-run Chinese media has\u00a0threatened India<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cit will suffer greater losses than in 1962.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

But, as Indian Defense Minister\u00a0Arun Jaitley said<\/a>, \u201cIndia of 2017 is very different\u201d from the India of 1962. India has refused to kowtow to China\u2019s entitled assumptions about a hegemonic control of Asia.<\/em><\/p>\n

At the epicenter of the\u00a0growing crisis<\/a>\u00a0is the Doklam plateau, which sits at the tri-junction of India, China and Bhutan, near the northeastern Indian state of Sikkim. In June, the Bhutanese army objected to the Chinese constructing a road in territory that it says is within its sovereignty. It asked the Indian military for help to resist the Chinese aggression, and Indian troops moved into the construction area in Bhutan. India says China has violated an agreed-upon status quo and is in violation of a 2012 boundary agreement. Beijing has referenced a much earlier colonial treaty signed between Great Britain and China. The Indian military maintains a permanent training presence in Bhutan; its current king was a graduate of the National Defense College in Delhi. China, for its part, has for years wanted full diplomatic ties with Bhutan.<\/em><\/p>\n

But still, Bhutan may simply be a decoy for a bigger play: Who will lead Asia?<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe larger\u00a0battle is essentially about strategic competition for geopolitical space and influence in Asia between India and China,\u201d said\u00a0Nirupama Rao<\/a>, who served as India\u2019s ambassador to China and retired as the government\u2019s top-ranking diplomatic official. \u201cThe gauntlet thrown is not directed against Bhutan, but against India,\u201d she told me in an interview.\u00a0 The entire Indo-Pacific region is now the gladiatorial ring where a global joust is unfolding, pulling in countries well beyond Bhutan. The United States, India and Japan just completed trilateral naval exercises amid reports of Chinese submarine presence in the Indian Ocean region.<\/em><\/p>\n

Tibet \u2014 and India\u2019s support for the Dalai Lama \u2014 has been another flashpoint; as China sulked, India allowed the Buddhist leader, who has championed independence for Tibet, to visit Tawang in the eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims to have rights over.<\/em><\/p>\n

Regional provocation is also spinning along the Sino-Pakistan axis. China has\u00a0regularly blocked<\/a>\u00a0action at the United Nations against Pakistan-based terrorist groups. China\u2019s ambitious \u201cone belt, one road<\/a>\u201d initiative passes through territory that India regards as sovereign, angering New Delhi. Beijing has used the Sikkim-Bhutan standoff to threaten India on possible interference in the Kashmir Valley, in support of Pakistan.<\/em><\/p>\n

Many Indians believe that infrastructure, power projects, highways in Pakistan are the instruments of Chinese neo-colonialism. Beijing\u2019s protectorate over Pakistan, Islamabad, is now seen as a virtual colony of China, locked into inescapable dependence.<\/em><\/p>\n

Yet, despite the Indian military chief asserting his readiness for a \u201ctwo-and-a-half-front war\u201d (a reference to Pakistan, China and internal threats), some\u00a0believe that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi\u2019s observation that India and China have not fired a single bullet in 40 years will remain true. India is China\u2019s largest trading partner; a sixth of India\u2019s imports are now Chinese. \u201cChina is no monolith,\u201d said\u00a0Alok Bansal with the India Foundation, a think tank linked to the government. \u201cWe have to look at the subterranean currents; Chinese society today is extremely driven by commercial interests. I don\u2019t think the people there want conflict with India. Indian soft power has also made its own ingress.\u201d Bansal said\u00a0that what really bothers the Chinese is India\u2019s growing proximity to the United States and points out that\u00a0any maleficent aggression will achieve precisely that.<\/em><\/p>\n

There are also murmurs in strategic circles about overdependence on Washington. \u201cIf ever there was a war with China, America would never come to our rescue,\u201d one government official said. India\u2019s road to equality with China may eventually route itself not through Washington or the West, but through the East; Modi has invested energy in building relationships with Japan, Vietnam and South Korea, all of whom are suspicious of China.<\/em><\/p>\n

Amid current fears of a second Sino-Indian battle between two nuclear-armed giants of Asia, the only denouement can be a mutual withdrawal of soldiers from the contested Bhutan region. Anything else could be cataclysmic.<\/em><\/p>\n

Barkha Dutt is an award-winning TV journalist and anchor with more than two decades of reporting experience. She is the author of \u201cThis Unquiet Land: Stories from India\u2019s Fault Lines.\u201d Dutt is based in New Delhi.<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Courtesy: Washington Post<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Barkha Dutt\u00a0 \u201cThe United States does not recognize our countries as great powers.\u201d Chairman Mao Zedong, the Communist revolutionary and the founding father of the People\u2019s Republic of China, said this to Jawaharlal Nehru, India\u2019s first prime minister, in 1954. The two leaders met in Beijing and bonded over a shared sentiment of anti-imperialism. \u201cThe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9446,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-union-territory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kashmir.watch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kashmir.watch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kashmir.watch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kashmir.watch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kashmir.watch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kashmir.watch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kashmir.watch\/index.php?rest_route=\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kashmir.watch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kashmir.watch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kashmir.watch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}