The Chinese premier deployed no less than 80,000 troops of the People’s Stainless Steel Open Blind Rivets Manufacturers Liberation Army (PLA) to overwhelm India. China’s india war by Bertil Lintner, Oxford, Rs 675 Prior to the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and its military occupation of Tibet, there was hardly any friction between the two ancient civilisations of China and India. A piece of land here or there is not the principal Chinese goal. Naga, Mizo and Manipuri secessionist rebels were trained, armed and financed by China via Myanmar until Mao died in 1976. Its contention is that the two are politically and ideologically distinct like thesis and antithesis, and hence bound to compete. Ideology, geopolitics and ambition have pushed China and India into a permanently edgy confrontation. They enjoyed cultural exchanges for millennia and kept a politically safe distance from each other, thanks to the natural barrier of the Himalayas.

The locations and targets for the Chinese to hit in India were carefully selected, meticulously planned.China’s military buildup and manoeuvres along the McMahon Line started as early as 1959."The central takeaway from this rambling but informative book of historical revisionism is that India faces a sophisticated and relentless adversary in China which has many aces up its sleeve besides the Pakistan card.The main motive for China to conceive and execute the coldblooded war in 1962 was conveyed by Mao in a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) meeting in March 1959: "India was doing bad things in Tibet and, therefore, had to be dealt with. Rather the larger objective is to tie India down to stay strategically inferior and incapable of equalling or overtaking China. The PLA’s knowledge of terrain inside India was "remarkable"as Chinese intelligence-gathering on the Indian side of the McMahon Line was done over several years in the 1950s, says the author,Indian intelligence agents had relayed to the Nehru government at least three years before the fateful war that China was massing forces for an impending attack. He does not extrapolate from this insight but it is obvious that China uses border disputes and sovereignty claims to try and coerce India against strategically embracing other powers." India, actually, never assisted armed anti-China Tibetan rebels before the 1962 war.But since the 1950s, as Tibet was swallowed by the dragon and ceased to be the buffer, the dominant theme driving bilateral relations between the Asian giants is of threat.China’s military buildup and manoeuvres along the McMahon Line started as early as 1959. The "Chinese private arms dealers" and "black market" which sustain anti-India guerrillas today through third party intermediaries may be after cash, but the author demonstrates that they are a product of Chinese security services "turning a blind eye to the traffic. With the intention of countering New Delhi’s influence in these Himalayan middle zones, Beijing has courted a vast variety of local players in these lands and tried to stoke anti-India sentiments. In 1959, when an armed Tibetan uprising broke out against Chinese colonialism in Lhasa, Beijing accused Nehru of "inheriting England’s old policy of saying Tibet is an independent country" and adopting "the strategic aspirations of British imperialism. Lintner’s key observation in this context is that "the Chinese always hedge their bets and never put all their eggs in one basket.

The militaries of the two Asian neighbours stands face-to-face with no resolution to a simmering border dispute." Tibet was the crux of the matter because India had granted asylum to the Dalai Lama who fled the PLA’s invasion of Tibet in 1959.The CCP had branded Nehru a "running dog of Western imperialism" in 1949 itself. The author points to the irony that China settled its border dispute with Myanmar in 1960 by accepting the same McMahon Line which it slams as an obsolete and "unequal" boundary drawn up by Western colonialists, when it comes to reaching a final agreement with India. India must grasp China’s multifarious means and dissect its true intent, which remains essentially unchanged since the fateful decade when Buddhist Tibet was gobbled up by the godless Communists.China’s India War contains fascinating details of the proxy wars waged by China and India after the 1962 war.The author starts his wide-ranging analysis by challenging the spin on the 1962 Sino-Indian war by British journalist Neville Maxwell in his 1970 classic, India’s China War, which claims that India provoked China into attacking it through its ill-conceived "Forward Policy".Lintner shows that the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru adopted the "Forward Policy" along the border with China only in November 1961, while China’s Chairman Mao Zedong was planning war against India much before that." He predicts that China will continue opportunistic ties with anti-India insurgents for leverage on border talks and as a bargaining chip vis-a-vis the presence of the Dalai Lama and his government-in-exile in India.The book, China’s India War, by Swedish journalist Bertil Lintner, who has conducted decades of field work and research on the borderlands and fault lines of South, Southeast and East Asia, offers ample proof of why China and India cannot be friends.Lintner devotes one chapter each in this book to the intriguing methods by which China converted Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal into battlefields for pressurising India. It is noteworthy that post-Maoist market-oriented China has not severed ties with separatists of Northeast India. The 1962 war was not meant to grab territory but, in Mao’s famous words, "teach India a lesson" and weaken Nehru’s credentials as a leader of the Third World.The writer is a professor and dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs As a utopian socialist who believed that India and China had more in common, Nehru failed to understand Mao’s hardnosed (albeit mistaken) conviction that India was colluding with Britain and the US to overturn China’s takeover of Tibet."The author illustrates with examples that for China, "political motives were more important than the exact alignment of the border" with India. But for the radical communists under Mao, India was pigeonholed as a "bourgeois" accomplice of the West "to invade Tibet and enslave its people. The saga of how India missed these obvious signals and was caught napping to suffer a devastating military defeat is, of course, now known and lamented among strategic circles in India. But Lintner’s point is to refute the historical fallacy propagated by Maxwell that China was justly responding to India’s unjustified aggressive patrolling and outposts near the Line of Actual Control (LAC)

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"We’ve registered an FIR and taken up investigations into the shooting incident," said Shopian’s SSP Shriram Ambarkar. IT Stud With Internal An Army convoy came under attack by a stone-pelting mob in Shopian’s Ganowpora village. The soldiers on board responded by opening fire, injuring eleven persons.Shopian and some neighbouring areas have been tense since Wednesday when two militants were killed during a fire fight with the security forces. Two of them later succumbed whereas the third person has been operated upon in Srinagar’s Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences", the police said.The authorities have decided to impose security restrictions under Section 144 CrPC in Srinagar areas and also in Shopian and Pulwama "as a precautionary measure" from Sunday morning. (Photo: File | Representational) Two people were killed and nine others wounded when the Army opened fire at a stone-pelting crowd in Jammu and Kashmir’s southern Shopian district on Saturday afternoon.Kashmir’s chief Muslim cleric Mirwaiz Umar Farooq who is one of the three leaders on JRL said

It is shame that the Indian rights activists, humanists and civil society members have turned deaf, dumb and blind to the butchering of young Kashmiris while as the world human rights watchdogs callously watch on and do nothing".The J&K police in a separate statement said the convoy of Army’s 10 Garhwal was on its way from 12 Sector Headquarters at Balpora to Maspora in Shopian when it came under heavy stone pelting at Ganowpora. It also said that seven soldiers were injured and eleven vehicles suffered damage in the mob attack. India, Jammu and Kashmir, Srinagar.A local teenager was also killed and two girls including the sister of one of the slain militants were critically injured when the security forces fired live ammunition to disperse protesters near the encounter site. The J&K police has registered a case and taken up investigations.The Army in a statement issued here in the evening said that its men had to open fire in self-defence to prevent the lynching of a JCO by the mob.

The violent crowd further closed in towards the vehicles and attempted to set them on fire.They said that around 3 pm a convoy of the Army 12 Sector Rashtriya Rifles stationed at nearby Balpora village passed through the Ganowpora and some local youth hurled stones at it following which the Armymen on board opened fire at them.The slain youth have been identified as Javed Ahmed Bhat, 20, and Suhail Javed Lone, 24.The condition of one of the injured civilians is stated to be critical.The locals said that soldiers from the Army’s 14 Rashtriya Rifles had come to the village on Saturday morning to tore down the posters which carried ‘tribute’ to a local Hizb-ul-Mujahedin militant Firdous Ahmed Lone who was among those killed in Wednesday’s encounter in neighbouring Chaigund village.Kashmir’s Divisional Commissioner, Baseer Ahmad Khan, said that he has ordered a magisterial inquiry into the shooting incident and asked Shopian’s Deputy Commissioner to ensure the inquiry in completed within three weeks’ time. They caused extensive damage to these vehicles and tried to set them on fire.Reports said that on Saturday afternoon an Army convoy came under attack by a stone-pelting mob in Shopian’s Ganowpora village."The statement further said, "Considering the extreme gravity of the situation the Army was constrained to open fire in self defence to prevent lynching of the JCO and burning of Government vehicle by the mob."Due to this stone pelting some Army personnel were reportedly injured. The crowd surrounded an isolated portion of the convoy consisting of four vehicles."The Army said that seven jawans were injured whereas eleven vehicles suffered damage in the mob attack.The statement said that the Defence Minister assured the Chief Minister that she would seek a detailed report on the incident and would impress upon the field formations that mechanisms put in place are strictly adhered to so that such incidents do not recur in future. Two of them succumbed on way to or at hospital, the officials said.Chief Minister, Mehbooba Mufti, enraged over the incident, telephoned Defence Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, to say that such incidents only cause setback to the efforts made at political level to bring about peace and normalcy in the State.The statement said that an Army administrative convoy was passing through Ganowpora chowk (square) when it came under "unprovoked and intense stone pelting by a group of 100-120 stone-pelters" at around 3 pm.A official statement issued in winter capital Jammu said that the Chief Minister while expressing anguish over the loss of lives in the shooting incident said that "every civilian killing, notwithstanding how erroneously made, impairs the political process in the State which has been put on track after hard work by all political parties". The soldiers onboard responded by opening fire, injuring eleven persons.It further said, "Within no time, their numbers swelled to 200-250 persons. The doctors at the district hospital in neighbouring Pulwama said that Bhat was brought there with a critical head injury and succumbed soon thereafter. A JCO accompanying the convoy got hit on the head and fell unconscious suffering serious injury. The mob tried to lynch the individual and snatch his weapon.The Jammu and Kashmir police has registered a case against the Army and taken up investigations.The Army said its men opened fire "in self-defence" and that only after a 250-strong mob tried to lynch a Junior Commissioned Office (JCO) and snatch his service weapon. The Army personnel retaliated by firing, in which three persons were injured.‘Joint Resistance Leadership (JRL)’, an alliance of key separatist leaders, while accusing the Army of indulging in "genocide" of Kashmiri Muslims has called for a protest shutdown in the Valley on Sunday. It also released photographs of two damaged vehicles. Lone injured in the firing incident was declared brought dead at a government-run health facility in the town of Rajpura

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