May 20, 2021
The locations and targets for the Chinese
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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