Saptarshi Basu
The Pioneer
December 10, 2014
China is actively blocking India’s diplomatic initiatives to go to the high table of the Security Council. Our defeatist attitude not only emboldens the Chinese but also delivers a severe jolt to the morale of our populace and security institutions, writes Saptarshi Basu.
Our great Aryan tradition of fairness and honour in everything, makes for a noble reading. It is also glorious to imagine and espouse. However, it is ineffective in today’s realpolitic and battlefield.
We got subjugated by the Muslim rulers, and the British, simply because our rulers were inept and our warriors were seeking personal glory rather than victory in the battlefield. The classic case of combat history of Japan, between the two of the finest warrior classes of Japan viz the Samurai and Ninjas, illustrates this point. The former was heavily indoctrinated to abide by a code of honour called the ‘Bushido code’ (the way of the warrior), while the other used stealth and surprise and lived with a motto ‘to kill or be killed’. The Ninjas slaughtered the Samurais and their warlords during the 15th-16th century and were regarded superior in their weapons and tactics. This was simply due the fact that the Samurai were inflexible in attitude and policy.
Indians have been a victim to the same mindset, like the great Rajput king Prithviraj Chauhan, who defeated the Afghan marauder Shahabuddin Muhammad Ghori 15 times, but during the 16th attack, fell victim to his treachery. It is ultimately the responsibility of the sovereign to protect this nation and its people. We need to understand that misguided benevolence and high-sounding ideals cannot guarantee lasting peace and stability.
The Chinese war strategy has been focussed on achieving dominance over the will of the enemy through deception and misdirection — the principles outlined in the Art of War and 36 Strategies of War”. Their view of geo-strategy is simple, immoralistic and ruthless. Our national leaders in the past blundered with this state, in not understanding its attitude and intention, and made a strategic blunder to extend one-sided friendship through the utopian view of our first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. His “bhai bhai” policy and the negative attitude towards developing our armament and military might, led us to the Himalayan debacle. China annexed the buffer state of Tibet and unleashed its wrath on the India-friendly population, culminating in ethnic cleansing. It gained the help of Pakistan, at India’s expense, and Pakistan returned the favour by giving it part of Aksai Chin. This led to atrocities on the people of Arunachal Pradesh.
The same China is actively blocking India’s diplomatic initiatives to go to the high table of the Security Council. Our defeatist attitude, not only emboldens the Chinese but also delivers a severe jolt to the morale of our entire populace and security institutions. Carl von Clausewitz in his book, On War, stated that the ultimate aim of the apparatus of war is to subdue and subordinate the enemies will. If we abrogate the rightful chance to respond to these bullying tactics of the dragon state, then it will be construed that we have lost the battle even without a worthy military engagement.
The Chinese have penetrated into our political institutions. It is an open secret that certain Left parties, and their major leaders were sympathetic to the Chinese Government. Various media houses, both print and electronic, have been influenced by their agents or front organisations and espouse their point of view, misguiding mass opinion.
Even China’s skewed trade with India is a form of warfare where the state-backed front companies are dumping cheap products into this country to destroy our small and medium scale industries. Data and identity theft through mobile phone and electronic communication good is a good example of Chinese espionage.
Hacking of sensitive data from websites by the Chinese cyber Army is also a form of fog warfare. The armament supply to the Red terror of Left-wing extremism or Maoists, is to sabotage the state from within. It succeeded in Nepal, where the entire royal family was executed by an ‘inside job’, and proper investigations never carried out. A puppet Government was put in place only to be replaced by a Chinese-backed Maoist regime.
China has allied with our enemy, Pakistan, and is manipulating the geo-political situation in Jammu & Kashmir. If timely action is not taken, we will lose our national honour. It is constructing huge multi-lane dual purpose highways in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to Gilgit —Baltistan, it has stationed short-range ballistic missiles, intermediate range ballistic missile and long-range ballistic missile around our border especially focusing Arunachal Pradesh. The insurgency is funded and abetted by them. They are constructing huge dams to bleed the Brahmaputra dry. Its maritime policy is to pull a garrote over our neck through the string of pearls policy to limit our trade and choke our critical energy supplies. It is investing in military usable complexes all around in neighboring countries including Maldives and Myanmar. It is gathering maritime domain awareness through an elaborate espionage network.
This state is essentially immoralist and hence employs destructive policy to poison the youths through narcotics and psychotropic drugs emanating through the fabled ‘Golden Triangle’ in Myanmar. Doing trade here has a consequence which is best exemplified by the Philippines, where the immigrant Chinese population has overtaken the complete economy, and the Chinese state is bullying the nation, manipulating its petroleum and mariculture wealth. The asymmetric military balance prevailing between India and China is likely to get accentuated over time, if effective political and military steps are not taken to address the same. However, as Sun Tzu has said in his book, Art of War — numerical superiority alone confers no advantage in the battlefield.
There is a crying need to develop an asymmetric strategy by India to prevent domination by inimical or hostile adversaries and an observable military doctrine backed by a political will to serve as dissuasive deterrent and for securing India’s growing geopolitical space. We must get involved overtly or covertly in the rapidly developing anti-china axis with the US and Japan and friendly countries like South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan etc to make a geopolitical counterweight to its hegemonistic misadventures which are currently running unchecked. We must totally revamp our own war machine and secure our energy sources so as to be unaffected by future hostilities.
We must develop reciprocal and resilient tactics to deal with the bullying on the international platform and totally jettison our placating attitude to the oversized aggressor. Our foreign policy should be remodelled to display our national resolve and zero tolerance towards any meddling in our internal affairs. We must show no mercy to traitors and insurgents within our borders, and to their ideologues who betray their motherland.
