India’s dirty role in Sri Lankan war

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, November 1-4, 2009

Six months after Sri Lanka’s stunning military triumph in the 26-year-old civil war at the cost of thousands of
civilian lives in the final weeks alone, the peace dividend remains elusive, with President Mahinda Rajapaksa setting out — in the name of “eternal vigilance” — to expand by 50% an already-large military. China, clearly, was the decisive factor in helping end that war through its generous supply of offensive weapons
and its munificent bilateral aid. It even got its ally Pakistan actively involved in Rajapaksa’s war strategy.

India’s role, although it has received little international attention, was also deplorable. For years, India had pursued a hands-off approach toward Sri Lanka in response to two developments — a disastrous 1987-90 peacekeeping operation there; and the 1991 assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. But
having been outmanoeuvred by China’s success in extending strategic reach to Sri Lanka in recent years, New Delhi got sucked into providing major assistance to Colombo, lest it lose further ground in that island-nation.

From opening an unlimited line of military credit for Sri Lanka to extending critical naval and intelligence
assistance, India provided sustained war support in defiance of a deteriorating humanitarian
situation there.  A “major turning point” in the war, as Sri Lankan navy chief Admiral Wasantha Karannagoda acknowledged, came when the rebels’ supply ships were eliminated, one by one, with Indian naval intelligence inputs, cutting off all supplies to the rebel-held areas. That in turn allowed the Sri Lankan ground forces to make rapid advances and unravel the de facto state the Tigers had established in Sri Lanka’s north and east.

Indeed, Rajapaksa deftly played the China, India and Pakistan cards to maximize gains. After key Tamil Tiger leaders had been killed in the fighting, Rajapaksa — to New Delhi’s acute mortification — thanked China, India and Pakistan in the same breath for Sri Lanka’s victory. Today, India stands more marginalized than ever in Sri Lanka. Its natural constituency — the Tamils — feels not only betrayed, but also looks at India as a colluder in the bloodbath. India already had alienated the Sinhalese in the 1980s, when it first armed the Tamil Tigers and then sought to disarm them through an ill-starred peacekeeping foray that left almost three times as many Indian troops dead as the 1999 Kargil war with Pakistan.

India’s waning leverage over Sri Lanka is manifest from the way it now has to jostle for influence there with archrivals China and Pakistan. Hambantota — the billion-dollar port Beijing is building on Sri Lanka’s
southeast — symbolizes the Chinese strategic challenge to India from the oceans.

Even as some 250,000 displaced Tamils — equivalent to the population of Belfast — continue to be held incommunicado in miserable conditions in barbed-wire camps to this day, India has been unable to persuade Colombo to set them free. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said recently that India
has conveyed its “concerns in no uncertain terms to Sri Lanka on various occasions, stressing the need for them to focus on resettling and rehabilitating the displaced Tamil population at the earliest.” But India seems unable to make a difference even with messages delivered in “no uncertain terms.”

Yet, such has been the unstinted Indian support that even after the crushing of the Tigers, India went out the way to castigate the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, in June for shining a spotlight on the deplorable human-rights situation in Sri Lanka. India accused Ms. Pillay — a distinguished
South African judge of Indian descent who has sought an independent international investigation into alleged war crimes committed by all sides in Sri Lanka — of going beyond her brief, saying “the independence of the high commissioner cannot be presumed to exceed that of the UN Secretary General.”
Subsequently, India voted in the IMF for a $2.8 billion loan desperately needed by cash-strapped Colombo.

The costs for lending such support have been high. New Delhi today is groping to bring direction to its Sri
Lanka policy, even as it struggles to respond to the Chinese strategy to build maritime choke points in the Indian Ocean region. The current upsurge of Sinhalese chauvinism flows from the fact that the Sri Lankan military accomplished a task whose pursuit forced the mightier Indian army to make an ignominious exit 19 years ago. Consequently, Colombo is going to be even less inclined than before to listen to New
Delhi.

Against this background, the least India can do is to help improve the humanitarian situation in Sri Lanka. It cannot impotently watch as the Sri Lankan government continues to hold more than a quarter of a
million innocent Tamil refugees as prisoners in internment camps in the north. The arrival of the annual winter monsoon rains is causing a further deterioration of living conditions in these camps, threatening the health and safety of the internally displaced persons (IDPs). To make up for the sins of its policy, India — more than 100,000 Sri Lankan refugees camping in Tamil Nadu — can do quite a few things.

●First, India must start exerting open, intense pressure on Colombo to free the more than 250,000 IDPs from internment. They must be granted freedom of movement. Also, the 11,000 suspected rebels being separately detained at military sites should be identified and not denied access to legal
representation.

●Second, it has to insist the government resettle the IDPs in their hometowns and villages. As Walter Kaelin, the UN secretary-general’s representative on the human rights of IDPs, recently said: “It is imperative to immediately take all measures necessary to de-congest the overcrowded camps in northern Sri Lanka with their difficult and risky living conditions. The IDPs should be allowed to leave these camps voluntarily and in freedom, safety and dignity to their homes. If this is not possible in the near future, the displaced must be allowed to stay with host families or in open transit sites.”

●Three, India must warn Colombo of serious consequences if it seeks to change local demography by settling Sinhalese in Tamil areas. With overt official encouragement, thousands of Sinhalese already have flocked to the east to regain farming and other land from which they claim to have been driven out in the 1980s by the Tamil Tigers. Attempts to “Sinhalise” the north and east will not only deprive local Tamils and Muslims of their livelihood, but also sow the seeds of another cycle of conflict. Rajapaksa, post-victory, has not only rejected federalism and regional autonomy, but also — to the chagrin of Tamils — demerged the northern and eastern provinces.

●Four, India should demand that the IDP camps be opened up for effective monitoring through the grant of full access to humanitarian organizations, including the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and to the media.

●And five, India ought to join hands with the co-chairs of the so-called Friends of Sri Lanka — the US, European Union, Norway and Japan — to oppose further disbursement of the IMF loan until Colombo meets the commitments on IDP resettlement it made in its July letter of intent to the Fund. In the letter, it
pledged to resettle 70 to 80 per cent of the IDPs by the year-end — a further shift in its deadline. Democratic players must employ further disbursements as leverage to relieve a deteriorating humanitarian situation.

More broadly, India should lean on Rajapaksa to restore democratic freedoms. The wartime
suppression of a free press and curtailment of fundamental rights continues in peacetime, undermining democratic freedoms and creating a fear psychosis. Sweeping emergency regulations remain in place, arming the security forces with expansive powers of search, arrest and seizure of property. Individuals can
still be held in unacknowledged detention for up to 18 months.

For national reconciliation and healing to begin, it is essential the government shed its war-gained powers. Unfortunately, Colombo still seeks to hold onto its special powers while suppressing the truth. Peace sought to be achieved through the brutal humiliation of an ethnic community has always proven elusive in world history. If Sri Lanka is to go from making war to making peace, the present opportunity has to be
seized before there is a recrudescence of violence. That can happen only if Colombo is diplomatically nudged by an India that works in tandem with other important players. With its leverage undermined, New Delhi no longer can operate on its own.

 (c) Covert, 2009.

U.S. spurs China-India tensions

A need to dissuade Beijing from any resort to force

• By Brahma Chellaney
• Washington Times, October 28, 2009

The India-China relationship has entered choppy waters because of a perceptible hardening in the Chinese stance. Anti-India rhetoric in the state-run Chinese media has intensified, even as China has stepped up military pressure along the disputed Himalayan frontier through frequent cross-border incursions. Beijing also has resurrected its long-dormant claim to the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, nearly three times as large as Taiwan.

The more-muscular Chinese stance clearly is tied to the new U.S.-India strategic partnership, symbolized by the nuclear deal and deepening military cooperation. As President George W. Bush declared in his valedictory speech, "We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India."

The Obama administration, although committed to promoting that strategic partnership, has been reluctant to take New Delhi’s side in any of its disputes with Beijing. This has emboldened China to up the ante against India, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry employing language like "we demand" in a recent statement that labeled the Indian prime minister’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh a "disturbance." The Communist Party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, after asking India to consider the costs of "a potential confrontation with China," ran another denunciatory editorial recently on New Delhi’s "recklessness and arrogance."

New Delhi has hit back by permitting the Dalai Lama to tour Arunachal Pradesh and announcing an end to the practice of Chinese companies bringing thousands of workers from China to work on projects in India. And in a public riposte to Beijing’s raising of objections to multilateral funding of any project in Arunachal, India has asked China to cease its infrastructure and military projects in another disputed region – Pakistan-held Kashmir.

The present pattern of border provocations, new force deployments and mutual recriminations is redolent of the situation that prevailed 47 years ago, when China – taking advantage of the advent of the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of a nuclear Armageddon – routed the unprepared Indian military in a surprise two-front aggression. Today, amid rising tensions, the danger of border skirmishes, if not a limited war, looks real.

Such tensions have been rising since 2006. Until 2005, China was eschewing anti-India rhetoric and pursuing a policy of active engagement with India even as it continued to expand its strategic space in southern Asia, to New Delhi’s detriment. In fact, when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited India in April 2005, the two countries unveiled six broad principles to help settle their festering border dispute. But after the Indo-U.S. defense-framework accord and nuclear deal were unveiled in quick succession in subsequent months, the mood in Beijing changed perceptibly. That gave rise to a pattern that now has become commonplace: Chinese newspapers, individual bloggers, security think tanks and even officially blessed Web sites ratcheted up an "India threat" scenario.

A U.S.-India military alliance has always been a strategic nightmare for the Chinese, and the ballyhooed Indo-U.S. global strategic partnership triggered alarm bells in Beijing. The partnership, though, falls short of a formal military alliance. Still, the high-pitched Indian and American rhetoric that the new partnership represented a tectonic shift in geopolitical alignments apparently made Chinese policymakers believe India was being groomed as a new Japan or Australia to America – a perception reinforced by subsequent arrangements and Indian orders for U.S. arms worth $3.5 billion in just the past year.

Clearly, New Delhi failed to foresee that its rush to forge close strategic bonds with Washington could provoke greater Chinese pressure and that in such a situation, the United States actually would offer little comfort. Consequently, India finds itself in a spot.

For one thing, Beijing calculatedly has sought to pressure India on multiple fronts – military, diplomatic and multilateral. For another, the United States – far from coming to India’s support – has shied away from even cautioning Beijing against any attempt to forcibly change the territorial status quo. Indeed, on a host of issues – from the Dalai Lama to the Arunachal dispute – Washington has chosen not to antagonize Beijing. That, in effect, has left India on its own.

The spectacle of the president of the most powerful country in the world seeking to curry favor with a rights-abusing China by shunning the Dalai Lama during the Tibetan leader’s Washington visit cannot but embolden the Chinese leadership to step up pressure on India, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile. Mr. Obama also has signaled that America’s strategic relationship with India will not be at the expense of the fast-growing U.S. ties with Beijing.

The Obama team, after reviewing the Bush-era arrangements, intends to abjure elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including any joint military drill in Arunachal or a 2007-style naval exercise involving the United States, India, Australia, Japan and Singapore. Even trilateral U.S. naval maneuvers with India and Japan are being abandoned so as not to raise China’s hackles. As his secretary of state did in February, Mr. Obama is undertaking an Asia tour that begins in Japan and ends in China – the high spot – while skipping India. In fact, Washington is quietly charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal dispute.

Yet Beijing remains suspicious of the likely trajectory of U.S.-India strategic ties, including pre-1962-style CIA meddling in Tibet. This distrust found expression in the People’s Daily editorial that accused New Delhi of pursuing a foreign policy of "befriending the far and attacking the near."

Left to fend for itself, New Delhi has decided to steer clear of any confrontation with Beijing. As the prime minister of the Tibetan government in exile, Samdhong Rinpoche, has put it: "For the past few months, China has adopted an aggressive attitude and is indulging in many provocative activities, which are being tolerated by Indian government in a very passive manner."

Still, even as it seeks to tamp down tensions with Beijing, New Delhi cannot rule out the use of force by China at a time when hard-liners there seem to believe that a swift, 1962-style military victory can help fashion a Beijing-oriented Asia.

Having declared that America’s "most important bilateral relationship in the world" is with Beijing, the Obama team must caution China against crossing well-defined red lines or going against its self-touted gospel of China’s "peaceful rise."

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan" (HarperCollins 2006, with a new U.S. edition scheduled for release in January 2010).

Click here for reprint permissions!
Copyright 2009 The Washington Times, LLC

Setting Boundaries

India must have an honest debate on its diplomatic and military options regarding China.

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, October 5, 2009 http://ow.ly/sCR1

No one in the Indian government has said
Chinese cross-frontier incursions aren’t happening. Yet to play down the
incursions, New Delhi
has accused the media of overplaying such intrusions. To the delight of the
autocrats in Beijing, who tightly control the
flow of information in their country, including through online censors, New Delhi has made its
home media the whipping boy. The unwitting message that sends to Beijing is that when the
world’s biggest autocracy builds up pressure, the world’s largest democracy is
willing to tame its media coverage, even if it entails dispensing half-truths and flogging
distortions.

The facts, even if unpalatable, should be
allowed to speak for themselves. New
Delhi’s oft-repeated line in recent days has been that
Chinese incursions are at last year’s level, so there is no need to worry. But
2008 brought a record number of incursions, with defence officials reporting
that the number of such intrusions went from 140 in 2007 to 270 last year, or
almost double. In addition, there were 2,285 reported instances of “aggressive border
patrolling” by Chinese forces in 2008. As Defence Minister A.K. Anthony told an
army commanders’ conference last year, “there is no room for complacency” on
the Tibet
border.

That the incursions this year are continuing at
the 2008 level suggests there is every reason to be concerned. After all, the
2008 record pattern is continuing, with China
keeping India
under sustained, unremitting pressure. Yet, from the external affairs
minister and foreign secretary to the national security adviser and army chief,
Indian officials have sought to tamp down public concerns by saying there is
“no significant increase” compared to last year. Do they wish to thank Beijing for keeping
border incidents and other provocations at the 2008 level without seeking to
establish a new record through a “significant” increase in incursions?

The key point to note is that China has opened pressure points against India across the Himalayas, with border incidents occurring in all the four sectors. Chinese forces
are intruding even into Utttarakhand, although the line of control in this
middle sector was clarified in 2001 through an exchange of maps, and into Sikkim, whose 206-kilometer border with Tibet is not in dispute and indeed is recognized
by Beijing.
Yet, gratuitously stretching the truth, Indian officials say the incursions are
the result of differing perceptions about the line of control. That may be so
about Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh, but can that be true about Sikkim
and Uttarakhand? It speaks for itself that Beijing hasn’t offered this lame excuse.

Make no mistake: The Chinese border provocations have resulted both from India’s political pusillanimity and from the withdrawal of China-related army divisions in past years. For example, the 8th Mountain Division, tasked with defending Sikkim, was moved from northern Bengal to J&K and took part in the Kargil War. Tank forces also were moved out from Sikkim. Similarly, a mountain division was moved from the northeast to J&K for counterinsurgency operations. Such relocation of forces emboldened the Chinese. The current Indian moves to beef up defences against China largely involve the return of the forces that were withdrawn a decade or more ago.

Chinese cross-border incursions are designed not only to keep India under military pressure all along the Himalayas, but also to ensure Indian “good behavior” on assorted political issues, including Tibet, Pakistan and military ties with the US. Take the Pakistan factor: At a time when an internally troubled Pakistan is facing US pressure to redeploy a sufficient number of forces to the Afghan front, China wants to shield its “all-weather ally” from Indian military pressure by keeping a sizable number of Indian forces bogged down along the Himalayas.

Had India’s
nuclear deterrent been credible in the eyes of China,
Beijing
wouldn’t have dared to ratchet up border tensions. But the Chinese
muscle-flexing suggests otherwise. In fact, more than three decades after China tested its first intercontinental
ballistic missile, India
doesn’t have an ICBM even on the drawing board. India still hasn’t deployed even a
single, Beijing-reachable missile.

If the threat from an increasingly assertive and ambitious China is to be contained, India must have an honest and open
debate on its diplomatic and military options, including how gaps in its
defences can be plugged and what it will take to build a credible deterrent.
The media has a crucial role to play in such a debate, both by bringing out the
facts and providing a platform for discussion. If New Delhi wishes to ensure Himalayan peace
and stability, pulling the
wool on public eyes at home is certainly not the way.

The author is
Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

India’s Growing China Angst

Largely unknown to the rest of the world, China-India border tensions have escalated in recent months, raising the specter of armed conflict along the Himalayas

By Brahma Chellaney

Far Eastern Economic Review (September 2009)

At a time when the global power structure is qualitatively being transformed, the economic rise of China and India draws ever more attention. But the world has taken little notice of the rising border tensions and sharpening geopolitical rivalry between the two giants that represent competing political and social models of development.

China and India have had little political experience historically in dealing with each other. After all, China became India’s neighbor not owing to geography but guns — by forcibly occupying buffer Tibet in 1950. As new neighbors, India and China have been on a learning curve. Their 32-day war in 1962 did not settle matters because China’s dramatic triumph only sowed the seeds of greater rivalry.

In recent months, hopes of a politically negotiated settlement of the lingering territorial disputes have dissipated amid muscle-flexing along the long, 4,057-kilometer Himalayan frontier. A clear indication that the 28-year-old border talks now are deadlocked came when the most-recent round in August turned into a sweeping strategic dialogue on regional and international issues. The escalation in border tensions, though, has prompted an agreement to set up a direct hotline between the two prime ministers. A hotline, however welcome, may not be enough to defuse a situation marked by rising military incursions and other border-related incidents as well as by new force deployments.

A perceptible hardening of China’s stance toward India is at the hub of the bilateral tensions. This hardening became apparent almost three years ago when the Chinese ambassador to India publicly raked up the issue of Arunachal Pradesh, the northeastern Indian state that Beijing calls “Southern Tibet” and claims as its own. For his undiplomatic act on the eve of President Hu Jintao’s New Delhi visit, the ambassador actually received Beijing’s public support. Since then, the Indian army has seen Chinese military incursions increase in frequency across the post-1962 line of control. According to Indian defense officials, there were 270 line-of-control violations by the People’s Liberation Army and 2,285 instances of “aggressive border patrolling” by it last year alone. Other border incidents also are being reported, such as the PLA demolition of some unmanned Indian forward posts at the Tibet-Bhutan-Sikkim trijunction and Chinese attempts to encroach on Indian-held land in Ladakh.

As a result, the India-China frontier has become more “hot” than the India-Pakistan border, but without rival troops trading fire. Indeed, Sino-Indian border tensions now are at their worst since 1986-87, when local military skirmishes broke out after PLA troops moved south of a rivulet marking the line of control in the Sumdorong Chu sector in Arunachal Pradesh. Those skirmishes brought war clouds over the horizon before the two countries moved quickly to defuse the crisis. Today, PLA forays into Indian-held territory are occurring even in the only area where Beijing does not dispute the frontier — Sikkim’s 206-kilometer border with Tibet. Chinese troops repeatedly have attempted to gain control of Sikkim’s evocatively named Finger Area, a tiny but key strategic location.

In response, India has been beefing up its defensive deployments in Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Ladakh to prevent any Chinese land-grab. Besides bringing in tanks to reinforce its defenses in mountainous Sikkim, it is deploying two additional army mountain divisions and two squadrons of the advanced Sukhoi-30 MKI bomber-aircraft in its northeastern state of Assam, backed by three airborne warning and control systems. To improve its logistical capabilities, it has launched a crash program involving new roads, airstrips and advanced landing stations along the Himalayas. None of these steps, however, can materially alter the fact that China holds the military advantage on the ground. Its forces control the heights along the frontier, with the Indian troops perched largely on the lower levels. Furthermore, by building modern railroads, airports and highways in Tibet, China is now in a position to rapidly move large additional forces to the border to potentially strike at India at a time of Beijing’s choosing.

Diplomatically, China is content, long having occupied land at will — principally the Aksai Chin plateau, which is almost the size of Switzerland. Aksai Chin, an integral part of Kashmir long before Xinjiang became a province of China under Manchu rule, provides the only accessible Tibet-Xinjiang route through the Karakoram passes of the Kunlun Mountains. Yet Beijing chooses to press claims on additional Indian territories as part of a grand strategy to keep India under military and diplomatic pressure.

Since ancient times, the Himalayas have universally been regarded as the northern frontiers of India. But having annexed Tibet, China has laid claim to areas far to the south of this Himalayan watershed, as underscored by its claim to Arunachal Pradesh — a state nearly three times the size of Taiwan. That Tibet remains at the core of the India-China divide is being underlined by Beijing itself as its claim to additional Indian territories is based on alleged Tibetan ecclesial or tutelary links to them, not any professed Han connection. Such attempts at incremental annexation actually draw encouragement from India’s self-injurious acceptance of Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China.

At the center of the Chinese strategy is an overt refusal to accept the territorial status quo. In not hiding its intent to further redraw the frontiers, Beijing only highlights the futility of political negotiations. After all, the status quo can be changed not through political talks but by further military conquest. Yet, paradoxically, the political process remains important for Beijing to provide the façade of engagement while trying to change the realities on the ground. Keeping India engaged in endless, fruitless border talks while stepping up direct and surrogate pressure also chimes with China’s projection of its “peaceful rise.”

But as border tensions have escalated, vituperative attacks on India in the Chinese media have mounted. The Communist Party’s mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, taunted India in a June editorial for lagging behind China in all indices of power and asked it to consider “the consequences of a potential confrontation with China.” Criticizing the Indian moves to strengthen defenses, it peremptorily declared: “China won’t make any compromises in its border disputes with India.” A subsequent commentary in the paper warned India to stop playing into the hands of “some Western powers” by raising the bogey of a “China threat.”

The most-provocative Chinese essay, however, appeared on China International Strategy Net, a quasi-official Web site that enjoys the Communist Party’s backing and is run by an individual who made his name by hacking into United States” government Web sites in retaliation to the 1999 American bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Posted on August 8, the essay called for a Chinese strategy to dismember multiethnic India into 20 to 30 fragments. This is an old, failed project China launched in the Mao years when it trained and armed Naga, Mizo and other tribal guerrillas in India’s restive northeast.

The strains in Sino-Indian relations also have resulted from sharpening geopolitical rivalry. This was evident from China’s botched 2008 effort to stymie the U.S.-India nuclear deal by blocking the Nuclear Suppliers Group from opening civilian nuclear trade with New Delhi. In the NSG, China landed itself in a position it avoids in any international body — as the last holdout. Recently, there has been an outcry in India over attempts to undermine the Indian brand through exports from China of fake pharmaceutical products labeled “Made in India.”

The unsettled border, however, remains at the core of the bilateral tensions. Indeed, 47 years later, the wounds of the 1962 war have been kept open by China’s aggressive claims to additional Indian territories. Even as China has emerged as India’s largest trading partner, the Sino-Indian strategic dissonance and border disputes have become more pronounced. New Delhi has sought to retaliate against Beijing’s growing antagonism by banning Chinese toys and cell phones that do not meet international standards. But such modest trade actions can do little to persuade Beijing to abandon its moves to strategically encircle and squeeze India by employing China’s rising clout in Pakistan, Burma, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.

In fact, the question that needs to be asked is whether New Delhi helped create the context to embolden Beijing to be assertive and bellicose. For long, New Delhi has indulged in ritualized happy talk about the state of its relationship with Beijing, brushing under the rug both long-standing and new problems and hyping the outcome of any bilateral summit meeting. New Delhi now is staring at the harvest of a mismanagement of relations with China over the past two decades by successive governments that chose propitiation to leverage building. New Delhi is so slow to correct its course that mistakes only get compounded. For example: India is to observe 2010 — the 60th anniversary of China becoming India’s neighbor by gobbling up Tibet — as the “Year of Friendship with China.”

Yet another question relates to China’s intention. In muscling up to India, is China seeking to intimidate India or actually fashion an option to wage war on India? In other words, are China’s present-day autocrats itching to see a repeat of 1962? The present situation, in several key aspects, is no different from the one that prevailed in the run-up to the 1962 invasion of India, which then Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai declared was designed “to teach India a lesson.” Consider the numerous parallels:

First, like ike in the pre-1962 war period, it has become commonplace internationally to speak of India and China in the same breadth. The aim of “Mao’s India war,” as Harvard scholar Roderick MacFarquhar has called it, was large political: To cut India to size by demolishing what it represented — a democratic alternative to the Chinese autocracy. The swiftness and force with which Mao Zedong defeated India helped discredit the Indian model, boost China’s international image and consolidate Mao’s internal power. The return of the China-India pairing decades later is something Beijing viscerally detests.

The Dalai Lama’s flight to India in 1959 — and the ready sanctuary he got there — paved the way for the Chinese military attack. Today, 50 years after his escape, the exiled Tibetan leader stands as a bigger challenge than ever for China, as underscored by Beijing’s stepped-up vilification campaign against him and its admission that it is now locked in a “life and death struggle” over Tibet. With Beijing now treating the Dalai Lama as its Enemy No. 1, India has come under greater Chinese pressure to curb his activities and those of his government-in-exile. The continuing security clampdown in Tibet since the March 2008 Tibetan uprising parallels the harsh Chinese crackdown in Tibet during 1959-62.

In addition, the present pattern of crossfrontier incursions and other border incidents, as well as new force deployments and mutual recriminations, is redolent of the situation that prevailed before the 1962 war. When the PLA marched hundreds of miles south to occupy the then-independent Tibet and later nibble at Indian territories, this supposedly was neither an expansionist strategy nor a forward policy. But when the ill-equipped and short-staffed Indian army belatedly sought to set up posts along India’s unmanned Himalayan frontier to try and stop further Chinese encroachments, Beijing and its friends dubbed it a provocative “forward policy.” In the same vein, the present Indian efforts to beef up defenses in the face of growing PLA crossborder forays are being labeled “new forward policy” by Beijing.

Moreover, the 1962 war occurred against the backdrop of China instigating and arming insurgents in India’s northeast. Though such activities ceased after Mao’s 1976 death, China seems to be coming full circle today, with Chinese-made arms increasingly flowing into guerrilla ranks in northeastern India, including via Burmese front organizations. India says it has taken up this matter with Beijing at the foreign minister-level. While a continuing 12-year-old ceasefire has brought peace to Nagaland, some other Indian states like Assam and Manipur are racked by multiple insurgencies, allowing Beijing to fish in troubled waters.

Finally, just as India had retreated to a defensive position in the border negotiations with Beijing in the early 1960s after having undermined its leverage through a formal acceptance of the “Tibet region of China,” New Delhi similarly has been left in the unenviable position today of having to fend off Chinese territorial demands. Whatever leverage India still had on the Tibet issue was surrendered in 2003 when it shifted its position from Tibet being an “autonomous” region within China to it being “part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China.” Little surprise the spotlight now is on China’s Tibet-linked claim to Arunachal Pradesh than on Tibet’s status itself.

This is why Beijing invested so much political capital over the years in getting India to gradually accept Tibet as part of China. Its success on that score has helped narrow the dispute to what it claims. That neatly meshes with China’s long-standing negotiating stance: What it occupies is Chinese territory, and what it claims must be shared — or as it puts it in reasonably sounding terms, though a settlement based on “mutual accommodation and mutual understanding.” So, while publicly laying claim to the whole of Arunachal Pradesh, China in private is asking India to cede at least that state’s strategic Tawang Valley — a critical corridor between Lhasa and Assam of immense military import because it overlooks the chicken-neck that connects India’s northeast with the rest of the country.

In fact, with the Dalai Lama having publicly repudiated Chinese claims that Arunachal Pradesh, or even just Tawang, was part of Tibet, a discomfited Beijing sought to impress upon his representatives in the now-suspended dialogue process that for any larger political deal to emerge, the Tibetan government-in-exile must support China’s position that Arunachal has been part of traditional Tibet. The plain fact is that with China’s own claim to Tibet being historically dubious, its claims to Indian territories are doubly suspect.

Today, as India gets sucked into a pre-1962-style trap, history is in danger of repeating itself. The issue then was Aksai Chin; the issue now is Arunachal. But India is still reluctant to shine a spotlight on Tibet as the lingering core issue. Even though Tibet has ceased to be the political buffer between India and China, it needs to become the political bridge between the world’s two most-populous countries. For that to happen, Beijing has to begin a process of reconciliation and healing in Tibet.

Internationally, there are several factors contributing to China’s greater assertiveness toward India as part of an apparent strategy to prevent the rise of a peer rival in Asia. First, India’s growing strategic ties with the United States are more than offset by America’s own rising interdependence with China, to the extent that U.S. policy now gives Beijing a pass on its human-rights abuses, frenetic military buildup at home and reckless strategic opportunism abroad. America’s Asia policy is no longer guided by an overarching geopolitical framework as it had been under President George W. Bush, a fact reflected by the Obama administration’s silence on the China-India border tensions.

In addition, the significant improvement in China’s own relations with Taiwan and Japan since last year has given Beijing more space against India. A third factor is the weakening of China’s Pakistan card against India. Pakistan’s descent into chaos has robbed China of its premier surrogate instrument against India, necessitating the exercise of direct pressure.

Against this background, India can expect no respite from Chinese pressure. Whether Beijing actually sets out to teach India “the final lesson” by launching a 1962-style surprise war will depend on several calculations, including India’s defense preparedness to repel such an attack, domestic factors within China and the availability of a propitious international timing of the type the Cuban missile crisis provided 47 years ago. But if India is not to be caught napping again, it has to inject greater realism into its China policy by shedding self-deluding shibboleths, shoring up its deterrent capabilities and putting premium on leveraged diplomacy.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.