Dragon Fire

1962 war wounds kept open by China’s hardline claims

The Times of India, June 7, 2007

Brahma Chellaney

China is a rising power but also an increasingly truculent state on territorial or maritime disputes with its neighbours, unable to rise above narrow considerations. Having awakened India long ago from its Nehruvian dream that good intentions are sufficient to run foreign policy, Beijing is now helping New Delhi discover how Chinese diplomacy helps underpin assertive claims and ambitions. Even as India has become more accommodating and forbearing in its dealings with China, Beijing has hardened its position on territorial issues.

China’s assertiveness is mirrored in its refusal to grant visa to any official from Arunachal Pradesh and aggressive patrolling of the still-fuzzy Himalayan frontier. In recent days, a flustered New Delhi has had to cancel a China visit by 107 elite civil servants and also respond to charges by two opposition MPs from Arunachal that Chinese forces have been nibbling at Indian territory there. In seeking to deny that claim, New Delhi has made an unusual revelation — that China maintains more than one line of control and sends regular patrols right up to the outer claimed perimeter.

Through its forcefulness on Arunachal, China is signalling that the ongoing negotiations with India cannot centre merely on border demarcation, even if both sides still call them “border talks”. Recent events indeed highlight the lack of real progress in these epic, 26-year-old negotiations.

Sharing one of the world’s longest and most rugged frontiers, India and China are the only two countries whose entire border is in dispute, without a mutually defined line of control separating them. China continues to lay claim to more Indian territories, even as it holds on to Himalayan areas it seized furtively or by conquest in the 1950s and early 1960s. It occupies one-fifth of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir.

India and China are old civilizations but new neighbours. It was the 1951 Chinese annexation of the historical buffer, Tibet, that brought Chinese troops to what is now the Sino-Indian frontier. Just 11 years later, China invaded India. Today, both countries have built a stake in maintaining the peaceful diplomatic environment on which their economic modernization and security depend. Yet the wounds of the 1962 war have been kept open by China’s publicly assertive claims to Indian territories. As long as China is unwilling to accept the status quo, it will keep alive the memory of 1962.

That China is not a status quo power, at least territorially, is evident from the way it has placed Taiwan under a permanent threat of force and asserted land and maritime claims vis-à-vis other neighbours. Its claims on India, however, involve the largest chunks of territory. Arunachal alone is more than double the size of Taiwan.

For almost half of the period they have been neighbours, India and China have pursued negotiations to resolve their territorial disputes. Since 1981, the two countries have been engaged in regular border-related talks in what is the longest and most-barren negotiating process in modern world history. Of late, however, China has pugnaciously pressed its claims. A classic instance was last November when the Chinese ambassador — backed by his foreign ministry — publicly renewed China’s claim on Arunachal, stoking an unusual diplomatic spat on the eve of President Hu Jintao’s visit to India.

Sino-Indian negotiations, although rich in symbolism, have yielded little progress for three main reasons. First, China has sought to stretch the talks to keep India under strategic pressure. It has employed negotiations as a diplomatic tool to engage India, not to reach accord. This tactic dovetails with China’s broader strategy to present a friendly face while building up its capabilities to go on the offensive.

Second, China persuaded India in 2003 to shift from the practical task of clarifying the frontline to the abstract mission of developing “principles,” “concepts” and “framework” for an overall border settlement. This shift was intended to release Beijing from its 2001 commitment to exchange maps with India of first the western sector and then of the eastern sector — a pledge it had already breached by missing the mutually agreed deadlines.

The contours of a possible settlement have been known for long — a simple trade-off involving India foregoing its claims to territories it has lost to China, in return for Beijing’s abandonment of its claims to Indian-held areas. But given its hegemonic intent, China is loath to settle on the basis of the status quo.

Third, India has needlessly retreated to a more and more defensive position, bringing itself under greater Chinese pressure. Rather than gain leverage by adopting a nuanced position on the core issue of Tibet, India continues to be overcautious in its diplomacy, even when Beijing acts antagonistically. New Delhi’s acquiescence to China’s annexation of Tibet has come to haunt it, as Chinese claims on Indian territories are openly predicated on their alleged historical or ecclesiastical links with Tibet. Seeking to territorially extend the gains from its Tibet annexation, Beijing pushes a bald principle: What is ours is ours to keep, but what is yours must be shared with us.

India can no longer shy away from making hard diplomatic choices. With an overly ambitious and revisionist China on the offensive, India needs to discriminate between appeasement and diplomacy.

The writer is a security affairs analyst.

© Times of India, 2007

Dragon’s Foothold in Gwadar

Brahma Chellaney

(c) Asian Age April 7, 2007  

The newly opened deepwater port at Gwadar, Pakistan, represents China’s first strategic foothold in the Arabian Sea. Along with Beijing’s onshore and offshore strategic assets in Burma, Gwadar signifies an enlarging Chinese footprint on both the oceanic flanks of peninsula India. Add to the scene China’s agreement to build a port at Hambantota in Sri Lanka, its aid to the Bangladeshi port of Chittagong and its interest in a strategic anchor in the Maldives. What all this underscores is an emerging Chinese challenge to India’s traditional dominance in the Indian Ocean region.

The recent, little-noticed inauguration of the Gwadar port by Pakistani military ruler Pervez Musharraf has set the stage for Gwadar’s expansion into an energy-transport hub and naval base. Describing the occasion as “a historic day,” General Musharraf announced, in the presence of Chinese Communications Minister Li Shenglin, that a modern airport also will be built at Gwadar by “our Chinese brothers.” Chinese engineers already are constructing the Gwadar naval base, scheduled to be ready in less than four years.

The Gwadar port’s first phase was completed by China ahead of schedule, and during President Hu Jintao’s visit to Islamabad last November, one of the agreements announced was titled: “Transfer of Completion Certification of Gwadar Port (Phase I) between the People’s Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.” This revealed that China built the port on a turnkey basis. It has pledged more than $1 billion in grants and loan guarantees for the multiphase Gwadar project.

Gwadar, near the Iranian border, epitomizes how an increasingly ambitious Beijing, brimming with hard cash from a blazing economic growth, is building new transportation, trade, energy and naval links around India to advance its interests. Such links, whether by design or accident, strategically encircle India, constricting its options and room for manoeuvre. 

Beijing has been busily fashioning two strategic corridors on either side of India in a north-south axis — the Trans-Karakoram Corridor from western China stretching all the way down to Gwadar, at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40 per cent of the world’s oil passes; and the Irrawaddy Corridor from Yunnan to the Bay of Bengal involving road, river and rail links through Burma, including to the Chinese-built harbours at Kyaukypu and Thilawa.  

The Irrawaddy Corridor has brought Chinese security personnel to Burmese sites close both to India’s eastern strategic assets and to the Strait of Malacca. Chinese agencies already operate electronic-eavesdropping and maritime-reconnaissance facilities on the Coco Islands — transferred by India in the 1950s to Burma, which then leased them to Beijing in 1994. The Coco Islands, however, were not the only instance of Jawaharlal Nehru’s territorial big-heartedness toward Burma. A sore point in Manipur remains the way Nehru unilaterally accepted Burmese sovereignty over the 18,000-square-kilometre Kabaw Valley in 1953. Today China operates a signals-intelligence (SIGINT) collection facility from the Great Coco Island.

A third Chinese strategic corridor is in an east-west axis in Tibet across India’s northern frontiers. The $6.2-billion railway from Gormu to Lhasa significantly boosts China’s offensive military capability against India. A railway branch southward from Lhasa to Xigatse — seat of the Panchen Lama’s Tashilhumpu monastery — is nearing completion. The People’s Liberation Army, strategically located on the roof against the Indian forces at low levels, now has the logistic capability to intensify military pressure at short notice by rapidly mobilizing up to 12 divisions.  

          Beijing intends to extend the Tibetan railway right up to the Indian frontier — to the Chumbi Valley where the borders of Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet meet, and to the Arunachal-Burma-Tibet tri-junction. It also plans to connect with Kathmandu by rail. The Chinese efforts to use transportation routes to make strategic inroads and create an economic dependency in Nepal challenge Indian security.

            As part of this east-west corridor, China has built new military airfields along the frontier with India, and has just announced a plan to set up the world’s highest airport at Ngari, at the southwestern edge of Tibet. The Ngari prefecture has a population of only 69,000, and the airport will play a largely military role in reinforcing Chinese capabilities in the captured Aksai Chin region, where China maintains an outer and inner line of control against India. The new railway allows China to rail-base in Tibet some of its intercontinental ballistic missiles, such as its latest DF-31A, a rail-mobile weapon.

China’s incremental efforts to build a “string of pearls” along the Indian Ocean rim symbolize its fourth strategic corridor — and the advent of a challenge to India from the south. This “string of pearls” — a term first used in a report for the Pentagon by defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton — is sought to be assembled through forward listening posts, naval-access agreements and Chinese-built harbours stretching from Pakistan and Sri Lanka to Bangladesh and Burma. The Chinese interest in the Indian Ocean rim now extends up to the Seychelles, which the visiting Hu Jintao two months ago called “a shining pearl in the Indian Ocean,” as if to corroborate his country’s string-of-pearls scheme.

Such is Gwadar’s vantage location that it is central both to the string of pearls and the Trans-Karakoram Corridor. Gwadar is being linked by road to the Chinese-built Karakoram Highway — an emblem of the long-standing Sino-Pakistan nexus. With the Chinese-aided Gwadar-Dalbandin project extending the railway up to Rawalpindi, Beijing has begun a technical study about building a railroad from Pakistan to Kashgar through the Khunjerab Pass, in parallel to the Karakoram Highway.

Gwadar’s transformation from a sleepy fishing village to a strategic centre and boomtown has been rapid. In his March 20 port opening, Musharraf thanked China for dramatically changing Gwadar “where five to six years back there was nothing except for sand and dust.”   

China has acknowledged that Gwadar’s strategic value is no less than that of the Karakoram Highway. In fact, the largest Chinese economic-information portal called Gwadar “China’s biggest harvest” and boasted that Beijing enjoys “relatively large control” there. China’s role in developing Gwadar is as strategically significant as its well-documented part in arming Pakistan with nuclear-weapon and missile capabilities. By linking Gwadar with the Karakoram Highway and by planning to build an oil pipeline from Gwadar to its restive Xinjiang province, China actually is seeking to reap a strategic-multiplier effect.  

One component of China’s plan is to make Gwadar a major hub transporting Gulf and African oil by pipeline to the Chinese heartland via Xinjiang. Such piped oil would not only cut freight costs and supply time but also lower China’s reliance on US-policed shipping lanes through the Malacca and Taiwan Straits. Pakistan has already signed a memorandum of understanding for “studies to build the energy corridor to China.” Beijing is also setting up a similar energy corridor through Burma involving oil and gas pipelines, with Chinese firms now developing a major port at Sitwe, the capital of Rakhine province.

The past is a testament to how Chinese projects in India’s periphery progressively assume strategic and military colour after originally having been touted as purely commercial. A classic case is the Karakoram Highway, which has served as a passageway through occupied Kashmiri territories for covert Chinese nuclear and missile transfers and other military aid to Pakistan.

As the practitioner of a Sun Tzu-style balance-of-power strategy aimed at averting the rise of a peer rival in Asia and engaging the world on its own terms, China blurs the line between commercial and military interests. Its investments in ports in Burma, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan have been driven largely by strategic considerations. Indeed its $475-million investment in Hambantota is bereft of even the fig-leaf of commercial interest. 

Just as China has furthered its military interests in Burma behind a commercial veil, it values Gwadar for the major strategic advantages that port holds despite its location in insurgency-wracked Baluchistan. Even after four Chinese engineers were killed in two separate guerrilla attacks in 2004, China did not slow down the construction. Gwadar — half the distance from Kashgar than Shanghai — provides much-closer access to the sea from China’s landlocked, sparsely-populated Xinjiang province, which is twice the size of Pakistan. 

Beijing sees Gwadar as providing a more-secure corridor for energy imports, given its fears that in the event of a strategic confrontation, its resource-hungry economy could be held hostage by hostile naval forces through the interdiction of oil shipments. Gwadar, along with Sitwe, would help reduce China’s reliance on the Strait of Malacca, through which 80 per cent of Chinese oil imports now pass. By deciding to substantially widen the Karakoram Highway and upgrade it as an all-weather passageway, China also plans to export and import goods through Gwadar. 

But while keen to develop it as a major trade and energy hub, Beijing has no intention of forsaking its ambition to use Gwadar for naval and other strategic purposes, including to project Chinese power in the Indian Ocean rim and the Gulf region. Gwadar, however, is essentially a product of Pakistan’s drive for strategic depth vis-à-vis India. The Indian navy’s 1971 blockade of Karachi led Pakistan to consider ways to mitigate its naval vulnerability. By mid-2000, Pakistan had built a small naval base at Ormara, located between Karachi and Gwadar. But once the work is complete on a base at Gwadar — protected by cliffs from three sides — India will be in no position to bottle up the Pakistan navy in 1971 style.

How quickly Gwadar has come up can be seen from the fact that its cornerstone was laid by Chinese Vice-Premier Wu Bangguo only in March 2002 — ironically four months after the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. The US military operations from the Pakistani airbases at Jacobabad in Sind and Pasni in Baluchistan, however, encouraged Beijing to successfully seek from Islamabad advance “sovereign guarantees” to use Gwadar facilities. Just before Musharraf opened Gwadar, the contract to run the port was awarded to PSA International of Singapore, with which Beijing enjoys close ties. 

In addition to a naval base, Gwadar is to house a modern air-defence unit, a military garrison, a large Chinese-built refinery and petroleum-storage facilities. Already home to an incipient Chinese listening post, Gwadar is a central link in the emerging chain of Chinese forward-operating facilities around India. Situated next to the world’s busiest oil-shipping lanes, Gwadar is a likely port of call and refuelling point for the rapidly modernizing Chinese navy. More than arming Pakistan with critical strategic depth, Gwadar potentially opens the way to the arrival of Chinese submarines in India’s backyard in the coming years.

            For China, Gwadar is a key maritime outpost to monitor developments in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf and to keep an eye on Indian and US naval patrols, including the naval bases in western India and the large American base at Diego Garcia, whose importance for US regional military strategy is set to rise after the Iraq debacle. 

The Baluchi insurrection, however, instils uncertainty about Gwadar’s future, with the new port already stoking the nationalist fire. Such is the threat that Musharraf, in his port-opening speech, was constrained to warn insurgents to “surrender their weapons and stop creating hurdles in the progress of Baluchistan” or be “wiped out.”  

China’s rise as an oil importer since 1994 and its more-recent voracious craving for energy resources have served as justification for its growing emphasis on the seas and its plans to build a blue-water navy. Its energy drive and desire to safeguard vital sea lanes, however, dovetail with its strategic efforts to build a string of pearls. For long, it has worked to box in India. 

The planned energy corridors on either side of India symbolize China’s mercantilist efforts to assert control — at New Delhi’s expense — over oil and gas assets and monopolize transport routes. That has been underlined by the way state-run Chinese companies, with their deep pockets and ruthless tactics, have signed energy deals in Iran and Burma, including to source gas from two partly Indian-owned Burmese blocks.

Not content with the six offshore and five onshore gas blocks it has already awarded to China, the Burmese junta now has chosen Beijing over New Delhi for selling the gas from the two fields where two Indian state-owned firms together hold a 30 per cent stake. A March 14 MoU with Beijing says Burma will sell to China “the entire natural gas” from the partly Indian-owned A-1 and A-3 blocks in the western Rakhine offshore region. The gas will be shipped through a 2,380-kilometre pipeline from Kyaukypu, on the Bay of Bengal, to Rili in Yunan. And in return, China will pay an annual transit fee of $150 million for 30 years for the pipeline’s 990-kilometre stretch through Burma.

India’s ability to avert the emergence of a Beijing-oriented Asia will hinge on its success in retaining its domination in the Indian Ocean. A China that expands its presence in the Indian Ocean and exerts increasing influence over the regional waterways and over Burma, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Nepal will pave the way for a Sino-centric Asia and for a greater strategic squeeze of India. 

Pakistan, of course, is not averse to a Sino-centric Asia and indeed would like China to complete its strategic encirclement of India. After all, China has been Pakistan’s “all-weather” ally, with their friendship billed as “taller than the Himalayas and deeper than the oceans.” Pakistan not only welcomes China’s maritime ambitions but also views Gwadar’s Chinese connection as essential to break India’s domination in the Indian Ocean.

Even so, India should leave Beijing in no doubt that using Gwadar for military purposes would be a serious escalation of Chinese containment and counterproductive, increasing strategic friction and rivalry and undermining prospects for interstate energy cooperation. 

The main reason India has come under increasing Chinese pressure is its retreat to a more and more defensive position. If India is to keep the Chinese navy out of its backyard, it has to start exerting naval power at chokepoints critical to its strategic interests. If India does not guard the various gates to the Indian Ocean — through its exercise of power and through strategic partnerships with key players — it will confront the Chinese navy in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea.

http://203.197.197.71/presentation/leftnavigation/opinion/op-ed/dragon’s-foothold-in-gwadar.aspx

(c) Asian Age, 2007 

The 1962 Chinese Invasion

Brahma Chellaney

(c) Hindustan Times 

At sunrise on October 20, 1962, China’s People’s Liberation Army invaded India with overwhelming force on two separate flanks – in the west in Ladakh, and in the east across the McMahon Line in the then North-East Frontier Agency.  The Chinese aggression, and the defeat and humiliation it wreaked on an unprepared India, remain deeply embedded in the Indian psyche.

            India was taken completely unawares by the invasion.  This reflected political naivete on its part.  It also bared a woefully flawed intelligence network that failed to pick up the movement of heavy artillery and other Chinese military activity along the Himalayan frontier in the months ahead.  The invasion of India was carefully planned well in advance and came after extended military preparations, including the improvement of logistics and the movement of heavy artillery from opposite Taiwan to Tibet, where PLA had since its annexation maintained infantry troops in large numbers to suppress the local population without the need to induct heavy weaponry.  That began to change by the spring of 1962, but Indian intelligence remained horrifically oblivious.

Decades later, some gnawing issues stand out.  One relates to the timing of the invasion masterminded by Mao Zedong.  The aggression was executed cunningly to coincide with the Cuban missile crisis that brought the United States and Soviet Union within a whisper of nuclear war. 

The timing, which precluded the possibility of India getting any immediate outside help, was made doubly favourable by two other developments – an American promise earlier in July to hold Taiwan from initiating hostilities across the straits that enabled China to single-mindedly mobilise against India, and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s subtle yet discernible tilt towards Beijing on the Sino-Indian border issue in an apparent effort to buy Chinese support in the looming Soviet confrontation with the United States.

            Two key interrelated questions need to be addressed. Why did Mao order the invasion?  And having captured most of the forward Indian military posts in both sectors in the first wave of assaults, why did Beijing carry out a second, more vicious round of attacks after a gap of three weeks?  Mao had several objectives on his mind in turning border skirmishes into a full-fledged war.  None was military.

            Mao’s aims were mainly political.  The military objectives had largely been achieved in the earlier years through furtive PLA encroachments that had, for example, brought Aksai Chin under Chinese control.  The PLA – not an independent power centre then – was merely an instrument to help Mao accomplish his political objectives in 1962.  Roderick MacFarquhar, in the third and final volume of his masterwork, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, published in 1997, aptly calls the aggression “Mao’s India War”. 

            The first political objective was to humiliate India, China’s Asian rival.  Mao was determined to cut India to size and to undermine what India represented – a pluralistic, democratic model for the developing world that seemingly threatened China’s totalitarian political system. 

The PLA’s military adventure against India was clearly punitive in nature, a judgement reinforced by Premier Zhou Enlai’s ready admission that it was intended “to teach India a lesson” – a lesson India has not forgotten to this day.  The second wave of assaults was designed to heap ignominy by soundly thrashing India.  Such have been the long-lasting effects of the humiliation it imposed that China to this day is able to keep India in check, despite transferring weapons of mass destruction to Pakistan and opening a new strategic front through Myanmar.

            Another aim of Mao was to wreck the image of Nehru, who until then had been a towering figure on the international stage and an icon in many parts of the developing world.  Nehru stood diminished and demolished by November 1962.  Defeat, especially decisive defeat, usually turns a statesman into a beaten, worn-out politician and shatters a nation’s international standing.  The crushing rout, in fact, hastened Nehru’s death. 

            But more than Mao, it was Nehru who contributed to his own disgrace by blundering twice on China.  His first blunder was to shut his eyes to the impending fall of Tibet even when Sardar Patel had repeatedly cautioned him in 1949 that the Chinese communists would annex that historical buffer as soon as they installed themselves in Beijing.  An overconfident Nehru, who ran foreign policy as if it were personal policy, went to the extent of telling Patel by letter that it would be a “foolish adventure” for the Chinese Communists to try and gobble up Tibet – a possibility that “may not arise at all” as it was, he claimed, geographically impracticable!

            In 1962, Nehru, however, had to admit he had been living in a fool’s paradise.  “We were getting out of touch with reality in the modern world and we were living in an artificial atmosphere of our creation,” he said in a national address after the Chinese aggression.

Nehru had ignored India’s military needs despite the Chinese surreptitiously occupying Indian areas on the basis of Tibet’s putative historical ties with them, and setting up a land corridor to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir through Aksai Chin.  Although Indian military commanders after the 1959 border clashes and casualties began saying that they lacked adequate manpower and weapons to fend off the PLA, Nehru ordered the creation of forward posts to prevent the loss of further Indian territory without taking the required concomitant steps to beef up Indian military strength, including through arms imports.  Nehru had convinced himself grievously that the Chinese designs were to carry out further furtive encroachments on Indian territory, not to launch major aggression. 

            A third objective of Mao was to undermine India’s non-aligned status.  No sooner the PLA began the first wave of assaults than an unnerved Nehru appealed to the United States for military help.  He implored that Washington grant military aid without insisting on a formal alliance.  But no U.S. military aid came while the Chinese were still attacking India.  Kennedy waited until Khrushchev’s capitulation over missiles in Cuba before sending Nehru a letter promising “support as well as sympathy”. 

When the PLA launched the second series of attacks, the U.S. carrier force, USS Enterprise, steamed not towards the East or South China Sea but towards the Bay of Bengal to serve as a psychological prop to the besieged Indians.  John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in his memoirs, Ambassador’s Journal, that he had, as U.S. Ambassador to India, recommended the despatch of the aircraft carrier to ease Indian nerves.

Once Beijing declared a unilateral cease-fire, the issue of U.S. arms sales to India got caught in the perennial and still-prevalent U.S. demand – that New Delhi open talks with Pakistan on Kashmir – forcing the Nehru government to hold five rounds of futile discussions with Islamabad as a quid pro quo for receiving low-line American arms.  The Chinese aggression was seen in Washington as creating an opportunity for what America has always desired and still seeks to pursue – closer and better ties with India while maintaining old bonds with Pakistan – to help promote ‘regional stability’, a euphemism for subcontinental balance.    

            A fourth objective of Mao, who had been seething over Nehru’s grant of sanctuary to the Dalai Lama and his followers, was to effectively cut off India’s age-old historical ties with Tibet.  In one stroke, all outside links with Tibet – religious, temporal, cultural, medicinal and trade – collapsed.  This meant that Tibetans could no longer maintain their ancient ties with Gaya, Sarnath, Sanchi and other seats of monasteries, and that Indians no longer had access to Mansorovar Lake and Mount Kailash.

            Fifthly, the war came handy to Mao for domestic politics.  At a time when China’s economic calamities, including famines, and Mao’s insistence on a domestic class struggle were spurring grassroots problems, the swiftness and brute power with which he managed to teach India a lesson not only boosted China’s image internationally, but also helped him to politically consolidate at home.  Success, after all, has a thousand fathers, while defeat leaves an orphan.

            What Indian policy did not appreciate then and has yet to come to terms with is that the invasion was triggered more by a Chinese ambition to dominate Asia than by a territorial dispute.  In that sense, 1962 represented far more than the loss of national pride or territory for India; it meant the beginning of an undeclared war for pre-eminence in Asia – a raging war in which India has steadily lost ground, with China making inroads into even the traditional spheres of Indian influence, including Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Bangladesh.

            For Mao, it was a victory for the asking, because the Indian leadership had made no effort to plug the glaring vulnerabilities in the defence of India.  In true Sun Tsu style, however, Mao waited for the right time to strike, invading India when it least expected to be attacked.  The PLA’s preparations to invade India started after 1959 but were camouflaged in the form of extended border negotiations that Beijing held with New Delhi.

Border negotiations with India were employed not only to feign reasonableness but, more importantly, to buy time for military consolidation and to bide time for the right opportunity to strike.  The building of border roads after 1959 was indicative of the Chinese efforts to upgrade military logistics along the mighty Himalayas.

In the same vein, the current series of largely fruitless border talks since 1981 – the longest continuing inter-state negotiations in post-World War II history – serve as a cover for China to pursue containment of India with engagement. 

Also, in a fashion reminiscent of the current Beijing approach to depict all Chinese actions as defensive and peaceful, Mao sought to paint India as the provoker with its ‘forward policy’ – a line of reasoning lapped up by some biased Western analysts, particularly a self-confessed Maoist, British journalist Neville Maxwell, who contended in his book, India’s China War, that it was India that had been the aggressor.

When the PLA marched hundreds of miles south to annex Tibet and establish a Sino-Indian military frontier for the first time in history, that was supposedly not expansionist or forward policy.  But when the Indian Army belatedly sought to set up posts along its unmanned frontier in Ladakh to try and stop further Chinese land grabs, this was christened ‘forward policy’ and dubbed provocative!

The Indian predilection for talk rather than action was on brazen display in the run-up to the 1962 war.  This was best illustrated by Nehru’s offhand remarks to reporters while leaving for Colombo on October 12: “Our instructions are to free our territory.  I cannot fix the date, that is entirely for the Army”.  Such loose talk was a god-send to the Chinese communists to fix the date for their attack.

            Mao needed no Indian provocation to launch a military attack.  He was provoked by his own logic to defeat the alternative model that India represented and the ideas and principles that Nehru symbolised.  Had India not started building forward posts, Mao would have found some other pretext to attack India.

In fact, Nehru, the architect of the Hindi-Chini bhai bhai festivity, had gone out of his way to propitiate communist China, accepting even the Chinese annexation of Tibet in a 1954 agreement without settling the Indo-Tibetan border.  While Nehru thought he had bought peace with China by accepting Chinese rule over Tibet on the basis of his doctrine of panchshila, or the five principles of peaceful co-existence, Mao and his team read this both as a sign of India’s weakness and a licence to encroach on strategically important areas of Ladakh.

Not only did the Nehru government cling to the belief that China was a benign neighbour despite the 1959 border clashes, its thinking and policy also precluded the defence of India on the Kautilyan principle that to maintain peace, a nation had to be ready to defend peace. 

Official policy had steadfastly refused to consider China to be a military threat, let alone to adopt counter-measures against the threat.  Forward posts were created not to militarily assert India’s claims by positioning troops at vantage points but to affirm a political line.  It was for reason that these posts were thinly manned and often on low ground in direct contravention of military logic.  In fact, the yawning mismatch between the officially encouraged perception of China and the ‘benign’ neighbour’s brutal aggression added to the severity of the shock that battered India.

So betrayed was Nehru by Mao’s war that he had this to say on the day the Chinese invaded: “Perhaps there are not many instances in history where one country has gone out of her way to be friendly and cooperative with the government and people of another country and to plead their cause in the councils of the world, and then that country returns evil for good”.

Four decades later, India has not forgotten the central lesson it was taught by Mao.  India’s rise as a military power with independent nuclear and missile capabilities is the consequence of a lesson learned.  Had the debacle not set in motion India’s military modernisation and reform of its defence techniques and strategies, India would not have fared well against Pakistan in the 1965 and 1971 wars.  In fact, without the post-1962 military buildup, it could well have lost the Kashmir valley to Pakistan in 1965.  However, with foreign policy still being shaped by personal predilections and idiosyncrasies rather than by institutional processes, India continues to repose faith in adversaries and then cries foul when they deceive it, as Kargil showed. 

II

A Question of Timing 

Brahma Chellaney

Mao directed two double-front attacks on India within a span of about a month.  In the style recommended by ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu who authored the treatise, The Art of War, Mao chose an exquisite time for perpetrating a ‘Himalayan Pearl Harbour’ against India.

The first wave of assaults on Indian border positions in Ladakh and NEFA began on October 20, 1962, five days after the CIA formally determined the presence of medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba on October 15 through reconnaissance photographs taken the previous day, triggering a major U.S. showdown with Moscow. 

A day before the PLA launched the attacks on India, Radio Moscow was citing U.S. naval manoeuvres in the Caribbean as preparations for an invasion of Cuba.  And the day the Chinese forces came pouring across the Himalayas, U.S. President John F. Kennedy had already put into effect a naval quarantine of Cuba.  By the time the Chinese halted their weeklong incursions into NEFA, while continuing to pick and target Indian posts in Aksai Chin, the Cuban missile crisis had brought the world to the edge of a nuclear Armageddon.

            Not content with the PLA’s battlefield victories against the outnumbered and outgunned Indian forces, Mao decided to launch a second wave of military assaults on India while the Americans and Russians were still embroiled in the Cuban crisis.  The threat of a nuclear holocaust had eased after Khrushchev gave in on October 28 and agreed to withdraw the nuclear-armed missiles from Cuba.  But the missile crisis was still lingering, with troops in Cuban military uniform taking up positions around the Soviet missile sites and strongman Fidel Castro refusing UN on-site inspections in Cuba as well as the withdrawal of Il-28 bombers.

            Making the most of the continuing global preoccupation with the Cuban missile crisis, and rushing to capitalise further before the abating crisis wound up, Mao employed the PLA for a second round of two-front attacks on India starting on November 18, a day before Castro gave in to the withdrawal of Il-28s. 

So scared were Indian policy-makers by a self-created fear that Calcutta would be bombed that they did not employ their superior air force against the invading Chinese, ignorant as they were of the fact that China had only one or two airfields in Tibet and that its fighter aircraft (including Ilyushin 24) were distinctly inferior to India’s British-made Hunters.  Had India employed its offensive air power, it could have overcome its tactical disadvantage of lacking artillery in Ladakh and been in a position to hit hard the foot and mule columns of the Chinese in the Tawang area.  But New Delhi was possessed by an irrational fear of Chinese retaliation against Indian cities – a fear that created a sense of panic in Calcutta.

According to Colonel Anil Athale, who has co-authored the official history of the aggression, “the best-kept secret of the 1962 border war is that a large part of the non-military supplies needed by the Chinese reached them via Calcutta!  Till the very last moment, border trade between Tibet and India went on though Nathu La in Sikkim.  For the customs in Calcutta, it was business as usual and no one thought to pay any attention to increased trade as a battle indicator.”

And such was the panic in New Delhi to the advancing Chinese columns in NEFA that Jawaharlal Nehru thought the fall of the plains of Assam was imminent and pretty nearly said good-bye to the people there in a national broadcast.  On the evening of November 19, as the Army’s 4 Corps began preparations to pull out from Tezpur, a panic-stricken move that triggered the collapse of the local administration by the following day, Nehru told the nation: “Huge Chinese armies are marching into the northeast of India … yesterday we lost Bomdila, a small town in Kameng division. .. my heart goes out to the people of Assam”.  Till this day, Assamese extremists cite Nehru’s ‘abandonment’ of Assam to stir up secessionist sentiment.  

But on November 21, coinciding with Kennedy’s formal termination of Cuba’s quarantine, Beijing announced a unilateral ceasefire and its intent to withdraw from NEFA while keeping the gains on the west.  The first U.S. emergency military supplies to India began arriving by November 24 while the Chinese withdrawal from India’s northeast started from December 1.  Mao knew it would not be wise to continue waging war on India after the United States was free from the Cuban missile crisis.

Copyright: The Hindustan Times, 2002 

AMBIVALENT POWER

Brahma Chellaney

(c) Asian Age  

The emerging US-India global strategic partnership foreshadows a geopolitical realignment in Asia. Such realignment will have an important bearing on global power relations. In an Asia characterized by a growing imbalance of power, a US-India partnership can help build long-term stability, order and equilibrium.

A strategic partnership with the US will be in India’s interest. But that does not mean India entrust its national security to America. The US is in search of dependable new allies, and a partnership with India holds valuable benefits for its continued prosperity and security. It will use such a partnership to assertively advance its interests, even at India’s expense.

For New Delhi, it is imperative that the partnership help underpin its power potential, rather than lopsidedly allow America to unduly influence Indian policies, to India’s long-term detriment. History testifies that a smaller power’s partnership with a globally dominant power has never been easy, given the inherent asymmetry. What is more, such a partnership has rarely helped the smaller power secure a reliable friend. 

That is why the current elation among some sections in India seems so premature and out of place. The nuclear deal has even been viewed as a defining moment paving the way to a US-India axis. The narrow focus on the deal loses the forest for the trees: the deal, far from being a turning point by itself, is actually embedded in a larger strategic framework whose more fundamental elements have become decipherable, one by one, over a year.

The deal is a product of, not a precursor to, an Indian strategic shift. Before America agreed to consider relaxing civilian nuclear export controls against India, New Delhi had already consented to team up with Washington on matters vital to US interests — from participating in US-led “multinational operations” and assenting to “conclude defence transactions” and share intelligence (see the June 28, 2005, defence-framework accord) to joining the US-directed non-proliferation regime (the first step of which was the May 2005 enactment by India of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Act).

When the nuclear deal was unveiled on July 18, 2005, it constituted just four paragraphs in a long “Joint Statement” which roped in India as America’s collaborator on yet more fronts — from a “Global Democracy Initiative” to an enduring, military-to-military “Disaster Response Initiative” designed, in the White House’s words, for “operations in the Indian Ocean region and beyond.” The July 18 statement also buttresses US economic interests through a far-reaching “Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture” that embraces research and outreach in India, as well as through new bilateral dialogues on commerce, finance and energy.

The nuclear deal still remains a four-paragraph affair. The March 2, 2006, oral announcement during President George W. Bush’s visit merely put the US stamp of approval on India’s civil-military “separation plan” — a sanitized version of which was presented to Parliament five days later. As Undersecretary of State Nick Burns put it on March 2, the US is now able to certify India’s “very complex” separation plan as “credible” and “transparent”.

Given the commitments New Delhi has already made, it is likely that in the coming months India will agree to provide logistical support to US forces, “conclude defence transactions” worth billions of dollars with US arms makers, and begin the process to join the controversial, US-controlled Proliferation Security Initiative, or PSI, which the “neoconservatives” in Washington have pugnaciously promoted. Such actions will leave little doubt about India’s movement into America’s strategic sphere.

Yet despite a fundamental reorientation of Indian foreign policy in full swing, there has been little debate. Other than the nuclear deal, the varied, broad policy moves by India have drawn little public scrutiny.

The direction of India’s relationship with America is set clearly — towards closer strategic collaboration. At issue, however, is not the direction but the content that is being added to the relationship largely at the pace and urging of the Bush administration. The content is in the form of firm, difficult-to-retract commitments or actions by India in return for US promises.

Unfortunately for India, the promises are by a president who is becoming increasingly unpopular at home and abroad. As the ruinous US occupation of Iraq entered its fourth year this week, an unabashed Bush vigorously defended his commitment to the war there while ruling out a troop pullout during his presidency. If Bush is still well-liked anywhere, it is in India, despite his rebuff to its claim to a UN Security Council permanent seat. Indeed, India embraced him like an “American maharajah,” as the New York Times said under the headline, "Bush Finds More Respect in India Than At Home."

Having hitched its fortunes to a beleaguered president who has been damaging US interests even as his approval ratings sink, India needs to face up to the risk that Bush has been too weakened to satisfactorily deliver on his promises. Even the nuclear deal is unlikely to be passed by US Congress without the attachment of grating, India-specific riders. India rushed into several far-reaching strategic initiatives (or “coalitions of the willing,” in Bush’s parlance) intended to subserve Bush’s misbegotten global agenda.

US and Indian interests now converge on several issues but they don’t come together on all matters, especially on Bush’s messianic missions. This is brought out by Bush’s just-released National Security Strategy Report­ — the first since 2002 — which tacitly expands his “axis of evil” by targeting seven “despotic” states, including two of India’s neighbours, Burma and Iran.

The report lays out US interests on most issues that form the basis of the “global-partnership” initiatives with India. It includes five of the eight areas of the July 18, 2005, US-India statement (three separate “coalitions of the willing” on disaster response, democracy advocacy and HIV/AIDS, plus stable energy markets and structural economic reforms), as well as the cooperation spheres defined earlier by the June 28, 2005, accord — counterterrorism, counter-proliferation, counter-narcotics and intelligence sharing. What the report brings out is the striking divergence of interests in the areas where America has brought in India as an international partner.

Take the issue of combating global terror. Not only have India’s concerns over Islamabad-directed terrorism been written off, the report actually portrays Pakistan as a victim of terror. India is not even among the 12 identified countries where “terrorists have struck.” In fact, India — with the world’s highest incidence of terrorist attacks, according to the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis — finds no mention in the report’s extensive chapter titled, “Strengthen alliances to defeat global terrorism and work to prevent attacks against us and our friends.”

Democracy is India’s greatest asset, and the global promotion of liberty may sound an innocuous exercise until one reads Bush’s statements and his national-security report. For a president who maintains increasingly close ties with tyrannical regimes in every corner of the world, “the promotion of freedom” is just war by other means against target states.

Bush slights Indian democracy by propping up a Janus-faced dictatorship in Pakistan and arming it with lethal, India-specific weapons. He then seeks New Delhi’s partnership to effect a regime change in Burma — a state that has never acted against India — and in Iran, a lynchpin in India’s energy-import policy and geopolitical strategy vis-à-vis Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia. Indeed, the sole superpower claims that today it “may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran,” and that it reserves the right to take “anticipatory action.”

Why should India subordinate its regional interests to America’s intent to play an active strategic role even in states that traditionally have been within the Indian sphere of influence, such as Nepal? Yet Bush designed his stagecraft on Indian soil to publicly demand democracy in Burma and Nepal, vilify Iran and acclaim Pakistan as “another important partner and friend of the US”. The White House even paints international disaster response in southern Asia in geopolitical colours in its report — as part of US efforts in “reconciling long-standing regional conflicts in Aceh and the Kashmir.”

If India followed Bush, it would be left with no independent strategic options in its own neighbourhood other those backed by the US. What kind of a regional power would India be if it played second fiddle to the US in its own neighbourhood and traditional pockets of influence? After making New Delhi cede some strategic space in its backyard, the White House states patronizingly through its report that, “India now is poised to shoulder global obligations in cooperation with the United States in a way befitting a major power.”

Long after Bush becomes history, America will still be paying for its follies. An open question is whether India, with its pell-mell embrace of the Bush initiatives, would also end up paying costs.

Fundamentally, India has yet to decide if it wishes to become a true economic and military power, or a power “shouldering global obligations” assigned by the White House. The Indian ambivalence is manifest from the prime minister’s continued denial of permission to scientists to carry out the inaugural test-launch of the Agni 3 missile, which became ready some time ago.

If a mutually beneficial US-India global strategic partnership is to be built, without New Delhi reduced to a subaltern status or passively aiding Bush’s warped, hawkish agenda, sobriety, statecraft and close scrutiny are indispensable. In believing that America is courting it as part of a hedging strategy against a ruthlessly ambitious China, India should hedge against the risk that entanglement with the global hegemon could stunt its strategic potential and influence.  (c) The Asian Age, March 25, 2006

Will Nepal’s Peace Last?

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Wall Street Journal

After a decade of killings and human-rights abuses, the rebel guns in Nepal have finally fallen silent. The peace agreement reached last week between the government and Maoists, followed by the arms accord signed on Tuesday, constitutes the first real progress towards consolidating a seven-month-old ceasefire. But achieving lasting peace will be more difficult. That will depend on whether the Maoists are truly committed to democracy — and not simply another grab for power.

Political crises have been endemic in Nepal, where a series of shaky governments have stunted the growth of democracy since its introduction in 1990. The latest lurch into political chaos was triggered when King Gyanendra suspended the country’s democratic institutions in February 2005, seeking to return Nepal to an absolute monarchy. The mass protests that erupted — with Maoist support — forced the king to cede many of his powers, including military control. As parliament was restored, the new government that emerged quickly opened peace talks with the rebels.

Previous peace agreements between the government and Maoists foundered because of poor implementation. As a result, Nepal has suffered gradual state atrophy. Widespread lawlessness and corruption helped vault the rebels into a pivotal role of power, enabling them to run a de facto parallel state in some areas of the country. In barely a decade, the Maoists morphed from a ragtag band of armed revolutionaries, inspired by Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, into the potent force now standing center stage in Nepalese politics.

Having waged a prolonged "people’s war" to overturn state institutions, the Maoists finally agreed on Nov. 21 to join the political mainstream. Their first order of business will be to help draft a new constitution. On the eve of the signing of the peace agreement last week, the rebels’ chairman, known by his nom de guerre, Prachanda, was publicly celebrated as a hero in New Delhi. He now hopes to become the first president of a republican Nepal.

India’s interest in Nepal goes back many years. The open, 1,600-kilometer-long border shared by the two countries allows for passport-free passage. After Mao’s annexation of Tibet brought Chinese troops to India’s frontiers, India linked Nepal to its security system through a 1950 treaty, creating a buffer with communist China. In recent years, India has watched with unease as China used Nepal’s political turmoil to increase its influence there. By brokering this peace accord, India hopes to stem the Chinese tide.

The agreement puts the Maoists on the same footing as the government, giving them joint responsibility for enforcing law and order. Under United Nations supervision, the Maoist and Nepalese armies are to lock up an equal quantity of weapons. And as the Maoist fighters are sequestered in special U.N.-supervised camps, Nepalese troops will be ordered to return to barracks. The Maoists expect their fighters to be merged with the official army.

India similarly hopes that the Maoists will be absorbed and tempered by Nepal’s governing institutions, but it would certainly not like to see the Maoists call the political shots, given their ideological leanings and cross-border links with Indian Maoists.

The deal’s implementation poses major challenges, with the success of establishing an enduring peace hinging on several questions: Will the Maoists abide by the rules of democracy, or try and usher in a proletariat dictatorship? Will they honor the deal by disbanding the parallel administration they run in many rural districts, or continue to levy taxes and mete out savage punishment upon those who fall foul of them? Will they lock up their guns in good faith, or continue to keep secret caches? Most importantly, will they run a fair campaign in next year’s Constitutional Assembly elections, or seek to win the vote by riding on their reputation of violence in the impoverished countryside?

The Communist influence will be strong in the new 330-member interim Nepalese parliament, with the Maoists and Nepal’s main communist party holding 73 seats each under the deal. The Maoists have set their sights on winning as many seats as possible in the Constitutional Assembly elections so that the new constitution will bear their permanent imprint. Until then, even as Prachanda has declined to forswear violence, the Maoists intend to exercise power without responsibility, with their top leaders declining to join the planned interim government, lest holding office dull their revolutionary sheen or erode their grassroots base.

The ascent of the Maoists carries the possibility of fashioning a "people’s revolution" through constitutional means. But if they don’t succeed in gaining elected power, they may return to their armed revolutionary ways, rather than sit on Parliament’s opposition benches. If that’s the case, then, once again, the peace will be short lived.

Mr. Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and most recently the author of "Asian Juggernaut" (HarperCollins, 2006).

(c) Wall Street Journal

December 1, 2006