Farooq Alay
FLARED up by India’s move to ramp up infrastructure along the Line of Actual Control with China, border tensions has risen in Ladakh as 20 Indian soldiers, including a Colonel, were killed in Galwan Valley clash. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said India had crossed the border twice “provoking and attacking Chinese personnel, resulting in serious physical confrontation”. Reports say “No shots were fired” in the latest skirmish and that they fought with rocks and clubs; Indian soldiers were “beaten to death”. India disputes China’s 38,000 sq km territory and 3,440 km long LAC, and Pakistan’s 140,000 sq km territory with a 740 km long LoC. Several rounds of talks have so far failed to resolve the disputes; instead India has started building roads network to boost its capability to move men and material in case of a conflict. Analysts believe that the Indian manoeuvrability is aimed at blocking China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) under which CPEC is being built. The conflict in eastern Ladakh gradually generated enough heat to become news and grew in intensity by June. Making headlines, it is now flaring up and Indian Government and Army turning out to be losers. India has not only lost territory, but also the credibility. The silence of Indian PM shows he has nothing left to tweet. The claim that Indian Army days ago conducted a surgical strike and regained territory from PLA, just as it had falsely done in the IoK, has earned Modi criticism from within.
It all started with both sides digging defences and Chinese trucks moving equipment into the area, raising concern of a long face-off. The early March aggressive posturing by India was replaced by reconciliatory gestures of peace after the Chinese simply walked into Indian territory and scared the Indian Army to retreat. PLA was able to push back the stone-throwing Indians by 2.5 km along LAC and reclaimed miles of their territory which is part of the Chinese Tibet. China has yet to regain 90,000 sq km of its territory from Indian occupation, including Arunachal Pradesh or South Tibet. PLA, far superior in strength and equipment, organized a military operation involving thousands of paratroopers. The move shattered the confidence of Indian Army forcing them to retreat. PM Modi in fact miscalculated the determination of Chinese leaders and abusing their policy of non-violence he decided to test their resolve by building solid military structures on Chinese territory. Beijing has never accepted the British demarcation of Tibet area and rejected treatise which the British forced on the Chinese Qing dynasty.
India’s expansionist policy of annexing territories of its neighbours has backfired in the Ladakh region. According to an editorial, “China is not Nepal or Bhutan and the Indian policy of eating away land will not succeed. The Indian Army stands a zero chance of countering a Chinese advance. The Chinese military has grown manifolds and so has its economy since 1962. The Chinese GDP is five times larger than that of India. The Indians know that rhetoric and gung-ho attitude can only work on the Indian media not on the ground with the PLA”. Although President Trump has offered to mediate, but his remarks about Hong Kong and Taiwan, further irritated China. Therefore, it is unlikely that the tainted US mediation offer will work. Under the circumstances, Islamabad’s concern is genuine that the Modi’s BJP-RSS-led government “is becoming a threat to neighbours. Bangladesh through Citizenship Act, border disputes with Nepal and China, and Pakistan threatened with false flag operation.” Pakistan has been forewarning the international community about this worrying pattern for quite a while now, yet, India’s large market has blinded the world to the policies it employs at the state level, especially in Occupied Kashmir.
It is now twelfth month that India revoked IOJ&K’s special status, massive human right violations are going on inside the occupied valley under 11-month-long curfew. And the noise Pakistan has been making about India’s aggressive, xenophobic policies, it must now make a lot more sense to the world. The truth is that Islamabad has been offering negotiations on all outstanding issues since Musharraf’s times; he had offered a four-point solution, and the successive governments have been calling upon India to come to a negotiable table. World knows that it is only India that has always bulldozed every effort for peace. Modi has falsely made Indians believe that India is an invisible regional power. Indian Army Generals know the ground realities in Ladakh and even in Kashmir. After disappointing his nation on Ladakh and last February in Balakot, India may try to reignite tension on the Line of Control to boost his public approval ratings which have gone down due to the Covid-19 disaster and massive unemployment and economic meltdown. He is doomed to fail.
—The writer is a freelance columnist from Rawalpindi.
