Crouching Modi, hidden Xi

Unanswered Questions

As the two-month-long tense and violent stand-off on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China seems to be easing through diplomatic means and as several TV channels gloat over the fact that the Chinese have withdrawn 1.5 km from their earlier position, many questions remain unanswered.

Neither the Defence Ministry nor Army Headquarters has informed the country how many kilometres the Chinese had ‘intruded’ into? Perhaps this has become difficult for the Army to state, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the nation with a sense of finality that “no incursion had taken place, nor is there any incursion today, nor has any of our posts been captured”. That makes China’s present withdrawal by 1.5 km even more intriguing!

News channels are now showing that on June 28, Chinese soldiers had occupied and built structures on our side of the LAC but on July 6, those structures and all those trucks had been removed. So, the TV channels, even those peddling the government line, are telling us, “Don’t believe what the PM said, but believe us now!” This is indeed a sorry state of affairs. It’s high time the NSA, Defence Ministry and External Affairs Ministry officials held a joint press conference and told the nation the truth, instead of letting the BJP IT Cell do the job.

When Chinese soldiers killed 20 of our soldiers on June 15, the major occupation of the ruling party and its loyal media channels was to blame the Nehru-Gandhi (Sonia Gandhi) family. Nehru, as usual, was blamed for the fate that has befallen this government for ‘appeasing China’ or for ‘surrendering territory to China’ 60 years ago, while Sonia Gandhi was blamed for diverting funds from the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund to the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation (RGF). Now, an investigation has been ordered into the accounts of RGF and the Indira Gandhi Foundation. This bizarre pre-occupation of the ruling party in demonising Nehru at regular intervals or in talking about corruption of the Congress party seasonally indicates that a huge cover-up is underway. And it’s even more bizarre how the media networks get sucked into this comfort zone of irrelevance. Neither the government nor the Army, nor the media want to tell the nation anything about our biggest skirmish with China since the 1967 clashes at Nathu La and Cho La.

Nobody questions as to whether there was an intelligence failure or when exactly did the Military Intelligence directorate come to know about the massive build-up by the Chinese PLA on their side of the LAC? Was there an incursion by Chinese soldiers on our side, or did we go on to their side? Since when are Indian troops being prevented from patrolling on Finger 4 to Finger 8, north of the Pangong Lake? What is the effect of this territorial loss on Pangong lake? Have we issued an emphatic rebuttal to China’s claim that the entire Galwan Valley belongs to it? Is the withdrawal taking place in all sectors? Is the status quo ante being restored?

The other important question is, why did the Chinese do what they did? Particularly to Prime Minister Modi, who had built up such an excellent rapport with President Xi Jinping in their 18 meetings. Modi should have been able to size up Xi fairly well in all those meetings. What and where did things go wrong? Is this all simply a result of India angering China by building roads and bridges along the LAC?

Modi, Nehru and China

Modi was doing what Nehru did 60 years ago, and China has done to him exactly what it did to Nehru. What Nehru did in 1960-61 was to order our Army to set up checkposts on forward areas of the McMahon Line from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh. These posts were set up to show the flag and tell the Chinese soldiers, “here begins Indian territory”. Because of the poor state of our manpower and military power, these posts were thinly spread and poorly armed; nevertheless, they were told to hold the posts as Nehru believed that the Chinese would not attack us for standing on our side of the border.

Now, India is building a proper infrastructure of support for our forward posts. Since 1962, India has built up both manpower and military power that is vastly superior to what it was then. We have positioned the XIV Corps at Nimu in Ladakh, which can provide enormous air and land power to our forward posts. And Modi, too, thought that the Chinese wouldn’t attack us for building roads on our side of the border. Plus, he had the advantage of knowing President Xi very well on a personal level.

Why did China pick up a fight now? One plausible explanation is the creation of Ladakh as a separate Union Territory last August and Home Minister Amit Shah’s declaration that “We will take back both PoK from Pakistan and Aksai Chin from China”. The government then issued a new political map of India in November 2019 showing the new Union Territories of J&K and Ladakh with Aksai Chin as part of the latter. China issued a strong demarche against this new map but Foreign Minister S Jaishankar told Beijing that it was an “internal administrative arrangement and did not alter our international boundaries”. Interestingly, Nepal, too, had protested against this map claiming that it included several territories belonging to it.

Later, as Defence Minister Rajnath Singh inaugurated an 80-km-long road connecting to the China border at Lipulekh pass, Nepal protested again and initiated action to amend its Constitution to claim territories within Kalapani district and issued a new map showing Lipulekh as its territory.

A new round of cartographic aggression has begun in the region. And in both cases, the bigger neighbour is imposing itself on the smaller one. China seems to have come prepared for the long haul and will bide its time. Modi must realise that summit meetings and personal charm have a limited role in changing either history or geography.

(The writer, a former Cabinet Secretariat official, is presently a Visiting Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi)