Is #China Testing #India’s Resolve?

China has gone overtly aggressive against India.

Despite aggressive PLA actions over the years, India usually downplayed them terming them ‘transgressions’ & differing perceptions since the LAC is not demarcated. http://www.indiandefencereview.com/news/is-china-testing-indias-resolve/

Concurrent to this was news of Chinese build up and movement in the Galwan Valley of Ladkh, where India had to rush additional troops and has had to ‘dig down’ and occupy defensive positions as China is upping its military presence in the region.

The PLA often resorts to aggressive actions under instructions from Beijing. China has no respect for boundaries & changes claims whenever it suits them. In Arunachal Pradesh, China expanded its long-time illegal claim from Tawang Plateau to entire Arunachal suddenly in 2005.

Despite obdurately aggressive actions by PLA over the years, India has generally downplayed these incidents terming them “transgressions” and differing perceptions since the LAC is not demarcated.

In contrast, China always insists its troops are on the Chinese side, as they even did when PLA intruded 16 km deep in Indian Territory in area of Raki Nala in Eastern Ladakh during 2013 when Chinese Premier Li Keqiang was visiting India.

Nepal’s new map follows China’s patent of cartographic aggression and has obviously been issued on China’s behest. To hide its complicity China gave a statement out of the blues that Kalapani is bilateral issue between Nepal and India that both sides should resolve peacefully.

With adverse global reaction post release of COVID-19 from Wuhan, the Chinese leadership appears to have gone berserk, either hoping to take advantage of capturing territories while the world battles the virus or to deflect the attention of Chinese public from internal dissent.

No doubt the Chinese regime is overconfident of its military & economic strength but by slicing off India’s North-East, its policy makers & media are hallucinating. Such delusions are curable by reading up history.

Just five years after China’s invasion of NEFA (now Arunachal Pradesh), India wacked the Chinese so hard in Sikkim in 1967, that they prefer to not to mention it.

Second example is the Chinese intrusion in Sumdorong Chu region in 1986-87 where India’s massive response by Operation ‘Falcon’ resulted on the PLA scurrying back. Tibet Military District Commanders were sacked.

If the Chinese regime is so eager for conflict, so be it.

At the same time Indian must remember Mao’s dictum that power flows from the barrel of the gun, which was reiterated by Li Peng, the butcher of Tiananmen, and successors down the line. Soft power if not backed by hard power is ineffective no matter how much diplomacy is used.