India’s Stands Firmly On The LAC, PLA’s Bravado Has Proved Counter Productive
With its continuous reckless moves to aggravate the LAC dispute with India, China is now facing a economic decoupling not only from India but from many other countries. Initially due to its reckless behaviour, China let the Wuhan Virus spread all over the World, making it as one of the worst pandemic seen by the humankind. Though now it claims that it is no more the epicenter of the world with respect to Wuhan Virus, the virus has shifted to other countries.
Even before the dust could settle on the Galwan episode, Chinese troops again illegally crossed the Line of Actual Control (LAC), they even fired warning shots at the Indian border Posts in Chusul Sector.
China it seems think only in business terms. They are now probably thinking that after a steep drop of 23.9 percent GDP in the quarter of April-June due to full lock down in India, the country is in a vulnerable position. So for the PLA this must be the best opportunity to grab some more Indian territory. Due to already slowing down economic growth, not to mention the potentially disastrous consequences of a war, in the Chinese view, India will not be in a position to oppose Chinese land grabbing.
So the PLA got a shock of their life to find that, India is not only fully deployed but more than a match for the four Chinese divisions which have concentrated in Chinese Occupied Ladhak and Chinese Occupied Tibet.
The India Tibetan border has remained a conundrum left over from history. After over 40 years of generally peaceful condition on Indo China LAC, China has recently shown its intent to provoke India. Domestically speaking, Chinese Communist Party is unable to handle rising dissent because of extreme slow down in manufacturing as a result of Wuhan virus. Perhaps the leadership is willing to use the border issue to deflect domestic attention from Beijing’s outright failure to contain the economic slow down.
In the meantime, Beijing may ponder the current international environment as an advantageous one for it to antagonize India in order to gain some bargaining chips. The US, Japan, Australia and India have rolled out strategies or policies trying to enhance cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region and put a break on the Chinese hegemony. This may have contributed to China’s intent to take riskier moves against India on the LAC and bet on opportunism.
However, it is obvious that China has chosen the wrong path. Leaving behind the primary and urgent task of containing the virus, it now wants to trigger a conflict with India which it clearly has zero possibility to win. In fact now there is a bright possibility that both Tibet and Xinjiang may attain their independence.
As a populous country, India has developed into a major emerging economy in Asia and accumulated fair growth momentum in recent years, which, may receive a set back but this time China is likely to be devastated and may even unravel into smaller entities.
India now has a solid industrial foundation, robust economic structure or abundant Young human resources, With the flight of multinationals from China it is inevitable that India will be rising.
