The Proponents Of Great Game At Their Best : They Are Advising India To Inflict A Shock Military Defeat To PLA To End Xi Jinping’s Dream
The British before reluctantly leaving the Subcontinent played a major hand of their Great Game and ensured a bitter division of India. For two hundred years they had done their best to destroy India, economically, militarily and Socially.
However after 1947 though India kept moving ahead, its eyes also remained fixed on its past in order to restore the Pride and élan of thousands of years of its great culture. So the result was that economic progress retained a slow pace. It saved India from rushing headlong and aping the West in everything. Due this non embracing of the West, they display their anger now by stating “ India’s societal progress have been rising, but only from catastrophically low to abysmally low.”
So the Great Gamers, when they found nothing, they are talking about change in the per capita income. They forget that that in the first place it was the British who looted all the wealth in trillion of pounds ( Subramaniam Swamy has calculated this to the last cent ) and now when they themselves are sinking to the lower rungs of International pecking order, they are trying to be sarcastic on India.
Unhappy over the Indian policies that kept India rushing into Western arms, the West is now blaming the policies for keping much of the Indian population poorly compensated, inadequately educated and badly housed.
Guardian says that When the doors of the UK were open to Commonwealth citizens and hundreds of thousands of those from Pakistan or the Caribbean were flooding Britain, the incomprehensibly difficult path towards a right as fundamental as a passport ensured that far fewer citizens of India could make that journey. Much of the migration was from locations in Africa, where some of the rulers destroyed their own economies by expelling the Indian community, sometimes with great cruelty, as in Idi Amin’s Uganda.
Well United Kingdom or whatever is left of it, should be happy that more Indians did not go to UK or by now it would have become an overseas territory of India. After brexit, UK has the option to apply for a Statehood within the Indian Union, later on it may have just a district status of say Punjab.
Next the Guardian has the gall to blame the Indian Freedom Fighters by stating that “ The national leadership of the world’s most populous democracy, failed to keep the subcontinent united when the British left, and after handing over to a hostile country the strategically essential territory since known as PoK, those in authority not merely welcomed but facilitated the PLA’s conquest of Tibet in 1950 by standing by in silence “.
Does Guardian think that even by now Indians are not aware of the partition scheme of the British and how the British led Gilgit Scout maneuvered to hand over POK to Pakistan. Also they better not talk about Tibet.
In the 1990s, when the USSR collapsed ( West did play a role in it ), India supported them by infusing about $9 billion (in 1993 values), the only country to do so. It was not only because the USSR stood by India when the US and the UK joined hands to wrest Kashmir for Pakistan, and assisted India in building up its defence infrastructure against both China and Pakistan. Later during 1971, it was USSR which helped India to keep both USA and China at bay, while it liberated Bangladesh.
Also it is the result of that monetary help to Russia, that they were able to develop the SU 30 and we have the world class SU30MKI, the mainstay of the IAF which keeps all kinds of adversaries at bay.
So even if in the eyes of the West, Moscow may have changed beyond recognition from what it was before the meltdown under Gorbachev, Lutyens Logic remains solid. Thus far this logic has rightly kept India from jumping into the lap of USA and become a lackey like the UK. Russians may or may not hate the Chinese, that will be their problem but we will continue to maintain a Indo -Russian bilateral friendship.
The reality is that the China and the US are locked in an existential battle as potent as was the Cold War 1.0 contest between the USSR and the US. Shabby diplomacy towards the Russian Federation from President Bill Clinton onwards has convinced Vladimir Putin (easily among the best strategic minds of the century) that the surest path to maintain stability is to have proper Sino Russian alliance and a Indo Russian Alliance separately.
India too maintains bilateral alliances with others on similar lines to ensure a multipolar world and not the West versus the Communists.
The Chinese have, since the early years of the Xi Jinping period, understood that there exists a fundamental tension between the US and China, and has acted accordingly in practice, while sending out signals designed to mask the reality. Which is that for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the contest taking place with the US is similar to the 1930s’ protracted battle for survival against the Japanese Empire.
Clinton was obsessed with Europe but President Barack Obama turned his pivot to Asia from the earlier obsession. Any such pivot would place an alliance with India being an essentiality for Washington. This was recognised both by Ashton Carter, Condoleezza Rice and Susan Rice, the very capable associates of Presidents Bush and Obama, and into the Trump Presidency by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Whereas the Biden campaign’s current foreign policy guru, Antony Blinken, seems to have retained his Euro-focused blinkers from the days of the Clintons. The proliferation in Team Biden of such rearview mirror enthusiasts is why the Chinese Communist Party leadership is eager for a Biden victory, despite inspired media reports that Donald Trump is the favoured choice. Whatever be the other faults of the CCP leadership, masochism is not among them. Among other vulnerabilities (in the context of Cold War 2.0) is the ubiquity of Pakistani-Americans having close ties to the Islamabad embassy, whose effective task has been to convince the campaign that China was a friend and that the real threat to US values came from India.
However, if Trump was a disappointment to the Chinese Zhongnanhai, a President Biden is also likely to be, given the cascading flow of information about the activities of the Sino-Russian alliance that are designed to thwart Washington’s security and other interests. Even Antony Blinken is likely to be less deferential towards China and less dismissive of India as an essential US partner than recent pronouncements show.
President Xi is moving ahead at speed to actualize the China Dream. In this process, there is frequent recourse to the Zero Sum methods used by European countries in previous centuries. According to the Xi Doctrine, the entire South China Sea (not to mention the East China Sea) belongs to China, as does the entire Himalayan massif.
So China thought of continuing with its tactics of nibbling of territories at by the PRC from India, Nepal and Bhutan.
China also thought that it would threaten to block Indian Information Technology companies from servicing domestic companies, or much of the pharma industry. At the sane time it thought that it will continue to have unrestricted access to its own manufactures, even at the cost of hundreds of thousands of small enterprises and artisans in India.
Then it did the un thinkable and attacked 16 BIHAR, forgetting the fact that it was 7000 Biharis ( out of 12000 british Army ) who had ensured that Manchus lost the Opium War in 1840s. Thus came the Modi apps ban (and presumably other like steps). Now Indian meta data would be not be flowing seamlessly to Chinese entities anymore. Indeed, the PRC’s trade surplus with India which has jumped several times during just the past decade, and has reached a level that ought to have been recognised as unsustainable years ago, will now start going down and later will have a freefall.
Apart from data and the related field of telecom, other sectors where Chinese companies are being booted out from the Indian market are electric power generation and infrastructure.
The effect on markets of President Xi’s use of the PLA to win territory in pursuit of the China Dream has been devastating for a change. Here again until the reality of Cold War 2.0 hit US policymakers in earnest in 2017, the US exported dollars to buy Chinese goods, which money was then returned to the US through US Treasury Debt purchases and other such pathways. Since at least 2016 Xi Jinping has sought to replace the US dollar with the Ren Min Bi (RMB) in international transactions, and has had significant success thus far.
However now the Guardian is trying to explain as to why India should join the USA bandwagon blindly. It tries to decipher the Chinese philosophy to prove its point. The trajectory now being taken by the PRC resembles that sketched out by Lin Biao in his essay “Long Live the Victory of the Peoples War”, published in 1965. In it, Marshal Lin Biao followed Mao Zedong Thought in forecasting that the “villages” of the world (i.e. the poor South) would in time overcome the “cities (ie the rich North) The deepening separation between China-centric supply chains and those that follow the lead of the US is resulting in a bunching together of the poorer “South” with China, including some countries in the south of Europe, such as Greece. The North (as well as countries with high GDP, or on the way to such an outcome) are increasingly allying with the US.
Given the leeway that the PLA is being given in the framing of policy in China, the chances for kinetic situations are rising. Taiwan is an obvious location, with the US, Japan and other countries certain to deploy military assets for its protection, in case an attack is launched by Beijing across the straits. Another is the South China Sea, which is being sought to be converted into a PRC lake.
The Himalayan boundaries is another such flash point. After Dokalam crisis and now the Galwan incident, the West is sure that a defeat for the PRC in a land contest along the Himalayas or in the South China Sea or Taiwan Straits may have the same impact on the PRC as the defeat of the Russian fleet at Tsushima in 1905 proved to be for the future of the Czarist regime. Expectations of Chinese invulnerability have been built up to such a level …….by the Western journalists themselves. Have they covered the 1967 bashing the PLA received at Nathu La in 1967 or the turning back of the PLAN flotilla during Maldives Crisis ………..that such a setback would severely impact the credibility and hence support for the CCP regime.
President Xi has relied on his diplomats to ensure (1) that the countries along China’s southern and eastern periphery do not unite but face the PRC singly and in particular that (2) an alliance does not form with the objective of presenting a united front against the PLA, should the need arise in any of the vulnerable theatres.
All for One and One for All is a nightmare scenario for planners in Beijing, especially if the …..mix includes its existential foe, the US.
Geopolitical plates are indeed moving in a tectonic fashion, and the Guardian article wants that India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi makes full use of the synergies released by Cold War 2.0, by joining USA in a military alliance with USA.
Sorry unlike pre 2014, now Lutyens view of the World is not from New Yorks tallest buildings but from the Qutab Minar. Whatever is best for India will be done but we will chart out and maintain our own International policy.
