Home and the World
Sometimes a change in perspective helps us see newer worlds – and, occasionally, some nuances even in the comfortingly familiar. Twirling the kaleidoscope every once in while gives you many more patterns to gaze at in wonderment. Out here, I hope to see the world through Indian eyes, and, occasionally, provide from my current station in Hong Kong an outside-in perspective on all things Indian. If I don’t go cross-eyed in the process, I’m sure to have loads of fun. And I hope you will too.
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From the Indian side, there have been articulations by defence analysts about the inevitability of an attack by China on India by 2012 (report here).
And on the Chinese side, there has in recent times been a barrage of criticisms and veiled warnings to India. For instance, this recent editorial in the nationalistic Global Times says, bluntly:
And this report, also in the Global Times, claims that 90% of Chinese people who participated in an online poll believe that "India threatens China's security".
More on the same lines here, here and here.
Last week, I interviewed Prof Shen Dingli of Fudan University, one of China's foremost authorities on China's nuclear program, and I asked him about such jingoistic media reports. His response is here.
The Sino-Indian border dispute relates to two tracts of land: a 90,000 sq km tract on the eastern wing of the Himalayas, which broadly corresponds to Arunachal Pradesh and which has been under Indian administration since the 1940s, but which China calls 'South Tibet' and claims as its territory; and a 43,000 sq km tract of cold desert in the Aksai Chin region in the western Himalayas, which is under Chinese control but which India says was "illegally occupied", including 5,000 sq km that was handed over to China by Pakistan.
The details of the dispute are very complex, but rather than recount them in merciless minutiae here, I'll merely refer you to some of my earlier articles, analyses and interviews on the subject. Since in any case, nothing much has changed on the ground, they still hold good.
'Friends of China' like to claim that China has resolved its border disputes with all its other neighbours, and if there is no progress on the Sino-Indian border dispute, it is all India's fault. This is patently untrue: China still has ongoing territorial disputes with Japan (details here), Vietnam (details here) and the Philippines (details here), and, of course, a bit of "unfinished business" with Taiwan.
If you want to know how deep Chinese nationalism (on among other things, Arunachal Pradesh) runs, watch this Chinese-language video (called '2009: Go China!'). In it, rural Chinese schoolchildren- many of them wearing the red scarves of the Young Pioneer movement - recite an over-the-top jingoistic poem, which lashes out at French President Nicolas Sarkozy's "dirty tricks", at "pathetic Europe" and "western values falling like snowstorm", and resolve to "step ruthlessly over all anti-China forces". At 1.12, a boy recites: "Da wang de suona xiang zai xi ma la ya"- "The suona (a musical instrument) plays aloud in the Tawang area of the Himalayas."
Given all this jingoism and war-mongering, the very fact that the two sides from China and India are meeting - even if there is little to show by way of progress after all these years - perhaps counts as a forward movement. As Churchill said on another occasion, "to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war"...
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On a lighter note, if all else fails, the border dispute between India and China could perhaps end in the same way that the "nuclear standoff" between India and Pakistan will end (courtesy, this bit of incisive analysis from Onion New Network)...
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