yesterday i wrote about the importance of prc to india and the necessity for india to have good relations with prc. today will try and examine how india can force prc to its terms if it ever were to come to that. as of date prc has no reasons to listen to india be it on the border incursions or the tibet issue for all our successive governments have done is meekly surrender to the thought that prc can not be taken head on. the key to any negotiation is to make your own position strong and then create a situation where the other party is forced to come to the negotiation table, so one can only gain if the concerned party negotiates from a position of strength.
And how do we create this situation ?
A conventional confrontation with PRC can be tilted in our favour if we play defensive.
Unfortunately, an Indian offensive against PRC can prove to be a suicide, unless an exceedingly brilliant strategy can be devised.
At the current stage Pakistan can be annihilated, because they lack strategic depth. They have no where to escape, the pincers can be tightened around them and with Afghanistan and Iran warming up to us, depending on their will, complete encirclement is a possibility.
Not so with China. They can always retreat, reinforce, and strike back.
We'll be stuck like Napoleon was in his Russian invasion.
to begin with one has to understand why we are in a situation where we are. one big reason that one comes across is the personality cult that existed in india in the nehru era, he then was hailed as one of the biggest statesman ever and he always thought that by building personal rapport with leaders across the globe he could solve any given problem at hand and never thought of having a strong army and war as a tool of diplomacy. the result of this rather faulty policy saw our land being occupied by the pla when nehru always thought that panchsheel and the slogan hindi chini bhai bhai could win the hearts of the chinese leadership and nehru completely blinded by the aura of his policies could not see the writing on the wall even when there were clear signals emerging from prc that they could attack india. this just shows how poor a vision and a clear defeatist attitude nehru had on certain issues.
I couldn't agree more.
He lived in an idealistic world. His desire for peace was clearly visible in the Panchsheel agreement, his hyper pursuit of NAM.
Unfortunately, the world was not ready for peace.
And we got back-stabbed, resulting in a humiliating defeat. By the time the Indian Army was mobilized for a counter-attack, China retreated. They had come to prove a point, and they did.
today prc has no need to go in for a direct confrontation with india because if they were to do that then their ambitions of being a hyper power also diminish big time. they played it rather smartly and post 1962 they propped up pakistan to tackle their common enemy india. today's pakistan acts as a proxy to prc which has squarely been used to further its agenda, and this has gone to the extent that prc became a major proliferator of nuke technology to pakistan, the missile technology in collaboration with dprk was handed over to pak, and much much more. the first thing for india to concentrate is pakistan, some believe we can help pakistan and then hope some sanity prevails there and they make friendly gestures to us, this is too good a dream to come true for there are too many vested interests to let any such thing happen. the one solution to this is make sure pakistan is so busy in its internal problems that they do not have time to think external stuff, eventually for this strategy to be successful disintegration of paksian is a must and in a way that the new governments formed in each state are dependent on india and they have valid reasons to have good relations with us. if this front were to be neutralised this way then that would be a big victory for india and a shocking defeat to prc and its policy of string of pearls as all other such countries that want to be a part of any such strategy against india would be very wary of taking a plunge into any such act. this would make prc very jittery.
Hmmm....
You can make a Pakistani do anything but friendship with India.
I don't see a Pakistan falling anytime soon. Yes, they will become a land of chaos. But when they reach the breaking point, US/NATO will march in from the west, stabilize the country, form a govt. , give them trillions of aid, reconstruct their Army with their most modern weapons and lo! Their stands Pakistan again ! More powerful than ever !
Its a necessary evil Ritesh, it cannot be destroyed.
Jinnah didn't work so hard for nothing.
US and russia become very important factors to this solution of tackling prc. it has to be drilled real down in the mind sets of the think tanks of the US that prc a communist nation is a major challenge to the very existence of the US and till the time this is not done successfully till then it will get very difficult for us to get US in containing and tackling prc. a fear psychosis has to be created and they have to be continuously reminded about the past atrocities of prc and their ever growing ambitions of more land acquisitions. india further needs to get russia on board, they have to be made to understand that a hyper power prc can never be in their interest and what if tomorrow once prc reaches that level they start claiming the whole of siberia for its huge natural resources or by changing the demography of that area by means of illegal migration and then cause a situation of internal unrest. if we are successful in getting both the US and russia reach a common ground on containing prc the position of prc dramatically decreases and our stake increases so does our position as a regional and global player which would further threaten prc from its current strong position.
What you are missing is... US cannot function without China.
80% of what they use comes from China. Yes, there are alternatives. But none as profitable as China.
Secondly, China is what balances US & Russia. And this is what makes them so important in the Asian power struggle.
Both Russia and US need China for their own reasons and both will be at a loss with its loss.
With a powerful communist China, Russia remains happy with the spread of Communism because Russia is no more the Soviet Union it used to be and it doesn't have the military might to safeguard communism.
the most obvious way to tackle them directly is to concentrate on our military build up and create it to such an extent that prc feels threatened not only qualitatively but also quantitatively, along with this their economy has to be contained, probably create a situation with the help of other leading powers where they are in a situation of utter chaos internally and the very communism they have thrived on gets challenged by the people of that country. all this is a very heady mix of cocktail which once unleashed from all sides creates a serious panic situation for the prc and we would be able to bring them down on their knees. once we can do this then our diplomats and our politicians alike can go ahead on the rhetoric of claiming back all our territory that has been occupied by prc as also the tibet issue and then force them to a negotiation table.
PS : we always have the option of going ahead with a war with them but today there will be massive causalities and we need to come to a situation where our loss is the least and still be are able to achieve our objectives that we set out to achieve in the first place.
I agree with the economic stranglehold but China functions on an evolved system of communism. It has succeeded where the USSR failed.
China is playing its cards very cleverly. Unlike, the sudden massive and un-sustainable Military spendings like that of USSR, China is maintaining a constant increase of military spendings along with up-gradation of existing technologies.
We have a very high budget too if looked from an independent perspective but the manpower crunch becomes a serious problem. At the end of the day, quantity is the best quality.
50 Abrams might thrash 50 T-90s, but when they are surrounded by 200 T-90s they can't do much but perish.
The only way to counter China is to build a military infrastructure powerful enough to deter an attack combined with a diplomatic "maskirova" as achieved by Indira Gandhi in '71.
