If you want peace you must be prepared for war
The threat to India's territorial integrity posed by China and Pakistan is, indeed, very grave and could be ignored only at its peril.
IT WOULD appear ironical that notwithstanding India’s inherent abhorrence for wars and consistent efforts to avoid them, the country has had to, over a period of six decades since independence, engage itself in five wars including the one recently fought at Kargil.
This is, of course, not to talk of Pakistan’s proxy war in Kashmir that the country has continuously been engaged in for the last 20 years. This is, perhaps, the highest number of wars fought by any other country in the world during the same length of time. The question naturally arises as to why this has been so.
The answer to the question is, however, not far to seek. The policy objectives in international relations which every country aims at in pursuance of its national interests may be categorised under either “containment”, aiming at peace through status quo, or “dominance”, seeking change in world order through war if necessary. The policies of ‘containment’ and ‘dominance’, will, therefore, always remain in constant conflict with each other, which forms the root cause of all wars.
The rider, however, is that no country would start a war – no matter what the stakes involved - unless it is convinced that its war making capacity is decisively superior to that of its potential enemy and consequently its victory in the end stands assured. The reason why India has remained continuously embroiled in wars since independence is not just because its policy of “containment” was up against the policy of “dominance” being pursued by two of its neighbours, with the aim of changing its territorial transfiguration, but essentially because it failed to put in place a military deterrent credible enough to dissuade these neighbours from taking recourse to the use of force in their pursuit of such objectives.
The weak military target that India continues to present to its belligerent neighbours tempts them to come at it again and again. It is nothing, perhaps, but India’s history of the medieval period repeating itself. This threat scenario will continue to prevail till India grows militarily to the extent necessary for instilling caution, if not fear, among its enemies before they look to war as an option.
Gravity of the Threat: The threat to India’s territorial integrity posed by China and Pakistan is, indeed, very grave and could be ignored only at its peril. What brings India in direct conflict with China is not the supposed border dispute connected with demarcation of the Mac Mahon Line but the fact that large tracts of Indian Territory, including the whole of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, and parts of Bengal are included in China’s list of “lost territories”, which it has vowed to recover in keeping with its official foreign policy objectives, with Arunachal Pradesh, evidently, as its immediate target.
The optimism expressed by our Prime Minister, Dr Man Mohan Singh, at the end of his three day visit to China in mid January last year, on the ability of the Indian and Chinese leaders to settle the long standing border dispute sooner than later, would, therefore, appear to be an over-simplification of issues involved. Interestingly the Chinese Premier, Mr Wen Jiahao did not give vent to any such sentiments. Who would have known better than him that the dispute between the two countries is not just a simple matter of border adjustments that could be easily sorted out across a conference table in a spirit of give and take but involves a serious case of clash of policy objectives of the two countries?
Apart from launching short successive wars of the 1962 type to gradually nibble into our territory, China has the option of launching a long drawn out war by proxy for attaining its objective. The tribal population adjoining the Indo-Tibetan border are yet to develop strong patriotic links with the rest of the country and the Chinese could easily subvert local loyalties for launching such a war. In all probability the on going Maoist and Naxal insurgencies in eastern India are already being sponsored by China, but even if not so yet, they have the potential for being so converted.
On the other hand the speed at which the political situation is developing in Pakistan, it will, in all probability, not be too long before a Talibanized Pakistan becomes a reality to pose a much graver threat to India than ever before. But even as Pakistan and the Taliban continue to fight each other for supremacy they are likely to combine over the common objective of “liberating” Kashmir. The entry of the Taliban into Pakistan by itself is, therefore, bound to give a big boost to the ongoing proxy war in Kashmir.
The present war on terror launched by the US in combination with Pakistan is not likely to be of any help to us as the US seems to have acquiesced to Pakistan’s categorisation of the terrorists into good and bad ones. The good ones being those engaged as “freedom fighters” in Jammu and Kashmir and the bad ones being those engaged in fighting the US-Pak duo. The “good ones” – and they are in pretty large numbers – we shall have to fight on our own.
The arrangements that India has made for meeting the twin threat from China and Pakistan would appear to be far from adequate. While India suffers from a tremendous handicap of the gaping disparity vis-à-vis the Chinese forces along the Indo-Tibetan border, against Pakistan it seems to be maintaining a balance of power with just a precarious tilt in its favour. So precarious, indeed that it is capable of being miscalculated and misunderstood either way. The effectiveness of India’s deterrent against Pakistan may be judged from the revelations made by Mr Altaf Gauhar, Pakistan’s Secretary Information in the 1960s, asserting that all Pakistan’s wars against India “were conceived and launched on the basis of one assumption: that the Indians are too cowardly and ill organised to offer any effective military response which could pose a threat to Pakistan”.
What seems to be coming in the way of our developing such a deterrent is, apparently, the colossal effort that the nation would be required to make it credible in keeping with the magnitude of the existing threat – particularly from China. Evidently too many people in the country seem to think that it is beyond our capacity to match the military might of China. Consequently either easier solutions to the problem are being sought or threat is being suitably modified to keep it within the ambit of convenience.
There is no rationale behind this psyche though. What does China have which India doesn’t? India has an equally booming economy and is bestowed with a vast reservoir of the best fighting material in the world. Besides the efforts required to meet the Chinese threat may not be as colossal as imagined. By raising its defence expenditure from the present 2 per cent of our Gross National Product to 7 per cent like that of China, India could, perhaps, stand on the same pedestal of military power as occupied by its rival. What is lacking amongst us is, perhaps, the ‘Will’ to gird up our loins and catch the bull by its horns.
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