Trumped India?
1962. Chinese soldiers stream through Bomdila. The Indians, unprepared and ill-equipped, retreat, humiliatingly.
1971. Narasimha Rao writes that it was the first victory that India had had in 5,000 years. Our neighbour to the west, distraught and heart-broken, without once looking into the mirror, vows eternal revenge on the eternal enemy. Its very raison d’etre becomes that. It almost managed to stoke the Khalistan movement beyond control in 1984, and has had Kashmir on the boil ever since.
9/11. The reigning world king kong goes nuts. It launches a crusade of sorts- anywhere, just about anywhere: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria. It keeps getting knocked down, but keeps getting back up, more punch drunk with each fall than before. In the meantime, the challenger keeps building itself up.
By now, China is the reigning world king kong. Building the one life, one road initiative across Asia to Europe.
Creating the China Pakistan Economic Corridor. The toppled champion? Fighting lost causes over and over again. One Bin Laden goes, another Al Baghdadi emerges. Al Baghdadi goes; another, more fierce version will emerge.
The CPEC is a fool’s endeavour, thinks India. But China is pouring sixty billion dollars into it. And it’s not those klutzy Pakistanis who are building it;
the efficient Chinese are.
Whatever the Chinese touch nowadays turns into gold. Think back to the opening ceremony of their Olympics. Think now to their stealth fighters, their aircraft carriers, their nuclear submarines, their search engines, their smart phones. You get the picture?
Indira Gandhi forged a bond with the Soviets in 1971. Sure, she later started buying French Mirage fighters to the consternation of the Russians, but in adversity, as in success, she knew how far to go and no further. Rao and Vajpayee cut our Russian umbilical cord, rooting for Americans as natural allies. In the end, India’s best, and perhaps only true friend, has turned out to be Israel. Those cozy walks on warm beaches must be so uplifting.
As Gandhi said, India is the only land that Hindus have. They may flock to greener pastures, but India is the only land they can return to. The only land we have something in common religion-wise is Nepal. See where that relationship is. The only lands we have something in common culturally are Pakistan and Bangladesh. Note where those relationships are.
Since 1971, we seem to have lost our bearings. But Pakistan has remained single-minded in its ferociousness to disembowel us. Apart from what it did to our Punjab, it wrested Afghanistan away from the Soviets to launch the first Kashmir jihad in 1989.
Now it holds almost all the aces in Afghanistan. The Americans know it, the Chinese know it, the Russians know it. Its sole purpose: to keep India out of Afghanistan.
And while it has always been ruled by the military, the Pakistani military has pulled a coup with CPEC. The Pakistani military is babied from cradle to grave. The best minds in Pakistan join it. Making biscuits and civilian roads does not dull its fighting appetite. After 1971, it decided that come what may, it would defer to the Chinese. China is surrounded by antagonists on all sides — India, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the US navy. So the Chinese were looking for a friend. In Pakistan, they found one.
We though spurned the Russians and cannot seem to make the Americans bed us. Do we have any treaty with the Yanks? No. But Japan does. Still, Japan is on edge over North Korea, not fully convinced that the Americans will honour their obligations in case of war with North Korea and its master, China. So why do we suppose that, beyond idle talk, the Yanks will help us.
Sushma Swaraj rails in Parliament that world is behind us in our Sikkim standoff with the Dragon Kingdom. Really? Can you name one country that has come out volubly on our side ? No one today is in the mood to take on the Reds.
An Indian diplomat has just been quoted in a reputed international publication as saying that our economy is growing faster than China’s and our population is about to overtake theirs. The economy-bit, I’m not so sure. There has been enough discussion in India how the methodology of gauging the economy was changed in 2014, making the GDP growth rate jump over two points. The population-bit I am sure about, but is that something to be proud of?
The government has just claimed seven crore new jobs being created in two years. Again, this seems a very questionable claim, but this is a government of hype, in which bear hugs tend to substitute for realpolitik.
How can India get out of the hole it finds itself in? First, we must stop obsessing over the US. If a bird is killed in Pittsburgh, it makes news in India. Second, we must stop obsessing over Pakistan. Anybody obsessed with a rat can grow no bigger than a cat. Third, we must rebuild our alliance with Russia. Russia is flush with oil and state-of-the-art arms. Putin is a strong leader who has restored the confidence of the Russians after Gorbachev and Yeltsin destroyed it.
Fourth, we must pay much more attention to China. Almost hardly news from China makes it to our front pages, except when some of their soldiers stir on the border. We must study Chinese, send more students to China, invite more students from China; in short, do almost everything possible to make China our friend, and wrest it away from Pakistan, who will never become our friend. Having Japan, South Korea, the US, Vietnam as so-called friends will not help us any against China.
Fifth, we must increase the size of our military. Roughly speaking, the Chinese and the Pakistanis have two million soldiers between them and we about a million. The disparity is there for all to see. A career as a military officer is today almost at the bottom of students’ choices. It must be made a career of top five choice.
The powers that be in India today are: the babu, the neta, the crony capitalist, the media, the judiciary, and finally the military brass. An unholy nexus exists between them. It has to be broken at all costs if India has to survive. The old man with the stick got us a whiff of freedom for 70 years after centuries of slavery. The powers that be must promise to reform themselves, otherwise they themselves will go into servitude sooner than later.
Finally, only about one percent of people in India who should pay income tax do so. In Indira Gandhi’s time, the top taxable rate was in the nineties. Today it is in the twenties or thirties, almost half of what is in the US. Still, almost no one fesses up. Evading taxes has become fashionable. But once again, if the government doesn’t get money to invest in the military and infrastructure, we are just signing away our future. To future slavery.
Author
Sunil Sharan
Sunil Sharan writes extensively on geopolitics, energy and South Asia. His opinion pieces have appeared regularly in the Washington Post, Fortune, Canada's .
