WHY CHINA IS DOING WHAT IT IS DOING AND DELHI IS DOING LITTLE

Noted defence analyst BHARAT KARNAD suggests measures that New Delhi should take to deal with Beijing

- BHARAT KARNAD

The press reported that on May 23, 2020, the Army Chief, General MM Naravane, briefed Raksha Mantri Rajnath Singh about the state of affairs in the Ladakh sector of the Line of Actual Control he visited in the previous days. That the National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat attended this briefing suggests the situation is more worrisome than the army has let on.

Indeed, in a short interview carried by The Indian Express on May 14, 2020, Naravane was complacent, pooh-poohing the violently intrusive tack the PLA has taken in asserting China’s territorial rights to the detriment of India’s claims. “All such incidents are managed by established mechanisms where-in local formations from both sides resolve issues mutually as per established protocols and strategic guidelines given by the PM after the Wuhan and Mallaparam summits,” he averred. He clarified, helpfully, that such confrontations arise due to the unresolved “differing perceptions of the alignment of boundaries”. To tamp down on speculation regarding the potential for such incidents to snowball into active hostilities, he added that the Chinese aggression in the Pangong Tso Lake region of eastern Ladakh and on the Sikkim border in the Naku La section (on May 5-6) are not “correlated nor do they have any connection with other global or local activities”. In other words, that these were one-off incidences with no connecting policy skin and that the Indian media would do well not to play them up.