Dharamshala, 25th July: Right now, there is a lot going on in the Indian subcontinent. A lot of it has to do with China in some way. Maoists’ overt move towards Beijing was the main reason for Nepal’s Communist government’s recent disintegration, prompting Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli to leave office. In the Chumbi Valley, the Chinese are building military barracks to challenge India’s red line drawn during the Doklam stalemate there in 2017 (this valley stretches north from Siliguri, between Bhutan and Sikkim, onto the Tibetan plateau).
U.S. troops have unexpectedly left Afghanistan after a decades-long fight against Islamist terror groups that achieved no substantial political aims. The Pakistani Taliban, who now control the vast majority of Afghanistan, is quickly filling that vacuum. In the Hindu Kush, analysts believe that China could ride on the coattails of Islamabad to make strategic advances.
India pressure China to stop the development of an all-weather road and rail link through Pakistan Occupied Kashmir in order to acquire secure access to the Arabian Sea via the Khunjerab Pass. On the Tibetan plateau, the Chinese are building a rail link over thousands of kilometers to Chengdu in Sichuan Province, China, in case their Khunjerab aspirations fail.
India and China are no longer pals after a century of turmoil. Unexpected, unilateral Chinese military buildup in Ladakh and Aksai Chin in April/May of last year led to the fatal Galwan clash in June 2020, which resulted in the death of a dozen people. Unresolved border means full divisions of both armies are now facing each other.
A ‘two-and-a-half-front war’ looms so large for India that few op-eds in major media can end their arguments without mentioning it (the half being the Islamist insurgencies they anticipate furious escalation of, in Jammu and Kashmir, if war breaks out). On the contrary, a recent article in an Indian publication predicted that the Chinese could invade and occupy Arunachal Pradesh this winter. What matters is that the subcontinent is poised at the cusp of a new era. Due to this, the Indian public is very interested in learning more about what the Chinese are doing militarily around our borders.
Image Source: newsdeal.in