It is no secret that Asia faces a trilateral fight which has global dimensions and regional implications. Should the world look toward the coming war between India and China or should it prepare for a multipolar planet? A set of Subsuper powers makes the triangle very complex. In three dimensions this becomes a complicated pyramid.During the Bush era the United States decided it could no longer rely on a regional triangle with one ally, one competitor and one neutral third party.

The Bush Administration therefore tried to become allies with two countries to keep the third one neutral. The Obama policiy run by Hillary Clinton has turned the Bush policy on its head. Instead of building a nexus with Bharat against China, Hillary Clinton has chosen to build a relationship with China. Delhi is the odd man out. The Times of India in a recent article commented on the growing feeling in Delhi that the Bush days are over. No amount of rhetoric from the likes of Bruce Reidel can change the new realities in Asia.

Rupee News has published several articles on this subject. Now the Indian Defense Weekly confirms the fears of Delhi about Beijing. Mr. Bharat Verma is a Hindu Mahasabah extremist strategist who has repeatedly called for the destruction of Pakistan and war against China. The issue is not his extremist views. The issue is that journals like the Indian Defense Review publish his claptrap. Obviously the growth of Beijing has rattled the cage of the Delhi politicians and military men.

A leading defence expert has projected that China will attack India by 2012 to divert the attention of its own people from “unprecedented” internal dissent, growing unemployment and financial problems that are threatening the hold of Communists in that country.

“China will launch an attack on India before 2012. There are multiple reasons for a desperate Beijing to teach India the final lesson, thereby ensuring Chinese supremacy in Asia in this century,” Bharat Verma, Editor of the Indian Defence Review, has said. WSJ

The rise of China threatens Japan, and makes the Bharatis nervous. There are many possible scenarios on the global scene. Indiaus, Chindia, or Chinapak or Uspak? Are the zero-sum games of the Cold War over? India vs. China: who is winning? Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro’s have rebutted the rosy scenarios painted by Peter Engardio’s Chindia. The seminal book called “The Coming Conflict with China (1997)” describes a nighmare scenario for Asia. He  foresees disasters just around the corner. As Beijing prepares for the “Chinese Century“, many questions are unanswered. The end of an era, the shrinking superpower, the emerging quad led by China.

Rajiv Sikri in an interesting book on Bharti strategy discusses the flaws of the Delhi’s thinking and its closeness to Washington. Bharat kep away from the USA during its reign as the preeminent Superpower. Bharat joined Washington at the tail end of its supermacy.

incompatibility between the American objective of maintaining a unipolar world order and India’s desire to be one of the poles of a fresh multipolar system. Washington expects Delhi’s foreign policies to be “congruent” with its interests, but this is not feasible in every region, since the two countries have numerous divergent goals. Sikri correctly rues Indian policymakers’ “outdated assumption that the US is destined to continue its overall global domination and therefore, India has no option but to get closer to it”.India’s quest for autonomy Challenge and Strategy. Rethinking India’s Foreign Policy by Rajiv Sikri. Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia

The conventional wisdom globally is that Pakistan is China’s Israel. China is the dominant power in Asia and increasingly it looks that Bharat will remain an “also ran”. Certainly Harvard analysts like Paragh Khanna seem to think so. He says Delhi has missed the boat. Depite a lot of rhetoric emanating from Delhi the Slumdog power has been unable to challenge the Chinese moves in Kashmir, Tibet, Lanka, Mayanmar, Thailand, Bangladesh, Gwader, Tehran, Korea, or Africa.

Nehru had tried to wrest control of Tibet from China. It has failed to do so and a few years back Delhi acknowledged the suzerainty of Beijing over Lasha. However Bharat never loses as opportunity to stir up trouble for China in Tibet and thinks of Tibet as its strategic depth–a way to destroy and balkanize the Chinese republic.. Bharati catatonia about China’s intentions are based on it policies of intervention in all her neighbors, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Thailand, Mayanmar, Maldives and of course Pakistan.

Much is going on behind the scenes and on the ground along the 4,057-kilometer-long McMohan Line, the British demarcated ephemeral line in the sand that roughly demarcates the borders between the “Union of Indian states” called “Bharat” and the Middle Kingdom called “China“.

The Indian army has predicted a war with its nuclear-armed neighbor China by 2017 as Beijing continues to strengthen its military muscle. Press TV

The world is prophesying a Chinese Century. Are Delhi’s statements about China meant to appease Washington and get US arms, or is the threat perception real?  It is however pedagogical to study this phenomenon.  Bharat has three major issues with China.

1. It has border disputes with China in Aksai Chin, Arunchal Pradesh and along the old McMohan Line.
2. China’s rising military strength threatens Delhi’s analysts.
3. China’s near abroad in the Indian Ocean, Pakistan, and Afghanistan seem to scare some in Delhi.

Bharat (aka India) seems obsessed with the so called threat from China and this paranoia is deeply entrenched in the Indian psyche. The ghosts of 1962 are camped in the Rashpati Bhavan, the Lok Sabha, the Rajha Sabha as well as the Indian Army. India places many of its aircraft on what it calls advanced bases in Ladakh and in territory occupied from China which India calls “Aranchal Pradesh”.

Bharat has been making some very agressive moves on its Northern border. It has called China the biggest threat to Delhi. To make waters worse, moved its latest Su-30s and 30,000 troops along the Chinese border and is also setting up new airfields and bases like Tezpur, and Chabua. Delhi feels very vulnerable, specially in the Northeast troublespots.

We have two visions for China. In one vision, India thinks of China as its biggest threat. The other vision sees China and India working together. Since 1962, Indian politicians have considered China as its biggest threat. A search on Google with the keywords “China is India’s biggest threat” produces 1.2 million threads. Most recently, Air Chief Marshal Fali Homi Major of the Indian Air Force made a remark that China has become a bigger threat than Pakistan.

Aksai chin is Chinese territory. Both parties to the dispute, China and Pakistan agree. India is not a party to this issue. 

Pakistan was crucial in helping China maintain its internal cohesion. By giving Aksai Chin to the the Chinese Pakistan allowed China to get land access to Tibet. Without Tibet, Bharat would have placed a wedge into the heart of China and allowed it to disintegrate into the pieces that the colonial powers had planned. Manchuria would have remained a Japanese enclave, and Hong Kong would have been expanded deep inside China. Without the stability and security provided to China from Pakistan Ughuristan would have been taken over by Russia as an independent republic. Mao Ze Dung and Chou En Lia recognized the importance of Pakistani help, and they secured their Western borders with Pakistan very early.

Not long ago the entire Chinese nation was kept in bondage by the East India Company which forced the country to continue to import opium. When the patriots revolted, Britain forced two wars on them. Finally Mao Ze Dung led the country to freedom from the machinations of Imperial Japan, Colonial Britain and a US which was supporting others in the civil war.

In the past century the Chinese have walked softly and hidden the Big stick. It has whispered where others have shouted. The leadership in Beiing has bitten its lip on Taiwan and Arunchal Pradesh. It has kept quiet on the boundary line South of Tibet and kept quiet on international issues that it felt strongly about. Now the results are evident for all to see. The pace of Chinese development in the past 60 years is one of the wonders of the world.

Delhi claims that there has been a four-fold increase in Chinese intrusions into Southern Tibet which Beijing considers China.

Scared of a repeat of 1962, Delhi has reopened airfields in Daulat Beg Oldi and Fukche in Ladakh near the Aksai Chin border. Delhi is trying to set up five air force bases in in the East– in Tezpur, Purnea in Bihar, Chabua and Jorhat in Assam, and Panagarh in West Bengal.

Map Sikkim Bhutan Chumb: Schonela peak south of Chumbi Valley in Tibet (China). Bhutan is negotiating Chaumb Valley to China. The pregnable Siluri corridor the thin land between Nepal, Bangladesh, and slightly south of Bhutan and Chinese Tibet. The Siliguri corridor is 500 km north of Chumbi valley

China and the People’s Republic spends $80 billion a year on defence. According to a report by Stratfor, the Texas-based private intelligence agency, “China has been seen as a threat to India, and simplistic models show them to be potential rivals. In fact, however, China and India might as well be on different planets. Their entire frontier runs through the highest elevations of the Himalayas. It would be impossible for a substantial army to fight its way through the few passes that exist, and it would be utterly impossible for either country to sustain an army there in the long term. The two countries are irrevocably walled off from each otherl…. Ideally, New Delhi wants to see a Pakistan that is fragmented, or at least able to be controlled. Towards this end, it will work with any power that has a common interest and has no interest in invading India.”

To be certain, India and China are not military rivals. Who is India then going to fight with? Bharatiya Sthalsena (the Indian Army) has a total of 13 corps, of which six are strike corps. Of the 13 corps at least seven have their guns pointed towards Pakistan. The 3rd Armoured Division, 2nd Armoured Brigade, 4 RAPID (Reorganised Army Plains Infantry Divisions), Jaisalmer AFS, Utarlai AFS and Bhuj AFS are all aiming at splitting Pakistan into two (by capturing the Kashmore/Guddu Barrage-Reti-Rahimyar Khan triangle). The News. Bharatiya Sthalsena Sunday, March 01, 2009 Dr Farrukh Saleem. The writer is the executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies (CRSS). Email: farrukh15@hotmail.com

The border dispute between China and Bharat stems from the 1962 border war between Bharat and China when Delhi lost 38,000 square kilometers of territory in Aksai Chin in the northeastern corner of Jammu and Kashmir.

India has been buying weapons and trying to build them for decades. It has been buying junk from Moscow (Flying Coffins) and has been unable to produce weapons on its own. The list of Indian failures is long. Kevari Engine, Tejas LCA, Trishul, Nag, Agni Arjun and Brahmos are a few examples of the total failure of the Delhi arms. Indian missile failures

Bharat Occupies Southern Tibet and calls it Arunchal Pradesh

Despite spending humongous amounts of money the bureaucrats of the Ganges have been unable to make Bharat self-sufficient in arms production. It is the only country of any sizable size which cannot produce arms that it can export. This colossal failure of the Bharati arms industry has filtered down to the total lack of any credible manufacturing from Goa to Gurdaspur.

Bharat occupies 90,000 square kilometers of Chinese Southern Tibet which Delhi calls ”Arunachal Pradesh”. Bharat also claims 5,180 square kilometers of land in Kashmir which was in the hands of Islamabad ’till 1963 which the Pakistanis ceded to Beijing in 1963.

The response from China to the recent augmentation of forces at Arunachal was swift. An editorial in Global Times, a tabloid of the People’s Daily group, a mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China, said that India seemed to believe that China would “defer to it on territorial disputes”. Dismissing this as “wishful thinking”, it stressed that “China won’t make any compromises in its border disputes with India”. Sudha Ramachandran Asia Times.

Chinese control over Southern Tibet and the Twang Valley will help China get sympathies from the people of Tibet, and the control will allow Beijing commanding control to overwhelm the valley of the Bramaputra, slicing off the 7 sister states of the Assam.

China’s has built rail lines through Tibet and plans to extend the Golmud-Lhasa rail up to Yatung,  near the trading center of Nathu La. This mountain pass connects Tibet with Sikkim, and to Nyingchi, a trading town north of Arunachal at tri-country node with Burma. China has the capability to deploy troops via rail right up to the border in Southern Tibet. The Chinese have also built an excellent road network allowing most Chinese and PLAN troops to drive right up to the border with Bharat.

The Slumdog power mesmerized by Bollywood (filmed outside Bharat) cannot come to terms with the simple fact that 80% of its population lives below $2 per day with the hunger index placing it below Burkino Faso. Why doesn’t Russia transfer plane technology to India?

One out of every 200 Indians is already employed by the Indian Armed Forces. Three out of every four Indians already live at or less than $2 a day. Bharat Sarkar (the Government of India) has, however, now jacked up the defence budget by a massive 55 percent. Who is India going to fight with?

India has 3,773,300 troops, plus 1,089,700 paramilitary forces (www.nationmaster.com). India’s army is second only to China in size. The Indian Air Force, with a total aircraft strength of 1,700, is the world’s 4th largest. The Indian Navy already operates some 13 dozen vessels with INS Viraat as its flagship, the only “full-deck aircraft carrier operated by a country in Asia or the Western Pacific, along with operational jet fighters.” Who is India going to fight with?

India has six neighbours; Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Nepal and China. India now spends a colossal $32.35 billion on defence, Pakistan $4.8 billion, Bangladesh $830 million, Nepal $100 million and Burma $30 million (according to Business Standard, India’s second-largest financial daily, “There is no apparent reason for India to understate its defence budget. No IMF conditions constrain defence spending…. But India continues to camouflage what other comparable liberal democracies transparently show as defence spending). Collectively, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma and Nepal spend $5.7 billion a year on defence. Who is India going to fight with?  The News. Bharatiya Sthalsena Sunday, March 01, 2009 Dr Farrukh Saleem. The writer is the executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies (CRSS). Email: farrukh15@hotmail.com

Lord Delhousie built the British train system in the Empire. Nothing has changed since. They fogot to connet Sikkim and Bhutan to the grid, because there were no soalmines or gold mines there. There are no trains in Sikkim, Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh.

 “dispatch of 60,000 troops” .. “a rivalry between the two countries” and asked the Indian government to consider “whether or not it can afford the consequences of a potential confrontation with China”. Chinese Daily Editorial

“China is seen in India as both a potential threat and a competitor to surpass. But India can’t actually compete with China in a number of areas, like international influence, overall national power and economic scale. India apparently has not yet realized this.” Peoples Daily Editorial

“the whole of the state of Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese territory”. November 2006, Beijing’s ambassador to India, Sun Yuxi told an Indian television station.

“In a Feb. 23 editorial, The People’s Daily addressed U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, with a focus on improving Pakistan’s position against India, saying, ‘It is clear that without Pakistan’s cooperation, the US cannot win the war on terror. Therefore, to safeguard its own interests in the fight against terrorism in South Asia, the US must ensure a stable domestic and international environment for Pakistan and ease the tension between Pakistan and India.’ This means supporting Pakistan’s position on Kashmir,” said William Hawkins of Front Page Magazine.

Ideas of Pakistan’s Gwadar Port as China’s Gibraltar and China’s billion-dollar port of Hambantota as Beijings’s Guantanamo defies India in the area of the oceans. An investigation is in order. At Rupee News, we scrutinized the issue and wrote to Dr. Daojiong. We could not find an iota of evidence of a shift in Chinese policy away from Pakistan.

Many Chinese leaders have chosen to visit Pakistan and not India, a resurgent Russia has waged war in Georgia to contain NATO, India has signed a nuclear deal with the US, and Russia’s Gozprom is building the Iran-Pakistan pipeline without India.

China has not threatened Bharat. It became a nuclear power years before India ever was, and it has a fantastic growth rate over the past several decades. The Hindu growth rate from 1947-1980 was the butt of jokes around the world. The past few years of global economic growth raised all boats, and Bharat also attained a respectable rate of growth. However Bharat has now returned to the low single digit rates which have been emblamatic of Delhi’s economy.