Chinese pin-pricks part of a sinister gameplan

The Chinese are needling India through a standoff with the Indian security forces in the Doklam area near Sikkim to pressurise this country to willy nilly accept the China-Pak Economic Corridor which is a dream project of Beijing. Piqued as China is with the closed-door parleys between Prime Minister Modi and US President Donald Trump when Modi was on a visit to Washington DC recently, the Chinese fear that some plan to deal with its sinister designs to establish hegemony over the sea lanes has been hatched between the two countries. The Chinese apprehension is that scuttling the CPEC would form part of the Sino-Indian plan. By opening a new front in Doklam the Chinese are trying to browbeat India first with a nudge and then with a show of limited force. Their calculation is that this would also serve to diminish Indian hold over Bhutan in which Doklam falls and in neighbouring Sikkim by making the two nascent countries feel that India is incapable of protecting them and that they must turn to China if they want peace in the region. The Chinese are out to psychologically corner India, but would not like to escalate the standoff to a level where war becomes inevitable because that may well jeopardise the commissioning of the CPEC.

Clearly, Defence Minister Arun Jaitley’s warning to China not to underestimate India on the basis of the 1962 experience when this country had to eat the humble pie in war against the Chinese, was directed to reassure Bhutan and Sikkim, knowing full well that China can ill afford to rub India on the wrong side until the CPEC is fully operational. Jaitley indeed was not being naive. He was responding to the need of the times and was acting on the basis of a conscious strategy. There is an understandable degree of disquiet in India over the fact that the current standoff is the longest between security forces of the two countries after 1962. The last one, which carried on for 21 days, occurred at Daulat Beg Oldi in the Ladakh division of Jammu and Kashmir in 2013, when Chinese troops entered 30 km into Indian territory till the Depsang Plains and claimed it to be a part of its Xinjiang province. They were, however, pushed back. The faceoff between Indian and Chinese troops has already taken a toll of the Kailash Mansarovar pilgrimage this season and threatens to escalate further. The Chinese are even showing their fangs at sea in a bid to scare India. As a measure of escalation, a trip by Indian journalists to Tibet has been cancelled by China. The decision was conveyed to the batch of journalists by the Chinese embassy in New Delhi. Doklam is a disputed territory between China and Bhutan but that does not give China the right to send troops there and destroy Indian bunkers. In retaliation, India has pushed in more troops in a “non-combative mode” to strengthen its position.