INDIA MAY RE-EVALUATE NEUTRALITY IN THE US-CHINA WAR

The Galwan incident may prove to be a watershed moment in the existential battle between Beijing and Washington should India abandon its longstanding policy of neutrality, in large part out of consideration for Moscow, which is now firmly on the PRC side.

The People’s Republic of China has, since 1949, had three transformational leaders: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and now Xi Jinping. All three threw into the waste basket the agreements and protocols agreed upon till then and negotiated their own versions for adoption, whenever they regarded doing so as advantageous to China. Mao charted an entirely new course in domestic and foreign policy, as did Deng. The latter had the advantage of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership rungs all but destroyed by the Great

Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. He was, therefore, enabled to slice through the opposition of the ideologues to his plans at bringing China into the front rank of the world’s economies when at the time it was lagging behind India, a country that saw a much lower growth rate during the 1950s to the 1970s than even Pakistan.

When Xi Jinping took over from Hu Jintao in 2012, the rest of the party leadership was strong to a degree that it had not been during the period in office of the growth-focused Jiang Zemin and the first term of the softer hand of Hu Jintao. Xi moved carefully but steadily in consolidating his control over the entire machinery of the CCP. The war that he unleashed on corrupt officials proved effective in getting rid of several within the various rungs of the party machine who had been less than enthusiastic about the new boss in town. Although reports continue to surface, especially outside China, about fissures and cabals designed to weaken the now limitlesstermed General Secretary of the CCP, the reality remains that by 2017, Xi had achieved mastery over even the People’s Liberation Army, an important—indeed vital—component of the Party. It was perhaps not entirely coincidental that this was the year when

President Donald J. Trump launched a trade war on the PRC, given that Xi had from the start of his tenure not been reticent about his intention to make China once again the fulcrum of global commerce, security and geopolitics. The Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) he launched in 2013 is nothing less than an attempt at re-order-fp16

People attend henna painting lessons during the India-themed weekend in Vilnius, Lithuania on Friday, ahead of International Yoga Day on Sunday, 21 June.