By

Vice Admiral (retd) Vijay Shankar (To be Published)

“Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate.”
                          ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The Aberrant Articulation

In a recent editorial in the Global Times a rare viewpoint was published, by a director of South Asian studies at the Fudan University, expounding eloquently the merits of the current Indian trajectory  available at https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202401/1304656.shtml titled “what I feel of the Bharat Narrative in India“. Its main theme was how India had achieved outstanding results in economic development, social governance and the manner in which its ‘great’ power strategy was rapidly progressing towards fruition. From any perspective this was odd for the extent of acclaim being heaped on India, and that, coming from a mouth piece of the Chinese Communist Party.   

In another press release China’s assertion of India’s “domineering diplomacy” appeared in the Global Times in quick succession to the earlier viewpoint. The latter could erringly be mistaken for strategic envy of the “Indian way” of establishing a hegemonic sphere of influence in South-Asia. The question arises why did these two aberrant articulations make their unprecedented appearance? Was it the opening move on the chess board to project the Indian State as a worthy rival? Or was to lull New Delhi to complacency?

The Soporific Jingle

 Hindi Chini bhai-bhai was a jingle popularised by Nehru after his first meeting with Zhou-Enlai in the run-up to the summit with Mao Zedong. It had a delusional quality that was further exacerbated after Mao met Nehru in Beijing in October 1954. China, having just fought the United States to a stalemate in the Korean War, was upbeat about the future. Mao perceived imperialism, at least the American brand of it, to be weak and in retreat. “Historically, all of us, people of the East, have been bullied by western imperialist powers,” he told Nehru. “The imperialist still looks down upon us,” this declaration was intended to forge an “instinctive feeling of solidarity” between the two; it did not fail. China and India, the two leaders seemed to be saying, would lead the developing world to a brighter future. Nehru went on to suggest that “big power status could well be handed over to the two” (!). The air during their summit was suffused, on the one side, by utopian thoughts such as “war was no longer a useable instrument for achieving policy goals”; while on the other were realpolitik assertions “that tension awakens people to revolution;” and that “war had a numbing and enervating effect on growth and progress.” But, “relations between China and India were sans tension “almost as if to allay any fears that India may have of China’s intentions (all the while not only had Tibet been invaded but the Aksai Chin region of northern Ladakh was being gnawed away).

The facts did not deter Nehru in his pursuit of an alternative bloc to the ‘cold warriors’ led by principles rather than power. He set about on a quest to band together like minded Afro-Asian nations that culminated in the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Sino-Indian declaration of the Panchsheel Agreement, (Premier Zhou proposed Panchsheel and its principles of peaceful co-existence and mutual non-interference in 1953).

India nurtured a misshapen hope that non-alignment would bloom into a pan Afro-Asian movement based on common experience of colonialism. Moral power, spear-headed by the two most populace and indeed impoverished nations, it was hoped would reshape the international system where righteousness would overpower the balance of terror. However, Mao and Nehru had very different ideas about what that future might bring. Nehru wanted the developing nations to follow India’s lead in staying out of the ideological quarrels of the Cold War. Mao, by contrast, perceived the Third World as central to the coming global revolution, which China would stimulate and eventually lead. From start, China and India were engaged on “parallel tracks” for influence.

Rude Awakening

Following China’s invasion of Tibet in 1951 and the sustained injustices inflicted on the Tibetan people leading to the brutal suppression of an uprising in 1959, thousands of Tibetans, and their spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, sought asylum in India. From there, the Chinese government alleged, the expatriates continued to instigate rebellion, moving across the border to carry out subversion and sabotage. The Chinese responded by increasing their military presence in the border area, which in August and October 1959 led to a series of escalating armed skirmishes along the erstwhile Indo-Tibetan border.

As China and India faced off across the Himalayas, India made a startling but cruel discovery that they had an armed conflict brewing over territory, which to this day remains unresolved. It did not take long before the dreamy vision of Sino-Indian solidarity and resurgence gave way to loss and great rancour.

Price of Complacency

The lack of either nuclear capability or significant conventional power exposed India’s status as a minor power of little strategic importance. China sensing the moment of India’s despondency and vulnerabilities to have arrived, leveraged these frailties in the 1962 war. In the ensuing conflict an ill prepared India suffered a humiliating drubbing; leadership was found wanting in resolve and morale of the nation was broken. China on her part was successful in achieving three objectives; firstly delegitimizing the McMahon Line, secondly consolidating their sovereignty over Tibet and lastly to establish that the great Asian resurgence had space for only one and that was not for an ideologically muddled India. China had so comprehensively lulled the Indian leadership into a strategic torpor that the war was lost before the fighting began.

Deception as the Key Principle of ‘War-with-Chinese-Characteristics’

In Chinese strategic parlance to attain shi, is to bring about the alignment of opportunities and manipulate forces such that they stimulate favourable circumstances to strike or make the potential adversary bend to ones will. In short it is to “shape a strategic situation” through patience, deception, intelligence and intuitive-acumen of impending events. Clearly Beijing attained shi in their war against the USA in Korea when they waited till American forces crossed the Yalu river before they struck; they attained it before the border war with India; and in the 1970s they manipulated Nixon and the USA to counter balance the USSR and feed their dazzling growth, four decades later they put themselves in a position to challenge America for global leadership. Chairman Mao was known to be fond of not just citing shi but invoking it in his international dealings.

 We began on a note of consternation over the view point of the Chinese scholar Dr Zhiang Jiadong expressed in his article on the “Bharat Narrative”. While it may have just been an academic’s feature of acclaim, it may also be false encomium as a first step in attaining shi for intentions that can only be mala fide. Planners will do well to analyse such opinions for cognizable patterns, for is there a shi zealot lurking in Premier Xi?

After all, it was Sun Tzu who suggested that “all warfare was based on deception”.